Daughter of the Salt King

by A. S. Thornton

  “What comes?” I shouted.

  One pointed out to the dunes on the horizon. I saw them then—the rapidly approaching army, an uncountable mass of soldiers. The largest I had ever seen, and they were not flying our banners, not fighting for our king.

  So swift were they that they had already spilled into our city by the time I returned to my father and mother.

  “An approaching army,” I panted, the door to the chamber slamming the wall behind me as I burst through it. And as I said it, I heard the cries outside. The cries of war, and the cries of terror.

  My mother did not wait, she dropped to her knees and reached under the raised bed. The ring of metal against stone sounded in the room, and when she stood, she held a long straight sword, and a small, jewel-encrusted dagger.

  “Find Azim. Assemble the soldiers!”

  I ran, searching for Nadia on the way out to warn her to hide, to find somewhere safe. I did not see her. It was not until much later that I learned she was killed in her room defending herself with a sword she could wield only poorly.

  Azim was gone from his quarters, and when I saw soldiers of Almulihi out in the streets already defending the palace from the invaders, I understood that he had already done what was needed of him. He had been more prepared than I.

  Like a child, I watched them from the balcony, seeing how my play battles with Kassim paled in comparison to the real thing. Real violence was not something I had seen. We had learned to wield swords and how to defend the softest parts of our bodies from the sharpest edges, but we had not seen blood, had not seen death. When I saw it then, I was unable to move to meet the enemy. I was terrified to join my father’s soldiers, fearing that in moments, I, too, would be lying lifeless on the steps.

  Our men were not ready. They were not strong enough. The people of Almulihi had grown complacent, and we were nothing compared to the prepared army that tore through our streets. Villagers fell easily to blades. Soldiers were taken by one stab of the sword. It seemed like years, like no time at all, before the invading men broke through the palace walls.

  “They’ve entered the palace!” I yelled to my mother and father, bursting again through the door. I do not know why I ran to them, but it was all I could think to do. I was a child, scared and in need of someone to direct me.

  Nothing could prepare me for what I saw.

  My father lay dead, the hilt of the jewel-encrusted dagger emerging from his chest. Blood was all over my mother’s hands, tears fell from her eyes.

  “What have you done?” I screamed, dropping to my knees and clasping my father’s hands.

  “Spared him the dishonor of dying by the enemy’s hand.” She said it strongly, like a queen. “We will fall, Saalim.” She picked up the long blade and moved to the bed to stand in front of the dead king, her gone husband. “Combat will not save us.”

  “So that is it? Are we to surrender?” I could hear the men’s shouts through the palace. They were combing the rooms. They were searching for us.

  She shook her head. “I will die defending Almulihi. You cannot. You must try and save her. Run from here. Find Zahar.”

  “The healer?” I asked, bewildered.

  “Go!” she screamed, pointing a shaking finger at the door. She clasped the hilt of her sword.

  I did not look back. I hated that I fled so easily, without remorse or guilt. That I could so easily turn from my home in desperation when my mother could kill her husband and stand and wait for her own death without flinching.

  That remorse, I carry now.

  Soldiers’ footsteps clattered behind me as I fled into the hall. I heard my mother call to them. I did not turn. Using the servants’ passages of the palace, much as I had when I was a child, I reached the healer’s home, tucked into the far reaches of the palace grounds.

  Zahar sat at the table of her kitchen as though she were waiting for me. I knew little of her other than the few times I was taken to her as a child with a scraped knee or fevered chill. Before she left, Edala had told me that she was magic and could wield Masira’s power. Perhaps my mother had listened to her daughter when she spoke of these things. I never believed a word.

  “Please,” I said, falling to my knee at her feet. “Almulihi falls. If there is anything you can do to save it, to save us, I beg you.” Shameful tears filled my eyes at how desperate and pathetic I must look, when I realized how much had already been lost. Everything my parents had created could not be taken by these people, not if I could stop it.

  Zahar peered at me for a long time.

  “Please,” I said, hearing more screams from the palace.

  “I can save Almulihi,” she said. “But it will cost you.”

  I nodded. Anything. “What must I give? I will give it.”

  “Everything you have.”

  Everything? I thought she meant the blankets on my bed, my books, my swords and tunics, my boots, my father’s gold and salt—mine now, I realized. It was a large price, but it was worth it if it would save my home. “You can have it all.”

  Zahar cackled and shook her head. “No, boy. I don’t want your things. I mean everything you have.” She pointed at me, at the home around us. “If you want me to save your home, first I will take you from your home, then take your home from you. I will take your family, your friends, your neighbors. You will watch them perish. And you will remember them all. I will take from you your pride and honor. You will be a slave and learn the power in benevolence and grace.”

  Balking, I stood up. “But how will that save my home?”

  “You will get it back. One day.” She leaned back in her chair.

  I grimaced and began to retreat, deciding that this did not seem worthwhile.

  She slammed her hand onto a table. “Boy, this world has been handed to you on a salt brick. It is time you learn to appreciate what you have and earn what you desire so greatly.”

  Appalled, I asked, “Why make me a slave to save my home?”

