Dreams of the Compass Rose (44 page)

“
Let me bind your feet with salve and cotton, my Lady,” said Yaro.

Egiras stared at her blankly, then nodded. Yaro rummaged in her bag, and came up with some cheap oil unguent, which she applied to the feet of the Princess, and plain rags which she used to create the simple wrap footgear of a pauper.

The rest of the day Egiras did not complain, and they walked onward, breathing hard, in silence.

Night was a blessed relief. After a quick meal of hard old cheese and flatbread, and their precious sips of water, they fell into delirious parched slumber.

A blink of an eye, and it was morning.

Yaro fed her mother and gave her water to drink, and herself took only two sips of water for every three that the others had. They took turns answering the call of nature, got their bags loaded, and were on their way.

The second day was more difficult. All pretense of hardiness was dropped, and everyone moved with a desperate stumbling gait as their feet sank in the crumbling sterile white powder. Breathing laboriously, they took each step with a group rhythm that had come about unconsciously.

Nadir walked with grim detachment, often throwing glances behind him at Yaro, seeing her breathe in shuddering gasps, her eyes averted, maybe in pride.

At around noon, Yaro stumbled and dropped her end of the sling. Her mother came down roughly and Nadir stopped and lowered his own end gently.

“
Yaro,” he said, watching her lie in the sand. “We will take a break now.”

“
No,” she panted. “We go on, mustn’t waste time. Let me catch my breath for a moment, my Lord. . . . Just one moment.”

“
Enough. I will carry the sling,” said Egiras. The wind howled. They stared at her for a moment in incomprehension.

“
Oh, no, my Princess,” said Yaro, gasping and struggling to rise. “How can you do that? It is not right for you to carry the burdens. . . .”

“
It is not right for me to perish in this desert,” replied Egiras with a glimmer of her former sarcasm. “Therefore be silent, woman, and walk the best you can.”

“
My Princess—” began Nadir. But then, seeing her determination, he too grew silent, and nodded.

He picked up his end of the sling-bed, while Egiras took the other end in her slender pampered hands, with their delicate tiny fingers.

They resumed walking through the wind-blown sands.

T
he third dawn was parched agony.

Blinking, Yaro opened her eyes into searing pain, her eyelids red and sore from the endless dust that had collected on her face and had not been washed off for days.

Her throat was dry and scraped, and her innards hurt with desiccated constriction. She could feel her kidneys shriveling up and turning into stones within her. All movement was languid agony, and headache-induced dizziness came in waves as she tried to rise and felt herself immediately floating and detached from her body.

Early dawn, and the desert stood like an ocean of smooth dunes in bluish haze around her, while she could barely see the sleeping shapes of the others.

A thought came to her,
Today is the last day of my life.

The wind swept her, and for a moment Yaro thought she flew.

She simply stood there, feeling herself soar, for long illusory minutes.

Eventually the others came awake, and then came the most important ritual: taking the three sips of water each to fortify themselves for the day’s journey ahead.

They had stopped eating the day before. It was impossible to chew and swallow bread and cheese without water to wash it down. Indeed, hunger had become deadened and secondary to the ache of emptiness that was dehydration.

When her turn came, Nadir stood before Yaro, holding up the clay jar while she took one tentative sip of water, feeling it slip within her like a glorious miracle of the gods.

And then she took another sip.

“
Go on,” Nadir said, watching her intently. “One more.”

“
No . . .” Yaro said. “You take it, my Lord. Drink it for me, for you are larger, and you require more than me. Besides, I don’t think I thirst all that much today. It must be a cooling of the wind. . . .”

But then came the voice of Egiras.

“
I command you to drink. Else we go nowhere.”

And Yaro had no choice but to obey.

T
hey stopped at noon. The young women had been taking turns carrying the old woman in the sling, but it had become obvious she was dying, and so they paused, setting down their burden.

Yaro put her nearsighted face close to her mother’s sunken chest and listened for her breath, lighter than a moth’s flutter and coming in sporadic labored bursts. Yaro’s expression contorted then, and she hid her face in the poor ragged cotton of the old woman’s robe.

Nadir took out the clay jar and uncapped it. “Let the old one have the rest of my water for today . . .” he said softly, his own voice rasping and low.

Gently moving Yaro away, he tilted the jar and brought it to the old woman’s black lips. The old one opened her eyes and stared back at him with quiet wisdom—nothing but eyes in a dry skull covered with shrunken ebony turtle skin.

She barely moved her head from side to side to indicate that she did not want the water. But Nadir continued nevertheless, and he managed to wet her lips with a couple of drops.

And then it came, the end of things. For as he tilted the jar vertically nothing more came forth from it. It was now empty except for a muddy thick residue of wet clay and moistened sand.

Indeed, as the dregs of sand poured forth, it was drying before their very eyes as the wind took away all that was not dust. . . .

They had run out of water, so much sooner than they had expected, and they had not even noticed.

But maybe not quite.

“
Let me, my Lord . . .” Yaro whispered. “I have a small flask which I’ve carried on me in secret for all these days in reserve for such a moment, a moment of our end, and it is no longer any use to conceal it. Let me first give her a couple of drops from the flask, and the rest you can have, to share with my Lady Egiras.”

As they watched, Yaro took out the hidden flask and reached into her pack for her old wooden bowl. She uncorked the flask and poured the small handful of liquid that it contained into the old worn bowl of polished faded wood. She took the bowl gently, with a timelessness of ritual, and brought it to her mother’s lips.

The old woman sipped once, then closed her eyes.

Overhead, the sun burned at the zenith.

