Dreams of the Compass Rose Page 6

  Little Rikah, one of the three cabin boys. I hauled him on-board myself, after he’d picked my pocket in one of the ports we stopped at. I liked his insolent grin then, and he's proved himself indispensable, running like a tightrope walker high upon the lightest webbing of the masts.

  My men. My dear old friends. What have I done?

  I’ve traded you all for this old beloved contraption of floating timbers. For the sail with the blazing cheery sun, and the “eye of wisdom”—as I secretly call it. . . . And I’ve betrayed a promise to an old man with an ill son who lost control, and whose responsibility I’ve relinquished to the abyss.

  Was it not my own fault, my own insecurity, that let me ignore this youth, ignore his obvious loneliness, the dangerous bent of mind, the obvious first crush of which I was the unfortunate object?

  A mere boy, despite all.

  And now, he too floats softly, gently, farther and farther down into the waves, and with him sinks the promise of powers fulfilled and deeds accomplished. Somewhere far in the future he might have made a difference, this youth, this boy. With his ability guided properly he might have changed the world.

  My friends! For all of you I bleed inwardly where no one can see, and at the same time I bleed overtly before the whole empty universe of ocean and sky. For it does not matter how I bleed, as I am all alone before the gods. Only this is left to me, this floating home. A piece of my own self, a fragment of my being, a splinter. . . .

  The Eye of Sun. I lean my cheeks against you for the last time, feeling your soft unsinkable eternity, the wood of the sacred ancient groves that was blessed by the gods themselves never to perish in the waves.

  I feel you thus, connected to me, for the last time. But for a moment more, we are two eternal souls.

  Ocean stands all around me still, like a mountain. It is so close now that I see many faces in it, some like children, some divine, some contorted or wizened with ancient black parchment skin. Ocean is an old woman, reeking of desolation and, for a moment only, distant alien sand underneath a burning sky.

  Even now it is awaiting, it seems, my true choice, my final decision. Its hunger may be appeased in different ways.

  And now, I make that choice.

  If you hear me, Ocean with the face of a hag, if you hear me now, all great gods, then let it be as it must!

  Come within my mind, and read me like a chart of ocean ways, and fathom me to the utmost depth.

  Great waves shuddered and rocked the Eye of Sun. Captain Lero lay, eyes shut tight, face down, lips upon the wood. . . .

  A single wave came crashing, like the greatest thunder. In that wave flickered the face of an ancient woman with warm young eyes and skin dried to black parchment by the desert wind, a strange antithesis. And the wave spewed forth human limbs.

  The men were moving still. Weakly, and barely alive, they lay, water and seaweed rolling off them, gasping for air, like fish on land.

  All fifty-seven of them. Fifty-eight, counting the son of Lord Erae. Overhead the skies cleared, and the waters receded calmly, allowing a golden blaze of a single eye in the heavens, an incandescent eye that was the true sun. The ship continued moving, unguided, and along the far southern horizon came a sudden faint glimmer of land.

  Varian Erae stepped down quietly upon the black sanded shore of the Southern continent, and was greeted by two men clad in priestly robes of persimmon orange, and with warm humorous slanted eyes. They had known him instantly, here in the Kingdom in the Middle, never having to be told that this was the Lord’s disturbed son, the wild power-wielder. They asked him gently to follow, and Varian sensed—without having to reach out a finger of his mind—an instant of homecoming. In that same moment his wild power suddenly settled a notch, settled into a new key.

  He looked behind him once only, at the solitary figure of the tall captain. She stood watching impassively from the upper deck, while all around her the cheerful crew, among hollering and guffaws, was busy unloading part of the cargo.

  A haze of memory slithered, vague like the horizon.

  He looked, and then did not look again, and disappeared beyond the curve of land in the wake of the two sage figures.

  Lero stood and watched him absently, watched the curving line of shore only a hundred feet away. She smelled the pungent sweetness of the air that was born of land. Lero’s hand rested lightly upon the smooth polished railing of the old ship, feeling cool silent wood against coarse fingertips.

