They looked to me like she had spoken out of turn.
I thought about the city walls and the night market closing around her again in Okalide.
I said, “Do you know about the stars?”
A week later we found someone who knew the stars, and he went through each constellation, jabbing his finger at the sky.
We found a botanist after that, wasted out in the scrub, who described flowers I’d never seen.
A silk trader liked her. He opened up his caravan of wagons and had his servants bring the best. We held up our lanterns and looked at the embroidered fountains that spit silver spangles along the blue silk.
Pilgrim women never spoke; the men only spoke to me. We stopped trying. Pilgrims could season their own food.
Once when I stopped the wagon for the night I found her sleeping with her cheek pressed against a barrel of cinnamon, like she could hear how it smelled.
I rarely said anything at strange camps; what was there to say when you were always the ignorant one?
But I listened, and I saw how people changed as they spoke of things they loved, and with every story I felt the world opening before us as if my oxen walked on the sea.
A metalworker and his wife sharpened our knives for some chilies, and the sandal-bride’s eyes gleamed in the dark as he explained how to power the wheel, how to shape a blade.
“Where did you learn it?”
“At my father’s feet,” the man said, and tears sprang into his eyes, but even as he cried he told her about the illness that had carried off his parents. He wanted a home by the sea, where the salt air dulled enough knives to feed a metalworker for the rest of his life, and where the fish was fresh.
That night she cried softly, mourning the parents of some man she’d never see again.
I counted the stars: the great ox, the three cubs, the parted lovers, the willow tree.
The wagon got lighter as we went.
Mark winced every time I opened a barrel, and though I kept the ladles skimpy, I couldn’t blame him. We would never make it to a port city before we ran out.
I closed my hand around the sapphires in my pocket as I drove. The day was coming when I’d have to break the clasp and sell them off.
Twice we stopped in tent cities and set up in their open squares, and Mark and Sara and I handed out envelopes of mazeflower and filled people’s burlap bags with what was left of the cumin and salt.
By then the nights were cold in earnest. Mark made beds amidst the barrels, little fortresses to keep out the wind. Sara and I kept separate blankets, but I slept between her and the wagon flap. I would listen to the wind hissing past the canvas and think: This much, at least, I can do for her.
One night it was birders, and I scraped the last of a barrel of cinnamon to make enough for an offering.
“I don’t know what you’re hoping for,” Mark said, “but you’re ruining yourself this way.”
I didn’t answer; there was nothing to argue.
When we reached camp I said, “This is my wife Sara,” and took her arm to present her, and she looked at me for a long moment before she smiled at them.
She told my stories, always. People were kinder if they thought she wasn’t from Miruna.
We met the girl with the shriveled leg who made cages, the boy who made paints that turned a thrush into a sweet-anna. Above us the little beasts hopped back and forth in the bentwood cages, and of everyone we met on that long journey, that family was the happiest.
That night she sat and looked out past our circle of light to their camp, where the birds were calling.
Silhouetted by the fire she looked like a camel, a beast who had always been wise, and I watched her until the birds went silent.
The last long stretch to Okalide was four nights of nothing, not even scrub for shelter, and in the pilgrim town we bought up vinegar-wine (only thing that won’t go brackish) and decided to travel at night and rest in the heat of the day.
Mark drank whenever wine was offered, and he took it as badly as ever, so he was still asleep when the sun set and it was time to go.
Sara and I sat in the shade of the wagon and watched the night crawl over the dust.
“Will I ever hear your story?” I asked, and she looked at me as if she knew why I was asking.
She did know. She knew, and Mark knew, and I was the only one who was just waking up to why.
Her thin mouth pressed tighter as if she was afraid of the words getting out. “I have no story,” she said. “I was born hidden, and grew hidden, and I married hidden, and now I go to Okalide.”
“And your husband? Is he kind?”
“I hope,” she said after a long time. There was a breeze moving in ahead of the moon. “But if not, I’ll be unhappy in Okalide, which is better than being unhappy in Miruna.”
I wanted to say, stay here and risk unhappiness with me, but “here” was a wagon and a raggedy trail around the desert cities. You met the same sort of people wherever you went, and one day she would regret asking someone his story and learning what he really was.
