Dreams of the Compass Rose (9 page)

As she walked, she looked at the faces only in order to identify. Her mind was atrophied. Through its placid filter she recognized many of them.

Behind her the youth walked, and stared with hypersensitive eyes, dilated pupils. His hands and jaw trembled, as his reason connected the wounds, mutilations, severed organs and limbs to the faces he knew.

The blood affected him. Amid clumps of ebony silhouette stalks of tall grass, it stained the sand and earth like bits of oasis—a thick congealing juice of over-ripe black cherries, so similar to the dark wine that he was accustomed to drinking. He had known on one level, yet had not known in this reality level of the here and now, that it would be so rich and gelatinous when drying.

Somewhere in the middle of the field the woman paused. She stood dumbly looking at the corpse of a young woman. Having caught up with her, and seeing that corpse, the youth suddenly retched and burst into tears.

She said nothing, did not look at him, vomit and tears dribbling over his face, although it passed through her mind, with a slight irritation, that she had once taught him not to cry at death. But—not his fault now; he had never seen death before like
this.

Not that
she
had ever seen death at such a scale.

“
Mother!” he uttered incoherently. “It’s Mideinn!
Mideinn!
”

Her gaze was upon the young girl, whose glass eye-marbles stared, her right hand mangled, encrusted with something that appeared to be so much like a frosting of rust, delicate and dry, and her neck was at an odd angle. Half-slit, a cross-section was exposed, and all around was a thickened pool.

“
I warned you when we were still on the other side,” the woman said through clenched teeth. “I warned you.”

“
But not Mideinn . . . No—”

“
I warned you on the other side.”

Behind them, figures of death stood motionless, hooded, their silver breath curling in the wind, wafting gently over their shoulders, reaching forward with the claws of emptiness.

Eyes of a small boy looked on, blind. They were lost in a haze of remote wilderness;
he
was lost. Lungs shuddered. He muttered the litany of a half-wit, between sobs, over and over.

Suddenly he focused, turned with fury to the woman. “How can you be so silent now? What are you, heartless ice? Your
daughter
is dead!”

She did not look at him but slowly nodded to the rest of the field, her face petrified. “And what of
them?
If I start crying now, I will not stop. There will not be enough tears.”

She looked then at the youth. “And you too, Talaq—” Was that a touch of gentleness he heard?—“You must stop crying. It is not the time, not yet.”

Through the constant hiss of the wind they heard the distant rich sound of a horn being blown.

Living energy came to the woman’s eyes, and she glanced around, searching the horizon. No, those were not carrion birds. Dark moving human specks were noticeable far in the distance, with pennants waving on high. All in black silhouette.

“
They surround us,” she said calmly.

The youth shivered. The tension of his facial muscles reformed him suddenly into an older man. “I curse them! Burn!” he babbled, while death brushed gentle claws against his hair, “I curse the Gheir, for all their generations, and I curse you, Cireive, High King,
taqavor!
Burn! Burn!”

Her eyes were blank as she replied, “Shhh. Do not waste your breath.”

But he continued, his words interspersed with sobs and cackles. “Burn! Oh, gods . . . Not one soul alive! Am I the last of the able-bodied Risei? Gods . . . hear me, hear me, hear me. . . .”

He turned to her, gasping suddenly, his litany coming to a full stop, so that there was a long moment of wind and silence. And then he took in a long shuddering breath, and whispered, “Oh, mother . . . What of the women back at the camp? And the old? The children?”

Her answer was slow in coming. “I don’t know. Probably they took them all by now.”

And then she too began to laugh.

He watched her, seeing a madwoman.

But she was sane. Oh yes.

“
I can’t believe,” she whispered to herself, while death, standing at her side, pulled the chill edge of an abysmal cloak of night over her trembling shoulders, “I can’t believe that all it took was one day for treachery. He promised and I trusted his word. He promised. . . .”

Suddenly she cried hoarsely, raising eerie shadowy echoes, “And all of this, all—it is
my fault!
”

Her head fell forward, as she struck her chest with her gloved fist, while the rest of her was stone. “I trusted his word. I could have been with them. . . .” she whispered.

Talaq’s tears had long since stopped. He watched her as she slowly came to her knees before the body of her daughter, who had lived nineteen summers.

With a steady hand the woman closed the eyelids of the corpse, then paused again. She reached out to touch the left hand of the fallen, pale as milk and already stiff, and withdrew a small ring from the index finger. Then she took out a small sharp knife and touched the girl’s hair, finding a bit of it that was unbloodied. She cut off a lock, soft and already dust-blown, with the texture of dandelion, and made colorless with the coming night. With jerking movements she wound the hair through and about the ring. And when she was done she placed it in a small cloth pouch and hid it in her armor, somewhere near her solar plexus.

“
In memory of . . . you,” she said stiffly, relying on ceremony, and incapable of her own words.

Talaq stared at her, this woman his mother. She turned to him, then got up, allowing him his own farewells.

But Talaq shook his head and backed away. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t
touch
her. . . . Not like this.”

The woman shrugged. Her eyes were unreadable. “Then remember your sister however you may.” She turned away abruptly, finished.

Talaq was trembling, as behind him death placed its silver finger-bones on his left shoulder and stroked his spine. “Are you—” he whispered, “What are we going to do now?”

“
No, I am not going to kill us, if that’s what you think. That would be wasteful cowardice. Not to mention, we still have unfinished work ahead of us.”

“
Then what?”

With a glance and a motion of her head she pointed toward the top of the hill. The sun had bled in red rivulets behind the horizon, and evening twilight distorted the fine contours of the moving figures. They were approaching, so near now that one could distinguish individual moving limbs, all in silhouette.

