Dreams of the Compass Rose (52 page)

Lirheas felt an impossible cold intensity overcome him, and this moment crystallized, became the most violently urgent and yet stretched out moment of his life. . . .

“
Lirheas,” she said loudly, calmly, while the sun set on the horizon behind them. “Come to my side and open the doors of this prison wide. Release all of the women who are within. If anyone else moves, I will plunge this knife into your Lord father’s neck.”

There was a terrible fury in the face of the
taqavor.
But he felt the sharp point biting at his neck and so he hissed to the guards, “For now, do as she says. You will pay for this, bitch, and you also, Lirheas—”

The women of the House of Wives came forth like funereal shadows into the twilight. In the distance torches were being lit in the Palace itself and along the garden paths.

When the last of the women has been released, the queen without eyes directed Lirheas to stand between her and the guards. Then she moved, backing, taking the
taqavor
with her into the orifice of night that was the gaping doorway of the domed sepulcher.

“
Close the door behind us,” she said. “And do not unlock it unless I tell you so.”

“
What will you do? Let me come with you, my queen,” whispered Lirheas.

But she made no answer, and for some peculiar reason he had no strength to follow her.

Prince Lirheas shut and locked the door behind them, and stood outside surrounded by a ring of guards while darkness fell completely upon the world.

I
n the darkness they were both equally blind, the
taqavor
and the woman whose eyes he had taken from her.

Cireive felt the sharpness of metal against his neck and he barely breathed, for fear had crept into him and then engulfed him, and he felt time dripping in precious globule moments, felt silence except for the blood rushing in his temples.

And then the terror increased.

For suddenly he sensed the rising sea of growth everywhere, the soft fluttering of leaves and the filaments of flowers rising from their desiccated ashes in the open coffins of brass.

The ghosts of the flowers were all around them, clamoring loudly in the silence, scarlet and vermilion and magenta in his memory, seething around him, amaranth. . . .

“
Who are you?” he whispered, needing to hear the sound of his own voice, forgetting the fear of death and the biting steel—indeed, holding on as a consolation to the awareness of the sharp prick of pain and the grip of her hand against his neck. For these were mundane things, in contrast to all that was rising around them.

And then the moon came forth, and shone bright and pale through the skylights.

Cireive blinked, and thought he saw the ghosts of the flowers recede momentarily, but instead he saw her shadow behind him, the woman without eyes.

She had released him and moved out of his way, allowing him easy freedom. He could have bolted for the door in that moment, could have taken the sharp dagger from her hands and used it on her. . . .

But he stood frozen with the passing of time, and watched her stand there him in the brief illumination of the tomb. Without a word she raised her hands to remove the binding of cloth that covered her blind eye-sockets.

Untying the cloth, she let it drop to the ground, fluttering gently. He saw her face made soft and smooth by moonlight, and the pits of her ravaged wounds, still unhealed after all this time, her eye-sockets that refused to close, were deep with darkness in the twilight, seeming in their incidental shape suddenly to be like crowns of heavy blossoms, familiar to him, oh so familiar.

And suddenly, for a moment out of time, he recognized her.

“
Mother . . .” sobbed Cireive, an old man in the voice of a little boy. “It
is
you, isn’t it? Why did you come back now? Why did you leave me then?”

The woman stood watching him. He could see now that there were translucent ghosts of eyes in her empty sockets, and that this was the reason they could never close. Her ghost-eyes glittered, moist and soft and receptive.

“
I never left you, my child,” she said then, speaking for the first time since they had entered the tomb, and he recognized her afresh for he knew that voice, singing to him out of the depths of antiquity.

The woman took a step forward so that she was just before him, close enough to look into his own eyes. “How you’ve grown,” she said gently, and he saw her form was fluid and shimmering with otherness. She reached forth with her hand and laid it on his cheek.

“
My . . . Cireive.”

And her ghost eyes were suddenly very liquid, so liquid that they pooled with richness, and the water came in a rivulet down her cheek.

“
Remember what really happened, child. . . .”

Memories struck him wildly then, sharp images of the growing field of amaranth, tall stalks and leaves covering his head, and he was running, a small boy, running and crying for his mother.

Except he was not running in search of her. Instead he was running away, far away
from
her, leaves striking his face, running madly.

For he had left her there at the edge of the field, just as he had found her, quiet and dead at the bottom of the scarlet amaranth sea. He had sat down at the edge of the field then, with his back turned to it, and he had looked ahead and muttered to himself until dusk.

“
How did you die?” whispered Cireive, the boy-old man in puzzlement, trying so very hard to remember. “What happened to you, mother?”

But the woman without eyes was again silent. Her form shimmered, and her ghostly eyes, now cloaked in a mantle of eternity, took on a deeper richness, the eyes of
another,
of a woman who was not a goddess and yet was not quite mortal, for she was suspended between times and she was unable to die, because of him, because of what he’d done.

“
You!”
cried Cireive, recognizing her suddenly, wildly—a woman whom he had seen coming forth from the field of amaranth many summers after he was a young man, in the same place where his mother had disappeared, carrying with her a small crying child that looked so much like himself and yet unlike.

He had almost forgotten. It had happened so long ago.

“
Cireive,” the strange woman had said to him, knowing out of nowhere his name. “I have stepped from time, and I am waiting for you, even as I hold
you
here, hold you back from the abyss of the bottomless well. . . .”

“
Who are you?” he had said harshly, already a bitter man and a warrior. He heard the incomprehensible words, and he looked at her, seeing an old glimmer of something familiar, something that he should know.