She was only my sandal-bride, and by the time the leather wore out she would be happy or unhappy with some other man, and I would still have a wagon and a wide circle of road.
I said, “You’ll find a way to be happy,” because that was the only thing I really knew about her, and we sat in the shadow of the wagon until the breeze turned cold.
She sat beside me, wrapped in her thin blanket, all that night as I drove toward Okalide.
After we were stationed in the morning market, Sara my sandal-bride stepped out from the wagon without even her blanket and said, “I’m ready.”
Mark came out behind her; when he was on the ground he held out his hand and they shook like it was a business deal.
“My wishes for a good life,” he started, but abruptly he turned his back and crawled into the wagon as if he had forgotten something important.
I almost took her elbow, but when I held out my hand she looked at me. Under her gaze I dropped my arm, held it against my side.
She looked around until she saw some landmark her husband must have given her.
“This way,” she said, and I followed her out of the market.
Okalide was under church rule, too, but here I saw women in daylight, at least, buying bread and reading the notices posted in the open squares.
The crowd that had been a nuisance before was overwhelming now. I wanted to know about the old man carving spoons on his doorstep, about the three young girls running along the edges of the fountain in the square.
Here no one noticed Sara (my wife). Her face was one of a thousand faces, not some apparition with a ladle of pepper in her hands, but somehow walking beside her I felt like the Empress’ Guard.
At a corner she looked at the words etched into the clay walls, then turned to me.
“Which one reads South?” she asked quietly, and my heart broke.
I pointed, and after she looked at the word to memorize it we turned down the shady street.
His was the sixteenth door, and when he answered her knock he said, “Sara,” as if she didn’t know her own name, but she just smiled and embraced him.
I looked back at the main road, where a shaft of sun crawled across the dust.
He introduced himself, but as he did he wrapped his arm around her waist and I didn’t catch his name.
“How was your journey?” he asked, and, tripping over himself, “—and of course you’ll come in and have some cold water and some fruit.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“He has an apprentice,” Sara explained, “and they have work.”
He nodded. “Of course, of course,” he said, and then he turned to her and smiled. “And how was the journey?”
I held my breath and waited for the first story she would tell him, the first words that would make it one big story sewn with little ones as a wedding gift to him.
She smiled and said, “A lot of brackish wine.”
He laughed so hard he had to drop his head, and for a moment she and I looked at each other.
I saw the bars of her cage bending around her, saw why she had wanted those stories; she’d needed something that was hers, to hoard against a life with some dull boy to whom she had given her word.
When he had recovered from his laughter he saw I was still there, and blinked. “You need your bride-price, of course, so sorry for forgetting,” he said, and a moment later there was a little ruby bracelet in my palm.
I was still looking at Sara. I had forgotten I would be paid.
The priest at the bastion wrote “safely delivered,” and wrote down all our names, and it was over.
She said, “Come visit as soon as you can.”
“We’ll be back again,” I said, which was the only lie I ever told her.
When I got back to the market the wagon was still packed and Mark was waiting in the driver’s seat.
“What did he look like?”
“Let’s go,” I said, took the reins.
We were five miles outside the city when I said, “What do you want to do after your indenture?”
“Trade!” he blurted, choked on a mouthful of dust.
I got his story; he had a woman in Suth he’d promised to come back for, and he’d heard about the botanist from Sara and wanted to find new spices. “From the East, maybe,” he said, “if they can be had by ship.”
I gave him the ruby bracelet. “Payment for the spice I used on the journey. Your indenture is over.”
The oxen would warm to him; he knew how to drive the wagon.
I moved through and questioned anyone who would answer. I wanted to know everything about the world. With the first sapphire, I bought a book to write in.
Some old man married a woman with six red-haired sisters. The youngest got black hair, and set about cursing them all, poorly, and he and I laughed into our beers until we cried.
Three brothers pulled aside a riverbed to keep their village from flooding, and they bought wine and sang songs in three parts, and I marked the words as fast as I could.
When the first book was full I bought another, for the botanist and the birders and all the stars I knew.
I listened to everyone, wrote down everything.
You have to write down everything. The world is wide, and you never know what stories someone is waiting to hear; maybe someday, someone will have bought a pair of boots from the shoemaker and his ugly wife, down a dusty street in Okalide.