  “Because those are my conditions. And I will do so with gladness. When you are released from your enslavement, you will be returned to your home, to everything made by your mother and father—” She spat on the ground after she said father, like it was bitter on her tongue, “—and then, you will be fit to rule.”

  “When will I be freed?”

  “When you desire it least. Watch for the one who carries your mark.”

  I did not understand how she could promise such things, how she had the power to make them so, but I agreed. I would have given anything in that moment. Slowly and with creaking bones, she stood from the table. She seemed older, weaker than I remembered. She brought me a stoppered glass vessel. It was wrapped in golden bands etched with the symbols of my home. Inside, golden liquid sloshed violently against its unyielding walls. It was like she had known I was coming. She was already prepared.

  “Drink it all.” She handed me the vessel.

  Opening the petaled lid, I smelled inside—ocean and dust and moon-jasmine. It did not smell bad. Jubilant cries of men penetrated the gardens, and I heard the hollering and laughing as they sliced at the rose bushes Nadia had so carefully clipped earlier. If they were finished in the palace, my mother, I was sure, was dead. I had nothing left to lose.

  Zahar looked beyond me, fear shaking away the apathy as she shrieked.

  “Drink it now!”

  The men came closer. Blades trailed on stone, nearing the enchantress’ home.

  I drank. Never before had I tasted something so wonderful yet so repulsive. I craved swallowing it as much as I desired to spit it onto the ground. After the first few gulps, I felt it—tendrils of liquid that felt alive and greedy. Like a hungry fire, they reached all the way to my feet, to my hands. They grabbed hold of me until I was powerless against them. They held the drink to my lips. I could not stop, though now I desperately wanted to as the flames swallowed me. But I was no longer in control.

  Zahar watched me with wild eyes. Like a madwoman, she laughed. “Foolish bo
y!”

  The door to her home exploded open and men poured in. But she was already gone.

  The fire built and built, and I burned from the inside, until finally, I was weightless, like smoke, like a hot wind that blew across the sand. Then I was moving, moving, moving so swiftly that everything was a blur. Until finally, I saw nothing.

  But I could feel everything. I felt sickening glee and triumphant power. I felt agonized horror and the depths of grief. The pain of the city that crumbled around me and the joy of the invaders that ruined it.

  Suddenly, there was a pull stronger than I’d ever felt, and I was swept from my weightless blindness. I grew heavier and heavier until I could feel the ground, and I could see the world. It felt different, though, as if I had been bound by the heaviest chains. With great effort, I broke from my kneeling posture and stood. And then, like a claw digging its nails into my skull, horrid and fouled thoughts pressed themselves to my mind. I could not make sense of them—why I felt them, why I didn’t feel them, why I understood them.

  The fiery hands that controlled me earlier turned up my face until I saw a man. Then, the hands moved my mouth and tongue so that I spoke the words: “Yes, Master?” I stared at a man I did not know. He was sitting on my father’s throne spinning my mother’s jewel-encrusted dagger into the wooden arm. We were in my home.

  But it was not my home anymore. It was a crumbled, hollowed shell of what used to be. There was no roof where once it had been. It was only dusk that covered us like a canopy.

  I wanted to fall into the ground, sick with what I had done, with what had been lost. I could feel it around me, Madinat Almulihi was perished, my family with them. I did not know what had become of my sister Edala, of my brother Kassim, but as I prayed they were spared, I was sure they were not. Had unseeing chains not lifted me upright, not held my face in stoicism, not fixed my attention onto the man, I would have run from there and cried.

  Instead, I stood and waited to serve, because the hands taught me that was my fate.

  And then it hit me, powerful and unyielding: the man’s searing desire for more death, for more victory.

  So, I gave him what he wished, and the desert fell, too.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Shattered tiles littered the ground in what used to be a room for thrones, a room to see the citizens of Madinat Almulihi and deliver edicts and orders. Now, it was a carcass of that place, and there were no citizens to seek its guidance. The jinni’s remorse stirred the air around us, crashing into invisible walls and sinking to the earth. Like the mixture he was forced to drink, I wanted to turn away from his tale but found myself transfixed, filled with all the sickening details children never heard.

  His story revealed what I had not understood before. It seemed, almost, to explain everything. The Dalmur did not search for a jinni simply to make a single wish, to uncover a better desert they hoped was there. They searched for the jinni to free him because they knew that with his freedom, life would begin anew.

  They were not rebels. They were believers.

  “You forgot one part,” I whispered, finally.

  He broke his gaze from his fallen home and turned to me. “Did I?”

  “The end.” The part that my mother had told to me over and over again as a child. She had been a believer all this time, and she had wanted me to be the same. I reached up to Saalim’s face and gently touched his cheek. “To be kind to the enslaved man, for one day he may be a king.”

  He looked at his feet, and I saw that I was losing him in his grief and in his fear.

  The city was so different now that I knew Saalim’s history with it, not through the pretty tales he told me before. Now that I understood he had been more than a man who lived amongst its streets. I saw it with new eyes. “Tell me more about what the palace was like before,” I said, hoping to distract him from his role in it all. Crunching carefully through the ceramic shards, I walked toward a battered wall.

