Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction Read online

  At eight, Kimriel could say a few words—sunset, box, no, fish; not nearly enough to pass into the scholars’ domain, locked now from him forever. We would no longer be allowed to call him after the men’s god, so the grandmothers took the name Kimriel away, together with his young child’s clothing. They named him my sister, Zohra, and dressed now her in garments appropriate for a girl. Though Kimi would not answer to Zohra, no longer did we have to worry about her fate beyond the men’s white walls, no longer would we struggle to teach her the words of scholars.

  But the relief from that pressure had thrust me suddenly into the center of my grandmothers’ regard. In all those years of adolescence I had spent watching Birdlike over my sister, I had not taken a deepname, had not even thought about magic. Now, at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, they insisted I should take a deepname if I wanted to be marriageable, and desirable as a partner in an oreg, a women’s trading group.

  I shrugged it off. I had no aptitude for magic, could not sense it like Kimi or my friends. Marriage would happen as it would, and I could not care less whether some man behind the inner walls would be a master artificer or a floorsweep. I would see him a few times a year at most, in the perpetual semi-darkness of the ritual chambers; most of my time I would spend with my oreg, whether trading or at home.

  And as for an oreg, well. Gitit-nai-Lur, that most beautiful girl with her dark lustrous skin and her eyes unpainted by kohl, had deepnames enough for both of us. An oreg was more than the deepnames held by its members.

  But even though I had not succumbed to the soul’s darkness that comes to so many who yearn in vain for the mind’s power, I was growing restless. I wanted to venture beyond the quarter’s outer walls, beyond the city, to trade, but grandmother-nai-Tammah begged me to stay and help watch over my sister while grandmother-nai-Leylit grew more and more frail. Gitit-nai-Lur, with her two deepnames, received many offers from trading groups both new and established, but she stayed behind with me out of sheer stubbornness.

  Later that year, grandmother-nai-Tammah constructed a rolling chair for grandmother-nai-Leylit. It was made of white metal and deepname-powered, though I could not see exactly how the light of deepnames operated it; it was a work of artifice and thus forbidden to women. Grandmother-nai-Leylit could steer it with her mind. It had annoyed me in the years past when grandmother-nai-Tammah would do those mannish things, but now I was heartened to think that she’d not asked for permission, for surely such would not have been granted.

  A few months after that, grandmother-nai-Leylit could no longer steer the chair. I rolled her around in it, and she would lay her hand, wrinkled and calloused and warm, over mine; she smelled of cardamom and bitter medicine, and her once-bright eyes now showed a map of a country unknown that spread under the desert in spidersilk webs of red.

  I’d wheel the chair into the orange room and open the box for my grandmother, pull the cloth of winds out for her—still invisible in my hands but heavy with the weight of unshed tears—and lay it against her cheek. She would tilt her head to her shoulder and sing quietly, in the language of the Surun’, a lullaby. She shouldn’t do so, but I had not the heart to remind her of rules.

  We all woke up that night, those of us with magic and those of us without. Kimi began to wail—fish, fish, fish, fish—I thought at first of how she couldn’t know that women are forbidden from song; and only then with a jolt, with the sinking in my stomach, I recognized the Surun’ melody. Wrapped in fear’s emptiness I listened hard for what only the strongest in magic are given to see, for the goddess coming.

  Bird has many shapes—finch and eagle, sandpiper and turtledove—and yet she comes, they say, in a single visage for the soul’s final exhalation. I heard nothing, saw nothing, I swear. None of us were strong enough to see what shape she took for my grandmother—but an invisible wing, rough like calloused fingers, brushed my cheek as the goddess bore my grandmother’s soul aloft.

  Grandmother-nai-Tammah and I had not been close before this death. She seemed too aloof, detached. She’d make frequent and not at all hushed supplications to Bird to allow her to be reborn a man, and sometimes I’d see her walk through the quarter in a man’s kaftan and veils, like a scholar who had found himself on the wrong side of the wall.

