She broke off, just as suddenly becoming again like stone. “I am wasting words. Leave me,”
her voice said tonelessly, oddly commanding, and she went permanently silent. He slapped her again. And again. He tore the remainder of her clothes and his own, and with a grunt of fury he impaled her upon himself. He thrust his loins repeatedly in madness, while his teeth closed upon her throat, then crushed her lips, then his mouth kissed them, then again, wounded.
Only—it was like wounding mist. Or some other such insubstantiality. She knew searing fire, a universe of pain, but she was a dead weight, already retreating inward, deep, to a place where even the death embracing her with sepulchral silver could not reach.
I am not here. I am. . . .
Dzieru, Archpriest of Gheir, was told to perform the Sacrifice before the sun set. Early that morning the taqavor had stalked madly into his presence, unusually disrespectful, and commanded the Full Ceremony before all the great armies of Gheir. The Risei bitch-queen, he cried, was to be deprived of her heart, the organ was to be cut into seven pieces, fed to camp dogs, and her body burned to a crisp, dedicated to the god of Conquest, Margh-Qa, the Apex One.
Dzieru took all this in calmly, noting the odd disheveled state, Cireive’s feverish eyes. It was true then, Ailsan, the fabled queen, had more power than he had expected. Already Cireive was thrown off balance, irreversibly changed.
He, Dzieru, must now go about it very firmly and dispose of her for good. It was not healthy, this effect on the taqavor.
Why do I bother? thought Ailsan. She was an empty husk left to wither, tied to the torture instrument.
The sun rose higher. He had abandoned her quickly after the rape, fearing to be seen, fearing to display weakness.
Here was peace. Long moments of it.
Why do I continue being? What does anything matter? Who am I? I no longer know. Why? Why?
Lirheas, silent Prince of Gheir, touched a dull cold hand against the leather-wrapped handle of a tiny dagger in the secret lining of his trouser leg.
In his tent, alone, he brooded upon the justice of mercy killings. He had seen mares in pain, had himself put them out of their misery. It had not been easy for a youth, but it had been infinitely easier than watching them convulse. . . .
Now there was another in need of this. He looked out, moving the flap of the tent, at the slumped, no longer human form in the slithering daylight under the sun. High noon over a great cool expanse.
No, I cannot. Not her.
The taqavor rode arrow-straight, magnificent in his armor, in review of his legions. The sun rode high. Pennants and banners of deep crimson, white and gold shone in aerial glory among the ranks of glittering steel. . . .
The wind blowing in his face, caressing the pale strands of silk, his hair, caused his eyes to tear suddenly. His leathered glove tensed, gripping the war stallion’s reins, and he blinked only once.
Show no weakness. Show no. . . .
When the sun came lower to the horizon, and the farthest reaches of the sky ripened to the color of persimmon and burned, Ailsan, once a queen of Risei, now queen of the dead, was escorted by guards to the small rocky hillock. The Gheir army stood tense all around, covering the plain as far as the horizon flowed unto fiery eternity.
As she walked, staggering, they opened ranks to make way for her in awed silence. A million staring eyes. Whisperings of “she.”
At the top of the rising stood the Archpriest. A few steps away, Cireive himself. All in black silhouette.
Drums rolled, and a low eerie wailing began. The entire army then seemed to sink, a field of black grass cut down, as the soldiers of Gheir went on their knees before the Sacrifice of MarghQa. Ailsan gathered herself with a supreme act of will. No longer staggering, she now walked without weakness, a stone among stones. Cireive, his fine pale hair moving in the wind, was another stone. Impassive, he watched her stop.
The low monotone voice of Dzieru began a hypnotic incantation. Clad in voluminous dark, in a multiplicity of illusory veils cast before the eyes, the Archpriest was terrifying to the Gheir. Out of nowhere, a sudden force, inevitable like the wind, compelled Ailsan to fall down on her knees, her head lowered before Cireive. She lay at his feet swooning, and death lay on top of her, covering her back, shifting its infinite gray weight.
A rising sigh of satisfaction coupled with terror moved among the army. All things were as they should be.
Dzieru spoke in a ringing voice, and every entity heard. “Behold, my Lord, the vanquished Queen kneels to you.”
Cireive’s heart quickened. He looked at her. “You kneel,” he repeated almost in surprise, his voice also heard by all. “But that is not enough. You know it is not. Tell me you serve me!
Tell me I am your Lord.”
Ailsan’s figure appeared to shake, and her lips moved silently. A whisper came. “My . . . Lord.”
And then, with even greater difficulty, “My soul . . . cannot . . . kneel. It . . . will not . . . kneel.”
She was visibly fighting the compulsion. Only Cireive heard her weak words. Dzieru meanwhile, took out the sword.
