Geometries of Belonging

Contents

I WILL SHOW YOU A SINGLE TREASURE FROM THE TREASURES OF THE RULER OF IYAR

GRANDMOTHER-NAI-LEYLIT’S CLOTH OF WINDS

THE DESERT GLASSMAKER AND THE JEWELER OF BEREVYAR

THE BOOK OF SEED AND THE ABYSS

THE SPLENDID GOAT ADVENTURE

THREE PRINCIPLES OF STRONG BUILDING

THE BOOK OF HOW TO LIVE

GEOMETRIES OF BELONGING

RANRA’S UNBALANCING

WHERE YOUR QUINCE TREES GROW

MIRRORED MAPPINGS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PUBLICATION HISTORY

Geometries Belonging

stories and poems

from the birdverse

R.B. Lemberg

FAIRWOOD PRESS

Bonney Lake, WA

Praise for R.B. Lemberg’s

Geometries of Belonging

"This engrossing, thoughtfully constructed volume collects 11 beautiful pieces of poetry and prose set in Lemberg’s fantastic Birdverse (last visited in The Four Profound Weaves). The poems and shorter stories, which vary in tone from angry to scholarly to lighthearted, masterfully contextualize and deepen other Birdverse tales. The stars of the collection, though, are its three novelettes: ‘Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds,’ ‘The Book of How to Live,’ and ‘Geometries of Belonging.’ All three delve into Lemberg’s innovative ‘deepname’-based magic system, feature queer and neurodiverse characters, and probe the limitations of traditional social boundaries. Despite these commonalities, the facet of the expansive Birdverse that each novelette presents is strikingly original, and each has issues of crucial importance on its mind, including consent, class struggle, and gender identity . . . It’s easy to get sucked into this intricate, lyrically described world and this collection proves both an easy starting place for newcomers and a treat for longtime fans."

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"A collection of stories and poems, R. B. Lemberg’s Geometries of Belonging compiles and expands on the immersive fantasy world of the Birdverse. The collection’s greatest strength is its balance–not a single note is wasted or misplaced in this fantastical symphony. Loss pairs with triumph, redemption clashes with betrayal, and searching (for belonging, purpose, answers, and love) is a unifying theme. Love is present in all its forms, depicted as both a saving grace and a destructive force; the unadorned, at times unflattering verisimilitude of these depictions brings resonant realism to the high-fantasy atmosphere . . . Whether drawing from established Birdverse lore or not, all entries are devoid of exposition, a hallmark of Lemberg’s prose; the world of the Birdverse reveals itself only as much as is necessary, and always in its own time . . . Human connection and resilience are the most powerful magic of all in the fantasy collection Geometries of Belonging."

—Foreword Reviews

Stories (and poems) of a stunningly ornate fantasy world, whose societal constructs are a perfect backdrop for characters of underrepresented identities and their search for recognition and place and purpose. R.B. Lemberg’s honest portrayal of these endearing characters shares intimate complexities of such identities yet makes their experiences poignantly and profoundly universal.

—Scott H. Andrews, World Fantasy Award-winning Editor

of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Magazine

R. B. Lemberg’s words work miracles. Their stories and poems have sustained me through terrible times, through heartache, loss, and longing. Whether this is your first visit to the Birdverse or you are a frequent traveler there, this gorgeous, meticulously-crafted collection will work its magic on you, too. These are tales that transform us, that hold us with power, tenderness, and wisdom.

—Izzy Wasserstein, author of All the Hometowns You Can't

Stay Away From

Since they began, R.B. Lemberg’s Birdverse stories have shown what’s possible to do in second world fantasy. Brilliantly imagined and populated by compelling and complex characters, the stories collected here break rules and don’t apologize, blending romance and action in a meticulously realized setting that grows more vivid with each new tale, where human cruelty and grief feature heavily but are expertly balanced by acceptance, love, and joy. I have been waiting for this collection for years, and it does not disappoint. It’s a triumph of queer speculative fiction!

