Book of a Thousand Days

Dashti is not afraid of being locked in a tower for seven years. As a mucker and member of the lower class, she is simply content to have a stable food supply. Besides, Dashti swore an oath to serve Lady Saren, the youngest daughter of the Lord of Titor’s Garden (the name of their realm). So, when Lady Saren refused the proposal of Lord Khasar, leader of Thoughts of Under, and was imprisoned by her father for treachery, Dashti had no choice but to follow her.

But being trapped in a sunless, rat-infested, and highly guarded tower takes its toll on Dashti and Lady Saren. Dashti tries to use mucker healing songs to soothe her lady, but nothing seems to help Saren.

Khan Tegus of Song for Evela, Lady Saren’s chosen betrothed, visits the pair, but Saren cannot bring herself to speak to him through the small hatch in the tower. Instead, she calls upon her maid, Dashti, to speak in her place, and Dashti is forced to commit the grave sin of impersonating a member of the gentry. Her talks with Khan Tegus are soothing, but he soon stops visiting. Instead, Lord Khasar visits the tower and threatens Saren and Dashti. He says that Saren can either agree to marry him and be rescued, or she can wait out the seven years of imprisonment. Saren chooses the tower.

Thanks to Dashti’s resourcefulness as a mucker, the pair eventually escapes. However, the world they return to is not the one they left behind: Lord Khasar has completely destroyed Titor’s Garden. Dashti must find a way to save Lady Saren from Lord Khasar’s dark intentions and reunite her with her love, Khan Tegus. The two of them hide their identities and work as servants in Khan Tegus’ castle. Dashti’s healing songs soon earn her a higher position as the Khan’s scribe. As she takes control of their desperate situation, Dashti begins to understand her own astonishing talents and comes to believe that even a low-born maid can find true love.

Book of a Thousand Days is based on the Grimm fairy tale, Maid Maleen, and is loosely inspired by the culture and customs of medieval Mongolia.  Told through Dashti’s diary entries, the book is filled with reflections on her time as a maid, which makes the story immersive and realistic. Dashti’s voice is strong, unique, and exemplifies her era and class. Her narration offers just enough explanation of her world’s rules and customs to keep readers informed while omitting enough to prevent the diary entries from becoming too expositional. Readers will learn a lot about the muckers, the gentry, Ancestors, and the traditions that connect all three.

 One of the most interesting elements is Dashti’s character growth. She begins as a meek and obedient member of the lower class who wholeheartedly believes in the superiority of the “gentry.” However, as she spends more time with Lady Saren, Dashti gains confidence and self-respect. Since Dashti is a compassionate, determined, and very likable narrator, readers will find her growth deeply rewarding.

Book of a Thousand Days also includes small illustrations of Dashti’s doodles. Not only are the illustrations well-crafted, but they also allow readers to see the world more closely through Dashti’s eyes. Additionally, a hand-drawn map of “The Eight Realms” is included to help with worldbuilding.

Split into two parts – life during the tower and after – Book of a Thousand Days teaches about resilience, resourcefulness, and the strength of the human will. True power comes not from being born rich but from having the determination to survive.

