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abstract patterns of script. They were skilled in medicine, in comprehending the invisible workings of the body. For that reason they were also excellent navigators, at home in an element whose territory was nearly entirely concealed from them.
    In war, they were experts in espionage, so skilled that opposing tribes competed to make mercenaries of them. They understood how to shape tales subtly and aggressively to their own ends. They understood how not to be seen. They were marvelous hunters, and they were the originators of the use of camouflage in military operations. And they made magnificent jewelry whose forms were not based on flowers, or fruits, or mythological figures, but on light itself. They took bleak dead stones, and revealed the light and brilliant colors inside them. These were remarkable; it was as if they had gone into catacombs and brought back life out of inertia and death. The women, the children, and the men themselves all wore these splendid ornaments, and they were a steady source of trade for the community.
    Souraya knew of other communities where both the men and women wore garments that concealed their bodies, but here it seemed the air itself veiled the people. Now she would go daily to examine the state of the gardens, paradises, as they were known, that Adon owned, which were now her work to oversee. This gave her the right to be called a human being, literally, because those who worked with the soil were called that, human beings, children of the earth.
    And the gardens were considered as the realm of women, because they produced food, but also, perhaps, because no one experiences sheer misfortune more intimately than gardeners, farmers, and women. All that is planted in the earth is subject to caprice—hailstorms, freezes, predators, drought, disease—while women give birth to dead infants and girls. Even overabundance could be dangerous, its own kind of emergency, which required the mother to deprive her too numerous children, or the gardener to arrange for many expensive hands to harvest and preserve a surprise of success.
    These customs were the source of a body of foolish, fanciful local legends told to frighten children, about a woman who destroyed the world through harvesting a dangerous fruit in search of some esoteric knowledge. However, legends are like ivy; they will relentlessly seek some crevice in the world, from which to emerge and make themselves come true. Thus these legends gradually became the underpinning for cruel superstitions about women, and later a body of opportunistic laws that deprived them of letters, and of civil and property rights.
    As she approached the gate that led into the property, she saw a small child being soundly punished for making a drawing with a stick in the ground. Souraya stopped and came closer, hoping to plead for some leniency for the little girl.
    She looked down at what the child had drawn. It was a sketch of Souraya herself; the child had caught the almond shape of her eyes, and had marked out curves with a playful exuberance that represented the wave on wave of her hair. She looked with a pang at her face; it seemed as far away now as a boat receding into the distance as it vanished around a river bend.
    It was with a concealed sense of relief and pleasure that Souraya received the news from Adon that she was to prepare to leave with him on a trading journey of indefinite duration. If she were a wife of longer standing, he might well have set off without her. She thanked God she was a new bride.
    Although she had adapted to her new life with tact, if not with ease, she had a keen, if untried, appetite for travel, as she had even in her girlhood. She was young, and wanted to see cities and settlements she had heard about in traveler’s tales, cities ascending to Heaven on stone, concealed in cliffs and caves, or settlements in marshes, where you leaned out of your floating house to catch a fish for breakfast. If she had submitted her own