Ages of Wonder

Coils of white rose slowly, smoke twisting into the air like rope unwinding. Blinking, Nasrah leaned over her makeshift incense burner and inhaled, drawing the haze deep into her lungs. She tried to focus on the smoke’s sweet fragrance, its taste, its gentle movement through still air, as if such details could shield her from the sounds of her family dying outside the tent walls.

Before her bent knees small chips of resin smoldered in a clay cup, pale yellow flaring to red as they burned. They were so tiny, Nasrah thought. So few. She did not let the thought go further, only clenched her hand around the ruins of the golden pendant that had concealed the resin, long hidden beneath the layers of her dress. Her neck still stung from the bite of the cord on which it had hung, the silken necklace snapped in her haste.

Just outside, her aged father-in-law screamed curses at his attacker, his oiled blade hissing through the air. Nasrah closed her eyes as he gasped and choked wetly, and then came the thump of something large falling. There was a sound of steel entering flesh once, twice, and the crunch of heavy footsteps. Farther away, a child’s cry rose shrill, and was silenced.

These tents had been her home, her safety. Here she had lived as A’isha, an identity birthed in empty sand from lips cracked and bloody, earned with humility and a willingness to work. Dark and quiet, A’isha had gained their trust, had been taken as wife by a man as strong as he was gentle, had been loved. Now the name seemed a curse, and the one who called herself “she who lives” breathed fragrant smoke as the people who had given her a home died for that shelter.

The slaughter felt endless, but at last the screaming stopped, the ring of blade on blade ceasing, the final pleas and whimpers of the dying whispering away to nothing. Then there was only the slow sound of footsteps across the stony ground—pausing, scuffing, kicking at unmoving bodies, and moving on.

On her knees, Nasrah stared ahead and watched through tears as breath and smoke mixed in the darkened confines of the tent. Then, the resin’s fog steady and sweet all around her, she waited. They searched the largest tents first, as she’d known they would, the silent attackers speaking for the first time since they’d ridden up and greeted offers of spiced tea with drawn blades. Nasrah heard claims of ownership of the few treasures the tents held, though most of the attackers would leave empty-handed; her in-laws had not been rich in anything but laughter.

At last one approached the small tent at the camp’s edge, its front closed and sides lowered despite the afternoon heat. A man brushed aside the heavy goat’s-hair fabric, letting in a wave of fresh, dry air, and crouched to enter. He started when he saw Nasrah kneeling silently in a ring of worn cushions, and drew breath to cry out, hand reaching for his weapon.

Nasrah watched as he blinked in sudden confusion, his intent expression turning vague, mouth opened to cry words he had forgotten. He inhaled again, and his gaze slipped from Nasrah’s face, slid down her body unseeing. At last his eyes settled on the clay cup and the last wisps of smoke rising above its lip. He sniffed.

Cautiously, he stepped into the tent’s shadowed interior, letting the flap fall closed behind him, trapping the rest of the precious smoke inside. Nasrah did not move as he began to search their few belongings, her husband’s leather traveling bag and carved pipe, her sh’ela headdress beaded in blue; merely closed her eyes as A’isha’s life was laid bare beneath the hands of this stranger.

He was soon joined by another, and this man’s awareness of Nasrah’s presence fled quicker, swept away in a breath of frankincense-scented air. Her skill, it seemed, had not faded in her years of hiding.

In silence she listened as they derided the threadbare clothes, the worn silver jewelry, as if they had believed they would find more. Why, she wanted to ask; why her family? But the frankincense smoke was too thin to coax answers from the strangers’ distracted minds, too little to force them to talk. And in truth, what could they say that she didn’t already know, hadn’t learned in the first moment she’d seen the up-raised blades: they had come for her. More than three years and uncounted stretches of desert sand lay between A’isha and her true identity as Nasrah bint Shahin, and never in that time had she revealed herself in the smoke or spoken the name of her lost people. And still they’d found her.