Sexual Content

• Dashti is not conventionally attractive due to birthmarks on her face, and her mother raised her to believe that her ugliness kept her safe from men. Her mother told her the story of Bayar, a beautiful woman from her village: “A lord fell for her beauty, got her with child, then left both girl and baby in the mud and never returned.”
• While in the tower with Saren, Dashti says that they often hear voices outside, “shouting saucy things at [them].”
• Dashti and Lady Saren hear men’s voices from outside their tower talking about Lady Saren. One stranger says that the imprisoned lady is, “Just ripe for the picking,” and they begin trying to break in. Dashti and Saren remain silent in fear, hoping the men will leave, and they eventually do.
• After leaving the tower, Dashti leads Lady Saren away from Titor’s Garden and into Song for Evela. In the streets of Song for Evela, Dashti comments, “There were people everywhere. . . fighting and kissing and eating and just talk, talk, talking.”
• When Khan Tegus is wounded in battle, Dashti is called in to sing healing songs for him, and the two of them have a tense moment. “He watched me while I sang. He looked at my eyes. My heart felt so big, it hurt against my ribs. At last I felt some shame and started to pull away, but he put his hand over mine on his chest to hold me there longer.” This romantic scene lasts for about two pages.
• To ensure Lady Saren’s continued safety, Dashti tells Khan Tegus and other leaders that she is the lost Lady Saren. After she “reveals” her identity, Dashti and Khan Tegus share a tender moment. “And all the while, Tegus held my hands to his face. I didn’t mean to stroke his cheek—my thumb moved of its own accord, I swear. He smiled up at me, and my face felt hot.”
• Nudity is mentioned multiple times as the most extreme act of vulnerability. To convince Lord Khasar to trust her, Dashti approaches him on the battlefield completely nude.
• While Dashti is pretending to be Lady Saren, Khan Tegus proposes to her. “His cheek was next to mine. He pulled me closer, his warmth so wonderful, my skin stung against his touch. And he kissed my neck, behind my ear.” In a lovestruck daze, Dashti agrees to marry him.
• Khan Tegus clandestinely kisses Dashti (whom he still believes is Lady Saren) after they are engaged. “He looked to see if we were alone, picked me up, hurried around a corner, and kissed me. Kissed me long.” This scene ends with them kissing once more and lasts for a page and a half.
• Khan Tegus and Dashti are wed. They kiss before their vows: “Then he kissed me on the mouth, though there were five chiefs in the room. . . I put my arms around his neck and kissed him back.” Later, after the ceremony, Dashti excitedly thinks of the rest of the night and the future of their marriage. “I plan to laugh and laugh and dance and maybe I’ll kiss him again, kiss my khan, right in front of the whole world.”

