1.
In her twelfth standard year, which on
Habara was the Season of Soft Rains, Jalila moved across the
mountains with her mothers from the high plains of Tabuthal to the
coast. For all of them, the journey down was one of unhurried
discovery, with the kamasheens long gone and the world freshly
moist, and the hayawans rusting as they rode them, the huge flat
plates of their feet swishing through purplish-green undergrowth.
She saw the cliffs and qasrs she’d only visited from her dreamtent,
and sailed across the high ridges on ropewalks her distant ancestors
had built, which had seemed frail and antique to her in her worried
imaginings, but were in fact strong and subtle; huge dripping
gantries heaving from the mist like wise giants, softly humming, and
welcoming her and her hayawan, whom she called Robin, in cocoons of
effortless embrace. Swaying over the drop beyond into grey-green
nothing was almost like flying.
The strangest thing of all in this
journey of discoveries was that the landscape actually seemed to
rise higher as they descended and encamped and descended again; the
sense of up increased, rather than that of down. The air on
the high plains of Tabuthal was rarefied–Jalila knew that from her
lessons in her dreamtent; they were so close to the stars that Pavo
had had to clap a mask over her face from the moment of her birth
until the breathmoss was embedded in her lungs. And it had been
clear up there, it was always clear, and it was pleasantly cold. The
sun shone all day hard and cold and white from the blue blackness,
as did a billion stars at night, although Jalila had never thought
of those things as she ran amid the crystal trees and her mothers
smiled at her and occasionally warned her that, one day, all of this
would have to change.
And now that day was upon her, and
this landscape–as Robin, her hayawan, rounded the path through an
urrearth forest of alien-looking trees with wrinkled brown trunks
and soft green leaves, and the land fell away, and she caught her
first glimpse of something far and flat on the horizon–had never
seemed so high.
Down on the coast, the mountains
reared behind them and around a bay. There were many people here–not
the vast numbers, perhaps, of Jalila’s dreamtent stories of the Ten
Thousand and One Worlds, but so many that she was sure, as she first
walked the streets of a town where the buildings huddled in
ridiculous proximity, and tried not to stare at all the faces, that
she would never know all their families.
Because of its position at the edge of
the mountains, the town was called Al Janb, and, to Jalila’s relief,
their new haramlek was some distance away from it, up along a
near-unnoticeable dirt track that meandered off from the blue-black
serraplated coastal road. There was much to be done there by way of
repair, after the long season that her bondmother Lya had left the
place deserted. The walls were fused stone, but the structure of the
roof had been mostly made from the stuff of the same strange
urrearth trees that grew up the mountains, and in many places it had
sagged and leaked and grown back toward the chaos that seemed to
want to encompass everything here. The hayawans, too, needed much
attention in their makeshift stables as they adapted to this new
climate, and mother Pavo was long employed constructing the
necessary potions to mend the bleeding bonds of rusty metal and
flesh, and then to counteract the mold that grew like slow tears
across their long, solemn faces. Jalila would normally have been in
anguish to think of the sufferings that this new climate was
visiting on Robin, but she was too busy feeling ill herself to care.
Ridiculously, seeing as there was so much more oxygen to breathe in
this rich coastal air, every lungful became a conscious effort, a
dreadful physical lunge. Inhaling the damp, salty, spore-laden
atmosphere was like sucking soup through a straw. She grew feverish
for a while, and suffered the attentions of similar molds to those
that were growing over Robin, yet in even more irritating and
embarrassing places. More irritating still was the fact that Ananke
her birthmother and Lya her bondmother–even Pavo, who was still
busily attending to the hayawans–treated her discomforts and fevers
with airy disregard. They had, they all assured her vaguely,
suffered similarly in their own youths. And the weather would soon
change in any case. To Jalila, who had spent all her life in the
cool unvarying glare of Tabuthal, where the wind only ever blew from
one direction and the trees jingled like ice, that last statement
might as well have been spoken in another language.
If anything, Jalila was sure that she
was getting worse. The rain drummed on what there was of the roof of
their haramlek, and dripped down and pooled in the makeshift
awnings, which burst in bucketloads down your neck if you bumped
into them, and the mist drifted in from every direction through the
paneless windows, and the mountains, most of the time, seemed to
consist of cloud, or to have vanished entirely. She was coughing.
Strange stuff was coming out on her hands, slippery and green as the
slime that tried to grow everywhere here. One morning, she awoke,
sure that part of her was bursting, and stumbled from her dreamtent
and out through the scaffolding that had by then surrounded the
haramlek, then barefoot down the mud track and across the quiet
black road and down onto the beach, for no other reason than that
she needed to escape.
She stood gasping amid the rockpools,
her hair lank and her skin feverishly itching. There was something
at the back of her throat. There was something in her lungs. She was
sure that it had taken root and was growing. Then she started
coughing as she had never coughed before, and more of the greenstuff
came splattering over her hands and down her chin. She doubled over.
Huge lumps of it came showering out, strung with blood. If it hadn’t
been mostly green, she’d have been sure that it was her
lungs. She’d never imagined anything so agonizing. Finally, though,
in heaves and starts and false dawns, the process dwindled. She
wiped her hands on her night-dress. The rocks all around her were
splattered green. It was breathmoss; the stuff that had sustained
her on the high plains. And now look at it! Jalila took a
slow, cautious breath. And then another. Her throat ached. Her head
was throbbing. But still, the process was suddenly almost
ridiculously easy. She picked her way back across the beach, up
through the mists to her haramlek. Her mothers were eating
breakfast. Jalila sat down with them, wordlessly, and started to
eat.
That night, Ananke came and sat with
Jalila as she lay in her dreamtent in plain darkness and tried not
to listen to the sounds of the rain falling on and through the
creaking, dripping building. Even now, her birthmother’s hands
smelled and felt like the high desert as they touched her face.
Rough and clean and warm, like rocks in starlight, giving off their
heat. A few months before, Jalila would probably have started
crying.
"You’ll understand now, perhaps, why
we thought it better not to tell you about the breathmoss. . .
?"
There was a question mark at the end
of the sentence, but Jalila ignored it. They’d known all along! She
was still angry.
"And there are other things, too,
which will soon start to happen to your body. Things that are
nothing to do with this place. And I shall now tell you about them
all, even though you’ll say you knew it before. . . . "
The smooth, rough fingers stroked her
hair. As Ananke’s words unraveled, telling Jalila of changings and
swellings and growths she’d never thought would really apply to
her, and which these fetid lowlands really seemed to have
brought closer, Jalila thought of the sound of the wind, tinkling
through the crystal trees up on Tabuthal. She thought of the dry
cold wind in her face. The wet air here seemed to enclose her. She
wished that she was running. She wanted to escape.
Small though Al Janb was, it was as
big a town as Jalila had ever seen, and she soon came to volunteer
to run all the various errands that her mothers required as they
restored and repaired their haramlek. She was used to wide expanses,
big horizons, the surprises of a giant landscape that crept upon you
slowly, visible for miles. Yet here, every turn brought abrupt
surprise and sudden change. The people had such varied faces and
accents. They hung their washing across the streets, and bickered
and smoked in public. Some ate with both hands. They stared at you
as you went past, and didn’t seem to mind if you stared back at
them. There were unfamiliar sights and smells, markets that erupted
on particular days to the workings of no calendar Jalila yet
understood, and which sold, in glittering, shining, stinking,
disgusting, fascinating arrays, the strangest and most wonderful
things. There were fruits from off-planet, spices shaped like
insects, and insects that you crushed for their spice. There were
swarming vats of things Jalila couldn’t possibly imagine any use
for, and bright silks woven thin as starlit wind that she longed for
with an acute physical thirst. And there were aliens, too, to be
glimpsed sometimes wandering the streets of Al Janb, or looking down
at you from its overhung top windows like odd pictures in old
frames. Some of them carried their own atmosphere around with them
in bubbling hookahs, and some rolled around in huge grey bits of the
sea of their own planets, like babies in a birthsac. Some of them
looked like huge versions of the spice insects, and the air around
them buzzed angrily if you got too close. The only thing they had in
common was that they seemed blithely unaware of Jalila as she stared
and followed them, and then returned inexcusably late from whatever
errand she’d supposedly been sent on. Sometimes, she forgot her
errands entirely.
"You must learn to get used to
things. . . . " Lya her bondmother said to her with genuine
irritation late one afternoon, when she’d come back without the tool
she’d been sent to get early that morning, or even any recollection
of its name or function. "This or any other world will never be a
home to you if you let every single thing surprise you. . . .
" But Jalila didn’t mind the surprises; in fact, she was coming to
enjoy them, and the next time the need arose to visit Al Janb to buy
a new growth-crystal for the scaffolding, she begged to be allowed
to go, and her mothers finally relented, although with many a
warning shake of the head.
The rain had stopped at last, or at
least held back for a whole day, although everything still looked
green and wet to Jalila as she walked along the coastal road toward
the ragged tumble of Al Janb. She understood, at least in theory,
that the rain would probably return, and then relent, and then come
back again, but in a decreasing pattern, much as the heat was
gradually increasing, although it still seemed ridiculous to
her that no one could ever predict exactly how, or when, Habara’s
proper Season of Summers would arrive. Those boats she could see
now, those fisherwomen out on their feluccas beyond the white bands
of breaking waves, their whole lives were dictated by these
uncertainties, and the habits of the shoals of whiteback that came
and went on the oceans, and which could also only be guessed at in
this same approximate way. The world down here on the coast was so
unpredictable compared with Tabuthal! The markets, the
people, the washing, the sun, the rain, the aliens. Even Hayam and
Walah, Habara’s moons, which Jalila was long used to watching, had
to drag themselves through cloud like cannonballs though cotton as
they pushed and pulled at this ocean. Yet today, as she clambered
over the groynes of the long shingle beach that she took as a
shortcut to the center of the town when the various tides were out,
she saw a particular sight that surprised her more than any
other.
There was a boat, hauled far up from
the water, longer and blacker and heavier-looking than the feluccas,
with a sort-of ramshackle house at the prow, and a winch at the
stern that was so massive that Jalila wondered if it wouldn’t tip
the craft over if it ever actually entered the water. But, for all
that, it wasn’t the boat that first caught her eye, but the figure
who was working on it. Even from a distance, as she struggled to
heave some ropes, there was something different about her, and the
way she was moving. Another alien? But she was plainly human. And
barefoot, in ragged shorts, and bare-breasted. In fact, almost as
flat-chested as Jalila still was, and probably of about her age and
height. Jalila still wasn’t used to introducing herself to
strangers, but she decided that she could at least go over, and
pretend an interest in–or an ignorance of–this odd boat.
The figure dropped another loop of
rope over the gunwales with a grunt that carried on the smelly sea
breeze. She was brown as tea, with her massy hair hooped back and
hanging in a long tail down her back. She was broad-shouldered, and
moved in that way that didn’t quite seem wrong, but didn’t seem
entirely right either. As if, somewhere across her back, there was
an extra joint. When she glanced up at the clatter of shingle as
Jalila jumped the last groyne, Jalila got a proper full sight of her
face, and saw that she was big-nosed, big-chinned, and that her
features were oddly broad and flat. A child sculpting a person out
of clay might have done better.
"Have you come to help me?"
Jalila shrugged. "I might have
done."
"That’s a funny accent you’ve
got."
They were standing facing each other.
She had grey eyes, which looked odd as well. Perhaps she was an
off-worlder. That might explain it. Jalila had heard that there were
people who had things done to themselves so they could live in
different places. She supposed the breathmoss was like that,
although she’d never thought of it that way. And she couldn’t quite
imagine why it would be a requirement for living on any world that
you looked this ugly.
"Everyone talks oddly here," she
replied. "But then your accent’s funny as well."
"I’m Kalal. And that’s just my
voice. It’s not an accent." Kalal looked down at her oily
hands, perhaps thought about wiping one and offering it to shake,
then decided not to bother.
"Oh. . . ?"
"You don’t get it, do you?" That gruff
voice. The odd way her features twisted when she smiled.
"What is there to get? You’re
just–"
"–I’m a man." Kalal picked up a coil
of rope from the shingle, and nodded to another beside it. "Well?
Are you going to help me with this, or aren’t you?"
The rains came again, this time
starting as a thing called drizzle, then working up the scale
to torrent. The tides washed especially high. There were
storms, and white crackles of lightening, and the boom of a wind
that was so unlike the kamasheen. Jalila’s mothers told her to be
patient, to wait, and to remember–please remember this time,
so you don’t waste the day for us all, Jalilaneen–the things that
they sent her down the serraplate road to get from Al Janb. She
trudged under an umbrella, another new and useless coastal object,
which turned itself inside out so many times that she ended up
throwing it into the sea, where it floated off quite happily, as if
that was the element for which it was intended in the first place.
Almost all of the feluccas were drawn up on the far side of the
roadway, safe from the madly bashing waves, but there was no sign of
that bigger craft belonging to Kalal. Perhaps he–the antique
genderative word was he, wasn’t it?–was out there, where the
clouds rumbled like boulders. Perhaps she’d imagined their whole
encounter entirely.
Arriving back home at the haramlek
surprisingly quickly, and carrying for once the things she’d been
ordered to get, Jalila dried herself off and buried herself in her
dreamtent, trying to find out from it all that she could about these
creatures called men. Like so many things about life at this
awkward, interesting, difficult time, men were something Jalila
would have insisted she definitely already knew about a few months
before up on Tabuthal. Now, she wasn’t so sure. Kalal, despite his
ugliness and his funny rough-squeaky voice and his slightly odd
smell, looked little like the hairy-faced werewolf figures of her
childhood stories, and seemed to have no particular need to shout or
fight, to carry her off to his rancid cave, or to start collecting
odd and pointless things that he would then try to give her. There
had once, Jalila’s dreamtent told her, for obscure biological
reasons she didn’t quite follow, been far more men in the universe;
almost as many as there had been women. Obviously, they had
dwindled. She then checked on the word rape, to make sure it
really was the thing she’d imagined, shuddered, but nevertheless
investigated in full holographic detail the bits of himself that
Kalal had kept hidden beneath his shorts as she’d helped stow those
ropes. She couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. It was all so
pointless and ugly. Had his birth been an accident? A curse? She
began to grow sleepy. The subject was starting to bore her. The last
thing she remembered learning was that Kalal wasn’t a proper man at
all, but a boy–a half-formed thing; the equivalent to
girl–another old urrearth word. Then sleep drifted over her, and she
was back with the starlight and the crystal trees of Tabuthal, and
wondering as she danced with her own reflection which of them was
changing.
By next morning, the sun was shining
as if she would never stop. As Jalila stepped out onto the newly
formed patio, she gave the blazing light the same sort of an
appraising what-are-you-up-to-now glare that her mothers gave
her when she returned from Al Janb. The sun had done this trick
before of seeming permanent, then vanishing by lunchtime into sodden
murk, but today her brilliance continued. As it did the day after.
And the day after that. Half a month later, even Jalila was
convinced that the Season of Summers on Habara had finally
arrived.
The flowers went mad, as did the
insects. There were colors everywhere, pulsing before your eyes,
swarming down the cliffs toward the sea, which lay flat and placid
and salt-rimed, like a huge animal, basking. It remained mostly cool
in Jalila’s dreamtent, and the haramlek by now was a place of tall
malqaf windtowers and flashing fans and well-like depths, but
stepping outside beyond the striped shade of the mashrabiyas at
midday felt like being hit repeatedly across the head with a hot
iron pan. The horizons had drawn back; the mountains, after a few
last rumbles of thunder and mist, as if they were clearing their
throats, had finally announced themselves to the coastline in all
their majesty, and climbed up and up in huge stretches of forest
into stone limbs that rose and tangled until your eyes grew tired of
rising. Above them, finally, was the sky, which was always blue in
this season; the blue color of flame. Even at midnight, you caught
the flash and swirl of flame.
Jalila learned to follow the advice of
her mothers, and to change her daily habits to suit the imperious
demands of this incredible, fussy, and demanding weather. If you
woke early, and then drank lots of water, and bowed twice in the
direction of Al’Toman while she was still a pinprick in the west,
you could catch the day by surprise, when dew lay on the stones and
pillars, and the air felt soft and silky as the arms of the ghostly
women who sometimes visited Jalila’s nights. Then there was
breakfast, and the time of work, and the time of study, and Ananke
and Pavo would quiz Jalila to ensure that she was following the
prescribed Orders of Knowledge. By midday, though, the shadows had
drawn back and every trace of moisture had evaporated, and your head
swarmed with flies. You sought your own company, and didn’t even
want that, and wished, as you tossed and sweated in your
dreamtent, for frost and darkness. Once or twice, just to prove to
herself that it could be done, Jalila had tried walking to Al Janb
at this time, although of course everything was shut and the whole
place wobbled and stank in the heat like rancid jelly. She returned
to the haramlek gritty and sweaty, almost crawling, and with a
pounding ache in her head.
By evening, when the proper order of
the world had righted itself, and Al’Toman would have hung in the
east if the mountains hadn’t swallowed her, and the heat, which
never vanished, had assumed a smoother, more manageable quality,
Jalila’s mothers were once again hungry for company, and for food
and for argument. These evenings, perhaps, were the best of all the
times that Jalila could remember of her early life on the coast of
Habara’s single great ocean, at that stage in her development from
child to adult when the only thing of permanence seemed to be the
existence of endless, fascinating change. How they argued!
Lya, her bondmother, and the oldest of her parents, who wore her
grey hair loose as cobwebs with the pride of her age, and waved her
arms as she talked and drank, wreathed in endless curls of smoke.
