The Four Profound Weaves

by R. B. Lemberg

  “What do you need?” the shadowed person asked.

  I need a loom. A loom of bones, so I can weave on it. I was restless in my skin and spinning like yarn out of long, slow tugs of pain. My flesh is not enough for you, Aunt. I need a loom so that I would weave on it a cloth of bones, and it will make you love me like you loved me when I was a little girl.

  “Where is your companion?” my aunt asked.

  “I don’t know.” There was no trace of nen-sasaïr. Only his ward.

  “Let me in, then.”

  “I cannot.”

  “Let me in. I love you. Let me in.” My aunt said this. It had to be her.

  I strained and twisted on the bed, crying until I could summon my deepnames, one-syllable and three-syllable, not very powerful but crafty. The Weaver’s Promise. Nen-sasaïr’s more powerful magical ward was not made to restrain me, just to keep people from entering the room. To keep my aunt away, and all the voices of the desert that called to me from all the bones in the world.

  I made an opening in the ward so my aunt could come in, and she did. A second person was now at the door. It was my aunt again, dressed in white like an assassin.

  My aunt, who was already inside, picked up the carpet of wanderlust. “Look,” she said. “It is woven of sand.” The carpet, blood-stained and weary, not much too look at, like me. “It is beautiful. What is it?”

  “Don’t you know? It is my carpet of wanderlust.” I had once woven it with such yearning. The white bones gleaming in the weave symbolized birds in flight, for Bird herself to watch me in my peregrinations. “You taught me how to weave it.” This close, I could see my aunt was not really my aunt but the physicker, come back to see me again.

  “Perhaps you would be willing to part from it, to sell it?”

  Yes, that was what the physicker wanted, that first time when my head was too heavy with pain. “What I want is a loom,” I said.

  “You are in pain.” The second, white-robed aunt stepped over the threshold now, past nen-sasaïr’s torn and tattered ward. This wasn’t my aunt, either. The new person spoke my language with a peculiar lilt, as if he was a neighbor from an encampment not too far away. “We will take you to where there is a loom.”

  “No, no.” If I left, nen-sasaïr would lose me. He’d left a ward; he was coming back. That I knew. And I was in too much pain to move.

  “Let me ease your pain,” said the physicker.

  “Where is my aunt?” I asked. You were her, just a short time ago . . .

  A shallow bowl of warm liquid was tilted to my lips.

  “Drink this, and we will take you to her.”

  I did not want to, but it spilled down my throat anyway, bitter and astringent, just like the potions nen-sasaïr made for me, only stronger.

  “Careful,” someone said. It was in Iyari. I did not understand much. “If she can . . . she can truly weave this weave . . . the master . . .”

  The warm, deep darkness wove itself again.

  nen-sasaïr

  I kept working on Uiziya’s chair. It would be neither big nor clumsy. It would be lightweight. It would be collapsible into a staff, which would help stabilize and support Uiziya when she was ready to walk again. A tricky design, but thinking about it made me calmer. I worked, not noticing much, until noise and commotion came from outside, and could not be ignored.

  I lifted my head. Many voices and footsteps. I heard the withdrawal of air and an exhalation, as from many throats flowed forth greetings, cries of “Bashri! You are back!” and women rushing forward to embrace me.

  I raised my hand to put a stop to all of it. “I am not Bashri. I never was. I am a man, and travel as nen-sasaïr.”

  “You are no man,” laughed someone. “You just like men’s clothes—we know you!”

  “Grief is hard,” said another. “It hasn’t been a year since Bashri-nai-Leylit was taken up by Bird—grief is hard, my friend.” She too had lost a lover last year, I remembered. “But you are Bashri-nai-Tammah, artificer and trader . . .”

  I shook my head. “No. I went to the desert and changed my body.”

  “Grief does strange things to people, but still . . .”

  Another woman spoke. “If I fashion a beak from my deepnames and make it stick to my face, it will not make me Bird. You are a woman of the Khana, doing womanly things, you are doing rebellious womanly things—that’s why you are here, in the underground workshop . . .”

