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Come with me, she said, and make my children into good people.

What would you pay me for such a hard and cruel task?

When it is done I will tell you the story of my life.

So I ate my last meal of the sound of icebeer trickling into a cup and the melody of bone stew boiling. I kissed everyone who would bear kisses. I went with her, seeking that story. I followed her into the warmth of Pentexore and the al-Qasr with its amethyst columns, and that red, red room, with all its silk and garnet toys and wooden scepters banging against bedposts.

This is the first story I told the children, when the heavy summer rains had come and banana leaves clung to the window-papers and they could not be calmed by any song or game. I will tell it to you as I told it to them, and where they would not let me go on until I satisfied their endless, urgent questions, I will not go on until I have answered them. You must know my audience to understand my tales, for as all tellers do, I molded each story to their little hearts, to their savage ears.

I began with a question. This is a very good way to begin a story. The question was: Do you know how the world began?

Lamis, Who Always Answered: Mother made it.

Ikram, Who Always Argued: She did not! Grandmother made her, so if anyone made it, Grandmother must have.

Houd, Who Always Frowned: I think the world was baked, like the apricot cake we had for supper, all soaked in wine. The apricots are the stars and the cake is the earth and the wine is… souls, I suppose. Or blood. Not that I care.

And I, Who Was Always Patient: In the beginning were the Spheres and the Spheres were with us and the Spheres were us. Think of the little glass balls Rastno the Phoenix-king brings for you when he visits: all clear and shining and so many colors, and how you love bashing one against the other, even though they never break, for Rastno knows you all too well. They make such a lovely sound, don’t they? Well, imagine thousands and thousands of them, all crowded together in a long black void, hanging like lanterns, silver and gold and scarlet and violet. The only sound in the beginning of the world was the Spheres creaking against one another as the lightless wind of the void rustled through.

Ikram, Who Demanded Walnut Milk Before Bed: If it was a void, how could there be wind?

Where the wind came from we cannot know. There has always been wind, because there has always been change, and the wind is the sound that changing makes.

Houd, Who Didn’t Care: That’s stupid. How could there be change if the world hadn’t even begun yet?

I answered the needful, grasping hands of my charges: The world didn’t begin only once, dearthumbs. The Spheres, milky and rose, crystal and gold, clanged one against the other in the darkness, for they were as blind as they were bright. Now, you will ask me why they did not go along scraping and knocking as they always had forever, which would have meant no scarlet bedclothes or walnut milk or mother or Lamis or Ikram or even Houd, even though he wouldn’t care if they had just kept bumping along forever.

I have no answer, except that nothing can stay as it is forever, no matter how sweet, no matter how bright in the black. No matter how much we might wish that all we love could stop and hold its breath in our arms, things will insist on happening. Catastrophe is natural, my darlings, perhaps the only natural thing. And so, though there can be no reason it occurred at the moment it did and not another moment, or another, one of the Spheres cracked.

It was the Crystalline Heaven who did it, as best folk very much wiser than your Imtithal can measure it. Why the Crystalline Heaven and not the Benevolent Gold of the Sun’s Sphere, or the Base Metal of the Leaden Spheres? Lean in, and I will tell you a secret: because the Heaven was lonely, and it had a weakness in its upper hemisphere, due to some trauma in its mysterious infancy. It is important that you know this. That loneliness and weakness were always part of us.

The Sphere of Heaven ground slowly through