The Four Profound Weaves Page 4

  The young assassin. His body under the swarm of the diamondflies was almost whole, but his arm and hand were missing from the elbow, where my blood had spilled on the white cloth he had taken from the tent. He had touched my aunt’s work, and now he was food. My aunt had been banished, because they feared if she stayed, her workmanship would have killed not only Lali, but everybody else as well—goats, children, women, men, in-betweeners, even the snakes that guarded us—everyone.

  It has not been a day since we encountered the assassin, but the body I saw now had lost all human integrity under the shreds of its piece of cloth, no longer brilliant white. The smell was horrible, putrid, with a strange green tang, and I pushed my sleeve in front of my nose to shield myself from the worst.

  “It is full of stars,” said nen-sasaïr, behind me. His voice was tense.

  “No, just diamondflies. Feeding.” I needed to get away from here. And I needed to stay.

  I exhaled, calling on my two deepnames. Onesyllable and three-syllable, a configuration which our people called the Weaver’s Promise. Nen-sasaïr’s magic was more powerful; mine was not known for its strength, but for its uses in craft.

  I extended my magic and let the light push past the feeding diamondflies and touch the slip of besmirched cloth and the body beneath it, now being absorbed into the magic my aunt had made. My touch conjured a brief vision of the person in life. Yes, it was the assassin we had seen. A young person, their face twisted in so much bewildered anger. Far to the southeast, underneath the School of Assassins, the great Orphan Star slumbers, its power almost as great as that of the two sibling gods. Those who had tasted despair come to it, to train as assassins. I heard they train the anger out of you in that school, or else you fail.

  I redirected the flow of my magic and folded my deepnames back into my mind. My touch had been gentle. Some of the diamondflies lifted off and away, but most continued to feed.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Why did he die? He did not seem wounded to me, just distraught . . .” Nen-sasaïr had also seen the apparition of the dead youth, and horror tinged his voice.

  “I don’t know. But we should go see Benesret. It’s not far. These flies feed her, see.” I wondered if she knew now that we were coming. I should have offered to turn back, but I did not. Nothing waited for me back at home, except the traders and the knowledge that I could not weave or live like before. And all these visions of death disturbed me and drew me forward.

  We left the body behind. As soon as it could no longer be seen, nen-sasaïr stopped and bent over. Floating above on my carpet of wanderlust, I watched him retch and heave, and I did not say a thing.

  nen-sasaïr

  We traveled southeast into the true night. Stars spun and rustled above us like predatory diamondflies, waiting for me to lose my balance and fall. But I would not let it happen. No. I was old, and I wanted to live. This was my true life, life in the new body made by the cloth of winds and by the sandbirds; I could not figure out my place or my name, but this I knew: I wanted to live for decades still, to taste the world in my true body.

  “Benesret—” I said, just to break the silence. I did not turn, but I put some power into my words, so that Uiziya would hear. “Benesret—all those years I thought she was exiled because of an affair, or—”

  “Because she had two husbands?” Uiziya laughed, but there was no joy in it. “No, it’s not a punishable offense, or an offense at all, among our people—”

  In the distance I saw a kind of hill, an outcropping of hard rock overgrown—no, studded—with thin dry reeds, which were topped with skulls of jackal and sand-fox and mouse, their eyes glowing with bluish magical lights. Human and animal bones formed the palisade. Behind that grate was a Surun’-style tent—but instead of reed poles, it was supported by curving tusks of the great razu beast, the legendary creature nobody had seen alive in the desert. The pink of the tusks had turned pale green and petrified millennia ago, when nothing else existed. And all the bones glowed in the near-darkness, reflecting starlight and the pallid blue light from the skulls.

  The diamondflies had terrified me, but not like this. No. I wanted to live. Not rush headlong into death.

  I turned on my sand-skis, but Uiziya lowered the sand-carpet and gripped my sleeve, unbidden. “Please. I want, after all these years, to talk to my aunt. If you leave without me, you will get lost in the sands.”

  I wanted to protest, before I could open my mouth, she hissed, “If you offend her, maybe the diamondflies will feed on you next.”

  “Benesret was my friend,” I said angrily. “She would not do that to me . . .”

