Dreams of the Compass Rose (53 page)

“
They spoke to me briefly, true, those foreign travelers,” said the woman-ghost. “But, far from meaning harm, they only asked me for the direction of the village. They were kind men. While their skins were darker than ours and of an olive hue, their faces were warm and unthreatening, and they thanked me from their hearts before continuing on toward town.

“
They were the last to speak to me in this life, Cireive. For after I watched them go, after I'd turned my back to resume our game and was about to go looking for you, I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my chest. It was so intense that I dropped the basket before I could even straighten myself. And then for a moment I still stood up, was still upright in spirit, while my body collapsed and lay on the ground at the edges of the great field.

“
I had so wanted to run to you, my son! So intense was my desire, so much unfinished business, and yet my heart broke and then stopped its living pump, and my body was useless. Death with her shimmering scythe stood a few steps away, ready to take me by the hand gently, but I—fool that I am—shook my head at her and instead remained standing there near my still warm body.”

In the moonlight, the woman’s translucent eyes spilled forth a stream of tears, also ghosts. Cireive, weeping himself, watched with peculiar detachment their unreal passage, and wanted so much to put his hand there and feel their nonexistent moisture against his fingers, and to maybe feel the warmth of her cheek one more time after so many years.

“
I was still there when you came back at last, my little boy Cireive. And when you saw me and when you ran in terror, I flew in spirit at your side, wanting to breathe warmth and relief into your being, but you never felt me, never heard my spirit cry. Instead, from great fear you sank into shock, and then into madness, and eventually, when twilight came, you returned to town. As you passed by the strangers, they had just began their trade with our people. An odd idea had come to you, and you somehow knew they had spoken to me, and in your denial of truth you wanted to cast blame upon someone. So, when the initial search for me was over for the night, you lay in bed, and I stood there at your side, and I saw a shadow approach you.”

“
It was
He,
” whispered Cireive, remembering suddenly a little boy’s fevered imaginations of moving shadows in the empty lonely night. “
He
came to me in the evil darkness, called there by my fear. . . .”

The woman without corporeal eyes nodded slowly. “Yes, I know,” she said softly. “The Lord of Illusion comes to us in our darkest moments, for that is when we are most vulnerable to a loss of reason and open to rebellion against the universe.”

“
He painted the Illusion so clearly in my mind’s eye,” said Cireive. “I could almost see how the strangers came to you and attacked you and beat you and forced you.”

“
Yes, you remember that version even now, even though none of it happened. It is the same thing you told our townspeople the next morning. And yet I cried out to you with all of my being, standing there between you and the Lord of Illusion, I cried and shielded you until dawn, and eventually
He
was gone, having done only partial harm, but
His
dark intent had taken root within you, and it was enough. . . .”

“
Enough indeed,” echoed the
taqavor.
He looked at the woman, and then his gaze slipped down to the hand in which she still held the long, thin, razor-sharp needle-dagger.

“
All these years of compounded slaughter and darkness, my
empirastan,
” said Cireive. “What have I done, mother. What have I done. One long interminable . . . Illusion.”

And, saying that, he reached across the space between them and took the dagger out of her unprotesting fingers, while she continued to stand before him, blind and yet all-seeing across time.

For a moment only, they looked at each other in silence.

“
Will this free you, at last?” he finally said, raising the blade.

“
No,” she whispered and in her eyes there was utter anguish, while at the same time he swept the razor forward at an angle and then suddenly, swiftly, he returned it with an old warrior’s skill, and struck it deep into his own chest.

Time blurred.

W
hen next it focused, Cireive stood in the same place in the sepulcher with the moon streaming its bright radiance down through the skylights.

But now two shadowed forms stood before him. Directly opposite him was the woman without eyes. The other, just at her side, was a cloaked figure of interminable opacity, its skeletal silver hands holding a long staff upon which was a moon-shaped blade of unknown metal and rippling rainbows.

“
You cannot escape this easily,” said death in a voice of echoing nothingness. “The deaths of thousands are still upon you, and they weigh you down. I cannot carry all that weight of mortal agony and suffering that is your Burden, and thus I cannot take you.”

And the skeletal one pointed with one bone-finger to his chest where was lodged a slim dagger of razor metal. Cireive looked down at himself, at the black stream of blood that had stained his chest. And all of a sudden he heard within himself the strange terrible resounding silence of a stilled heart.

What am I?
he cried in madness.
Help me!

“
I cannot take you,” repeated death. “Not like this. Lighten your burden first, and then I will come for you at last.”

But how?
he cried for the second time, realizing only then that he was unable to form words, for his dead lungs did not compress air, and thus the sound had emerged only in his mind.

But death had turned her back to him, and begun to walk away, shimmering into nothingness against the walls of the sepulcher.

Help me!

And the woman without eyes, without a name, who was and yet was not his mother, stood before him, ghostly tears streaming down her face.

Please,
he whispered in his mind,
Mother, please don’t leave me this time!

And then he wailed, and howled, and it was not the sound of a human being, but of a peculiar unnatural beast.

Who am I?
he growled and wept.
What am I that I cannot die, that not even death would claim me?

Time was frozen around him, and he could feel its sterile walls pressing in, no longer empty red flowers born of Illusion, no longer the scent of ashes. Time stood choking him with its edges just outside of him, just at his periphery. . . .

