by Ken Scholes
“And you agreed.”
“Benesret—see, ah. Benesret. She made this cloth of winds for me, that would begin the spell, this promise-cloth, to come back anytime. I wanted to, after we found out what happened to Bashri-nai-Divrah. What did we have to lose now? But Bashri, Bashri-nai-Leylit, she was stricken. How could I do this to her, tear myself from her at such a time? She said that I could as a woman do all the things I wanted to do, that artifice and scholarship were still within my reach, that if I wanted still to travel and trade like a woman, to bake and to raise children like a woman, to fight and use powerful magic like a woman, then why would I even want to change? What did it even matter?”
“But you wanted to.”
“I wanted to,” grandmother said. “It’s not about what I do, as a man or as a woman. It is about how I feel, how I had always felt.”
“Yes,” said Gitit.
“And so I gave Bashri the cloth of winds. When you’re ready, tell me, give it back to me, I said. Accept me as I am, from north to south and back, a man, a woman, I will always love you, I will never leave you.”
“Did she ever?”
“She gave the keys to me so I could give the cloth to the child,” said my grandmother. “By then we were too set in our unhappiness, too tired to steer away. Like Zurya of the Maiva’at, the blessing of our love had turned into a cocoon that kept us constricted and silent until the end.”
Long silence dripped. The winds lay still upon my cheeks like ropes. I felt the weight of it, that lightlessness that bound my grandmothers in stifling closeness, in tenderness that could not let them grow. I wanted to go out, to hug grandmother-nai-Tammah to me, to ask forgiveness for assuming that she did not want us because of magic or because of Kimi; but before I could stir, Gitit spoke again.
“But you are going now.”
“I did not think I would,” said grandmother-nai-Tammah. “I gave the cloth away. But I cannot. I cannot. I am going now.”
I lay there, thoughts of movement drained from me. You’re going now. You will abandon us, you cannot bear to stay, you’re eager to abandon us. What matter why you shall abandon us?
The winds whisked my tears away, lulled me at last into an uneasy sleep. I said nothing to grandmother-nai-Tammah when we set out again, I said nothing to either of them for days. I said nothing until we saw from afar the conical, bell-topped tents of the Surun’, until the hissing snakes of air and dust arose from the ground to greet us.
* * *
Kimi ran forward with a laugh, but grandmother grabbed her and pulled her back. “Stand still,” she hissed. My sister began to wail, hands reaching out towards an undulating vision of the serpent golden with the sun, its scales like triangular diamonds. “We have to wait for the guardians.”
On and on my sister cried, her body growing rigid and spasming, but grandmother’s grip did not slack.
A group of warriors approached us, walking slowly through dry stalks of whisperweed. They were men, deep brown in the desert heat and dressed in grassweave shirts and skirts of leather. Their hair was styled as I have never seen—cut down to springly curls and shaved to nothing on the sides, in stripes of skin that patterned after snakes. Each of the men bore a spear of dark bronze—forged beneath the ground, said my books, engraved with symbols of men’s secret stories. So similar the weapons were to those the ghost-warriors had wielded that I barely held myself from gasping.
One of the men waved at the snakes of air and shining dust. I did not see his deepnames crowning him, but something almost shimmered as the snakes collapsed into the ground.
“Greetings, Khana traders,” he said. And then, “Are you traders?”
His companions looked at us with wariness.
“I am Bashri-nai-Tammah,” my grandmother said. “A Khana from Niyaz, but not a trader.” How careful was she to avert her gaze from me, how careful to avoid the word woman. “I come to you after an old friend, Benesret e Nand e Divyát, and by her invitation.”
The men exchanged glances, and their grips on spears tightened. “Is that so?”
“I bear her sign. It is a cloth of winds.” Never relaxing her grip on Kimi, grandmother pulled the cloth out of the pocket of her kaftan. Unprisoned from the darkness of the garment, the winds whined and crackled as if before a storm, and stalks of dry grass buzzed and shook at our feet.
