Benesret looked startled to see us. A little alarmed. When nen-sasaïr gave her the carpet of song, she hardly looked at it.
“I took your flesh,” she said to me. “And still you came back.”
If she thought we would kill her, she was mistaken. We had brought her the carpet, and now I wanted to talk.
“You could have taken anyone,” I said. “Shrubs growing furtively in the desert’s heat, lizards darting around, sandplovers with their curved beaks; you could have stepped between worlds, taken the razu beast in flight. You could have created living beings with your great mastery of the weaving arts. You could have created them and taken them.” Nen- sasaïr shuddered, hearing my words. I pressed on. “But you have taken me.”
“You asked me.”
“Because I wanted you to teach me.”
“The weave of death must be made from those you care about. I told you this, but you would not attend. I killed your husband,” Benesret said. “Took his life, drop by leeched drop for my work. Grief upon grief you have known—but still it wasn’t enough for you to truly desire to weave from death. You were content to remain in the leather tents with your children and your nieces and your goats, forever yearning for my instruction yet never seeking me out, never weaving anything of magic until you followed him here. Until you asked me.”
“Until you harmed me.” I wondered now why she had not taken my children.
Benesret said, “You should be grateful, for it is because I took you that you have learned this, and wove at last from death.”
Benesret’s eyes shone with hunger as she looked at the bone-white tapestry I had tucked under my arm. With nen-sasaïr’s help I spread it for her now, bone and ash and yearning and song.
See? I wanted to say. I, a weaver who spent forty years in the tents, discontent yet unmoved even in grief, I, a mortal who would not even learn from you, I have surpassed you. I was tempted to say that, but it was not right. Craft she had aplenty, and between the two of us, she was the greater weaver still. The carpet of song reverberated with a great precision, her mastery, but she did not want what she’d woven. What she wanted was the work I had done.
“You devoured all these people, devoured even me, because you must care for the people you take for your work.” I’d seen this in her—and in the torturer, whose family he killed to create the rod. I saw this even in the Ruler of Iyar. “I have learned this: that you can care about the dead without devouring them. Without using them. This is my story, and my weave.”
“I do not know how to do this,” she said. And yet she was alive, when both the torturer and the Collector had died. There was a reason for that.
“You sought out death as your craft, Aunt,” I said, “but your greatest weaving was hope. Hope and death are intertwined, inseparable like the sibling gods. That is the secret of the Four Profound Weaves.”
“There is no more hope for me,” Benesret said, her voice ragged. “And even if there was, Bird would never take me up. Not after all of this. Never. All I ever wanted was to make the great last weave; but you have surpassed me.”
“This is not about ambition or craft.” I had never aspired to this. “In the darkest place that even Bird could not find, I wove from my sisters. If you care about someone strongly enough, if you listen hard to their stories, perhaps one day you will find yourself in that place.”
We left Benesret with her carpet of song, and journeyed farther into the desert.
nen-sasaïr
We traveled southeast until we found a great outcropping of rock shimmering with indigo and the rainbow of mineral salt. We had been looking for this place or one much like it, a place we had never visited but that had called to us from afar. It was hot and bright, and our eyes swam from heat and sweat. The carpet of sand floated to the ground. Struggling, determined, we lifted the tapestry of death, the greatest treasure ever woven, and offered it to the sky.
For many long moments, the tilting world of the desert was silent. Then, one by one, the threads began to sing. Not as triumphantly as the carpet of song had sung, not as grandly, but it made the air melt in my lungs with the redness of heat, with the swelling of yearning. In all their languages the dead sang, in Iyari and Khanishti and Burrashti and Surun’, and other languages I did not know. No more did the dead sing their lives; instead they sang this light, the wide-open spaces, the scorching sunglare, the wind.
My eyes ran with tears, so at first all I saw was a blur tumbling down from the sun. I thought that it was a sandbird, like the birds that came to me during my ritual of transformation. But it was no sandbird. It was the goddess herself.
Bird came in the shape of a great swan of bone, her skeletal wings spread wide and her long neck curving. The swan wasn’t a desert bird, but a sigil of royal Iyar, stripped now of flesh and feather.
