The Four Profound Weaves Page 3

  The Four Profound Weaves. A carpet of wind, a carpet of sand, a carpet of song, and a carpet of bones. Change, wanderlust, hope, and death.

  Nen-sasaïr watched me intently as I breathed my deepnames into the carpet of sand. It floated, lifting me above ground, carrying me out of the encamp- ment, where the tents of my people swayed in the wind, empty. They all were trading, but I had not even tried to sell my carpet, and I did not look back. My weave of wanderlust floated over the boundary spirals drawn in the dust, over the guardian snakes that lifted their heads in recognition and farewell, then settled.

  My past lay ahead, and its secrets. The wind and the sand to all sides. Behind me, nen-sasaïr followed.

  I had woven the carpets of air and sand. Benesret’s great carpet had been made of song. Only death was missing now.

  nen-sasaïr

  We traveled in silence through the cooler hours—I on my sand-skis, Uiziya floating ahead of me, only slightly above ground. I had known her for forty years—no, I had only known her briefly, forty years ago. When we were both young. When I traveled with my lover Bashri-nai-Leylit on a desperate trading venture to find the greatest treasure ever woven, to buy our other lover’s life from the Collector.

  It was strange to travel with someone again. Uiziya and I, we were not lovers. Friends, perhaps. Two people making a journey together. I did not know where we were going, but I followed Uiziya. Closer to the encampment, I saw the dun grasses and shrubs that clung to patches of ground; then, deeper into that domain, the vegetation became even scarcer and drier, and the sandhills began to waver in my sight. I waited for the wind to shift the layers of sand, revealing to me its secrets like years before, but I saw no miracles this time. Just the sand and the dust in the wake of Uiziya’s carpet, the sun—even in cooler hours—forever following me.

  I had left my grandchildren behind without even saying goodbye.

  Aviya—Aviya-nai-Bashri—my granddaughter was an adult now, and a fine trader, traveling with an oreg of her own. The newly formed Aviya oreg consisted of my granddaughter and her lover, Aviya-nai-Lur—and they would be all right. The two had already made a journey of their own, from Iyar to the desert. And they had taken good care of Kimi.

  Kimi, a child of eleven summers, a child we named after the men’s god Kimri, a child who was neither a boy nor a girl, who back in Iyar could not be recognized, but here, in the desert, could thrive with an ease that required no discussion. A child who did not talk, a child who wove butterflies from wind, a child whose first-woven carpet was sold to my tormentor.

  I did not recall having stopped or closing my eyes, but I must have. I stood there, not willing to look or think of anything, until the rough, grainy threads of a carpet brushed over my face, and I smelled the old threads and dust of Uiziya’s carpet. I opened my eyes into sand-cloud in which dim shapes moved and transformed into others, then closed them, my fists in my sand-scrubbed eyes. I coughed and rubbed my eyes and swayed, and Uiziya waited, but not very long.

  “What troubles you?” she asked.

  That I left my grandchildren to fend for themselves among your people.

  I was glad I did not speak this. The Surun’ people were our friends, not adversaries. My grandchildren wanted to travel without me, had traveled on their own before. They would continue to be safe. Perhaps. Probably. Likely.

  My problem was different.

  I said, “All my life, I was a man. And yet I kept that a secret. Not because I wanted to keep such a secret, but because other people told me that I must, that it was shameful and wrong to reveal it, that it was selfish to be who I was. I had to remain—a lover, a trader, a grandmother. I was a reluctant grandmother, but now that I’m free, now that I am a grandfather, am I supposed just not to care for them anymore?”

  “Why is there a difference?” Uiziya shrugged. “You can choose to care or not, as all people do.”

  But in my culture, we never even saw the grandfathers. They were behind the inner white wall. As a part of a traditional family-trading group, called an oreg, a small group of women lovers made trading journeys together, returning to the outer quarter of Iyar. There they met with their husbands only for rituals, in the special rooms tucked in-between the outer and inner parts of the Khana quarter. Grandmothers raised the children while the young women traveled and traded.