Grandmother, startled, tucked the cloth back in. “Benesret made it for me. She said come back any time.” Calmed by the winds, Kimi fell silent, but when grandmother-nai-Tammah hid the cloth, she sobbed again.
The leader turned to us. “And you? Do you also seek Benesret?”
I looked at Gitit, but her eyes remained fixed on the ground. With no recourse I spoke in Surun’, concentrating so hard on the enunciation that I forgot to be afraid of my words. “I am Aviya-nai-Bashri, trader, granddaughter of Bashri-nai-Tammah. This is my oreg-mate, Gitit-nai-Lur.” It grated even more to me now that we were oreg-mates and lovers, and yet we had not taken each other’s names, and lately had not exchanged even words. I barged on. “My sister...” I gulped, “Zohra-nai-Bashri, who goes by the name of Kimi...” Tight in grandmother’s arms, Kimi keened quietly, rocking back and forth as much as grandmother’s body would allow.
“Ah,” the man said. I could not guess his thoughts. Were we too strange, these generations, these silences, tensions? Why didn’t he ask after my sister? I did not know which felt better—the asking, the pity, the useless advice; or the turning away, the unseeing, the warding signs that mothers made inside their sleeves as if I wouldn’t notice after all those years—fingers moving to shield one against children born strange. The heart in my chest hung heavy and hollow, gnawed out by all the small hurts of what had already passed, of what was yet to pass. Neither Gitit nor grandmother would look at me.
The man motioned us to follow. His warriors flanked us, none of them giving us names or greetings. As we walked, the worry of it felt dull in me and pressing like the onset of nausea. The first thing I had felt in days.
My sister quieted. Hand gripped in grandmother’s, she twisted backwards to look at—there, in the dust of the trail, the golden snake with triangular scales undulated in our wake, the boundary guardian not dismissed after all. The serpent’s glimmer made a no-sound of the rain that falls in dreams. Around it, us, the air began to darken.
Shortly we reached the campsite with its conical leather tents. Small brown goats wandered in-between, not tethered, looking at us intruders with annoyance. The men led us to a large circular construction, a tent painted with serpents and strung with ropes of silver bells that made music like starlight falling. Inside it was hung with carpets, their colorful wool embroidered with plain spidersilk in triangles and squares arranged to symbolize the beasts that rose from buried bone. The tent’s floor was strewn with sturdier weavings I recognized to have been traded from further east, from the peoples of the Maiva’at and the Gehezi—thick-piled and rich with weld and madder.
Upon these carpets five women sat, the oldest in her fifties, the rest my age or younger. They were drinking tea. All turned to us, their fingers still spread with the weight of flat desert-style cups that curved slightly at the lip.
The man who brought us addressed the women in a language I did not know. I heard our names given, and the word Niyaz, and I saw the frown on his face. When he stopped, one of the women, middle-aged and stout, addressed us in Surun’. “Welcome. I am Naïr e Bulvát. My husband, Bulvát. My guests, Uiziya—”
“I know you,” said the older woman so named. “You are the three-named strong for whom the winds came shivering, for whom the bones of the old warriors awoke, the one who carried Zurya’s threads and yet refused to sing.”
The one for whom old warriors awoke...?
“I’d sing,” grandmother-nai-Tammah said, “not for the warriors or threads, but for myself, and yet it is forbidden for the women of the Khana, and so I kept quiet.”
“I remember,” said Uiziya, “how your stifled voice
rattled inside you, a rotten walnut shriveled in its shell. Aunt Bene—...”
“Shhh,” said the one called Naïr e Bulvát. “Aunt.”
“No, I want to know,” said my grandmother, “I want to know what happened to Benesret.” She crossed her hands at her chest, and the women stared at her as if she’d just—
“We do not tell this tale. We do not say this name.”
Something shifted in the dimmed light of the tent. I saw—heard—
But suddenly none of this mattered to me, for grandmother’s hands no longer held Kimi.
My sister wasn’t inside.
