Interlude 1
You will forgive me, dear reader, for this must seem the cruelest of moments to steal away from Amina’s fate.
But she has requested that I unravel her tale as it happened and in this quest, I have struggled to do so.
For this is not a story that can be told without the voice—the voices of another—one I scarcely understand.
There is no travelogue to read aloud, no inscribed clay tablets to decipher.
It was an entity, an experience unlike anything I have ever heard of; an experience so profound that it loosened a tongue that had before been most reticent.
And so, though I am reluctant to put you in the hands of another, I fear I must.
For this is not only Amina’s story.
* * *
You are born in a gentle land.
This is perhaps a misremembrance, for its forests are dark and filled with wolves and tusked boar, and its steep rocky cliffs daunt even the wiliest of goats.
But your birthplace seems gentler, more dangerously innocent than all the filthy, fetid cities that would follow and so you will recall it, in the blur of so many lost eons, as gentle.
As a place washed by a pale blue-green sea and hemmed by a narrow beach of glittering slate pebbles.
It is primitive and small, a village compared to the grand cities and empires you will see rise and fall, with more inhabitants than your birth-self realized existed in all of the earth, with temples and citadels that block the sky, palaces of marble courts and terraced hanging gardens, places that can send wave upon wave of warriors—armies, another idea you will come to learn.
But you as you are do not know of armies, though your people believe themselves advanced.
Your headman lives with his family and his livestock in a whitewashed stone building of two stories, and your flocks and fish are plentiful.
So plentiful that you trade with similar settlements and marry your daughters off wearing anklets of imported red beads.
Bronze is too costly for most, but your people work stone in beautiful and useful ways; satisfied.
And while there are no grand temples for your gods of sea and childbirth, hearth and harvest, you would not have understood the need for one.
Not when nature itself offers shrines in the forms of sunlit glens and your ancestors’ bones.
However, what your people do have, what you are acclaimed for, what you will be cursed for is your cloth.
Wool is the lifeblood of your birthland as much as the sea that keeps you fed.
The earthy, salty smell of raw, wet fiber drying in the ocean breeze, the bleating of flocks.
The dye that stains your fingertips and the carved wooden spindle given to every child upon surviving to their fifth year.
Whether your ancestors were blessed with an abundance of clever weavers who envisioned novel, beautiful patterns of math in their tapestries, emblems to mark the passage of life, to record your history and your heartbreak; or whether there was something in the thistle and thorns that gave the fluffy cream-colored coats of your black-faced sheep their characteristic softness, no one knows.
You have stories, of course, of the blessings of spider goddesses and boons of a deity with horns and an unspoken, sacred name.
In another age, your people might have learned how to turn this blessing into an advantage.
A crafty headman might have bartered a yearly cloak embroidered with sacred emblems to a neighboring king strong enough to offer protection.
But yours is a small settlement with a limited flock, and there was never enough excess wool that could be worked and traded away.
Instead, the pieces your people spin and weave are cherished, meant for familial use: the mantle for your wedding, the blanket that swaddles your infant, the shroud that would be the very last gift you gave your mother.
It is love that goes into those intricate stitches, years of laughter and story circles, pride and grief.
And never again—not in the courts of kings, nor the silk-laden treasure rooms of empresses—will you encounter textiles as extraordinary as those in the land of your birth.
But the world is changing. Your people are not as isolated as your ancestors were and you do not conceal your woven treasures.
Why would you? And so your veils and tapestries travel with married children and loyal trading partners.
Requests begin to come in: Could you weave a cape for a new headman, quilted vests with protective symbols for a hunting party?
When possible, your people oblige, enjoying unexpected windfalls of grain and amphorae of sweet mead.
You believe your leaders savvy in their lovely home with its new walls of imported mosaics whose frolicking dolphins and wan-eyed maidens are swiftly to be painted in blood.
For though you do not know it yet: peaceful lands, whose inhabitants are a bit sheltered, their leaders lost in their own internal problems, and who have such lovely, lovely goods—arable soil, gold-flecked streams, temples of pilgrim treasure .
. . or simply cloth fit to drape the shoulders of a would-be king—they are but good green leaves before locusts.
It all ends in a night.
Sea raids are not unheard of among your people, but pirates—vicious bands of men more brutal than rabid beasts—typically target the wealthier coastal settlements, not your little hamlet of fishermen and weavers.
There is no warning; the boy who keeps watch from the hills is awake, but his throat is slit by an advance scout.
For the raiders who silently pour across the beach from black ships are not loosely organized; they are skilled thieves of bodies and treasure, hired to steal away both the fabled textiles and their creators.
They slaughter all deemed not valuable enough to be carted off.
Which means all of the men, for theirs is not a world that considers that your men might weave, that they might be the only ones who practice a particularly sophisticated courtship stitch used to woo future brides.
This knowledge is ripped from the seam of the world forever in a moonrise.
All of the boys taller than their mother’s waist, leading them screaming and crying from those they try to cling to. All of the babes.
The men were killed and the women and children enslaved.
There are very few phrases both duller and more horrific.
Because it is a fate so frequent to the pages of history, that unparalleled distance which separates our lives from the back-trodden past, that it becomes almost commonplace.
We shudder and move on, marking the fates of the monarchs and kingdoms affected.
Perhaps a famous scholar will bear mention, the strategies of generals and hand-wringing of politicians.
They will step into the record, they will often escape.
It will be those who cannot flee, whether by lack of means or because they have nowhere to go, who are left behind.
And then the men will be killed and the women and children enslaved.
But what does that truly encompass? Do we really want to know, to delve into the details that scar your nightmares?
What it is to lay in this blood upon the straw mattress you shared with your children and your husband—the man you once loved most sweetly—slaughtered at its foot for trying to stop your daughter from being dragged to the beach where she screams as you both share the fate of conquered women everywhere?
The rough straw pokes into your skin for the mattress is bare now of everything save the blood of everyone precious to you, everything that was your world, for the blankets had to be saved first.
They were valuable.
As are you. Somewhat. With your daughter who will never speak again, and your breasts engorged with milk for a murdered infant, you are taken to a new settlement.
It is no mere village, but has the makings of something else.
Not a city, not yet. But one whose thick walls of mudbrick and sharpened sticks enclose several thousand souls.
Its ruler lives in a grand stone home and his people in cruder huts.
The women from your land are imprisoned in pens you wouldn’t have kept sheep in and viewed much the same; given inferior wool, stinking poisonous dyes, and crude looms. You are told to re-create the tapestries from a ruined world, the blankets that will never welcome new babies nor celebrate new marriages, the many shrouds you would have needed to wrap all your dead.
The demand is so ghastly, so cruel and profane, that a few of the women refuse.
They pay the price you imagine. But you have a daughter to protect, the only thing left in your life, the reason you did not throw yourself into the sea on the voyage here.
And so you shove aside your once-cherished traditions and try to do as those who claim they own you command.
You give everything—your fingers grow gnarled and your back stooped.
Every moment in pain, both in your heart and body.
But your child is there when you wake. And for that, you will suffer anything.
Until your daughter doesn’t respond when an impatient overseer demands to know if her work is nearly complete.
When he interprets her silence as an insult, the sort of insubordination that cannot stand and strikes her so hard with her spindle—the spindle her father carved, that you gave her when she turned five—that her familiar eyes will never open again.
All grief transforms, it is a boundary, and when one is cruelly transported into that new land of the bereft, they are forever changed. But this.
This.