  And I did not fit. I never fit.

  “You make it sound so simple, nen-sasaïr. What your people do, what your people don’t do. What they told you to do. What they did not tell you to do, but you think they told you to do. What you think your lovers thought. What you think they think now that they died. Always you lived in the shadow of these people and their rules. Even forty years ago. But nobody’s world is clear and simple, much as we want it to be.”

  “You did not live my life,” I said. “And yet you judge me.”

  She laughed, bitterly. “Judge you? Me? Who am I to judge anyone?”

  “You lived your life openly . . .”

  She cut me short. “You do not know me. And if you knew, you would surely judge me.”

  “I wouldn’t—”

  “No? How can you know?” She seemed angrier now, her carpet swirling with visions of bones and jewels. I took a step back, not from her, from the dust and the threads that once again threatened my face. “I am not afraid.”

  She looked me up and down. “Then let me show you.”

  She turned away and I followed. The sand was different here, as if freer, wilder, stirring about the visions of bones and wind. I remembered moments like these from before, when I traveled with Bashri-nai-Leylit, so full of desperate hope for our venture. I was twenty-four then, but now I was sixty-four, and Bashri-nai-Leylit was dead, and Bashri-nai-Divrah was dead, and the world was very short on hope. But even my bones sang the need to wander.

  Uiziya e Lali

  My carpet shifted as I shifted my weight. It was slightly too large for just one person sitting; another person would balance it out, but I worried my weight made it sag. Benesret had been thin, almost skeletal always, but I was a woman of size. I’d woven this carpet at sixteen. I was big then, too, but I wanted back then to be slim like Benesret, to be lithe and limber like the snakes in our encampment. I wanted to cast a long, elegant shadow. I had always been big, but at sixteen, I had not yet embraced it, so I’d woven my carpet for a thinner person. It carried me well, even now, but it wasn’t well-balanced; the tasseled edges rose up as it moved.

  “I will teach you to weave from sand,” my aunt had said to me back then, “the second mystery of the everchanging desert. A weave of wanderlust: the second of the Four Profound Weaves I will teach you until you are ready to put together my loom.”

  I had never been ready to put together a loom. The one I continued to use was the training loom that I’d made at sixteen. Others in the encampment gossiped at first, then they stopped, thinking perhaps that I had persisted with such a simple, small frame as a boast about my skills. But my craft, like the frame, had not grown much after I wove this very carpet of sand that carried me now. It whispered of wanderings, and of bones, always bones, for I had woven bones into it—sparsely, as decoration, peeking out of the sand-weaves in glimpses of white. The true weave of bones I had not mastered, for that was the last of the four—the weave of death Aunt Benesret said she would teach me when I was ready. I’d have learned it perhaps, if I hadn’t drawn away—from her, from this place.

  Oh, this place.

  I made my carpet stop. Nen-sasaïr, also deep, perhaps, in his thoughts, kept moving until we were level. We stood side by side on a small outcropping. Below us, we saw collapsed tents, their weavings half- gnawed by time and transformations that happen in the desert when nobody looks. Ghost snakes slithered in the dust, their skeletons glimmering white from their long, limber bodies of smoke.

  Nen-sasaïr turned to me. “What is it that I’m seeing, Uiziya? Are these things dangerous?”

  “Only if you are afraid to die.” I was beyond such
things. My life was over.

  “What is there?” He was pointing out at a tent that still stood proud. Or so it seemed. It was smaller, white and embroidered blue—but it wasn’t embroidery we saw. It was covered in insects. Brilliant, sparkling, winking in and out of sight.

  “My husband. This is why we came here. Look.”

  nen-sasaïr

  The brilliant insects shifted about. I saw a young woman, brown-skinned and beautifully large, her face so full of yearning and hope. Uiziya in her youth, as I met her all those years ago, perhaps just a little bit older. She opened the fold of her tent and peeked out tentatively as the stars shone, but these were just pinpricks and slivers of light from the flies.

  The flesh-and-blood Uiziya said, “You see other lives as easy because you don’t see them. You see your story as complex and hard because you know it best.”

