Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction Page 3

  “And will you take the name Gitit?” she asked us. It was customary for an oreg to be fully formed and named before the first journey, but we were neither formed, nor named.

  “We have agreed to wait with the naming until we find a third,” I said, though I doubted by now that that would ever happen.

  Grandmother pursed her lips, unsurprised but not especially happy at this development. “Nothing in this family runs true to course,” she said with some bitterness, “struggle as we might to fit in the great pattern our lives must make.”

  “How is your life not true to course?” said my lover, ever brash when frustrated.

  “Hah,” said grandmother-nai-Tammah.

  “You have lived your life as Khana women must,” Gitit insisted. “You were part of an oreg of three and traded and brought children into the world, and they in turn brought children of their own, some even daughters to carry your name. It’s not your fault that Bashri-nai-Divrah was killed. There is nothing else in your life that deviates from the pattern.”

  To this grandmother made no response.

  “You should come with us,” I said, thinking of her alone and not a granddaughter nearby to pour her tea or listen to her silences. “If things do not run true to course, then what is one more?”

  She waved me away. “I am old, not shaped for young women’s travels.” But she brought the cloth of winds out to us, locked again in its box, and handed me the key.

  I averted my eyes, embarrassed. Had she given her heart’s treasure up for Kimi’s sake, or had she simply wanted it gone, to be torn out of her like the grief for grandmother-nai-Leylit? I could not quite tell.

  As soon as we left grandmother’s rooms, Gitit-nai-Lur hissed at me, “I cannot believe she just implied that having you and Kimi for granddaughters meant her life deviated from the true course!”

  “I am not sure that’s what she meant. There is more.” I spoke of my grandmother’s supplications to Bird, and of her late-night walks in veils and scholars’ garb.

  But Gitit remained unconvinced. “No, she worries about what is proper. This is the woman who told you you wouldn’t be able to get married or join an oreg without magic, this is the woman who worried that Kimi...”

  “I, too, worry about Kimi.” It was painful to think about, impossible to put in words what I felt—that both grandmothers Bashri wanted what was best for us, had said hurtful words out of love, tried to bend us to that pattern out of love, had let go at last with love and sadness, letting us just be. How I did not feel anything wrong with not having magic, did not feel there was anything wrong with Kimi for being herself, and yet I worried about Kimi and grew—not angry, that was for Gitit—but sad at our attempts to form an oreg.

  “If anything deviates from the right pattern,” said Gitit stubbornly, “it is not us, it is the world.”

  There’s nothing wrong with you, I yearned to say, and yet you stay with us, but these words, too, were a part of that wrongness Gitit spoke about. So I swallowed them, and cried into her shoulder, and let her comfort me before we were ready to leave.

  THE FIRST DAYS of the journey taught us to miss grandmother-nai-Tammah. The things she’d done for Kimi slipped our notice. It now seemed the cardamom cookies and millet flatbreads had baked themselves, fish and greens had been set on plates pre-washed by air, free hours had appeared as if by magic when we needed them—time in which to learn about trade routes and to sit for tea with our numerous friends; clean clothing quietly replaced the garments my sister soiled. And even my grandmother’s silences were, I now saw, a necessity, a cornerstone of Kimi’s calm that now was gone from us.

  Leaving the quarter we’d joined a small group of traders—two oregs of women about our mothers’ age who had planned a joint venture to Burri. Once we passed through the outer gates, past the great stone guardians of the quarter and into the greater city of Niyaz, Kimi became overwhelmed with the sights and sounds of the streets—the endless stream of people and their carts, the noise and smells and garbage. With a sudden cry, she darted away from us and into the crowd.

  Gitit and I were quick to chase her, but when we grabbed her by the arms she began to scream, high keening sounds familiar and yet forgotten over the years we’d lived in peace. I tried to embrace her, pull her tight to me and shelter her, but Kimi fought me like she did before the cloth of winds was first placed in her hands. I wanted to pull the cloth out, but feared the other women and what they would say.