—Charles Payseur, winner of the Locus Award, and Hugo and

Ignyte Awards finalist

There’s always been a sense of care and empathy in Lemberg’s stories, in which characters (often queer and/or disabled) are exquisitely human, flawed and worth loving; social power dynamics are thoughtfully examined; magic itself is entangled with the need to consider the individuality and consent of all beings. But there’s an aliveness that emerges from the placement of all of these works together which is greater than the sum of its parts. Birdverse isn’t the home of one set of protagonist characters, or one important country whose history progresses through the ages. It’s a rich tapestry in which all sorts of wildly different characters, in wildly different circumstances, interconnect. A magical tapestry is woven, passes through many hands as it makes its way to the greedy ruler who will buy it, and those hands in turn have their own stories, which are less about the tapestry and more about family, gender, and belonging. A nation of refugees flee a disaster, find a new home, make and break magical agreements with the land, and a thousand years later a new set of refugees comes to them on uneasy terms. Magical characters have absurd, light-hearted adventures in the pursuit of their research; magical characters struggle greatly and seriously with the weight of their responsibilities, and save the land from disaster, and have PTSD from their attempts to save the land; meanwhile non-magical characters face discrimination, in the face of one country's magical snobbery, and agitate for institutional change. There is no one story and that’s the point. Everyone is alive, everyone is connected, and everyone is human.

—Ada Hoffmann, author of The Outside

ALSO BY R.B. LEMBERG

The Four Profound Weaves

The Unbalancing

Geometries of Belonging

A Fairwood Press Book

November 2022

Copyright © 2022 R.B. Lemberg

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First Edition

Fairwood Press

21528 104th Street Court East

Bonney Lake, WA 98391

www.fairwoodpress.com

Characters are the products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Cover image © Getty Images

Cover and book design by Patrick Swenson

ISBN: 978-1-958880-01-2

First Fairwood Press Edition: November 2022

Printed in the United States of America

For Bogi and Shweta—

the feathers of her crest are splendor

the feathers of her tail are desperation

the feathers of her wings are love

I WILL SHOW YOU A SINGLE

TREASURE FROM THE TREASURES

OF THE RULER OF IYAR

1.

There once lived a woman who glorified Bird

with such exultation that the goddess turned

every song she sang into a thread.

She sang, and they hung from her mouth, the wool

dipped in vowels of madder and pomegranate

and consonants of indigo.

Her body was cocooned in them,

and her kinsmen praised her,

until she sang and spoke no more.

Come, pull on these threads, Khana trader, pay us in gold

coins of Iyar, pay us in salt and loukum,

unravel her mouth so she will speak again,

unravel her mouth so she will sing

madder and walnut out of Bird’s feathers.

2

There was a Khana woman who walked through the sands

in sturdy shoes of rose-adorned leather

to trade in spidersilk and in fine wool,

in salt and honey crystal, and in staves of blue wood.

Her lovers went with her—they hid in the sleeves of the whirlwind

and walked again in quiet weather,

stepped over the bones of forgotten beasts

the desert wind reveals in its open fist, before it closes again.

And they would sing of this, but they are forbidden,

all Khana women are forbidden from this,

and especially among strangers.

I have pulled this thread from your mouth, stranger,

walnut and pomegranate rind—is it a song I have touched?

You say you’ll never raise your voice again

even if I fill your hands with gold coins

but still, your eyes

will see the glory of Bird rising

arrayed in feather clouds, and inside

your voice, like a shriveled walnut rattling in its shell,

will sing her colors, hoarse with yearning,

will sing in all the ways that are forbidden to me.

3

There was a weaver in a tent of old leather

stooped on the reed floor. Her children had forsaken her,

this old woman with wool-burned fingers,

blind with Bird’s visions that the wind brought her, blind

with visions of the beasts rising from buried bone

that the wind reveals and hides in its clenched fist.

She would weave from fine wool and spidersilk, but she had only sisal,

and when sisal ran out she wove from dry reeds,

and when the reeds grew no more she wove a carpet from air,

an invisible road for the wind to step on,

to bring her a story that even the winds forgot.

Who are you, traders that I cannot see

in your rattling ornaments and your good creaking shoes,

aren’t your faces dry from wandering?

Give me of these fine threads that sing with indigo and weld,

I’ll make it into a carpet of my hurts,

knot it into a desert alive with Bird’s burning,

I’ll weave—with undyed wool and spidersilk—

the bones out of their hiding places.

I will blot out the screaming of my flesh

with the song of the wild madder

through a thousand nights until my work is done.

