Nisa buried her babies in the cold silt that divided the mountains and the sea. Nisa did not remember the mountains or the sea, only the silt. Ash-gray granules. Soft skin. She watched her babies squirm against one another in the shallow depression below her, curled together, as they’d been inside her. They did not cry out anymore.
The women kicked sand across the bodies. Nisa still saw the outline of one small arm.
Another sacrifice to the insatiable desert.
Someone touched Nisa’s elbow.
“Wake up, Nisa.”
The sand consumes all you love. Even a world away from it.
“Nisa. Woman. Fighter-mine. They are bodies buried. Buried deep. Wake up.” Her mother’s voice, but her mother was three days dead.
“Leave me be,” Nisa said.
“You’re a desert woman, fighter-mine. Women feed blood to the sand. Feed it the blood of another or feed it their own. You know that. Don’t forget what you are.”
“I won’t forget anything,” Nisa said. She fell into silence then, a silence as heavy as her sleep. She wrapped her blade in leather and strapped it to her back. She walked outside the circle of her clan women. They no longer looked at her.
When Nisa finally allowed herself to wake, she and the rest of her clan were on the other side of the mountains.
When she looked up the world was only sand and gray stone. The high, hot sun rode over her shoulder. She had walked back to the sand that was her world.
“You talking yet?” Hoshana, the new clan mother, asked her as they walked. “You’re a weak woman to drag your feet in the sand over this.”
Nisa said nothing, but her gaze moved to Hoshana’s face, traced the deep creases in her dark skin.
“I’ve approved a caravan raid tonight. You know that?” Hoshana said. “The other women wanted you to lead it, bring them all down over the dunes. I said no.”
Hoshana waited. Nisa looked away from her and up at the men, women, unblooded girls, crones, and children striding ahead of them.
“Nisa,” Hoshana said, “unwrap that blade and go with them. Kanika will lead them, but I want you there.”
Hoshana strode ahead of Nisa, back to the head of the line. Nisa did not unwrap her blade. She gazed down at her hands, at the red sand stuck beneath her nails, the reddish dust clinging to her skin.
The sun sank low and the women assembled under the deepening dusky wound of the sky. Behind the circle of women, the rest of the clan—unblooded girls, men, crones, children—stood and waited.
Nisa was the only woman who stood outside the circle of women. She stood among the others like an unblooded girl, watching the drawing of the circle on the sand for the first time in— how many years? How long had her mother kept them among the ocean people?
Hoshana took up her blade and drew a line in the sand. She thrust the blade into the sand halfway to the hill and then drew the dagger at her hip. One of Hoshana’s kin stepped forward and knelt in the sand before Hoshana. The kinswoman held out her open palms to Hoshana and bowed her head. Her hair, like the hair of all the other blooded women, was braided back against her scalp, knotted at the nape of the neck, and fell in gritty dreadlocks from neck to waist.
“We of clan Hoshana ask appeasement of your hunger,” Hoshana said. “We ask forgiveness for abandoning you to the false vessels of the desert. We of clan Hoshana ask to be brought back into the fold, to take our rightful place on the sand. Accept our gift, and be filled.”
Hoshana cut her kin’s palms, one long clean stroke, releasing the blood. The kinswoman’s broad palms were already scarred, as was every woman’s. She squeezed her fingers, made her hands into fists, and let the blood drip from her palms to the line in the sand.
“We ask permission to draw our circle,” Hoshana said.
The blood soaked into the sand.
Hoshana nodded to Kanika and Kanika’s birth sister, the thin, narrow-waisted Edibe. Kanika and Edibe crossed blades and began the enormous circle, each moving in an opposite direction until only a span of sand remained for the rest of the clan to enter the space. Hoshana walked into the nearly completed circle and put out her hand to the rest of the clan.
“Step into the circle,” she said.
The clan complied. The unblooded girls, the men, the crones, the children, and finally, the last of the women. Nisa walked last, walked until she tread in the tracks left by her kin into the protection of Hoshana’s circle. Hoshana held out her hand to her.
“Step into my circle, Nisa,” Hoshana said.