  “I am sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to imply that you had no hardship.”

  “I was so full of hope after I saw your great carpet of song being woven. Again and again I pleaded with my aunt to teach me the remaining weave. The weave of death.”

  “Did she? Benesret?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something white flash, a motion, around the tent.

  “She said to me, ‘Do you know what it means? What it means to weave from the people you care for, from sisters, from lovers, from kin? What it means to weave out of your body, your flesh, to weave your own death as if you saw it for the first time?’ Her eyes were hungry but still I said, teach me. Please, teach me. So she tried.”

  “What happened?” I whispered.

  “Let us go down.”

  “Something is there,” I said, in a warning, but Uiziya shrugged.

  “Something is always there.”

  We trekked down, until we stood in front of the brilliant buzzing tent. Uiziya drew open the f lap, and then suddenly there was movement. Too quick for my eyes to follow at first. A youth, his eyes wide and startled, clutching a handful of white cloth in his right hand. His left held a knife, and he lunged. I breathed, and my names flared to life, but not quickly enough. The youth pushed past Uiziya, the knife making a long, thin graze on her arm as he past her, Uiziya’s blood spraying him and the white cloth he held. The youth ran. I formed my Builder’s Triangle as fast as I could, but my magic was not that of offense.

  Uiziya called after me, “Don’t pursue!” as the youth’s lean, wavering shadow ran up and out of the ghost encampment. Out of sight.

  Uiziya e Lali

  Nen-sasaïr stepped closer to me. He looked shaken. My eyes still trailed the youth, who escaped, and who seemed real enough, just desperate and thin. A fail-out from the Orphan Star’s School of Assassins, looking for my aunt’s cloth. And weren’t we all?

  “May I heal you?”

  I startled, only now noticing the shallow wound in my arm and the seeping blood that darkened the dun of my dress. It was hard to know what was real, in this place; I felt pain, but as if at a remove, as if nen-sasaïr’s voice brought me back to the now in which I could feel pain.

  “Yes,” I sighed. “Go ahead.”

  The cut wasn’t deep. I watched him carefully apply his magic in a healing weave upon my arm. If recently dealt, flesh wounds could be healed with powerful deepnames quite easily, repaired while the body still remembered itself before the injury. But I was no longer even sure what was real.

  “What was that?” nen-sasaïr asked as he tucked the last strands of magic into my flesh.

  “An assassin.” Far to the southeast, the star of assassins slumbered under the earth, its powerful tendrils spreading the song of strictness and yearning and welcome to all who despaired. To orphans and cast-outs and those disdained by kin. I’d heard that song myself once, long ago. Before I transformed.

  “What was an assassin doing here?” nen-sasaïr asked.

  “I think he is a fail-out,” I said. “If he wanted to kill me, he would have. But no, he was looking for cloth, to prove his worth again to the headmaster. You cannot be an assassin without it, for it is the cloth of death. When death is your pursuit, it protects and conceals you until it is time to strike.”

  Again, I opened the flap of the tent. Nen-sasaïr shifted nervously, magic at the ready, but there was nobody else inside; nobody alive. There were bones heaped in there, upon carpets that once were boldcolored, and now were bleached almost to whiteness. Upon them were bones gnawed by the insects, and brilliant bones overlaid by more bones. A torn-up piece of white cloth covered them: an offering or a memory.

  I said, “My aunt weaves this cloth for those who graduate from the assassins’ school. She is paid lavishly, and all this cloth is woven from bones.” I thought of this often, how death calls to death, and how she was called to create these clothes for the assassins, for the Orphan Star under the earth. I wanted to learn this craft. I wanted her to teach me.

  I wanted so much. But she came to my tent when I was out with the children, and she touched my husband Lali until he lay bloodless on these carpets I’d made.

  “What happened?” nen-sasaïr asked.

