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from some peasant’s field outside Assisi? Do the Charons who transport us to the other shore think the lotions with which they embalm our flesh bubbles from Veneto springs? We are part of the world—unless we live like stylites in the desert, surviving on air, faith, and rainwater.
    We cannot escape this net of exchange that binds us without our choosing. How strange that I feel so much more a part of the world so far from the world that I have known.
    The rough stones we buy are mined northeast of Pegu in a place called Capelan, a journey of several weeks, and no one can go there without royal permission. Brigands roam the countryside, and it is a long and dangerous trip into territory hostile to the Peguans.
    So we wait for the rubies, sapphires, and spinels to be transported here for our examination. Win has in safer times been to the hills of Capelan, which are, from his telling, Dante’s words made flesh and stone. At the edge of the Seventh Circle, you look down into pits as far as the eye can behold at bent, brown backs scurrying like beetles across the gray, ravaged earth. These poor brutes burrow through mud and gravel, their picks and shovels striking stone outcroppings with a low, mournful echo.
    What if these echoes were heard in the princely halls where our stones, cut and polished, finally find jeweled homes on fingers, wrists, and necks? Would it make a difference if our rich and noble patrons witnessed these scenes of woe outside their leaded windows? I think not. This is the way of the world.
    Though at times, in the quiet of the night with the palms rustling outside my window, I wonder if this way is forever set, if we cannot make ourselves more than we were born to be. The words I write are not in the pen before I pick it up. Who is to say that the path is in my feet before I take a step? Forgive these late-night meanderings.
    Perhaps my journey taken reluctantly may lead me as far inward as it has outward across oceans and desert. Perhaps I may return to Venice a better cartographer of my soul than if I had remained.
    Your cousin,
    Abraham

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    When the rice field turns from green to the gold of early-morning sunlight and then to the pale yellow of dry straw, it is ready.
    I can see that it is ready. If I close my eyes and rub the kernels between my fingers, I can feel that it is ready. I see it. I feel it. I know it.
    When the day approached for my ears to be bored, I knew it. I prayed to the Buddha to hurry the day. I was ready. I sat on the mat in front of my father and felt like a princess. The needle caused me no more pain than the bite of a mosquito. With each blade of grass my aunt slivered into my ear day by day, the more a woman I became. I stopped chewing sugarcane like a child (or at least stopped chewing where I could be seen). When the leaf in my ear uncurled more and more until I could almost poke my little finger in the hole, I knew that someday I would marry.
    And now I am ready. It has been many years since I stopped playing games with the boys and touching them on their right shoulder, many years since they ran without fear under my sarong drying on the line. I am ready to be a wife and to bear, I pray, a son.
    But the village is quiet. There are no young men for the girls to tease with songs at harvest time. We pound the rice alone. The young men drift away into the jungle to avoid the king’s men, who want to make them soldiers. They would rather live on wild fruit and roots than die a slave in Arakan or Toungoo.
    Old Min-Tun, who with a short arm and twisted foot could make no match when he was young, is now every young girl’s favorite.
    He is uncle to us all, and with his long Buddha ears he hears what we say and what we want to say but don’t. I can talk to him and when my mind confuses my tongue, he doesn’t scold me or turn away like my father.
    Yesterday he scuffled into the edge of the forest to hunt for medicine, while I looked for wild fruit. Whatever he may have done