Dreams of the Compass Rose (24 page)

But when the
taqavor
was told of this next scheme, he again voiced his displeasure.

“
The Moon is round and dull and is surrounded by darkness. The Crescent is a weakling and its concave shape better resembles the blade of a farm implement than a royal treasure. The stars are puny spilled droplets of light. None of these are true Symbols of my realm. Go, and find me something that is!”

And the craftsmen and artists scattered forth from the palace, driven by terror and by the promise of immeasurable honors from the sovereign of the world.

The
taqavor
was left to walk his marble halls and the cultivated gardens, brooding in silence, and waiting. When no one was nearby, only then would he allow his gaze to lose its energy, and his eyes to grow dull with apathy and relentless depression. Not even the inferno of the brilliant sun overhead shining upon the luxurious greenery of his gardens and the rainbow of blossoms could lift his internal darkness.

For here, in the natural peace, above all places, old memories would start to surface—the ancient turmoil of wars that he had fought, the endless campaigns through the desert, and to the outer rim of the colder lands, to the island places beyond the great cerulean ocean, and the long days of nothing. . . .

He would stop and stare at delicate fountains circulating water and see instead the spray of sea foam upon the oars of boats filled with soldiers. He would blink and look away to rest his eyes upon a frieze of marble, and instead would see the blanched walls of cities before which he had sat in siege. . . .

Sometimes, the wind rustled jade-colored leaves in thick trees, and he would hear his name spoken, as though in a dream.

Cireive.

The speaker was a woman, and yet her voice was muted, most distant of all, and her shape was a blur. He remembered the woman looking down at him, knew the vital importance of her, and yet could not see her face, only vaguely remember an affiliation, or maybe even intimacy. She had looked at him, a small boy, holding him against her, warming him, humming a song that was not so much a lullaby as it was a keening cry of the ancients that had been sung for as long as he could remember.

My Cireive.
 . . .

And yet the wind would blow from another direction, or recede in silence, and her voice would recede also.

Then, in the remaining silence, something would catch him unaware, and he would suddenly hear screeching echoes of thunder, and a red bleeding sky in a cold land. In that instant a blazing form of
another,
no longer human, would speak through his very skull, and he would remember the words of a mortal woman whom he had destroyed, and thus re-made into a goddess.

The Skies heard you, Cireive, I am Damned.

And in that moment of inner rending the
taqavor
would close his eyes, squint tightly, with madness rapidly closing in, while shuddering pangs of terror slid down his spine. He would turn and walk back inside, sometimes moving at a run . . . just as he had run that time. . . .

The
taqavor’s
son, the quiet studious Prince Lirheas, had long since noticed an oddity—it seemed there were never any women nearby. In fact, when his father walked the palace, the female servants were either absent altogether or retreated quickly and discreetly, lowering their eyes, and drawing the dark cotton shawls closer about their faces.

And in the
taqavor’s
spacious House of Wives, it was rumored, the women had to put on face masks every time their Lord was due for a visit. But Lirheas, as the sovereign’s son, was spared, and was never to hear even darker rumors about the details of his father’s intimacies.

For, within the palace, the highest-ranked Servants of the Wives would whisper to each other and to occasional others that the
taqavor
refused to address by name the twelve beauties who had been designated his royal
taqoui,
and the remaining two hundred concubines. Instead, he would single out his evening’s companion by saying, “You,” and pointing at any given one of the women who stood lined up before him, their features completely masked and their voluptuous bodies nude.

And then the
taqavor
would walk ahead to his bedchamber in the House of Wives, and the chosen
taqoui
or concubine would follow, walking a designated number of steps behind him in resigned deathly silence.

What went on in the actual bedchamber was also unclear, but rumors would not fall quiet. It was thought that the women who serviced the
taqavor
were tormented and forced to endure unspeakable pain during the carnal acts; that he would rip out clumps of their hair, and draw gashes with a dagger in the skin of their breasts and buttocks; that he would strike, would draw blood from their throats with his teeth like a demon, in that same violent instant as he spilled his seed. . . .

The
taqoui
were thus pitied, and none would wish their fate upon any noble’s young daughter. And yet the honors and riches bestowed upon the chosen women’s families were great, and the
taqavor
’s House of Wives was continuously replenished with virginal newcomers from all the corners of his boundless
empirastan.

Most recently, the
taqavor
had been so preoccupied with waiting for his artisans to present him with the symbol of his realm that his visits to the House of Wives—already infrequent and prompted only by occasional flareups of lust—seemed to cease altogether. Many days went past, flowing like slow molasses, several moons waned and grew full again, and the royal women started to forget the pain and humiliation that their Lord had caused them, for the old wounds and lacerations on their flesh had long since healed, and their spirits had rebounded. Abandoned, they had regained a joy of life, albeit limited by their perfumed prison.

It is said that human memory for pain is not strong and is easily replaced with complacency. Thus it was now, vague and ephemeral, and the old pain seemed not to belong to them, in retrospect.

Some of the
taqoui
were so relieved, and then so bored, that they stopped playing mindless games of chase and wargames of glitter-stones upon gameboards with one another. They stopped splashing in the bathing pools, and instead spent their solitary days learning the sciences and the arts, having bribed the servants to bring them appropriately learned teachers. Others turned to each other for physical intimacy, and spent their own unrelieved energy practicing truer acts of carnal love than they had ever experienced with their sadistic Lord.