  “She asked, ‘Are you ready to weave from death? You must weave from death that matters to you,’ but I did not know what she meant. I was confused. So she said, ‘I will show you.’ So my husband died, and she fed on him, and my people ran. I did not know if I believed them at first. ‘Death is the greatest art,’ she said, ‘the greatest weave of the four. To weave a true weave of death is the greatest calling.’”

  My aunt had woven from her husbands, first. Nand had been sick, and I was still unsure if his death had been natural. Divyát . . . nobody suspected at first, not until Lali’s death; but then my people began to talk about these and other deaths, and Benesret’s name could no longer be spoken among us. I was not sure about anything. Except that she cared for them, except that I still had waited for her. I had seen her weave from hope—from hope!—the greatest hope in the world she had made, and let it go to nen-sasaïr, to help him.

  I wanted to understand.

  I waited for her to return, to explain. Waited for her to apologize. Waited for her to teach me. For forty years since Lali’s death, I waited.

  And all my weaves since then had been lifeless, and people whispered behind my back. I was neither theirs nor Benesret’s, nor even mine. I did not want Lali to die. I did not want to learn my craft from his death. But I did not want to stop waiting.

  nen-sasaïr

  Uiziya’s face was turned away from me. “If you changed your mind and do not want to travel with me anymore, I would understand. I won’t hold you.”

  She waited for me to reject her, I saw, or to silence her, just like her kin had done. We both wanted to find Benesret, but now I understood why the others refused to talk of her. Benesret had woven from hope for me, but Benesret was responsible for deaths, and I was not sure what I’d find if I continued.

  I could have turned back—turned back where? To the snake-Surun’ encampment and my reluctant grandchildren? To Iyar, and all the people in the Khana quarter? Uiziya asked me again and again why I wouldn’t talk to my people. But there wasn’t my people in this, there were women and men—never any in-betweeners that I knew about—just women and men, each on their own side of the wall.

  The very thought of coming back to the Khana quarter, to the inner white wall of the men’s domain, made me queasy with trepidation. If I could not enter—if they did not accept me—would that mean that I was not a man after all? Would I, having the heart and body of a man, still feel wrong somehow, not fully whole if the men of my people rejected me? I was brave, I had always thought, but I did not want to know the answer. Not yet. Perhaps never.

  It was easier to imagine talking to Benesret than to contemplate this. And I had told Uiziya that I was brave. “I will travel with you.”

  Uiziya sighed. “Very well. If you want to find Benesret, we should follow the diamondflies. They feed on death and feed her, and she feeds on all the death.”

  We left
the ghostly encampment and traveled south through the desert made once more ordinary. We rested in the heat, and with darkness we traveled again, following the sparkle of diamondflies and glimpses of bone revealed and concealed by the wind.

  I had never been this far south in the great Burri desert. At the dawn of our lives, on our first trading journey, Bashri-nai-Leylit and I had gotten only as far as the snake-Surun’ encampment. We journeyed in hope and in fear, for the Ruler of Iyar had imprisoned our lover; and he would free her if we brought, in exchange, the greatest treasure ever woven.

  Its threads were spun of song, and it was made from these threads by Benesret e Nand e Divyát, a weaver who sat under the faded embroidered awnings in her tent. She wove not from death then, but from song; and weaving from song was an ancient tradition known to no other kin but the snake-Surun’. Yet among all the other snake-Surun’ weavers in their tents, Benesret alone knew the secrets of all the desert’s profound weaves. As she had no children of her own, she would bequeath this craft to the child of her closest kin. Uiziya.

  Darkness was falling over the dunes, and the cry of the swaddlebird came from the gloom, calling out a warning to its mate. I was once oreg-mate to two of my lovers, but now I was the last of the three to remain.

  “Look!” Uiziya’s carpet stopped, and she pointed forward. I saw something swirling there, dense darkness in the dusk, like guardian snakes undulating in the evening sand of the Surun’ encampment. Feeding. “What is it?” I asked, swallowing the other question.

  “I’m afraid it’s somebody we know.”

  Uiziya e Lali

  My carpet floated closer. The darkness tugged and beckoned at me with a secret buzz, and out of it I saw a cloud of diamondflies swarming over a body.