Fire was in the mind of Ailsan. She was being torn apart. Here was her Lord before her, to be worshiped. Something around her cried loudly, 'Submit to him.'
And yet some strange other part of her—one that was inside, one that was stubborn and raw like an open wound—refused. And out of all her collective memories, one thing only kept surfacing—eyes of glass.
Eyes of the dead.
First there was Mideinn, frozen in death, then the thousands of slain on the field, their eyes all bulging, silent, and in their silence strangely childlike, forgiving her. Death had renewed their innocence in that last moment of embrace. There was no accusation, only a soft memory flower unfurling its petals of silver.
And it broke her at last.
Ailsan died in that moment, or maybe not. Maybe she was only thrown with the force of her agony into a bottomless abysmal well outside the universe, fleetingly to know the nature of true death. And then just as violently she was wrenched back into the mortal fabric of the world by the memory of the wild, living, beloved eyes of Talaq, that last instant before he had died—
“Enough!” she cried abruptly. Her voice came piercing the silence, a hush of thousands, as thunder gathered in her mind.
Deliberately, she stood up and looked at the Archpriest, who paused in surprise, the ceremonial sword still in his hand.
“Damn you to the Skies!” Cireive exclaimed, trembling. He pulled out his own great sword of polished metal. “Enough, yes, I shall kill you myself! No more!” The blade, a senseless thing, rose high in the air.
Sitting upon Ailsan’s back, death became very still. Its skull-mouth was suddenly visible in the hooded darkness, jaws parted to reveal a hungry void. The crimson light of sunset gleamed acutely against the bone-whiteness of death’s teeth, turning it to rose. And then the sun swooned. Or was it that all of a sudden a great dark cloudmass appeared out of nowhere in the volcanic sky? And with it built a rumble of gathering thunder. The violent thunderclouds gathered from all directions—from the right and the left hand of the setting sun, from the sun’s bright scarlet face, and from the sun’s obscured rose-tinted back. A heartbeat. . . .
Then a hair-thin line of white celestial fire split the boiling red heaven into shards, like broken bloodied glass, and fell upon the figure of Ailsan. And in that moment the woman glowed.
Panic started everywhere. The Archpriest began to make violent ritual gestures in the air, and electric currents jumped from his fingers. Cireive paused, sword held over his head, gripping it with both hands, in the stance of an executioner.
And then her voice came. It was no longer even remotely human in essence, but thunder and raging wind.
The Skies heard you, Cireive. I am—Damned.
She stood before him, monumental. A silhouette against the madness of heaven. She did not need to raise a hand to meet the crashing blade. She parried
it, instead, with a look of her eyes.
On one side of her, the Archpriest’s sword went up in flames. On the other side, the sword in the hands of the taqavor splintered, never completing its down-arc, while the taqavor himself gave a horrible cry, and for one fraction of an instant also glowed. And then Cireive dropped what was left in his grip, still attached to shards of a broken blade, watching the hilt burn in his fingers. A moment, and the black charred remains of metal turned unbelievably not to liquid but to solid coal, which then crumbled into ash-dust. Stand back, priest and king, from my wrath, boomed the voice of no woman but a goddess. She was a torch. She burned and turned to black parchment, and time swept past her, accelerating, then spinning at last in a circle so that she was at the same time a child and an old woman with a wizened face.
Dzieru, finding no more ritual force in him, cringed, retreating down the hill. Cireive faltered for a moment, and then he also ran—ran like a possessed coward madman, clutching his burning hand and leaving behind his pride.
She stood watching them retreat both from her sight and from her memory—for her memory no longer held a place for such trivial things, swept as she was with time. I am Ailsan, she said, I have been Damned to bear the burden of being the last one. And then, from the sky, another Voice sounded.
She is the last, it said, louder than thunder, and suddenly the people knew the sound of Margh-Qa.
Through that storm, a vague, giant shape moved, flickered for a moment—a divine shadow the size of heaven. Then, for the second and final time spoke the god, the One who had possibly never been heard to speak before.
A new one comes in our midst.
And more thunder.
I am Ailsan. The soul and spirit of Risei, my people. There was a legend among my people that never should there be an end to Risei, but that if it did come then their soul would not die but be preserved with the gods.
She stood looking at the last moments of sunset, while tiny specks of remote humanity, the army of mortals, ran like ants upon the hillside.
They ran from her, leaving her all alone.
But she was not yet alone. Not quite.
Ailsan turned around, and for the first time felt an immense burden of shadow leave her shoulders, ease her back. Something cold and eternal left her, stepped away. Something.
Ailsan stood and faced the form of gaunt silver darkness, clad in a cloak of night. Death stood before her, tall and insolent, and yet locked in a paradox of simultaneous remoteness and tangibility.
