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 it had taken root and was growing. Then

  she started coughing as she 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 agonising. 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 which 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

  2 9 4

  B R E AT H M O S S

  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, word-

  lessly, 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 say 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 which are nothing to do

  with this place. And I shall now tell you about them all

  even though you’ll say you known it before . . .”

  The smooth, rough fingers stroked her hair. As

  Ananke’s words unravelled, telling Jalila of changings

  and swellings and growths she’d had never thought

  would really apply to her, and which these foetid low-

  lands 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 2 9 5

  I A N R . M A C L E O D

  the various errands that her mothers required as they re-

  stored and repaired their haramlek. She was used to ex-

  panses, big horizons, the surprises of a giant landscape

  which crept upon you slowly, and often dangerously. Yet

  here, every turn and square brought intricate surprise and 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 sights and smells, markets which erupted on particular days to the workings

  of no calendar Jalila yet understood, and 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 which 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 over-

  hung top windows like odd pictures in an old frame.

  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 2 9 6

  B R E AT H M O S S

  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 to visit Al Janb arose for a new growth-crystal for

  the scaffolding, she begged and pleaded to be allowed,

  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 towards 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 pat-

  tern, much as the heat increased, 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 which

  came and went on the oceans, 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 still there was a particular sight which surprised Jalila 2 9 7

  I A N R . M A C L E O D

  more than any other as she clambered over the ropes and

  groynes of the long shingle beach which she took as a

  shortcut to the centre of the town when the various tides were out. The air was fishy and stinking. A few months

  before, it would have disgusted her. It still did, but there were many sights and compensations.

  Today, Jalila was studying a boat, which was hauled

  far up from the water and was longer and blacker and

  heavier-looking than the feluccas, with a sort-of ram-

  shackle house at the prow, and a winch at the stern which was so massive 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 which had 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. An-

  other alien? But she was plainly human. And barefoot, in

  ragged shorts, 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 gun-

  wales with a grunt which carried on the smelly breeze.

  She was brown as tea, with her massy hair hooped back

  and sticking in a long sweat tail down her back. She was

  broad-shouldered, and moved in that way which 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, 2 9 8

  B R E AT H M O S S

  that her features was oddly broad and flat. A child with

  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 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 image why it would be a require-

  ment of 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?” 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 which was

  so unlike the kamasheen. Jalila’s mothers told her to be

  patient, to wait, and to remember— please remember this 2 9 9

  I A N R . M A C L E O D

  time, so you don’t spoil the day for us all, Jalilaneen—the things which they sent her down the serraplate road to

  get from Al Janb. She trudged under an umbrella, an-

  other 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?—he was out there, where the clouds rumbled

  like boulders. Perhaps she’d imagined their whole en-

  counter entirely.

  Arriving back home at the haramlek surprisingly

  quickly, and carrying for once the things she’d been or-

  dered 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 which he would then try to give her. There had once, Jalila’s

  dreamtent postulated, and for obscure biological reasons

  she didn’t quite follow, been far more men in the uni-

  verse; almost as many had there had been women. Obvi-

  ously, they had dwindled. She then checked up the word

  3 0 0

  B R E AT H M O S S

  rape, to make sure it really was the thing she’d imagined, shuddered, but nevertheless investigated in full holographic detail the bits of himself which 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 halfformed 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 won-

  dering 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 ap-

  praising 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 van-

  ishing by lunchtime into sodden murk, but today her bril-

  liance 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

  colours everywhere, pulsing before your eyes, swarming

  down the cliffs towards the sea, which lay flat and placid and salt-rimed; a huge animal, basking—or possibly dead.

  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 out-

  side beyond the striped shade of the mashrabiyas at mid-

  3 0 1

  I A N R . M A C L E O D

  day 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 which 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 colour 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 whilst 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 break-

  fast, 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 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.

  3 0 2

  B R E AT H M O S S

  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

  which Jalila would 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, fasci-

  nating 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 smoked and drank in curling endless

  wreathes of smoke and steam. Little Pavo, her face

  smooth as a carved nutmeg, with her small, precise,