When they finally left the tent, they already spoke of the journey away. For a time she could hear them outside, one calling orders as others loaded the camels with stolen goods and water. She listened as they moved on, the camels’ gait unhurried; listened as the sound of their small caravan faded; listened until she could hear nothing but sand.

And though she knew they were gone, Nasrah knelt in the center of the tent and shivered, suddenly more afraid than even swords or the screams of the dying had made her. For as the men passed but a hand’s length from her face, she’d smelled something on their clothes that the tang of blood and sweat had hidden. A scent both sharp and bitter, with a faint and lingering sweetness.

The afternoon had begun to cool, light lengthening, before Nasrah gained the courage to enter the smoke. Much of the frankincense had escaped, gusting out the opened tent’s flap and seeping slowly through the walls themselves. Still, she thought as she brought herself to the edge of trance, there would be enough. It was not a tool, now; merely a door.

As she slipped into the smoke, the details of her surroundings sharpened while the feel of her body receded. Her awareness drifted with the smoke, senses swaying in eddies of air through the tent’s shadowed interior, easing through gaps in the fabric’s weave and expanding into the desert’s heat. Rising to the farthest edges of the incense she had burned, Nasrah leapt, her awareness flying outward until it caught on another cloud of smoke, burning leagues distant: a small temple on the edge of the desert, its stone altar attended by a prone worshipper. Caught in the smoke and all it touched, Nasrah knew she could influence this man as she had the attackers, but left him to his silent prayer.

Again she leapt, and again, again: to a small house filled with young children, to a jewelry shop on the southern coast, to an amir’s harem. And with each leap something of her stayed behind, as if she drew a map of the world in her mind with the twisting passage of frankincense clouds.

At last Nasrah slowed, not wanting to reach all the way to Egypt or Parthia, though leaps of such distances were possible. Instead she peered at the whole, seeking through smoke those who meant her harm. Here and there she felt sharp sense of another mind of her blood, attuned to the smoke, but they were rare and scattered, the secret network of her people in disarray.

Perhaps, Nasrah thought, others hid from the smoke, as she had. A thin hope, and one she couldn’t truly believe. Besides, she had been found even with her talent damped; she would not wait to be caught again unaware. Instead, she sought places where myrrh tainted the smoke, a shadow across the white, a sharp scent amidst the sweet.

Such flaws pulled—yet she found herself moving not towards the coast or foreign lands, but the desert’s heart. With a cold shock, she recognized the place: the golden stone, the outline of a tumbled outer wall. The ruins of her true home. Irem’s fallen pillars were before her, neither seen nor felt nor sensed, but something of all three. No frankincense burned here now, no people of the smoke waited: she found only silence and places unfilled. Yet the smoke lingered, years of its burning staining the city’s very stones.

And here, even years distant, lay the evidence of a slaughter as terrible as the one outside her tent. The frankincense shuddered with the memory of fear and pain, as if the air itself still held the city’s dying cries. And worse—

Nasrah jerked, eyes opening wide as if light could banish what the smoke held. But sight of the tent’s dark walls couldn’t hide what had been written in smoke for her to find. Through the lingering smoke burned a dark streak of myrrh, the Romans’ funeral scent mocking the vast grave of her people, vivid against the frankincense like a bruise across flesh.

Smoke so new, so plentiful, could only be a sign. Even now, she realized, the enemy had a spy that stood in the ruins of her city and burned myrrh, plumes of incense rising skywards to remind her scattered people of their defeat and promise their deaths.

What did they want? Nasrah placed her head in her hands, her cheeks soaked with tears. Power hungry, her father had called the Romans, thieves and conquerors beneath the rule of a madman. A madman driven to rage by the thoughts of a talent he could not possess; driven to murder by knowledge of spies who could influence him, even kill him, through the very incense burned across his vast empire.