  As a child, I was fascinated and frightened; as an adolescent I was angry that a grandmother of mine would taunt the laws this way. Now I followed grandmother-nai-Tammah around, making cup after cup of red tea for her or accepting the cups she brewed for me. In silence we sat and stared each into her own distance as we blew on the scalding water to cool. My thoughts from years past made me uncomfortable, uneasy for having judged an elder with whom I now shared this grief; and even if she wouldn’t share it, how could I judge what she wanted to be in her next life or how she felt now and yet bristle at the thought of my Kimi being judged?

  Day after day we sat with our tea, while my sister played nearby in the orange room. Grandmother-nai-Tammah no longer locked the box. I wondered many times whether she wanted Kimi to damage or misplace the cloth of winds, but it did not happen.

  One day grandmother-nai-Tammah spoke to me, as if to continue a conversation we had never begun. “Beyond the city,” she said, “in the heart of the desert, the sandhills crest and fall, shifted about by the hand of the wind. Sometimes the wind blows so mighty it cuts through the layers of sand, through the years, revealing bones of perished animals too winsome to exist. People of the Surun’ treasure these, and so do the Maiva’at. The best of their weavers know how to listen to the bones. In plain threads of spidersilk they then embroider these beasts, fantastical and forgotten, onto carpets dyed with weld and madder.”

  I nodded, not feeling the need for speech.

  “Each tribe has its own designs, shapes formal and solemn to embody the memories of the bones. Each tribe has its own materials—spidersilk and wool, sisal and reeds and thin leather cords. Yet only among the snake-Surun’ is there a tradition of weaving from air.”

  She said nothing more, expecting perhaps a question.

  Later, Gitit-nai-Lur would ask me why I had not asked, her eyes bright with secrets and dreams of the desert. “A cloth of winds! A whole tradition of it, not just a single fragment but a whole carpet, carpets! Oh, such a treasure to bring back from a trading venture, to unroll before the ruler of the city!”

  I do not know why it made me uneasy to think of the cloth of winds in its box, the invisible heaviness of it alive with threadlike winds. They held within them still the smell of my grandmother’s fingers, the softness of her cheek—and more, images and feelings I could not express: the desert where it had been woven, exhaling the day’s accumulated heat into the night; the patient touch of weavers unknown to me. My heart recoiled at the thought of such a treasure spread before the ruler of Niyaz. I had never seen the Shah, but heard plenty of stories—of our women ridiculed or even assaulted on streets outside of the quarter and then not protected by the law; of our traders imprisoned; of his coffers, in which all matter of treasure lay without ever seeing a person’s loving gaze. I did not want the cloth of winds to feel that loneliness. I scolded myself for letting it become a person to me, because the first thing a trader learns is not to become attached to trade goods.

  I brought Gitit-nai-Lur and the stoked flames of her curiosity to my grandmothers’ rooms. But though grandmother-nai-Tammah looked my friend up and down with approval, she was unenthused by Gitit’s questioning. “If you desire to bring such a treasure to the ruler of Niyaz, then you are nothing but a fool.”

  “Explain to me, trader Bashri,” said Gitit-nai-Lur, frustrated curiosity lending forcefulness to her voice. “What is so wrong in this? So foolish? Is it not what Khana traders do?”

  “You do not understand.” Grandmother-nai-Tammah sighed and passed a hand over her eyes. “There is no need for you to scour the desert for the best woven treasure to bring before the ruler of Niyaz in his rainbow-tiered court. He already has it.”

  Grandmother’s wo
rds stirred something in me, a yearning I could not explain. “Yes?” I whispered.

  “Yes.”

  She fell silent. Gitit and I just sat there, determined to wait her out, occasionally refreshing her tea. Kimi ran out and circled us curiously once, twice, thrice, then stole a cardamom cookie from the tray of tea and hopped one-legged into the orange room.

  At last, grandmother-nai-Tammah relented.

  “It begins with Zurya, a woman of the Maiva’at, who sang a supplication to Bird so beautifully that the goddess gave her the gift to spin with her voice alone, multicolored threads that sang with indigo and weld and the finest red madder.” She paused to take a sip of tea. “And it begins also with a woman of the Khana named Bashri-nai-Leylit, whose lovers took her name and formed an oreg.”

  We sighed at the first mention of that name while grandmother’s voice continued to weave for us her heart’s story.