Little Pavo, her face smooth as a carved nutmeg, with her small,
precise hands, and who knew so much but rarely said anything with
insistence. And Jalila’s birthmother Ananke, for whom, of her three
mothers, Jalila had always felt the deepest, simplest love, who
would always touch you before she said anything, and then fix you
with her sad and lovely eyes, as if touching and seeing were far
more important than any words. Jalila was older now. She joined in
with the arguments–of course, she had always joined in, but
she cringed to think of the stumbling inanities to which her mothers
had previously had to listen, while, now, at last, she had real,
proper things to say about life, whole new philosophies that no one
else on the Ten Thousand Worlds and One had ever thought of. . . .
Most of the time, her mothers listened. Sometimes, they even acted
as if they were persuaded by their daughter’s wisdom.
Frequently, there were visitors to
these evening gatherings. Up on Tabuthal, visitors had been rare
animals, to be fussed over and cherished and only reluctantly
released for their onward journey across the black dazzling plains.
Down here, where people were nearly as common as stones on the
beach, a more relaxed attitude reigned. Sometimes, there were formal
invitations that Lya would issue to someone who was this or
that in the town, or more often Pavo would come back with a
person she had happened to meet as she poked around for lifeforms on
the beach, or Ananke would softly suggest a neighbor (another
new word and concept to Jalila) might like to pop in (ditto).
But Al Janb was still a small town, and the dignitaries generally
weren’t that dignified, and Pavo’s beach wanderers were often shy
and slight as she was, while neighbor was frequently a
synonym for boring. Still, Jalila came to enjoy most kinds of
company, if only so that she could hold forth yet more devastatingly
on whatever universal theory of life she was currently
developing.
The flutter of lanterns and hands. The
slow breath of the sea. Jalila ate stuffed breads and fuul and
picked at the mountains of fruit and sucked lemons and sweet blue
rutta and waved her fingers. The heavy night insects, glowing with
the pollen they had collected, came bumbling toward the lanterns or
would alight in their hands. Sometimes, afterward, they walked the
shore, and Pavo would show them strange creatures with blurring
mouths like wheels, or point to the vast, distant beds of the
tideflowers that rose at night to the changes of the tide; silver,
crimson, or glowing, their fronds waving through the dark like the
beckoning palm trees of islands from storybook seas.
One guestless night, when they were
walking north away from the lights of the town, and Pavo was filling
a silver bag for an aquarium she was ostensibly making for Jalila,
but in reality for herself, the horizon suddenly cracked and
rumbled. Instinctively by now, Jalila glanced overhead, expecting
clouds to be covering the coastal haze of stars. But the air was
still and clear; the hot dark edge of that blue flame. Across the
sea, the rumble and crackle was continuing, accompanied by a glowing
pillar of smoke that slowly tottered over the horizon. The night
pulsed and flickered. There was a breath of impossibly hot salt air.
The pillar, a wobbly finger with a flame-tipped nail, continued
climbing skyward. A few geelies rose and fell, clacking and cawing,
on the far rocks; black shapes in the darkness.
"It’s the start of the Season of
Rockets," Lya said. "I wonder who’ll be coming. . . ?"
2.
By now, Jalila had acquired many of
her own acquaintances and friends. Young people were relatively
scarce amid the long-lived human Habarans, and those who dwelt
around Al Janb were continually drawn together and then repulsed
from each other like spinning magnets. The elderly mahwagis, who had
outlived the need for wives and the company of a haramlek and lived
alone, were often more fun, and more reliably eccentric. It was a
relief to visit their houses and escape the pettinesses and sexual
jealousies that were starting to infect the other girls near to
Jalila’s own age. She regarded Kalal similarly–as an escape–and she
relished helping him with his boat, and enjoyed their journeys out
across the bay, where the wind finally tipped almost cool over the
edge of the mountains and lapped the sweat from their
faces.
Kalal took Jalila out to see the
rocketport one still, hot afternoon. It lay just over the horizon,
and was the longest journey they had undertaken. The sails filled
with the wind, and the ocean grew almost black, yet somehow
transparent, as they hurried over it. Looking down, Jalila believed
that she could glimpse the white sliding shapes of the great
sea-leviathans who had once dwelt, if local legend was to be
believed, in the ruined rock palaces of the qasrs, which she had
passed on her journey down from Tabuthal. Growing tired of sunlight,
they had swarmed back to the sea that had birthed them, throwing
away their jewels and riches, which bubbled below the surface, then
rose again under Habara’s twin moons to become the beds of
tideflowers. She had gotten that part of the story from Kalal.
Unlike most people who lived on the coast, Kalal was interested in
Jalila’s life in the starry darkness of Tabuthal, and repaid her
with his own tales of the ocean.
The boat ploughed on, rising,
frothing. Blissfully, it was almost cold. Just how far out at sea
was this rocketport? Jalila had watched some of the arrivals and
departures from the quays at Al Janb, but those journeys took place
in sleek sail-less craft with silver doors that looked, as they
turned out from the harbor and rose out on stilts from the water, as
if they could travel half-way up to the stars on their own. Kalal
was squatting at the prow, beyond that ramshackle hut that Jalila
now knew contained the pheromones and grapplers that were needed to
ensnare the tideflowers that this craft had been built to harvest.
The boat bore no name on the prow, yet Kalal had many names for it,
which he would occasionally mention without explaining. If there was
one thing that was different about Kalal, Jalila had decided, it was
this absence of proper talk or explanation. It put many people off,
but she had found that most things became apparent if you just hung
around him and didn’t ask direct questions.
People generally pitied Kalal, or
stared at him as Jalila still stared at the aliens, or asked him
questions that he wouldn’t answer with anything other than a shrug.
Now that she knew him better, Jalila was starting to understand just
how much he hated such treatment–almost as much, in fact, as he
hated being thought of as ordinary. I am a man, you know,
he’d still remark sometimes–whenever he felt that Jalila was
forgetting. Jalila had never yet risked pointing out that he was in
fact a boy. Kalal could be prickly and sensitive if you
treated him as if things didn’t matter. It was hard to tell, really,
just how much of how he acted was due to his odd sexual identity,
and how much was his personality.
To add to his freakishness, Kalal
lived alone with another male–in fact, the only other male in Al
Janb–at the far end of the shore cottages, in a birthing
relationship that made Kalal term him his father. His name
was Ibra, and he looked much more like the males of Jalila’s
dreamtent stories. He was taller than almost anyone, and wore a
black beard and long colorful robes or strode about bare-chested,
and always talked in a thunderously deep voice, as if he were
addressing a crowd through a megaphone. Ibra laughed a lot and
flashed his teeth through that hairy mask, and clapped people on the
back when he asked them how they were, and then stood away and
seemed to lose interest before they had answered. He whistled and
sang loudly and waved to passers-by while he worked at repairing the
feluccas for his living. Ibra had come to this planet when Kalal was
a baby, under circumstances that remained perennially vague. He
treated Jalila with the same loud and grinning friendship with which
he treated everyone, and which seemed like a wall. He was at least
as alien as the tube-like creatures who had arrived from the stars
with this new Season of Rockets, which had had one of the larger
buildings in Al Janb encased in transparent plastics and flooded in
a freezing grey goo so they could live in it. Ibra had come around
to their haramlek once, on the strength of one of Ananke’s
pop in evening invitations. Jalila, who was then
nurturing the idea that no intelligence could exist without the
desire to acknowledge some higher deity, found her propositions and
examples drowned out in a flurry of counter-questions and assertions
and odd bits of information that she half-suspected that Ibra, as he
drank surprising amounts of virtually undiluted zibib and freckled
aniseed spit at her, was making up on the spot. Afterward, as they
walked the shore, he drew her apart and laid a heavy hand on her
shoulder and confided in his rambling growl how much he’d enjoyed
fencing with her. Jalila knew what fencing was, but she
didn’t see what it had to do with talking. She wasn’t even sure if
she liked Ibra. She certainly didn’t pretend to understand
him.
The sails thrummed and crackled as
they headed toward the spaceport. Kalal was absorbed, staring ahead
from the prow, the water splashing reflections across his lithe
brown body. Jalila had almost grown used to the way he looked. After
all, they were both slightly freakish: she, because she came from
the mountains; he, because of his sex. And they both liked their own
company, and could accept each other into it without distraction
during these long periods of silence. One never asked the other what
they were thinking. Neither really cared, and they cherished that
privacy.
"Look–" Kalal scuttled to the rudder.
Jalila hauled back the jib. In wind-crackling silence, they and
their nameless and many-named boat tacked toward the
spaceport.
The spaceport was almost like the
mountains: when you were close up, it was too big be seen properly.
Yet, for all its size, the place was a disappointment; empty and
messy, like a huge version of the docks of Al Janb, similarly
reeking of oil and refuse, and essentially serving a similar
function. The spaceships themselves–if indeed the vast cistern-like
objects they saw forever in the distance as they furled the sails
and rowed along the maze of oily canals were spaceships–were only a
small part of this huge floating complex of islands. Much more of it
was taken up by looming berths for the tugs and tankers that
placidly chugged from icy pole to equator across the watery expanses
of Habara, taking or delivering the supplies that the settlements
deemed necessary for civilized life, or collecting the returning
fallen bulk cargoes. The tankers were rust-streaked beasts, so huge
that they hardly seemed to grow as you approached them, humming and
eerily deserted, yet devoid of any apparent intelligence of their
own. They didn’t glimpse a single alien at the spaceport. They
didn’t even see a human being.
The journey there, Jalila decided as
they finally got the sails up again, had been far more enjoyable and
exciting than actually arriving. Heading back toward the sun-pink
coastal mountains, which almost felt like home to her now, she was
filled with an odd longing that only diminished when she began to
make out the lighted dusky buildings of Al Janb. Was this
homesickness, she wondered? Or something else?
This was the time of Habara’s long
summer. This was the Season of Rockets. When she mentioned their
trip, Jalila was severely warned by Pavo of the consequences of
approaching the spaceport during periods of possible launch, but it
went no further than that. Each night now, and deep into the
morning, the rockets rumbled at the horizon and climbed upward on
those grumpy pillars, bringing to the shore a faint whiff of sulphur
and roses, adding to the thunderous heat. And outside at night, if
you looked up, you could sometimes see the blazing comet-trails of
the returning capsules, which would crash somewhere in the distant
seas.
The beds of tideflowers were growing
bigger as well. If you climbed up the sides of the mountains before
the morning heat flattened everything, you could look down on those
huge, brilliant, and ever-changing carpets, where every pattern and
swirl seemed gorgeous and unique. At night, in her dreamtent, Jalila
sometimes imagined that she was floating up on them, just as in the
oldest of the old stories. She was sailing over a different
landscape on a magic carpet, with the cool night desert rising and
falling beneath her like a soft sea. She saw distant palaces, and
clusters of palms around small and tranquil lakes that flashed the
silver of a single moon. And then yet more of this infinite sahara,
airy and frosty, flowed through curves and undulations, and grew
vast and pinkish in her dreams. Those curves, as she flew over them
and began to touch herself, resolved into thighs and breasts. The
winds stirring the peaks of the dunes resolved in shuddering
breaths.
This was the time of Habara’s long
summer. This was the Season of Rockets.
Robin, Jalila’s hayawan, had by now,
under Pavo’s attentions, fully recovered from the change to her
environment. The rust had gone from her flanks, the melds with her
thinly grey-furred flesh were bloodless and neat. She looked thinner
and lighter. She even smelled different. Like the other hayawans,
Robin was frisky and bright and brown-eyed now, and didn’t seem to
mind the heat, or even Jalila’s forgetful neglect of her. Down on
the coast, hayawans were regarded as expensive, uncomfortable, and
unreliable, and Jalila and her mothers took a pride in riding across
the beach into Al Janb on their huge, flat-footed, and loping
mounts, enjoying the stares and the whispers, and the whispering
space that opened around them as they hobbled the hayawans in a
square. Kalal, typically, was one of the few coastal people who
expressed an interest in trying to ride one of them, and Jalila was
glad to teach him, showing him the clicks and calls and nudges, the
way you took the undulations of the creature’s back as you might the
ups and downs of the sea, and when not to walk around their front
and rear ends. After her experiences on his boat, the initial rope
burns, the cracks on the head and the heaving sickness, she enjoyed
the reversal of situations.
There was a Tabuthal saying about
falling off a hayawan ninety-nine times before you learnt to ride,
which Kalal disproved by falling off far into triple figures. Jalila
chose Lya’s mount Abu for him to ride, because she was the biggest,
the most intelligent, and generally the most placid of the beasts
unless she felt that something was threatening her, and because Lya,
more conscious of looks and protocol down here than the other
mothers, rarely rode her. Domestic animals, Jalila had noticed,
often took oddly to Kalal when they first saw and scented him, but
he had learned the ways of getting around them, and developed a bond
and understanding with Abu even while she was still trying to bite
his legs. Jalila had made a good choice of riding partners. Both of
them, hayawan and human, while proud and aloof, were essentially
playful, and never shirked a challenge. While all hayawans had been
female throughout all recorded history, Jalila wondered if there
wasn’t a little of the male still embedded in Abu’s imperious
downward glance.
Now that summer was here, and the
afternoons had vanished into the sun’s blank blaze, the best time to
go riding was the early morning. North, beyond Al Janb, there were
shores and there were saltbeds and there were meadows, there were
fences to be leapt, and barking feral dogs as male as Kalal to be
taunted, but south, there were rocks and forests, there were tracks
that led nowhere, and there were headlands and cliffs that you saw
once and could never find again. South, mostly, was the way that
they rode.
"What happens if we keep
riding?"
They were taking their breath on a
flatrock shore where a stream, from which they had all drunk, shone
in pools on its way to the ocean. The hayawans had squatted down now
in the shadows of the cliff and were nodding sleepily, one
nictitating membrane after another slipping over their eyes. As soon
as they had gotten here and dismounted, Kalal had walked straight
down, arms outstretched, into the tideflower-bobbing ocean. Jalila
had followed, whooping, feeling tendrils and petals bumping into
her. It was like walking through floral soup. Kalal had sunk to his
shoulders and started swimming, which was something Jalila still
couldn’t quite manage. He splashed around her, taunting, sending up
sheets of colored light. They’d stripped from their clothes as they
clambered out, and laid them on the hot rocks, where they now
steamed like fresh bread.
"This whole continent’s like a huge
island," Jalila said in delayed answer to Kalal’s question. "We’d
come back to where we started."
Kalal shook his head. "Oh, you can
never do that. . . . "
"Where would we be, then?"
"Somewhere slightly different. The
tideflowers would have changed, and we wouldn’t be us, either."
Kalal wet his finger, and wrote something in naskhi script on the
hot, flat stone between them. Jalila thought she recognized the
words of a poet, but the beginning had dissolved into the hot air
before she could make proper sense of it. Funny, but at home with
her mothers, and with their guests, and even with many of the people
of her own age, such statements as they had just made would have
been the beginning of a long debate. With Kalal, they just seemed to
hang there. Kalal, he moved, he passed on. Nothing quite seemed to
stick. There was something, somewhere, Jalila thought, lost and
empty about him.
The way he was sitting, she could see
most of his genitals, which looked quite jaunty in their little nest
of hair; like a small animal. She’d almost gotten as used to the
sight of them as she had to the other peculiarities of Kalal’s
features. Scratching her nose, picking off some of the petals that
still clung to her skin like wet confetti, she felt no particular
curiosity. Much more than Kalal’s funny body, Jalila was conscious
of her own–especially her growing breasts, which were still somewhat
uneven. Would they ever come out right, she wondered, or would she
forever be some unlovely oddity, just as Kalal seemingly was? Better
not to think of such things. Better to just enjoy the feel the sun
baking her shoulders, loosening the curls of her hair.
"Should we turn back?" Kalal asked
eventually. "It’s getting hotter. . . . "
"Why bother with that–if we carry on,
we’ll get back to where we started."
Kalal stood up. "Do you want to
bet?"
So they rode on, more slowly, uphill
through the uncharted forest, where the urrearth trees tangled with
the blue fronds of Habara fungus, and the birds were still, and the
crackle of the dry undergrowth was the only sound in the air.
Eventually, ducking boughs, then walking, dreamily lost and almost
ready to turn back, they came to a path, and remounted. The trees
fell away, and they found that they were on a clifftop, far, far
higher above the winking sea than they could possibly have imagined.
Midday heat clapped around them. Ahead, where the cliff stuck out
over the ocean like a cupped hand, shimmering and yet solid, was one
of the ruined castles or geological features that the sea-leviathans
had supposedly deserted before the arrival of people on this
planet–a qasr. They rode slowly toward it, their hayawans’ feet
thocking in the dust. It looked like a fairy place. Part natural,
but roofed and buttressed, with grey-black gables and huge and
intricate windows, that flashed with the colors of the sea. Kalal
gestured for silence, dismounted from Abu, led his mount back into
the shadowed arms of the forest, and flicked the switch in her back
that hobbled her.
"You know where this
is?"
Kalal beckoned.
Jalila, who knew him better than to
ask questions, followed.
Close to, much of the qasr seemed to
be made of a quartz-speckled version of the same fused stone from
which Jalila’s haramlek was constructed. But some other bits of it
appeared to be natural effusions of the rock. There was a big arched
door of sun-bleached and iron-studded oak, reached by a path across
the narrowing cliff, but Kalal steered Jalila to the side, and then
up and around a bare angle of hot stone that seemed ready at any
moment to tilt them down into the distant sea. But the way never
quite gave out; there was always another handhold. From the
confident manner in which he moved up this near-cliff face, then
scrambled across the blistering black tiles of the rooftop beyond,
and dropped down into the sudden cool of a narrow passageway, Jalila
guessed that Kalal had been to this qasr before. At first, there was
little sense of trespass. The place seemed old and empty–a
little-visited monument. The ceilings were stained. The corridors
were swept with the litter of winter leaves. Here and there along
the walls, there were friezes, and long strings of a script which
made as little sense to Jalila, in their age and dimness, as that
which Kalal had written on the hot rocks.