Who had whispered the secret of the Ad into the Roman emperor’s ear, none had learned; not before the emperor had caused the fall of their great desert city. Was that not enough, she asked silently. Must he drive each survivor into the ground until all that was left of their blood was powder?

Even so distant, the scent of myrrh made her sick. Nasrah struggled to rise and cried out, cramped legs sending her sprawling across the cushions. Breath hissing through her teeth, she crawled out of the tent to the clean air beyond.

Though little time had passed, the sun had already taken its toll on the fallen: blood dried to flakes on skin turned ashy, open eyes clouding as the dry air stole their tears. Beside the tent, her father-in-law lay curled, his bloodied sword beside him, caked in sand. Turning away, Nasrah struggled to her feet. She shut her eyes as she passed the main tent, unable to face what lay behind the women’s shielding curtain where her sisters-in-law had hidden the smallest children.

She staggered onward. There, by the communal cookfire, lay her husband’s aunt, face obscured by her favorite yellow scarf. There, the youngest of her husband’s brothers, the flesh of his belly opened onto the ground. And there, just where she had last seen him, lay Talib, her husband. First to raise a hand in greeting, and first to fall. Nasrah approached with unsteady steps.

“Talib . . .” she whispered, dry voice cracking. If he hadn’t been the first, the hateful thought came, she would have fought. She would have been beside him.

Her hand rose to clutch at her neck where her necklace had once hung, and she felt that she was choking on tears. “Talib, there wasn’t enough for—” She couldn’t say their names: his sisters, his baby nieces and nephews. Not enough smoke to fill the large tent, and not enough time to reach them safely. And the same hot afternoon breeze that tugged at her hair would have whisked the smoke away long before any could breathe it.

And the one who had caused the slaughter of these people and her blood-kin alike hunted her, had writ his name clumsy and large in smoke that still trembled with cries of betrayal and death. She knew not what myrrh-puppet burned incense in the ruins of Irem, only that even a controlled mind could lead her closer to its true master. She would find the person responsible, be he the emperor himself; in body or smoke, he could not hide.

And if she shuddered and collapsed, touched Talib’s cooling body and his blood splattered across the gravel—if she threw back her head and wailed into the empty sky—it was only the last of the woman called A’isha, dying in her husband’s arms.

Nasrah left before dawn, whispering prayers of apology for leaving their bodies unburied. She had done what she could, but she was but one woman, and hunted. The attackers had stolen all but two thin, aged camels, and Nasrah took both: one to ride, and one to bear an extra burden of water. She left the familiar ground of the family’s trading route, leaving the shadows of the coastal mountains for the empty desert. Her face and lashes turned white as she crossed the flats, her camels’ feet churning up clouds of chalky powder. She navigated the dunes, hills of sand towering forty man-heights or more, and stumbled through rocky expanses that threatened even the camels’ feet.

Even with all the water her camels could carry, she sought the wells she knew. Where they were guarded, she disguised her gender and paid, giving her bracelets, her red headscarf, Talib’s pipe. At last she had to trade her second camel for enough food and water to finish her journey.

Soon, she guided her camel onto the old trading roads, wide trails pounded to rock firmness over centuries. Yet few traveled these routes now, choosing instead to forge more difficult paths to avoid fallen Irem, and she met no other travelers.

As she rode, Nasrah thought of the camp as she’d left it, the row of bloating bodies and their hideous wounds. She thought of her birth family, the people of her blood destroyed as the earth shook, screaming as the walls fell, vanishing below the sand.

Eight days passed before Nasrah was jarred from her furious remembrances by sight of a familiar ridge of limestone. Turning her camel, she hurried to the site, then fell to her knees and dug. Few had known of these places, fewer still among women, yet Shahin al-Adi had shown each of his daughters. Any who worked the smoke, he said, needed to know these places.

Nasrah trembled with fatigue before she uncovered one of the great stone vats, forgotten beneath the sand. The harvest had been stored here, frankincense of the finest quality hidden safely until it went to market. She forced aside the lid and filled her dress with chunks of the pale resin, and something inside her eased: if not the anger, then the fear that had laced it. She would not return to her city—or find the ones who hid in its ruins—unarmed.