  “And it continues with the ruler of Niyaz, who imprisoned the youngest of the oreg, Bashri-nai-Divrah. The crime was that of showing her face unveiled beyond the walls of the Khana quarter, her magic plain for all to see; for outside these walls, they do not allow women to hold deepnames, unless they are Khana and properly veiled. And so it passed that Bashri-nai-Leylit and Bashri-nai-Tammah went to the rainbow-tiered court to plead for their lover’s life; for her veil had been torn away by tormentors, and through no ill intent had she defied the law.”

  Between each sliver of the tale, grandmother-nai-Tammah would take a sip of tea; and between each sliver of the tale we breathed, Gitit’s hand tight in mine and shivering like a sparrow.

  “The ruler of Niyaz would not relent, unless, he said, the greatest treasure ever woven would be his. And so the two remaining traders Bashri set out to the great desert until they reached the leather tents, bell-strung, that housed a tribe of the Maiva’at.” Grandmother stopped there, allowing our traveling minds to catch up with her story. “It was there that Zurya had sung her supplications to Bird, it was there that she had been rewarded with the gift of spinning from Bird’s own feathers. But now, clouds of dust and dullness of despair veiled the encampment.

  “‘Help us, help us, traders of the people of the Khana,’ cried Zurya’s kinsmen. ‘For the threads she sang have cocooned her body,’ and so the Bashri women, having prayed to Bird, pulled on the threads of song that hung from Zurya’s mouth and freed her.”

  “Weighted with the wealth of threads that sang of weld and pomegranate, the traders Bashri walked again across the desert. Where the wind reveals and hides the great depths in the sand, they saw bones of such creatures as have never tread on solid ground—a flying razu beast, a lizard longer than my arm and made of entirely of letters, a skeleton of a two-headed bird with a crest of bone feathers, a stag on crane’s feet, a dog with a forehead studded with rubies. And with each revelation, small winds came to us and sang to the song-threads that we carried and wound around them like mating snakes.”

  I wasn’t sure if grandmother had noticed abandoning the language of they for the language of we, but I wasn’t about to remind her while in my mind the threads of song and the small threadlike winds conversed in the language of lovers. Gitit-nai-Lur drew on her shorter deepname to heat the tea remaining in the pot, and I poured another round, grateful for the magic. I did not want to get up.

  “We came at last, burdened with threads of song and accompanied by small winds, to the tents of the snake-Surun’. There, under awnings once painted in serpents gold and green that were now faded to mere traces of pigment, sat Benesret e Nand e Divyát, a weaver, who took the threads away from us and made them into a carpet. With undyed threads of spidersilk she then embroidered over it the visions of the beasts we saw as we have never seen them: the great razu in flight, its tusks of ivory curled towards the stars; the bird, two-headed and illustrious, drumming with four sticks held tight in beak and claw; the lizard made of letters from a language dead before the trade routes began; and between these images, a hundred roses golden like the sand. Joyfully burdened with Benesret’s carpet, we walked across the desert back home.”

  Gitit-nai-Lur and I exchanged a glance. Neither of us interrupted the story, but grandmother’s unspoken secrets yawned from it like lions.

  “The ruler of Niyaz delighted in this vision, for truly such a treasure had never before been woven, nor such threads as these ever spun. He offered us our weight in gold, but when we asked instead for Bashri-nai-Divrah, he said she was already dead. And so we were blood-paid and sent off, and the Shah locked the carpet away in his coffers, where it can neither show its colors nor sing.”

  Later, Gitit-nai-Lur and I talked about what grandmother said and what she did not say—how she told me that the snake-Surun’ weave from air, but the carpet the Shah hid away had been woven from song; and how she had not spoken of the cloth of winds, even though it had come from this story.

  GRANDMOTHER’S VISIONS KEPT me awake that night, and when I slept at last, I found myself in the desert, above a gaping hole in the sand. Something stirred at the bottom, a treasure of bones and emerald green. I teetered on the edge, yearning and afraid to step forward, until I was jolted out of the dream and back to my cushions.

