“The Maker King will have peace, I think,” said Saoud’s father. “But he will do it in another way.”
We never asked what that way might be, not even Tariq, and questions came to him the way that breathing did to the rest of us. Saoud’s father would freely tell us many ugly things, so we did not press him when he did not wish to be pressed.
Now, I realized our path would have been easier if we had. Tariq was right about the version of the story that I knew from my mother: it was in many pieces, and we had put them together differently over the years. My mother told me about the creatures and their gifts to our princess as I lay sick in bed, and if there was an oddness to her face as she said the words, I thought it was because she was sad I had missed the event. Six-year-olds can be selfish, and I never thought that maybe, maybe, there was more to the tale she was telling.
I had not realized the extent of the darkness until weeks later, when my sheep pox had healed, and I had gone back to the spinning room to sit at my mother’s feet. It should have been the same as any other day in the spinning room—wool came in, carded and bundled for us, and thread went out, each skein destined to be a part of a better work—but something was different. My mother wouldn’t let me spin.
They whispered, the spinners, where once they had chatted freely. Spinning was a craft of the eyes and hands, and left the mind free for talk. At my mother’s knee, I learned as much about how Kharuf ran as I learned about her craft. But that day they were quiet, as though they did not wish for me to hear. I heard them anyway, of course, because it was a small room, but the words I remembered were strung together along an uneven yarn, such that I might have spun in my first months of working.
“The Silk Road is the only way,” I heard, and “Mariam is already sick. It has only been two weeks!” and “They cannot expect us to stay here. They cannot expect us to live like this.”
My mother said nothing, just spun on and on, as though the evenness of her thread and the steadiness of her work would be enough. She spun as the room around her emptied, of spinners and of that which they would spin. The wealth and wool of the kingdom went to Qamih, and returned in the form of cloth we should have been able to make ourselves. The food we ate became plainer fare. Other artisans followed the spinners out of the castle, back home to their own meager villages to scrounge for work, or across the sand in search of something better in the land their ancestors had called home. Arwa’s mother coughed, and pressed a hand against her belly; but she would not leave my mother, and my mother would not leave Kharuf.
In the end, it took a royal decree. It was nearly a full year after the fateful party, when most of the spinners had gone, and those who stayed spent more time idle than they did at their craft. King Qasim stood on the dais in his threadbare purple robe, his face gaunt, and without his crown upon his head. Queen Rasima stood behind him, the Little Rose in her arms, even though she was six now, and too big to be carried. We stood in the Great Hall and listened as the decree was read out by the king himself, so important that he would not leave it to a herald.
“By order of King Qasim and Queen Rasima, rulers of Kharuf,” the declaration began, “the craft of spinning, whether by wheel or by spindle or by means held secret to the crafters themselves, is forbidden. Wool may be shorn from the sheep and bleached and baled. It may be carded and coiled, but it may not be spun into thread within the borders of this kingdom.”
There were so few spinners left in the court, a shadow of the former glory we had once held here, and all of them had stayed for love of their king and queen. Around me, I saw drooped shoulders as crafters saw the ending of their work. Arwa, not quite a year old now, made cooing noises, but the rest of us were silent as we considered our future. Even Tariq knew to be still. Some of the adults would find another trade, perhaps, or limit themselves to the care of the sheep and the trading of raw wool. Most would leave, my mother among them, rather than give up the craft they had set their lives to the mastery of. In the Great Hall that day, hers was the only back unbent, the only face that was not overcome with despair. I remember her standing there, so determined in the face of the king’s decree, and I felt my own body straighten to match hers.