Ten Thousand Threads

The Shroud

Ten thousand threads run across the Loom

Ten thousand tufts spin into thread

Such is the providence of the Weaver Uttu:

Through her Eyes she sees us, by her Hands she binds us,

Every thread of life into the Grand Tapestry

The Eye may only see, and never choose,

Lest she tangle the thread she is meant to guide

From the Weaver’s Scrolls, English translation

The wind kept pulling at the shroud of ashes in my hands, trying to take Gran before I was ready to give her up.

We walked out to the meadow in a slow procession. Past the fence, a dozen sheep crowded around a hay feeder, unbothered by whatever the day meant to the strange creatures visiting their land. Green grass was just starting to emerge across the field, low and close to the ground, weeks off from anything worth looking at. The yellow daffodils along Gran’s front walk would be doing the same thing right now, six inches of leaf and no flower. She put those in the year I was born. She had missed them bloom by three weeks.

My mom, uncle, and I were at the front. Each of us holding a cloth pouch, a shroud, with some of my Gran inside, and each was heavier than a cloth and ash should weigh. The Hearth had adorned all three with their embroidery. The wool had already gone grey where the ashes sifted through the pores in the cloth. The wind came straight across the open field, and I pulled my coat tighter against the cold of early spring.

Elder Broussard stepped in front to begin the eulogy. I stared at the collar of his robe instead of his face. The stitches along the hem were even enough to pass for machine work from far away. Up close, though, the slant drifted by a hair, the way it does when a person is doing the work. I couldn’t remember the name of the man who’d sewn them, but I did remember that embroidering the robes of the Elder Qa’u was the greatest achievement of his life. Behind me, my little cousin kicked at a rock and got shushed.

“Grief is a strange thing to gather around,” he said, and the meadow went a little more still, even the sheep. “We are not only grieving the end of an extraordinary life today. We are grieving the words we did not get to say to her, the things she did not get to finish. We are here with her children, Adele and Felix, and her granddaughter, Sylvie, to give our farewell.”

His opener. Uttu, I wanted to strangle that man. He knew he was a terrible writer. I don’t think he’d opened a single book in his life that hadn’t been written by a philosopher, the Ishparatu Council, or the Oxford University Press.

I had written him a lovely eulogy for Gran, and the opener was not only my favorite part, but the best part. He’d told me when I handed the pages over that he was keeping the one he’d written. I’d fought him, but I’m not Gran. Fine. Four sentences. The rest was mine, and the rest was good.

I picked at a loose thread on the shroud and made myself stop. My fingers had gone stiff in the cold.

“Most of you know Vivianne Adler wrote every eulogy this kushtaru has heard since its founding. The Qa’u was supposed to do it. She loved this Hearth the way she loved everything, completely.”

He kept going. I stayed on that sentence.

Notcompletely. That was the wrong line.Which is to say she ran it.That was the real end of it. The whole reason the sentence existed. And he’d left the front half standing there missing the part that made it aboutGran. Instead, he made her sound like a loyal dog and not the founder of our kushtaru.

He paused, and my mother’s hand found my elbow and stayed there. She’d heard me read it at the kitchen table. She’d caught it too.

I could guess why. It made her sound harsh. Except Gran wasn’t harsh. She was tough, and she was fair about it. She ran this place for fifty years and would’ve said so proudly to anyone who asked. She had written every eulogy that the Elder Qa’u delivered since it was founded, despite the fact that it was against the rules, because there was a time and a place to break the rules. Honoring the lives of our people was one of them. She’d find the one thing about a person that captured their life, the good and the bad of it, and it came out sounding like love. This eulogy, more than any other at Kushtaru Adler, was the one that deserved that truth, and Broussard sanded down all her rough edges when that was the thing she loved most aboutherself.

Somewhere in there I’d gotten a fistful of the shroud. Grey was sifting out between my knuckles onto the front of my coat. I opened my hand.

“You know the history. She was a Disciple Inu and married a man she’d met twice because he was a Qa’u who shared her ambition. The two of them started this Kushtaru with thirteen people in a rented hall and a roof that leaked into the offering bowl. She leaves us six hundred and the Ishparatu Council having eyed her to join their ranks. And it’s all because she taught us that the Weave is our religion, but the Cloth, the community we build, is what deserves our devotion.”

