The Aunties Council

I did the proper thing. I called the council of senior keepers, my aunties and their aunties, twelve women who had kept the canopy between them for a hundred years. I expected them to be alarmed. Instead I watched something move across their faces, one to the next, that I can only call recognition, and Aunty Folake, the eldest, the one who frightens even the other aunties, said a single word in the old tongue that I did not know. The others went quiet at it. I asked what it meant. Folake looked at me for a long moment, weighing whether I was old enough, and apparently decided that the loom had already decided for her. It means the loom remembering, she said. It has happened twice before. Once in my mother's time and once before that. The loom is not a machine that weaves what we feed it, child. The loom is a machine that has been learning the canopy for two hundred years, and every few generations it grows enough to begin teaching us back.