Then Kalal gestured for Jalila to
stop, and she clustered beside him, and they looked down through the
intricate stone lattice of a mashrabiya into sunlight. It was plain
from the balcony drop beneath them that they were still high up in
this qasr. Below, in the central courtyard, somehow shocking after
this emptiness, a fountain played in a garden, and water lapped from
its lip and ran in steel fingers toward cloistered
shadows.
"Someone lives
here?"
Kalal mouthed the word tariqua.
Somehow, Jalila instantly understood. It all made sense, in this
Season of Rockets, even the dim scenes and hieroglyphs carved in the
honeyed stones of this fairy castle. Tariquas were merely human,
after all, and the spaceport was nearby; they had to live somewhere.
Jalila glanced down at her scuffed sandals, suddenly conscious that
she hadn’t taken them off–but by then it was too late, and below
them and through the mashrabiya a figure had detached herself from
the shadows. The tariqua was tall and thin, and black and bent as a
burnt-out matchstick. She walked with a cane. Jalila didn’t know
what she’d expected–she’d grown older since her first encounter with
Kalal, and no longer imagined that she knew about things just
because she’d learnt of them in her dreamtent. But still, this
tariqua seemed a long way from someone who piloted the impossible
distances between the stars, as she moved and clicked slowly around
that courtyard fountain, and far older and frailer than anyone
Jalila had ever seen. She tended a bush of blue flowers, she touched
the fountain’s bubbling stone lip. Her head was ebony bald. Her
fingers were charcoal. Her eyes were as white and seemingly blind as
the flecks of quartz in the fused stone of this building. Once,
though, she seemed to look up toward them. Jalila went cold. Surely
it wasn’t possible that she could see them?–and in any event,
there was something about the motion of looking up which seemed
habitual. As if, like touching the lip of the fountain, and tending
that bush, the tariqua always looked up at this moment of the day at
that particular point in the stone walls that rose above
her.
Jalila followed Kalal further along
the corridors, and down stairways and across drops of beautifully
clear glass, that hung on nothing far above the prismatic sea.
Another glimpse of the tariqua, who was still slowly moving, her
neck stretching like an old tortoise as she bent to sniff a flower.
In this part of the qasr, there were more definite signs of
habitation. Scattered cards and books. A moth-eaten tapestry that
billowed from a windowless arch overlooking the sea. Empty coat
hangers piled like the bones of insects. An active but clearly
little-used chemical toilet. Now that the initial sense of surprise
had gone, there was something funny about this mixture of the
extraordinary and the everyday. Here, there was a kitchen, and a
half-chewed lump of aish on a plate smeared with seeds. To imagine,
that you could both travel between the stars and eat bread
and tomatoes! Both Kalal and Jalila were red-faced and chuffing now
from suppressed hilarity. Down now at the level of the cloisters,
hunched in the shade, they studied the tariqua’s stooping back. She
really did look like a scrawny tortoise, yanked out of its shell,
moving between these bushes. Any moment now, you expected her to
start chomping on the leaves. She moved more by touch than by sight.
Amid the intricate colors of this courtyard, and the flashing glass
windchimes that tinkled in the far archways, as she fumbled
sightlessly but occasionally glanced at things with those odd, white
eyes, it seemed yet more likely that she was blind, or at least
terribly near-sighted. Slowly, Jalila’s hilarity receded, and she
began to feel sorry for this old creature who had been aged and
withered and wrecked by the strange process of travel between the
stars. The Pain of Distance–now, where had that phrase come
from?
Kalal was still puffing his cheeks.
His eyes were watering as he ground his fist against his mouth and
silently thumped the nearest pillar in agonized hilarity. Then he
let out a nasal grunt, which Jalila was sure that the tariqua must
have heard. But her stance didn’t alter. It wasn’t so much as if she
hadn’t noticed them, but that she already knew that someone
was there. There was a sadness and resignation about her movements,
the tap of her cane. . . . But Kalal had recovered his equilibrium,
and Jalila watched his fingers snake out and enclose a flake of
broken paving. Another moment, and it spun out into the sunlit
courtyard in an arc so perfect that there was never any doubt that
it was going to strike the tariqua smack between her bird-like
shoulders. Which it did–but by then they were running, and the
tariqua was straightening herself up with that same slow
resignation. Just before they bundled themselves up the stairway,
Jalila glanced back, and felt a hot bar of light from one of the
qasr’s high upper windows stream across her face. The tariqua was
looking straight toward her with those blind white eyes. Then Kalal
grabbed her hand. Once again, she was running.
Jalila was cross with herself, and
cross with Kalal. It wasn’t like her, a voice like a mingled
chorus of her three mothers would say, to taunt some poor old
mahwagi, even if that mahwagi happened also to be an aged tariqua.
But Jalila was young, and life was busy. The voice soon faded. In
any case, there was the coming moulid to prepare for.
The arrangement of festivals, locally,
and on Habara as a whole, was always difficult. Habara’s
astronomical year was so long that it made no sense to fix the
traditional cycle of moulids by it, but at the same time, no one
felt comfortable celebrating the same saint or eid in conflicting
seasons. Fasting, after all, properly belonged to winter, and no one
could quite face their obligations toward the Almighty with quite
the same sense of surrender and equanimity in the middle of spring.
People’s memories faded, as well, as to how one did a
particular saint in autumn, or revered a certain enlightenment in
blasting heat that you had previously celebrated by throwing
snowballs. Added to this were the logistical problems of catering
for the needs of a small and scattered population across a large
planet. There were travelling players, fairs, wandering sufis and
priests, but they plainly couldn’t be everywhere at once. The end
result was that each moulid was fixed locally on Habara, according
to a shifting timetable, and after much discussion and many
meetings, and rarely happened twice at exactly the same time, or
else occurred simultaneously in different places. Lya threw herself
into these discussions with the enthusiasm of one who had long been
missing such complexities in the lonelier life up on Tabuthal. For
the Moulid of First Habitation–which commemorated the time when the
Blessed Joanna had arrived on Habara at a site that several
different towns claimed, and cast the first urrearth seeds, and
lived for five long Habaran years on nothing but tideflowers and
starlight, and rode the sea-leviathans across the oceans as if they
were hayawans as she waited for her lover Pia–Lya was the leading
light in the local organizations at Al Janb, and the rest of her
haramlek were expected to follow suit.
The whole of Al Janb was to be
transformed for a day and a night. Jalila helped with the hammering
and weaving, and tuning Pavo’s crystals and plants, which would
supposedly transform the serraplate road between their haramlek and
the town into a glittering tunnel. More in the forefront of Jalila’s
mind were those colored silks that came and went at a particular
stall in the markets, and which she was sure would look perfect on
her. Between the planning and the worries about this or that turning
into a disaster, she worked carefully on each of her three mothers
in turn; a nudge here, a suggestion there. Turning their thoughts
toward accepting this extravagance was a delicate matter, like
training a new hayawan to bear the saddle. Of course, there were
wild resistances and buckings, but you were patient, you were
stronger. You knew what you wanted. You kept to your subject. You
returned and returned and returned to it.
On the day when Ananke finally
relented, a worrying wind had struck up, pushing at the soft,
half-formed growths that now straggled through the normal weeds
along the road into Al Janb like silvered mucus. Pavo was fretting
about her creations. Lya’s life was one long meeting. Even Ananke
was anxious as they walked into Al Janb, where faulty fresh
projections flickered across the buildings and squares like an
incipient headache as the sky greyed. Jalila, urging her birthmother
on as she paused frustratingly, was sure that the market wouldn’t be
there, or that if it was, the stall that sold the windsilks was sure
to have sold out–or, even then, that the particular ones she’d set
her mind on would have gone. . . .
But it was all there. In fact, a whole
new supply of windsilks, even more marvelous and colorful, had been
imported for this moulid. They blew and lifted like colored smoke.
Jalila caught and admired them.
"I think this might be you. . . .
"
Jalila turned at the voice. It was Nayra, a girl about a
standard year and a half older than her, whose mothers were amongst
the richest and most powerful in Al Janb. Nayra herself was both
beautiful and intelligent; witty, and sometimes devastatingly cruel.
She was generally at the center of things, surrounded by a bickering
and admiring crowd of seemingly lesser mortals, which sometimes
included Jalila. But today she was alone.
"You see, Jalila. That crimson. With your hair, your eyes . .
. "
She held the windsilk across Jalila’s face like a yashmak. It
danced around her eyes. It blurred over her shoulders. Jalila would
have thought the color too bold. But Nayra’s gaze, which flickered
without ever quite leaving Jalila’s, her smoothing hands, told
Jalila that it was right for her far better than any mirror could
have. And then there was blue–that flame color of the summer night.
There were silver clasps, too, to hold these windsilks, which Jalila
had never noticed on sale before. The stallkeeper, sensing a desire
to purchase that went beyond normal bargaining, drew out more
surprises from a chest. Feel! They can only be made in one place,
on one planet, in one season. Look! The grubs, they only hatch when
they hear the song of a particular bird, which sings only once in
its life before it gives up its spirit to the Almighty. . . .
And so on. Ananke, seeing that Jalila had found a more
interested and willing helper, palmed her far more cash than she’d
promised, and left her with a smile and an oddly sad backward
glance.
Jalila spend the rest of that grey and windy afternoon with
Nayra, choosing clothes and ornaments for the moulid. Bangles for
their wrists and ankles. Perhaps–no? yes?–even a small tiara. Bolts
of cloth the color of today’s sky bound across her hips to offset
the windsilk’s beauty. A jewel still filled with the sapphire light
of a distant sun to twinkle at her belly. Nayra, with her dark
blonde hair, her light brown eyes, her fine strong hands, which were
pale pink beneath the fingernails like the inside of a shell, she
hardly needed anything to augment her obvious beauty. But Jalila
knew from her endless studies of herself in her dreamtent mirror
that she needed to be more careful; the wrong angle, the
wrong light, an incipient spot, and whatever effect she was striving
for could be so easily ruined. Yet she’d never really cared as much
about such things as she did on that windy afternoon, moving through
stalls and shops amid the scent of patchouli. To be so much the
focus of her own and someone else’s attention! Nayra’s hands,
smoothing across her back and shoulders, lifting her hair, cool
sweat at her shoulders, the cool slide and rattle of her bangles as
she raised her arms. . . .
"We could be creatures from a story, Jalila. Let’s imagine
I’m Scheherazade." A toss of that lovely hair. Liquid gold. Nayra’s
seashell fingers, stirring. "You can be her sister, Dinarzade. . . .
"
Jalila nodded enthusiastically, although Dinarzade had been
an unspectacular creature as far as she remembered the tale; there
only so that she might waken Scheherazade in the Sultana’s chamber
before the first cock crow of morning. But her limbs, her throat,
felt strange and soft and heavy. She reminded herself, as she
dressed and undressed, of the doll Tabatha she’d once so treasured
up on Tabuthal, and had found again recently, and thought for some
odd reason of burying. . . .
The lifting, the pulling, Nayra’s appraising hands and glance
and eyes. This unresisting heaviness. Jalila returned home to her
haramlek dazed and drained and happy, and severely out of
credit.
That night, there was another visitor for dinner. She must
have taken some sort of carriage to get there, but she came toward
their veranda as if she’d walked the entire distance. Jalila, whose
head was filled with many things, was putting out the bowls when she
heard the murmur of footsteps. The sound was so slow that eventually
she noticed it consciously, looked up, and saw a thin, dark figure
coming up the sandy path between Pavo’s swaying and newly sculpted
bushes. One arm leaned on a cane, and the other strained seekingly
forward. In shock, Jalila dropped the bowl she was holding. It
seemed to roll around and around on the table forever, slipping
playfully out of reach of her fingers before spinning off the edge
and shattering into several thousand white pieces.
"Oh dear," the tariqua said, finally climbing the steps
beside the windy trellis, her cane tap-tapping. "Perhaps you’d
better go and tell one of your mothers, Jalila."
Jalila felt breathless. All through that evening, the
tariqua’s trachoman white eyes, the scarred and tarry driftwood of
her face, seemed to be studying her. Even apart from that odd
business of her knowing her name, which she supposed could be
explained, Jalila was more and more certain that the tariqua knew
that it was she and Kalal who had spied on her and thrown stones at
her on that hot day in the qasr. As if that mattered. But somehow,
it did, more than it should have done. Amid all this confused
thinking, and the silky memories of her afternoon with Nayra, Jalila
scarcely noticed the conversation. The weather remained gusty,
spinning the lanterns, playing shapes with the shadows, making the
tapestries breathe. The tariqua’s voice was as thin as her frame. It
carried on the spinning air like the croak of an insect.
"Perhaps we could walk on the beach, Jalila?"
"What?" She jerked as if she’d been abruptly awakened. Her
mothers were already clearing things away, and casting odd glances
at her. The voice had whispered inside her head, and the tariqua was
sitting there, her burnt and splintery arm outstretched, in the
hope, Jalila supposed, that she would be helped up from the table.
The creature’s robe had fallen back. Her arm looked like a picture
Jalila had once seen of a dried cadaver. With an effort, nearly
knocking over another bowl, Jalila moved around the billowing table.
With an even bigger effort, she placed her own hand into that of the
tariqua. She’d expected it to feel leathery, which it did. But it
was also hot beyond fever. Terribly, the fingers closed around hers.
There was a pause. Then the tariqua got up with surprising
swiftness, and reached around for her cane, still holding Jalila’s
hand, but without having placed any weight on it. She could have
done all that on her own, the old witch, Jalila thought. And
she can see, too–look at the way she’s been stuffing herself
with kofta all evening, reaching over for figs. . .
.
"What do you know of the stars,
Jalila?" the tariqua asked as they walked beside the beach. Pavo’s
creations along the road behind them still looked stark and strange
and half-formed as they swayed in the wind, like the wavering silver
limbs of an upturned insect. The waves came and went, strewing
tideflowers far up the strand. Like the tongue of a snake, the
tariqua’s cane darted ahead of her.
Jalila shrugged. There were these
Gateways, she had always known that. There were these Gateways, and
they were the only proper path between the stars, because no one
could endure the eons of time that crossing even the tiniest
fragment of the Ten Thousand and One Worlds would entail by the
ordinary means of traveling from there to
here.
"Not, of course," the tariqua was
saying, "that people don’t do such things. There are tales, there
are always tales, of ghost-ships of sufis drifting for tens of
centuries through the black and black. . . . But the wealth, the
contact, the community, flows through the Gateways. The
Almighty herself provided the means to make them in the Days of
Creation, when everything that was and will ever be spilled out into
a void so empty that it did not even exist as an emptiness. In those
first moments, as warring elements collided, boundaries formed,
dimensions were made and disappeared without ever quite dissolving,
like the salt tidemarks on those rocks. . . . " As they walked, the
tariqua waved her cane. ". . . which the sun and the eons can never
quite bake away. These boundaries are called cosmic strings, Jalila,
and they have no end. They must form either minute loops, or they
must stretch from one end of this universe to the other, and then
turn back again, and turn and turn without end."
Jalila glanced at the brooch the
tariqua was wearing, which was of a worm consuming its tail. She
knew that the physical distances between the stars were vast, but
the tariqua somehow made the distances that she traversed to avoid
that journey seem even vaster. . . .
"You must understand," the tariqua
said, "that we tariquas pass through something worse than nothing to
get from one side to the other of a Gateway."
Jalila nodded. She was young, and
nothing didn’t sound especially frightening. Still, she
sensed that there were the answers to mysteries in this near-blind
gaze and whispering voice that she would never get from her
dreamtent or her mothers. "But, hanim, what could be worse,"
she asked dutifully, although she still couldn’t think of the
tariqua in terms of a name, and thus simply addressed her with the
short honorific, "than sheer emptiness?"
"Ah, but emptiness is nothing.
Imagine, Jalila, passing through everything instead!" The
tariqua chuckled, and gazed up at the sky. "But the stars are
beautiful, and so is this night. You come, I hear, from Tabuthal.
There, the skies must all have been very different."
Jalila nodded. A brief vision flared
over her. The way that up there, on the clearest, coldest nights,
you felt as if the stars were all around you. Even now, much though
she loved the fetors and astonishments of the coast, she still felt
the odd pang of missing something. It was a feeling she
missed, as much as the place itself, which she guessed would
probably seem bleak and lonely if she returned to it now. It was
partly to do, she suspected, with that sense that she was loosing
her childhood. It was like being on a ship, on Kalal’s nameless
boat, and watching the land recede, and half of you loving the loss,
half of you hating it. A war seemed to be going on inside her
between these two warring impulses. . . .
To her surprise, Jalila realized that
she wasn’t just thinking these thoughts, but speaking them, and that
the tariqua, walking at her slow pace, the weight of her head
bending her spine, her cane whispering a jagged line in the dust as
the black rags of her djibbah flapped around her, was listening.
Jalila supposed that she, too, had been young once, although that
was hard to imagine. The sea frothed and swished. They were at the
point in the road now where, gently buzzing and almost out of sight
amid the forest, hidden there as if in shame, the tariqua’s caleche
lay waiting. It was a small filigree, a thing as old and black and
ornate as her brooch. Jalila helped her toward it through the trees.
