Rebel of the Sands

by Alwyn Hamilton

  The same thought clearly occurred to Jin. “Come on.” He started to push himself forward on his elbows to stay close to the sand, moving away from the rails. We’d been walking between them, from one wooden slat to the next, so there’d be no tracks. I crawled behind Jin, kicking any marks from our bodies away with my boot. We crested a sand dune. I rolled over to the other side, flattening myself on my front so we were hidden from the rails.

  I loosened my gun just in case. Jin already had a knife in his hand.

  We lay in the sand in silence, side by side. I could feel the desert shifting below my stomach with every breath. I listened for the sound of passing footsteps. That was the trouble with sand—it muffled most noises. We’d never hear him climbing up the dune until he was on top of us. We outnumbered him, but surprise made a single man dangerous.

  It probably wasn’t a soldier, I realized. Soldiers didn’t tend to travel alone. But that still left a hundred dangerous possibilities. A hungry Skinwalker. A greedy desert bandit. A Djinni.

  No. That was ridiculous. It couldn’t be a ghoul—the iron ought to keep them away. And no one had seen a Djinni for decades. They didn’t live among us like they used to anymore.

  But they were immortal. And this was the desert. The true open desert. Legend said things were out here that hadn’t been seen by civilizations in decades.

  The unknown made me itch to clamber over the dune and take a look. I shifted ever so slightly, inching my way up the dune. Jin hissed a warning under his breath. I pressed the gun to my lips, to silence him. And remind him I was armed, and likely a better shot than whoever was on the rails. He didn’t reach out to stop me as I pulled myself the rest of the way up.

  The rails were as empty as a drunk’s liquor bottle on prayer day.

  “There’s no one there. They’ve gone past.” Or they’d vanished in a column of smokeless fire like the Djinn in the stories.

  “Do you have a death wish?” Jin sounded almost impressed, his voice returning to a normal volume as he sat up.

  “If I did, I wouldn’t be very good at it, seeing as I’m still alive,” I said, holstering my pistol.

  “God knows how.” Jin scrubbed his hands over his face, tiredly. I was dead tired, too. It hit me all at once. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you the story of Impulsive Atiyah and the Djinni Sakhr when you were a child?”

  “You mean the Djinni Ziyah,” I corrected him absently.

  “What?”

  “It’s Atiyah and Ziyah, it rhymes. Who’s ever heard of Sakhr?” I argued. Everybody knew the story of Atiyah, the impulsive girl who was always getting herself into trouble and her Djinni lover Ziyah, who feared so much for her life that he gave her his name. His true name. Which she could speak and he would be summoned to her rescue. That she could use to bind him to her will. The name that she could whisper to the lock of any door and it would open into his secret kingdom.

  “You think the point of the story is the Djinni’s name?”

  “No, but I reckon you ought to get it right. She died because she said his name wrong in the story, not because she was impulsive, and why are we arguing about this?” I snapped. We both went silent.

  “Is your aunt in Izman really worth your life?” he asked finally.

  “I don’t know, I’ve never met her.”

  Jin stopped, hands caught midway through his hair. He’d shoved his shirt up to his elbows and I saw the tension in the muscles in his forearms as he scrutinized me. “You’re going to Izman to find someone you’ve never met?”

  “I’m going to Izman because it’s got to be a better life than out here.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Jin said. “Cities are worse, if anything. It’s not like Dustwalk, where everybody knows your name and kills you for a good reason. They’ll kill you for no reason at all. And that’d be a crying shame. You’re too remarkable to waste as a corpse in a gutter.” He got to his feet and offered me a hand. I ignored it. I ignored what he’d said about me being remarkable, too.

  “You sound like my father,” I said, standing up without his help.

  “Your father?” He dropped his hand.

  “He used to say the city was for thieves and whores and politicians.” I mocked my father’s slurred tones with a wave of an imaginary drink. “I was better off staying where my family was going to keep me safe. Do you want to know how safe my father kept me?”

  “What happened to him?” Jin asked. There was a tense note in his voice that I couldn’t read.

