"It is not strange," contradicted the Yellow Girl, as she pirouetted with dainty feet across the moon-lapped silk. "For you see me now as I was when I wove my soul into this very rug."
Clarke smiled incredulously: which was illogical enough, since, compared with the girl's presence, nothing else should be incredible.
"How can that be, Yellow Girl, seeing that we two met one evening twenty years ago, whereas this rug was woven when the Great Khan sat enthroned in Samarcand and reproved the Persian Hafiz for his careless disposal of the Great Khan's favorite cities. This was the joy of kings hundreds of years before you and I were born——"
"Before the last time we were born," corrected the Yellow Girl. "But the first time—at least, the first time that I can recollect—the barred windows of a prince's palace failed to keep you from me. And eunuchs with crescent-bladed simitars likewise failed. But in the end—why must all loveliness have an end?—a bowstring for me, and a swordstroke for you...."
The Yellow Girl shuddered as she stroked her smooth throat with fingers that sought to wipe off the last lingering memory of a cord of hard-spun silk.
"And from the first," continued the girl, "I knew what our doom would be. So I started weaving, and completed my task before they suspected us and the bowstring did its work. My soul, my self, being woven cunningly and curiously into silk rich enough to hang on the wall of the khan's palace, waited patiently and wondered whether you and I could have our day again. Thus it was in the beginning——"
"Ah ... how it does come back to me," interrupted Clarke, "as in a dream dimly remembered. How compactly and stiflingly they would wrap me in a bale of silk and carry me past the guards and into your presence. And by what devious routes I would leave you ... yes, and how painlessly swift is the stroke of a simitar...."
The Yellow Girl shuddered.
"A simitar truly wielded is really nothing, after all," continued Clarke. "I might have been sawn asunder between planks.... Well, and that meeting in the garden these short twenty years ago was after all not our first ... it seems that I knew then that it was not the first. Though but for an evening——"
"Yes. Just for an evening. So to what end were we spared bowstrings and the stroke of swift simitars, since we had but an evening?" And thinking of the empty years of luxurious imprisonment that followed, she smiled somberly. "For only an evening. And then you forgot, until this rug—this same rug I wove centuries ago—interrupted your pleasant adventuring, and reminded you.