I dodged past the men, ignoring limbs and grabbing hands, ran out. My sister, knees in dirt, was just outside, thank—
—wrestling with the snake that wound around her arms in suffocating—
I rushed forward.
Stopped.
She wasn’t wrestling. Snake and child, enraptured by each other, wound against each other—Kimi, rocking slightly, giggled as the snake’s thick yellow body slithered past her cheek.
“The guardian will not harm her,” said someone. I turned to see a young woman, one of those who sat with Naïr; older and taller than me but not by much. She wore reddish garments and simple ornaments of bronze. Her brown cheeks were rouged with orange. The other men and women poured out of the tent, surrounding my grandmother and my lover like cupped hands.
“Your grandchild is ready to take power,” said Uiziya.
“I thought she would, in the desert,” said grandmother-nai-Tammah, “when the warriors awoke and pursued us. I waited...”
“Yes?”
“And nothing.”
Naïr said, “Look at the guardian, helped in shape by your grandchild’s curiosity. This power will not be born in defense or aggression.”
“If you say so,” said grandmother dubiously. It was intense emotions—anger, pain, fear—that prompted magically apt children to take deepnames on the threshold of youth.
Uiziya drew my grandmother and others back into the tent. I stayed behind with my sister and the young woman, Leivayi, as the snake and child spun around each other in the dust. Gitit stood with us too. She said nothing. Above us, Bird pecked out small bright holes in the dark cloth of the sky.
“Gitit,” I said in our own language. “Did you hear what she said, what they said? The warriors awoke because of grandmother’s magic, and then she waited to save us because Kimi—because Kimi should have taken a deepname, but Kimi-”
My lover turned away from me.
“Gitit-”
“I do not want to hear.”
She walked off, back into the tent.
Leivayi stretched her arm out, and the snake guardian crawled over to her and wound around her shoulders, shining full, full, full with the day’s accumulated heat, a shoulder-necklace of pure sun. She offered to take both of us to a sleeping place, and I was too exhausted to argue.
My sister was too confused to recognize danger, my grandmother too focused on herself and how that measured against what was proper; my lover too loyal to speak against the one who saved her life, no matter how that life had come to be endangered. Where did this leave me? Where?
Too stubborn to...
Too stubborn to...
I did not argue with Leivayi. She seemed to have no deepnames, and her tent was dark. It smelled of leather, wool, and sweat, and sleep.
* * *
Too stubborn to forgive.
In my dreams, snakes and children tangled under the star-embroidered sky. Grandmother-nai-Tammah sprouted wings and flew up, gleeful, unseeing. Her wings grew and grew. Joined where my grandmother’s body used to be, the wings alone soared higher, intent on flight.
* * *
I went to see my grandmother the next day. In the tent with Naïr and Uiziya she talked and talked, not paying attention to anything.
“You should talk to the men,” said Naïr.
“No!” Was it fear that colored grandmother’s voice so? “I do not want to talk to men. I want to talk to you...”
“If you’re to be known as a man...”
Round and round they went. I entered and exited, intent to keep an eye on Kimi, but she seemed engrossed by the snake, and Leivayi watched over them both.
Towards the evening, Leivayi set up a small square loom and threaded it. My sister tangled the threads and laughed, but Leivayi patiently corrected her. She guided Kimi’s hand in hers, repeating the same motion over and over.
And in Naïr’s tent, grandmother was still talking. “Who am I to say what I should or should not be called, whether I am or am not a man already? My grandchild is a girl because she cannot talk, but she is not a girl...”
“I don’t think your grandchild knows—cares—what tai is.” Naïr used a pronoun common to many desert languages—tai, taim, tair in Surun’—that indicated ‘neither he nor she’. The Khana language lacked such a word, both in the speech the scholars used and in women’s talk. In Khana, a person was either she or he. In Khana, all the words were either she or he—carpets, carts, grains of sand, stars in the sky each had their chosen form, female or male. There was no escaping this, but the desert tongues lacked such a distinction. One could be anything. In Surun’.
