Dreams of the Compass Rose (39 page)

Instead, the anger rebounded back upon her, and she burned with unresolved futility, tormenting him even more cruelly than before. And he endured it all.

He remained her loyal minion, even as she mocked his every act and breath. And it was not precisely understood how or why this Nadir, this terrifying and yet humble one, came to serve the petulant Princess, or what secret power she held over him.

It was enough that things had been like this forever, it seemed, and certainly since long before Egiras had seen the Thousand Moons and lost her vision and her mind.

Some had called that Night of a Thousand Moons a hallucination, a trick of the Lord of Illusion. But Egiras was evidence, at least to her own intimidated household, that something occult had indeed taken place. For she had become a blind madwoman overnight, a silent remote being who did not respond to anything.

Egiras stared with unblinking eyes, never reacting when a candle flame was brought to linger before her face. Two handmaidens instead of one had to undress her at night and help her with her personal needs, because their now silent mistress seemed incapable of untying knots or adjusting her own clothing. No longer did she bother to make herself presentable, and her long black waterfall of silken hair was tangled from being worn loose and unbrushed. She never noticed it.

Egiras did not sleep at all that first night after the Night of a Thousand Moons. And the next night she slept briefly and fitfully, and came awake like a wild creature. Her eyes were glassy, filled with strange unseeing depths.

She cried out, and Nadir awoke immediately, rising from the chair in the corner where he had stayed with her to guard her sleep. He tried to soothe her with a light touch, but she snarled at him, as though in a waking nightmare, and beat him away with her fingers splayed like claws, scratching his arm bloody with her nails.

Physicians had to restrain her, and gave her a medicinal herbal draft, forcing it down her throat. It served not only to nullify pain but to take away her consciousness, so that the Princess fell back into drugged oblivion. But when she came awake later that morning she was once again a terrified alien thing, unseeing, and incapable of responding to soothing voices.

Old servants wept at the sight of their mistress, for though she had been cruel Egiras was still the one they had grown accustomed to serving. They loved not her but the symbol of her household and the security she represented.

“
What is to be done, Lord Nadir?” they bemoaned, turning to the man who was her unwavering protector.

And the man who was named the lowest of the low soothed them all, saying, “We must wait.”

Nadir’s words were justified. As days passed, Egiras very tentatively regained a small amount of her senses. She was still fitful at night, and unpredictable; she would still snarl and act like a madwoman. But there were now times when her sarcastic clarity would return, and then a thin, cruel, perfectly rational smile would settle on her lips. Softly she would mutter words that none could hear properly, and which might have been remnants of her long-unused native tongue.

And eventually those muddled words too made sense, and they knew that she was calling for her homeland, asking to be taken back, far from this terrible city, to the place from where she had sprung.

“
My Lady, it will be as you wish, and I will take you there,” Nadir said then, in a voice that barely registered, but its softness for some reason had more of an effect on her than loud forcefulness. He added, drawing his face near hers, “What of your eyes? You understand when I speak, yet cannot see. Is that true? What do you see?”

The face of the Princess, with its delicate skin of pale yellow porcelain, remained immobile, and her slanted almonds of eyes did not move from their fixed position, the irises and pupils murky with a colorless dark.

“
Moons, burning bright . . .” she muttered. “I see the whole world is burning. It is all around. Oh, take this brightness away! Deliver me!”

“
I cannot . . .” whispered Nadir. “Oh, how I wish I could.”

In that moment, for the first time in many days, her small cold hand gripped his strong dark one, finding it by touch.

Egiras turned to him, turned without seeing, and her gaze was blind and yet focused on that place that was him.

“
Nadir!” she said fiercely, “Nadir, Nadir! Is it you? Speak so that I know it is you.”

“
Yes, it is I,” he responded, heartened by her unexpected quickening. “I am here!”

“
Why?” said Egiras then, an odd question—odd for it had no mockery and no taunt in it, only a sincere searching quality. “Why are you here with me? After all this time. . . .”

“
Where else would I be, my Princess?” he said calmly, while his great hands trembled, betraying him.

But she did not appear to be aware of it, and instead her tone became remote again, abstracted, as she spoke.

“
When will we go, Nadir? When will we return to the Kingdom in the Middle?”

“
At any moment, we return.”

“
Then let us go now!” she exclaimed suddenly, and her greatly dilated eyes glittered. Yet they shed no moisture, not a single tear, although they appeared as though they must.

“
Not immediately, my Lady, for we must tell the servants to pack your things, and to sell this House. . . .”

“
No! Just . . . leave it. Leave all of it be.”

Nadir frowned. For a moment, the woman before him shimmered and his own sight convulsed, as though a veil of Illusion had gently shifted between them, rippling in place for one instant. And then things came back, and he stared at her, wondering at this latest strangeness.

Egiras was still clutching his arm, and her grip had become painful, so that he had to gently extricate himself from her fingers. Where they had pressed his flesh had become a numb, bloodless place.

“
We will need supplies as we travel through the desert,” he said rationally. “And to equip a caravan with enough provisions and pack beasts and guards will require money. Because of that, we must sell your House.”

“
Then do it,” she said fiercely, a pale shadow of her former commanding tone returning. Her empty eyes focused past him and through him, gazing upon an unseen distant horizon.

And Nadir lowered his head before her, even though she could not see it, and he said softly as a whisper, “It shall be done.”

* * *

I
glanced away from her eyes. Even then they were impossible to meet directly, roiling with darkness, so many layers of it. And yet for the first time I saw a difference in the overall lines of her face; a kind of new calm had settled upon her. Not peace, surely, for that was the one thing she would never have. But it was a stillness of some kind.