I checked it against the version in my head word by word as it came, waiting for the next thing to go missing, and didn’t find anything. That wasn’t one of my better paragraphs, but it at least honored Gran’s true history. That was easy to do. Everyone liked a good underdog story, especially when they knew the underdog won.

I hadn’t written down any of the things that had made her my Gran. How her whole face lit up the day I took my initiation vows and became a Pupil, barely fifteen. How she put twice as much whipped cream on her pancakes as anyone else at the table and dared you to say something about it. Or how she kept her lipsticks lined up on her vanity, and she used to sit me down in front of that mirror and try them on my lips one at a time. How she combed and braided my hair with her long, gentle fingers. I’d tried writing it, at the table. I got half a sentence into the pancakes and had to put the pen down. I was glad of it now. He’d have taken the whipped cream out.

I stopped listening to him after that. I may have written most of the rest and the rest was good on paper, but Broussard had the kind of voice they’d use for sleeping podcasts. He was reading Gran’s life like he read a budget. Gran had always called him Qa’u Talcum when we were at home. I thought it was because of his voice until I asked.

“That man may be as dry and soft as talcum powder, but he keeps things running just as smooth,” she’d said, and I’d watched the joke arrive in her eyes a full second before it reached her mouth. “You’re going to run this kushtaru one day, Sylvie. A kushtaru lives by sharp Eyes and dies by idle Hands. My job isn’t just to teach you to be a good Inu. It’s also how to find a good Qa’u.”

Out in public, she called him the second-best Qa’u the Hearth ever had. The first had been my Grandad. Whether that was a true assessment of an Elder Inu or the affection of a wife, he died before I was old enough to know.

After I finished weaving my shroud for Gran, I remembered that she had written all the eulogies for Broussard. I’d come home and see her sitting with her special flower-printed notebook and her favorite fountain pen. She’d sit there with me and Voss and we’d figure out how to how to honor somebody’s whole life in four hundred words. She used to read them out to Mom and Uncle Felix first to find where they dragged. She would’ve written this one too, if she’d died slowly enough to sit down to it. So I did. Same table, same flower notebook, same pen. Mom across from me telling me where it dragged, and it took me three nights to do what she did in an afternoon.

Broussard’s voice came back to around the end of the eulogy. I held my breath to see if he had cut this part. He hadn’t.

“We all must ask ourselves what happens to our Cloth now that its strongest thread is gone? Vivianne Adler honored us with her life and now we will honor her. Let us speak the prayer with which she ended every service.”

“For our Cloth adorns us, and protects us, and carries us.”

The whole field’s voices rose in unison together and their eyes all landed on me.

I knew what it meant. Ten years old and standing next to her at services, someone would crouch down to my height and tell me what big shoes I had to fill, like I hadn’t already worked that out myself. Vivianne’s granddaughter. The next great Inu of the Hearth she built. I’d been hearing some version of it my whole life, gently, sideways, and hushed, like saying it too loud might jinx whether I turned out to be enough.

“Sylvie?”

Broussard said it gently, but the whole congregation was already looking at me. I’d missed my name the first time he said it. I found his face as he said it again.

“Will you lead us in the devotion?”

I’d known the words to “Ashes to Threads” since I was young enough that I still needed to hold my mom’s hand when going to Weave classes. I recited them every Saturday morning in a flat, bored singsong with twenty other kids who wanted to be anywhere else.

“From death, our bodies return to ashes.” My voice came out steadier than I expected. “From ashes, our bodies return to the earth.”

My mom and uncle looked at each other. Felix nodded first. They spoke the words with me as we untied our shrouds together and lifted them open to the wind and shook.

“From the earth, our bodies return to the grass.”

It did not take much. The wind emptied my uncle’s first, then my mother’s, and most of it dropped straight down into the grass, heavier than it looked, a pale drift settling at the roots. Mine went last. The wind carried away some of it though, motes of dust turning sideways across the tips of the dry grass. For a second, it didn’t look like anything. Then it looked like the silver of Gran’s hair catching the light.

“From the grass, our bodies return to the sheep.” More voices had joined by now, but I could pick out my mother’s cracking on the third word and my uncle’s low and sure. “From the sheep, our bodies return to the wool. From the wool, our bodies return to the Thread.”

The field in front of me lost its edges, but my voice held steady. I’d said this prayer so many times it had worn smooth in my mouth, and every word of it came up rough.

My eyes frosted over and I went to the Loom, to the Bit-Ishpari. Only for a breath.

