Dreams of the Compass Rose (8 page)

“
No!” Lero howled in anguish, seeing another old friend, a sailor who had been on this ship forever it seemed, ripped from his place near the bow and thrown far out into the churning waters like a still puppet.

“
So, you’re invincible?” Varian raged, screaming insanely at the mast, at the deck, the timbers themselves, but never at her. “You think that you will stay afloat forever? Watch this!”

A wave began, greater than the others, and as the floor below them gave way—for the deck was now vertical—the
Eye of Sun
began to fall straight down. Lero felt herself tumbling, her stiff body receiving any number of bruises as she rolled toward the railing, knowing that she was about to be removed from this ship forever. At the last moment, something allowed her fingers to grab stiffly onto the wood, the very dear wood of her ship—it was what saved her, the only thing that saved her.

Or maybe Varian’s spell upon them all was waning. And no wonder. It took so much power to hold them thus and simultaneously wreak the storm all around.

Even now, he himself was holding onto some roping precariously, mad in his unconcern for his own safety.

“
Damn you!” she cried, feeling her lips, the muscles of her jaws freed at last, holding on for dear life, while all around she heard the screams for help of the dying crew. “Damn you, hellspawn, who’ve come to destroy my ship and drown my men! I wish I’ve never seen your father, nor his accursed gold, never made this mad promise. I hope you drown in these waves now! I hope to all the gods that you fall like a dead weight and go straight to the bottom! I will not take you any farther on this ship, gods help me, but I would throw you overboard myself! Oh gods, take me! Take all my crew, only let nothing befall my ship!”

And then, with a great pause of silence,
someone
heard her.

The wind screamed, and the waves arose suddenly all around them like a great mountain.

And the
one
that was Ocean came forth from the abyss. And as the maddened form of Varian paused in his own moment of surprise and silence, looking up at the wall of water all around them, Ocean leaned forward with a breath of inner deep, of utter silence, and swallowed him, took him and all of them into itself with a flick of one wave, a finger. . . .

Lero was left alone on the ship, spinning now at the bottom of a well, an abyss of waves and silence.

A
s the spell came suddenly away, releasing me, releasing my lungs, I cried. Lying face down on the deck, I held onto the railing, and howled, and wept, as though Ocean itself had been in my lungs, in my heart, in my solar plexus.

They are gone, all of them. My men. And he is gone too, the mad one who has brought us all to this end.

Around me, the wall of Ocean stands, obscuring the sun. And as salty boundless tears run down my cheeks, my guts are wrenched by the howling sobs of a madwoman who has nearly lost her love by betraying another.

Lines of choice are blurred. Pride and weakness are intermingled. The madwoman betrays her own self.

My wooden beloved remains afloat. And yet—

My men are all overboard. They sink now, like sorrowful children of the land below, to mingle with the underworld of blue and azure, to dissolve into the boundless place of liquidity.

To what depth will they fall, before their strong weathered hands are gnawed by schools of hungry fish? When will their bones separate from flesh and muscle, and when will water dissolve the innards, the lungs of those whose loud living voices I heard only this dawn, raised in laughter and camaraderie?

The First Mate, Jiand. The one with the loud voice that couldn’t carry a tune, and yet was singing daily with boundless laughter. I’ve known him almost as long as I’ve known old Hareve.

Hareve. The one who used to tie the knots, and spit overboard, and grin at me, and show me how it’s done, one by one, when I was still scrubbing the lower decks. I’ve called Hareve “father” once, not to his face, but that one time when we fought the pirates, and he stood before me, shielding me from three cutthroats, and got that slash on his neck.

Verig and Bear. Two brothers, who once challenged me to draw steel, and who would’ve surely trounced me if it hadn’t been for sheer luck on my part. They’ve served under me for years now, and I cannot imagine not seeing their brotherly grins, full of poor missing teeth, and not knowing their unwavering loyalty.

Little Rikah, one of the three cabin boys. I hauled him on-board myself, after he’d picked my pocket in one of the ports we stopped at. I liked his insolent grin then, and he's proved himself indispensable, running like a tightrope walker high upon the lightest webbing of the masts.

My men. My dear old friends. What have I done?

I’ve traded you all for this old beloved contraption of floating timbers. For the sail with the blazing cheery sun, and the “eye of wisdom”—as I secretly call it. . . .

And I’ve betrayed a promise to an old man with an ill son who lost control, and whose responsibility I’ve relinquished to the abyss.

Was it not my own fault, my own insecurity, that let me ignore this youth, ignore his obvious loneliness, the dangerous bent of mind, the obvious first crush of which I was the unfortunate object?

A mere boy, despite all.

And now, he too floats softly, gently, farther and farther down into the waves, and with him sinks the promise of powers fulfilled and deeds accomplished. Somewhere far in the future he might have made a difference, this youth, this boy. With his ability guided properly he might have changed the world.

My friends! For all of you I bleed inwardly where no one can see, and at the same time I bleed overtly before the whole empty universe of ocean and sky. For it does not matter how I bleed, as I am all alone before the gods. Only this is left to me, this floating home. A piece of my own self, a fragment of my being, a splinter. . . .

The
Eye of Sun.
I lean my cheeks against you for the last time, feeling your soft unsinkable eternity, the wood of the sacred ancient groves that was blessed by the gods themselves never to perish in the waves.

I feel you thus, connected to me, for the last time. But for a moment more, we are two eternal souls.

Ocean stands all around me still, like a mountain. It is so close now that I see many faces in it, some like children, some divine, some contorted or wizened with ancient black parchment skin. Ocean is an old woman, reeking of desolation and, for a moment only, distant alien sand underneath a burning sky.