Nasrah made a hasty camp, eating strips of dried fish before pitching a shelter of scarves and curling in their shade. Come nightfall, she would approach what was left of the city’s walls, shrouded by darkness and sleep. She tried clear her mind of all but the tasks to come, yet memories of her home intruded. For the first time in years, she thought of the date groves planted at the city’s heart by the Temple, kept green by water drawn from the great cavern below the city. There had been music and morning calls to market as the city’s gates were opened to let traders enter. As a child, she’d lived immersed in Irem’s riches: gold and cinnamon and cassia, silk and red Parthian pottery. Each day had smelled of frankincense, the resin’s sweetness so constant that she only noticed its lack.

Run, he’d screamed as he threw her over Irem’s outer wall. Hide! Nasrah had hit the hard ground and rolled as the earth shook beneath her. She’d looked back, expecting to see her sisters following, her father and brother climbing the wall; yet saw only the great spire of the Temple shudder and slowly fall. Nasrah hid her face in her dress from the cloud of dust and rock, but mere cloth could not shield her from the sounds: a city screaming, earth and golden stone breaking as the City of Pillars tumbled into the ground.

Nasrah had hidden in the ruins of an outer tower as the few survivors pulled themselves from the ruins. But they were normal people, and Nasrah’s calls into the smoke went unanswered. Many of the caravans camped beyond the city’s walls fled after the earthquake, making signs against evil when the wounded begged for help or shelter. The very earth moved against the people of Ad, the traders said, their voices harsh; the lake in the vast cavern beneath the city had run dry in a day. Irem had been cursed and cast down; they would not bring that fate on their own.

In the tower’s shadows, Nasrah had known that their words were true. Yet she alone smelled the evidence in the smoke, the scent that curled through the dust that choked the air and shadowed the sun: myrrh. Earth and water had turned against them, but only, she knew, at the hands of the Romans. Strange foreigners who wielded their smoke clumsily, the Romans were said to have other powers: mages who could control earth and water alike, gathered in their conquest of kingdoms and yoked to their empire’s will with myrrh.

When at last she stumbled from the city, the sands around Irem were empty. With little food or water, she’d only managed a day’s travel down the trade roads before collapsing. It was only chance that the young son of a trader saw her huddled form, and the grace of the divine that brought his family to care for her, treat her, until she returned to health.

Nasrah awoke to the sudden press of a hand across her face. She started upwards, thrashing and disoriented, but a man pushed down on her shoulders while his hand silenced her cries. Chewing, the camel watched dispassionately. She fought wildly, cursing herself for falling asleep, yet even against her nails and flailing arms the man stood unmoving. At last, Nasrah stilled, letting him haul her to her feet. At the sight of his weathered face, hope withered; she did not know him.

Yet it was the man who waited some steps distant that made Nasrah freeze like prey. Neither tall nor imposing, he stood like royalty, watching her. His head was covered with a pale cloth bound with a brown band, and the trailing edges had been drawn across his face, leaving only his eyes exposed. Yet even so disguised, the man could not hide his heritage. Burned and peeling, his skin was too pale for a man of the desert; the nose that shaped the fabric too sharp and aquiline. Most startling was the color of his eyes: a brown so pale it rivaled the desert, flecked with green.

A trap, she thought, struggling to think through the furious sound, struggling to breathe. A trap, all of it—the murders a ploy designed to make her seek the power and protection of the smoke. This Roman would have seen her frankincense burn through the smoke as surely as she’d seen his plume of myrrh—he had been watching, waiting. And, armed only with incense and a knife, she had run straight to him.