  I waited for them to scold us for drawing attention, for taking such a child on the road, but the opposite happened. The elders of the Oshrat and Kelli oregs invited Kimi and me to ride in their large mechanical cart. They constructed a shielding of magic over it, so that the city and its people were reduced for us to rain that drummed a whisper upon the opaque gray veil. Inside this canopy Kimi and I sat together, she gradually calming enough to lay her head on my thigh. I opened the box of winds, and my sister pulled the heavy fabric over her head. There we sat, my fingers on the weave that sheltered Kimi’s hair. The thread-winds felt to me as if wet with weeping—rain, regret.

  I feared of what Gitit would say, or worse, would think—that these girls were right, who had bid for her and grimaced over Kimi. But in an hour or so she peeked under the veil and offered to replace me, smiling as if nothing was the matter. I felt more eager than I wanted to admit for a gulp of air and a glance of the city. Kimi clung to her as I jumped off the cart.

  We’d reached the Desert Gate by then, its arch of rose-carved razu ivory glistening pink in the sun. I shied away from the Kelli elder, Kelli-nai-Marah, who walked beside the cart and probably maintained the veil, but she greeted me with warmth.

  “Don’t worry, child,” she said.

  “I worry...”

  “Yes,” she said, “I know. I know.” She patted me on the shoulder. “Your sister will calm in the desert. It is a good place for those that yearn for the quiet and wide spaces.”

  Her kindness overwhelmed me. I wanted to embrace her, to cry, to rage the way Gitit would often rage at the injustice of the world. To beg forgiveness of Gitit, of Kimi, of myself for not knowing better, for having now to pretend that everything was all right. I should have stayed behind with my sister, tricked Gitit into leaving us behind, refused to ever become lovers. “I fear I made a horrible mistake...”

  “Daughter,” she said, “your sister is not the first one, not the only one. Trust in the magnanimity of Bird.”

  “Then why has Bird made her this way?” It was such a horrible thing to say that I slapped myself on the head, swallowing snot and tears together with my shame. If Bird hadn’t made her this way she would be behind the walls of the inner quarter now, studying the writ and praying to Kimrí, constructing automata, speaking in the scholars’ dialect of Khana peppered with old words the women did not learn. My sister would not be a sister. My sister would be a stranger. My sister would not exist.

  “I am sorry. Please don’t listen to me. I am sorry.”

  “See?” The trader Kelli pointed out a short, heavily veiled woman that walked with the Oshrat oreg, the only one who had not greeted us when we joined. “Kelli-nai-Berurit will not speak to you, to any strangers. When she is upset, she cannot talk. The veil we constructed for your sister we first constructed for her. She is used to this road now. And if you need to ask, we chose her not out of pity, but because we love her.”

  “Nobody wanted to choose us,” I said, the bitterness too much to swallow. When not upset, your lover talks. My sister cannot.

  “Your time will come,” the elder Kelli said. She paid for our passage through the Desert gate and would accept no argument over it.

  WE PARTED WITH the traders Kelli and Oshrat at the crossroads. A throughway, paved and magically reinforced with bricks of compressed sand, would lead the seven older women through the craggy northern edges of the Burri desert, where water was scarce but reliably available at major oases, all the way eastwards to the Old Royal’s city of eleven wells.


  It was at the crossroads that the elders Kelli and Oshrat formally invited us to join them in their venture. Kelli-nai-Marah spoke of the splendors of the terraced red city—the painted tiles of the royal tumbleweed garden, the smell of spices and dust, the markets where multicolored birds spoke poetry in the sixteen languages of the desert.

  The elder Kelli spoke, too, of togetherness. “We say that it isn’t good for a Khana to travel alone, and there are reasons aplenty to keep old words close in the turbulent world. There is safety and firmness in the sisterhood we offer to each other.”

  The women Kelli and Oshrat all nodded to this. Kelli-nai-Berurit, her gaze firmly on the ground, encouraged us likewise to travel with her oregs.