  In the small hours before dawn I dozed off again, to dream of the Shah’s prisons and faceless women wailing behind bars, beneath the ground. Their magic had been taken away from them, as well as their tongues, so they could neither light a candlebulb nor speak. Unable to break away from this vision I walked down the corridors, peering into the cells. I saw Khana women, their kaftans and sharovar smeared with dirt; Niyazi women in soiled dresses; even foreign women, their torn garments strange to my eyes.

  I knew that soon I would see grandmother-nai-Divrah, one I had never known, never touched. The thought of it filled me with dread, and yet I kept walking.

  I was saved from that vision by the dawnsong that came wafting from the men’s side of the quarter. The holy melody crested up and up, clearing up the putrefying odor of my dreams, to soar at last with Kimrí, Kimrí, Kimrí, Kimrí as the dawn burst out behind the curtained windows of my room.

  “How long does it take to weave and embroider a carpet?” I asked the next day of Gitit-nai-Lur while we watched over spinning Kimi in an overgrown courtyard by the wall. My head buzzed.

  “Firefly,” said Kimi, and Gitit weaved her fingers absent-mindedly in the air, producing tiny lights for Kimi to catch and laugh at while we talked.

  “How long?” Gitit-nai-Lur pursed her lips. “A month at least, when people are weaving together. I have not heard from my elders of women weaving alone, although I guess it would not be impossible...”

  “I want to know more about these women,” I said. Zurya of the Maiva’at, whose song so glorious at the beginning of grandmother’s story had turned into a constricting cocoon by its end; and Benesret e Nand e Divyát, who must have woven for a month, and maybe not alone, while my grandmothers presumably waited—all this spoken over in a breath of my grandmother’s story.

  There had been small winds, too, that had accompanied my grandmothers to the snake-Surun’ camp, and I wanted to know how that ended. “I want to know this story, I want to feel it in my bones...”

  “I want to travel to these lands,” Gitit-nai-Lur said, wistfullness rising in her voice. Her grandmothers of the Lur oreg had been famous traders, and she had grown up on stories of trade and danger. Her mothers too had been famous for their ventures. Even though Gitit had stayed with me, she would not be content to be idle for much longer. “I want to trade for the carpets of winds and song, if not for the Shah Niyaz, then for the sheer glory of it, a tale for our granddaughters.”

  “Then we must find something to do about Kimi. Grandmother—” is too old to watch her alone, I wanted to say, and though the other women would take care of my sister, I worried they would not understand her ways, think her odd or even wrong, constrain her in the ways that we did not.

  “We’ll take her with us,” said Gitit-nai-Lur. “I’m sure
between us we will manage, especially if we find a third to join our oreg.”

  But with one of us lacking magic and another lacking speech, we found ourselves at a disadvantage. We kept sending girls away who bid for Gitit alone, or for Gitit and me without Kimi; later, we argued with friend after friend about the wisdom of our decisions, and Gitit-nai-Lur was growing progressively angrier. “If I hear one more girl tell me with tearful concern how difficult this child will be to manage on the road, I swear I’ll shape my power into a fish and whack her.”

  I giggled into my fist, much of my sadness drained away, though not all of it.

  “We’ll have to do it. Just us,” said Gitit.

  My sister, oblivious, once again chased after Gitit’s magical lights. Kimi had learned two new words this month, firefly and cookie, and used both to gleefully to ask for favors. I watched her with water in my eyes, wishing fervently that the joy I felt at these small words from my sister would be shared by all who saw us. “An oreg of two is unstable,” I said. “Are you sure?”

  “It’s either that or the fish.”

  And so we opened our dowry caskets and blended them like lovers do, and with that money purchased trade goods from the men: mechanical rods, instruments to measure the heat, pens that secreted ink inside them, and deepname-reinforced parchment. We bought jewelry of the most glorious kind, bracelets and necklaces shaped like butterflies that fluttered and kept the wearer cool in the desert heat; chains of balls that unfolded into fragrant blooms with the advent of cooler hours and closed again at sleeping time; and glorious rings set with beetles and bees. And we found a mechanical cart to carry it all, not large for a person but serviceable enough until we could afford better. Thus equipped, we went to deliver our news to grandmother-nai-Tammah.