  “Captain! We’re done movin’ the last of it. And the rowboats are secured. Shall we cast off?” the First Mate cried, grinning at her.

  They did not remember, none of them.

  Only she would, always.

  A few paces away, old Hareve whistled intently, spat, and then started to bind a new length of knotted rope, while Bear winked in mischief to his brother on the far side of the mast, and pulled at the other side, raising aloft the great sail. Somewhere high up in the crow’s nest, little Rikah waved his hands in the patterns of a seaman’s code, and his thin boyish voice resounded in laughter upon the wind.

  “Cast off, then, brothers!” Captain Lero cried. “Let’s sail home!”

  She grinned, looking at them all. She startled them with the insane fierceness of her smile. Then she turned, shielding her eyes against an auburn sunset, and walked slowly to take the helm. And only at that one point—only for a moment—the quiet singular emptiness was visible in her eyes.

  Beneath them, the ship rolled softly, sweet and ancient.

  Her beloved. But no longer unsinkable, no longer eternal. She could taste it now, mortality encroaching, just at the edges.

  The Eye of Sun would sink someday now, as surely as her heart beat in her breast. And there was nothing she could do about it but live with the taste of its death just on the tip of the tongue. And thus she must, for in all things, Lero madly kept her word.

  Taken away, the magical invulnerability. Traded away somewhere, one bit of her soul for another.

  For here they were, her brothers, her soul—moving and living and breathing before her, sailing once more aboard a ship called the Eye of Sun.

  DREAM FOUR

  GODDESSDAY

  There were two human figures which rode two horses over the craggy hill to look down at the battlefield—one rider per horse. And yet their mounts each labored under a double weight, for death rode at the back of both human figures, skeletal fingers of one silver hand clutching at their saddlebags and the other wrapped around their waists as a vise of emptiness. It was that touch which curled their entrails with cold, corroded the sweet marrow of their bones. Death also stood at the foothill of the valley, against a crimson sunset sky. The two mortals were a woman and a youth.

  The woman sat rigidly astride a black warhorse, while the last golden rays of the sun fingered the polished steel of her armor, the antique scabbard of her great battlesword, and the ornate visor of the helmet attached to the saddlehorn. A cold evening wind disturbed lose filaments of hair from her unkempt long dark braids. Death’s breath kissed the nape of her sunburned neck.

  The woman’s face was gaunt and lined. Expressionless eyes. She glanced once behind her, to where the other sat atop a russet stallion—a youth, or a boy, also in armor. His hair and eyes were like hers.

  He watched her.

  “Come,” she said, her voice cracking upon its first note as it cleaved the silence. She did not speak again.

  He nodded quietly. All that was heard from then on was the sound of hoofbeats against rock, and small stones hurtling away from under the feet of the great horses, chipping and bouncing down before them into the valley.

  At the foot of the hill, they paused. The woman looked at the great field before her, covered with bodies. She heard the wind of the wide-open land, a constant soothing hiss. The sound made by the wind was a major chord.

  Between matted grass, steel occasionally gleamed in the waning light, pitch-black with blood. There were movements in places, but as she looked hopeful
ly closer they were revealed to be lurching scavenger birds. Even now, their cries brought more of their kind, black hungry specks against a red sky.

  She felt weak. She did not know it, but death shifted its silver gauntness in the saddle behind her, and gently touched her throat, then her cheek, draining her. She was compelled to dismount.

  Slowly following the compulsion, the woman entered the field, walking with leaden feet, pulling her black warhorse by the reins. The youth followed her example. As she walked, she looked at the faces only in order to identify. Her mind was atrophied. Through its placid filter she recognized many of them.

  Behind her the youth walked, and stared with hypersensitive eyes, dilated pupils. His hands and jaw trembled, as his reason connected the wounds, mutilations, severed organs and limbs to the faces he knew.

  The blood affected him. Amid clumps of ebony silhouette stalks of tall grass, it stained the sand and earth like bits of oasis—a thick congealing juice of over-ripe black cherries, so similar to the dark wine that he was accustomed to drinking. He had known on one level, yet had not known in this reality level of the here and now, that it would be so rich and gelatinous when drying.