The one whom I knew as Egiras, my Princess, tormentor, sovereign, burden, was suddenly one other thing—a delicate being of agony. For the first time it had come to the surface, and I knew now that she was not perfectly invulnerable, but rather had been perfectly contained.

Egiras had been contained in an impenetrable shimmering veil of Illusion.

And pity came to stab me, to overwhelm, in that instant. I had always known it to be so, had always known she was one to be pitied, despite all, but it had never been sincere or real to me before, always on the bitter edge of hatred.

Until now.

And thus I did as she asked. I arranged to sell her city House and the dross bulk of her extravagant belongings, and hired an experienced caravan leader and trustworthy guards to take us far into the desert—all paid for by the revenues from that sale.

I also re-hired the most loyal of the servants to accompany us on this long journey into the unknown lands. Egiras would need her handmaidens to care for her person, especially now that she could not fend for herself. And the ones who would come on this journey had to do so without any qualms or fear for their lives.

For only the gods really knew where we were going.

* * *

“
Y
aro, Yaro, child of dust . . .” muttered the old woman, thinner and blacker than a dried-out twig, nearly blind, and draped in rags the color of the earth upon which she lay. “Where are you?”

“
Here, mother,” said a younger version of the old woman, equally dark and thin, and only a little less nearsighted, but with a straight back. She stood leaning against the outer city wall of stone, veiled in a poor shawl against the open wind of the desert.

The wind came to strike them both as it broke itself in fury against the city walls and the sparse earthen embankment that arose at the foot of the walls, the layer of soil that had been brought here from afar and deposited in a fine sediment to form the foundation of the city. Sand slowly encroached upon the earth, dunes rising like stilled waves of a petrified ocean. Whiteness mingled with sienna and deep umber.

“
Do not go far . . .” said the old woman.

“
I am not going anywhere. I only stand here so that I can see the road better, and the caravans that pass here. One of them will be ours.”

“
What caravan would take an old serving woman and her willful daughter who betrayed her mistress?”

“
I betrayed no one . . .” bristled Yaro momentarily, her voice initially strong like an angry swell of surf and then again receding into dissolved humility. “And, yes, a caravan will take us, because it must. Because the sum of the whole world is justice, and it is at our disposal—at everyone’s disposal—as long as we remember that we must give back what we take.”

“
What?” said her mother, “What kind of mad arrogant words do you speak, child of dust? Stop provoking the gods with your unending ramblings. It is not for the likes of us to use the things of the world, or to have opportunities come to us. We will die here in the sand, very soon. Or at least, I will die first, as I drink the last of our poor water, and then you will follow me, in the bright sun-whiteness that is desert death. . . .”

“
Hush, stupid old woman! Take this instead and drink before you indeed go up in sun-flames. Look how burned and black you are!”

And saying that, Yaro squatted down at her mother’s side and dug around in their one sack of possessions. Eventually she pulled out the old wooden bowl that she’d used to feed the old woman soup but which now held only water, for they had had nothing to eat for several days. She rummaged around some more and took out a water-flask, which she uncorked with difficulty, and poured a small amount into the very bottom of the bowl.

Yaro propped up her mother’s head and tilted the bowl at her lips while the old one drank weakly, her turtle throat making swallowing movements. The old woman’s shawl had come off her head, revealing white, tightly coiled hair close to her scalp, in sharp contrast to her midnight parchment skin.

When she was done, Yaro hid the bowl and the flask away again in the dim recesses of their bag, and used the corner of the old woman’s shawl to wipe the glitter of sweat from her mother’s forehead. Then she ran the cloth gently against the soft flattened nose and sunken hollow cheeks while the old woman sighed and closed her eyes under the touch.

The morning sun started its ascent towards the zenith.

And at the same time a caravan embarked from the city gates, with the soft clamor of pack beasts and the sounds of footfalls against the road near the embankment. Soon those too would fade as the road transformed into an ocean of silent sand. . . .

Yaro immediately sprang upright and placed her palm over her brows to shade her eyes from the wicked sun. She peered, squinting her eyes narrowly, putting all her intensity into the gaze, willing her blurred vision to focus the chaos of colored light and shadow and movement that was the world into distinct recognizable forms—which for a moment it did, granting her a brief scene.

There were pack-beasts cruelly loaded and fine horses bearing guards, stout wagons with wide-tracked desert wheels, and several covered sedans suspended from tall swaying camels. An altogether familiar sight: one more caravan exactly like a dozen she had already observed over the past days.

And yet unlike. For in that moment of intense squinting truth she recognized a large human shape atop one of the horses. She recognized him with her nearly blind eyes from a distance of several hundred feet.

She knew him merely by his manner of being. Not by the outline of his form or his bearing, but rather as one senses the position of all things in a single moment of homing—the distant horizon and the earth underneath and the sky above. She recognized him by his placement and direction relative to herself.

And, knowing who he was and whom he accompanied always, Yaro drew in her breath while a coldness came to slither into her, despite the heat of the climbing sun.

It brought cold, such cold, the act of knowing that salvation and destruction lay in the exact same place.

“
Our caravan is before us, mother,” said Yaro. Then she added, “Wait here, while I go to them and beg to take our former place. For it is the caravan of my former mistress the Princess Egiras, and with her is the Lord Nadir. One of them will condemn me and the other will insist upon mercy.”

I trust mercy to prevail,
Yaro thought.

But the cold continued. For, in order to be subjected to mercy, Yaro was about to destroy the last shreds of her pride.