was the part which Jalila still found hardest to acknowl-

  edge; the idea that her mothers had a physical, sexual relationship. Sometimes, deep at night from someone else’s

  dreamtent, she had heard muffled sighs, the tick of flesh.

  Just like the hayawans, she supposed, there were things

  about other people’s lives which you could never fully understand no matter how well you thought you knew them.

  She chose a different tack. “So why did you choose to

  have me?”

  “Because we wanted to fill the world with something

  which had never ever existed before. Because we felt selfish. Because we wanted to give ourselves away.”

  “Ananke, she actually gave birth to me, didn’t she?”

  3 4 0

  B R E AT H M O S S

  “Down here at the Al Janb, they’d say we were primi-

  tive and mad. Perhaps that was how we wanted to be. But

  all the machines at the clinics do is try to recreate the conditions of a real human womb—the voices, the movements, the sound of breathing . . . Without first hearing that Song of Life, no human can ever be happy, so what

  better way could there be than to hear it naturally?.”

  A flash of that dream-image of herself being buried.

  “But the birth itself—”

  “—I think that was something we all underestimated.”

  The tone of Pavo’s voice told Jalila that this was not a

  subject to be explored on the grounds of mere curiosity.

  The tideflower beds had solidified. You could walk across them as if they were dry land. Kalal, after several post-ponements and broken promises, took Jalila and Nayra

  out one night to demonstrate.

  Smoking lanterns at the prow and stern of his boat.

  The water slipping warm as blood through Jalila’s trailing fingers. Al Janb receding beneath the hot thighs of the

  mountains. Kalal at the prow. Nayra sitting beside her,

  her arm around her shoulder, hand straying across her

  breast until Jalila shrugged it away because the heat of

  their two bodies was oppressive.

  “This season’ll end soon,” Nayra said. “You’ve never

  known the winter here, have you?”

  “I was born in the winter. Nothing here could be as cold as the lightest spring morning in the mountains of

  Tabuthal.”

  “Ah, the mountains. You must show me sometime. We should travel there together . . .”

  Jalila nodded, trying hard to picture that journey.

  She’d attempted to interest Nayra in riding a hayawan,

  3 4 1

  I A N R . M A C L E O D

  but she grew frightened even in the presence of the

  beasts. In so many ways, in fact, Nayra surprised Jalila

  with her timidity. Jalila, in these moments of doubt, and as she lay alone in her dreamtent and wondered, would

  list to herself Nayra’s many facets: her lithe and willing body; the beautiful haramlek of her beautiful mothers;

  the fact that so many of the other girls now envied and

  admired her. There were so many things which were good

  about Nayra.

  Kalal, now that his boat had been set on course for the

  further tidebeds, came to sit with them, his face sweated lantern-red. He and Nayra shared many memories, and

  now, as the sails pushed on from the hot air off the

  mountains, they vied to tell Jalila of the surprises and delights of winters in Al Janb. The fogs when you couldn’t

  see your hand. The intoxicating blue berries which ap-

  peared in special hollows through the crust of the snow.

  The special saint’s days—If Jalila hadn’t known better,

  she’d have said that Nayra and Kalal were fighting over

  something more important.

  The beds of tideflowers were vast, luminous, heavy-

  scented. Red-black clusters of geelies rose and fell here and there in the moonslight. Walking these gaudy carpets

  was a most strange sensation. The dense interlaces of

  leaves felt like rubber matting, but sank and bobbed.

  Jalila and Nayra lit more lanterns and dotted them

  around a field of huge primrose and orange petals. They

  sang and staggered and rolled and fell over. Nayra had

  brought a pipe of kif resin, and the sensation of smoking that and trying to dance was hilarious. Kalal declined,

  pleading that he had to control the boat on the way back, and picked his way out of sight, disturbing flocks of

  geelies.

  3 4 2

  B R E AT H M O S S

  And so the two girls danced as the twin moons rose.

  Nayra, twirling silks, her hair fanning, was at grace as

  Jalila still staggered amid the lapping flowers. As she

  lifted her arms and rose on tiptoe, bracelets glittering, she had never looked more desirable. Somewhat drunkenly—

  and slightly reluctantly, because Kalal might return at

  any moment—Jalila moved forward to embrace her. It

  was good to hold Nayra, and her mouth tasted like the

  tideflowers and sucked needily at her own. In fact, the

  moments of their love had never been sweeter and slower

  than there were on that night, although, even as Jalila

  marvelled at the shape of Nayra’s breasts and listened to the changed song of her breathing, she felt herself chill-ing, receding, drawing back not just from Nayra’s physi-

  cal presence, but from this small bay beside the small

  town on the single continent beside Habara’s great and

  lonely ocean. Jalila felt infinitely sorry for Nayra as she brought her to her little ecstasies and they kissed and

  rolled across the beds of flowers. She felt sorry for Nayra because she was beautiful, and sorry for her because of

  all her accomplishments, and sorry for her because she

  would always be happy here amid the slow seasons of in

  this little planet.

