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  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 colour of to-

  day’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 in-

  side 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 and 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 imag-

  ine 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 un-dressed of the doll Tabatha she’d once so treasured up on 3 2 2

  B R E AT H M O S S

  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 re-

  turned 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 towards 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 no-

  ticed 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 forwards. In shock, Jalila dropped the bowl she was holding. It seemed to roll

  around and around on the table forever, slipping play-

  fully 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 and thrown stones at her on that

  hot day in the qasr. As if that mattered. But somehow,

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  more than it should have done, it did. 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, sucking in the tapestries. 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 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 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, and

  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 ex-

  pected 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 surpris-

  ing 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; the waver-ing silver limbs of an upturned insect. The waves came

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  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 aeons of time and expense which

  crossing even the tiniest fragment of the Ten Thousand

  and One Worlds would entail by the ordinary means of

  travelling 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 beyond 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 which was and will

  ever be had 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 had formed, dimensions had been 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 aeons 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 which she tra-

  versed to avoid that journey seem even vaster . . .

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  “You must understand,” the tariqua said, “that we tari-

  quas 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 which she would never get from

  her dreamtent or her mothers. “But, hanim, what could be worse,” she asked dutifully, although 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, instead, Jalila, passing through everything instead.” The tariqua chucked, 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 going on inside her between these two warring impulses . . .

  To her surprise, Jalila realised 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 3 2 6

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  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 towards it through the trees. The craft’s door creaked like an iron gate. 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 craft rose up

  through the treetops and wafted away.

  The day of the moulid came. It was everything Jalila ex-

  pected, although she paid it little attention. The intricate, bowered pathway which 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 as-

  sailed 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 Jamb. Everything seemed to be different today.

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  I A N R . M A C L E O D

  There were too many sounds and colours. 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 alien. Her feet were al-

  ready blistered and delicate from her new crimson slip-

  pers. 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 clus-

  tered 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 marvellous! 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 which 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 got around to harvesting some of the tideflowers

  for which their nameless boat had been designed, and

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  B R E AT H M O S S

  they were selling every sort here, salt-fresh from the

  ocean.

  “Try this one . . .” Kalal drew Jalila away to the edge of the harbour 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, towards the top of her breast, smoothing out the windsilks in a way which

  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 wind-

  silks, burning briefly as it bound to her flesh. And it was beautiful anyway, even if she wasn’t, and it would have

  been churlish to refuse. Jalila placed her finger into the tideflower’s centre, 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 centre of Al Jamb was transformed un-

  recognisably into the set of a play. Young Joanne herself walked the vast avenues of Ghezirah, the island city

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  which lies at the centre of all the Ten Thousand and One

  Worlds, but 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 Joanne, she was supposedly thinking of a planet which 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 projec-

  tions which briefly covered of Al Janb’s ordinary

  buildings, wondered why, even if this version Ghezirah

  was fake and thin, Joanne 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

  and sound swept over them in a moan from the sea, and

  everyone looked up as sunglow poured through the

  gaudy images of Ghezirah which 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 fleurs 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 Joanne’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.

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  “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 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