Her empty eye sockets looked into my soul. The great beak tugged at the tapestry.
We let it go into Bird’s keeping, and she carried it up just a bit. And then she began to dance.
Bones, bones, oh how her bones rattled above the swirling sun-domain of the desert, rattling like drums, like the first and last music that ever existed. In her beak, Uiziya’s great weaving shook and dissolved into ash. Floating, swirling over our heads so that even the sun was obscured. Then a strong gust of wind bore ash and Bird away. The heat filled the world once more.
I stood there, bereft and teetering, next to Uiziya. At last, I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my garment. “What does it mean?” But I knew what it meant; that for all our endeavor, Bird would not take up the souls of our dead.
“I think it means,” said Uiziya, “that some wrongs can never be fully remedied even by the gods, no matter how great our effort. But the wind and the sand will remember.”
The wind, shifting my lover’s ash, all the lost women’s ash, all around the great desert. The wind, traveling through all lands that ever existed, mingling ash with sand, weaving the desert out of our yearning, our wanderlust, so the desert itself may wander, so it may change and remember itself anew in the voices of the never-born and the dead, making out of itself pasts and futures in which all is possible.
And from afar, I heard the echo of my lover’s voice.
“Remember me—a woman of the people of the Khana, a lover of Bashri-nai-Leylit and of the one whose true name became . . .”
I whispered, “Kaveh-nen-Kimri,” for it was the name given to me by my god. Kaveh: a man who has hope.
“. . . and of Kaveh-nen-Kimri, a man of the people of the Khana and my lover, whose story is woven into the great weave of the land.”
The sound of Bashri-nai-Divrah’s voice was almost palpable, sand-gold and warm and then fading into silver, folded into the retreating wind.
It was done. I wanted it to be done differently. I wanted the woman I loved at the dawn of my life to be back, this woman I hardly knew; and I wanted Bashri-nai-Leylit, who wept now, above, wrapped in the dove-wings of the goddess. I wanted a story that ended in hope, but all I could see, as far as I looked, was ash.
Uiziya e Lali
“Do not look so forlorn,” I said to Kaveh. “Our work was not for nothing. This wind and these sands are a life beyond death, unlike the stone-cold prisons of Iyar.”
I felt his grip tighten on my arm, steadying me. “I think it is true, and yet I fear. Soon a new ruler will rise in Iyar, and he again will collect treasure.”
“I understand this fear.” I had shaped from death, but I was not burdened by it, for the bone-tapestry I had made was created from the song’s defiance, too. Here under the open skies where the ash of my sisters was woven now into the desert, I felt a new feeling expand my chest.
“Yes,” I said, “A new ruler will rise in Iyar, to do this and worse, unspeakable things until the world overflows with them, and the scream of the bones chokes the land. But this I know: new weavers will rise among our peoples, new weavers who will raise their voices even if that music is made of their bones; and these new makers wi
ll weave and be woven, from hope and death, to bring the collector down. Over and over will we rise.”
Kaveh said, “That is hope.”
“No,” I said. “More than hope. It is the truth of the weaves, as profound as the wind and the sand and the certainty of death.”
Kaveh-nen-Kimri
I stood listening for all my lost lovers and for Bird until my head felt like it would split with the heat, and my eyes refused to see anymore.
Uiziya touched my sleeve. “Where will you go now?”
My hand touched my chin, where the stubble of a gray and black beard was growing unshaved for the first time. I was a Khana man and I was perhaps expected to answer home. Home, to the lock of song in the Khana quarter, where Kimri was waiting for me for the first time, my god, to let me into the smallest of places from which a song issues forth. But I had turned away from that life, and still Kimri came to me. Song was everywhere. I did not have to go anywhere to find him. Perhaps one day I would return, but I was a man who was brought up a woman of the Khana, and I had the love of trade routes and wide-open spaces. Home ran between my fingers like ash, and was carried away by the wind.
Yet I did not speak.