  He took me through what would have been the back of the palace. Without the tedious care to preserve the impossible garden at the desert’s edge, what would have been the beautiful flowering bushes were now just sand and small-leaved plants.

  White birds cried above us as they swooped down to the crashing sea. Seagulls, he had called them the last time we were here.

  “I wish I could have seen it when it stood,” I said.

  “I do, too.” He walked away from me beyond the gardens.

  “Saalim.” I held out my hand to stop him, to beg him to look at me. I wanted to tell him that he need not carry so much guilt, so much regret. But when I saw the fallen city, I saw it was unfair of me to expect him to be unfeeling in the aftermath of his loss.

  He turned and told me we stood in the healer’s home, where he had been changed into who is he now. How different this Saalim seemed from the man he described before.

  I knelt down and pushed through the rocks, imagining that I was touching the same thing that a human Saalim once touched.

  I love all of you, regardless of your past. I pressed my fingers into the ground, hoping that Saalim from the lifetime before could feel it. “What do you think happened to her?”

  “Zahar?” He looked out at the horizon, walled by rocky cliffs. “She fled just before the invaders arrived in her home. She was old and tired. She did not get far.”

  There were some remnants of metal and glass scattered along the ground, and I pushed the rocks aside to peer at them. Beneath were pieces of parchment, unbelievably whole. Their words were mostly smudged and faded from the wet air, but I could see they were old correspondences. Now was not the time to sit and sift through them, though I wished I could. Anything to glimpse the life that Saalim lived, to understand the city that needed to be reborn. “Where were your quarters?”

  He led me there, his bare feet stepping easily through the sharpness. He pointed above our heads, saying it would have been there. But now, he gestured to the ground, then stiffened. He knelt down to pick up a small, wooden figure.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A toy . . .” he stared at it for a long time, and I heard wonder in his words. “From when I was a child.” He held it out to me. A meticulously carved, wooden soldier holding a long, straight sword at his side. Saalim gripped it tightly. “I can’t believe it’s here, that I have never found it before. I kept it for so long. When I was a child, I’d pretend to be brave like him. I would stand just the same with my dulled sword at my side.” He threw it to the ground, and it broke in half.

  He moved on to the edge of the palace where the dunes overlooked the sea. I quickly picked up the now-legless soldier, tucked it beneath the band at my hips, and went to stand beside him.

  Wrapping my arm around his waist, I leaned into him.

  “You are not the same man you used to be. You are no coward.”

  “How can I be anything but? I am bound to obey. Bravery is not a choice I have.”

  “That isn’t true.” I stood in front of him, between Saalim and the sea, forcing him to look at me. “Bravery doesn’t have to be what we hear in the stories, Saalim. Big and heroic. Perhaps that soldier,” I pointed back to where he’d thrown the toy on the ground, “was very scared. And taking that sword in his hand was the bravest thing he’d done in his life. Maybe he never went to battle.

  “Bravery can be small—like when you came to me that rainy morning in the prison tents because you needed to apologize, to confess. Or when I asked you to let us stay forever here and you told me no. Or letting Aashiq have me, because you knew he was good.”

  Saalim grimaced at the memories.

  “Doing something despite what it costs you. Doing something hard when you could choose something easy. That is brave.” Telling me this tale and showing me, finally, all of you. That is brave.

  He pressed his mouth to my brow but said nothing. His heart pounded against my ear. My heart thudded its reply. They banged on their cage walls, calling to each other. But neither Saalim nor I acknowled
ged their cries.

  Saalim was trapped in the darkness of his home, lost in the dust he’d kicked up from his tale. It was not the beautiful city we had been to before. It was the ruins of a family, of a life, of dreams and a future. Saalim had given everything to save what mattered to him most.

  Could I do the same?

  Though I did not want to face my choice, we could not stay here. I did not want Saalim to linger in the aching remains of his home any longer.

  “Can you take me back to the oasis?”

  “Of course.” He tightened his arms around me, and we were returned.

  I felt like I had been pulled from one world and had been plunged into the next. The images of a roiling sea, a fallen family, and a crumbled home were taken and rapidly replaced with the memories of what happened with my father, with Omar and Ibrahim. They came barreling at me as the fear of my future pummeled my gut.

  Saalim spoke. “I am sorry you have to do this.”

  “What do you mean?” The toy soldier’s sharp edges poked into my skin, and I carefully removed it, tucking it beside a rock when Saalim looked away.

  “That you have to make this decision. That you have been given no better alternative. I know that you have hoped for something else, a different answer to this problem. And now you are left with no time for that to come. It is not fair—none of your life has been, Emel. I am sorry for that burden.”

  “Thank you,” I said, my voice strained.

  Burden. That was the second time he had mentioned my burden that day.

  Kneeling by the pool, I dipped my fingers into the water. The sun was low in the sky and shining its light through the trunks of the trees onto my face. My reflection peered up at me from the sapphire pool. My eyes reminded me so much of my father’s, I had to look away. Fear gnawed at my insides. The water was cool, and I wanted to submerge myself in it, hoping it would dull the throbbing ache.