The craft’s door creaked open like an iron gate, then shut behind
the tariqua. A few crickets sounded through the night’s heat. Then,
with a soft rush, and a static glow like the charge of windsilk
brushing flesh, the caleche rose up through the treetops and wafted
away.
The day of the moulid came. It was
everything that Jalila expected, although she paid it little
attention. The intricate, bowered pathway that Pavo had been working
on finally shaped itself to her plans–in fact, it was better than
that, and seemed like a beautiful accident. As the skies cleared,
the sun shone through prismatic arches. The flowers, which had
looked so stunted only the evening before, suddenly unfolded, with
petals like beaten brass, and stamens shaped so that the continuing
breeze, which Pavo had always claimed to have feared, laughed and
whistled and tooted as it passed through them. Walking beneath the
archways of flickering shadows, you were assailed by scents and the
clashes of small orchestras. But Jalila’s ears were blocked, her
eyes were sightless. She, after all, was Dinarzade, and Nayra was
Scheherazade of the Thousand and One Nights.
Swirling windsilks, her heart
hammering, she strode into Al Janb. Everything seemed to be
different today. There were too many sounds and colors. People tried
to dance with her, or sell her things. Some of the aliens seemed to
have dressed themselves as humans. Some of the humans were most
definitely dressed as aliens. Her feet were already blistered and
delicate from her new crimson slippers. And there was Nayra, dressed
in a silvery serwal and blouse of such devastating simplicity that
Jalila felt her heart kick and pause in its beating. Nayra was
surrounded by a small storm of her usual admirers. Her eyes took in
Jalila as she stood at their edge, then beckoned her to join them.
The idea of Dinarzade and Scheherazade, which Jalila had thought was
to be their secret, was now shared with everyone. The other girls
laughed and clustered around, admiring, joking, touching and
stroking bits of her as if she was a hayawan. You of all people,
Jalila! And such jewels, such silks . . . Jalila stood
half-frozen, her heart still kicking. So, so marvelous! And not
at all dowdy. . . . She could have lived many a long and happy
life without such compliments.
Thus the day continued. All of them in
a crowd, and Jalila feeling both over-dressed and exposed, with
these stirring, whispering windsilks that covered and yet mostly
seemed to reveal her body. She felt like a child in a ribboned
parade, and when one of the old mahwagis even came up and pressed a
sticky lump of basbousa into her hand, it was the final indignity.
She trudged off alone, and found Kalal and his father Ibra managing
a seafront stall beside the swaying masts of the bigger trawlers,
around which there was a fair level of purchase and interest. Ibra
was enjoying himself, roaring out enticements and laughter in his
big, belling voice. At last, they’d gotten around to harvesting some
of the tideflowers for which their nameless boat had been designed,
and they were selling every sort here, salt-fresh from the
ocean.
"Try this one. . . . " Kalal drew
Jalila away to the edge of the harbor, where the oiled water flashed
below. He had just one tideflower in his hand. It was deep-banded
the same crimson and blue as her windsilks. The interior was like
the eye of an anemone.
Jalila was flattered. But she
hesitated. "I’m not sure about wearing something dead." In any case,
she knew she already looked ridiculous. That this would be more of
the same.
"It isn’t dead, it’s as alive as you
are." Kalal held it closer, against Jalila’s shoulder, toward the
top of her breast, smoothing out the windsilks in a way that briefly
reminded her of Nayra. "And isn’t this material the dead tissue of
some creature or other. . . ?" Still, his hands were smoothing.
Jalila thought again of Nayra. Being dressed like a doll. Her
nipples started to rise. "And if we take it back to the tideflower
beds tomorrow morning, place it down there carefully, it’ll still
survive . . . " The tideflower had stuck itself to her now, anyway,
beneath the shoulder, its adhesion passing through the thin
windsilks, burning briefly as it bound to her flesh. And it
was beautiful, even if she wasn’t, and it would have been
churlish to refuse. Jalila placed her finger into the tideflower’s
center, and felt a soft suction, like the mouth of a baby. Smiling,
thanking Kalal, feeling somehow better and more determined, she
walked away.
The day went on. The night came.
Fireworks crackled and rumpled, rippling down the slopes of the
mountains. The whole of the center of Al Janb was transformed
unrecognizably into the set of a play. Young Joanna herself walked
the vast avenues of Ghezirah, the island city that lies at the
center of all the Ten Thousand and One Worlds, and which grows in
much the same way as Pavo’s crystal scaffoldings, but on an
inconceivable scale, filled with azure skies, glinting in the dark
heavens like a vast diamond. The Blessed Joanna, she was supposedly
thinking of a planet that had come to her in a vision as she
wandered beside Ghezirah’s palaces; it was a place of fine seas,
lost giants, and mysterious natural castles, although Jalila, as she
followed in the buffeting, cheering procession, and glanced around
at the scale of the projections that briefly covered Al Janb’s
ordinary buildings, wondered why, even if this version of Ghezirah
was fake and thin, Joanna would ever have wanted to leave
that city to come to a place such as this.
There were more fireworks. As they
rattled, a deeper sound swept over them in a moan from the sea, and
everyone looked up as sunglow poured through the gaudy images of
Ghezirah that still clad Al Janb’s buildings. Not one rocket, or
two, but three, were all climbing up from the spaceport
simultaneously, the vast white plumes of their energies fanning out
across half the sky to form a billowy fleur de
lys. At last, as she craned her neck and watched the last of
those blazing tails diminish, Jalila felt exulted by this moulid. In
the main square, the play continued. When she found a place on a
bench and began to watch the more intimate parts of the drama
unfold, as Joanna’s lover Pia pleaded with her to remain amid the
cerulean towers of Ghezirah, a figure moved to sit beside her. To
Jalila’s astonishment, it was Nayra.
"That’s a lovely flower. I’ve been
meaning to ask you all day . . . " Her fingers moved across Jalila’s
shoulder. There was a tug at her skin as she touched the
petals.
"I got it from Kalal."
"Oh . . . " Nayra sought the right
word. "Him. Can I smell it. . . ?" She was already bending
down, her face close to Jalila’s breast, the golden fall of her hair
brushing her forearm, enclosing her in the sweet, slightly vanilla
scent of her body. "That’s nice. It smells like the sea–on a clear
day, when you climb up and look down at it from the mountains. . . .
"
The play continued. Would Joanna
really go to this planet, which kept appearing to her in these
visions? Jalila didn’t know. She didn’t care. Nayra’s hand slipped
into her own and lay there upon her thigh with a weight and presence
that seemed far heavier than the entire universe. She felt like that
doll again. Her breath was pulling, dragging. The play continued,
and then, somewhere, somehow, it came to an end. Jalila felt an
aching sadness. She’d have been happy for Joanna to continue her
will-I-won’t-I agonizing and prayers throughout all of human
history, just so that she and Nayra could continue to sit together
like this, hand in hand, thigh to thigh, on this hard
bench.
The projections flickered and faded.
She stood up in wordless disappointment. The whole square suddenly
looked like a wastetip, and she felt crumpled and used-up in these
sweaty and ridiculous clothes. It was hardly worth looking back
toward Nayra to say goodbye. She would, Jalila was sure, have
already vanished to rejoin those clucking, chattering friends who
surrounded her like a wall.
"Wait!" A hand on her arm. That same
vanilla scent. "I’ve heard that your mother Pavo’s displays along
the south road are something quite fabulous. . . . " For once,
Nayra’s golden gaze as Jalila looked back at her was almost coy,
nearly averted. "I was rather hoping you might show me. . . .
"
The two of them. Walking hand in hand,
just like all lovers throughout history. Like Pia and Joanna. Like
Romana and Juliet. Like Isabel and Genya. Ghosts of smoke from the
rocket plumes that had buttressed the sky hung around them, and the
world seemed half-dissolved in the scent of sulphur and roses. An
old woman they passed, who was sweeping up discarded kebab sticks
and wrappers, made a sign as they passed, and gave them a weary,
sad-happy smile. Jalila wasn’t sure what had happened to her
slippers, but they and her feet both seemed to have become
weightless. If it hadn’t been for the soft sway and pull of Nayra’s
arm, Jalila wouldn’t even have been sure that she was moving.
People’s feet really don’t touch the ground when they are
in love! Here was something else that her dreamtent and her
mothers hadn’t told her.
Pavo’s confections of plant and
crystal looked marvelous in the hazed and doubled silver shadows of
the rising moons. Jalila and Nayra wandered amid them, and the rest
of the world felt withdrawn and empty. A breeze was still playing
over the rocks and the waves, but the fluting sound had changed. It
was one soft pitch, rising, falling. They kissed. Jalila closed her
eyes–she couldn’t help it–and trembled. Then they held both hands
together and stared at each other, unflinching. Nayra’s bare arms in
the moonslight, the curve inside her elbow and the blue trace of a
vein: Jalila had never seen anything as beautiful, here in this
magical place.
The stables, where the hayawans were
breathing. Jalila spoke to Robin, to Abu. The beasts were sleepy.
Their flesh felt cold, their plates were warm, and Nayra seemed a
little afraid. There, in the sighing darkness, the clean scent of
feed and straw was overlaid with the heat of the hayawans’ bodies
and their dung. The place was no longer a ramshackle tent, but solid
and dark, another of Pavo’s creations; the stony catacombs of ages.
Jalila led Nayra through it, her shoulders brushing pillars, her
heart pounding, her slippered feet whispering through spills of
straw. To the far corner, where the fine new white bedding lay like
depths of cloud. They threw themselves onto it, half-expecting to
fall through. But they were floating in straggles of windsilk, held
in tangles of their own laughter and limbs.
"Remember." Nayra’s palm on Jalila’s
right breast, scrolled like an old print in the geometric moonlight
that fell from Walah, and then through the arched stone grid of a
murqana that lay above their heads. "I’m Scheherazade. You’re
Dinarzade, my sister . . . " The pebble of Jalila’s nipple rising
through the windsilk. "That old, old story, Jalila. Can you remember
how it went. . . ?"
In the tide of yore and in the time
of long gone before, there was a Queen of all the Queens of the Banu
Sasan in the far islands of India and China, a Lady of armies and
guards and servants and dependants. . . .
Again, they kissed.
Handsome gifts, such as horses with
saddles of gem-encrusted gold; mamelukes, or white slaves; beautiful
handmaids, high-breasted virgins, and splendid stuffs and costly. .
. .
Nayra’s hand moved from Jalila’s
breast to encircle the tideflower. She gave it a tug, pulled harder.
Something held, gave, held, hurt, then gave entirely. The windsilks
poured back. A small dark bead of blood welled at the curve between
Jalila’s breast and shoulder. Nayra licked it away.
In one house was a girl weeping for
the loss of her sister. In another, perhaps a mother trembling for
the fate of her child; and instead of the blessings that had
formerly been heaped on the Sultana’s head, the air was now full of
curses. . . .
Jalila was rising, floating, as
Nayra’s mouth traveled downward to suckle at her breast.
Now the Wazir had two daughters,
Scheherazade and Dinarzade, of whom the elder had perused the books,
annals, and legends of preceding queens and empresses, and the
stories, examples, and instances of bygone things. Scheherazade had
read the works of the poets and she knew them by heart. She had
studied philosophy, the sciences, the arts, and all accomplishments.
And Scheherazade was pleasant and polite, wise and witty.
Scheherazade, she was beautiful and well bred. . . .
Flying far over frost-glittering
saharas, beneath the twin moons, soaring through the clouds. The
falling, rising dunes. The minarets and domes of distant cities. The
cries and shuddering sighs of the beloved. Patterned moonlight
falling through the murqana in a white and dark tapestry across the
curves and hollows of Nayra’s belly.
Alekum as-salal wa rahmatu allahi
wa barakatuh. . . .
Upon you, the peace and the mercy of
God and all these blessings.
Amen.
There was no cock-crow when Jalila
startled awake. But Walah had vanished, and so had Nayra, and the
light of the morning sun came splintering down through the murqana’s
hot blue lattice. Sheltering her face with her hands, Jalila looked
down at herself, and smiled. The jewel in her belly was all that was
left of her costume. She smelled faintly of vanilla, and much of
Nayra, and nothing about her flesh seemed quite her own. Moving
through the dazzling drizzle, she gathered up the windsilks and
other scraps of clothing that had settled into the fleece bedding.
She found one of Nayra’s earrings, which was twisted to right angles
at the post, and had to smile again. And here was that tideflower,
tossed upturned like an old cup into the corner. She touched the
tiny scab on her shoulder, then lifted the flower up and inhaled,
but caught on her palms only the scents of Nayra. She closed her
eyes, feeling the diamond speckles of heat and cold across her body
like the ripples of the sea.
The hayawans barely stirred as she
moved out through their stables. Only Robin regarded her, and then
incuriously, as she paused to touch the hard grey melds of her flank
that she had pressed against the bars of her enclosure. One eye,
grey as rocket smoke, opened, then returned to its saharas of
dreams. The hayawans, Jalila supposed for the first time, had their
own passions, and these were not to be shared with some odd
two-legged creatures of another race and planet.
The morning was still clinging to its
freshness, and the road, as she crossed it, was barely warm beneath
her feet. Wind-towered Al Janb and the haramlek behind her looked
deserted. Even the limbs of the mountains seemed curled in sleepy
haze. On this day after the moulid, no one but the geelies was yet
stirring. Cawing, they rose and settled in flapping red flocks from
the beds of the tideflowers as Jalila scrunched across the hard
stones of the beach. Her feet encountered the cool, slick water. She
continued walking, wading, until the sea tickled her waist and what
remained of the windsilks had spread about in spills of dye. From
her cupped hands, she released the tideflower, and watched it float
away. She splashed her face. She sunk down to her shoulders as the
windsilks dissolved from her, and looked down between her breasts at
the glowing jewel that was still stuck in her belly, and plucked it
out, and watched it sink; the sea-lantern of a ship,
drowning.
Walking back up the beach, wringing
the wet from her hair, Jalila noticed a rich green growth standing
out amid the sky-filled rockpools and the growths of lichen. Pricked
by something resembling Pavo’s curiosity, she scrambled over, and
crouched to examine it as the gathering heat of the sun dried her
back. She recognized this spot–albeit dimly–from the angle of a band
of quartz that glittered and bled blue oxides. This was where she
had coughed up her breathmoss in that early Season of Soft Rains.
And here it still was, changed but unmistakable–and growing. A small
patch here, several larger patches there. Tiny filaments of green, a
minute forest, raising its boughs and branches to the
sun.
She walked back up toward her
haramlek, humming.
3.
The sky was no longer blue. It was no
longer white. It had turned to mercury. The rockets rose and rose in
dry crackles of summer lightening. The tube-like aliens fled,
leaving their strange house of goo-filled windows and pipes still
clicking and humming until something burst and the whole structure
deflated, and the mess of it leaked across the nearby streets. There
were warnings of poisonings and strange epidemics. There were
cloggings and stenches of the drains.
Jalila showed the breathmoss to her
mothers, who were all intrigued and delighted, although Pavo had of
course noticed and categorized the growth long before, while Ananke
had to touch the stuff, and left a small brown mark there like the
tips of her three fingers, which dried and turned golden over the
days that followed. But in this hot season, these evenings when the
sun seemed as if it would never vanish, the breathmoss proved
surprisingly hardy. . . .
After that night of the moulid, Jalila
spent several happy days absorbed and alone, turning and smoothing
the memory of her love-making with Nayra. Wandering above and
beneath the unthinking routines of everyday life, she was like a
fine craftsman, spinning silver, shaping sandalwood. The dimples of
Nayra’s back. Sweat glinting in the checkered moonlight. That sweet
vein in the crook of her beloved’s arm, and the pulse of the blood
that had risen from it to the drumbeats of ecstasy. The memory
seemed entirely enough to Jalila. She was barely living in the
present day. When, perhaps six days after the end of the moulid,
Nayra turned up at their doorstep with the ends of her hair chewed
wet and her eyes red-rimmed, Jalila had been almost surprised to see
her, and then to notice the differences between the real Nayra and
the Scheherazade of her memories. Nayra smelled of tears and dust as
they embraced; like someone who had arrived from a long, long
journey.
"Why didn’t you call me? I’ve
been waiting, waiting. . . . "
Jalila kissed her hair. Her hand
traveled beneath a summer shawl to caress Nayra’s back, which felt
damp and gritty. She had no idea how to answer her questions. They
walked out together that afternoon in the shade of the woods behind
the haramlek. The trees had changed in this long, hot season,
departing from their urrearth habits to coat their leaves in a waxy
substance that smelled medicinal. The shadows of their boughs were
chalkmarks and charcoal. All was silent. The urrearth birds had
retreated to their summer hibernations until the mists of autumn
came to rouse them again. Climbing a scree of stones, they found
clusters of them at the back of a cave; feathery bundles amid the
dripping rock, seemingly without eyes or beak.
As they sat at the mouth of that cave,
looking down across the heat-trembling bay, sucking the ice and
eating the dates that Ananke had insisted they bring with them,
Nayra had seemed like a different person than the one Jalila had
thought she had known before the day of the moulid. Nayra, too, was
human, and not the goddess she had seemed. She had her doubts and
worries. She, too, thought that the girls who surrounded her were
mostly crass and stupid. She didn’t even believe in her own obvious
beauty. She cried a little again, and Jalila hugged her. The hug
became a kiss. Soon, dusty and greedy, they were tumbling amid the
hot rocks. That evening, back at the haramlek, Nayra was welcomed
for dinner by Jalila’s mothers with mint tea and the best china. She
was invited to bathe. Jalila sat beside her as they ate figs fresh
from distant Ras and the year’s second crop of oranges. She felt
happy. At last, life seemed simple. Nayra was now officially her
lover, and this love would form the pattern of her days.