  Somewhere in the middle of the field the woman paused. She stood dumbly looking at the corpse of a young woman. Having caught up with her, and seeing that corpse, the youth suddenly retched and burst into tears.

  She said nothing, did not look at him, vomit and tears dribbling over his face, although it passed through her mind, with a slight irritation, that she had once taught him not to cry at death. But—not his fault now; he had never seen death before like this. Not that she had ever seen death at such a scale.

  “Mother!” he uttered incoherently. “It’s Mideinn! Mideinn! ”

  Her gaze was upon the young girl, whose glass eye-marbles stared, her right hand mangled, encrusted with something that appeared to be so much like a frosting of rust, delicate and dry, and her neck was at an odd angle. Half-slit, a cross-section was exposed, and all around was a thickened pool.

  “I warned you when we were still on the other side,” the woman said through clenched teeth. “I warned you.”

  “But not Mideinn . . . No—”

  “I warned you on the other side.”

  Behind them, figures of death stood motionless, hooded, their silver breath curling in the wind, wafting gently over their shoulders, reaching forward with the claws of emptiness. Eyes of a small boy looked on, blind. They were lost in a haze of remote wilderness; he was lost. Lungs shuddered. He muttered the litany of a half-wit, between sobs, over and over. Suddenly he focused, turned with fury to the woman. “How can you be so silent now? What are you, heartless ice? Your daughter is dead!”

  She did not look at him but slowly nodded to the rest of the field, her face petrified. “And what of them? If I start crying now, I will not stop. There will not be enough tears.”

  She looked then at the youth. “And you too, Talaq—” Was that a touch of gentleness he heard?—“You must stop crying. It is not the time, not yet.”

  Through the constant hiss of the wind they heard the distant rich sound of a horn being blown.

  Living energy came to the woman’s eyes, and she glanced around, searching the horizon. No, those were not carrion birds. Dark moving human specks were noticeable far in the distance, with pennants waving on high. All in black silhouette.

  “They surround us,” she said calmly.

  The youth shivered. The tension of his facial muscles reformed him suddenly into an older man. “I curse them! Burn!” he babbled, while death brushed gentle claws against his hair, “I curse the Gheir, for all their generations, and I curse you, Cireive, High King, taqavor! Burn!

  Burn!”

  Her eyes were blank as she replied, “Shhh. Do not waste your breath.”

  But he continued, his words interspersed with sobs and cackles. “Burn! Oh, gods . . . Not one soul alive! Am I the last of the able-bodied Risei? Gods . . . hear me, hear me, hear me. . . .”

  He turned to her, gasping suddenly, his litany coming to a full stop, so that there was a long moment of wind and silence. And then he took in a long shuddering breath, and whispered, “Oh, mother . . . What of the women back at the camp? And the old? The children?”

  Her answer was slow in coming. “I don’t know. Probably they took them all by now.”

  And then she too began to laugh.

  He watched her, seeing a madwoman.

  But she was sane. Oh yes.

  “I can’t believe,” she whispered to herself, while death, standing at her side, pulled the chill edge of an abysmal cloak of night over her trembling shoulders, “I can’t believe that all it took was one day for treachery. He promised and I trusted his word. He promised. . . .”

  Suddenly she cried hoarsely, raising eerie shadowy echoes, “And all of this, all—it is my fault! ”

  Her head fell forward, as she struck her chest with her gloved fist, while the rest of her was stone. “I trusted his word. I could have been with them. . . .” she whispered. Talaq’s tears had long since stopped. He watched her as she slowly came to her knees before the body of her daughter, who had lived nineteen summers.

  With a steady hand the woman closed the eyelids of the corpse, then paused again. She reached out to touch the left hand of the fallen, pale as milk and already stiff, and withdrew a small ring from the index finger. Then she took out a small sharp knife and touched the girl’s hair, finding a bit of it that was unbloodied. She cut off a lock, soft and already dust-blown, with the texture of dandelion, and made colorless with the coming night. With jerking movements she wound the hair through and about the ring. And when she was done she placed it in a small cloth pouch and hid it in her armor, somewhere near her solar plexus.