  “Then why are you running away?”

  “I . . .”

  Bluish light poured out of the tent of bones, and stars swirled overhead in rapid motion, revealing a pink glistening in the eastern sky. Night had not yet fully fallen. And yet—

  The light within the bone tent grew brighter. A withered, stooped figure emerged and gingerly sat down at the entrance. I heard a voice that chilled and welcomed me.

  “My friend, you say. Yes, I remember. I’ve woven from air a cloth of transformation for you. And also I had woven another, much larger. From song. Oh, that carpet of song. For your master.”

  “The Ruler of Iyar is not my master,” I said.

  “Aunt, oh aunt.” Uiziya seemed about to burst into tears.

  “Hush, child,” said Benesret, and I almost smiled to be so called. It meant she was ancient, and we were not so ancient yet. “Hush, child,” she said again, and I realized that meant Uiziya, not me. “Come sit at my feet.”

  Uiziya hurried forward, faster than I had seen her move, then lowered herself on the stone ground by Benesret—the one whose name, for forty years, I had repeated like a promise, like hope. I looked on, at her parched skin, her sunken eyes, and remembered the diamondflies over the old tent. How could Uiziya—

  But then Benesret took pity upon me, and this startled me. “I am glad you claimed your true shape, child. Thus one of my lesser weaves yielded its promise.”

  “Aren’t all four weaves equal?” chimed Uiziya. She was a large and poised woman of sixty and more, but now I could see the child in her, the child who yearned to sit at her aunt’s feet and learn, a child who was at peace now, in this moment, despite all the visions we saw.

  “The weaves might be equal, child,” Benesret said, “But we have our affinities. Isn’t it strange that among all my weaves, the one that I wove from song was the greatest of them all?” She looked at me. “I hope the carpet of song bought your lover back, Bashri—though I suppose you are no longer called Bashri?”

  I swallowed, hard. By Khana custom, all three of us lovers had taken the name Bashri when we formed our oreg. Bashri-nai-Leylit, our leader. Bashri-naiDivrah. And myself.

  I said, “I have no name, and travel as nen-sasaïr.”

  “I see.” said Benesret. “And your lovers?”

  “Bashri-nai-Leylit passed away last year. I traveled back to the snake-Surun’ encampment, looking for you.”

  She waited, still.

  I forced myself to continue. “Bashri-nai-Divrah . . . the Ruler of Iyar took her life before we returned with your carpet. It had all been all in vain. I am sorry.”

  “Death is never in vain,” said Benesret e Nand e Divyát, “for from it I weave this time and place.”

  Around us, dawn was crowning the sky with striations of pink and orange. It was no time yet for dawn, but she had made this time with her weaves. Above in the trembling dawn, an ancient, perished razu beast made of bones was laboring to fly.

  She could make anything, and what she made and made was bones.

  “You sought me out for a reason,” she said.

  “I wanted to find you,” said Uiziya. “I still want to learn.”

  “And you?”

  “I, too, wanted to see you.” I could have lied, but I wouldn’t. “You told me I could transform my body. You have given me a cloth of winds, to give
me hope for forty years when I couldn’t use it, could not make this choice. But at last I have transformed, Benesret, and now I came to ask you to name me.”

  She frowned. “Why not name yourself? Why not take a name of one of your dead, your father, your grandfather perhaps—isn’t that your people’s tradition?”

  I averted my gaze. Mumbled. “I . . . I do not know them. The Khana men all live behind the white inner walls . . . I . . . do not remember ever seeing my own father.”

  “Seek him out then, now that you have transformed.”

  Uiziya, sitting still and attentive by Benesret’s knee, spoke. “Changing is not done among his people.”

  Benesret snorted, an odd hollow sound. “That’s what he says. Changing is always and forever done. Everywhere, it is done; in open, in secret. He has gone through the change and so, I assure you, have others.”

  To this I made no response. Perhaps other Khana had changed their body, but I knew of no one who had done so and spoke of it openly, or else I would not feel so alone for so long. If there had been others to talk to, perhaps Bashri-nai-Leylit would not be so worried to have my secret revealed, nor asked me to keep it in the first place.