“Your grandchild may never know, or it may never be important to taim. And because it is not important to taim it is not important to us what style of clothing tai wears, or whether tai chooses to spend tair days among men or among women. If tai were to learn Surun’, tai would ask to be called tai, or something else, when tai knows it. If it is important to taim. Tai might never know, we might never know. But you know. You have always known.”
“Yes, I have always known. And yet...”
“You always hesitated,” said Uiziya. “I thought it was because of your lover, but now that she is gone, I thought...”
“It’s all about Bashri. It’s always been about Bashri. After forty-four years... I do not know how to live otherwise, do not know how to live in this world without Bashri, I do not know if I want to live...”
I left them. I sought out Gitit, sat by her side while she spoke to other women of carpets that might be woven for trade. We talked later that night, awkwardly, rediscovering words, rediscovering how they hurt.
“What is it that angers you,” she asked, “this thing about the elder-nai-Tammah?”
The truth burst out of me, the shape of it before this hidden even from myself. “I would not know how to talk to her if she is a man.”
Gitit frowned. “And what if I were a man?”
“Are you?” I asked. “Are you a man?”
“Does it matter?” she asked.
It doesn’t—
No. It mattered. It mattered to me. I had never talked to scholars. Marriage did not scare me, but only because it would be such a formal thing, and such a needed thing, to beget lives—but it would not really matter. Marriage was not for closeness, not for conversations or journeys. For that one had lovers, oreg-mates. If Gitit were a man, how would we trade? How would we expand our oreg, raise our children, what would the other women say? Would she even stay with me? The scholars wouldn’t accept this transformation, and in the quarter she’d have to hide, so why break your heart changing anyway?
Only after Gitit left me I remembered, with a sticky rush of shame I remembered grandmother-nai-Tammah’s words, of what my grandmother-nai-Leylit had told her. Almost the same. The same.
Dark had fallen. The stars keened above. Somewhere beyond the veil of that darkness my grandmother’s soul could not find rest, her arms outstretched towards the cloth of winds.
* * *
Naïr and Uiziya constructed the large horizontal frame of the loom with the help of others, men and women. None of them would utter the name Benesret, would not speak of her story, but it seemed they’d keep her promise.
The women with deepnames began to sing quietly, drawing winds out of the sky to thread the warp. I could not see them, but I heard the sound they made when pulled tau
t on the loom—the snapping voice of strong, thin threads. Grandmother, wound tightly in veils and bent like a scholar over a tome of writ, paced around and around the construction.
Kimi learned the Surun’ words for snake, thread, and hand. The large yellow snake still followed her, and Leivayi kept teaching her to weave. Other children would join them now, pulling and pushing and giving instructions to Kimi in voices joking and serious. The youngest of these children, aged three, spoke far more better and fluidly than Kimi ever had.
They talked of my sister as tai now, but I did not. If Kimi had not decided, if Kimi did not know, then how would one pronoun be better than another? Besides, I spoke in Khana in my head, and there was no such thing as tai. She, I continued saying, she, defiant and guilt-gnawed, no longer sure whose truth was real. If only Kimi could tell me... but if Kimi could talk, she would be he. Perhaps not in her deepest heart; perhaps like grandmother-nai-Tammah she’d yearn for change, but she—he—would live in the inner quarter with the men, and would not be now traveling with me.
The day the frame was ready, Uiziya approached me. “It is better if those who love Bashri weave the cloth of transformation,” she said. I answered awkwardly, said I did not know how. And besides, I had no deepnames to weave from wind. But when Naïr and Uiziya sat down to the loom, when Leivayi and the children joined them, I could not leave, or simply watch. I sat down by Naïr and asked to be taught.
She gave me a comb of bone and gold and taught me to beat down the weft-weaves of the winds and push them tight against the ones that had come before. I did it by touch, marveling at the feel of compressed winds under my fingers, rougher than wool, prickly with sand and memory. Leivayi and other weavers without deepnames likewise wielded combs, but Kimi threw hers away and insisted on threading by hand. Her laughter rang out like a pair of bronze sticks striking the sun.