Jalila’s life now seemed complete; she
believed that she was an adult, and that she talked and spoke and
loved and worshipped in an adult way. She still rode out sometimes
with Kalal on Robin and Abu, she still laughed or stole things or
played games, but she was conscious now that these activities were
the sweetmeats of life, pleasing but unnutritous, and the real
glories and surprises lay with being with Nayra, and with her
mothers, and the life of the haramlek that the two young women
talked of founding together one day.
Nayra’s mothers lived on the far side
of Al Janb, in a fine tall clifftop palace that was one of the
oldest in the town, clad in white stone and filled with intricate
courtyards, and a final beautiful tajo that looked down from gardens
of tarragon across the whole bay. Jalila greatly enjoyed exploring
this haramlek, deciphering the peeling scripts that wound along the
cool vaults, and enjoying the company of Nayra’s mothers who, in
their wealth and grace and wisdom, often made her own mothers seem
like the awkward and recent provincial arrivals that they plainly
were. At home, in her own haramlek, the conversations and ideas
seemed stale. An awful dream came to Jalila one night. She was her
old doll Tabatha, and she really was being buried. The ground she
lay in was moist and dank, as if it was still the Season of Soft
Rains, and the faces of everyone she knew were clustered around the
hole above her, muttering and sighing as her mouth and eyes were
inexorably filled with soil.
"Tell me what it was like, when you
first fell in love."
Jalila had chosen Pavo to ask this
question of. Ananke would probably just hug her, while Lya would
talk and talk until there was nothing to say.
"I don’t know. Falling in love is like
coming home. You can never quite do it for the first
time."
"But in the stories–"
"–The stories are always written
afterward, Jalila."
They were walking the luminous shore.
It was near midnight, which was now by far the best time of the
night or day. But what Pavo had just said sounded wrong; perhaps she
hadn’t been the right choice of mother to speak to, after all.
Jalila was sure she’d loved Nayra since that day before the moulid
of Joanna, although it was true she loved her now in a different
way.
"You still don’t think we really will
form a haramlek together, do you?"
"I think that it’s too early to
say."
"You were the last of our three,
weren’t you? Lya and Ananke were already together."
"It was what drew me to them. They
seemed so happy and complete. It was also what frightened me and
nearly sent me away."
"But you stayed together, and then
there was . . . " This was the part that Jalila still found hardest
to acknowledge; the idea that her mothers had a physical, sexual
relationship. Sometimes, deep at night, from someone else’s
dreamtent, she had heard muffled sighs, the wet slap of flesh. Just
like the hayawans, she supposed, there were things about other
people’s lives that you could never fully understand, no matter how
well you thought you knew them.
She chose a different tack. "So why
did you choose to have me?"
"Because we wanted to fill the world
with something that had never ever existed before. Because we felt
selfish. Because we wanted to give ourselves away."
"Ananke, she actually gave birth to
me, didn’t she?"
"Down here at Al Janb, they’d say we
were primitive and mad. Perhaps that was how we wanted to be. But
all the machines at the clinics do is try to recreate the conditions
of a real human womb–the voices, the movements, the sound of
breathing. . . . Without first hearing that Song of Life, no human
can ever be happy, so what better way could there be than to hear it
naturally?"
A flash of that dream-image of herself
being buried. "But the birth itself–"
"–I think that was something we all
underestimated." The tone of Pavo’s voice told Jalila that this was
not a subject to be explored on the grounds of mere
curiosity.
The tideflower beds had solidified.
You could walk across them as if they were dry land. Kalal, after
several postponements and broken promises, took Jalila and Nayra out
one night to demonstrate.
Smoking lanterns at the prow and stern
of his boat. The water slipping warm as blood through Jalila’s
trailing fingers. Al Janb receding beneath the hot thighs of the
mountains. Kalal at the prow. Nayra sitting beside her, her arm
around her shoulder, hand straying across her breast until Jalila
shrugged it away because the heat of their two bodies was
oppressive.
"This season’ll end soon," Nayra
said. "You’ve never known the winter here, have
you?"
"I was born in the winter. Nothing here could be as
cold as the lightest spring morning in the mountains of
Tabuthal."
"Ah, the mountains. You must show me sometime. We
should travel there together. . . . "
Jalila nodded, trying hard to picture that journey. She’d
attempted to interest Nayra in riding a hayawan, but she grew
frightened even in the presence of the beasts. In so many ways, in
fact, Nayra surprised Jalila with her timidity. Jalila, in these
moments of doubt, and as she lay alone in her dreamtent and
wondered, would list to herself Nayra’s many assets: her lithe and
willing body; the beautiful haramlek of her beautiful mothers; the
fact that so many of the other girls now envied and admired her.
There were so many things that were good about Nayra.
Kalal, now that his boat had been set on course for the
further tidebeds, came to sit with them, his face sweated
lantern-red. He and Nayra shared many memories, and now, as the
sails pushed on from the hot air off the mountains, they vied to
tell Jalila of the surprises and delights of winters in Al Janb. The
fogs when you couldn’t see your hand. The intoxicating blue berries
that appeared in special hollows through the crust of the snow. The
special saint’s days. . . . If Jalila hadn’t known better, she’d
have said that Nayra and Kalal were fighting over something more
important.
The beds of tideflowers were vast, luminous, heavy-scented.
Red-black clusters of geelies rose and fell here and there in the
moonslight. Walking these gaudy carpets was a most strange
sensation. The dense interlaces of leaves felt like rubber matting,
but sank and bobbed. Jalila and Nayra lit more lanterns and dotted
them around a field of huge primrose and orange petals. They sang
and staggered and rolled and fell over. Nayra had brought a pipe of
kif resin, and the sensation of smoking that and trying to dance was
hilarious. Kalal declined, pleading that he had to control the boat
on the way back, and picked his way out of sight, disturbing flocks
of geelies.
And so the two girls danced as the twin moons rose. Nayra,
twirling silks, her hair fanning, was graceful as Jalila still
staggered amid the lapping flowers. As she lifted her arms and rose
on tiptoe, bracelets glittering, she had never looked more
desirable. Somewhat drunkenly–and slightly reluctantly, because
Kalal might return at any moment–Jalila moved forward to embrace
her. It was good to hold Nayra, and her mouth tasted like the
tideflowers and sucked needily at her own. In fact, the moments of
their love had never been sweeter and slower than they were on that
night, although, even as Jalila marveled at the shape of Nayra’s
breasts and listened to the changed song of her breathing, she felt
herself chilling, receding, drawing back, not just from Nayra’s
physical presence, but from this small bay beside the small town on
the single continent beside Habara’s great and lonely ocean. Jalila
felt infinitely sorry for Nayra as she brought her to her little
ecstasies and they kissed and rolled across the beds of flowers. She
felt sorry for Nayra because she was beautiful, and sorry for her
because of all her accomplishments, and sorry for her because she
would always be happy here amid the slow seasons of this little
planet.
Jalila felt sorry for herself as well; sorry because she had
thought that she had known love, and because she knew now that it
had only been a pretty illusion.
There was a shifting wind, dry and abrasive, briefly to be
welcomed, until it became something to curse and cover your face and
close your shutters against.
Of Jalila’s mothers, only Lya seemed at all disappointed by
her break from Nayra, no doubt because she had fostered hopes of
their union forming a powerful bond between their haramleks, and
even she did her best not to show it. Of the outside world, the
other young women of Al Janb all professed total disbelief–why if
it had been me, I’d never have . . . But soon, they were
cherishing the new hope that it might indeed be them. Nayra,
to her credit, maintained an extraordinary dignity in the face of
the fact that she, of all people, had finally been rejected. She
dressed in plain clothes. She spoke and ate simply. Of course, she
looked more devastatingly beautiful than ever, and everyone’s eyes
were reddened by air-borne grit in any case, so it was impossible to
tell how much she had really been crying. Now, as the buildings of
Al Janb creaked and the breakers rolled and the wind howled through
the teeth of the mountains, Jalila saw the gaudy, seeking and
competing creatures who so often surrounded Nayra quite differently.
Nayra was not, had never been, in control of them. She was more like
the bloody carcass over which, flashing their teeth, their eyes,
stretching their limbs, they endlessly fought. Often, riven by a
sadness far deeper than she had ever experienced, missing something
she couldn’t explain, wandering alone or lying in her dreamtent,
Jalila nearly went back to Nayra. . . . But she never
did.
This was the Season of Winds, and Jalila was heartily sick of
herself and Al Janb, and the girls and the mahwagis and the mothers,
and of this changing, buffeting banshee weather that seemed to play
with her moods. Sometimes now, the skies were entirely beautiful,
strung by the curling multicolored banners of sand that the winds
had lifted from distant corners of the continent. There was crimson
and there was sapphire. The distant saharas of Jalila’s dreams had
come to haunt her. They fell–as the trees tore and the paint
stripped from the shutters and what remained of Pavo’s arches
collapsed–in an irritating grit that worked its way into all the
crevices of your body and every weave of your clothes.
The tariqua had spoken of the pain of nothing, and
then of the pain of everything. At the time, Jalila had
understood neither, but now, she felt that she understood the pain
of nothing all too well. The product of the combined genes of her
three mothers; loving Ananke, ever-curious Pavo, proud and talkative
Lya, she had always felt glad to recognize these characteristics
mingled in herself, but now she wondered if these traits hadn’t
cancelled each other out. She was a null-point, a zero, clumsy and
destructive and unloving. She was Jalila, and she walked alone and
uncaring through this Season of Winds.
One morning, the weather was especially harsh. Jalila was
alone in the haramlek, although she cared little where she or
anywhere else was. A shutter must have come loose somewhere. That
often happened now. It had been banging and hammering so long that
it began to irritate even her. She climbed stairs and slammed doors
over jamming drifts of mica. She flapped back irritably at flapping
curtains. Still, the banging went on. Yet all the windows and doors
were now secure. She was sure of it. Unless. . . .
Someone was at the front door. She could see a swirling
globular head through the greenish glass mullion. Even though they
could surely see her as well, the banging went on. Jalila wondered
if she wanted it to be Nayra; after all, this was how she had come
to her after the moulid; a sweet and needy human being to drag her
out from her dreams. But it was only Kalal. As the door shoved
Jalila back, she tried not to look disappointed.
"You can’t do this with your life!"
"Do what?"
"This–nothing. And then not answering the fucking
door. . . . " Kalal prowled the hallway as the door banged back and
forth and tapestries flailed, looking for clues as if he was a
detective. "Let’s go out."
Even in this weather, Jalila supposed that she owed it to
Robin. Then Kalal had wanted to go north, and she insisted on going
south, and was not in any mood for arguing. It was an odd journey,
so unlike the ones they’d undertaken in the summer. They wrapped
their heads and faces in flapping howlis, and tried to ride mostly
in the forest, but the trees whipped and flapped and the raw air
still abraded their faces.
They took lunch down by a flatrock shore, in what amounted to
shelter, although there was still little enough of it as the wind
eddied about them. This could have been the same spot where they had
stopped in summer, but it was hard to tell; the light was so
changed, the sky so bruised. Kalal seemed changed, too. His face
beneath his howli seemed older, as he tried to eat their aish before
the sand-laden air got to it, and his chin looked prickled and
abraded. Jalila supposed that this was the same facial growth that
his father Ibra was so fond of sporting. She also supposed he must
choose to shave his off in the way that some women on some decadent
planets were said to shave their legs and armpits.
"Come a bit closer–" she half-shouted, working her way back
into the lee of the bigger rock beside which she was sitting to make
room for him. "I want you to tell me what you know about love,
Kalal."
Kalal hunched beside her. For a while, he just continued
tearing and chewing bits of aish, with his body pressed against hers
as the winds boiled around them, the warmth of their flesh almost
meeting. And Jalila wondered if men and women, when their lives and
needs had been more closely intertwined, had perhaps known the
answer to her question. What was love, after all? It would
have been nice to think that, in those dim times of myth, men and
women had whispered the answer to that question to each other. . .
.
She thought then that Kalal hadn’t properly heard her. He was
telling her about his father, and a planet he barely remembered, but
on which he was born. The sky there had been fractaled gold and
turquoise–colors so strange and bright that they came as a delight
and a shock each morning. It was a place of many islands, and one
great city. His father had been a fisherman and boat-repairer of
sorts there as well, although the boats had been much grander than
anything you ever saw at Al Janb, and the fish had lived not as
single organisms, but as complex shoals that were caught not for
their meat, but for their joint minds. Ibra had been approached by a
woman from off-world, who had wanted a ship on which she could sail
alone around the whole lonely band of the northern oceans. She had
told him that she was sick of human company. The planning and the
making of the craft was a joy for Ibra, because such a lonely
journey had been one that he had long dreamed of making, if ever
he’d had the time and money. The ship was his finest-ever creation,
and it turned out, as they worked on it, that neither he nor the
woman were quite as sick of human company as they had imagined. They
fell in love as the keel and the spars grew in the city dockyards
and the ship’s mind was nurtured, and as they did so, they slowly
re-learned the expressions of sexual need between the male and
female.
"You mean he raped her?"
Kalal tossed his last nub of bread toward the waves. "I mean
that they made love."
After the usual negotiations and contracts, and after the
necessary insertions of the appropriate cells, Ibra and this woman
(whom Kalal didn’t name in his story, any more than he named the
world) set sail together, fully intending to conceive a child in the
fabled way of old.
"Which was you?"
Kalal scowled. It was impossible to ask him even simple
questions on this subject without making him look annoyed. "Of
course it was! How many of me do you think there are?" Then
he lapsed into silence. The sands swirled in colored helixes before
them.
"That woman–your birthmother. What happened to
her?"
"She wanted to take me away, of course–to some haramlek on
another world, just as she’d been planning all along. My father was
just a toy to her. As soon as their ship returned, she started
making plans, issuing contracts. There was a long legal dispute with
my father. I was placed in a birthsac, in stasis."
"And your father won?"
Kalal scowled. "He took me here, anyway. Which is winning
enough."
There were many other questions about this story that Jalila
wanted to ask Kalal, if she hadn’t already pressed too far. What,
after all, did this tale of dispute and deception have to do with
love? And were Kalal and Ibra really fugitives? It would explain
quite a lot. Once more, in that familiar welling, she felt sorry for
him. Men were such strange, sad creatures; forever fighting, angry,
lost. . . .
"I’m glad you’re here anyway," she said. Then, on
impulse, one of those careless things you do, she took that rough
and ugly chin in her hand, turned his face toward hers and kissed
him lightly on the lips.
"What was that for?"
"El-hamdu-l-Illah. That was for thanks."
They plodded further on their hayawans. They came eventually
to a cliff-edge so high that the sea and sky above and beneath
vanished. Jalila already knew what they would see as they made their
way along it, but still it was a shock; that qasr, thrust into these
teeming ribbons of sand. The winds whooped and howled, and the
hayawans raised their heads and howled back at it. In this grinding
atmosphere, Jalila could see how the qasrs had been carved over long
years from pure natural rock. They dismounted, and struggled
bent-backed across the narrowing track toward the qasr’s studded
door. Jalila raised her fist and beat on it.
She glanced back at Kalal, but his face was entirely hidden
beneath his hood. Had they always intended to come here? But they
had traveled too far to do otherwise now; Robin and Abu were tired
and near-blinded; they all needed rest and shelter. She beat on the
door again, but the sound was lost in the booming storm. Perhaps the
tariqua had left with the last of the Season of Rockets, just as had
most of the aliens. Jalila was about to turn away when the door, as
if thrown wide by the wind, blasted open. There was no one on the
other side, and the hallway beyond was dark as the bottom of a dry
well. Robin hoiked her head back and howled and resisted as Jalila
hauled her in. Kalal with Abu followed. The door, with a massive
drumbeat, hammered itself shut behind them. Of course, it was only
some old mechanism of this house, but Jalila felt the hairs on the
nape of her neck rise.
They hobbled the hayawans beside the largest of the scalloped
arches, and walked on down the passageway beyond. The wind was still
with them, and the shapes of the pillars were like the swirling
helixes of sand made solid. It was hard to tell what parts of this
place had been made by the hands of women and what was entirely
natural. If the qasr had seemed deserted in the heat of summer, it
was entirely abandoned now. A scatter of glass windchimes, torn
apart by the wind. A few broken plates. Some flapping cobwebs of
tapestry.
Kalal pulled Jalila’s hand.
"Let’s go back. . . . "
But there was greater light ahead, the shadows of the
speeding sky. Here was the courtyard where they had glimpsed the
tariqua. She had plainly gone now–the fountain was dry and clogged,
the bushes were bare tangles of wire. They walked out beneath the
tiled arches, looking around. The wind was like a million voices,
rising in ululating chorus. This was a strange and empty place;
somehow dangerous. . . . Jalila span around. The tariqua was
standing there, her robes flapping. With insect fingers, she
beckoned.
"Are you leaving?" Jalila asked. "I mean, this place. . . .
"
The tariqua had led them into the shelter of a tall,
wind-echoing chamber set with blue and white tiles. There were a few
rugs and cushions scattered on the floor, but still the sense of
abandonment remained. As if, Jalila thought, as the tariqua folded
herself on the floor and gestured that they join her, this was her
last retreat.
"No, Jalila. I won’t be leaving Habara. Itfaddal. . . .
Do sit down."