Outside the circle was death on the sand. Inside was the clan that buried Nisa’s babies, and the woman who cut her mother’s throat. Death on the sand, death inside the circle. It was all the same, wasn’t it? The sand consumes all you love.
Nisa stepped into the circle.
Kanika and Edibe closed it behind her, their blades crossing, sealing clan Hoshana inside the circle on the sand.
The unblooded girls constructed the circle of dung fires inside the sand circle. The women set up the big domed meeting tent and the others camped inside the circle of sand and fires. They let the dogs loose, but not even the dogs dared cross the circle. Only the women crossed that line after dark.
Hoshana called the women into the main tent. Nisa did not join them. She sat outside, squatting at the edge of the circle. Kanika found her there, as Nisa knew she would. Kanika kicked up sand as she walked.
Kanika, younger, leaner than Hoshana, but with a face just as narrow and heavy-browed, put her big hands on her narrow hips and stared down at Nisa.
“The other women are ready. There’s a caravan out there that brought in a dozen ladies from the ocean cities. The ladies are all tied up outside their fire ring. It’ll be a quick run.”
Nisa said nothing.
Kanika kicked sand at her. It fell across Nisa’s thighs.
“The sand eat you, are you a woman or not?” Kanika said. “Your mother would have made us ocean slaves. That’s all. That was her great vision.”
Nisa raised her gaze to Kanika. She did not unwrap her blade.
Kanika snorted. “We’ve killed women for less than what your mother did. Those babies blotted out the rest of her foolishness. You’re a clean woman now, Nisa. The ocean has been scoured clean with sand, purged with our blood.”
Nisa stood. To do otherwise would have meant her blood on the sand. She had not forgotten everything.
Kanika turned to join the group of women on the other side of the camp. Nisa followed her. She watched Kanika step over the drawn circle in the sand, the circle that protected the ring of firelight and all those within it.
The group of women gazed back at her. Waited. Dozens of eyes gleamed in the fire glow.
Nisa stepped over the line. Did not break it.
They started along the dunes, twenty-five women in long red-brown robes, their black hair braided back from their faces.
Nisa gazed out at the land that stretched out ahead of her, hilly and wind-sculpted. Gray pillars of stone stabbed jaggedly into the sky. Some of the pillars had fallen across the sand in a dozen pieces, big as boulders. Others stood in groups of three and five, taller than a dozen people, their forms twisted, worn smooth by wind and sand. The pillars were the easiest way to navigate out on the sand. Unlike the shifting red dunes and pale wandering stars, the pillars were constant, unmoving. They framed the desert.
The women slipped across the sand as the red glow of a double moon rose over their shoulders.
An hour, maybe more, and then Kanika halted them at the crest of a sandy rise.
Standing out atop a dune in the midst of four pillars, one of the caravan scouts stood with his back to them, pissing onto the sand.
Kanika directed three women into the shadow of the pillars.
Nisa stayed at the back of the group of women, gazing out at the desert at the robed women ahead of her, as darkness pooled around them. She wondered how many bodies the desert would eat tonight.
They waited until the shadows of the three women overwhelmed the pissing man, then Kanika moved the rest of the women up into the shade of the pillars.
Nisa watched the women bury the scout’s body. His throat was cut clean, left to right. Edibe and her birth-mother, Kadife, were bleeding with the moons, so none of the women feared the scout’s blood.
Edibe’s blade and hands were covered in his blood. Kadife kicked sand over the body. Nisa watched black-eyed Fahra lick at the blood on Edibe’s hands.
Fahra and Edibe were both small for desert women, but as their shadowy figures came together atop the sand; their combined form loomed before Nisa like an omen. She finally looked away from Fahra suckling Edibe’s fingers, away from the sight of Edibe’s mouth moving toward Fahra’s, sharing spit and blood on the sand. Nisa’s desire was too much, too palatable here where a woman’s circle meant life or death, where the women around her became fighters, warriors, lovers, kin, companions, where women had the only power on the sand.
The power of life and blood.
Below, the caravan camped. The sight of Fahra licking Edibe’s hands had stirred something within Nisa, something she believed dead. The caravan, the camels, the big brown dogs, the two-dozen ocean men and their loop of ladies, all were easy prey to her eyes. The bloodlust started in her, the peculiar flicker of tenuously bridled anger, fear stoppered to bursting.