  “My mother killed him.” He opened his mouth. “And don’t bother to say you’re sorry. He was an ass and he wasn’t my real father anyway.” I thought back to the blue-eyed soldier who’d been working for Commander Naguib and wondered how many half-Gallan children there were in the desert. No others that I knew of, but I hadn’t exactly traveled far. Until now.

  “I was going to say that it sounds like he deserved it.” Jin said. “And your mother?” His voice said he already knew.

  “What normally happens to murderers?” Sometimes in my nightmares I still saw her swinging from a rope. I squared my shoulders. Let him tell me she deserved it, like everybody else had.

  “That I am sorry for,” he said. “A mother is a hard thing to lose.” I got the feeling he might know something about dead mothers.

  “I’ve got nothing to go back to,” I admitted. “My aunt Safiyah in Izman is all I’ve got. So why not Izman?”

  He didn’t answer me right away. There was some kind of war behind his eyes. “Fine,” he said on a long resigned exhale. “Here’s what we do.” He dropped to his knees and started sketching a lopsided triangle in the sand that I gathered was meant to be Miraji. “We walk to Massil. Here.” He jabbed at a point at the bottom of the triangle. “Trains are the only way to get through the mountains this time of year. And I don’t suppose you have enough money left to wait around for the next one.” He looked to me for confirmation as he drew a jagged line across Massil, cutting us off from Izman.

  “First class tickets are expensive,” I admitted.

  “But,” he went on, “there’ll be caravans preparing for the journey across the Sand Sea. Toward the port cities on the northwest coast.”

  “That’s where your compass was pointing,” I prodded. His hat tipped over his face hid any answer from me.

  “And they’ll be hiring.”

  “Hiring what?” I asked.

  “Muscle.” He shrugged. “Guns. Your desert’s not all that safe, you know. The crossing is nothing but sand from Massil to Dassama.” He pointed at another dot he’d made in the top left of the triangle. North and west. “It’s a month of walking.”

  “It’s also the wrong direction from Izman.” I scuffed the top right corner with my toe, give or take where I knew the capital was.

  He gave me an exasperated look that told me to shut up and let him finish. “From Dassama it’s another ten days of walking across the plains; the caravans do some trading on the way, so it can take longer. Then you get to the sea. It’s two days’ sailing to Izman. You can buy your way across with wages from the caravan. What do you say, Bandit?”

  “You sure didn’t miss your calling as a mapmaker.” I looked at the muddled lines in the sand on which he’d sketched out our path. It seemed easy drawn out like that. But I knew better than to underestimate the desert. “It’s a lot harder than a train.” It came out as an accusation.

  “Yes, but with fewer soldiers who want to kill you.” Jin stood up, brushing the sand off his hands onto his clothes. It was such a foreign thing to do. The gesture of somebody who wasn’t used to sand getting into everything. Who was still trying to fight it.

  “They want you,” I reminded him. “I’m just trying to get to Izman in one piece.” I had to admit, it was the best plan I had. He seemed to know Miraji better than I did. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to carry on with him. And
lying was a sin.

  But something was nagging at me all the same. “I suppose you want me to think it’s a coincidence that the best way across the desert is the way your compass is pointing.”

  “I want a lot of things, Bandit. To get out of this goddamn country of yours, a cold bath, a decent meal . . .” Jin trailed off, and for just a moment I could’ve sworn his eyes drifted to me. “But what we need is to start walking if we want to be in Massil before we die of thirst. So what do you say, Bandit.” He stuck his hand out. “Stick together?”

  My hand fit well in his.

  eleven

  Jin was standing motionless in the middle of the ring, the muscles across his bare back glistening with sweat as they rose and fell. He let his opponent circle him. The other man dove at Jin, who caught him and slammed him to the ground. I heard the crack of the man’s nose just before the cheers drowned anything else out.

  “He can throw a hit as well as take one, I’ll give him that.” Parviz of the Camel’s Knees Caravan ran his knuckles along his jaw as he watched Jin’s opponent wipe his bloody nose.