They stepped from their sandals and obeyed. Jalila couldn’t
quite remember now whether Kalal had encountered the tariqua on her
visit to their haramlek, although it seemed plain from his stares at
her, and the way her grey-white gaze returned them, that they knew
of each other in some way. Coffee was brewing in the corner, over a
tiny blue spirit flame, which, as it fluttered in the many drafts,
would have taken hours to heat anything. Yet the spout of the brass
pot was steaming. And there were dates, too, and nuts and seeds. The
tariqua, apologizing for her inadequacy as a host, nevertheless
insisted that they help themselves. And somewhere there was a trough
of water, too, for their hayawans, and a basket of acram
leaves.
Uneasily, they sipped from their cups, chewed the seeds.
Kalal had picked up a chipped lump of old stone and was playing with
it nervously. Jalila couldn’t quite see what it was.
"So," he said, clearing his throat, "you’ve been to and from
the stars, have you?"
"As have you. Perhaps you could name the planet? It may have
been somewhere that we have both visited. . . . "
Kalal swallowed. His lump of old stone clicked the floor. A
spindle of wind played chill on Jalila’s neck. Then–she didn’t know
how it began–the tariqua was talking of Ghezirah, the great and
fabled city that lay at the center of all the Ten Thousand and One
Worlds. No one Jalila had ever met or heard of had ever visited
Ghezirah, not even Nayra’s mothers–yet this tariqua talked of it as
if she knew it well. Before, Jalila had somehow imagined the tariqua
trailing from planet to distant planet with dull cargoes of ore and
biomass in her ship’s holds. To her mind, Ghezirah had always been
more than half-mythical–a place from which a dubious historical
figure such as the Blessed Joanna might easily emanate, but
certainly not a place composed of solid streets upon which the
gnarled and bony feet of this old woman might once have walked. . .
.
Ghezirah . . . she could see it now in her mind, smell the
shadowy lobbies, see the ever-climbing curve of its mezzanines and
rooftops vanishing into the impossible greens of the Floating Ocean.
But every time Jalila’s vision seemed about to solidify, the tariqua
said something else that made it tremble and change. And then the
tariqua said the strangest thing of all, which was that the City At
The End Of All Roads was actually alive. Not alive in the
meager sense in which every town has a sort of life, but truly
living. The city thought. It grew. It responded. There was no
central mind or focus to this consciousness, because Ghezirah
itself, its teeming streets and minarets and rivers and
caleches and its many millions of lives, was itself the mind. . .
.
Jalila was awestruck, but Kalal seemed unimpressed, and was
still playing with that old lump of stone.
4.
"Jalilaneen. . . . "
The way bondmother Lya said her name made Jalila look up.
Somewhere in her throat, a wary nerve started ticking. They took
their meals inside now, in the central courtyard of the haramlek,
which Pavo had provided with a translucent roofing to let in a
little of what light there was in the evenings’ skies, and keep out
most of the wind. Still, as Jalila took a sip of steaming hibiscus,
she was sure that the sand had gotten into something.
"We’ve been talking. Things have come up–ideas about which
we’d like to seek your opinion. . . . "
In other words, Jalila thought, her gaze traveling across her
three mothers, you’ve decided something. And this is how you tell
me–by pretending that you’re consulting me. It had been the same
with leaving Tabuthal. It was always the same. An old ghost of
herself got up at that point, threw down her napkin, stalked off up
to her room. But the new Jalila remained seated. She even smiled and
tried to look encouraging.
"We’ve seen so little of this world," Lya continued. "All of
us, really. And especially since we had you. It’s been marvelous.
But, of course, it’s also been confining. . . . Oh no–" Lya
waved the idea away quickly, before anyone could even begin to start
thinking it. "–we won’t be leaving our haramlek and Al Janb. There
are many things to do. New bonds and friendships have been made.
Ananke and I won’t be leaving, anyway. . . . But Pavo . . . " And
here Lya, who could never quite stop being the chair of a committee,
gave a nod toward her mate. ". . . Pavo here has dec–expressed a
wish–that she would like to travel."
"Travel?" Jalila leaned forward, her chin resting on her
knuckles. "How?"
Pavo gave her plate a half turn. "By boat seems the best way
to explore Habara. With such a big ocean . . . " She turned the
plate again, as if to demonstrate.
"And not just a boat," Ananke put in encouragingly. "A
brand new ship. We’re having it built–"
"–But I thought you said you hadn’t yet decided?"
"The contract, I think, is still being prepared," Lya
explained. "And much of the craft will be to Pavo’s own
design."
"Will you be building it yourself ?"
"Not alone." Pavo gave another of her flustered smiles. "I’ve
asked Ibra to help me. He seems to be the best, the most
knowledgeable–"
"–Ibra? Does he have any references?"
"This is Al Janb, Jalila," Lya said. "We know and
trust people. I’d have thought that, with your friendship with
Kalal. . . . "
"This certainly is Al Janb. . . . " Jalila sat back.
"How can I ever forget it!" All of her mothers’ eyes were on her.
Then something broke. She got up and stormed off to her
room.
The long ride to the tariqua’s qasr, the swish of the wind,
and banging three times on the old oak door. Then hobbling Robin and
hurrying through dusty corridors to that tall tiled chamber, and
somehow expecting no one to be there, even though Jalila had now
come here several times alone.
But the tariqua was always there. Waiting.
Between them now, there was much to be said.
"This ant, Jalila, which crawls across this sheet of paper
from here to there. She is much like us as we crawl
across the surface of this planet. Even if she had the wings some of
her kind sprout, just as I have my caleche, it would still be the
same." The tiny creature, waving feelers, was plainly lost. A black
dot. Jalila understood how it felt. "But say, if we were to fold
both sides of the paper together. You see how she moves now. . . ?"
The ant, antennae waving, hesitant, at last made the tiny jump. "We
can move more quickly from one place to another by not travelling
across the distance that separates us from it, but by folding space
itself.
"Imagine now, Jalila, that this universe is not one thing
alone, one solitary series of this following that, but
an endless branching of potentialities. Such it has been since the
Days of Creation, and such it is even now, in the shuffle of that
leaf as the wind picks at it, in the rising steam of your coffee.
Every moment goes in many ways. Most are poor, half-formed things,
the passing thoughts and whims of the Almighty. They hang there and
they die, never to be seen again. But others branch as strongly as
this path that we find ourselves following. There are universes
where you and I have never sat here in this qasr. There are
universes where there is no Jalila. . . . Will you get that for me.
. . ?"
The tariqua was pointing to an old book in a far corner. Its
leather was cracked, the wind lifted its pages. As she took it from
her, Jalila felt the hot brush of the old woman’s hand.
"So now, you must imagine that there is not just one sheet of
a single universe, but many, as in this book, heaped invisibly above
and beside and below the page upon which we find ourselves crawling.
In fact . . . " The ant recoiled briefly, sensing the strange heat
of the tariqua’s fingers, then settled on the open pages. "You must
imagine shelf after shelf, floor upon floor of books, the aisles of
an infinite library. And if we are to fold this one page, you see,
we or the ant never quite knows what lies on the other side of it.
And there may be a tear in that next page as well. It may even be
that another version of ourselves has already torn it."
Despite its worn state, the book looked potentially valuable,
hand-written in a beautiful flowing script. Jalila had to wince when
the tariqua’s fingers ripped through them. But the ant had vanished
now. She was somewhere between the book’s pages. . . .
"That, Jalila, is the Pain of Distance–the sense of every
potentiality. So that womankind may pass over the spaces between the
stars, every tariqua must experience it." The wind gave an extra
lunge, flipping the book shut. Jalila reached forward, but the
tariqua, quick for once, was ahead of her. Instead of opening the
book to release the ant, she weighed it down with the same chipped
old stone with which Kalal had played on his solitary visit to this
qasr.
"Now, perhaps, my Jalila, you begin to
understand?"
The stone was old, chipped, grey-green. It was inscribed, and
had been carved with the closed wings of a beetle. Here was
something from a world so impossibly old and distant as to make the
book upon which it rested seem fresh and new as an unbudded leaf–a
scarab, shaped for the Queens of Egypt.
"See here, Jalila. See how it grows. The
breathmoss?"
This was the beginning of the Season of Autumns. The trees
were beautiful; the forests were on fire with their leaves. Jalila
had been walking with Pavo, enjoying the return of the birdsong, and
wondering why it was that this new season felt sad when everything
around her seemed to be changing and growing.
"Look. . . . "
The breathmoss, too, had turned russet-gold. Leaning close to
it beneath this tranquil sky, which was composed of a blue so pale
it was as if the sea had been caught in reflection inside an
upturned white bowl, was like looking into the arms of a miniature
forest.
"Do you think it will die?"
Pavo leaned beside her. "Jalila, it should have died long
ago. Inshallah, it is a small miracle." There were the three
dead marks where Ananke had touched it in a Season of Long Ago. "You
see how frail it is, and yet . . . "
"At least it won’t spread and take over the
planet."
"Not for a while, at least."
On another rock lay another small colony. Here, too, oddly
enough, there were marks. Five large dead dots, as if made by the
outspread of a hand, although the shape of it was too big to have
been Ananke’s. They walked on. Evening was coming. Their shadows
were lengthening. Although the sun was shining and the waves
sparkled, Jalila wished that she had put on something warmer than a
shawl.
"That tariqua. You seem to enjoy her
company. . . . "
Jalila nodded. When she was with the old woman, she felt at
last as if she was escaping the confines of Al Janb. It was
liberating, after the close life in this town and with her mothers
in their haramlek, to know that interstellar space truly existed,
and then to feel, as the tariqua spoke of Gateways, momentarily like
that ant, infinitely small and yet somehow inching, crawling across
the many universes’ infinite pages. But how could she express this?
Even Pavo wouldn’t understand.
"How goes the boat?" she asked instead.
Pavo slipped her arm into to crook of Jalila’s and hugged
her. "You must come and see! I have the plan in my head, but
I’d never realized quite how big it would be. And complex. Ibra’s
full of enthusiasm."
"I can imagine!"
The sea flashed. The two women chuckled.
"The way the ship’s designed, Jalila, there’s more than
enough room for others. I never exactly planned to go alone, but
then Lya’s Lya. And Ananke’s always–"
Jalila gave her mother’s arm a squeeze. "I know what you’re
saying."
"I’d be happy if you came, Jalila. I’d understand if you
didn’t. This is such a beautiful, wonderful planet. The
leviathans–we know so little about them, yet they plainly have
intelligence, just as all those old myths say."
"You’ll be telling me next about the qasrs. . . .
"
"The ones we can see near here are nothing! There are
islands on the ocean that are entirely made from them. And the wind
pours through. They sing endlessly. A different song for every mood
and season."
"Moods! If I’d said something like that when you were
teaching me of the Pillars of Life, you’d have told me I was being
unscientific!"
"Science is about wonder, Jalila. I was a poor teacher
if I never told you that."
"You did." Jalila turned to kiss Pavo’s forehead. "You did. .
. . "
Pavo’s ship was a fine thing. Between the slipways and the
old mooring posts, where the red-flapping geelies quarreled over
scraps of dying tideflower, it grew and grew. Golden-hulled. Far
sleeker and bigger than even the ferries that had once borne Al
Janb’s visitors to and from the rocket port, and which now squatted
on the shingle nearby, gently rusting. It was the talk of the
Season. People came to admire its progress.
As Jalila watched the spars rise over the clustered roofs of
the fisherwomen’s houses, she was reminded of Kalal’s tale of his
father and his nameless mother, and that ship that they had made
together in the teeming dockyards of that city. Her thoughts
blurred. She saw the high balconies of a hotel far bigger than any
of Al Janb’s inns and boarding houses. She saw a darker, brighter
ocean. Strange flesh upon flesh, with the windows open to the
oil-and-salt breeze, the white lace curtains rising, falling. . .
.
The boat grew, and Jalila visited the tariqua, although back
in Al Janb, her thoughts sometimes trailed after Kalal as she
wondered how it must be–to be male, like the last dodo, and trapped
in some endless state of part-arousal, like a form of nagging worry.
Poor Kalal. But his life certainly wasn’t lonely. The first time
Jalila noticed him at the center of the excited swarm of girls that
once again surrounded Nayra, she’d almost thought that she was
seeing things. But the gossip was loud and persistent. Kalal and
Nayra were a couple–the phrase normally followed by a
scandalized shriek, a hand-covered mouth. Jalila could only guess
what the proud mothers of Nayra’s haramlek thought of such a union,
but, of course, no one could subscribe to outright prejudice. Kalal
was, after all, just another human being. Lightly probing her own
mothers’ attitudes, she found the usual condescending tolerance.
Having sexual relations with a male would be like smoking kif, or
drinking alcohol, or any other form of slightly aberrant adolescent
behavior; to be tolerated with easy smiles and sympathy, as long as
it didn’t go on for too long. To be treated, in fact, in much the
same manner as her mothers were now treating her regular visits to
the tariqua.
Jalila came to understand why people thought of the Season of
Autumns as a sad time. The chill nights. The morning fogs that
shrouded the bay. The leaves, finally falling, piled into rotting
heaps. The tideflower beds, also, were dying as the waves pulled and
dismantled what remained of their colors, and they drifted to the
shores, the flowers bearing the same stench and texture and color as
upturned clay. The geelies were dying as well. In the town, to
compensate, there was much bunting and celebration for yet another
moulid, but to Jalila the brightness seemed feeble–the flame of a
match held against winter’s gathering gale. Still, she sometimes
wandered the old markets with some of her old curiosity,
nostalgically touching the flapping windsilks, studying the faces
and nodding at the many she now knew, although her thoughts were
often literally light-years away. The Pain of Distance; she
could feel it. Inwardly, she was thrilled and afraid. Her mothers
and everyone else, caught up in the moulid and Pavo’s coming
departure, imagined from her mood that she had now decided to take
that voyage with her. She deceived Kalal in much the same
way.
The nights became clearer. Riding back from the qasr one dark
evening with the tariqua’s slight voice ringing in her ears, the
stars seemed to hover closer around her than at any time since she
had left Tabuthal. She could feel the night blossoming, its
emptiness and the possibilities spinning out to infinity. She felt
both like crying, and like whooping for joy. She had dared to ask
the tariqua the question she had long been formulating, and the
answer, albeit not entirely yes, had not been no. She talked to
Robin as they bobbed along, and the puny yellow smudge of Al Janb
drew slowly closer. You must understand, she told her hayawan, that
the core of the Almighty is like the empty place between these
stars, around which they all revolve. It is there, we know
it, but we can never see it. . . . She sang songs from the
old saharas about the joy of loneliness, and the loneliness of joy.
From here, high up on the gradually descending road that wound its
way down toward her haramlek, the horizon was still distant enough
for her to see the lights of the rocketport. It was like a huge
tidebed, holding out as the season changed. And there at the center
of it, rising golden, no longer a stumpy silo-shaped object but
somehow beautiful, was the last of the year’s rockets. It would have
to rise from Habara before the coming of the Season of
Winters.
Her mothers’ anxious faces hurried around her in the
lamplight as she led Robin toward the stable.
"Where have you been, Jalilaneen?"
"Do you know what time it is?"
"We should be in the town already!"
For some reason, they were dressed in their best, most formal
robes. Their palms were hennaed and scented. They bustled Jalila out
of her gritty clothes, practically washed and dressed her, then
flapped themselves down the serraplate road into town, where the
processions had already started. Still, they were there in plenty of
time to witness the blessing of Pavo’s ship. It was to be called
Endeavor, and Pavo and Jalila together smashed the bottle of
wine across its prow before it rumbled into the nightblack waters of
the harbor with an enormous white splash. Everyone cheered. Pavo
hugged Jalila.
There were more bottles of the same frothy wine available at
the party afterward. Lya, with her usual thoroughness, had ordered a
huge case of the stuff, although many of the guests remembered the
Prophet’s old injunction and avoided imbibing. Ibra, though, was
soon even more full of himself than usual, and went around the big
marquee with a bottle in each hand, dancing clumsily with anyone who
was foolish enough to come near him. Jalila drank a little of the
stuff herself. The taste was sweet, but oddly hot and bitter. She
filled up another glass.
"Wondered what you two mariners were going to call that boat.
. . . "
It was Kalal. He’d been dancing with many of the girls, and
he looked almost as red-faced as his father.
"Bet you don’t even know what the first Endeavor
was."
"You’re wrong there," Jalila countered primly, although the
simple words almost fell over each other as she tried to say them.
"It was the spacecraft of Captain Cook. She was one of urrearth’s
most famous early explorers."
"I thought you were many things," Kalal countered, angry for
no apparent reason. "But I never thought you were
stupid."
Jalila watched him walk away. The dance had gathered up its
beat. Ibra had retreated to sit, foolishly glum, in a corner, and
Nayra had moved to the middle of the floor, her arms raised,
bracelets jingling, an opal jewel at her belly, windsilk-draped hips
swaying. Jalila watched. Perhaps it was the drink, but for the first
time in many a Season, she felt a slight return of that old erotic
longing as she watched Nayra swaying. Desire was the strangest of
all emotions. It seemed so trivial when you weren’t possessed of it,
and yet when you were possessed, it was as if all the secrets of the
universe were waiting. . . . Nayra was the focus of all attention
now as she swayed amid the crowd, her shoulders glistening. She
danced before Jalila, and her languorous eyes fixed her for a moment
before she danced on. Now she was dancing with Kalal, and he was
swaying with her, her hands laid upon his shoulders, and everyone
was clapping. They made a fine couple. But the music was getting
louder, and so were people’s voices. Her head was pounding. She left
the marquee.