She looked up in time to see the Roman flick a dismissive hand, and speak. His words might have been unintelligible, but his meaning was not; she had a moment to steel herself before the other man’s hands were upon her, dragging her upright and searching her clothes. Her face flushed hot, and she turned her head away from the men, jaw tight. He was efficient, finding the chunks of frankincense hidden inside the layered fabric of her dress and rolled into her sleeves, and tossing them into the Roman’s outstretched hands.

Nasrah whimpered, reaching unbidden for the incense. The Roman snorted and turned, trusting the other man to bring her. Still reeling, Nasrah staggered behind as they traveled across the sand. The sun had all but vanished before they crested a last rise and Nasrah’s ruined city lay before them.

There were no towers now to mark Irem’s presence, only empty space where the spires and pillared buildings had once risen above the desert like a sultan’s palace. The city’s great wall was but a tumbled-down ring of yellow stones; and where the caravans had gathered, tents and camels spread out from the city like a sea, there was only sand.

Nasrah stumbled, staring at the hole where once stood her home. Though sand had covered most of the city’s surviving walls, the empty space still gaped wide as the day she’d first seen it, as if having devoured all of Irem it struggled to swallow more. The Roman laughed at Nasrah’s expression, and gestured widely towards the city as if towards strange riches. Still laughing, he led the way across ground pounded flat by untold centuries of tents, traders, and camels’ feet, to a small camp hidden just inside the ruins of the great wall.

“Sit,” the desert man commanded her, pushing her to the ground. Traitor, she named him in the depths of her mind. She could smell no myrrh on him, and yet he worked as the Roman’s guide, had allowed this enemy to cross the sands where no foreign foot had before stepped. He knelt, and carefully lit a small fire, already set, to help stave off the desert’s creeping cold.

Yet it was not only against the cold that the fire burned, Nasrah saw, watching as the Roman locked away her frankincense in a wooden box, and filled his hands with deep amber pieces of myrrh. He placed the largest piece in a stone dish lined with wood chips that he lit from the open flame. Smoke curled upwards and he quickly blew it across her face. As myrrh filled her lungs, the Roman attacked through the smoke.

Nasrah pulled back in surprise. She had heard of the crudeness of control gained with myrrh-smoke and the fumbling skill with which the Romans employed it, but never had she imagined anything so primitive. The pressure of the smoke against her mind had power, yes, but no smoothness, no subtlety. Mere noise where she’d expected song.

She looked up at this man, the creases of concentration between his pale eyes, the rawness of his sunburned skin. It took no blood-talent to wield myrrh, she remembered; only practice. And it seemed clear that this Roman had never been submitted to the daily tests she had endured, the constant smoke-borne struggle of wills between sisters to decide who would sweep the hearth and who would steep tea, which one of them would mend the clothing while another got first use of the washwater.

If he wanted her to submit, she thought, he would be better served to bind her with rope. Yet she let her eyes go wide and pushed back through the smoke, pitiful struggles, while in truth she held his invasion at bay. She fought briefly, in body and smoke, and then sagged in the traitor’s arms. The Roman’s smoke enveloped her, bitter myrrh in every breath.

With this, the questioning began. Though the traitor was forced to translate, the Roman seemed to follow her responses, watching intently. Where she could, Nasrah told the truth or feigned ignorance of matters usually kept from women. She spoke of frankincense groves and trading routes, the resin’s price at market. She spoke of the talent of smoke, the exercises and tests to hone the inborn skill—practiced by her father and brother, she said, but never herself. Never her sisters.

She grew confused when he spoke of spies, frightened when he pressed for details of the men of Ad, disguised as merchants and traders, scattered across his empire. He tested her truthfulness and the smoke’s control, and Nasrah danced on blade’s edge to hide her deception. The questions seemed endless, yet at last the Roman was satisfied. He sighed, then asked, “Do you have children?”

“A lie?” the Roman asked haltingly in her tongue, his accent mangling the words. A hint of a smile touched his face. “You fight the smoke. Your blood is strong. Powerful.”