Even now it is awaiting, it seems, my true choice, my final decision. Its hunger may be appeased in different ways.

And now, I make that choice.

If you hear me, Ocean with the face of a hag, if you hear me now, all great gods, then let it be as it must!

Come within my mind, and read me like a chart of ocean ways, and fathom me to the utmost depth.

G
reat waves shuddered and rocked the
Eye of Sun.
Captain Lero lay, eyes shut tight, face down, lips upon the wood. . . .

A single wave came crashing, like the greatest thunder. In that wave flickered the face of an ancient woman with warm young eyes and skin dried to black parchment by the desert wind, a strange antithesis. And the wave spewed forth human limbs.

The men were moving still. Weakly, and barely alive, they lay, water and seaweed rolling off them, gasping for air, like fish on land.

All fifty-seven of them. Fifty-eight, counting the son of Lord Erae.

Overhead the skies cleared, and the waters receded calmly, allowing a golden blaze of a single eye in the heavens, an incandescent eye that was the true sun.

The ship continued moving, unguided, and along the far southern horizon came a sudden faint glimmer of land.

V
arian Erae stepped down quietly upon the black sanded shore of the Southern continent, and was greeted by two men clad in priestly robes of persimmon orange, and with warm humorous slanted eyes. They had known him instantly, here in the Kingdom in the Middle, never having to be told that this was the Lord’s disturbed son, the wild power-wielder. They asked him gently to follow, and Varian sensed—without having to reach out a finger of his mind—an instant of homecoming. In that same moment his wild power suddenly settled a notch, settled into a new key.

He looked behind him once only, at the solitary figure of the tall captain. She stood watching impassively from the upper deck, while all around her the cheerful crew, among hollering and guffaws, was busy unloading part of the cargo.

A haze of memory slithered, vague like the horizon.

He looked, and then did not look again, and disappeared beyond the curve of land in the wake of the two sage figures.

Lero stood and watched him absently, watched the curving line of shore only a hundred feet away. She smelled the pungent sweetness of the air that was born of land.

Lero’s hand rested lightly upon the smooth polished railing of the old ship, feeling cool silent wood against coarse fingertips.

“
Captain! We’re done movin’ the last of it. And the rowboats are secured. Shall we cast off?” the First Mate cried, grinning at her.

They did not remember, none of them.

Only she would, always.

A few paces away, old Hareve whistled intently, spat, and then started to bind a new length of knotted rope, while Bear winked in mischief to his brother on the far side of the mast, and pulled at the other side, raising aloft the great sail. Somewhere high up in the crow’s nest, little Rikah waved his hands in the patterns of a seaman’s code, and his thin boyish voice resounded in laughter upon the wind.

“
Cast off, then, brothers!” Captain Lero cried. “Let’s sail home!”

She grinned, looking at them all. She startled them with the insane fierceness of her smile.

Then she turned, shielding her eyes against an auburn sunset, and walked slowly to take the helm. And only at that one point—only for a moment—the quiet singular emptiness was visible in her eyes.

Beneath them, the ship rolled softly, sweet and ancient.

Her beloved. But no longer unsinkable, no longer eternal. She could taste it now, mortality encroaching, just at the edges.

The
Eye of Sun
would sink someday now, as surely as her heart beat in her breast. And there was nothing she could do about it but live with the taste of its death just on the tip of the tongue. And thus she must, for in all things, Lero madly kept her word.

Taken away, the magical invulnerability. Traded away somewhere, one bit of her soul for another.

For here they were, her brothers, her soul—moving and living and breathing before her, sailing once more aboard a ship called the
Eye of Sun.

T
here were two human figures which rode two horses over the craggy hill to look down at the battlefield—one rider per horse. And yet their mounts each labored under a double weight, for death rode at the back of both human figures, skeletal fingers of one silver hand clutching at their saddlebags and the other wrapped around their waists as a vise of emptiness. It was that touch which curled their entrails with cold, corroded the sweet marrow of their bones.

Death also stood at the foothill of the valley, against a crimson sunset sky.

The two mortals were a woman and a youth.

The woman sat rigidly astride a black warhorse, while the last golden rays of the sun fingered the polished steel of her armor, the antique scabbard of her great battlesword, and the ornate visor of the helmet attached to the saddlehorn. A cold evening wind disturbed loose filaments of hair from her unkempt long dark braids. Death’s breath kissed the nape of her sunburned neck.

The woman’s face was gaunt and lined. Expressionless eyes. She glanced once behind her, to where the other sat atop a russet stallion—a youth, or a boy, also in armor. His hair and eyes were like hers.

He watched her.

“
Come,” she said, her voice cracking upon its first note as it cleaved the silence. She did not speak again.

He nodded quietly. All that was heard from then on was the sound of hoofbeats against rock, and small stones hurtling away from under the feet of the great horses, chipping and bouncing down before them into the valley.

At the foot of the hill, they paused. The woman looked at the great field before her, covered with bodies. She heard the wind of the wide-open land, a constant soothing hiss.

The sound made by the wind was a major chord.

Between matted grass, steel occasionally gleamed in the waning light, pitch-black with blood. There were movements in places, but as she looked hopefully closer they were revealed to be lurching scavenger birds. Even now, their cries brought more of their kind, black hungry specks against a red sky.

She felt weak. She did not know it, but death shifted its silver gauntness in the saddle behind her, and gently touched her throat, then her cheek, draining her. She was compelled to dismount.

Slowly following the compulsion, the woman entered the field, walking with leaden feet, pulling her black warhorse by the reins. The youth followed her example.