Dreams of the Compass Rose (45 page)

“
My Lord Nadir!” she said faintly. “Do not move! Oh, stand still, my Lord, stand perfectly still. . . .”

And, while Nadir froze with his back to her in confusion, Yaro came up behind him, holding the empty wooden cup. She crouched behind him, and with one sudden movement dipped the cup into the darker shadowed area of the sand, just at his feet.

Then she arose, holding in her hands the cup, now filled with sand, and speaking like a madwoman. “I can see you! Oh, I know you, and I can see you, Illusion!”

To the others Yaro added, “This cup holds no sand, but true water. You can turn around, my Lord, but be careful not to step into your own shadow, for it is a small spring, and all around us is not dry sand but an oasis.”

Nadir slowly turned around and looked directly at her. His expression was sorrowful, filled with kind pity.

“
What do you say, Yaro, my poor one?” he said very softly. “Come, sit down, for we will not go any farther and it is easier that we die thus, as fast as possible, instead of lingering—”

“
No!” exclaimed the skinny serving woman. “You don’t understand, because you cannot see! And it is all because of
her!
” And Yaro pointed in the direction of Egiras.

“
It is she!” continued Yaro. “She is a fount of Illusion, permeated by it. And all those around her also grow not to see, the longer they are with her, the closer they are.”

“
What a sad delusion, Yaro—”

“
Not a delusion, but truth obscured!” retorted Yaro. “It is obscured in the same manner as it was on that Night of a Thousand Moons when I encountered
Him
for the first time in the shape of the Lord of Night. For he cast a glamour over my vision, allowing me to see clearly like I had never seen things in my entire blind life—for I am blind as a bat, my Lord Nadir, and that is my only true measure. I am
not supposed
to see clearly! And yet, though nearsighted, I can right now see each grain of sand, each tiny sharp outline of this desert for hundreds of feet around us! It is only at the horizon that things begin to blur naturally, as I am used to observing them. And therefore all of this must be not real.”

“
But to what purpose?” whispered Nadir.

“
I know not,” said Yaro. “Only that Illusion is her nature, and her purpose. Ask her yourself, my Lord. In the meantime, I will drink this water in the cup, even though you may think I am drinking sand.”

And with that Yaro raised the wooden bowl to her lips, and swallowed hungrily, swallowed dry bone-white dust.

And then Yaro choked and began to cough.

“
Stop,” said Egiras, watching the sand granules spill from Yaro’s face. “There is no water, Yaro. You have gone mad from the sun and the heat and the desolation.”

“
You lie!” exclaimed the servant, forgetting herself, and she again brought the cup up to her lips with trembling bony fingers, saying hoarsely, “I will see the water! Just as I saw the Lord of Illusion hiding in my Lord Nadir’s dark shadow, as he always does, for that is how I knew! I saw a glimmer of water there, yes. . . .”

And to that Egiras replied quietly, looking at her with surprisingly straightforward sympathy, “I am sorry. It is nothing but a mirage, woman—possibly because we have remembered Tazzia the god of mirage, and thus called him to us briefly. And I regret myself that it is so.”

Egiras looked at them all—at the wild-eyed dark young woman holding the cup, at her loyal Nadir standing like a monument to approaching death, at the old black-skinned crone who was even now taking her last breaths on the pallet.

And for a moment an odd sense came to her, a sudden feeling of constriction in the area of her chest or her lungs, or maybe a little deeper. It was a new feeling, for she had never sensed this before, this peculiar brief
connection
with others, with what they were sensing. . . .

Egiras looked at them and knew that they were all here in one way or another because of her.

Bonds of human servitude.

And a sudden thought came to her: what if indeed it was true, that she was herself so bound to Illusion that there were things being obscured around her, a whole world that she could not see except through the sterile filter of the dark one?

Egiras blinked, staring intensely, and for a moment the memory of the white moons standing with false brilliance in her vision returned with searing fire. . . . But she blinked it away.

And she looked at Nadir, and she saw his dark forehead which could no longer even produce sweat, and she saw that his eyes were so calm and resigned. Was that because of her? For he was here now and would be here up to the end, and he would die with her with just such calm silence, under a burning desert sun.

“
Nadir,” said Egiras, looking into his eyes, and then her voice broke and cracked, with something more than thirst. “Nadir. . . .”

The man looked at her, responding immediately to her call, as he always did.

“
What is it, my Princess Egiras?” he said.

“
Nadir, I want you to leave me, Nadir. Go forth. . . .”

In sudden attention he neared her. “What?”

“
I want you to go,” repeated Egiras. And then, “No, it is not I that want, not I—rather, you
need
to go. You must leave me now. All of you. It is not too late for you. I, meanwhile, will turn my face toward the East, and will walk alone for as long as I can.”

“
How can I leave you?” he said. “What nonsense! Where is there to go? We are all together now, and we will all die—”

“
No!”

Her voice came as a screech, broken, jagged, inhuman, echoing in the windblown humming silence.

Egiras stood up straight and began to back away from them all—from the old woman and the dark skinny young woman, and most of all from
him.

As she moved away, she felt an odd thing happening. It was as though an invisible ancient and permanent restraint were being drawn taut between them—between
her
and
him,
one on one—as though a rope of wind and dry sunrays stretched tight and began to constrict her throat and to pull at her innards. And the more she walked, putting distance between them, seeing the line between them stretch in her inner mind’s eye, the more it hurt her inside, until the hurt became a sharp agony in her solar plexus and then in a place that she at last realized was her heart.

The rope of wind and sunlight pulled at her heart, and the other end of it was attached to Nadir’s.