Nisa reached for her blade, the heavy weight upon her back.
And then Kanika’s profile swung into her field of vision—the narrow, heavy-browed profile of the woman who helped bury Nisa’s babies in the silt of the other world. Kanika motioned the women into two columns. Watching her delivering death on the sand now when the sand had already been appeased after the circling of clan twisted Nisa’s stomach.
The bloodlust bled out of her.
She pulled her hand away from her blade.
Nisa followed the end of her column toward the slumbering caravan camp. She walked last.
The camp below them did not stir. As they neared, Nisa picked out individuals among the sleepers. Ten ladies, three of them just blooded, the others so small they looked to be no more than children. They wore the red dresses of ladies that clung to their tiny, slender bodies. Their black hair, unbound, curled around their heads like pillows.
These pale, breakable things, these ladies, were what Hoshana had sent them for. Ladies, so lost in the desert the ocean men forced them to travel across, were the most precious of possessions outside of it.
The men hauling these pale creatures across the sand were tall, broad of chest, and lean of waist. They wore brown desert robes over white ocean vests and trousers and their long beards eclipsed their soft, wet faces.
Kanika splayed her fingers to the other women and they fanned out around the camp. They circled until they had enclosed everything in the camp but the camels.
Nisa hovered at the edge of the circle just outside the light of the camp’s fires. She watched shadows flicker over women’s faces, across brown desert robes.
Kanika hissed.
The circle of women tightened.
All but Nisa.
She turned away, away from the ladies, the women, the men’s blood they would spill. She trudged back up to the four gray pillars, stood beneath their black shadows, blacker than the night. Above, the stars hung in the sky and when she looked up she saw the wanderers, those strange stars that did not sit still, but shot across her line of sight and disappeared along the horizon, night after night. Some of them wobbled, flared, and faded. Her mother once told her that the stars who wandered the farthest died the fastest.
Nisa wondered how much longer she had to walk before she died.
She collapsed onto the sand. She put her face in her hands. She could hear the cries of the dying ocean men.
Kanika found her there sometime later. Blood smeared Kanika’s face, her hands, her robe. She took Nisa by the arm, jerked her to her feet. She threw sand into Nisa’s face.
“You’re not fit to be a woman,” Kanika said.
Nisa heard the hiss of the sand. Kanika raised her head, looked out over Nisa, across the dunes.
“It comes,” Kanika said.
She left Nisa and hissed at the women in the camp, gestured them all back up atop the crest of the dune. The women fanned out past Nisa, formed a loose crescent of figures. Fahra led the roped line of ladies behind them. The little ladies, so tiny and pale, sobbed and whimpered and clung to one another.
All of the women ignored Nisa now, even Kanika. Their gazes swept down into the camp they’d blooded. Even Nisa had to look, a ritual as old as women on the sand.
The sand hissed; a soft, far-off, sound. Then closer, approaching fast. So fast now that the hiss sounded to Nisa’s ears like a shuddering roar.
The air trembled in the wake of it.
It came from behind them. Only Nisa turned to watch it, there, just behind the crescent of women. Long, gray rivulets of sand, dark against the red of the desert. The runnels spat up from the unbroken surface of the dunes, carved sinuous water-like runnels along the face of a world that had seen no water in months. The sand spat toward the crescent of women, close, so close Nisa half-hoped the sand would engulf them, half-hoped the powerful blood of women would not halt the sand tonight.
Then, a spray of sand.
The rivulets met an invisible wall of resistance, piled upon one another and looped around the crescent of women, carving a perfect circle around them, a full moon from their crescent. The gray sand slipped past Nisa’s fingers, so close she choked on the spray of sand.
It crested the dune and splashed down into the camp.
The roaring sand became a thunder. Lashes of sand curled and twisted around gashed, broken bodies. Every bloodied opening of flesh allowed it entrance into the rest of the body. Those men still living cried out in terror as the sand ate out their guts, lapped up the blood until the gray sand ran red, red as the rest of the desert.
“We are born in blood,” Kanika said, the tip of her bloody blade resting in the sand at her feet.