4

Like the wind that opens its fist

to reveal a thousand years of lives not its own,

so does the ruler of Iyar

open and close his coffers

on a whim, and only for himself.

Do you know this, spinner who chokes on a song?

Do you know this, trader with blood inside your shoes?

Do you know this, star-weaver with your slow, crooked fingers?

Yes, even for the ruler of Iyar

who knows nothing of this song or this wandering,

who knows nothing of this dry blood rattling inside the bones.

GRANDMOTHER-NAI-LEYLIT’S

CLOTH OF WINDS

Grandmother kept her cloth of winds in the orange room, a storage chamber painted in fire and lit to a translucent glow by dozens of floating candlebulbs created by the older women’s magic. As a small child, I remember hiding between the legs of a polished pearwood commode, safe and stuffy-warm behind the ancient embroidered material that draped it, hiding—just to be sure—also behind the veil of my hair. Grandmother-nai-Leylit would come in always just before the afternoon meal, and her smell—saffron and skin and millet dough—spread through the room like perfume. Her shuffling steps rang for me a music more exalted and mysterious than the holy sounds of the dawnsong that drifted each morning from behind the white walls of the men’s inner quarter.

I would watch from the darkness of my veils as grandmother unlocked the walnut cupboard, one of many pieces of storage in the room. She would pull from it, her brown age-spotted hands shaking slightly, a basinewood box ribbed in razu ivory and guarded by nails of hammered iron. Gently, as if deep in prayer, she would lift the lid and pull from the box an invisible cloth.

Lacking the magic of deepnames myself, then and now, I could not see what she held, but I could hear a faint crinkling, a movement of small threads of air as they restlessly wound around each other. I watched grandmother bury her face in this cloth, inhale it, pull her kaftan sleeves up and trace the length of it along her bare lower arms, before with a sigh she would put it back.

A few years later my brother was born, and my mothers left again for a trading venture through the southern deserts. I did not see a trace of them nor hear any word before I grew too big to hide under the pearwood commode. Then a letter, torn and filthy, arrived from the south to say that my mothers were now staying in Zhaglit-Beyond-Walls, a place nobody in the quarter had heard of.

My brother Kimriel, now three, did not talk. With my mothers so far and the day of his entrance to the men’s inner quarter only a year away, we were growing more and more anxious. The scholars would not admit a wordless child, but all our teaching and cajoling led to nothing.

One day, grandmother-nai-Leylit brought us children openly into the orange room. Kimriel wailed and struggled in my arms, his face bewildered, eyes darting from one strongbox to another. I hoped, I prayed she’d let him touch the fabric made of wind. I wanted miracles, I wanted him to touch the cloth and break out in a torrent of blessed speech, in great sentences of Old Khana that only the scholars know. I wanted to shake the gatekeepers of the inner quarter, men bearded and veiled and unknown to me, to shout at them to let my Kimi in; I knew, I knew even if they refused to believe, that behind the white walls of the men’s domain there waited for him a greatness. He’d been named after the men’s god, the singer, Kimrí, Bird’s brother, and like the goddess Bird I yearned to shelter him under my wings from all that hurts, and then to send him triumphantly forth. But I did not know how to help him.

When grandmother-nai-Leylit opened the cupboard and the box and pulled out the cloth of winds, Kimi’s eyes focused on it. Even as a young child that had not yet taken magic he could see it, hinting at an aptitude greater than mine by far. Grandmother-nai-Leylit guided his hands to touch the cloth, but no great torrent of speech burst forth from Kimi’s mouth. It took me a moment to realize he’d fallen silent—not wailing, mumbling, or fidgeting even. His small fingers held tightly to what I could not see; a homecoming.

When Kimi turned four, the traditional age for a male child to depart the women’s quarters and pass through to the men’s domain, the scholars would not take him. Another four years they granted him, four years of reprieve during which he could begin to speak and gain acceptance to the men’s side of the quarter, where to learn his Birdseed letters and the deeds of holy artifice. I watched over him, watchful as Bird. Unnoticed by grandmothers and protected from the idle questions of other girls and women by the fierceness of my glare, Kimriel would spin around and around, his face gleeful, his arms spread wide as if he would fly.