Of the ten thousand threads that lay across it, no two were alike. Some were so delicate they look like they could blow away. Some so bold you have to come at them sideways, and colors I’ve never found in the World and couldn’t name for you if you gave me a lifetime to try.

Gran’s thread was one of the rare gold ones, brighter than anything near it, and it drew others toward it. Whenever I entered Bit-Ishpari, my mind centered around her thread and I’d never once had to look for her.

But now she was gone.

Where her thread used to run, there was a fading golden haze like a sunbeam with motes of dust turning slowly through it. I let my hand drift through its glimmer, but the haze moved around me like the last of her cedar perfume, until the golden motes disappeared. I came back out.

“From the Thread, our souls are bound by the Weaver Uttu in her Grand Tapestry.”

Adept Voss spoke the closing words. “May her thread hold true, and may we who remain hold true to what she wove in us.”

That was that. People turned back into people with places to be. My youngest cousin was already running for the car.

“Your eyes went opal, darling,” said Mom, her voice breaking, and she pressed a kiss to my hair. “Did you get to say goodbye in there, too?”

“I’m okay,” I said, which wasn’t what she asked. She waited a second too long, then let it go. Our eyes both followed the last bits of ash still floating in the air before she left, quiet.

I stood there a long while, holding the empty shroud to my chest. There was grey across the front of me where it had been, and I left it there. A shroud hangs in your home until it is your turn to return to the earth. This one was mine now. The sheep wandered closer, curious if I had any food and bleating for attention. I walked over and scratched the black sheep behind the ears.

“This might be a little morbid,” I told her, low, while she leaned into my hand. “Your wool made my Gran’s shroud. One day your great-great-great-grandchildren will make mine.”

She kept chewing and didn’t seem to care either way.

Behind me, soft footsteps. Adept Voss leaned against the fence next to me and tried to pat one of the other sheep, who dodged away from her hand.

“Your devotional was lovely, Sylvie,” she said gently. “Your grandmother used to say the words were easy. It was standing in front of everyone and meaning them that took practice.”

I looked down at the shroud, running my thumb over the little heart in the center. “I don’t know if I meant them. I think I was mostly trying to get through it without falling apart in front of the sheep.”

That got a real laugh out of her, short and surprised. “I’m not sure I believe that. I’ve never been good at that part myself. You looked like her up there.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t try.

Voss went quiet, watching the meadow empty out. “Your grandmother spent a long time worried about what would happen after she was gone.” A warm, practiced smile spread across her lips. “I look at you now, Sylvie, and I am not.”

My throat went tight in a way I hadn’t expected. Of everything anyone had said to me that day, that was the first thing that felt like it was actually about me and not about her.

“If you ever want to talk anything through, my door’s open,” she said. “Anytime. I mean that.”

People said that at funerals and forgot they’d offered by the following week. She did not sound like that. She was good at finding the thing to say that made you want to keep talking to her. Twice now she’d told me I reminded her of Gran, and both times it landed exactly where it was supposed to, right in the spot still raw enough to want more of it.

“Thank you, Adept,” I said, smiling before I decided to. “I appreciate your kindness.”

Gran had always been my someone to talk to when the tangle of thoughts in my head got too big to sort through myself, but now she was gone. Voss had been at our kitchen table more than any other Inu. She’d been Gran’s protégé since before I was born. Gran trusted her with the parts of the Hearth she didn’t trust to anyone else, like the education program of the new seer girls or building support for some new reform. Twenty-five years of that kind of trust had to mean something.

Gran used to say there was no such thing as a day off from politics. I decided she could forgive me one, today of all days, and let the rest of it go.

My mother drove us to the wake. Once the meadow was behind us I pulled the shroud into my lap and turned it over in my hands, looking at it in a way I hadn’t been able to while it still carried her ashes. A length of cloth I’d woven myself, careful and even, and then embroidered by the Hearth in Gran’s honor.

Every hand in that Hearth had put something on it. Daffodils, sheep, cotton bolls, eyes, stars. Things anybody could look at and know what they meant.

The stitch I loved best didn’t mean anything at all. A heart sewn slightly off center, about the size of my thumb. Not the kind you draw on a card. The other kind, with the vessels branching off the top and the little arteries running down the front of it. Anatomically correct, as far as I could tell.

Three people had asked me about it while the cloth was still on the table. I told all three whose it was.