I wanted to be as sure as Uiziya, but I was not sure of anything—of what we had wrought, my lover’s words within the ash, the nature of the weaves, the certainty of hope’s resilience, which is as strong as the certainty of death. But I had to tell this tale to my grandchildren. For we are all woven of words; and after we go, it is our tales that remain, wandering around the desert with the wind until our stories are told four times, until a weave is pulled from them—the carpet of truth which is this desert, this weave of change, and wanderlust, and hope, and death.
Uiziya e Lali
“Where will you go?” I asked again, for I was stubborn and would keep asking until I was satisfied. I saw him smile, at last—just a small tugging of the lips, but I knew him: Kaveh-nen-Kimri, a man of the people of the Khana. My friend.
“I am going back to the snake-Surun’ encampment, to my grandchildren, to return the carpet of wind to Kimi, and to tell the story. Then—away. I might be old, but I’m not ready yet to be done. I want to learn more about my new magic. I want see what lies beyond—to the east, where the sacred tumbleweed wanders, a star in its heart; and beyond, where youths send their mountain hawks up to greet the dawn. I lost my sand-skis, and I would need to find a workshop and make myself new ones—if I even can now—but perhaps we can use your carpet of wanderlust, if you want to come with me.”
“My old carpet? Hah. Not this thing.” It was good to be sure at last both of myself and my craft. “I will weave you one better.”
My friend surveyed the horizon, as if looking out for a way ahead. He adopted my way in the end, and repeated his question, more tentatively than I would ask it. “Would you come with me?”
I did not hesitate. “Of course I will.”
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without editors who, over the course of years, took chances on my works set in Birdverse, and works that formed the great weave of this story. Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica Wick published my poem about the making of the greatest treasure ever woven, which went on to place in the Rhysling Award. One of my greatest lessons and gifts in this life is learning to move aside so the words can come through, and this poem paved the way. I wrote “Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds” next. It was a novelette, and I am grateful to my editor Scott H. Andrews for publishing it in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. That piece was a finalist for the Nebula Award, and for that I am forever grateful to my readers who voted for it, discussed it, believed in it, argued with it. “Cloth” is a story of a family—a story of the trans and non-binary members of that family, as told by a queer cisgender relative, Aviya. It wasn’t the most comfortable viewpoint for me as a non-binary person, but it allowed me to say things about queer and trans family dynamics that I needed to say at that point in my life. A few years later, I wrote The Four Profound Weaves. It is a work that came to me after my father’s death. For a short, painful time after he passed, I thought I was done writing. This was the work that came after. It seems that I was not done writing about families, or about this particular family, but the trans viewpoints were the ones I was going to foreground. I am grateful to the crew at Tachyon, and especially to my editor Jaymee Goh, who did a fantastic job helping me develop a much shorter and shallower draft into the book you are reading now. Jaymee’s attention to detail, deep understanding of LGBTQIA+ issues in storytelling, and most excellent sense of humor made working on edits a pleasure. Jill Roberts, the managing editor at Tachyon, helped me take the book even further by suggesting ways to develop the story and its characters. Special thanks to Jacob Weisman at Tachyon, and to my former agent Connor Goldsmith, for making the book a reality. Many thanks to early readers Corey Alexander, Elora Gatts, Sonya Taaffe, Bryn Greenwood, Jay Wolf, and to my sensitivity reader Izzy Wasserstein, for their insights and support. Much gratitude to my wonderful Patreon supporters, who followed along as I developed and edited this book. I could not have written this book without the encouragement, support, invaluable suggestions, and anti-brain-weasel efforts of my spouse, Bogi Takács. Our child Mati contributed hugs and excitement regardless of whether or not I wrote anything. Last but not least, I am grateful to the splendid fellowship of queer and trans writers in my online writing group, to whom this book is dedicated.
About the Author
R.B. Lemberg is a queer, bigender immigrant from Eastern Europe and Israel. Their stories and poems have appeared in Lightspeed Magazine’s Queers Destroy Science Fiction!, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Uncanny Magazine, Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology, and many other venues. R.B.’s work has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, and other awards. You can find more of their work on their Patreon (patreon.com/rblemberg) and a full bio at rblemberg.net
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