He was in a walled cocoon outside the universe.

The bottomless well.

Who am I?
the beast without a name whispered, reaching with its once human appendage forward, toward her. . . .

Mother.
 . . .

And the woman remained, at the edge of him. Her form shook with weeping, for she could do nothing now, even though she was so close, and she was
between
times.

I can see you at last,
the beast spoke.
You are so real, and I can name you now. Your name is Amarantea, for you stand among the blossoms of the great field, as simple and unyielding and as beautiful.

“
I thank you for your beginnings of true vision,” she whispered. “And yet that is not my name.”

Who is she, then?
his inner voice said,
For I know her somehow, and I know this name. Who is Amarantea? She is within you!

And the queen without eyes and without a true name replied, “Amarantea was the mother of your son. The one who came forth from the field of red flowers carrying a child that you denied at first. He, that child, was the one who was never the son of your flesh, but then became the son of your conscience. All those years of darkness, he was the silent one who kept you back from the very edge. And you never knew it, just as he never knew.”

I had no son, then,
remembered the beast.
And yet Lirheas became my son, from the moment my eyes fell upon his little form. He reminded me of something.

“
He reminded you of yourself, of what you had been and could have been in innocence, had you not come before the sway of the Lord of Illusion.”

Moments of silence. Moonlight began to fade in the skylights as the moon sank from its zenith.

The beast sank also, to its knees, and then lay forward with its head resting against the cold tiles of the floor of the sepulcher. It remained thus for long interminable flowing moments of time, muttering with inhuman lips against the stone, muttering words of regret and agony, and repeating the name “Amarantea.”

The woman without eyes stood before it with infinite patience.

And then at last the beast raised its distorted face toward her, and it said,
She is gone, and I can never find her to beg her forgiveness, for I cannot even remember her, or remember hurting her. Such is the great power that Illusion has upon me. I do not remember. And yet I must remember her, Amarantea!

“
Then I will once again bring the purgatory of Remembrance to you,” said the woman. “For you left Amarantea at the edge of that field—just another faceless woman, just as years ago you had left your dead mother—while you took her son away from her, and you ordered your soldiers to set the field to flames. The flowers burned as you watched for the second time in your life their red crowns and filaments turn to ash, and you observed Amarantea burning also, saw her scream in agony as she died while you held her infant son—crying and choking from the smoke—while silence and detachment were firmly lodged within you, and you felt nothing from beyond the first wall of Illusion.

I cannot remember any of this,
uttered the beast, moaning.

“
You now have all of eternity to remember,” she replied. “All of eternity, or until the world ends, for you are now outside of time, and around you is the bottomless well. You yourself have chosen it to be thus. Your choice, to see not truth but through the veil of Illusion.”

Help me!

“
I cannot. The spirit of your mother lives within me even now, but briefly. And the spirit of Amarantea was in me for only a moment. And yet they are still both here, even now, for they are at your side, the only ones who will never leave you. I will not leave you either. For together we hold your soul at the edge of the bottomless well, we hold you tight and keep you from sinking forever.”

The woman came to kneel before the beast, and, looking into its murky eyes, whispered, “We are your last hope . . . and we alone can see you through the thick layers of Illusion that now surround you. If you choose, look for us in return.”

Then she rose and turned her back, and walked to the doors of the sepulcher where she knocked loudly, calling to be released from the night of hell.

Behind her, the beast was fading already, for only the gaze of her ghostly eyes upon him had kept him here, and now there was nothing left.

She turned around for a moment as the doors were being opened from the outside, and a shaft of pale dawn light came striking the stone floor and the old flower ashes. As she looked behind her, the beast came for a last time momentarily into view, and then its form curled in upon itself as it lay down, poised between death and time.

“
Sleep . . .” whispered the queen without eyes. “And thus only will they see you. When you sleep, and when Illusion is weakest around you.”

And then she walked outside, into the dawning daylight and the voices of nervous soldiers and into the arms of the Prince who loved her.

A
nd thus I have told you the story of time.

The Prince Lirheas who married the queen without eyes, became a king and thus
taqavor,
and for many enlightened years he ruled the greatest
empirastan
that comprised the whole world—or so it was claimed.

The queen without eyes and without a name gave birth to three children over the course of time, and the first child, a girl, she called Amarantea. On that same day, the queen also took this name for herself, saying that it was in honor and in memory, and in hope.

Their great city stood like a blossom in the heart of the desert for many years, and in the Palace, in the center of a great stone hall floated a four-pointed star that was the world’s first Compass Rose. Occasionally, when the dusk fell a certain way and shadows gathered, some claimed they saw the shape of a peculiar nameless beast hunched over the Rose, and muttering soft words that echoed through the hall. But then, it was all an Illusion, they knew, and in time even this legend was forgotten.

When the great
taqavor
and his queen Amarantea had died in their old age, much beloved by all, their heirs obeyed their last wishes, and opened a forgotten domed sepulcher in the middle of the Palace gardens.

Within were many old weathered coffins filled with dust and ashes, and not a sign of human remains. The coffins—since their purpose and true contents were unknown—were respectfully lidded up, and then three new coffins were placed in the center, all made of shining brass.

The bodies of the
taqavor
and his beloved
taqoui
were laid in the two outer coffins, while the middle coffin was left empty, as instructed, and its lid was shut over gaping nothingness.