  Gitit and I exchanged glances, each not wanting to accept the offer but feeling too guilty to reject that kindness. But we saw in each other’s eyes an unwillingness to swerve from the path marked by us in my grandmother’s silences, woven into the story of the cloth of winds. And so we took our leave from Oshrat and Kelli formally with traditional words and informally with hugs and tears, and steered the small cart down the lesser trodden paths that led south and into the great desert.

  The unending freedom of that land, unknown to us and yet familiar from song and story, spread before us. It smelled like the carpets our mothers and grandmothers had brought back from ventures, before they were rigorously beaten out in the streets: dust and wool and herbs that burned with just a hint of sweetness.

  We walked in the early mornings and the evening’s cool hours, childishly unafraid of brigands and thirst. Though I was without magic I read our path easily by the patterns made by the great embroidery of stars that stretched taut upon the needleframe of the sky. I named many kinds of low-hanging grass and shrubbery I recognized from the dried shapes and drawings that grandmother-nai-Tammah had shown me in her journeybooks back home, and I made teas for us and poultices for Gitit’s bleeding feet. Kimi abandoned shoes and took to running joyfully around our cart and forward. Gitit made a string bracelet for her, reinforced with magic, so that she could roam without getting lost.

  In the first week we met others, Khana traders and strangers from the desert and from lands far away. With all, we spoke respectfully and all spoke back to us likewise, and as luck shines upon fools and children, we were unhindered. Further south we traveled, following the sky-roads I believed would lead us to the tents of the snake band of the Surun’. The wind was quiet upon the land. We saw no bones, of wondrous beasts or otherwise.

  The miracles began with small things—Kimi bringing back an emerald-eyed lizard that escaped before we could determine whether it was mechanical; the wind blowing in a great sudden gust as we hid from the desert heat in a small embroidered tent gifted to us by Gitit’s grandmothers Lur; bones, always bones, that the wind left after it receded, small fragments bleached to a faint pink and yet striated differently from any razu ivory we’d studied. Kimi’s solitary runs stretched longer, and her face browned to an even deeper hue, as did Gitit’s.

  We did not worry about Kimi’s excursions until one day she brought in her clenched fist a brown lump that she bit over and over. She swallowed the thing before we could see what it was or twist it from her fingers.

  In our hastily pitched tent we fussed over my wailing sister, feeling guilty and foolish for not imagining the kind of poisons Kimi could eat in the desert. Always before she’d been picky, reluctant to try new foods even with family, much less pick them from the ground; yet we should have considered this.

  Gitit made fire with her magic, and I brewed poultice after poultice for Kimi. She’d have none of it, kicking and flailing and spitting with grim determination. Once again we felt keenly the absence of grandmother-nai-Tammah, for she had fed much bitterer medicine to Kimi without any apparent effort. We got lucky—either the thing she ate wasn’t poisonous, or stray drips of my boiling brews had done the deed; by nightfall, my sister looked no worse but for the wear we had inflicted upon her by our worry. Gitit and I were done for. Slumped with exhaustion, we slept like the dead through the night and into the morning, when we awoke to the incessant wailing of the wind.

  It must have been going for some time, building up before it woke us, gusts that shook the tent and rattled the cart and climbed ever higher in pitch. Kimi, oblivious to the sounds, slept curled on her side with the cloth of winds draped over her face.

  In whispers we consulted with each other. The tent pegs, reinforced with Gitit’s magic, should hold even though they would have been stronger, more stable in a magical weave done by two. But perhaps we could further reinforce—

  With a great push and a groan the tent was torn from its pegging and was tossed up and sideways, toppling the cart. The backlash flung me back and sideways, painfully into the dust, into—

  —I lay on my back, staring up—

  —all around me, a great ring of warriors, clothed in armor of polished bronze and headgear of enameled tin feathers that rattled in the wind; warriors with curved breasts and also beards, their faces lighter brown in color than my own, their hands wrapped around pennons and spears. Between them prowled small lions, feather-maned and winged, that bared at me thin fangs of sharpened emerald. I struggled up as one of the warriors raised a hand, the bronze spear in it clutched to strike. I heard more than saw Gitit rush towards me with a great cry, thrown back with the wind’s wailing. Kimi, hands outflung and laughing, spun forward—

  “No!”