“And we die in blood,” Fahra said.
The sand devoured.
“May you be satiated,” Kanika said.
And Nisa laughed.
The women turned to her as one, their faces empty.
The sand would never be satiated. Her mother had known it. Hoshana knew, they all knew. They gave up the ocean to come back here, to bury the world in blood, because here, in this place, they were powerful, they were women. They were the stuff of the desert.
She laughed so hard tears ran down her cheeks and mixed with the sand at the corners of her eyes, her mouth.
“You’re mad,” Kanika said.
Nisa followed after the bloody women, behind their train of captured ladies, trailing in their wake like a drunken woman, stumbling in their footprints. She reached the circle of fires long after they had all tied up the ladies and gone back to the big main tent to lick the blood from one another’s faces.
Hoshana waited for her from within the clan’s circle.
Nisa got to her knees just outside the ring of the circle, outside the ring of the firelight. She bowed her head.
She waited.
“Death would be easier, wouldn’t it?” Hoshana said. “Easier than living with your foolish choices. You think I’ll let you have the coward’s way out, woman? Step inside.”
Nisa got to her feet. She gazed long at Hoshana, at the woman who told her to bury all she knew.
“You’ve taken us back to the sand,” Nisa said. Memory glistened, wet and hot and painful.
Hoshana’s black eyes shone. “I did what your mother was too afraid to do. I’ve made us women again. Step into my circle, Nisa.”
“You’re just an unblooded girl,” Nisa said. “Blooding my mother didn’t change that. You don’t bleed. You never will, no matter how much of our blood you shed.”
She watched Hoshana stiffen, that lean, narrow body that would never bear children.
Nisa stepped inside the circle.
“We aren’t going to make the next water hold,” Hoshana told Kanika and Fahra. Nisa listened to them speak. For three days they talked only of where they would sell the ladies. Now they realized they had too many ladies among them, no one to sell them to, and not enough water.
Nisa spat at their circles. Hoshana's circles.
I will bind your clan together no longer, Nisa thought.
Hoshana convened the women’s circle that night. The clan camped next to a tall pillar of gray stone jutting up from the red sand. The women’s circle put up their tent next to it, and the clan’s fires burned in a wide circle around the pillar, just inside the circle on the sand. The others took up sleeping places inside the circle of fires and muttered among themselves. Nisa heard soft whispers in the dark, a cloud of fear and rumor.
“They’re going to make someone walk,” the voices said. “Walking dead across the sand. Who will they choose?”
Nisa knew who they would choose.
She walked into the tent, unbidden, uninvited. She stood at the outer edge of the circle of women. The tent was too hot, stuffy. The air choked her.
“The water’s low,” Hoshana was saying. She looked up once when Nisa walked in but said nothing to her.
Fahra spat onto the sand. “You want advice on who walks? We have enough men among us. Too many, I think. We’ll find wanderers the farther we cross into the desert. We should purge the old blood before we take up the new.”
“None of ours,” Hoshana said. “I’m not feeding any more of ours. We’ve got a dozen ladies tied up outside. I feed chattel to the desert first, then our own.”
The women protested. Fahra, Kadife, Nasirah, Kanika, all of the others, nearly twenty voices loud and strong in the close confines of the tent.
Nisa said nothing.
“Welcome back to the desert,” Hoshana said, her voice louder than the rest. “We live by desert rules again. There is no space within our number for ladies we can’t sell.”
“Edibe died to get us those ladies!” Kanika said.
“That’s the price we paid the sand then. This is the price we pay now,” Hoshana said. “Not enough food and water to keep them. You want to kill them instead? No, we have given the sand too much since we arrived back into the desert. They’ll walk.”
Nisa imagined little ladies sprawled across the sand. She saw the desert eat them alive and drink their blood.
And she saw her babies, curled around one another at the bottom of a silty pit.
“How many do you want to throw out?” Nisa said.
The women all turned. They looked at her as if a ghost had spoken, not a woman.
“We need to leave three of them,” Hoshana said.
“You want to bury them here?” Nisa said.
“We’re not going to bury trading goods,” Kanika said. “Someone else might find them. Someone else might—”
“You buried my babies,” Nisa said. “Why not these pale things, too?”
