Dreams of the Compass Rose (49 page)

But somehow she knew it. The blind queen turned her bandaged face to the wind and strained forward, breathing the tainted air.

“
What is happening?” she said softly. “Tell me.”

“
I think they are burning the gardens,” he said. “My Father’s latest mad decree.”

Lirheas neared her, and he touched her lightly on the shoulder so that she grew tense and motionless, instinctively not trusting anyone’s touch.

“
Please,” he whispered then. “Forgive me . . . for not being there when it happened, when he—the beast—had this done to you.”

His hand, the fingers that touched her shoulder gently, were trembling.

“
My Prince,” she replied, “you have always been there when you could. You are not like him at all, do you know? As though you are not his son.”

And then she added, her voice infinitely gentle, “There is nothing to forgive when one is blameless. Tell me, did you ever know your mother? Was she like you? She must have been a kind woman.”

“
No. My mother died soon after my birth, I was told.”

The queen’s lips curved into a tired smile. “She was fortunate, then. The gods took pity upon her and allowed her to escape an existence with
him.
How did she die? Did they tell you?”

Lirheas frowned while his memories attempted to fly back to that obscured time, past all the dark things that had happened in the interim, dark things he did not want to recall.

There had been hushed whisperings in the Palace. He had paid little attention to them, but then he had been just a small child and did not know what was worth paying attention to; it had not interested him at that point.

There was little said thereafter about his mother. In fact, he did not even recall if her name had ever been spoken in his hearing.

But now suddenly, all these years later, with the sightless face of the blind queen before him, Lirheas was tormented by an urge to know. Who had his mother been? And, even more so, what kind of a peculiar creature was he that he had never wondered about this earlier?

“
I don’t know,” he said after a long pause of stilled thought. “But I must now find out.”

T
he
taqavor
was in his most beloved place, the central hall of the Compass Rose, when his son Prince Lirheas came to him with a question.

“
Forgive me, my Lord Father,” he said in a measured wooden voice, steeling himself for anything. “I want to know the name of the woman who had gave birth to me, my mother. What happened to her? How did she die?”

The
taqavor
tore himself away from the floating four-point star that pointed in the same direction always, a tendency he himself named “North.”

He looked at his son with his earnest face, a younger man who had always been quiet and reserved throughout the years, and who now suddenly came into focus before him, out of nowhere, out of time.

“
What’s this?” said Cireive. “What do you ask?”

“
My mother,” repeated Lirheas. “Who was she?”

“
How should I know?”

Lirheas strained to keep his breath even. “I am your son,” he said. “Who else would know such a thing but my father?”

The
taqavor
raised one eyebrow, then his eyes moved away to look into nothingness. He then just as quickly looked back at the younger man, and approached him.

Lirheas wanted to step back from the sickly intensity of the gaze, but held himself in place.

“
Who else?” said Cireive. “I am your father, yes. I am also your mother!”

And then the
taqavor
smiled and began to cackle, his voice sending up harsh echoes in the stone hall.

Lirheas looked at the madness before him, but he was now beyond caution, beyond fear, in a singular place of clarity, which required him to persist.

“
What was her name?” he said. “You must tell me. Try to remember, please. . . .”

The bark that came in the next instant made the Prince’s heart weak.

“
Oh, I
remember,
do not doubt!” cried the
taqavor
in a shrill voice, again advancing on his son. “You think me insane, don’t you, boy? Well, think what you will, but I remember it very well! It is the one thing that is with me always, and the one thing that I will never forget. Never.
Never!
”

The last word came as a scream.

“
Then tell me,” said Lirheas, with a false outer calm.

The
taqavor
laughed. He chuckled, then guffawed, then paused to listen to the macabre echoes he made and giggled, pointing with his hand to the sound as though it were something to be captured in the air like a summer fly.

“
I will tell you,” he whispered. “For she lives in my dreams. . . .”

B
lue twilight had come to hang thickly over the amaranth field when the boy finally rose and walked up the hill slowly. He had left their basket behind and he was on his way home, which lay on the other side of the hill.

When he came to the row of outlying houses and the clearing where the well stood, he saw horses and strange men. They had stopped near the well, and there was loud talk and many foreign accents. Some of the townsmen had come out to barter, and now were discussing news of the outer lands.

Cireive walked straight ahead past them all, and several of the neighborhood boys waved at him and cried out bold greetings in their play language. But he ignored them all and continued forward.

His house lay within the confines of the town, and the room that he and his mother occupied was just next door to another family, sharing with them a thin wall and an outside entrance. To get to his own room, Cireive had to pass through his neighbors’ one.

“
Where is your mother, boy?” asked the old man who sat in his usual place at the entrance. He always asked that same question, but today Cireive paused before him and glared with all the intensity his small frame could muster.

“
I’ve lost my mother,” he said. “She did not come home? Did you see her enter, Grandpa?”

The old one scrunched a face that was already furrowed like a cracked jar of mud. “Where is your mother, boy?” he said again, for he was daft with time.

“
Don’t talk crazy, Grandpa!” said Cireive. “Did you see her, or not? Tell me!
Tell me!
”

But the old man shook his head, and began to mutter.

A young woman came out, dark-haired and smooth, probably his mother’s age, carrying a heavy bowl. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Why are you shouting?”