  I do not know if I cried this or another. In-between the wind’s great roar a man appeared, in Khana veils and a billowing kaftan, slicing through the army on flat planes of white metal painted over with the seedlike letters of the writ. In one hand he held a spear of blinding light, a work of magic so powerful it was visible even to me. Moving ever forward, the scholar swung the spear that spread into a fan of two, three, a thousand spears, sweeping into the warriors, sweeping through the warriors who folded like shadows and collapsed into the sand. The emerald-toothed beasts bared their teeth and growled, defiant, before the sleeve of the whirlwind was lowered over them, folded them in—and all went quiet.

  Shaken and unsteady I rushed to the fallen Gitit, and our savior sped to my sister in a motion so achingly familiar I knew grandmother-nai-Tammah before she lowered the veil.

  In the moments that followed I had no time for thought. Gitit was injured and unconscious. Blood seeped from a spear-wound in her side where no spear remained. Kimi laughed and laughed in confusion, running around and around until with my help grandmother-nai-Tammah pitched her tent over our toppled but unharmed cart. Of our own tent there was no sign.

  Grandmother draped the cloth of winds over Kimi, and I was too confused and shaken to contemplate what had just happened. Behind us, a great hole in the ground gaped, but I wouldn’t have dared look into it even if grandmother hadn’t pulled me inside the tent.

  I brewed potion after potion while grandmother cleaned and dressed Gitit’s wound. To distract and occupy my sister, Grandmother-nai-Tammah gave her a great lump of brown dough that looked familiar even to my dulled senses, but I continued to work, single-minded until grandmother proclaimed Gitit to be out of danger.

  We moved camp later that night, after Gitit came to and asked for water. The hole in the ground had closed by then. The treacherous desert fell quiet, peaceful and placid as before.

  I yearned to ask my grandmother a thousand questions, about the wounding memory of bronze-clad warriors and beasts of spiked emerald, about the wind, about her garb, her magic. She must have been a three-named strong—a miracle, a rarity, a marvel that should have propelled her to great power, made her to sit in council, to lead a famous oreg of her own. And yet, though my grandother-nai-Leylit had only a single deepname, grandmother-nai-Tammah, the stronger of them, had called her elder and had taken her name, Bashri. But I had a more urgent question to ask.

  Settled anew in grandmother’s tent, I waited to spring it until both Gitit and Kimi had fallen asleep. Grandmother-nai-Tammah sat
, her back erect and her face half-turned away from me, expecting my speech as one expects a blow.

  I spoke. “Back in Niyaz, I offered you to join us. You said no.”

  She said, “I meant to let you go. I gave my cloth away to you.”

  “I recognize the cake you fed the child, the poison we thought would slay her. You followed us veiled, knowing that we had no magic to see you. You spoke to Kimi, knowing that she could not tell us where she went and what she saw.”

  “I changed my mind,” grandmother said. “It is not good for a Khana to travel alone.”

  I gulped for breath. Grandmother-nai-Tammah had meant herself. She’d told us she was too old to travel, but what she had planned was to set out alone and leave us.

  I turned away from her, and she from me. My face to the painted leather wall of the tent, I let silent tears fall, not quite lulling me to sleep. Later I turned around. Grandmother lay like a lump under a veil of magic that obscured her from the shoulders down. Her back was turned to me. I could not see her face, could not see whether she slept. Kimi snored quietly under the cloth of winds, and Gitit, numbed by my potions, slept also.

  I lay on my back, counting invisible stars beyond the tent’s leather canopy, unable to sleep, thinking, thinking. I gave my cloth away to you, she’d said as if it meant the world—but the cloth of winds had belonged to grandmother-nai-Leylit.

  GITIT SLEPT FOR eleven hours. When she woke up, grandmother and I took down the tent; Gitit was too weak to do anything but look, hands folded in her lap like nesting birds. Kimi danced around us, asking intermittently for cookies, gleeful at the shadows that fell like sticks around the tent’s collapsing angles.