  “I am making a moving chair for my friend,” I said.

  The speaker continued. “If you were a man, you would be making your chair on the men’s side of the quarter, behind the white walls, where artifice is permitted—you would not be a woman rebel with us all those years . . .”

  I said wearily, “We all did manly things, but out of all of you, I alone transformed my body. This is not about artifice for me, or trade, or childbirth, or whatever it is Khana women do which is traditional or rebellious—no, this is about what feels right for me.”

  “Hush,” said another voice. My erstwhile mentor Sulikhah-nai-Tali, who was older than me by almost three decades. By the virtue of her great age, she was the sole survivor of her oreg, and so we called her simply Sulikhah. She was our workshop’s leader, and now she spoke. “Women, we are here because we are rebels, because we have always been rebels. Bashri-nai-Tammah had been a rebel among us, making with us works of artifice forbidden to women. Let her work.”

  “I am not Bashri,” I said. “It is exactly because you cannot hold my truth that I had to go away, among Bird-eaters, no—among non-Khana . . .” My tongue was slipping. I did not want to call Uiziya and her people Bird-eaters, even though they ate the flesh of birds and animals forbidden to us.

  “Finish your chair,” Sulikhah said.

  They all stood there and watched as I worked. I would have preferred they didn’t all stare—it made me feel even more an outsider than when I entered the quarter in secret and veiled. It was too painful to contemplate what they thought of me. But I had to continue my work.

  When the staff was finished, Sulikhah took me out of the workshop, and into the deepest night.

  “You can stay here,” she said. “And we can keep talking, but if you stay here, everybody will see you as a woman, as Bashri, no matter what body you now have.”

  “I am nen-sasaïr.” The pain of being called Bashri again and again lacerated me. I needed a real name to outweigh all the Bashris, my two lost lovers and my past tormented, hidden self. I needed a Khana name. Why had I ever felt otherwise? Benesret was right that she could not help me.

  But who would give me a Khana man’s name? These women, who Bashried me until I could scream?

  Sulikhah spoke. “Long time ago . . .” Then nothing.

  I wanted to move faster, but I matched my pace to her halting steps. She did not touch me as we walked through the warmth of narrow nighttime streets.

  “Long time ago,” she said again, after a while, “I had a lover like you. A lover who was born and raised among us on the women’s side of the quarter, but who had always been a man.”

  I stopped. “What happened to him?” I had needed his tale desperately, before—and now, too. And yet I’d never heard of such a thing. I’d always felt alone here, where these tales—these tales existed, stories of people like me, but hushed so that we could not learn about each other.

  “What happened to him?” I repeated, like Uiziya would have done in my place.

  Sulikhah did not answer or stop, and after a moment, I followed her once again. We reached the inner wall, and the chiseled white stones of the men’s inner quarter now glowed, radiant with flickers of deepname lights.

  “In the end, we traveled to Che Mazri. To the Old Royal’s court.” Sulikhah had swallowed parts of this tale. “To the Sandbird Festival. The Old Royal helped him transform.”

  Sulikhah led me along the wall. She fell silent again, and her garments made swishing sounds as she walked. “We came back in secret.”

  We stopped by
a round door of blackened iron. It was elaborate and old, reinforced with bindings of enameled white metal and precious stone—em- erald and sapphire and ruby, the crowning jewels of our desert trade. In the middle of the door was a lock-shaping made like a cloud of interlocking white metal swirls, each hammered precisely with the tiny letters of the writ.

  “I took him here,” Sulikhah said. “He made a key out of the Birdseed writ, and walked in.” She took a steadying breath. “I will wait for you here, as I waited for him.”

  “What happened to him?” My voice rang heavy with yearning.

  “He never came out.” And she smiled.

  I put my hand on the lock.

  Was that the hope I sought so many decades, wandering in men’s clothing between the narrow streets of the quarter, hoping one day to be myself without knowing that my dearest love could not love me if I changed? What would I have done if Bashri-nai-Leylit had brought me here forty years ago, when I was young and full of hope and vigor?

