I remembered Uiziya’s words, spoken to me before my ceremony. The first of the Four Profound Weaves is woven from wind. It signifies change.
One of the emissaries leaned forward over Kimi’s carpet. He pressed a finger to the carpet, and a butterfly rose from it, its wings so delicate I could barely discern the movement of pink against the Iyari man’s palm. “What price for this?”
Why did Aviya deal with these men? What was the need, the necessity? We were well supplied from our previous trades, we were doing well and could refuse any trade, especially such a troubling one—what was she doing?
I spoke in my native Khana. “This carpet is not for sale.”
“Yes, it is,” Aviya said stubbornly.
I grabbed her by the arm, dragged her out from under the awning, carpet and all. She glared at me, defiant, and I did my best to ignore it. “What are you doing?”
“Trading. I’m trading, grandfather, that thing I trained for all my life. You trained me. Before you went through your change.”
I grimaced. “This is for the Collector. We did not leave Iyar to trade with him, we left Iyar to never see him again—”
“This is Kimi’s first carpet they wove completely alone,” Aviya said. “Their first trade. Don’t spoil it, grandfather. Please.”
“First trade?” I shouldn’t have gotten so angry, so bitter. “The Collector imprisoned your grandmother. Killed her. You want Kimi’s first trade to be to this man?”
She propped her fists at her waist and glared at me, half-angry, half-exasperated. “And yours wasn’t? Your first trade, your second, your third? The weave of song, the greatest carpet ever woven—you sold it to the Collector!”
“Yes, but there was a reason . . .”
“We are traders, grandfather. Khana women trade. Shouldn’t you go sit with the men?”
It would have been better if she’d slapped me.
I turned away. She ran after me, perhaps not wanting to wound me after the spear of her words had already made its way through my chest. “I am sorry, grandfather. I did not mean . . .”
I waited, for a brief moment, for her to say what she meant, but she looked confused—not because she couldn’t find a way to speak her mind, I thought, but because my existence, the change, had confused her—had confused and hurt every Khana person who loved me, or so I thought to myself. I had thought about it for forty years before I finally changed my body. I thought how my people judged me, how my lovers Bashri had judged me, how my grandchildren judged me, except perhaps Kimi, who did not know how to judge. Forty years. Even in a woman’s body I wanted so desperately to be a man, I was a man—and now, a month after my change, in a man’s body at last, I did not know how to stop flinching from their judgment. At best, their confusion. Aviya loved me, I knew, but her tongue kept slipping.
“It’s fine.” It wasn’t, but I did not want to talk anymore. It hurt too much to talk, again and again, about the same thing. So I walked away.
Something made me look back. Aviya remained standing by the trading tent, the cloth of winds tucked clumsily under her arm. A stray butterfly fol- lowed me, pink and translucent; I reached out to it, but it slipped through my fingers, into the air.
Uiziya e Lali
Everybody seemed to be in the trading tents, but I dragged my feet—and not just because of the pain from sitting still for so long. The encampment felt empty. The carpet of sand on my shoulder whispered into my ear of the wide-open spaces where I wanted and dreaded to go. It was thin, almost weightless, as if it wanted to fly away from my shoulder. I tried to imagine what I would do next, after I traded the carpet away. Sell my tent and my weavings and move to some other encampment, where nobody knew me and nobody gossiped? Walk out into the desert without any water, and wait for the goddess Bird to come for my soul? Go look for that thing that I dreaded? Go back to my tent and sit once again?
I stepped closer and closer, my resolve liquefying like sweat, when I saw my old acquaintance, the nameless man. He was all but running away from the tents, his lighter brown face a grimace of anger-pain-anger I’d come to recognize in him.
Seeing me, he stopped, and averted his gaze.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
A thin green snake slithered in the dusk between us, as if drawing a boundary I should not cross. I stepped right over it.
“So what is going on?” I had a habit of repeating a question until it was answered.
“Go see for yourself,” he said. “Trading is a woman’s business, I’m told.”
“Is it Aviya again? Telling you to go sit with the men?”
“Yes. But there’s more—they are selling Kimi’s weave.’’ He spoke bitterly. “Like the one you’d all woven for my transformation, but Kimi made it alone, out of joy and wind and—and these butterflies . . .”
I had woven a carpet of change for myself, at the dawn of my life.
“I will teach you to weave from wind,” my aunt had said to me then, “the first mystery of the ever-changing desert. A weave of change: the first of the Four Profound Weaves I will teach you until you are ready to put together my loom.”
The nameless man spoke on, his voice shaking with the speed and vehemence of his feeling. “My grandchild’s first carpet, first trade, to be traded to the Collector, to be held by the Collector’s hands, and they all think it’s nothing. Joyful even. Joyful!” He took a deep breath. Spoke a bit slower. “What joy is there in trading the cloth of change to a man who will never change? The Collector will lock this cloth in his coffers, away from all eyes but his, away from the people who would use it, who need it, themselves, to change.”
I sighed. “Kimi doesn’t want to change yet.”
“Then she should—he should—they should—”
The nameless man waved his hand in exasperation. “Kimi should keep the cloth and transform already!”
“Your grandchild hasn’t chosen whether to transform,” I said patiently, as I had many times before. “It may never matter to them to go through the change in the body. It is enough that they would weave.” I was a good listener, if nothing else; but this I had listened to over and over. The nameless man’s people, the Khana, did not recognize in-betweeners. The nameless man’s people did not recognize people like him, either; instead, they insisted that the shape of one’s body determined one’s fate. “The Khana are not the only people in the world who make up these rules and these freedoms.”
The nameless man waved his hand in the air again, as if to shoo a stray butterfly. Then he eyed me with a bit more attentiveness. “You, too, bring a carpet to the tent?”
“As you see.” I wanted him to ask me about the carpet. I wanted him to ask me why. I wanted to tell him then of my endless waiting, and how I wanted it to be over. I was a good listener, but now I wanted him to listen as I told him about Aunt Benesret. After he came back to us after forty years away, he kept asking about Benesret, and everybody shushed him, because in our encampment we did not say her name.
But he asked me nothing. Just squinted at my carpet and said, “You shouldn’t sell it, either.”