Uiziya e Lali
I sat alone in my old goatskin tent. Waiting, like I had for the last forty years, for Aunt Benesret to come back. Waiting to inherit her loom and her craft, the mastery of the Four Profound Weaves. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been sitting like this, and it was dark in the tent; I no longer knew day from night.
When the faded red woven tapestry at the entrance shifted aside, I drew my breath sharply, waiting for my aunt’s thin, almost skeletal hand—but it was not Benesret. Of course not. Instead, one of my grand-nieces stepped in, plump and full of life, bedecked in embroideries and circlets hammered with snakes. Her eyes shone like stars in the gloom.
“Aunt Uiziya, don’t sit here alone. Aunt Uiziya, you should come to the trading tent. Aunt Uiziya, bring some of these weaves—” The girl’s bejeweled hand motioned at the weavings that hung, heavy and lifeless, around my tent. “You might sell something, and if not, just show your craft, yes?” And just like a flutter of wind, she was gone.
I kept sitting. But something had changed, as if some sliver of song entered my dead domain and withdrew. I had woven so much in those decades of waiting for my aunt to come back, but I wouldn’t show them. None of them sang and yearned like hers did, none of them called the goddess Bird down from the merciless heat of the sky. My weaves hung lifeless, like bodies. Who would want them? Did I want them? I had not thought about that, just sat among them, the guardian of all the unwanted, forgotten things. I turned sixty-three this year; I would sit like this, until I sat among bones. My aunt could weave even from bones, but she never finished teaching me. The flap of my tent had not been fully closed, and now the riot of light and of sounds trickled in, only half-real to my senses after a day spent in gloom. It was the commotion of trading—the rustling of cloth, the heavy sound of carpets unrolled for display, the bleating of goats. So much excitement in the encampment—the traders must be foreign. Show my craft? What craft? My life had stopped, like a wind trapped in a fist.
I’ll make a weaver out of you yet, my aunt Benesret had said to me. I’ll teach you—I’ll teach you, just wait. I’ll teach you the Four Profound Weaves so that you will inherit my loom.
Where was she, then? Where was she? The guardian snakes that circumnavigated the encampment all knew her, and I doubted she would be allowed to enter, but she could have tried, at least. She could have sent me a letter. She could have sent an assassin, one of those she worked with, to kill the snakes and find me and bring me to her.
The girl should have left me alone, but now I was angry and hot and I wanted . . . I wanted something that wasn’t this endless wait. Show my craft, like it once was, all the promise of the desert and its secret weaves, endless future that never came to be.
I was too large and too old for rash movements, but I dragged myself up, stiff in my joints from being still for so long. Hesitantly, I unlatched a large chest of leather in which I kept especially precious things. My late husband’s wedding shirt, embroidered by my own hands before they wrinkled. A small ball of spidersilk spun by my daughter when she was a little girl. A note from the nameless man before he became nameless, given to me forty years ago. Beneath the precious debris of my life, a rustle of sand.
At last I pulled the thin, rolled-up carpet, hidden away these forty years. Shook it out. It was as long as I was tall, and slightly shorter in width. Sand grains made its threads, yellow and dun and shadow-warmth; thread-bones peeked out of their hiding places in the weave. If I called on my magical deepnames, I could make the carpet of sand float and fly, all the way up to the guardian poles of the tent.
Show your craft. You might even sell it.
“I have a carpet for sale,” I said to no one in particular. “A carpet woven from sand, the second of the Four Profound Weaves that Aunt Benesret taught me before she was exiled.” This carpet, that I had never shown anyone else but her. I would sell it, give it away, even—and then my yearning and my waiting would be done. And I would be done.
the nameless man
Everybody seemed to have gone to the trading tents, and so I made my way there as well. I was hoping to see my grandchildren, always too busy those days to spend time with me. It was true that I did not want to be trading, but if someone was trading, Aviya for sure would be there.
The trading tents were open to the air, supported with carved poles to which the lightweight cloths of the roof attached festive woven ribbons. People milled under these awnings, mostly women—Surun’ weavers of all ages, each with a carpet or carpets for sale; and a few of their beloved snakes. The crowd parted as I entered, and in that moment my fears came true.
Three men stood in the middle of the trading tent. They had the gold rods of trade, and gold coins sewn onto the trim of their red felt hats. The men’s eyes shone; their dark beards were groomed and oiled, and adorned with the tiniest bells that shook and jingled as they bent over the wares. I sensed powerful magic from all three of them. Their magic—multiple short deepnames—shone in their minds, each deepname like a flaring, spiky star. I was powerful myself, but the strangers’ power was that of capturing, of imprisonment, of destruction, held tightly at bay. The vision made me recoil. These men—and it was always men—belonged to the Ruler of Iyar. The Collector.
I had been living here for three months with my grandchildren, among our friends the snake-Surun’. Almost three months after my transformation, my ceremony of change. I thought I had finally broken free from Iyar. But now Iyar came here.
My Surun’ friends did not seem to feel any danger. They brought forth carpet after carpet, traditional indigo weaves embroidered with lions, with snakes, with birds, and more modern designs of dyed madder and bold geometric shapes. The Iyari traders examined the offerings one by one yet chose nothing, their faces still with masked disgust.
I wanted to shout at my friends to stop this trade. I wanted to run away, to escape unseen. I wanted to fight, to strike at these men, to demand recompense for all the wrongs the Collector inflicted upon me and mine forty years ago.
But then I saw my granddaughter.
Aviya-nai-Bashri was dressed in her trading best—a matching shirt and voluminous pants of green and pink cloth that contrasted so beautifully with her smooth brown skin. Her fish earrings, fashioned of hammered silver, chimed in tune with her words. Her Surun’ friends, all girls of nineteen and twenty, milled around, giggling with excitement.
“We offer a carpet of wind,” Aviya nai-Bashri all but sang, “A cloth woven of purest wind caught wandering over the desert—a treasure like this you will never see . . .”
The carpet she offered was small and exquisite, made from the tiniest movements of air that come awake, breath after breath, as the dawn tints the desert pink and silver. The threads that made the carpet were delicate flurries of blue not so much woven but whispered into cloth, convinced to come together by the magic of deepnames and laughter.
I’d never seen this weave, but knew who made it. My youngest grandchild. Something like tears welled in my eyes, but I would not allow myself that emotion. I looked around instead, and yes, I saw Kimi, a child of twelve, dancing between two guardian snakes. Kimi laughed, and a flurry of pink butterflies shook themselves loose from the carpet of wind. They sparkled in the air for a moment, then winked out of sight, delicate like my grandchild’s magic.