It was strange to travel with someone again. Uiziya and I, we were not lovers. Friends, perhaps. Two people making a journey together. I did not know where we were going, but I followed Uiziya. Closer to the encampment, I saw the dun grasses and shrubs that clung to patches of ground; then, deeper into that domain, the vegetation became even scarcer and drier, and the sandhills began to waver in my sight. I waited for the wind to shift the layers of sand, revealing to me its secrets like years before, but I saw no miracles this time. Just the sand and the dust in the wake of Uiziya’s carpet, the sun—even in cooler hours—forever following me.
I had left my grandchildren behind without even saying goodbye.
Aviya—Aviya-nai-Bashri—my granddaughter was an adult now, and a fine trader, traveling with an oreg of her own. The newly formed Aviya oreg consisted of my granddaughter and her lover, Aviya-nai-Lur—and they would be all right. The two had already made a journey of their own, from Iyar to the desert. And they had taken good care of Kimi.
Kimi, a child of eleven summers, a child we named after the men’s god Kimri, a child who was neither a boy nor a girl, who back in Iyar could not be recognized, but here, in the desert, could thrive with an ease that required no discussion. A child who did not talk, a child who wove butterflies from wind, a child whose first-woven carpet was sold to my tormentor.
I did not recall having stopped or closing my eyes, but I must have. I stood there, not willing to look or think of anything, until the rough, grainy threads of a carpet brushed over my face, and I smelled the old threads and dust of Uiziya’s carpet. I opened my eyes into sand-cloud in which dim shapes moved and transformed into others, then closed them, my fists in my sand-scrubbed eyes. I coughed and rubbed my eyes and swayed, and Uiziya waited, but not very long.
“What troubles you?” she asked.
That I left my grandchildren to fend for themselves among your people.
I was glad I did not speak this. The Surun’ people were our friends, not adversaries. My grandchildren wanted to travel without me, had traveled on their own before. They would continue to be safe. Perhaps. Probably. Likely.
My problem was different.
I said, “All my life, I was a man. And yet I kept that a secret. Not because I wanted to keep such a secret, but because other people told me that I must, that it was shameful and wrong to reveal it, that it was selfish to be who I was. I had to remain—a lover, a trader, a grandmother. I was a reluctant grandmother, but now that I’m free, now that I am a grandfather, am I supposed just not to care for them anymore?”
“Why is there a difference?” Uiziya shrugged. “You can choose to care or not, as all people do.”
But in my culture, we never even saw the grandfathers. They were behind the inner white wall. As a part of a traditional family-trading group, called an oreg, a small group of women lovers made trading journeys together, returning to the outer quarter of Iyar. There they met with their husbands only for rituals, in the special rooms tucked in-between the outer and inner parts of the Khana quarter. Grandmothers raised the children while the young women traveled and traded.
And I did not fit. I never fit.
“You make it sound so simple, nen-sasaïr. What your people do, what your people don’t do. What they told you to do. What they did not tell you to do, but you think they told you to do. What you think your lovers thought. What you think they think now that they died. Always you lived in the shadow of these people and their rules. Even forty years ago. But nobody’s world is clear and simple, much as we want it to be.”
“You did not live my life,” I said. “And yet you judge me.”
She laughed, bitterly. “Judge you? Me? Who am I to judge anyone?”
“You lived your life openly . . .”
She cut me short. “You do not know me. And if you knew, you would surely judge me.”
“I wouldn’t—”
“No? How can you know?” She seemed angrier now, her carpet swirling with visions of bones and jewels. I took a step back, not from her, from the dust and the threads that once again threatened my face. “I am not afraid.”
She looked me up and down. “Then let me show you.”
She turned away and I followed. The sand was different here, as if freer, wilder, stirring about the visions of bones and wind. I remembered moments like these from before, when I traveled with Bashri-nai-Leylit, so full of desperate hope for our venture. I was twenty-four then, but now I was sixty-four, and Bashri-nai-Leylit was dead, and Bashri-nai-Divrah was dead, and the world was very short on hope. But even my bones sang the need to wander.
Uiziya e Lali
My carpet shifted as I shifted my weight. It was slightly too large for just one person sitting; another person would balance it out, but I worried my weight made it sag. Benesret had been thin, almost skeletal always, but I was a woman of size. I’d woven this carpet at sixteen. I was big then, too, but I wanted back then to be slim like Benesret, to be lithe and limber like the snakes in our encampment. I wanted to cast a long, elegant shadow. I had always been big, but at sixteen, I had not yet embraced it, so I’d woven my carpet for a thinner person. It carried me well, even now, but it wasn’t well-balanced; the tasseled edges rose up as it moved.
“I will teach you to weave from sand,” my aunt had said to me back then, “the second mystery of the everchanging desert. A weave of wanderlust: the second of the Four Profound Weaves I will teach you until you are ready to put together my loom.”
I had never been ready to put together a loom. The one I continued to use was the training loom that I’d made at sixteen. Others in the encampment gossiped at first, then they stopped, thinking perhaps that I had persisted with such a simple, small frame as a boast about my skills. But my craft, like the frame, had not grown much after I wove this very carpet of sand that carried me now. It whispered of wanderings, and of bones, always bones, for I had woven bones into it—sparsely, as decoration, peeking out of the sand-weaves in glimpses of white. The true weave of bones I had not mastered, for that was the last of the four—the weave of death Aunt Benesret said she would teach me when I was ready. I’d have learned it perhaps, if I hadn’t drawn away—from her, from this place.
Oh, this place.
I made my carpet stop. Nen-sasaïr, also deep, perhaps, in his thoughts, kept moving until we were level. We stood side by side on a small outcropping. Below us, we saw collapsed tents, their weavings half- gnawed by time and transformations that happen in the desert when nobody looks. Ghost snakes slithered in the dust, their skeletons glimmering white from their long, limber bodies of smoke.
Nen-sasaïr turned to me. “What is it that I’m seeing, Uiziya? Are these things dangerous?”
“Only if you are afraid to die.” I was beyond such things. My life was over.
“What is there?” He was pointing out at a tent that still stood proud. Or so it seemed. It was smaller, white and embroidered blue—but it wasn’t embroidery we saw. It was covered in insects. Brilliant, sparkling, winking in and out of sight.
“My husband. This is why we came here. Look.”
nen-sasaïr
The brilliant insects shifted about. I saw a young woman, brown-skinned and beautifully large, her face so full of yearning and hope. Uiziya in her youth, as I met her all those years ago, perhaps just a little bit older. She opened the fold of her tent and peeked out tentatively as the stars shone, but these were just pinpricks and slivers of light from the flies.