She pointed to the child and then to himself.

“
No!” he had exclaimed, taking an involuntary step away from her. “I do not know you, whoever you are, nor this brat! One thing is sure, it is not mine!”

But the woman stood watching him, and her eyes were in that instant impossible to describe, for the depth of ancient color they contained, showed times mixing in her pupils.

“
I hold
you,
Cireive,” she repeated. And then the next thing she said was a puzzle: “The soul is a flower, severed from its stem, bearing seed, planted at birth, reaped in death, but never discarded in the bottomless well.”

And stricken by a sudden panic, he, who had not been afraid of hordes of armed men, ran from her, ran as he had so many years ago as a little boy. He turned around eventually, and looked down at the field of amaranth from the top of the hill that he had scaled in his frenzy.

She was not there.

Maybe she had never been there in the first place.

Cireive gasped for breath, surfacing in the here and now, where the wan moonlight of the tomb illuminated a woman with empty eye-sockets who stood like an upright corpse before him, waiting for something.

“
Who are you?” he repeated, feeling the space of the large airy chamber close in on him as though he were in a cocoon of stems and leaves and branches, with filaments of magenta streaming just overhead.

“
Wrong question,” she said in that same peculiarly familiar voice. “Ask instead who you yourself are.”

“
Ah . . .” he muttered, taking a step back from her as the cocoon of ghostly flowers growing all around him began to close in even more. And then he cried, “I am Cireive,
taqavor
of the mortal world, and my
empirastan
is all this that you see around you! All of it!”

The woman smiled. “There are walls around you. Indeed, you are Lord of them, but nothing else, not even yourself. Don’t you understand this, now of all times?”

Cireive frowned, his brow furrowing in effort. He stood considering, dislocated suddenly, and for a moment the world went dizzy.

“
I am Cireive,” he said. “And I have conquered the lands East, West, South, and North of the Compass Rose. The directions did not exist before I named them. I name all things. I name you!”

“
And yet,” she countered in a soft ghostly voice, “you cannot. For your names have no substance and are temporary designations. You named me ‘you with the knowing eyes,’ and then you named me ‘holes for eyes.’ You never named me at all, for you never learned my true name. Just as you have never known the women who serve you and for that matter the men.

“
For, a true name is not given but observed and derived from the fabric of one’s being. Look at me now and tell me what you see.”

“
Another game!” he exclaimed with false levity, while cold gathered about him, tightening the cocoon.

“
If so, then play along with me, you who are
taqavor
of the world. Or are you afraid of a woman without eyes and without a name?”

Cireive lunged backward, but things were pressing on him from all sides, invisible things with stalks and wide leaves and filaments that brushed against his skin, making the hairs on the surface stand on end.

“
Well then,” she said. “What will you take away from me next? Strip me of my hair? Peel away the skin and then the flesh from my bones? Dig deeper yet, into the marrow, to seek the essence that comprises me, and which is still beyond your reach?”

She took a step forward, closer to him again, the bottom of her robe sweeping lightly against the intricate floor tiles strewn with ashes of the flowers. Ghostly eyes, brimming with liquid, once more filled her empty eye-sockets, and the liquid was overflowing. . . .

“
Mother,” he said, “what is happening? What am I? And what are you?”

“
You have hungered for the truths of this world for so long,” she replied. “All the while you have ravaged the world within your grasp. The oceans are overflowing with the blood of your conquest and creation of the greatest
empirastan
that spans the world. And yet the desert grows around you and around this city, and one day the ocean will close in, and you will be an island all alone. Indeed, you already are.”

A knot was forming in his throat, even stronger than the pressing of terror. From the corner of his eye he saw the opened coffins filled with ashes, and pale shapes of growth rising, crawling vines reaching for him.

“
You died, mother!” he exclaimed in the voice of a boy. “You scared me so much because you were so still and yet your skin was still warm. I was so scared, so cold and scared! You were warmer than me still, almost alive. And I wanted to shake you and yet I could not! I could not stand it, I had to run! Don’t you see why—?”

The woman with the ghost eyes continued to weep before him as she said, “I had died, my child, and it was not your fault that I had, nor that you were frightened and that you ran. But don’t you know that you kept me from the cleansing and renewing cycle of death, you kept me frozen in time, because of the injustice you had done in my name? Remember, Cireive! For that night you returned to the village alone, and you brought them back and they searched for me in futility. And the next day, when they came back again and found me at last, you lied to them, and blamed those strangers for my death!”

“
No! No, mother!” muttered he, shaking. “No, I did not, no. . . .”

But the woman’s words were now a river of time, flowing wildly and not to be contained. “And the people of our village believed you,” she said. “Remember how the mob turned upon those innocent strangers who had stopped in our village to trade, and how they took them and stripped them, and lit torches from the bonfire of cut amaranth—do you remember now, my son?”

“
No,” sobbed Cireive. “I remember the flowers burning, the red feather tendrils curling into ashes, so pungent with smoke. . . .”

“
They put me on that fire, Cireive, and my body—now truly cold—went up in flames, while my essence remained in anguish, for around me were the living cries of the innocents, the twelve men who did not properly speak our tongue and thus could not defend themselves, twelve who could do nothing but struggle against the ropes as they lay surrounding my body, being punished for a crime they did not commit. . . .”

“
It did not happen!” he snarled. “No! It was so very long ago, but I remember it clearly, the flowers over my head as I was hiding, and their voices as they spoke to you, and you replied—”