  Bashri-nai-Leylit could have done this for me. She could have brought me here, then stood and waited. Could have smiled.

  Under my hand, I felt the ancient deepnames of the ward stir awake and examine me. Then the ward swirled in my vision, forming columns upon columns of letters of the Birdseed writ. I could use my deepnames to sort them, to find a way in. Here was a squiggle-seed for daled, a door. Yated, wedge. The letters combined and split, each possessing a value of numbers as well as of sounds. I could make them all dance, then push at the yielding mass of iron and enter the streets of the inner quarter.

  I would be among men.

  Among scholars.

  I had dreamt of this day so many times, ever since I was little. I dreamt of running through one of these gates unnoticed, as a child, sneaking in before my grandmothers could stop me. I would hide among the narrow streets of men, unseen until I learned how to better pass among them. I would sneak into the holy rooms where boys my age learned the writ. I would become a ghost, learning the writ in secret while the boys slept.

  Later, after Benesret’s promise, returning from the desert with the small cloth of winds in my hands, I began to fantasize about entering the gate not as a ghost, but as a man who had a right to be there. And that was when my mind would hiccup and withdraw, for how would I prove—how would I fit—even having the right body, but not the lifetime of learning, how would I fit on the men’s side?

  Still now, letter by letter, I moved the puzzle, combining it into a line from the Books of Birdseed I knew by heart. The words of the dawnsong.

  The dawn is never far away.

  The letters spun under my hand, showing me the vision of what awaited inside. A chamber of holy immersion, a ritual bath where I would shed my profane clothing and immerse myself in the water gathered from sky-given rains, to purify myself from the dust and hassle of the outside world, to step truly then into the garments of holiness. I would not be questioned about my body and its iterations, but be accepted as all those who walked through the door were accepted. I would grow out my beard and wear Khana men’s clothes. They would give me an artificer’s tools—ancient and true and held by many hands before me—and I would make holy automata with the others. At dawn, I would lift my voice in song to Kimri.

  I thought I heard his voice then; Kimri, Bird’s hidden brother, the god of my people’s men, locked away from the dirt and the noise and distraction of the outside world so that nothing would sully the song.

  And I heard it, that song, like a surging wave of the rainbow washing the sky in the colors of jewels and of carpets—the red of madder and the yellowsweet of weld, then indigo and walnut and emerald, turquoise and pink tourmaline. It was hope. My hope, and the hope of all others of my people who sang it throughout the landmass. The hope that wherever we gathered, wherever we wandered, exiled and unwanted, the dawn would still come for us. We only had to hold on.

  What was I hoping for? What had I been holding out for, these forty years? This, a personal triumph, a withdrawal from the world. I had liberated myself from the strictures of my youth, and all my lovers were dead. My grandchildren fended for themselves. I could do what I wanted. I could go in.

  Was this what I truly wanted?

  While I struggled with myself, the melody surged—the dawnsinger’s prayer, which is sung from the roof of the great gathering-place in the men’s inner quarter, the song that is heard in the deadest hour of the night. That melody is as ancient as the landmass. It had accompanied my people when we were exiled from our ancient home, from the mountainous land of Keshet. The Khana men sang it, so the legend went, on our great peregrination north to Iyar. Powerful women formed an outer ring. Blessed by the goddess Bird, these women protected the men and the children from enemies and ambush and wild beasts, from all disasters which, raging, come into the world. Walking the road of our exile, shielded by our strongest women, the scholars sang to Kimri, as they sang now from the rooftops of the quarter.

  “The dawn is never far away. The dawn is never far away.”

  Was this the hope I wanted? To walk in, forget the outside world, to cleanse its taint and dust from my body?

  I raised my left hand to join my right, on the lock, and the wide staff I had made rattled out of my grip.

  Uiziya.

  Uiziya was outside, injured, in the hostel. I had promised the physicker that I would come back after the Khana men sang.

  If I were to go in and never come out, what would happen to my friend? She knew nobody, did not know the language of Iyar . . . she was wounded.