  Receiving no answer from me, Benesret spoke again. “Why seek me, a woman of people not your own? Why ask me to name you away from your own people?”

  Uiziya said suddenly, “He was running away from the emissaries of the Ruler of Iyar.”

  “As were you,” I hissed.

  Benesret raised an eyebrow. “Why were you running?”

  “I wanted to sell my carpet, but then, I hoped . . .” Uiziya mumbled. “I hope still to be taught.”

  I said, “I, too, hoped, for you have given me hope when I had none.” I had thought about this for forty years. How Benesret, a stranger from the desert, saw me; how she promised me that one day I would come back to the desert and change my body. She was not welcome among her own people anymore, but she had welcomed me, a changer, when I had no hope.

  And I thought, too, over and over, how after Benesret would weave my cloth of transformation, I would ask her to name me. Something that wasn’t Bashri.

  That was my hope, still.

  “You both came here, to me, to seek hope?” Benesret laughed, bitterly. “Let me tell you where it went.”

  Uiziya e Lali

  I was sitting at my aunt’s feet, like I’d wanted, oh, I’d wanted for so long, but there was a whirlwind of feeling within me now: fear and yearning and darker things I could not look at, much less name. Still sitting, I half-turned, trying to see both my aunt and nen-sasaïr. I was not agile enough for these motions. My body protested as I twisted and turned to try to see both.

  My aunt’s body shifted as well. She was so thin now, insubstantial almost, in contrast to my own robust size; when she moved, I could almost hear her bones moving of their own accord, like the skeletal razu, a mythical beast she had resurrected, preparing to fly.

  “There was a weaver,” my aunt said.

  Nen-sasaïr had taken off his sand-skis. His face, still and serious, appeared carved of a warm stone. He clasped his hands behind his back, preparing to listen.

  “There was a weaver, see, a weaver wise with age but not yet burdened by it, a weaver who had been taught by her grandmother to make, in the ancient Surun’ tradition, a cloth out of wind to assist those who sought to change their body in accordance with their innermost heart. The weaver’s grandmother had been a changer, but the girl herself was not, and yet joyously did she learn the weave. From near and far, people young and old would come to her—those who could not make the journey to our far-off capital to seek the Old Royal’s own assistance—and so they came to her, and she wove for them the cloth of transformation that calls the sandbirds down from the sun.”

  I could just about see Benesret as that girl. I had been such a girl, plump and studious under the awning of her tent, so full of hope after my wanderings. The first cloth of winds I made was my own. It was so long ago that I had all but forgotten the time before, pushed it out of my mind like a summoning I no longer wanted to hear.

  “Weave after weave the girl matured into a young woman, sure of her craft, and yet she still used her grandmother’s loom. ‘It is time for you to go into the desert,’ the girl’s grandmother said, ‘and learn to weave from sand,’ and so I did. I wove of sand, and stepped upon the carpet I made, and gave myself to wanderlust. I traveled south to the heart of the desert, under the whirligig of stars spinning in the darkness above. I stopped at last, and disembarked among the remains of a stone labyrinth. It was a different time, this time I found, ever-changing, always moving, the secret depths of the desert revealed to me by the wind, for I have woven that wind.”

  It had been nothing like that for me. I simply went out to the regular desert, at sunset, when orange and blue mixed and mingled; I wove of ordinary sand, took a short fly-about on my carpet of wanderlust, and then put it away where it lay unused for those forty years.

  Benesret continued her tale. “I opened my arms to the spinning ancient sky and turned, around and around, the sleeves of my garment filling with wind. Everywhere I looked, I saw bones—bones of beasts, forgotten and ancient, dreaming themselves up into visions I had never seen—a bird with two heads, drumming on four bone drums, a stick in each beak and claw; a lizard, illustrious, bejeweled; the great razu beast in flight, its wings unfolding over a desert like a rainbow.”

  Nen-sasaïr said, “These are the images you wove into the great carpet made of song.”