  “In memory of . . . you,” she said stiffly, relying on ceremony, and incapable of her own words.

  Talaq stared at her, this woman his mother. She turned to him, then got up, allowing him his own farewells.

  But Talaq shook his head and backed away. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t touch her. . . . Not like this.”

  The woman shrugged. Her eyes were unreadable. “Then remember your sister however you may.” She turned away abruptly, finished.

  Talaq was trembling, as behind him death placed its silver finger-bones on his left shoulder and stroked his spine. “Are you—” he whispered, “What are we going to do now?”

  “No, I am not going to kill us, if that’s what you think. That would be wasteful cowardice. Not to mention, we still have unfinished work ahead of us.”

  “Then what?”

  With a glance and a motion of her head she pointed toward the top of the hill. The sun had bled in red rivulets behind the horizon, and evening twilight distorted the fine contours of the moving figures. They were approaching, so near now that one could distinguish individual moving limbs, all in silhouette.

  “There,” she said. “The enemy is coming. There is but one thing left for us. We will go to them and surrender.”

  Cireive’s heartbeat raced. It had been like that since dawn, since he gave the command to attack, and his army—the metal-clad legions of Gheir—fell upon the unprepared barbaric rabble of Risei, killing them to the last man and woman.

  Only the Risei camp remained. It was situated far away from the rim of these hills, far from the underlying valley on higher ground where the colder lands began, somewhere in the sparse jade forests. There they hid—the old and sick and their whelps, hiding in the silent greenery of the wooded expanses that seemed to have no end.

  And yet, they hid all for nothing.

  Their camp had been found, among the deeply verdant trees, and it was even now very methodically being taken.

  The taqavor sat on a silk cushion in a hastily erected tent, surrounded by advisors. He had only one thing on his mind: victory at last over those dregs of humanity that came from the right hand of the setting sun and called themselves Risei—their ultimate destruction. Nothing else
now to block his wave of conquest of the cold lands to the right hand of the setting sun. Gheir legions had come a long way from a distant burning place, the very lotus-heart of the desert. They had come from the glorious right hand of the rising sun, where the hot air warped over the scalding sands, and the skies rained sun fire upon bleached familiar desolation. Beloved familiar inferno.

  Here, it was frigid. Even the wind made a different sound in the open spaces of the steppe—

  a hiss, a constant din. For it honed itself over sharp blades of grass, over heavy stalks of barley and magenta amaranth, instead of grains of sand, and was now singing a savage high-pitched song.

  The taqavor had tricked her, tricked the legendary bitch-queen Ailsan of Risei, under the pretense of truce. When his spies had reported that she was away from her people—probably to plead for reinforcements from their equally barbaric neighbors—at that time he chose to attack. He broke the truce ignobly but conveniently, with his customary inevitability. He took the cold land warriors unprepared, with none to command them—just as he had taken dozens of other peoples, many times over, and to all the directions of the sun. And he smiled, recalling that the queen’s young daughter Mideinn had perished in the first attack. It gave him pleasure to know it, because the taqavor nurtured several peculiar hates, one such being the hate of everything female. It was no wonder he hated the Risei with their matriarchate.

  Thus, only one thing remained. He must have Ailsan herself, living or dead. And now a wild joy was upon him, for he was told she had returned, had been found at the field of battle and had surrendered into his power.

  Cireive was not old. It was only his pale hair, gaunt face with its unhealthy fevered stare, and his commanding height that suggested age and experience, and evoked fear from his followers. And yet here was a paradox—he had a son, Lirheas, of twenty-two summers, but they were often mistaken for peers in age, or else for two men unrelated by blood. The youthful feverenergy of the father stood in contrast with the ageless silence that gathered about the son. The taqavor ordered the captive brought in. Seated on the ground at his left hand, Lirheas his son and Prince watched. Unlike the rest of the taqavor’s advisors, his withdrawn passive face did not contain anticipation.