She pulled back, blinking, as the men’s faces, Irem’s crumbling walls, seemed suddenly to spin and sway around her. She did not fight but reached out, fingers grasping empty air.

Again, the Roman blew bitter myrrh in her face, drowning her senses, stinging her eyes and her throat. Nasrah coughed and inhaled. She could feel the Roman’s sudden press upon her mind, his presence closer than the smoke that swirled between them. The sickening scent surrounded her, sharp and spicy, and her body began to shake as it filled her.

It was full dark before the Roman at last settled down to sleep, gesturing for the desert man to keep watch. Nasrah listened as the traitor’s steps receded, listened as the Roman’s breathing slowed, listened to the fire popping in the silence of the desert night.

Then slowly, Nasrah pushed herself upright and rolled her shoulders to loosen them of the tension from her feigned tremors. Only myrrh, she thought; and the Roman was not the only one to lay traps. She looked down at his naked face, then reached into her clothing, fingers seeking hidden seams while the fire before her crackled and burned.

“You know little of frankincense, Roman,” Nasrah said at last, her voice quiet enough to be the play of wind across sand. “We of Irem, we were born of it: we inhale it in our first breath and our spirits ride its smoke after death. The first harvest of the resin—it comes as a shock. A blade from nowhere, a gash in smooth bark, sap dripping like tears.”

With a flick of her wrist, she cast a handful of what seemed to be small stones towards the fire. They pattered to the desert sand like rain. “The second cut opens that old wound. The resin runs stronger, faster, more plentifully during the second harvest—but its quality is not the same.”

She barely moved, and yet again there came a sound of something falling to the ground—larger pieces, this time, and more of them. “But the third . . . the tree’s third harvest needs not cut long nor deep, and yet from that slice comes the finest resin. Smoke fit for the sultan, the smallest piece worth more than gold.”

And again her hand flashed from the shadows of her sleeve, and tossed something into the stones ringing the fire. As she watched, it began to smoke. “You killed my family,” Nasrah bint Shahin said. “You turned your mages against us, cast our city into the sand, then hunted the gift of our blood nearly to extinction.”

She looked up and stared into the Roman’s slumbering face, his features made harsh in the fire’s light. “You killed my husband. You killed his family down to the smallest child, and they knew nothing of our war. You ruined what joy I’d found.”

With the sound of the frankincense falling into the embers, the Roman started awake, his eyes going wide as he looked from her steady gaze to the fire. He reached blindly, though for sword or myrrh, she did not know—and he was too late. For the smoke had already surrounded him in slow wisps and eddies as he’d slept, and the plume of white that rose from the fire’s core only gave her the strength to tighten her hold on his mind.

“When you wake,” she told him, her will echoing through the smoke, “you will take us from here. You will leave off the search for my people—I am the last of Irem, the last of this blood, and you will know it to be true. I carry a son, and you will believe him be a product of this night. You will know and love and care for my child as your own, and will let me live to raise him.”

His eyes were dark in the firelight, his whole body trembling in fear and rage as he struggled fruitlessly against her control. It did not matter if he could not understand her words; the smoke needed no language.

“You will think me harmless,” she whispered savagely, even as she forced him to close his eyes and drove his struggling mind back down into sleep. “And each night you will burn frankincense to sweeten our home.”

The Roman collapsed into his blankets as if cut down, his head striking the ground with a loud thump. Drawn at last by the noise and movement, the traitor hurried back to the fire and stared at the Roman’s limp form. “What have you done to him?” he hissed, keeping his distance.

Nasrah bowed her head, and murmured, “He has . . . tired himself.” A subtle wisp of smoke reinforced the misdirection of her words. The traitor shot her a look of disgust, then turned his back on them both, returning to his sentry.

At last, Nasrah lay back in her blankets, Irem’s fallen wall at her back and both arms wrapped across her belly. Tears slipped down her cheeks as she stared at the coil of white still rising from the fire’s heart. But for her child’s presence, she felt empty.