One afternoon, farther to the south, they found their biggest quarry yet: a crew of dozens of men, all swarming around a gigantic hole in the ground.
The jinniyeh laughed at the sight.—Why do they dig into the earth like ghuls?
Her lover did not laugh.—They call it a cistern, he said. It’ll collect the rainwaters, enough to feed their fields from here to the horizon.
A wooden beam hung across the hole, supporting a pulley from which a platform dangled, loaded with bricks. A pair of well-muscled men held the other end of the pulley’s rope, their arms straining against the weight. The men at the top shouted to the men at the bottom, the men at the bottom shouted back, and the platform began to lower.
A low breeze began, and turned to a buffeting wind that set the platform rocking. The men at the bottom shouted in fear, leaping up their ladders and pressing themselves against the cistern walls as the bricks slid from the platform one by one. The men at the top hurried to tie off the rope, then huddled coughing against the dust.
The jinniyeh laughed, watching them run back and forth in panic. She looked to her lover; he, too, was laughing. They will tell stories about us one day, she thought.
One of the men at the top was the son of a village shaman, and had learned in his childhood how to spot jinn in the patterns of their whirlwinds. He grabbed a shovel, took aim, and hurled it upward like a javelin, shouting, “Iron, O unlucky one!”
The jinniyeh didn’t think, only saw the danger to her beloved and pushed him out of the way—and so the steel sliced through her body, and not his. It ought to have crippled her. Instead her flame rejoined itself at once, as though the shovel had been nothing more than an errant tree-branch.
For a moment, as her lover stared in awful disbelief, she thought she might convince him that he hadn’t seen what he’d seen. But she’d allowed her shame to show far too nakedly. She knew that she was irredeemable; and now, so did he.
She tried to flee, but he was older, and stronger. He stole away the wind she rode, and dragged her back to the elders.
—This is true? they asked her. And you knew of this . . . defect?
—Yes, she said. I’ve known for many seasons. And even in her grief and terror, she felt the weight of her secret leave her.
The elders placed her under guard, then withdrew to decide her fate while onlookers screamed abuse at her, calling her human and storm-cloud. Her lover jeered the loudest of all. The noise drew more and more jinn, and the story traveled outward among them, accumulating quick drifts of detail, splitting into variations that rode their own random currents, crashing together and diverging again. She was immune to iron, and had promised to use it against her own clan. She had injured her lover with a human weapon, and cast him into a hole in the ground. She was in league with the humans; she’d vowed to eradicate the jinn and pave the habitation with steel, all the way from Homs to the Cursed City . . .
None of them would remember who’d first uttered those words, Cursed City, but soon they spread from voice to voice.
—Banish her to the Cursed City!
—Let the demons devour her, let shades and ifrits chase her through the columns!
—She is a monster of Sulayman, and that is where she belongs!
They didn’t wait for the elders; their own verdict had been reached. As one, the mob raised the winds into a funnel so fierce it nearly tore the jinniyeh apart. Eastward they herded her, all the way to the mountain range, and then pushed her over the ridge, down into the foothills, and out of sight.
Once the winds had died down, some of the jinn felt uneasy about what they’d done. Surely extinguishment would’ve been more kind? But no one spoke, and they dispersed in silence, shuddering as they imagined the horrors she now faced. Was she already cowering from the spirits that crawled through the ruins? How long could she possibly survive?
The jinniyeh took shelter in a small, dark cave at the bottom of the foothills. She was badly injured, and needed heat to heal properly—but to go outside would mean certain death. And so she hovered half delirious near the cave’s mouth, where it was warmest, and waited for the monsters to emerge howling from their wells, hungry for flame.
But nothing happened.
For days she cowered, expecting an attack. When none came, she began to wonder: Had some mistake been made? Had they banished her to the wrong place? But that made no sense—for there, just visible from the cave’s mouth, stood the lines of crumbling pillars, the scattered tower-tombs that housed the human dead. And yet she heard no awful howling, only the whistling of the wind.
Slowly her wounds healed themselves. Occasionally she’d hear the nicker of a horse, and peer out to see a handful of lean, black-robed men riding past, on their way to Homs to sell their sheepskins. As a child, she’d been taught never to approach the Bedu from the Cursed City, for it was well known that the spirits of that place liked to steal away inside the Bedu’s saddle-bags, or their horses’ ears.—And if they sense a jinn-child nearby, they poke out their heads and . . . snap!
Had the city’s spirits all escaped in the men’s saddle-bags? Was she hiding from nothing at all?
The spring rains arrived, soaking the thirsty valley.
Now the view from her cave grew more interesting, as each morning the Bedu drove their sheep into the grazing lands. New lambs trotted by on unsteady