And then, as the agony grew utmost—so that she no longer sensed the heat of the desert, for it was brighter than the sun—then Egiras cried with her last breath, “Be free of me! Go! I set you free! I will not look upon you or call you or need you, ever!”

With that, the rope of agony was severed—having been stretched to its utmost—and the world grew very dark, and at the same time it was very bright, beyond day.

* * *

I
watched her crumple to the sands, like a puppet that has suddenly lost its strings. And as she fell I felt something break between us, a sudden sharp snap of acute pain. And I sensed a peculiar lightness that I had not felt since I was a little boy, walking alone on the streets of the great city that spawned me, long before I met Grandmother, who was Ris, and long before I entered the desert. . . .

With my old instinct I started to run toward her, but then stopped.

The urge of duty that had until now directed my actions was no longer there, and instead there was an emptiness. I felt light and calm and almost indifferent. I could simply leave her be, lying there in the scalding white sand, and walk away and never look back.

And then the next second I felt a stab of a different feeling rushing in, and in that moment I heard Yaro exclaim behind me. “Oh, My Lord Nadir! Oh, look! Water!”

But I did not look back. Instead, I walked forward and I knelt before Egiras, and I reached out with my shaking parched hands to hold her husk of a body, knowing that she was still alive but barely.

Sensing me in turn, she opened her dark eyes, and they were liquid. “Nadir,” she whispered. “No . . . In the name of Ris, no . . . I have set you free, and now you will be able to see what you could not before, and you will be able to drink the water and live. But—only if you leave me. Get away from me, Nadir, for I stain you even now with the darkness of Illusion.”

Yaro approached us, and she came down on her knees at my side. “Look!” she exclaimed, touching me, and I was compelled to turn.

I glanced and saw that she was holding the wooden cup, gingerly, and saw what was now
within
it.

The cup was full to the brim with clear water.

While all around us was a small oasis of prickly desert shrubs and hardy greenery surrounding, only a few feet away, a small natural spring.

“
Take it, my Lord, and let her drink! We are saved!” whispered Yaro, a wild new expression in her eyes.

I released Egiras with one hand, with the other continuing to support her against my chest. And I took the cup from Yaro’s trembling fingers. As I did so I felt a coolness come from it, like a breath of distant ocean, and with it a memory of childhood.

My heart began to race wildly as a maelstrom of hope surged into it, and I brought the cup to the lips of Egiras, dipping it forward.

But then I watched in growing horror. As the water came in contact with her flesh it immediately turned to sand, which crumbled down her chin and her throat.

“
You see . . .” whispered Egiras to me with a strange smile of joy I had not ever seen in her. “I have set you free, Nadir. There is now a chasm between us once more, as it should be. I alone will die now, while the three of you will cross the desert. Even now, the desert is all around me. . . .”

And at her words it burst within me, something wild and uncontrollable that I had no words for. For the first time since childhood I wept.

* * *

Y
aro watched Nadir as he shook with tears, his large smooth, features twisted, and she knew there was a new bond forged between him and the strange terrible woman whom he had so long served. And this time the bond was such that it was unbreakable.

For, while duty and honor and caprice and hatred had bound them previously with Illusion, in their place was now truth and warmth. Instead of cause and effect there was freedom. And with it, a choice.

“
Egiras!” cried the great man, her former servant and henchman and loyal shadow. “I will never leave you, Egiras, how can I? You are like—”

“
Go on, speak it,” said Yaro. “She is like your very breath. She is the one closest to your heart.”

And then the skinny woman sighed and put her hand to her brow, rubbing it thoughtfully, saying, “Tell me what I can do, and I will do anything I can. There must be something that can be done for her whom you love so much, my Lord. . . .”

“
And surely there is, Yaro, child of dust,” said her mother from the sling-bed.

Now the old woman arose, surprisingly hale, and stood up straight. And she walked toward them lightly over the sands, her footfalls effortless as the wind, those of a young woman.

Yaro’s mother stopped, and they looked upon her and saw that her tattered beggar clothing had transformed into robes of brilliant white cotton. Her skeleton-parchment face was wrinkled still, and yet her eyes danced—young and mischievous and brilliant—and were distinctly no longer the eyes of a mortal.

“
Mother!” exclaimed Yaro, her mouth falling open. “What has happened to you! Oh!”

“
What do you think?” said the
one
before her with a smile.

“
Oh!” continued Yaro, stuttering. “What—you are not—who are you?”

“
Of course I am,” replied the other, while Nadir stared, his dilated eyes filling with ancient recognition.

“
I am still your Mother,” said Ris to Yaro. And turning to Nadir she added, “And I am your Grandmother.”

And then she moved between them and bent forward. She put her hand on the lifeless forehead of the dying Egiras and she said, “And as for you, daughter of Illusion, I have been nothing to you until the moment you decided to open your heart, and now I would like to make you mine also. For you carried me with your own hands.”

There was a sudden rising of the wind around them, a wind that had come out of nowhere and wailed and stirred the sands.

Egiras opened her eyes with a snap.

Her eyes were roiling darkness, and they too were not mortal eyes now. “Ris . . .” she whispered, trembling. “I
see you,
Ris!”

And even as she spoke, a dark shadow began to form before them out of the swirling wind that obscured the very sun.

The shadow was translucent, like a malformed mirage, yet shimmering like air warping in the heat.

Only, he was cold, the Lord of Illusion.

He stood opposite Ris, and his eyes were not visible. Only his voice sounded, the whisper of a snake.

She is mine.

Is that so?
Ris spoke forcefully, also in their minds.