“
There,” she said. “The enemy is coming. There is but one thing left for us. We will go to them and surrender.”

C
ireive’s heartbeat raced. It had been like that since dawn, since he gave the command to attack, and his army—the metal-clad legions of Gheir—fell upon the unprepared barbaric rabble of Risei, killing them to the last man and woman.

Only the Risei camp remained. It was situated far away from the rim of these hills, far from the underlying valley on higher ground where the colder lands began, somewhere in the sparse jade forests. There they hid—the old and sick and their whelps, hiding in the silent greenery of the wooded expanses that seemed to have no end.

And yet, they hid all for nothing.

Their camp had been found, among the deeply verdant trees, and it was even now very methodically being taken.

The
taqavor
sat on a silk cushion in a hastily erected tent, surrounded by advisors. He had only one thing on his mind: victory at last over those dregs of humanity that came from the right hand of the setting sun and called themselves Risei—their ultimate destruction. Nothing else now to block his wave of conquest of the cold lands to the right hand of the setting sun.

Gheir legions had come a long way from a distant burning place, the very lotus-heart of the desert. They had come from the glorious right hand of the rising sun, where the hot air warped over the scalding sands, and the skies rained sun fire upon bleached familiar desolation. Beloved familiar inferno.

Here, it was frigid. Even the wind made a different sound in the open spaces of the steppe—a hiss, a constant din. For it honed itself over sharp blades of grass, over heavy stalks of barley and magenta amaranth, instead of grains of sand, and was now singing a savage high-pitched song.

The
taqavor
had tricked her, tricked the legendary bitch-queen Ailsan of Risei, under the pretense of truce. When his spies had reported that she was away from her people—probably to plead for reinforcements from their equally barbaric neighbors—at that time he chose to attack.

He broke the truce ignobly but conveniently, with his customary inevitability. He took the cold land warriors unprepared, with none to command them—just as he had taken dozens of other peoples, many times over, and to all the directions of the sun.

And he smiled, recalling that the queen’s young daughter Mideinn had perished in the first attack. It gave him pleasure to know it, because the
taqavor
nurtured several peculiar hates, one such being the hate of everything female. It was no wonder he hated the Risei with their matriarchate.

Thus, only one thing remained. He must have Ailsan herself, living or dead. And now a wild joy was upon him, for he was told she had returned, had been found at the field of battle and had surrendered into his power.

Cireive was not old. It was only his pale hair, gaunt face with its unhealthy fevered stare, and his commanding height that suggested age and experience, and evoked fear from his followers. And yet here was a paradox—he had a son, Lirheas, of twenty-two summers, but they were often mistaken for peers in age, or else for two men unrelated by blood. The youthful fever-energy of the father stood in contrast with the ageless silence that gathered about the son.

The
taqavor
ordered the captive brought in. Seated on the ground at his left hand, Lirheas his son and Prince watched. Unlike the rest of the
taqavor’s
advisors, his withdrawn passive face did not contain anticipation.

But the others of the high-ranking Gheir seethed with gossip. At last, they were to behold
her,
the Risei queen. It was always a good thing to see the face of the conquered enemy.

Cireive purposefully looked away. He wanted to see her on his own terms, at the precise instant he himself chose. Oddly superstitious, he did not want to actually
see
her walk in. The
taqavor
appeared composed, but his nerves were on edge and his heart pounded.

He heard her enter, directed forward by the guards. She stopped.

“
My Lord,” said the guard.

Now. I will look now.
And he looked at her.

Ailsan was somehow what he had expected, and at the same time not. He had expected dark intensity, and she was indeed swarthy, a woman in the middle of her fourth decade, her stone face swept by the wind and formed into an insensitive mask.

But he had not planned for beauty, and yet beautiful she was. Ailsan was beautiful beyond belief. Her half-lowered black eyes—no, he realized, they were not black, but dark blue twilight—so haughty, sublime.

Eyes of a queen.

Or maybe it was just his vanity exaggerating her, making her into a paragon for him to topple.

And she was disarmed and in his power.

“
You,” he said, in a low voice of force, “are the Royal Consort of the King of Risei.”

Ailsan looked up, meeting the fevered gaze of the fair-haired man clad in silk and gold.
So,
she thought,
you are Cireive. My enemy. I should hate you. Yet I feel nothing. You are but an empty place.

“
There is no King of Risei.” Her answer came in a low quiet voice, startling Cireive. “My Consort died some years ago. I am the Queen.”

She had known the intended insult, but had not risen to it. Cireive was purposefully baiting her. Her mate, he knew quite well, had been Consort by title—an ancient tradition of the Risei, and a tradition that belonged to many of the people of the colder lands.

“
No matter, Ailsan,” Cireive said. Another insult. He used her name.

“
What do you want of me, now that you have betrayed a warrior’s trust, Cireive?” she said simply, in turn using his name as an equal.

“
I want nothing but your obedience and loyalty.”

Her gaze on him was unwavering, forthright in its pride. Her lips eventually rose at the corners. “Ah, how simpleminded. Do you really expect this, Cireive? What would you expect of yourself, being in my place?”

“
I would not be in your place. I have conquered.”

To this, she did not reply.

There were seconds of silence.

He is torturing her,
thought Lirheas the withdrawn Prince, watching passively from a few feet away beside his father. And yet an uncustomary restlessness was beginning to stir in him.
My father tortures. . . . Again.

And had he but squinted in just such a way, the youth might have seen the cloaked form that was death, standing like an honor guard at the woman’s back.