Violence

• When Lady Saren’s father locks her and Dashti in the tower for seven years, he tells them, “And if you try to break your way out, I’ve told the guards to kill you on sight.”
• Dashti’s old literacy teacher used to throw candlesticks at his students “when his back pinched him sour.”
• Dashti ritually cut her finger while taking “the oath of a lady’s maid,” a ceremony that certified her to serve Lady Saren.
• The day that Dashti met Lady Saren and learned that she would be locked in a tower, she witnessed Lady Saren’s father slapping her. The lord slapped his daughter twice unprovoked, and when Dashti agreed to join Saren in the tower, Saren’s father slapped Dashti, too. Reflections on this event last for five and a half pages.
• In the tower, Dashti makes a rat trap using cheese, paper, and nails. The next morning, she finds a rat’s “body stuck inside the spikes with one nail up through its chin.”
• Lady Saren expresses her terror towards Lord Khasar, the man her father wants her to marry: “In this tower, I’m a tethered goat left out for the wolf, and now he’ll take me and marry me and kill me.”
• When Lord Khasar visits the tower, Dashti does not pretend to be Lady Saren. Lord Khasar takes Dashti’s hand through the small hatch and slaps it against the wall three times. Dashti describes, “It stung like a log full of hornets.”
• Dashti speaks to a tower guard, and he tells her, “You’re not coming out of that tower, miss, not unless that lord from Thoughts of Under breaks you out, and then he’d snap a maid’s neck and toss her to the dogs, more than like.”
• Lord Khasar decides to “burn” Lady Saren out of the tower, and he sends burning chips of fire into her prison. Over two pages, Dashti and Saren frightfully stomp out the fires that Lord Khasar gleefully sets. Saren is eventually reduced to “hysterics,” and Dashti is left to fight the fires on her own.
• As vengeance for the fires, Lady Saren dumps her and Dashti’s full chamber pot down the hatch and onto Lord Khasar.
• A giant wolf attacks Dashti through the tower’s hatch. Its mouth is “smeared with blood,” and it snaps at her from the opening. My Lord, Dashti’s pet cat, jumps at the wolf and attacks it. Dashti hears “horrible growls from the beast, and a yelp from the cat,” but she does not see what happens. She later learns that the wolf was Lord Khasar himself, and she sees “three thin white scars down his cheek, like the marks a cat might leave.”
• After My Lord the cat leaves the tower, Dashti reflects on his hunting abilities. “When he attacked a rat, he was deadly fast, going straight for a fatal bite on the back of the neck.”
• Dashti and Lady Saren hear men outside the tower plotting to break in and assault Saren. Dashti makes a plan to defend her lady and herself against the men using a broken shard of a kitchen knife: “I will find their pig parts and cut them out before they touch me!”
• Dashti and Lady Saren walk through desolate villages, and they later learn that Lord Khasar is responsible for murdering many citizens of Titor’s Garden and causing others to flee. Traders tell them that Lord Khasar “[w]iped [Titor’s Garden] out entirely” and is advancing on other kingdoms.
• Qacha, a mucker who is employed in Khan Tegus’ kitchen alongside Saren and Dashti, “laughs when Cook knocks her head with a spoon.”
• Khan Tegus called Dashti into his chambers to help his chief of war survive a fatal wound. “The first thing I noticed was a man lying on the floor and bleeding, bleeding fast.” The man, Batu, was wounded by an assassin, sent by Lord Khasar, who was trying to kill Khan Tegus. Batu loses a lot of blood over multiple days, but Dashti manages to save him with her healing songs.
• Saren asks Dashti to kill her. She says, “Please, I can’t do it myself, I’ve tried. I’m too afraid and I’ll do it wrong.” Dashti refuses.
• A servant named Osol gets angry at the chief of animals, pushes her to the ground, and kicks her. For this, he is hanged.
• Khan Tegus leaves the palace and returns “wounded, a tenth of his warriors dead.” Dashti is able to help him with her songs.
• Lady Vachir, ruler of Beloved of Ris, who becomes Khan Tegus’ betrothed in Saren’s absence, asks Dashti to use her songs to help with her back pain. When it does not work, Dashti blames Lady Vachir, and the lady slaps her.
• Saren discusses her father’s abuse with Dashti. She says, “He might slap me, just for show. He never slapped me when we were alone, only in front of people.”
• When Saren first visited Lord Khasar as a child, he shapeshifted into a wolf in front of her and killed a goat. “[Lord Khasar’s war chief] held my head and made me watch while the wolf devoured the animal.”
• Dashti’s “song of the wolf” forces Lord Khasar to shapeshift in broad daylight, and the wolf attacks her. “He pounced, landing on my leg, and I heard a crunch before I felt pain. . . I turned my head as he lunged. The sides of our skulls collided. I could taste blood.” Her ankle is broken.
• Lord Khasar’s warriors turn against him when he becomes the wolf. They shoot him with arrows, and he begins “tearing out the throats” of the soldiers. Several men die trying to stop the wolf, but Lord Khasar eventually sustains enough arrow injuries to kill him. His corpse falls on Dashti and further wounds her broken ankle. This fight scene lasts for two pages.
• Dashti is caught attempting to escape the castle, and she is arrested for impersonating Lady Saren. “Hands were on my arms and legs, pulling me to a chopping block in the center of the yard, and they were none too gentle with my broken ankle.”
• Lady Vachir declares, “By the ancient law of the Ancestors. . . it’s my right to take the life of anyone who interferes with my lawful betrothal.” She later yells, “I demand [Dashti’s] blood!”

Drugs and Alcohol

• In the tower, Dashti and Lady Saren consume bad grain and begin seeing things that aren’t there, like wolves and orange fire. Dashti reflects, “My mama warned me once that if eating stored grain makes you see things that aren’t really there, then it’s gone bad, touched by Under, god of tricks.”
• On their journey towards Song for Evela, her surroundings make Dashti homesick for her life as a mucker, and she calls herself “drunk with wishes.”
• Dashti explores a market in Song for Evela and sees “skins of wine.”

