“The Ruler of Iyar is not my master,” I said.
“Aunt, oh aunt.” Uiziya seemed about to burst into tears.
“Hush, child,” said Benesret, and I almost smiled to be so called. It meant she was ancient, and we were not so ancient yet. “Hush, child,” she said again, and I realized that meant Uiziya, not me. “Come sit at my feet.”
Uiziya hurried forward, faster than I had seen her move, then lowered herself on the stone ground by Benesret—the one whose name, for forty years, I had repeated like a promise, like hope. I looked on, at her parched skin, her sunken eyes, and remembered the diamondflies over the old tent. How could Uiziya—
But then Benesret took pity upon me, and this startled me. “I am glad you claimed your true shape, child. Thus one of my lesser weaves yielded its promise.”
“Aren’t all four weaves equal?” chimed Uiziya. She was a large and poised woman of sixty and more, but now I could see the child in her, the child who yearned to sit at her aunt’s feet and learn, a child who was at peace now, in this moment, despite all the visions we saw.
“The weaves might be equal, child,” Benesret said, “But we have our affinities. Isn’t it strange that among all my weaves, the one that I wove from song was the greatest of them all?” She looked at me. “I hope the carpet of song bought your lover back, Bashri—though I suppose you are no longer called Bashri?”
I swallowed, hard. By Khana custom, all three of us lovers had taken the name Bashri when we formed our oreg. Bashri-nai-Leylit, our leader. Bashri-naiDivrah. And myself.
I said, “I have no name, and travel as nen-sasaïr.”
“I see.” said Benesret. “And your lovers?”
“Bashri-nai-Leylit passed away last year. I traveled back to the snake-Surun’ encampment, looking for you.”
She waited, still.
I forced myself to continue. “Bashri-nai-Divrah . . . the Ruler of Iyar took her life before we returned with your carpet. It had all been all in vain. I am sorry.”
“Death is never in vain,” said Benesret e Nand e Divyát, “for from it I weave this time and place.”
Around us, dawn was crowning the sky with striations of pink and orange. It was no time yet for dawn, but she had made this time with her weaves. Above in the trembling dawn, an ancient, perished razu beast made of bones was laboring to fly.
She could make anything, and what she made and made was bones.
“You sought me out for a reason,” she said.
“I wanted to find you,” said Uiziya. “I still want to learn.”
“And you?”
“I, too, wanted to see you.” I could have lied, but I wouldn’t. “You told me I could transform my body. You have given me a cloth of winds, to give me hope for forty years when I couldn’t use it, could not make this choice. But at last I have transformed, Benesret, and now I came to ask you to name me.”
She frowned. “Why not name yourself? Why not take a name of one of your dead, your father, your grandfather perhaps—isn’t that your people’s tradition?”
I averted my gaze. Mumbled. “I . . . I do not know them. The Khana men all live behind the white inner walls . . . I . . . do not remember ever seeing my own father.”
“Seek him out then, now that you have transformed.”
Uiziya, sitting still and attentive by Benesret’s knee, spoke. “Changing is not done among his people.”
Benesret snorted, an odd hollow sound. “That’s what he says. Changing is always and forever done. Everywhere, it is done; in open, in secret. He has gone through the change and so, I assure you, have others.”
To this I made no response. Perhaps other Khana had changed their body, but I knew of no one who had done so and spoke of it openly, or else I would not feel so alone for so long. If there had been others to talk to, perhaps Bashri-nai-Leylit would not be so worried to have my secret revealed, nor asked me to keep it in the first place.
Receiving no answer from me, Benesret spoke again. “Why seek me, a woman of people not your own? Why ask me to name you away from your own people?”
Uiziya said suddenly, “He was running away from the emissaries of the Ruler of Iyar.”
“As were you,” I hissed.
Benesret raised an eyebrow. “Why were you running?”
“I wanted to sell my carpet, but then, I hoped . . .” Uiziya mumbled. “I hope still to be taught.”
I said, “I, too, hoped, for you have given me hope when I had none.” I had thought about this for forty years. How Benesret, a stranger from the desert, saw me; how she promised me that one day I would come back to the desert and change my body. She was not welcome among her own people anymore, but she had welcomed me, a changer, when I had no hope.
And I thought, too, over and over, how after Benesret would weave my cloth of transformation, I would ask her to name me. Something that wasn’t Bashri.
That was my hope, still.
“You both came here, to me, to seek hope?” Benesret laughed, bitterly. “Let me tell you where it went.”
Uiziya e Lali
I was sitting at my aunt’s feet, like I’d wanted, oh, I’d wanted for so long, but there was a whirlwind of feeling within me now: fear and yearning and darker things I could not look at, much less name. Still sitting, I half-turned, trying to see both my aunt and nen-sasaïr. I was not agile enough for these motions. My body protested as I twisted and turned to try to see both.
My aunt’s body shifted as well. She was so thin now, insubstantial almost, in contrast to my own robust size; when she moved, I could almost hear her bones moving of their own accord, like the skeletal razu, a mythical beast she had resurrected, preparing to fly.
“There was a weaver,” my aunt said.
Nen-sasaïr had taken off his sand-skis. His face, still and serious, appeared carved of a warm stone. He clasped his hands behind his back, preparing to listen.
“There was a weaver, see, a weaver wise with age but not yet burdened by it, a weaver who had been taught by her grandmother to make, in the ancient Surun’ tradition, a cloth out of wind to assist those who sought to change their body in accordance with their innermost heart. The weaver’s grandmother had been a changer, but the girl herself was not, and yet joyously did she learn the weave. From near and far, people young and old would come to her—those who could not make the journey to our far-off capital to seek the Old Royal’s own assistance—and so they came to her, and she wove for them the cloth of transformation that calls the sandbirds down from the sun.”
I could just about see Benesret as that girl. I had been such a girl, plump and studious under the awning of her tent, so full of hope after my wanderings. The first cloth of winds I made was my own. It was so long ago that I had all but forgotten the time before, pushed it out of my mind like a summoning I no longer wanted to hear.
“Weave after weave the girl matured into a young woman, sure of her craft, and yet she still used her grandmother’s loom. ‘It is time for you to go into the desert,’ the girl’s grandmother said, ‘and learn to weave from sand,’ and so I did. I wove of sand, and stepped upon the carpet I made, and gave myself to wanderlust. I traveled south to the heart of the desert, under the whirligig of stars spinning in the darkness above. I stopped at last, and disembarked among the remains of a stone labyrinth. It was a different time, this time I found, ever-changing, always moving, the secret depths of the desert revealed to me by the wind, for I have woven that wind.”