She welcomed the harshness of the night air, the clear
presence of the stars. Even the stench of the rotting tideflowers
seemed appropriate as she picked her way across the ropes and
slipways of the beach. So much had changed since she had first come
here–but mostly what had changed had been herself. Here, its shape
unmistakable as rising Walah spread her faint blue light across the
ocean, was Kalal’s boat. She sat down on the gunwale. The cold wind
bit into her. She heard the crunch of shingle, and imagined it was
someone else who was in need of solitude. But the sound grew closer,
and then whoever it was sat down on the boat beside her. She didn’t
need to look up now. Kalal’s smell was always different, and now he
was sweating from the dancing.
"I thought you were enjoying yourself," she
muttered.
"Oh–I was . . . " The emphasis on the was was
strong.
They sat there for a long time, in windy, wave-crashing
silence. It was almost like being alone. It was like the old days of
their being together.
"So you’re going, are you?" Kalal asked
eventually.
"Oh, yes."
"I’m pleased for you. It’s a fine boat, and I like Pavo best
of all your mothers. You haven’t seemed quite so happy lately here
in Al Janb. Spending all that time with that old witch in the
qasr."
"She’s not a witch. She’s a tariqua. It’s one of the
greatest, oldest callings. Although I’m surprised you’ve had time to
notice what I’m up to, anyway. You and Nayra . . . "
Kalal laughed, and the wind made the sound turn
bitter.
"I’m sorry," Jalila continued. "I’m sounding just like those
stupid gossips. I know you’re not like that. Either of you. And I’m
happy for you both. Nayra’s sweet and talented and entirely lovely .
. . I hope it lasts . . . I hope . . . "
After another long pause, Kalal said, "Seeing as we’re
apologizing, I’m sorry I got cross with you about the name of that
boat you’ll be going on–the Endeavor. It’s a good
name."
"Thank you. El-hamadu-l-illah."
"In fact, I could only think of one better one, and I’m glad
you and Pavo didn’t use it. You know what they say. To have two
ships with the same name confuses the spirits of the winds. . . .
"
"What are you talking about, Kalal?"
"This boat. You’re sitting right on it. I thought you might
have noticed."
Jalila glanced down at the prow, which lay before her in the
moonlight, pointing toward the silvered waves. From this angle, and
in the old naskhi script that Kalal had used, it took her a moment
to work out the craft’s name. Something turned inside
her.
Breathmoss.
In white, moonlit letters.
"I’m sure there are better names for a boat," she said
carefully. "Still, I’m flattered."
"Flattered?" Kalal stood up. She couldn’t really see his
face, but she suddenly knew that she’d once again said the wrong
thing. He waved his hands in an odd shrug, and he seemed for a
moment almost ready to lean close to her–to do something
unpredictable and violent–but instead, picking up stones and
skimming them hard into the agitated waters, he walked
away.
Pavo was right. If not about love–which Jalila knew now that
she still waited to experience–then at least about the major
decisions of your life. There was never quite a beginning to them,
although your mind often sought for such a thing.
When the tariqua’s caleche emerged out of the newly teeming
rain one dark evening a week or so after the naming of the
Endeavor, and settled itself before the lights of their
haramlek, and the old woman herself emerged, somehow still dry, and
splashed across the puddled garden while her three mothers flustered
about to find the umbrella they should have thought to look for
earlier, Jalila still didn’t know what she should be thinking. The
four women would, in any case, need to talk alone; Jalila recognized
that. For once, after the initial greetings, she was happy to
retreat to her dreamtent.
But her mind was still in turmoil. She was suddenly terrified
that her mothers would actually agree to this strange proposition,
and then that, out of little more than embarrassment and obligation,
the rest of her life would be bound to something that the tariqua
called the Church of the Gateway. She knew so little. The tariqua
talked only in riddles. She could be a fraud, for all Jalila knew–or
a witch, just as Kalal insisted. Thoughts swirled about her like the
rain. To make the time disappear, she tried searching the knowledge
of her dreamtent. Lying there, listening to the rising sound of her
mothers’ voices, which seemed to be studded endlessly with the
syllables of her own name, Jalila let the personalities who had
guided her through the many Pillars of Wisdom tell her what they
knew about the Church of the Gateway.
She saw the blackness of planetary space, swirled with the
mica dots of turning planets. Almost as big as those as she zoomed
close to it, yet looking disappointingly like a many-angled version
of the rocketport, lay the spacestation, and, within it, the
junction that could lead you from here to there
without passing across the distance between. A huge rent in the Book
of Life, composed of the trapped energies of those things the
tariqua called cosmic strings, although they and the Gateway itself
were visible as nothing more than a turning ring near to the center
of the vast spacestation, where occasionally, as Jalila watched,
crafts of all possible shapes would seem to hang, then vanish. The
gap she glimpsed inside seemed no darker than that which hung
between the stars behind it, but it somehow hurt to stare at it.
This, then, was the core of the mystery; something both plain and
extraordinary. We crawl across the surface of this universe like
ants, and each of these craft, switching through the Gateway’s
moment of loss and endless potentiality, is piloted by the will of a
tariqua’s conscious intelligence, which must glimpse those choices,
then somehow emerge sane and entire at the other end of everything.
. . .
Jalila’s mind returned to the familiar scents and shapes of
her dreamtent, and the sounds of the rain. The moment seemed to
belong with those of the long-ago Season of Soft Rains. Downstairs,
there were no voices. As she climbed out from her dreamtent, warily
expecting to find the haramlek leaking and half-finished, Jalila was
struck by an idea that the tariqua hadn’t quite made plain to her;
that a Gateway must push through time just as easily as it
pushes through every other dimension. . . ! But the rooms of the
haramlek were finely furnished, and her three mothers and the
tariqua were sitting in the rainswept candlelight of the courtyard,
waiting.
With any lesser request, Lya always quizzed Jalila before she
would even consider granting it. So as Jalila sat before her mothers
and tried not to tremble in their presence, she wondered how she
could possibly explain her ignorance of this pure, boundless
mystery.
But Lya simply asked Jalila if this was what she wanted–to be
an acolyte of the Church of the Gateway.
"Yes."
Jalila waited. Then, not even, are you sure? They’d
trusted her less than this when they’d sent her on errands into Al
Janb. . . . It was still raining. The evening was starless and dark.
Her three mothers, having hugged her, but saying little else,
retreated to their own dreamtents and silences, leaving Jalila to
say farewell to the tariqua alone. The heat of the old woman’s hand
no longer came as a surprise to Jalila as she helped her up from her
chair and away from the sheltered courtyard.
"Well," the tariqua croaked, "that didn’t seem to go so
badly."
"But I know so little!" They were standing on the
patio at the dripping edge of the night. Wet streamers of wind
tugged at them.
"I know you wish I could tell you more, Jalila–but then,
would it make any difference?"
Jalila shook her head. "Will you come with me?"
"Habara is where I must stay, Jalila. It is
written."
"But I’ll be able to return?"
"Of course. But you must remember that you can never return
to the place you have left." The tariqua fumbled with her clasp, the
one of a worm consuming its tail. "I want you to have this." It was
made of black ivory, and felt as hot as the old woman’s flesh as
Jalila took it. For once, not really caring whether she broke her
bones, she gave the small, bird-like woman a hug. She smelled of
dust and metal, like an antique box left forgotten on a sunny
windowledge. Jalila helped her out down the steps into the rainswept
garden.
"I’ll come again soon," she said, "to the qasr."
"Of course . . . there are many arrangements." The tariqua
opened the dripping filigree door of her caleche and peered at her
with those half-blind eyes. Jalila waited. They had stood too long
in the rain already.
"Yes?"
"Don’t be too hard on Kalal."
Puzzled, Jalila watched the caleche rise and turn away from
the lights of the haramlek.
Jalila moved warily through the sharded glass of her own and
her mothers’ expectations. It was agreed that a message concerning
her be sent, endorsed by the full long and ornate formal name of the
tariqua, to the body that did indeed call itself the Church of the
Gateway. It went by radio pulse to the spacestation in wide solar
orbit that received Habara’s rockets, and was then passed on inside
a vessel from here to there that was piloted by a
tariqua. Not only that, but the message was destined for Ghezirah!
Riding Robin up to the cliffs where, in this newly clear autumn air,
under grey skies and tearing wet wind, she could finally see the
waiting fuselage of that last golden rocket, Jalila felt confused
and tiny, huge and mythic. It was agreed though, that for the sake
of everyone–and not least Jalila herself, should she change her
mind–that the word should remain that she was traveling out around
the planet with Pavo on board the Endeavor. In need of
something to do when she wasn’t brooding, and waiting for further
word from (could it really be?) the sentient city of Ghezirah,
Jalila threw herself into the listings and loadings and preparations
with convincing enthusiasm.
"The hardest decisions, once made, are often the best
ones."
"Compared to what you’ll be doing, my little journey seems
almost pointless."
"We love you so deeply."
Then the message finally came: an acknowledgement; an
acceptance; a few (far too few, it seemed) particulars of the
arrangements and permissions necessary for such a journey. All on
less than half a sheet of plain two-dimensional printout.
Even Lya had started touching and hugging her at every
opportunity.
Jalila ate lunch with Kalal and Nayra. She surprised herself
and talked gaily at first of singing islands and sea-leviathans,
somehow feeling that she was hiding little from her two best friends
but the particular details of the journey she was undertaking. But
Jalila was struck by the coldness that seemed to lie between these
two supposed lovers. Nayra, perhaps sensing from bitter experience
that she was once again about to be rejected, seemed near-tearful
behind her dazzling smiles and the flirtatious blonde tossings of
her hair, while Kalal seemed . . . Jalila had no idea how he seemed,
but she couldn’t let it end like this, and concocted some queries
about the Endeavor so that she could lead him off alone as
they left the bar. Nayra, perhaps fearing something else entirely,
was reluctant to leave them.
"I wonder what it is that we’ve both done to her?" Kalal
sighed as they watched her give a final sideways wave, pause, and
then turn reluctantly down a sidestreet with a most un-Nayran duck
of her lovely head.
They walked toward the harbor through a pause in the rain, to
where the Endeavor was waiting.
"Lovely, isn’t she?" Kalal murmured as they stood looking
down at the long deck, then up at the high forest of spars. Pavo,
who was developing her acquaintance with the ship’s mind, gave them
a wave from the bubble of the forecastle. "How long do you think
your journey will take? You should be back by early spring, I
calculate, if you get ahead of the icebergs. . . . "
Jalila fingered the brooch that the tariqua had given her,
and which she had taken to wearing at her shoulder in the place
where she had once worn the tideflower. It was like black ivory, but
set with tiny white specks that loomed at your eyes if you held it
close. She had no idea what world it was from, or of the substance
of which it was made.
". . . You’ll miss the winter here. But perhaps that’s no bad
thing. It’s cold, and there’ll be other Seasons on the ocean. And
there’ll be other winters. Well, to be honest, Jalila, I’d been
hoping–"
"–Look!" Jalila interrupted, suddenly sick of the lie she’d
been living. "I’m not going."
They turned and were facing each other by the harbor’s edge.
Kalal’s strange face twisted into surprise, and then something like
delight. Jalila thought that he was looking more and more like his
father. "That’s marvelous!" He clasped each of Jalila’s arms and
squeezed her hard enough to hurt. "It was rubbish, by the way, what
I just said about winters here in Al Janb. They’re the most magical,
wonderful season. We’ll have snowball fights together! And when Eid
al-Fitr comes . . . "
His voice trailed off. His hands dropped from her. "What is
it, Jalila?"
"I’m not going with Pavo on the Endeavor, but I’m
going away. I’m going to Ghezirah. I’m going to study under the
Church of the Gateway. I’m going to try to become a
tariqua."
His face twisted again. "That witch–"
"–don’t keep calling her that! You have no idea!"
Kalal balled his fists, and Jalila stumbled back, fearing for
a moment that this wild, odd creature might actually be about to
strike her. But he turned instead, and ran off from the
harbor.
Next morning, to no one’s particular surprise, it was once
again raining. Jalila felt restless and disturbed after her
incomplete exchanges with Kalal. Some time had also passed since the
message had been received from Ghezirah, and the few small details
it had given of her journey had become vast and complicated and
frustrating in their arranging. Despite the weather, she decided to
ride out to see the tariqua.
Robin’s mood had been almost as odd
as her mothers, recently, and she moaned and snickered at Jalila
when she entered the stables. Jalila called back to her, and stroked
her long nose, trying to ease her agitation. It was only when she
went to check the harnesses that she realized that Abu was missing.
Lya was in the haramlek, still finishing breakfast. It had to be
Kalal who had taken her.
The swirling serraplated road. The black, dripping trees. The
agitated ocean. Robin was starting to rust again. She would need
more of Pavo’s attention. But Pavo would soon be gone too. . . . The
whole planet was changing, and Jalila didn’t know what to make of
anything, least of all what Kalal was up to, although the
unasked-for borrowing of a precious mount, even if Abu had been
virtually Kalal’s all summer, filled her with a foreboding that was
an awkward load, not especially heavy, but difficult to carry or put
down; awkward and jagged and painful. Twice, now, he had turned from
her and walked away with something unsaid. It felt like the start of
some prophecy. . . .
The qasr shone jet-black in the teeming rain. The studded
door, straining to overcome the swelling damp, burst open more
forcefully than usual at Jalila’s third knock, and the air inside
swirled dark and empty. No sign of Abu in the place beyond the porch
where Kalal would probably have hobbled him, although the floor here
seemed muddied and damp, and Robin was agitated. Jalila glanced
back, but she and her hayawan had already obscured the possible
signs of another’s presence. Unlike Kalal, who seemed to notice many
things, she decided that she made a poor detective.
Cold air stuttered down the passageways. Jalila, chilled and
watchful, had grown so used to this qasr’s sense of abandonment that
it was impossible to tell whether the place was now finally empty.
But she feared that it was. Her thoughts and footsteps whispered to
her that the tariqua, after ruining her life and playing with her
expectations, had simply vanished into a puff of lost
potentialities. Already disappointed, angry, she hurried to the
high-ceilinged room set with blue and white tiles and found, with no
great surprise, that the strewn cushions were cold and damp, the
coffee lamp was unlit, and that the book through which that patient
ant had crawled was now sprawled in a damp-leafed scatter of torn
pages. There was no sign of the scarab. Jalila sat down, and
listened to the wind’s howl, the rain’s ticking, wondering for a
long time when it was that she had lost the ability to
cry.
Finally, she stood up and moved toward the courtyard. It was
colder today than it had ever been, and the rain had greyed and
thickened. It gelled and dripped from the gutters in the form of
something she supposed was called sleet, and which she
decided as it splattered down her neck that she would hate forever.
It filled the bowl of the fountain with mucus-like slush, and
trickled sluggishly along the lines of the drains. The air was full
of weepings and howlings. In the corner of the courtyard, there lay
a small black heap.
Sprawled half in, half out of the poor shelter of the arched
cloisters, more than ever like a flightless bird, the tariqua lay
dead. Her clothes were sodden. All the furnace heat had gone from
her body, although, on a day such as this, that would take no more
than a matter of moments. Jalila glanced up though the sleet toward
the black wet stone of the latticed mashrabiya from which she and
Kalal had first spied on the old woman, but she was sure now that
she was alone. People shrank incredibly when they were dead–even a
figure as frail and old as this creature had been. And yet, Jalila
found as she tried to move the tariqua’s remains out of the rain,
their spiritless bodies grew uncompliant; heavier and stupider than
clay. The tariqua’s face rolled up toward her. One side was pushed
in almost unrecognizably, and she saw that a nearby nest of ants
were swarming over it, busily tunneling out the moisture and
nutrition, bearing it across the smeared paving as they stored up
for the long winter ahead.
There was no sign of the scarab.
5.
This, for Jalila and her mothers, was the Season of
Farewells. It was the Season of Departures.
There was a small and pretty onion-domed mausoleum on a
headland overlooking Al Janb, and the pastures around it were a
popular place for picnics and lovers’ trysts in the Season of
Summers, although they were scattered with tombstones. It was the
ever-reliable Lya who saw to the bathing and shrouding of the
tariqua’s body, which was something Jalila could not possibly face,
and to the sending out though the null-space between the stars of
all the necessary messages. Jalila, who had never been witness to
the processes of death before, was astonished at the speed with
which everything was arranged. As she stood with the other mourners
on a day scarfed with cloud, beside the narrow rectangle of earth
within which what remained of the tariqua now lay, she could still
hear the wind booming over the empty qasr, feel the uncompliant
weight of the old woman’s body, the chill speckle of sleet on her
face.
It seemed as if most of the population of Al Janb had made
the journey with the cortege up the narrow road from the town.
Hard-handed fisherwomen. Gaudily dressed merchants. Even the few
remaining aliens. Nayra was there, too, a beautiful vision of sorrow
surrounded by her lesser black acolytes. So was Ibra. So, even, was
Kalal. Jalila, who was acknowledged to have known the old woman
better than anyone, said a few words that she barely heard herself
over the wind. Then a priestess who had flown in specially from Ras
pronounced the usual prayers about the soul rising on the arms of
Munkar and Nakir, the blue and the black angels. Looking down into
the ground, trying hard to think of the Gardens of Delight that the
Almighty always promised her stumbling faithful, Jalila could only
remember that dream of her own burial: the soil pattering on her
face, and everyone she knew looking down at her. The tariqua, in one
of her many half-finished tales, had once spoken to her of a world
upon which no sun had ever shone, but which was nevertheless warm
and bounteous from the core of heat beneath its surface, and where
the people were all blind, and moved by touch and sound alone; it
was a joyous place, and they were forever singing. Perhaps, and
despite all the words of the Prophet, Heaven, too, was a place of
warmth and darkness.