Language

• The word hell is used once. Lady Saren’s father tells Dashti, “What a hell you walked into, though it can’t be worse than your own home.”
• Rather than referring to a god, people refer to Ancestors, either as a whole or individually. Dashti does this frequently in her writing. For example, Dashti blesses Lady Saren for protecting her from Lord Khasar, saying, “the Ancestors bless her.” Dashti also writes, “He watched her for a moment, and I swear by Titor and his dogs. . .”
• When Dashti walks into Khan Tegus’ chambers, he exclaims, “Lord Under but you startled me.” This phrasing is used frequently.
• After slapping his daughter, Lady Saren’s father calls her a “wench.”

Supernatural

• Muckers like Dashti sing “healing songs” and other mystical tunes that can affect the people around them. Songs exist for nearly any ailment, and even Dashti, said to be especially effective with them, does not know every song. Whatever impact the songs have relies on the singer’s ability to visualize the songs working and the recipients’ willingness to be affected. Healing songs for specific body parts often require physical contact.
• Dashti sings a healing song for Khan Tegus that alleviates the pain from an old leg injury. She thinks afterwards, “Some say hearing the songs makes them tickle inside, some say they feel as if they’ve suddenly gone hot to cold or cold to hot. Some say it’s like dreaming while awake, or swimming while dry.”
• Dashti remembers when a “travelling shaman” visited her family. Shamans are religious and mystical beings who sometimes serve as healers. Dashti writes, “If he turned into a fox, as I’d always heard shamans can, I was determined not to miss the sight.”
• Dashti sings “the song for stone hearts” to encourage the tower guards to have some kindness towards her and Lady Saren.
• Unsure of what makes Lady Saren so depressed in the tower, Dashti continuously tries many healing songs on her. She records, “I try new songs on her, I combine songs.”
• While listening to a storyteller in Song for Evela, Dashti recalls “the story of the skinwalkers” that she had heard during her time as a mucker on the steppes. She writes, “First, a skinwalker offers his spirit as barter to a desert shaman, then he must kill a close relative—the more he loves the person he kills, the greater his power will be.” After the murder, the skinwalker obtains a “predator spirit” from the shaman and is granted the ability to shapeshift into that predator/animal.
• Dashti uses her songs on Cook, her superior in Khan Tegus’ kitchen, to ease the pain that she can sense within her. Dashti combines “the tune for body aches” and “the words for common pain,” and she eventually adds in “the song for heartache” as well. Cook is deeply calmed by Dashti’s abilities.
• After Dashti helps Cook, her fellow servants and she talk about the mucker songs. Qacha, another mucker, tells her friend Gal, “The songs nudge things to be what they really are—a healthy body, a heart as calm as a baby’s in the womb.” Dashti says that there is no real power in the songs, but Qacha disagrees.
• Not knowing she is the servant from the tower, Khan Tegus calls upon Dashti to use her mucker songs on his wounded leg. While working, Dashti can “sense the pain lifting from him fast.” She writes, “The more I work his leg, the better it remembers what it felt like to be whole and uninjured.” She heals him again later when he is wounded in battle.
• Qacha tells Dashti about when an assassin threatened the life of Khan Tegus and a shaman “took fox form and leaped between the khan and the assassin.”
• Khan Tegus calls Dashti into his chambers to encourage his injured chief of war’s soul to keep living. Dashti does not sing a healing song but rather “a play song, one the mucker children sing in the spring, racing in a circle.” She sings more happy songs to remind the chief of war of joyous life, and the man gradually gets better.
• Lady Saren tells Dashti that Lord Khasar is a skinwalker who can shapeshift into a wolf. Lord Khasar’s chief of war, Chinua, once told Saren that Lord Khasar “had made quite a bargain with the desert shamans and now was the greatest hunter in all the realms.” Khasar keeps his shapeshifting a secret and only does it at night.
• Dashti decides to bring forth Lord Khasar’s wolf persona during the day to reveal his secret powers to his troops. On the battlefield, she sings to him “the song of the wolf,” which can encourage the wolf within him to emerge. Dashti touches his boots to make the song more powerful, and it works. As Dashti is singing, Khasar is slowly forced into his wolf form. “I can say that his face thrust out, his back hunched with fur, his clothing tore, his armor bent and groaned before popping off. He dropped down on all fours, and where Khasar had stood, a wolf now growled.”