And then she looked the boy over, saying, “You are a mess, Cireive. Your face is covered with dirt. Go on in and wash yourself, piglet. Where is your mother, anyway?”

And at that instant something burst in him, seeing this woman and hearing her say this, which somehow was such an ordinary thing. And yet it terrified him, seeing that these adults also did not know where his mother was.
Everything
suddenly became terrifying, because he knew that he was completely alone.

And Cireive bawled, huge tears rolling down his face. He wept in public for the first time in his self-aware life, not caring that he was a grown boy of six summers, and words came squeezed out of him, random and tattered words. . . .

“
My mother is gone . . . she was supposed to go in and look for me, but she didn’t, and I waited, and then I heard some strange men’s voices passing by, and then I waited again, and then I came out and she wasn’t there, and she is not here either!”

By now the neighbors had all come out, and the young woman of his mother’s age took him to her and held him tight and rocked him against her. He was still sobbing, sobbing.

“
Where is the boy’s mother?” a man said. “Did she not come home tonight from the field?”

“
I saw those strangers come riding from the same direction,” said someone else.

And then they were holding Cireive and shaking him and questioning him. “Did you see the men come by?” they were asking. “Did these men talk to your mother, did they do anything?”

“
I don’t know!” the boy cried. “I did not see, I don’t know!”

A crowd gathered. Tired, drawn, sun-burnt faces of grown men he knew, faces of stone frowning all around him, closing in, the swelling hum of the disturbed hive.

“
We need to go look for the boy’s mother!”

Twilight had grown heavy, and in the new darkness they lit torches.

Cireive trembled, holding onto the hand of the woman who was his neighbor, holding it as tight as a death grip.

“
Show us where you last saw her, boy!” they were now saying. And he huddled further, covering his face against the cotton robe of this woman who stroked his hair.

In the growing darkness he was led forward through the center of town, and the woman walked with him, supporting him from the back and the shoulders while he continued to sob and tremble.

They walked up the hill and beyond it, torches flickering like angry orange eyes in the night, and within the hour had come to the edge where the blackness of the field stretched in all directions like an ebony sea.

The moon rose high, tumbling like a quarter of an apple across the abyss sky.

The men bearing torches had scattered, and they entered the field at the edges, like a necklace of light.

At some point someone found the dropped basket that Cireive’s mother had left lying, and the tumbled fruits.

But there was no sign of the woman herself, though they searched the field in the vicinity, sweeping rows of growing amaranth methodically.

Eventually the moon began to sink to the horizon and drowned in the field. The search was abandoned for the night, and Cireive was taken home by his neighbors. The woman who was so like his mother pulled him along in the darkness, until they came to their communal dwelling. Here the boy was made to eat at the neighbors’ table, and eventually put to sleep in his own room next door.

There was no one else in the room with him, which made the night uncustomary and terrifying. He fell asleep struggling against the dark evil which all children knew about, and which so obviously rushed in when the fire was extinguished and when others left the room. . . .

Evil, which preyed upon those who had lost their mothers.

L
irheas watched his father rave, watched the memories being regurgitated, hearing things that were new, that he had not known before.

There was something that brought subtle unease, hearing the older man talk thus, something with a faint whiff of taint in the very telling of it, as though time itself were being filtered through a penumbra of illusion.

“
Was she ever found, my Lord father? I am sorry. . . . I wish I had known my grandmother, seen her for one brief instant, just once. As it is, I see her only from this ancient story you tell.”

The
taqavor
grew silent and stared at him. And then he smirked, saying, “You see nothing, boy. And you still do not understand. But then, you never can. Get out of my sight, for I grow tired of your stupidity and your questions.”

And with that he turned his back on the Prince. He returned to his plaything in the stone pool of the Rose.

Lirheas could do nothing but stare in unfulfilled silence at his father’s hunched back. Eventually he too turned away and left the hall.

The queen without eyes was in the same place he had left her. More and more she was like an inanimate thing, not a living being—pliable and yielding, and yet as remote as the horizon.

“
I learned nothing of my mother,” Lirheas told her softly. “But I learned something of his. I pity him because of it, and yet—”

“
Look outside my Prince, and tell me what is out there,” said the queen without eyes, apparently ignoring his words.

And when Lirheas moved to comply, wordlessly approaching the window, she suddenly reached out with her hand and touched him on his arm. Her fingers were cold, and he could feel their inflexible ice through the fabric of his sleeve. And yet his arm burned in that place with a sudden tunneling of the senses, a focus on nothing but her fingers, her light touch. . . .

“
Thank you,” she said. “You have a strange ability to bend your will for the will of others. And I heard what you said, about your mother and his.”

“
Oh,” he said, his arm still burning. And then, while the wind came in a fresh warm gust from the window, he put his arms around her and held her in a full embrace for the first time since that one time in the beginning. It was a touch which was light and tentative for fear of hurting her, but it was an embrace nevertheless.

In this butterfly-gentle embrace she became pliant. It seemed she melted into flowing water in his hands, her flesh a single warm current. He held it as it coursed, and he too felt his flesh melt and dissolve until the solid outlines that constituted his being were blending with hers in a peculiar moment taken out of time.

He looked up at the window, seeing the haze of the sunlit day, feeling the breeze upon his face, as he dissolved into her, and he said, “I see the horizon and—”