“It must have been a mirage,” said her father, Jalal ibn Karim al-Hadid, who was known to his clan as Abu Yusuf. Her mother, Fatim, simply snorted and shook her head, and went back to nursing her youngest. But the girl, who was fifteen, stubborn, and headstrong, dragged her father from the tent, pleading with him to go look at the palace with her.
“Daughter, you simply can’t have seen what you thought you saw,” said Abu Yusuf.
“Do you think me a child? I know a mirage when I see one,” she insisted. “And it stood as real before me as you do now.”
Abu Yusuf sighed. He knew that look in his daughter’s eye, that blazing indignation that defied any attempt at reason. Worse, he knew it was his own fault. Their clan had been fortunate of late, and it had made him indulgent. The winter had been mild, and the rains had come on time. His brothers’ wives had both born thriving sons. At the turning of the year, as Abu Yusuf had sat warm in the glow of the fires and watched his clan as they ate and played and squabbled around him, he’d told himself that perhaps finding a husband for Fadwa could wait. Let the girl have one more year with her family, before sending her away. But now Abu Yusuf wondered if his wife was right: perhaps he had coddled his only daughter beyond reason.
“I don’t have time to argue about nonsense,” he told her sharply. “Your uncles and I are taking the sheep to pasture. If there’s a magical palace out there, we’ll see it. Now go and help your mother.”
“But—”
“Girl, do as I say!”
He rarely shouted. She drew back, stung. Then she turned and ran into the women’s tent.
Fatim, who’d heard it all, came in after her and clucked her tongue at her daughter. Fadwa sniffed and avoided her eyes. She sat herself in front of the low table where the day’s dough was rising and began to rip the dough to pieces and pound them flat, using rather more force than necessary. Her mother sighed at the noise, but said nothing. Better the girl exhaust herself than stay a simmering nuisance all morning.
The women cooked and milked and mended as the sun traced its familiar path through the sky. Fadwa bathed her little cousins, and endured their howls and recriminations. The sun set, and still the men were not yet returned. Fatim’s expression began to darken. Bandits were rare in their valley, but even so, three men and a large herd of sheep would make an easy target. “Enough of that,” she snapped at Fadwa, who was struggling to clothe a squirming boy. “I’ll do it, since you can’t. Go and sew your wedding dress.”
Fadwa obeyed, though she’d rather do just about anything else. She was no good at fine stitching, she had little patience for it; she could weave well enough, and mend a tent as quick as Fatim, but embroidery? Little stitches arranged just so? It was dull work, and it made her go cross-eyed. More than once Fatim had looked over her daughter’s progress and commanded her to rip it all out again. No girl of hers, she declared, would be married in such a sloppy dress.
If it were up to Fadwa, she would toss the dress into the cooking fire and sing loudly as it burned. Life in her clan’s encampment grew more stifling with each day, but it was nothing compared with her terror at the idea of marriage. She knew she was a spoiled child; she knew her father loved her, and wouldn’t be so harsh as to choose a husband who was cruel or stupid simply to make a good alliance. But anyone could be fooled, even her father. And to leave everyone she had ever known, and live with a strange man, and lie beneath him, and be ordered about by his family—was it not like dying, in a way? Certainly she wouldn’t be Fadwa al-Hadid anymore. She’d be someone else, another woman entirely. But there was nothing to do about it: she would marry, and soon. It was as certain as the sunrise.
She looked up at a joyful cry from her mother. The men were coming into camp, driving the sheep before them. The sheep stumbled against one another, drowsy from full bellies and a long journey. “A good day,” one of Fadwa’s uncles called. “We couldn’t ask for better grazing.”
Soon the men were sitting down to their dinner, tearing at the bread and cheese. The women served them and then retired to their tent to eat what was left. With her husband safely home, Fatim’s mood improved; she laughed with her sisters-in-law and cooed over the baby at her breast. Fadwa ate silently, and gazed across at the men’s tent, at her father’s solid back.
Later that night, Abu Yusuf drew his daughter aside. “We went by the place you spoke of,” he told her. “I looked hard, but I saw nothing.”
Fadwa nodded, dejected but unsurprised. Already she herself had begun to doubt it.
Abu Yusuf smiled at her downturned face. “Have I told you about the time I saw an entire caravan that wasn’t there? I was about your age. I was out with my sheep one morning, and saw a gigantic caravan come marching down through a pass in the hills. At least a hundred men, coming closer and closer. I could see the men’s eyes, even the breath from the camels’ noses. I turned and ran back home, to make them come see. And I left my sheep behind.”
Fadwa’s eyes widened. This was a carelessness she wouldn’t have believed of him, even as a boy.
“By the time I returned with my father, the caravan was gone without a trace. And most of my sheep had vanished as well. It took all day to hunt them down, and some had gone lame from the rocks.”
“What did your father say?” She was almost afraid to ask. Karim ibn Murhaf al-Hadid had died many years before Fadwa was born, but stories of his severe character were legend in the tribe.
“Oh, at first he said nothing, only whipped me. Then, later, he told me a tale. He said that once when he was a little boy, playing in the women’s tent, he looked out and saw a strange woman dressed all in blue. She was standing just beyond the camp, smiling at him, and holding out her hands. He could hear her calling, asking him to come and play. The girl who was supposed to be watching him had fallen asleep. So he followed the woman out into the desert—alone, in the middle of a summer afternoon.”
Fadwa was astonished. “And he lived!”
“It was a near thing. They didn’t find him for hours, and by then his blood was boiling. It was a long time before he was well again. But he said he would have sworn on his father’s name that the woman was real. And now”—he smiled—“you will have a story to tell your children, when they come running to you and swear that they saw a lake of clear water in a dry valley, or a horde of djinn flying across the sky. You can tell them of the beautiful shining palace you knew to be there, and how your cruel and terrible father refused to believe you.”
She smiled. “You know I won’t say that.”
“Perhaps, perhaps not. Now”—he kissed her forehead—“finish your chores, child.”
He watched as she turned back toward the women’s tent. His smile faltered, then faded. He had not been honest with his daughter. The tales of the caravan and his father’s misadventure were true enough—but earlier that day, driving the sheep along the ridge, he had, for the briefest of moments, been blinded by a shining vision of a palace in the valley below. A blink, and it had disappeared. He’d stared at the empty valley for a long time, telling himself that the sunlight must strike the eye in a particular way at this spot, creating the illusion. Nevertheless, he was shaken. As his daughter had said, it had been no vague, wavering mirage—he’d seen impossible details, spires and battlements and glittering courtyards. And standing a little ways from the open gate, the figure of a man, staring up at him.
6.
It was almost the end of September, but the summer heat lingered without mercy. At midday the streets thinned, and pedestrians congregated under the awnings. The brick and stone of the Lower East Side soaked up the day’s heat and released it again at sundown. The rickety staircases that ran up the backs of the tenements became vertical dormitories as residents dragged their mattresses onto the landings and made camp on the rooftops. The air was a malodorous broth,