My friend Gitit-nai-Lur took to following us to the courtyards nestled under the outer walls of the quarter. Outside these rough-hewn gray boulders lay the city of Iyar, fabled with its trade and splendor, anointed in persimmon perfume. Everything about it frightened and enticed us—the Iyari men oiled their beards and donned brightly colored garments; behind these walls they walked unveiled and spoke loudly. The women, radiant in billowing silk dresses and adorned in beads, were stripped of magic according to an age-old tradition. This deed, so repulsive and incomprehensible to us, was to them joyous, marking passage from childhood into adulthood. In time we’d step out of the quarter as grownups, as traders. We would venture into the city, and out of it, through the carved Desert Gate. But it was not yet our time.

In courtyards so close and yet so far from that world, we would watch Kimi’s grounded gyre; Gitit would mutter words in the trade tongues of the desert, which she was trying valiantly to learn. I’d help her sometimes. Languages came easily to me. Under the shadow of the walls we’d say spidersilk, basinewood, glass, honey crystal to each other in Maiva’at and Surun’ and Burrashti. In these words lived for us the dream of all what lay beyond the quarter, beyond even the city—the desert embroidered in heat, the people in their tents of leather strung with bells and globes of fireglass. We spoke of flatweave carpet, madder, garnet, globes of fireglass and of each other in that heat, protected by the benevolence of the ancient trade routes.

Kimi got used to my friend. Gitit learned to draw on her deepnames and send forth bubbles of multicolored air. Kimi would laugh when they landed on his fingers and winked out like tiny candlebulbs or fireflies.

Grandmother-nai-Leylit found it more and more difficult to walk. She made a spare set of keys for my other grandmother, grandmother-nai-Tammah. I would bring Kimriel to the orange room when he was inconsolable, and my other grandmother, tall and willowy under her shawls of spidersilk gauze, would pull the cloth of winds out of the casket for Kimi. The weave of the rustling winds calmed him. It made him happy. It made me happy with the kind of happiness that comes from wanting a person you love to be content in a hundred ways that have nothing to do with aspirations of propriety.

At eight, Kimriel could say a few words—sunset, box, no, fish; not nearly enough to pass into the scholars› domain, locked now from him forever. We would no longer be allowed to call him after the men’s god, so the grandmothers took the name Kimriel away, together with his young child’s clothing. They named him my sister, Zohra, and dressed now her in garments appropriate for a girl. Though Kimi would not answer to Zohra, no longer did we have to worry about her fate beyond the men’s white walls, no longer would we struggle to teach her the words of scholars.

But the relief from that pressure had thrust me suddenly into the center of my grandmothers’ regard. In all those years of adolescence I had spent watching Birdlike over my sister, I had not taken a deepname, had not even thought about magic. Now, at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, they insisted I should take a deepname if I wanted to be marriageable, and desirable as a partner in an oreg, a women’s trading group.

I shrugged it off. I had no aptitude for magic, could not sense it like Kimi or my friends. Marriage would happen as it would, and I could not care less whether some man behind the inner walls would be a master artificer or a floorsweep. I would see him a few times a year at most, in the perpetual semi-darkness of the ritual chambers; most of my time I would spend with my oreg, whether trading or at home.

And as for an oreg, well. Gitit-nai-Lur, that most beautiful girl with her dark lustrous skin and her eyes unpainted by kohl, had deepnames enough for both of us. An oreg was more than the deepnames held by its members.

But even though I had not succumbed to the soul’s darkness that comes to so many who yearn in vain for the mind’s power, I was growing restless. I wanted to venture beyond the quarter’s outer walls, beyond the city, to trade, but grandmother-nai-Tammah begged me to stay and help watch over my sister while grandmother-nai-Leylit grew more and more frail. Gitit-nai-Lur, with her two deepnames, received many offers from trading groups both new and established, but she stayed behind with me out of sheer stubbornness.

Later that year, grandmother-nai-Tammah constructed a rolling chair for grandmother-nai-Leylit. It was made of white metal and deepname-powered, though I could not see exactly how the light of deepnames operated it; it was a work of artifice and thus forbidden to women. Grandmother-nai-Leylit could steer it with her mind. It had annoyed me in the years past when grandmother-nai-Tammah would do those mannish things, but now I was heartened to think that she’d not asked for permission, for surely such would not have been granted.

A few months after that, grandmother-nai-Leylit could no longer steer