The flesh-and-blood Uiziya said, “You see other lives as easy because you don’t see them. You see your story as complex and hard because you know it best.”
“I am sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to imply that you had no hardship.”
“I was so full of hope after I saw your great carpet of song being woven. Again and again I pleaded with my aunt to teach me the remaining weave. The weave of death.”
“Did she? Benesret?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something white flash, a motion, around the tent.
“She said to me, ‘Do you know what it means? What it means to weave from the people you care for, from sisters, from lovers, from kin? What it means to weave out of your body, your flesh, to weave your own death as if you saw it for the first time?’ Her eyes were hungry but still I said, teach me. Please, teach me. So she tried.”
“What happened?” I whispered.
“Let us go down.”
“Something is there,” I said, in a warning, but Uiziya shrugged.
“Something is always there.”
We trekked down, until we stood in front of the brilliant buzzing tent. Uiziya drew open the f lap, and then suddenly there was movement. Too quick for my eyes to follow at first. A youth, his eyes wide and startled, clutching a handful of white cloth in his right hand. His left held a knife, and he lunged. I breathed, and my names flared to life, but not quickly enough. The youth pushed past Uiziya, the knife making a long, thin graze on her arm as he past her, Uiziya’s blood spraying him and the white cloth he held. The youth ran. I formed my Builder’s Triangle as fast as I could, but my magic was not that of offense.
Uiziya called after me, “Don’t pursue!” as the youth’s lean, wavering shadow ran up and out of the ghost encampment. Out of sight.
Uiziya e Lali
Nen-sasaïr stepped closer to me. He looked shaken. My eyes still trailed the youth, who escaped, and who seemed real enough, just desperate and thin. A fail-out from the Orphan Star’s School of Assassins, looking for my aunt’s cloth. And weren’t we all?
“May I heal you?”
I startled, only now noticing the shallow wound in my arm and the seeping blood that darkened the dun of my dress. It was hard to know what was real, in this place; I felt pain, but as if at a remove, as if nen-sasaïr’s voice brought me back to the now in which I could feel pain.
“Yes,” I sighed. “Go ahead.”
The cut wasn’t deep. I watched him carefully apply his magic in a healing weave upon my arm. If recently dealt, flesh wounds could be healed with powerful deepnames quite easily, repaired while the body still remembered itself before the injury. But I was no longer even sure what was real.
“What was that?” nen-sasaïr asked as he tucked the last strands of magic into my flesh.
“An assassin.” Far to the southeast, the star of assassins slumbered under the earth, its powerful tendrils spreading the song of strictness and yearning and welcome to all who despaired. To orphans and cast-outs and those disdained by kin. I’d heard that song myself once, long ago. Before I transformed.
“What was an assassin doing here?” nen-sasaïr asked.
“I think he is a fail-out,” I said. “If he wanted to kill me, he would have. But no, he was looking for cloth, to prove his worth again to the headmaster. You cannot be an assassin without it, for it is the cloth of death. When death is your pursuit, it protects and conceals you until it is time to strike.”
Again, I opened the flap of the tent. Nen-sasaïr shifted nervously, magic at the ready, but there was nobody else inside; nobody alive. There were bones heaped in there, upon carpets that once were boldcolored, and now were bleached almost to whiteness. Upon them were bones gnawed by the insects, and brilliant bones overlaid by more bones. A torn-up piece of white cloth covered them: an offering or a memory.
I said, “My aunt weaves this cloth for those who graduate from the assassins’ school. She is paid lavishly, and all this cloth is woven from bones.” I thought of this often, how death calls to death, and how she was called to create these clothes for the assassins, for the Orphan Star under the earth. I wanted to learn this craft. I wanted her to teach me.
I wanted so much. But she came to my tent when I was out with the children, and she touched my husband Lali until he lay bloodless on these carpets I’d made.
“What happened?” nen-sasaïr asked.
“She asked, ‘Are you ready to weave from death? You must weave from death that matters to you,’ but I did not know what she meant. I was confused. So she said, ‘I will show you.’ So my husband died, and she fed on him, and my people ran. I did not know if I believed them at first. ‘Death is the greatest art,’ she said, ‘the greatest weave of the four. To weave a true weave of death is the greatest calling.’”
My aunt had woven from her husbands, first. Nand had been sick, and I was still unsure if his death had been natural. Divyát . . . nobody suspected at first, not until Lali’s death; but then my people began to talk about these and other deaths, and Benesret’s name could no longer be spoken among us. I was not sure about anything. Except that she cared for them, except that I still had waited for her. I had seen her weave from hope—from hope!—the greatest hope in the world she had made, and let it go to nen-sasaïr, to help him.
I wanted to understand.
I waited for her to return, to explain. Waited for her to apologize. Waited for her to teach me. For forty years since Lali’s death, I waited.
And all my weaves since then had been lifeless, and people whispered behind my back. I was neither theirs nor Benesret’s, nor even mine. I did not want Lali to die. I did not want to learn my craft from his death. But I did not want to stop waiting.
nen-sasaïr
Uiziya’s face was turned away from me. “If you changed your mind and do not want to travel with me anymore, I would understand. I won’t hold you.”
She waited for me to reject her, I saw, or to silence her, just like her kin had done. We both wanted to find Benesret, but now I understood why the others refused to talk of her. Benesret had woven from hope for me, but Benesret was responsible for deaths, and I was not sure what I’d find if I continued.
I could have turned back—turned back where? To the snake-Surun’ encampment and my reluctant grandchildren? To Iyar, and all the people in the Khana quarter? Uiziya asked me again and again why I wouldn’t talk to my people. But there wasn’t my people in this, there were women and men—never any in-betweeners that I knew about—just women and men, each on their own side of the wall.
The very thought of coming back to the Khana quarter, to the inner white wall of the men’s domain, made me queasy with trepidation. If I could not enter—if they did not accept me—would that mean that I was not a man after all? Would I, having the heart and body of a man, still feel wrong somehow, not fully whole if the men of my people rejected me? I was brave, I had always thought, but I did not want to know the answer. Not yet. Perhaps never.
It was easier to imagine talking to Benesret than to contemplate this. And I had told Uiziya that I was brave. “I will travel with you.”