  Jalila felt sorry for herself as well; sorry because she

  had thought she had known love, and because she knew

  now that it had been a pretty illusion.

  There was a shifting wind, dry and abrasive, briefly to be welcomed, until it became something to curse and cover

  you face and close your shutters against.

  Of Jalila’s mothers, only Lya seemed at all disap-

  pointed by her break from Nayra, no doubt because she

  had fostered hopes of their union forming a powerful

  3 4 3

  I A N R . M A C L E O D

  bond between their haramleks, and even she did her best

  not to show it. Of the outside world, the other young

  women of Al Janb all professed total disbelief— why if it had been me, I’d never have . . . But soon, they were cherishing the new hope that it might indeed be them.

  Nayra, to her credit, maintained an extraordinary dignity in the face of the fact that she, of all people, had finally been rejected. She dressed in plain clothes. She spoke and ate simply. Of course, she looked more devastatingly

  beautiful than ever, and everyone’s eyes were reddened

  by air-borne grit in any case, so it was impossible to tell how much she had really been crying. Now, as the buildings of Al Janb creaked and the breakers rolled and the

  wind howled through the teeth of the mountains, Jalila

  saw the gaudy, seeking and competing creatures who so

  often surrounded Nayra quite differently. Nayra was not,

  had never been, in control of them. She was more like the gaudy carcass over which, flashing their teeth, their eyes, stretching their limbs, they endlessly fought. Often, riven by a sadness far deeper than she had ever experienced,

  missing something she couldn’t explain, wandering alone

  or lying in her dreamtent, Jalila nearly went back to

  Nayra . . . But she never did.

  This was the Season of Winds, and Jalila was heartily

  sick of herself and Al Janb and the girls and the mah-

  wagis and the mothers, and of this changing, buffeting

  banshee weather which seemed to play with her moods.

  The skies, sometimes now, were entirely beautiful, strung by the curling multicoloured banners of sand which the

  winds had lifted from distant corners of the continent.

  There was crimson and there was sapphire. The distant

  saharas of Jalila’s dreams had come to haunt her. They

  fell, as the trees tore and the paint stripped from the shut-3 4 4

  B R E AT H M O S S

  ters and what remained of Pavo’s arches collapsed, in an

  irritating grit which worked its way into all the crevices of your body and every weave of your clothes.

  The tariqua had spoken of the pain of nothing, and then of the pain everything. At the time, Jalila had understood neither, but now, she felt she understood the pain

  of nothing all too well. The product of the combined

  genes of her three mothers; Loving Ananke, ever-curious

  Pavo, proud and talkative Lya, she had always felt glad to recognise these characteristics mingled in herself, but

  now she wondered if these traits hadn’t cancelled each

  other out. She was a null-point, a zero, clumsy and de-

  structive and unloving. She was Jalila, and she walked

  alone and uncaring through this Season of Winds.

  One morning, the weather was especially harsh. Jalila

  was alone in the haramlek, although she cared little

  where she or anywhere else was. A shutter must have

  come loose somewhere. That often happened now. It had

  been banging and hammering so long it began to irritate

  even her. She climbed stairs and slammed doors over

  jamming drifts of mica. She flapped back irritably at

  flapping curtains. Still, the banging went on. Yet all the windows and doors were now secure. She was sure of it.

  Unless . . .

  Someone was at the front door. She could see their a

  swirling globular head through the greenish glass mul-

  lion. Even though they could surely see her as well, the

  banging went on. Jalila wondered if she wanted it to be

  Nayra; after all, this was how she had come to her after

  the moulid; a sweet and needy human being to drag her

  out from her dreams. But it was only Kalal. As the door

  shoved Jalila back, she tried not to look disappointed.

  3 4 5

  I A N R . M A C L E O D

  “You can’t do this with your life!”

  “Do what?”

  “This— nothing. And then not answering the fucking door . . .” Kalal prowled the hallway as the door banged

  back and forth and tapestries flailed, looking for clues as if he was a detective. “Let’s go out.”

  Even in this weather, Jalila supposed she owed it to

  Robin. Then Kalal had wanted to go north, and she in-

  sisted on going south, and was not in any mood for argu-

  ing. It was an odd journey, so unlike the ones they’d

  undertaken in the summer. They wrapped their heads and

  faces in flapping howlis, and tried to ride mostly in the forest, but the trees whipped and flapped and the raw air still abraded their faces.

  They took lunch down by a flatrock shore, in what

  amounted to shelter, although there was still little enough of it as the wind eddied about them. This could have been the same spot where they had stopped in summer, but it

  was hard to tell; the light was so changed, the sky so

  bruised. Kalal seemed changed, too. His face beneath his

  howli seemed older as he tried to eat their aish before the sand-laden air got to it, and his chin looked prickled and abraded. Jalila supposed this was the same facial growth

  that his father Ibra was so fond of sporting. She also supposed he must choose to shave his off in the way that

  some women on some decadent planets were said to

  shave their legs and armpits.

