The Child Bride of the Lost City of Ubar

by Catherynne M. Valente

IV: Ubar, the Lost

We chose her for her hair. And for the thinness of her wrists

and the promise of her hips, which seemed to foreshadow sons,

and for the way she played in the alley–ways, the slip–jump

of her dancing gait on sap–strung terraces.

The al–raml was cast, flung high

into the shadowless sun:

The sands showed the fourth daughter conjunct. Prophets

always did a brisk business here — they wept and refused their ladles,

keened and preached that we should not have worshiped

the pillar–gods with their stone breasts, their resin–altars,

should not cast the al–raml, should not do this,

should not do that.

But the truth is:

the desert is always thirsty.

It needs no reason to drink.

The sand–augur shouted down the howl of holies:

the dunes do not thirst but lust. Give them

a daughter of Ubar and they will quiet, they will recede,

they will retire to a dusty wedding–bed curtained

with saltbush and mouse–bones.

will feed dwarf–acacias

and pale yellow spiders.

V: Izdihar

Even among the seventy-two pillars whose roofs

bruise the stars’ bellies, I had never known anything

so fine as the black veils of my wedding dress.

The scent of the veils against my nose was of skin

and emerald dust, and frankincense, always frankincense,

that slow rosy sigh.

I walked to the edge of the sand where the palm fronds wither,

and behind me walked Ubar, cymbals clanging and throats ululating —

trumpets announced my virginity to the crawling gray scrub.

A red ribbon was laid over my wrist,

and over a rise of rough sand —

I swore to obey it, and serve it,

and bear it children

with yellow eyes running over like hourglasses.

In the desert, the nights are colder than you expect:

The resin hardens. The cistern cools. I was afraid —

the moon was so dry and empty, a bone bowl filling up with sky.

I was knotted to a stake deep-driven, spangled with sapphire-rain —

they had known better than to let me choose.

Long hours ground against me. The wind came up

through the white grasses.

A skinny, dry-whiskered mouse darted near —

in the marrow-sucked moonlight,

he began to nibble my toes.

VI. Rub’ al-Khali: The Empty Quarter

Perhaps it did not love her. She was so strange, after all.

The desert did not push open her untried legs

and forget us in the sweetness of her mouth.

It did not want her.

Perhaps a black-haired girl

would have satisfied it.

The pillars fell onto the sand softer than memory.

Even we did not hear them go — until all the eyes of Iram

were drowned in a shower of gold.

The earth was wet for years afterward, wet and glittering

and stinking of incense, so that even the fleas would not come near.

The cistern soaked the earth for miles,

though the ash-sand covered the market like a page.

when the desert unhinged its jaw,

when the desert did not want her.

There are no bones here, not even hers. We sank so far

we tasted water — water at the root of all this rainless waste.

But it is not deep enough, never deep enough to find silence.

We still hear it, we still hear it and there are no palms left

to press against desiccated ears, we hear and hear and cannot stop:

Such are the wails of Izdihar the Dune-Wed,

who yet pleads to come home.

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