And Yaro, looking directly into the sun-blinded eyes of Nadir, offered him the bowl of water.

Nadir stared, then took the bowl from her and put his lips to it. It was the same bowl in which she had served him before at their nightly camp rests when the caravan had still been alive. He had held it, drunk from it, yet had not recognized it then.

But now it was high noon. And the sun glittered with sudden bright golden and persimmon fire upon the shallow surface of the water. . . .

Familiar fire.

Nadir felt the reflection of orange pierce him, strike his eyes with a sudden sharp memory of childhood.

He stared at the cup of water in his hands, and he
knew
it.

This cup was his, had
always
been his.

It was the cup of Ris, the same one that he had lost and had given to Egiras and lost again. . . .

More than twenty years ago.

“
Where did you get this cup?” he whispered, looking at Yaro with an intensity that she did not understand.

“
My Lord?” she replied. “It is my mother’s old soup bowl. What do you mean? She’s had it always.”

“
No!” exclaimed Nadir. “Where did she get this cup?”

And then the old woman parted her lips, barely croaking. “This is an old cup. I—picked it up many years ago, from the floor where it had been dropped and forgotten. I served the Princess Egiras long before my daughter Yaro served her. I served the father of Princess Egiras also, the late Lord Urar-Tuan. . . . It was in his tent I found it, on the day he died. In his tent, many years ago.”

“
Then this is
my
cup! The same one that my Grandmother Ris gave me, the one that used to hold boundless water, until—”

“
Until I took it away from you,” said Egiras. “I was a spoiled child and my dark will was to have the magical trinket. Except that, as soon as I had the cup to myself after my father had tricked you, poor little angry boy Nadir—as soon as it was mine, the miraculous water ceased. The cup became dry and useless.”

Nadir stared into the mirror-bright water in the bowl, seeing in it the sun’s double.

“
Ris had taken away the wonder of it . . .” he muttered. “And yet here it is, after all the years—an impossible coincidence. Maybe if we pray to Ris she will show her mercy once again.”

“
I do not pray,” said Egiras suddenly, rising behind him, a dark silhouette in the sun, coughing and speaking with peculiar energy. “And this is not a coincidence, simply the manner in which things came to pass. I remember the day of my father’s death, and then later how you swore faithfulness to me, little brave Nadir. All that time I had tortured you so, and yet after all that, you still resigned yourself to my will. And in that one moment you truly gave me your prize possession, this thing of wood. I knew it was the very soul of you, and that’s why I hated it and threw it from me. Because I hated you. Hated you because you served me so well. . . .”

But Nadir did not seem to hear her maddened speech. Closing his eyes tight, leaning his head forward, he mouthed silent words, his lips and breath against the wooden bowl’s rim. And then he kissed it with reverence and took several swallows.

“
You drink, my Princess,” he said. “And then all the rest of you. Ris willing, there will now be water enough for all.”

“
Didn’t you hear me?” she said.

But Nadir’s face was transfigured. “Drink . . .” he said simply, and then smiled.

And thus she received the bowl from him and took two careful sips, then handed the rest to Yaro.

Yaro began to protest once again, but Egiras looked at her like a serpent. And Nadir stared with equal intensity, but one of a different nature—as if a sun were hidden within him.

Even Yaro’s fading mother croaked something to the extent of insisting she drink.

And so Yaro drank.

She took one swallow, and then another, and then . . .

The wooden cup was empty.

The last drop had touched Yaro’s lips, and already the desert wind was quenching itself on the surface of the bare wood, taking in the last remnants of liquid discoloration until the cup was pale and bone-dry once again like the well worn old utensil that it was.

It was then that Egiras began to laugh.

She laughed hoarsely, her voice scraped raw and wheezing, while the rest remained in silence, except for the hum of the wind.

In silence they remained, for there was no miracle of Ris to save them this time. And silence was the only thing left to those who respected the gods.

Meanwhile, the blasphemer among them, the woman whose nature had been bound from birth to the Lord of Illusion—who is also the Lord of Doubt—made noise and banished the quietude with her hysterical sound of despair.

“
What did you think would happen, my poor Nadir?” she finally managed to croak after her outburst had settled down. “Did you think the cup would now replenish itself after you’ve muttered over it? Did you honestly think that you could call forth the gods themselves with your priestly lips? That Ris would deliver you, deliver all of us, for the second time?

“
Truly, now that I think back, I hardly remember if it wasn’t all a dream in the first place, if it ever existed—that original miraculous cup. When I was a little horrible girl and I played with the cup, just after taking it away from you, I don’t remember if it was an illusion of water in it or if it was one of my sorcerous father’s tricks.

“
There was a god present, if I recall, a bound god whom my father was tormenting—indeed, my father had taught me well—tormenting the one called Tazzia, in the shape of a mortal horse.

“
It was that marvelous horse that lured you to us, Nadir, was it not? Surely it was not our humanity. For you had newly come forth out of the desert, halfway a god yourself, and you were quietly insolent and angry and filled with dark energy that needed a release somehow. . . .”

As Egiras continued speaking, almost babbling, Yaro remained frozen in horror, holding the empty dry cup. Nadir meanwhile stood up and turned his back to them all.

The desert wind moved his pale cotton robes about him, and he stood dark against the light of the slate-white sky. His was a tall warrior shape, and yet the shadow he cast upon the sand was short and squat, for the sun had barely began to move from the zenith toward the West.

Looking at that crisply delienated dwarf shadow, Yaro thought she saw a flicker of something vaguely familiar.

And then she was sure. . . .