  “Come a bit closer—” she half-shouted, working her

  way back into the lee of the bigger rock beside which she was sitting to make room for him. “I want you to tell me

  what you know about love, Kalal.”

  Kalal hunched beside her. For a while, he just contin-

  3 4 6

  B R E AT H M O S S

  ued tearing and chewing bits of aish with his body

  pressed against hers as the winds boiled around them, the warmth of their flesh almost meeting. And Jalila wondered if men and women, when their lives and needs had

  been more closely intertwined, had perhaps known the

  answer to her question. What was love, after all? It would have been nice to think that, in those dim times of myth, men and women had whispered the answer to that question to each other . . .

  She thought then that Kalal hadn’t properly heard her.

  He was telling her about his father, and a planet he barely remembered, but on which he was born. The sky there

  had been fractalled gold and turquoise—colours so

  strange and bright that they came as a delight and a

  shock each morning. It was a place of many islands, and

  one great city. His father had been a fisherman and boat-

  repairer of sorts there as well, although the boats had

  been much grander than anything you ever saw at Al

  Janb, and the fish had lived not as single organisms, but as complex shoals which were caught not for their meat,

  but for their joint minds. Ibra had been approached by a

  woman from off-world, who had wanted a ship on which

  she could sail alone around the whole lonely band of the

  northern oceans. She had told him that she was sick of

  human company. The planning and the making of the

  craft was a joy for Ibra, because such a lonely journey

  had been one that he had long dreamed of making, if ever

  he’d had the time and money. The ship was his finest ever creation, and it turned out as they worked on it that neither he nor the woman were quite as sick of human com-

  pany as they had imagined. They fell in love as the keel

  and the spars grew in the city dockyards and the ship’s

  3 4 7

  I A N R . M A C L E O D

  mind was nurtured, and as they did so they slowly re-

  learned the expressions of sexual need between the male

  and female.

  “You mean he raped her?”

  Kalal tossed his last nub of bread towards the waves.

  “I mean that they made love.”

  After the usual negotiations and contracts, and after

  the necessary insertions of the appropriate cells, Ibra and this woman (whom Kalal didn’t name in his story, any

  more than he named the world) set sail together, fully intending to conceive a child in the fabled way of old.

  “Which was you?”

  Kalal scowled. It was impossible to ask him even sim-

  ple questions on this subject without making him look

  annoyed. “Of course it was! How many of me do you think there are?” Then he lapsed into silence. The sands

  swirled in coloured helixes before them.

  “That woman—your birthmother. What happened to

  her?”

  “She wanted to take me away, of course—to some

  haramlek on another world, just as she’d been planning

  all along. My father was just a toy to her. As soon as their ship returned, she started making plans, issuing contracts. There was a long legal dispute with my father. I

  was placed in a birthsac, in stasis.”

  “And your father won?”

  Kalal scowled. “He took me here, anyway. Which is

  winning enough.”

  There were many other questions about this story

  which Jalila wanted to have asked Kalal if she hadn’t al-

  ready pressed too far. What, after all, did this tale of dispute and deception have to do with love? And were Kalal

  and Ibra really fugitives? It would explain quite a lot.

  3 4 8

  B R E AT H M O S S

  Once more, in that familiar welling, she felt sorry for him.

  Men were such strange, sad creatures; forever fighting,

  angry, lost . . .

  “I’m glad you’re here anyway,” she said. Then, on impulse, one of those careless things you do, she took that rough and ugly chin in her hand, turned his face towards

  hers and kissed him lightly on the lips.

  “What was that for?”

  “El-hamdu-l-Illah. That was for thanks.”

  They plodded further on their hayawans. They came

  eventually to a cliff-edge so high that the sea and sky

  above and beneath vanished. Jalila already knew what

  they would see as they made their way along it, but still it was a shock; that qasr, thrust into these teeming ribbons of sand. The winds whooped and howled, and the

  hayawans raised their heads and howled back at it. In this grinding atmosphere, Jalila could see how the qasrs had

  been carved over long years from pure natural rock. They

  dismounted, and struggled bent-backed across the nar-

  rowing track towards the qasr’s studded door. Jalila

  raised her fist and beat on it.

  She glanced back at Kalal, but his face was entirely

  hidden beneath his hood. Had they always intended to

  come here? But they had travelled too far to do otherwise now; Robin and Abu were tired and near-blinded; they

  all needed rest and shelter. She beat the door again, but the sound was lost in the booming storm. Perhaps the

  tariqua had left with the last of the Season of Rockets,

  just as had most of the aliens. Jalila was about to turn

  away when the door, as if thrown by the wind, blasted

  open. There was no one on the other side, and the hall-

  way beyond was dark as the bottom of a dry well. Robin

  hoiked her head back and howled and resisted as Jalila