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“Neither did you!”
I hung my head, made myself as humble in her sight as I could. “Let us go home, Kohinoor. Let us go back to our Alcazars and drink coalwine and sing new songs. Songs of Ajanabh and Stars and the hearts of tigers.”
She shook her hair back, and her salamander stamped its dry feet. “This is her city. I will take it, and I will live in her footsteps, held in these red stones as she was held, and I will climb every tower to the sky until I find where you have hidden her, until I can look her in the eye, until I can have my fire, and she her children.”
I straightened, and put my hands on my silver hip-baskets. “This ignorant gutter-coal thinks you will not.”
“Have you spent so long within that giant’s fat knuckles that you have gone mad? This is the decision of the Kings, the Queens, and the Khaighal, and you can do nothing.”
I tried to smile, as I imagined a Queen in full possession of herself would. I imagine it came out a sickly snarl, a kitten hissing at a lion. But I could not let the Ajans burn. I could not.
“I can make a wish,” I said.
The Khaighal roared. “You may not! It is not permitted! Nothing you could wish is in our books! Kashkash would never wish for defeat; he would never wish to lose a battle, to lose a city! We will shrivel your tongue in your mouth before you can utter a single word!”
“But if I could,” I said sharply, holding up my hands, their orange and black flaring in the faces of the crimson Khaighal salamanders, “if I could wish for a thing permitted, if I could wish for something that Kashkash himself would have drawn from his beard with such glee that the heavens would flame in answer, would you let my tongue rest in my mouth, would you let my wish disturb the air?”
“You cannot wish for the salvation of this place,” they said. “Nothing in your wish can touch our will.”
“Nevertheless?”
“If it is in our books, it is permitted. This is the law of the Khaighal. We are accountants, not senators.”
Then I did smile; I could smile. My teeth flared white-hot and I pressed my palms together. “My wish is the simplest thing there is, something Kashkash wished for a man in a little hut so long ago that the trees who witnessed it are dust. I wish”—my smile broadened—“for my wife.”
They looked puzzled; their pale beards flushed blue and yellow. Kohinoor rolled her ashen eyes. Khaamil raised his mangled eyebrow. And there was a peculiar sound in the supply train, a grinding, rumbling, inexorable sound, like the wheels of a catapult grinding against the earth. The salamanders stomped nervously, and Kohinoor struggled with her reins.
When they came, I had never seen anything more radiant. The sun caught their brows, their eyes, their shoulders as they rounded the front lines, all my wives, alive and walking to me, men and women of stone: emerald and ruby and turquoise, tourmaline and hematite and granite, garnet and topaz and jasper, diamond and brass, silver and quartz, copper and malachite, and carnelian, so many red carnelian faces glittering in the morning. They came to me one by one and kissed my cheeks, and by the time the fiftieth of them came, and the hundredth, and more and more, I was weeping, my cheeks wet with flame. They kissed me and they took their places along the wall as I asked them to, a fabulous skirt for Simeon, for his poor, bleeding chest, for his poor city.
“The simplest thing there is,” I said. “They will not let you in—after all, a wife’s love is absolute, eternal, untouchable as breath. Come near them and they will smother your fires in stone.”
Kohinoor looked at me, her expression curiously like a child’s: hurt, uncomprehending.
“She was my mother. I only wanted to touch her
,” she whispered. “You could not possibly understand. I searched my vaults for you, for your family, for grass or wind or water or stone. You are not there. You are nothing, and no one. You drifted into Kash like a scrap of trash, and it is only chance which made you Queen. You are smoke, and nothing more.”
“So are we all, sister.” The hands of my wives tightened on mine.
I would like to say the Djinn dispersed before the day was out, that the army of Kings and Queens was sent to their well-curtained homes and their many-pronged crowns. But it was weeks before they determined that my wives would not move, that the Khaighal would find no precedent for repeal. They went slowly; they went cursing. And on the day when the fields of Ajanabh were empty of all and dry, Simeon opened his hands entirely, and my jeweled wives were let inside, hesitant as infants, reaching for the folk of the Carnival, to touch them and know their names. I let them go; I let them wander. They were not truly mine. They clung to me at first as kits will cling to a vixen, but soon enough they took names, and tried their first, stumbling dances, and asked after lovely fauns and chorus boys they had seen.
When they found Orfea’s courtyard they were as upset as a flock of squabbling geese. They put their fingers to the eyes of the statues, they shook their stone shoulders, trying to wake them, they called out to the sandstone figures, they begged them to answer, begged them to breathe. They wept and trembled to see these mirror-siblings; they did not understand. I tried to calm them, but hundreds of stone folk who think they stand in a field of slaughter are not easily calmed.
I held the head of an inconsolable woman of lapis in my lap, and a young man of obsidian lay sickened at my feet. From behind a sandstone bust of a boy with bees’ wings, a soft voice sounded:
“Please,” it whirred, “listen to me.”
The stone wives looked up, eyes wet with sparkling, mica-flecked tears, and before them stood Hour, her head bent, her clock-heart ticking, her armor hands clasped like a girl who has forgotten her lesson.
“These are not like us,” she said, “and if you will listen, I will help you to grow up, I will tell you all you need to know of living.”
They gathered close round her, many-colored eyes hopeful and curious. They, too, folded their hands politely and waited. The tall, gleaming woman stood very still.
“Once upon a time,” said Hour, “there lived a maiden in a castle…”
THE TALE
OF THE WASTE,