  I snorted, pitching my voice low to go with my disguise. I was a boy again tonight. No matter how many noses Jin turned bloody, no one was going to take us on as hired muscle so long as I was a girl. And we needed a caravan to get across the Sand Sea without dying of thirst.

  It had taken us a day of walking and all our supplies to get to Massil. What was left of our money we spent getting into the city. It was five fouza for every camel to enter the ancient walls and three fouza for every person. The cost of a life told you all you needed to know about a place, especially in the Trader City, where everything was a commodity. Here, human life was the cheapest thing going. Those were Jin’s words as we passed beneath a huge stone arch into the once glorious city.

  Even I knew the story of Massil. A wise and powerful Djinni once ruled there, back when it was the greatest city on the edge of the Small Sea. The Djinni fell in love with the daughter of one of the traders and offered him the whole city in exchange for her hand. The girl was already promised to another trader from far across the Small Sea, but the greedy father wanted the city. So he fashioned a living doll of wax and magic to trick the Djinni while marrying his daughter to the trader. When the Djinni discovered the trick, he had already given the man the city. And Djinn were only able to tell the truth, which meant they were bound by their word. Unable to take the city back, he raised a sandstorm so great that the sea filled up and up and up until the water was swallowed and there was nothing but sand as far as the eye could see. And then he vanished, leaving the worthless city on the edge of the desert to the greedy merchant.

  Massil, the last bastion of civilization before the Sand Sea crossing.

  The crowd roared as Jin landed a punch on his opponent’s face with a crunch and sent him down to the ground again.

  No more civilized than anywhere else, best I could see.

  “You ought to see him in a real tight spot,” I said to Parviz. “I’ve seen him break a man’s hand like that.” I clicked my fingers, thinking of the noise Dahmad’s wrist made when it cracked. Just then Jin’s opponent dove at him again. Jin sidestepped him, his leg lashing out, catching the man’s knee and flipping him over to land flat in the sand. Parviz had a trader’s face, even better than a gambler’s. But I reckoned he was impressed.

  “He’d have to be able to fight if he’s always got to be rescuing scrawny little brothers,” a voice chimed in from a few bodies over. I knew before I made the mistake of raising my head that the comment was meant for me. A boy with crooked front teeth had been trying to get a rise out of me all night. I reckoned he wanted me to take a swing at him so he could beat me up and impress some caravan leader without having to step into the ring and fight someone his own size. Jin might be able to hit him hard enough to straighten out his teeth, but I wasn’t fixing to get my arm broke.

  Parviz turned to me and eyed me up against Jin. “He’s your brother?”

  “We had different mothers.” Our charade was rickety as an old henhouse, but it was the only thing we had that was likely to get us hired and across the desert without being picked apart by buzzards two days out. “We’ll work for half of what the others are asking for,” I said instead of answering the question. We’d been turned down twice already tonight, maybe on account of Jin’s foreignness or my size. But the Camel’s Knees clan had a reputation for being cheapskates.

  “I’ve been trading since I was high as a camel’s knee.” Parviz chuckled at his own joke. “I can count well enough to know that with two of you it works out the same fee as a single man, and then there’s an extra mouth to feed. I don’t need dead weight, Alidad.” He called me by the fake name I’d given. “Even if you don’t hardly weigh nothing.”

  Parviz turned away, and already my heckler was stepping out to meet him. “You’ve a fine eye for business, my friend. Now I could take any of these fellows any time of the day.” He gestured in a wide arc with a glass of dark liquor dangling from his fingers.

  My gun was in my hand in a flash, ready to execute some half-formed plan.

  I squeezed the trigger.

  The glass in the heckler’s hand shattered before the bullet sank into the wall behind him.

  The pit fell silent. The heckler stared dumbly at his handful of glass, blood, and liquor. Someone in the crowd burst out laughing, and then the roar of conversation went up again.

  “You son of a bitch!” The heckler had a piece of glass sticking out from his thumb. “You shot me!”

