The Blue They Walked Three Days For
Blue does not grow on the mountain.
It comes up from the south, in a cake, wrapped in cloth.
She paid for it in wool and waited a year.
Then she tied it four fingers deep and never looked back.
Every other colour the Beni M'Guild use, they can make at home, from madder root and walnut husk and the yellow weed on the slopes. Blue is different. Blue is indigo, and indigo comes up from the south in hard dark cakes, carried by traders who know what it is worth, and a woman who wanted it had to save a fleece or two and wait for the right market. That is why a blue Beni M'Guild is rare, and why this one was tied so deep, four full fingers of wool, as if she meant to make the most of every thread she had dyed. The blue has the depth of a berry crushed on a white cloth, dark where the pile is thick, lighter where forty years of feet have brushed it, and the lattice sits in it quietly, like something seen through water.
It is not a large rug by Beni M'Guild standards, under three metres, and it is all the better for it in a modern room, where it can be the one deep thing on a pale floor. It lies now between a linen sofa and a low wooden table, and in the evening the lamp finds the blue before it finds anything else.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.