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 had the

  deepest, simplest love, who would always touch you be-

  fore she said anything, and then fix you with her sad

  and lovely eyes, as if touching and seeing were far more

  important that 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 lis-

  ten, whilst, now, at last, she had real, proper things to say about life, whole new philosophies which 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.

  3 0 3

  I A N R . M A C L E O D

  Frequently, there were visitors to these evening gath-

  erings. 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 which 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 neigh-

  bour (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, whilst neighbour 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 bum-

  bling towards the lanterns or would alight in their hands.

  Sometimes, afterwards, 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 which rose at night to the changes of the tide;

  silver, crimson, or glowing, their fronds waving through

  the dark like the beckoning palms of islands from story-

  book seas.

  3 0 4

  B R E AT H M O S S

  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 which slowly tottered over the horizon. The

  night pulsed and flickered. There was a breath of impos-

  sibly 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 acquain-

  tances and friends. Young people were relatively scare

  amid the long-lived human Habarans, and those who

  dwelt around Al Janb were continually drawn and re-

  pulsed to 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 which 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

  3 0 5

  I A N R . M A C L E O D

  then 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 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 which had birthed them, throwing away

  their jewels and riches, which bubbled below the surface, then rose again under the Habara’s twin moons to became the beds of tideflowers. She had got 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 rocket-

  port? Jalila had watched some of the arrivals and depar-

  tures from the quays at Al Janb, but those journeys took

  place in sleek sail-less craft with silver doors which

  looked, as they turned out from the harbour 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 but which Jalila now knew

  contained the pheromones and grapplers which were

  needed to ensnare the tideflowers which this craft had

  been built to harvest. The boat bore no name on the prow, 3 0 6

  B R E AT H M O S S

  yet Kalal had many names for it, which he would occa-

  sionally mention or curse without explaining. If there

  was one thing which 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 he

  wouldn’t answer with anything other than a shrug. Now

  that she knew him better, Jalila was starting to under-

  stand 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 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 was due to his odd sexual identity, and how much

  was his personality.

  To add to his freakishness, Kalal lived alone with an-

  other male—in fact, the only other male in Al Janb—at the far end of the shore cottages, in a birthing relationship which 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 colourful robes or strode

  about bare-chested and always talked in a thunderously

  deep voice as if her was 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 loose interest before they had answered.

  3 0 7

  I A N R . M A C L E O D

  He whistled and sang loudly and waved to passers-by

  whilst he worked at repairing the feluccas for his living.

  Ibra had come to this planet when Kalal was a baby, un-

  der circumstances which 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 infor-

  mation which 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. Afterwards, 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 to-

  wards 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

  3 0 8

  B R E AT H M O S S

  could accept each into it other 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 towards 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 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 which placidly

  chugged from icy pole to equator across the watery ex-

  panses of Habara, taking or delivering the supplies which the settlements deemed necessary for civilised 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 which only di-

  3 0 9

  I A N R . M A C L E O D

  minished when she began to make out the lighted dusky

  buildings of Al Janb. Was this homesickness, she won-

  dered? Or something else?

  This was the time of Habara’s long summer. This was the

  Season of Rockets. Jalila was severely warned by Pavo of

  the consequences of approaching the spaceport during

  periods of possible launch when she mentioned their trip, but it went no further than that. Each night now, and

  deep into the morning, the rockets rumbled at the horizon and climbed upwards 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 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 which

  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 3 1 0

  B R E AT H M O S S

  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 now fully recovered from

  the change to her environment under Pavo’s attentions.

  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, and enjoyed the stares and the

  whispers, and the whispering space which opened around

  them as they hobbled them in a square. Kalal, typically,

  was one of the few coastal people who expressed an in-

  terest 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 expe-

  riences 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 treble fig-

  ures. Jalila chose Lya’s mount Abu for him to ride, be-

  3 1 1

  I A N R . M A C L E O D

  cause she was the biggest, the most intelligent, and gen-

  erally the most placid of the beasts unless she felt 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 whilst she was still trying to bite his legs.

  Jalila had made a good choice of riding partners. Both of them, hayawan and human, whilst proud and aloof, were

  essentially playful, and never shirked a challenge. Whilst 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 which led nowhere,

  and there were headlands and cliffs 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 shone in pools on its way to the ocean,

  from which they had all drank. The hayawans had squat-