Free The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani Page A

water, with roses, tulips, lilies, and violets as beautiful as real ones. Floating above them, a single peach tree with white blossoms gave life to seedlings in each garden. It was like watching nature at work, feeding and renewing her own beauty.
    At the next loom we stopped to admire, the carpet was so dense with patterns that my eyes couldn't follow them at first. The most visible design was a red sunburst, which gave birth to tiny turquoise and indigo blossoms edged with white. Somehow, unbelievably, the knotters had made a separate layer of curved vines and another simultaneous layer of arabesques, as delicate as breath. Despite the intricacy of these patterns, none interfered with another, and the carpet seemed to pulse with life.
    "How do they make it so fine?" I asked.
    Gostaham laughed at me, but it was a kind laugh. "Touch one of the skeins," he said.
    I stood on my toes to reach a pale blue ball hanging from the top of the loom. Each thread was thinner and softer than the wool I used at home.
    "Is it silk?" I asked.
    "Yes."
    "Where does it come from?"
    "Long ago, a couple of Christian monks who wanted to curry favor with our Mongol conquerors smuggled some cocoons into Iran. Now it's our biggest export, and we sell more of it than the Chinese," he finished with a chuckle.
    Iraj, the man in charge of the sunburst rug, called his workers to their labors. After they settled on their cushions, he assumed a crouching position behind the loom and began reciting the sequence of colors needed for a blue-and-white flower. Because the carpet was symmetrical, the knotters could work on a similar flower at opposite ends of the loom. Every time Iraj called out a color change, two pairs of hands reached simultaneously for the silk and made the knot. The men held a knife loosely in their right hands, which they used to separate the knot from its connection to the skein.
    "Abdullah," said Iraj abruptly, "go back. You missed the change to white."
    Abdullah uttered an oath and slashed at a few knots with his blade. The other man stretched while he corrected his mistake. Then the chant started up again, and they were off.
    From time to time, I saw Iraj look at a sheet of paper to refresh his memory of what came next.
    "Why do they use a design on paper instead of in their heads?" I asked.
    "Because it is an exact guide to where every knot and every color should appear," Gostaham replied. "The results are as close to flawless as any human can attain."
    In my village, I always knotted my patterns from memory, inventing little details as I went along. I had been used to thinking of myself as an accomplished knotter, even though my rugs weren't perfectly symmetrical, and curved shapes like birds, animals, or flowers often looked more square than round. But now I had seen what master craftsmen could do, I wanted to learn everything they knew.
    Before returning home, Gostaham decided to check on sales at his alcove in the bazaar. As we twisted and turned through the bazaar's alleys, we passed hammams, mosques, caravanserais, schools, endowed wells, and markets for everything, it seemed, that man had ever made or used. The smells told me which section we were passing, from the nose-tingling spice market redolent of cinnamon, to the richness of leather used by the slipper makers, to the blood of freshly slaughtered lamb in the meat market, to the crispness of flowers that would soon be distilled into essences. "I've worked here for twenty years," a rug merchant told me, "and there are still many parts of the bazaar I've never set foot in." I didn't doubt his word.
    After Gostaham picked up his receipts, we looked at rugs on display in other merchants' shops. Suddenly, I noticed a carpet that made me cry out.
    "Look!" I said. "There's the rug I sold to the merchant my mother was telling you about!"
    It was hanging at the entrance of a shop. Gostaham approached and checked it with expert fingers. "The knots are nice and tight," he said. "It's a