  “No, I shot your glass. Don’t worry, the liquor’ll wash the blood off.” I holstered my pistol, hoping I wasn’t about to get shot back. “Like I was about to say before getting interrupted, it’s a modern age. I don’t need a lot of muscle to pull a trigger.”

  Parviz’s eyes swept the heckler, then me. Traders knew the worth of things. And they knew when they were getting a bargain, too. “We’re leaving from the West Gate at dawn. Don’t be late.”

  Jin was at my side, pulling his shirt on over his head, as Parviz disappeared. “Did you just shoot someone?”

  “I got us hired, if that’s what you’re asking.” I scratched the back of my head and tried to look sheepish. I was sure I wasn’t successful judging by the look Jin was giving me. “And I only shot his glass.”

  Jin hooked one arm around my shoulder, leaning on me. “I knew I liked you, Bandit.”

  And then came that grin. I might have traitor eyes, but Jin had the sort of smile that would turn over whole empires to the enemy—that made me feel like suddenly I understood him exactly, even though I knew nothing about him. The kind that made me feel like if I was on the right side of it, we could do anything together. I had the next six weeks to find out if that was true.

  twelve

  We left at dawn with the Camel’s Knees as promised. I thought I knew the desert, but as I watched the sun rise in a perfect clear sky over an unbroken stretch of gold, I knew this was something else. The Sand Sea was huge and restless. The Camel’s Knees treated it like something between a beast to be broken and a tyrant to cower in front of. I felt at home instantly.

  The landscape shifted from one moment to the next, the moving sands dragging me irresistibly down a dune one moment and trapping me in place the next. Some of the dunes seemed infinite—no matter how long we walked we never seemed to crest them. The wind sliced its path through the land, scattering sand like shrapnel into my eyes and my mouth, in spite of my sheema. In the middle of the day the whole desert shifted and a huge wooden structure appeared out of the sand, red and blue paint flaking off of it with the wind.

  “What’s that?” I asked Jin, shielding my eyes from the sun.

  “It’s a shipwreck,” Jin told me. And just as quickly as it had appeared, the sand swallowed it up again.

  When we pitched camp on the first evening, my skin was raw, my whole body ache
d from walking, and I was happy.

  There were sixty-odd people in the Camel’s Knees, plus two dozen camels heavy with supplies and goods for trade. The years of travel between them were obvious; they moved as one when they made camp.

  “Is this what the real sea is like?” I asked Jin, taking my food to sit next to him on a darkened dune just away from the fire. Jin had started a rumor that I was in a fire as a kid so I was ashamed to show my face. I loosened my sheema enough to eat without taking it off.

  “You don’t have to walk across the sea.” He stabbed at his food with a piece of burned flatbread.

  “So what do sailors do all day? Lounge around growing soft?” I poked him in the stomach, which was all muscle. I was stupidly pleased when he laughed. Before he could reply, Old Daud spoke up from beside the fire.

  “Settle, children, and I will tell you a story.” The storyteller had a voice deep like the desert night and quick like the fire. It was a good voice for stories.

  “I wonder if he could set you straight on the moral of Atiyah and Sakhr,” Jin whispered to me teasingly. I knew he was getting it wrong to annoy me.

  “Maybe he ought to tell the one of the Foreign Man who pushed his luck,” I whispered back.

  “In the new days of the world, God looked down on the earth and decided to fill it. From his own body of fire he made immortal life. First the clever Djinn were crafted, then giant Rocs who soared through the skies from one mountaintop to the next, and wild Buraqi who raced from one side of the desert to the other, until the whole earth was full.”

  “I wonder if God could save me from having to hear this story again.” A girl startled me, dropping down in the sand between me and Jin without warning. I already knew her: Yasmin, Parviz’s daughter, the princess of the caravan.

  Isra, her grandmother, walked past and reached over me to smack her on the back of the head, making Yasmin’s braid flip over her shoulder. “You will be quiet and listen, Princess Big Mouth.” That name worked, too, I supposed.