  My aunt ignored him. “I knew right then that I was destined to be a great weaver. I would make the Four Profound Weaves and then bring them to- gether, to reveal the greatest secret of all; that the Four Profound Weaves would bring the gods themselves at my bidding, for the desert had revealed itself to me. And everything in it was made of death.”

  nen-sasaïr

  “Bird is the goddess of death.” I was not sure why Benesret’s tale rattled me so, but I needed to breathe.

  “No,” said Benesret. At her knee, Uiziya shifted uncomfortably.

  “Bird takes us up when we die,” I insisted.

  “No,” Benesret said again.

  “It is true. I’ve seen it happen. She came for Bashri as a dove.” I’d lied to my grandchildren when they asked if I had seen the goddess when Bashri-naiLeylit died. My three deepnames gave me power; and of all of my family, I alone could see Bird, but I lied, said I wasn’t strong enough to see what shape the goddess took when the she came for my lover’s soul. How could have Bashri-nai-Leylit gotten such a peaceful vision of Bird when all our lives, all my life she had restrained me? She’d pleaded with me and shamed me with my truth of being a man, until the very end.

  I did not realize I had spoken these words, but Benesret said, “Did it feel good to conceal the shape Bird took for her?”

  “Yes,” I hissed, the confession spilling from me unrestrained. “Yes. A dove. Such a small thing to conceal compared to my life of forced secrets, forty years of her refusing me when she knew—” I exhaled. “Yet I loved her, Benesret, I loved her, and Bird help me, I still do.”

  “I remember that,” she said. “And I see that.”

  We stood in silence. Rather, she sat, supported by the sitting Uiziya, and I stood like a supplicant in front of them. Pain wrapped around me like a veil, lending all shapes a pallid hue—or perhaps it was the dawn, called unbidden before the night was done, unfolding now over the two Surun’ women and their throne of bones. I had been glad to find Benesret alive after all those years, but now I was dizzy and wary. Benesret spoke of the great secret of the weaves, but her hand moved upon Uiziya’s shoulder, and a shimmer like diamondflies ran down her long, gnarled fingers.

  My lips moved. Uiziya—

  She nodded at me. Nothing’s amiss.

  Benesret’s mouth pulled wide, as if she was smiling, but I was not sure of that either.

  “Bird is not the master of death. I steered my carpet of wanderlust south and east o
ver the everchanging sands, looking for her, but I could not find her. I went to the School of Assassins next, the school built over the buried Orphan Star. The goddess Bird does not come for the assassins, or for their victims. But I learned from the headmaster that they, too, need cloth.”

  I shuffled on my feet. “You said you would tell me of hope.”

  “Yes, child.” Benesret sighed.“I said no to the headmaster that first time, for I would not weave from death before I wove from song. Tell us why, Uiziya.”

  “This tale must be told four times,” said Uiziya, as if reciting a lesson. “Stitched with wind, stitched with sand, stitched with song, stitched with bones. Change, wanderlust, hope, and death. Only then will the ultimate secret will become known. It is the secret of the sibling gods—the glorious Bird and her hidden brother, the singer Kimri.”

  “Death,” echoed Benesret. “Yes, death, but not yet. First I became normal, for that is the word people say. I hid the desert’s visions in my heart and went back home to my tent, my two husbands, my goats—I taught my niece and made lesser weaves and I waited. I needed to weave from hope, but I could not envision a hope that would not lead me back to death, to the last of the Four Profound Weaves which I desired so much, but that was not enough.

  “One day I took up my carpet of wanderlust and traveled east, calling out for hope to find me so I could be done with my task. I saw a woman of the Maiva’at standing on the edge of her encampment. Her mouth overflowed with melodies that hung in threads down her body. She told me, haltingly, that Bird came to her when she sang, and by singing, she spun these threads out of Bird’s own feathers.”

  “Zurya,” I said, for I knew this tale of old, or at least a version of it.

  “Yes, Zurya,” said Benesret. “I begged her for these threads, so I could weave from them. Such a cloth I would make—I could already see it in my mind, how it would sing with all the colors of Bird’s triumphant plumage when she flies over the desert at dawn. But Zurya refused to give me anything, and her eyes were dull with hunger for the goddess. ‘I will sing these threads until I can sing no more, because she comes to me, and I spin from her, and I will possess these threads alone.’”