  She was not even Khana.

  I snatched my hands away from the lock.

  “The lock recognized you as a man, I saw. But you could not solve it?” asked Sulikhah.

  “No, no, it was easy. I solved it. I just did not turn it all the way.” I took a breath. “But I need to go back. I cannot leave my companion, for she is sick and helpless.”

  Sulikhah looked at me, her eyes shrouded. “And this is the nature of women. Always given too much to those in our care.”

  “I am not a woman.”

  She shrugged. “You were brought up to be one. These things are hard to erase, much as you change otherwise.”

  This is not the nature of women, but rather the nature of all people who care. Uiziya had told me this once. “You can choose to care or not, and that is what people do.”

  Sulikhah shrugged again. “As you wish.”

  It had been better, coming here, than the fears my brain had spun. They did not accept me, but neither did they throw me out of the quarter. Help had been rendered to me despite argument. And yet, the only way to be truly myself was to abandon my friend and go inside. Make being a man among my people’s men my only hope.

  Above us, the dawnsong quieted down.

  I placed my hand once again on the lock. Not because I wanted to turn it, but because I wanted, for the last brief moment, to see the ritual bath just behind the gate. To hear the lapping of water inside. To smell the rainwater that filled it.

  Faintly, like a rustle that emerges from behind a curtain of noise, I heard a soft, reverberating sound—not of the rainwater, but of song. It was like the dawnsong, but more profound and at once subtler, hovering at the very edge of my senses. That, too, tapered off to a whisper, and then to nothing.

  With a sigh, I stepped back.

  I retrieved my staff-chair, and Sulikhah led me out of the quarter safely, for she was a woman given too much to those in her care.

  nen-sasaïr

  I was still on time. The hostel loomed dark in the deadest of pre-dawn darkness that stifled the magical lights and even the stars. The flowers that closed for the night did not yet begin to reopen. But something felt different here. I wanted to run—either forward or away—and yet I continued to approach at a steady pace, my feet knowing what my mind yet refused to acknowledge—that something was profoundly, irreparably amiss.

  Uiziya was inside. I could not run away.

  I drew on my deepnames and f
ormed a protective construct, then entered the building. Up the stairs. Second floor. An enfilade of rooms, cloth-swaddled, smelling stale and treacherous in the gloom.

  This was the door to the room where I left Uiziya—I had warded it—

  The magic of my ward was in tatters.

  With my senses enhanced hundredfold by the powerful magic I wielded, I sensed three people in the room. And none of them breathed like Uiziya.

  She was gone.

  In a moment of vision I saw myself fleeing all the way back to the quarter. To the lock. The door to the innermost domain. I would be safe there, safe and serene and among my own.

  But back when I still lived among Khana women, my powerful magic made me one of them. Three deepnames is the most a mind can hold, and my configuration was recognized as a powerful woman’s magic to use for protection, for trade; the men had subtler and weaker configurations. In all our stories of exile, women walked in an outer circle, protecting those who walked within. I could now choose to walk within and be protected by others.

  My thoughts jumbled, confused by myself, the inner and outer circles mixed and tangled. I did not know how to make my thoughts come right, but I would not desert Uiziya. Perhaps it was my upbringing, or perhaps it was simply me.

  I clutched Uiziya’s white staff—her collapsed chair I had made—and lit the white enamel surface of it with my magic. I stepped into the abandoned room, closing my eyes as I made the staff flash with a sudden, dazzling light.

  The soldiers threw themselves at me, half-blinded, screaming. One had a two-deepname configuration, and the others had scimitars curved and polished, but the shield of my deepnames, and the staff ’s light, had bought me a moment. I lunged, the staff too lightweight and inconsequential in my hands.

  Uiziya e Lali

  A story floated like stars in the darkness that pulsed with the insistence of pain. I would catch them one by one, all the diamondflies my aunt had made, and I would know again the truth of the wide-open skies where the ancient wind meanders from sandwave to sandwave, revealing and hiding its secrets.