Altogether, it was a time of respite and seething urgency for the House of Wives. And this time lasted until one day a new young woman was brought in.

She was brought in neither to be an exalted
taqoui
nor a lesser concubine. For she was plain, and she had no name—or at least she would not divulge it. In truth, the
taqavor
did not even know of her existence, nor would he have cared.

The young woman had ebony-dark hair, pale skin, and extraordinarily intelligent eyes. She was brought in to serve and cook meals for the chosen royal females, but ended up the one to entertain them with tales of the outside world, and of the colder lands whence she had come.

Since the
taqoui
had a sense of humor and some of them sharp sarcastic tongues, they soon took to her. And, since names were not to be used, she was referred to as “you with the knowing eyes.”

The young woman would peel vegetables and tell them impossible stories of her native land. She would come in to brush a
taqoui’s
hair, and would make her laugh all the while, until the royal wife would cry with the effort. In the evenings, just before bedtime, she would serve the women sweets and warmed wine, and would half-sing dreamlike stories. . . . And indeed, many of the
taqoui
would dream her tales that night, and would wake up flushed with wonder.

And that was not all. The young woman had an odd ability to draw. In her brief free moments, she sat down with sticks of eye-kohl and drew upon silk the faces of the royal women of the House of Wives, drew them everywhere, in fact, and drew them from memory.

When she was in the kitchens, she would use ashes to trace patterns and outlines of faces upon bread-cloth. On the mosaic floors of the terraces that led into the gardens, she would be found on her knees sketching peculiar human shapes with charcoal, pictures that would be soon washed away by running overflow and spray from the nearby fountains, and the remainders swept by gardeners.

And one morning, as the Prince Lirheas took his walk upon the sandy beaten path of the Palace gardens, just near the House of Wives, he noticed on the ground at his feet a beautiful carved etching of a woman’s face, traced deeply into the sand, sculpted almost like a shallow relief.

He stopped his foot just before it crushed the remarkable image. And then, as he stared, he saw a thin female shape in a dark shawl crouching another ten paces ahead of him on the path, and using a short dry stick to trace another image, this one in profile.

Seeing him approach, the creature in the shawl scrambled to her feet, and bowing quickly started to back away from him, allowing him to pass.

Lirheas walked past her, and then curiosity got the better of him. He turned around, but the woman was already moving quickly down the path, back to where he had come from.

“
Wait!” he cried. “You, come back!”

The shawled one halted in her tracks.

Lirheas walked toward her, and said, pointing back at the drawn images, “Did you draw these, woman? Who are you?”

She nodded in silence, her face lowered, her eyes downcast, all obscured by the shawl.

“
You draw very well,” said Lirheas.

“
Thank you, my Lord.”

He was rather surprised to hear that her voice was steady, confident, and that there was a warmth coupled with humor, so that for a moment he thought she might have been actually holding back her speech not from fear but because she was laughing at him. And wanting to know that, to make certain, he said, “Look at me.”

She looked up, and with a pang he knew he had guessed right. A thin pale face met his, and the corners of her lips were dancing with a suppressed smile.

And then he saw her eyes.

They struck him with a pang of intensity, something oddly familiar, something intimate—like coming home to ancient wisdom.

And Lirheas was made mute. He stood there, speaking nothing, unable to formulate a sentence, because in that instant a peculiar thought passed his mind, a thought that here was something momentous taking place.

A moment rich with fate.

And she was the one to speak first, to dispel it. “I serve the House of Wives,” she said. “Forgive me, but I must get back, since my mistresses are expecting me.”

And then she bowed again, curtly, almost as an afterthought, and did not wait for his dismissal, as she started back on the path.

Lirheas remained like a dumb thing, staring in her wake. He then glanced back to where, a few steps away on the ground, was the image of beauty that she had wrought out of nothing.

And before her, in his mind, the image paled.

A
fter three moons had waxed and waned, the
taqavor
got tired of waiting. And he called his advisors and four of the bravest soldiers of his army, and he also called the most talented of his artisans to come before him.

They gathered before his lofty throne, in a hall of great gilded columns of mauve marble and carved stone blossoms.

“
Have you found for me a true symbol of my
empirastan?
” he asked.

In response, trembling, they cast their gazes down.

“
I see,” said the
taqavor.
“You are all just as I thought, idiots with the imaginations of dumb beasts and the artistic craft of monkeys.”

“
My Lord,” whispered one advisor. “The task you set before us is almost impossible, for how can we find something to fairly represent your
empirastan
when we have yet to span it?”

“
True,” muttered a soldier, a decorated hero of the old wars. “I have campaigned with you in all the directions of the horizon, and yet, my Lord, I have not seen an end to your
empirastan,
have not seen the true End of the World.”

“
Indeed,” said another, “I have not either. Does the End even exist? The thought is so vast, it is beyond me.”

“
That would not be such a difficult feat, with your poor set of brains,” quipped the
taqavor
once again in sarcasm, as he was wont to do with his advisors and those most near to him.

And then he added, “Of course the world has an End. Surely it must, for I have seen all of it in my conquest, and it rims the horizon.”

“
Then, my Lord,” put in a courtier, “surely it would be a fair task to find out the nature of the Shape of the World that is your
empirastan,
before we can compress it into one Symbol. Is the world a round circle, or a square, or another odd shape?”

“
But how can we find out?” said an artisan. “How many men would it take to line up around the rim of the world? An impossible feat!”