“I told you, we have given too much,” Hoshana said. “The sand will come to expect too much from us.
“Save this for another time, Nisa.”
“This is the best time,” Nisa said. She gazed long at Hoshana’s face, the narrow, desert-weary face that told Nisa to bury her mother and her babies and pick up her blade and keep walking.
“I’m walking,” Nisa said. “Those pale things will die out there. If I walk with them, I can call on the sand. I can make it feed them.”
The women stirred. “Not Nisa,” Fahra said.
“Not a woman,” Kadife said, she a woman among women, broad and tall and strong, mother of four. She had a voice even Hoshana listened to.
“If I go with them,” Nisa said, “you only have to throw out two of those ladies. Not three. I’ll take those two with me.”
Hoshana shook her head. “Fighter-mine, sacrifice does not bring back dead. Only makes more of them. Understand that?”
“I’m not leaving any more children alone for the sand,” Nisa said.
Nisa strode from the main tent, back to the fire ring where she had left her things. She unwrapped the sword her mother had put in her hands at her death; a thin length of steel worn smooth by blood and sand.
“The blade is what makes you a woman,” her mother once told her. “Not birthing babies. Babies make crones. Blades make you free.”
Does killing make us free? Nisa thought. Does killing make Hoshana free? But she took the blade.
She untied two ladies, two children not yet old enough to be called ladies. One girl was just past ten, the other half that. Yet they wore their hair long and unbound, and they dressed in the long red dresses of ladies.
Nisa did not wait for dawn.
She was done with Hoshana’s circles.
Hoshana and the rest of the women’s circle waited outside the tent, but she did not go to them. She strode out through the camp, ignoring the women. Hoshana walked after her, as far as the edge of the circle of fires.
“Nisa!” she called.
Nisa looked back. “I don’t want your desert ritual,” she said. The girls huddled behind her, their liquid dark eyes brilliant in the glow of the firelight. The elder girl gripped the sleeve of Nisa’s long robe. The younger clung to the red dress of the elder.
“You’re going to die out there!” Hoshana shouted. “They’ll be no one to bury you. You understand that, woman? You understand?”
Nisa saw the sharp lines of Hoshana’s face drawn down in a dark frown. Her black hair was braided back against her scalp. She had taken off her robe and stood out in the chill night wearing only her short tunic and throat wrap. Her feet were bare.
“Are you a woman or not, Nisa!” Hoshana shouted. “Should we put you in a red dress and call you lady? That’s what your mother wanted. Was she right, Nisa? Should we have buried you with your babies?”
“I’m done giving to the desert,” Nisa said.
“You swore a desert oath to me!”
Nisa saw Hoshana take a step back and cower in the safety of the circle.
“I swore that oath over my mother’s body,” Nisa said, “and fulfilled that oath over the bodies of my children.”
“The desert will drink your blood,” Hoshana said. “Your mother wanted us sold off into those cities as ladies. She bred you to one of those soft city men, and he told us he owned you. Like a thing. Like a lady. Is that the life you wanted for your sisters? You cannot change what you are, Nisa.”
“You’re wrong, Hoshana. I can defeat the sand, bury the past, and become something else. You will see me do it.”
Nisa pulled her blade from the twisted leather loop at her hip. She drew a line in the sand in front of her, between her body and the fires, darkness and light, cold and warmth. But she did not cut her palm. She did not bleed into the line in the sand.
She sheathed her blade without blooding it.
Hoshana shouted at her, “Nisa, you fool! Fill that line in the sand now, or you’ll be feeding it blood until you die. Do you hear me, Nisa?” And then, pleading, “You belong to me, Nisa. Taking the life of your mother gives what was hers to me. You, this clan, all of it. You can’t leave me, Nisa. We follow desert practice!”
“I am done with desert practice,” Nisa said. She reached down and took the younger girl by the hand, held the moist palm tight.
“It’s time to walk,” Nisa murmured.
“Where?” the girl said.
“To another circle.”
“There’s only sand out there,” the girl said.
Nisa gazed out at the darkness, the low rise of the sand dunes, the darker shadows of the pillars.
“Yes,” Nisa said. “I know.”