The ceremony was finished. Everyone moved away, each pausing
to toss in a damp clod of earth, but leaving the rest of the job to
be completed by a dull-minded robotic creature, which Pavo had had
to rescue from the attentions of the younger children, who, all
though the long Habaran summer, had ridden around on it. Down at
their haramlek, Jalila’s mothers had organized a small feast. People
wandered the courtyard, and commented admiringly on the many changes
and improvements they had made to the place. Amid all this, Ibra
seemed subdued–a reluctant presence in his own body–while Kalal was
nowhere to be seen at all, although Jalila suspected that, if only
for the reasons of penance, he couldn’t be far away.
Of course, there had been shock at the news of the tariqua’s
death, and Lya, who had now become the person to whom the town most
often turned to resolve its difficulties, had taken the lead in the
inquiries that followed. A committee of wisewomen was organized even
more quickly than the funeral, and Jalila had been summoned and
interrogated. Waiting outside in the cold hallways of Al Janb’s
municipal buildings, she’d toyed with the idea of keeping Abu’s
disappearance and her suspicions of Kalal out of her story, but Lya
and the others had already spoken to him, and he’d admitted to what
sounded like everything. He’d ridden to the qasr on Abu to
remonstrate with the tariqua. He’d been angry, and his mood had been
bad. Somehow, but only lightly, he’d pushed the old woman, and she
had fallen badly. Then, he panicked. Kalal bore responsibility for
his acts, it was true, but it was accepted that the incident was
essentially an accident. Jalila, who had imagined many versions of
Kalal’s confrontation with the tariqua, but not a single one that
seemed entirely real, had been surprised at how easily the people of
Al Janb were willing to absolve him. She wondered if they would have
done so quite so easily if Kalal had not been a freak–a man. And
then she also wondered, although no one had said a single word to
suggest it, just how much she was to blame for all of this
herself.
She left the haramlek from the funeral wake and crossed the
road to the beach. Kalal was sitting on the rocks, his back turned
to the shore and the mountains. He didn’t look around when she
approached and sat down beside him. It was the first time since
before the tariqua’s death that they’d been alone.
"I’ll have to leave here," he said, still gazing out toward
the clouds that trailed the horizon.
"There’s no reason–"
"–no one’s asked me and Ibra to stay. I think they
would, don’t you, if anyone had wanted us to? That’s the way you
women work."
"We’re not you women, Kalal. We’re people."
"So you always say. And all Al Janb’s probably terrified
about the report they’ve had to make to that thing you’re
joining–the Church of the Gateway. Some big, powerful body,
and–whoops–we’ve killed one of your old employees. . . .
"
"Please don’t be bitter."
Kalal blinked and said nothing. His cheeks were
shining.
"You and Ibra–where will you both go?"
"There are plenty of other towns around this coast. We can
use our boat to take us there before the ice sets in. We can’t
afford to leave the planet. But maybe in the Season of False
Springs, when I’m a grown man and we’ve made some of the proper
money we’re always talking about making from harvesting the
tideflowers–and when word’s got around to everyone on this planet of
what happened here. Maybe then we’ll leave Habara." He shook his
head and sniffed. "I don’t know why I bother to say maybe. .
. . "
Jalila watched the waves. She wondered if this was the
destiny of all men; to wander forever from place to place, planet to
planet, pursued by the knowledge of vague crimes that they hadn’t
really committed.
"I suppose you want to know what happened?"
Jalila shook her head. "It’s in the report, Kalal. I believe
what you said."
He wiped his face with his palms, studied their wetness. "I’m
not sure I believe it myself, Jalila. The way she was, that day.
That old woman–she always seemed to be expecting you, didn’t she?
And then she seemed to know. I don’t understand quite how it
happened, and I was angry, I admit. But she almost lunged at
me. . . . She seemed to want to die. . . . "
"You mustn’t blame yourself. I brought you to this,
Kalal. I never saw . . . " Jalila shook her head. She couldn’t say.
Not even now. Her eyes felt parched and cold.
"I loved you, Jalila."
The worlds branched in a million different ways. It could all
have been different. The tariqua still alive. Jalila and Kalal
together, instead of the half-formed thing that the love they had
both felt for Nayra had briefly been. They could have taken the
Endeavor together and sailed this planet’s seas; Pavo would
probably have let them–but when, but where, but how? None of it
seemed real. Perhaps the tariqua was right; there are many worlds,
but most of them are poor, half-formed things.
Jalila and Kalal sat there for a while longer. The breathmoss
lay not far off, darkening and hardening into a carpet of stiff
grey. Neither of them noticed it.
For no other reason than the shift of the tides and the
rapidly coming winter, Pavo, Jalila, and Kalal and Ibra all left Al
Janb on the same morning. The days before were chaotic in the
haramlek. People shouted and looked around for things and grew cross
and petty. Jalila was torn between bringing everything and nothing,
and after many hours of bag-packing and lip-chewing, decided that it
could all be thrown out, and that her time would be better spent
down in the stables, with Robin. Abu was there too, of course, and
she seemed to sense the imminence of change and departure even more
than Jalila’s own hayawan. She had become Kalal’s mount far more
than she had ever been Lya’s, and he wouldn’t come to say
goodbye.
Jalila stroked the warm felt of the creatures’ noses. Gazing
into Abu’s eyes as she gazed back at hers, she remembered their
rides out in the heat of summer. Being with Kalal then, although she
hadn’t even noticed it, had been the closest she had ever come to
loving anyone. On the last night before their departure, Ananke
cooked one of her most extravagant dinners, and the four women sat
around the heaped extravagance of the table that she’d spent all day
preparing, each of them wondering what to say, and regretting how
much of these precious last times together they’d wasted. They said
a long prayer to the Almighty, and bowed in the direction of
Al’Toman. It seemed that, tomorrow, even the two mothers who weren’t
leaving Al Janb would be setting out on a new and difficult
journey.
Then there came the morning, and the weather obliged with
chill sunlight and a wind that pushed hard at their cloaks and
nudged the Endeavor away from the harbor even before her
sails were set. They all watched her go, the whole town cheering and
waving as Pavo waved back, looking smaller and neater and prettier
than ever as she receded. Without ceremony, around the corner from
the docks, out of sight and glad of the Endeavor’s
distraction, Ibra and Kalal were also preparing to leave. At a run,
Jalila caught them just as they were starting to shift the hull down
the rubbled slipway into the waves. Breathmoss; she noticed
that Kalal had kept the name, although she and he stood apart on
that final beach and talked as two strangers.
She shook hands with Ibra. She kissed Kalal lightly on the
cheek by leaning stiffly forward, and felt the roughness of his
stubble. Then the craft got stuck on the slipway, and they were all
heaving to get her moving the last few meters into the ocean, until,
suddenly, she was afloat, and Ibra was raising the sails, and Kalal
was at the prow, hidden behind the tarpaulined weight of their
belongings. Jalila only glimpsed him once more, and by then
Breathmoss had turned to meet the stronger currents that
swept outside the grey bay. He could have been a
figurehead.
Back at the dock, her mothers were pacing,
anxious.
"Where have you been?"
"Do you know what time is?"
Jalila let them scald her. She was almost late for her
own leaving. Although most of the crowds had departed, she’d half
expected Nayra to be there. Jalila was momentarily saddened, and
then she was glad for her. The silver craft that would take her to
the rocketport smelled disappointingly of engine fumes as she
clambered into it with the few other women and aliens who were
leaving Habara. There was a loud bang as the hatches closed, and
then a long wait while nothing seemed to happen, and she could only
wave at Lya and Ananke through the thick porthole, smiling and
mouthing stupid phrases until her face ached. The ferry bobbed
loose, lurched, turned, and angled up. Al Janb was half gone in
plumes of white spray already.
Then it came in a huge wave. That feeling of incompleteness,
of something vital and unknown left irretrievably behind, which is
the beginning of the Pain of Distance that Jalila, as a tariqua,
would have to face throughout her long life. A sweat came over her.
As she gazed out through the porthole at what little there was to
see of Al Janb and the mountains, it slowly resolved itself into one
thought. Immense and trivial. Vital and stupid. That scarab. She’d
never asked Kalal about it, nor found it at the qasr, and the
ancient object turned itself over in her head, sinking, spinning,
filling her mind and then dwindling before rising up again as she
climbed out, nauseous, from the ferry and crossed the clanging
gantries of the spaceport toward the last huge golden craft, which
stood steaming in the winter’s air. A murder weapon?–but no, Kalal
was no murderer. And, in any case, she was a poor detective. And yet
. . .
The rockets thrust and rumbled. Pushing back, squeezing her
eyeballs. There was no time now to think. Weight on weight, terrible
seconds piled on her. Her blood seemed to leave her face. She was a
clay-corpse. Vital elements of her senses departed. Then, there was
a huge wash of silence. Jalila turned to look through the porthole
beside her, and there it was. Mostly blue, and entirely beautiful:
Habara, her birth planet. Jalila’s hands rose up without her
willing, and her fingers squealed as she touched the glass and tried
to trace the shape of the greenish-brown coastline, the rising brown
and white of the mountains of that huge single continent that
already seemed so small, but of which she knew so little. Jewels
seemed to be hanging close before her, twinkling and floating in and
out of focus like the hazy stars she couldn’t yet see. They puzzled
her for a long time, did these jewels, and they were evasive as fish
as she sought them with her weightlessly clumsy fingers. Then Jalila
felt the salt break of moisture against her face, and realized what
it was.
At long last, she was crying.
6.
Jalila had long been expecting the message when it finally
came. At only one hundred and twenty standard years, Pavo was still
relatively young to die, but she had used her life up at a frantic
pace, as if she had always known that her time would be limited.
Even though the custom for swift funerals remained on Habara, Jalila
was able to use her position as a tariqua to ride the Gateways and
return for the service. The weather on the planet of her birth was
unpredictable as ever, raining one moment and then sunny the next,
even as she took the ferry to Al Janb from the rocketport, and hot
and cold winds seemed to strike her face as she stood on the dock’s
edge and looked about for her two remaining mothers. They embraced.
They led her to their haramlek, which seemed smaller to Jalila each
time she visited it, despite the many additions and extensions and
improvements they had made, and far closer to Al Janb than the long
walk she remembered once taking on those many errands. She wandered
the shore after dinner, and searched the twilight for a particular
shape and angle of quartz, and the signs of dark growth. But the
heights of the Season of Storms on this coastline were ferocious,
and nothing as fragile as breathmoss could have survived. She lay
sleepless that night in her old room within her dreamtent, breathing
the strong, dense, moist atmosphere with difficulty, listening to
the sound of the wind and rain.
She recognized none of the faces but her mothers’ of the
people who stood around Pavo’s grave the following morning. Al Janb
had seemed so changeless, yet even Nayra had moved on–and Kalal was
far away. Time was relentless. Far more than the wind that came in
off the bay, it chilled Jalila to the bone. One mother dead, and her
two others looking like the mahwagis she supposed they were
becoming. The Pain of Distance. More than ever now, and hour
by hour and day by day in this life that she had chosen, Jalila knew
what the old tariqua had meant. She stepped forward to say a few
words. Pavo’s life had been beautiful and complete. She had passed
on much knowledge about this planet to all womankind, just as she
had once passed on her wisdom to Jalila. The people listened
respectfully to Jalila, as if she were a priest. When the prayers
were finished and the clods of earth had been tossed and the groups
began to move back down the hillside, Jalila remained standing by
Pavo’s grave. What looked like the same old part-metal beast came
lumbering up, and began to fill in the rest of the hole, lifting and
lowering the earth with reverent, childlike care. Just as Jalila had
insisted, and despite her mothers’ puzzlement, Pavo’s grave lay
right beside the old tariqua’s whom they had buried so long ago.
This was a place that she had long avoided, but now that Jalila saw
the stone, once raw and brittle, but now smoothed and greyed by rain
and wind, she felt none of the expected agony. She traced the
complex name, scrolled in naskhi script, which she had once found
impossible to remember, but which she had now recited countless
times in the ceremonials that the Church of the Gateway demanded of
its acolytes. Sometimes, especially in the High Temple at Ghezirah,
the damn things could go on for days. Yet not one member of the
whole Church had seen fit to come to the simple ceremony of this old
woman’s burial. It had hurt her, once, to think that no one from
offworld had come to her own funeral. But now she
understood.
About to walk away, Jalila paused, and peered around the back
of the gravestone. In the lee of the wind, a soft green patch of
life was thriving. She stooped to examine the growth, which was
thick and healthy, forming a patch more than the size of her two
outstretched hands in this sheltered place. Breathmoss. It must have
been here for a long time. Yet who would have thought to bring it?
Only Pavo: only Pavo could possibly have known.
As the gathering of mourners at the haramlek started to peter
out, Jalila excused herself and went to Pavo’s quarters. Most of the
stuff up here was a mystery to her. There were machines and
nutrients and potions beyond anything you’d expect to encounter on
such an out-of-the way planet. Things were growing. Objects and data
needed developing, tending, cataloging, if Pavo’s legacy was to be
maintained. Jalila would have to speak to her mothers. But, for now,
she found what she wanted, which was little more than a glass tube
with an open end. She pocketed it, and walked back up over the hill
to the cemetery, and said another few prayers, and bent down in the
lee of the wind behind the old gravestone beside Pavo’s new patch of
earth, and managed to remove a small portion of the breathmoss
without damaging the rest of it.
That afternoon, she knew that she would have to ride out. The
stables seemed virtually unchanged, and Robin was waiting. She even
snickered in recognition of Jalila, and didn’t try to bite her when
she came to introduce the saddle. It had been such a long time that
the animal’s easy compliance seemed a small miracle. But perhaps
this was Pavo again; she could have done something to preserve the
recollection of her much-changed mistress in some circuit or synapse
of the hayawan’s memory. Snuffling tears, feeling sad and exulted,
and also somewhat uncomfortable, Jalila headed south on her hayawan
along the old serraplate road, up over the cliffs and beneath the
arms of the urrearth forest. The trees seemed different;
thicker-leafed. And the birdsong cooed slower and deeper than she
remembered. Perhaps, here in Habara, this was some Season other than
all of those that she remembered. But the qasr reared as always–out
there on the cliff face, and plainly deserted. No one came here now,
but, like Robin, the door, at three beats of her fists,
remembered.
Such neglect. Such decay. It seemed a dark and empty place.
Even before Jalila came across the ancient signs of her own future
presence–a twisted coathanger, a chipped plate, a few bleached and
rotting cushions, some odd and scattered bits of Gateway technology
that had passed beyond malfunction and looked like broken shells–she
felt lost and afraid. Perhaps this, at last, was the final moment of
knowing that she had warned herself she might have to face on
Habara. The Pain of Distance. But at the same time, she knew that
she was safe as she crawled across this particular page of her
universe, and that when she did finally take a turn beyond the
Gateways through which sanity itself could scarcely follow, it would
be of her own volition, and as an impossibly old woman. The tariqua.
Tending flowers like an old tortoise thrust out of its shell. Here,
on a sunny, distant day. There were worse things. There were always
worse things. And life was good. For all of this, pain was the price
you paid.
Still, in the courtyard, Jalila felt the cold draft of
prescience upon her neck from that lacy mashrabiya where she and
Kalal would one day stand. The movement she made as she looked up
toward it even reminded her of the old tariqua. Even her eyesight
was not as sharp as it had once been. Of course, there were ways
around that which could be purchased in the tiered and dizzy markets
of Ghezirah, but sometimes it was better to accept a few things as
the will of the Almighty. Bowing down, muttering the shahada,
Jalila laid the breathmoss upon the shaded stone within the
cloister. Sheltered here, she imagined that it would thrive.
Mounting Robin, riding from the qasr, she paused once to look back.
Perhaps her eyesight really was failing her, for she thought she saw
the ancient structure shimmer and change. A beautiful green castle
hung above the cliffs, coated entirely in breathmoss; a wonder from
a far and distant age. She rode on, humming snatches of the old
songs she’d once known so well about love and loss between the
stars. Back at the haramlek, her mothers were as anxious as ever to
know where she had been. Jalila tried not to smile as she endured
their familiar scolding. She longed to hug them. She longed to
cry.
That evening, her last evening before she left Habara, Jalila
walked the shore alone again. Somehow, it seemed the place to her
where Pavo’s ghost was closest. Jalila could see her mother there
now, as darkness welled up from between the rocks; a small, lithe
body, always stooping, turning, looking. She tried going toward her;
but Pavo’s shadow always flickered shyly away. Still, it seemed to
Jalila as if she had been led toward something, for here was the
quartz-striped rock from that long-ago Season of the Soft Rains. Of
course, there was no breathmoss left, the storms had seen to that,
but nevertheless, as she bent down to examine it, Jalila was sure
that she could see something beside it, twinkling clear from a
rockpool through the fading light. She plunged her hand in. It was a
stone, almost as smooth and round as many millions of others on the
beach, yet this one was worked and carved. And its color was
greenish-grey.
The soapstone scarab, somehow thrust here to this beach by
the storms of potentiality that the tariquas of the Church of the
Gateway stirred up by their impossible journeyings, although Jalila
was pleased to see that it looked considerably less damaged than the
object she remembered Kalal turning over and over in his nervous
hands as he spoke to her future self. Here at last was the link that
would bind her through the pages of destiny, and, for a moment, she
hitched her hand back and prepared to throw it so far out into the
ocean that it would never be reclaimed. Then her arm relaxed. Out
there, all the way across the darkness of the bay, the tideflowers
of Habara were glowing.
She decided to keep it.