Spiritual Content

• People of the Eight Realms worship the “eight Ancestors” and the “Eternal Blue Sky.” This group is called “the sacred nine.” Each of The Eight Realms is named to honor an Ancestor, and each Ancestor is a god/goddess of a different physical thing or concept. Each of the Eight Realms has eight chiefs for the eight Ancestors, though one ancestor, Under’s, has chiefs that are invisible and never seen.
• The realm “Vera’s Blessing” is named for Vera, goddess of food. Dashti prays to Vera to thank her for their tower’s food storage and to help keep them fed.
• The realm “Beloved of Ris” is named for Ris, god of roads and towns. Dashti prays to him to help her and Lady Saren “find home.”
• The realm “Song for Evela” is named for Evela, goddess of sunlight. Dashti prays to her while in the sunless tower to return her to the sunlight.
• The realm “Carthen’s Prayer” is named for Carthen, goddess of strength. Dashti prays for Carthen to make her and Lady Saren strong enough to break down the walls of their tower.
• The realm “Pride of Nibus” is named for Nibus, god of order. Dashti appeals to Nibus regarding her status as Lady Saren’s loyal maid.
• The realm “Goda’s Second Gift” is named for Goda, goddess of sleep. Dashti prays that Goda will keep Under asleep so that he does not threaten their chances of survival in the tower.
• The realm “Titor’s Garden” is named for Titor, god of animals. Dashti remarks that even Titor “can’t force a cat to change his mind.”
• The realm “Thoughts of Under” is named for Under, god of tricks. Dashti blames Under for their rat infestation in the tower.
• When Dashti and Lady Saren are locked in the tower, Dashti quickly works her prayers into her morning routine. “First thing, I splash a drop of milk in the north corner, facing the direction of the Sacred Mountain, and say my prayers. By tradition, I should dribble the milk on the soil, not stones, but it’ll have to do since the metal flap faces south.” Dashti also prays to her mother at night.
• Dashti believes that, when a person dies, their “soul climbs the Sacred Mountain.” They join the “Ancestors’ Realm,” a version of heaven.
• Dashti has been taught that the power imbalance between the gentry and the common folk is sacred. The gentry themselves are said to be descendants of “divine ancestors” and favorable in the eyes of the gods. Dashti closely follows the rules laid out for her as a lady’s maid so that she can appease the Ancestors.
• When Dashti and Lady Saren find other people for the first time since leaving the tower, Dashti calls it a “heavenly sight.”
• Certain sins make one unable to join the Ancestors’ Realm. When Lady Saren asks Dashti to kill her, Dashti responds, “If I did such a thing, there’d be no place for me in the Ancestors’ Realm, nor for you either. We’d wander in the gray beyond the borders forever, with nowhere to sit and no milk to drink, and I’d never see my mama again.”
• Lord Khasar lays siege to Titor’s Garden and Goda’s Second Gift, and he changes the name of Thoughts of Under to “Carthen’s Glory” to appeal to the goddess of strength. Lord Khasar’s indiscretions against the Ancestors lead Dashti to think that, “Animals, sleep, and trickery will not be his friends” on the battlefield.
• When Lord Khasar “offered his soul to the desert shamans” to obtain the powers of a shapeshifter, he barred himself from the Realm of the Ancestors. Dashti writes that his soul “can never climb the Sacred Mountain.”
• When Dashti is in prison for impersonating a gentry, she thinks of the Eternal Blue Sky instead of praying. She reflects, “How can a body be too sad with the highest sky blue?”

by Gabrielle Barke