Ailsan knew this entity at last, knew it in a physical sense, because now she could reach out with her hand and touch the cold folds of death’s eternal cloak.
And, as she did this, death was the one who recoiled.
“You,” Ailsan said, her inner vision opening to the truth. “I know you. You damned bitch!”
And with a scream of divine thunder, Ailsan swung her hand and landed a blow at the side of the skeleton’s right cheek, a blow that sent the shadow form reeling, thrown to the ground with a violence that held in it all the pent-up agony of cumulative human loss belonging to a whole people.
Death lay for a span of timeless moments on the cold earth, made oddly corporeal by its proximity to ethereal immortality, by comparison.
At the feet of death, a little away upon the cold rock, lay a curved scythe blade of strange nameless metal shimmering with its own eerie light in the twilight.
“Receive the Blow for all that you have taken from me,” Risei-Ailsan said. “Receive it, and remember.”
And then the new goddess nodded in the direction of the shimmering blade and said, “Pick it up. Take your scythe, and hold onto it well. And yet I promise you, you will lose it again, Hag. That, as a reminder—for I damn you to remember always what you do and who you are.”
And the manifestation of death reached forward with its silver finger-claws, slowly took hold of the scythe, and then crawled away, leaving the goddess this time unto eternity. Risei-Ailsan was alone at last.
And as she too started to fade into the dusk of the night air, the goddess softly wept. Lirheas, Prince of silence, observed with awed awakening, from a distance, the coming into being of the goddess Risei-Ailsan. And suddenly it all burst through his skull, and he could hear and see and sense all the earth and sky, all at once.
And thus as he watched the Gheir and his father run in madness, he heard her immortal voice thunder in the plain, rioting the army, and he also heard her voice whisper to him, yes, a soft private voice.
I am a jackal torn away from her cubs. I am the mother you recognized in me, the mother you never had. Lirheas, Prince of Gheir, you will remember me always. Not because of what I am now, not because of pity, although that too you’ve felt. No . . . Remember me only as that which your father loved, hated, and feared. For I revealed to him the truth of himself. And he will bear the burden of the truth now, unto madness.
Know that loyalty is the most precious thing. To be gifted in trust, not taken by force. Know that a mother’s desperation is the strongest force, and a mother’s forsaking is the greatest loss. I now bear one secret guilt within me always, a guilt of pride. My son might have lived, if only—
And yet my spirit cries! I could not do otherwise! For now I am paradox. I am pride unfurled, coexisting with humility. I am Risei. I am Ailsan. I am the vast desert and the deep ocean. Remember me, for a goddess speaks within you now. And forget. . . . Thus the young son of the taqavor was for one instant only inside the soul of Her who was from then on worshiped under the name of Risei-Ailsan, Bringer of Stillness and Water, the Bright-Eyed Liberator, the Mad Sovereign of Wisdom, and then simply Ris. He knew her and then knew not, only remembered in hazy musings a shadow, understanding for the first time an old legend among his own people.
The gods, it said, are all the souls of different peoples. When a people dies, the last woman or man among them is always something more, always sacrosanct. It is the last that bears all the responsibility for a people, and is never to be dishonored.
Or else, the gods hear. And they elevate the one in misery, so that a new deity joins the pantheon, forged, like all the others, from the collective spirit of a people. That is the secret of deity.
And he knew it. Lirheas the Prince of revelation knew the lore as he witnessed the Change taking place, and he too was elevated. Later it was he who would look upon the rising and the setting sun, observe its burning face, its scalding back, its left hand and its right—from all directions.
And in the wide expanses of the wind, the ocean, the desert sand, and the glimmer of daylight, he would observe the Compass Rose.
DREAM FIVE
TALE OF NADIR
The boy came out of the desert, leading a pack-beast and carrying a cup of water. His skin was dark like the rich soil underneath the sand; his hair midnight-black and wiry, short against his scalp; his features rounded, flat and soft, malleable like sweet brown clay and belonging to a darker race of humankind.
His eyes were startling. They were like an ocean at night, without a horizon line and without bottom. Lurking inside were experience and sorrow.
No one would question the boy’s facial expression, nor his solo emergence from out of the desert, nor the fact that his pack-beast did not look nearly as parched and weary as was customary after a long crossing of uninterrupted sands.
However, one thing unexplainable was the cup filled with fresh water, seemingly boundless, that the young one carried in his dirty palms.
The water was clear and stood so very near the brim. It sparkled in the sun with an added brilliance of a peach sunset, or maybe a hue deeper than gold and rosy with persimmon. Whence did this color come? For the cup itself was faded brown, old polished wood without a hint of embellishment.
The boy came to the outskirts of the sands, to a place where sparse growing shrubs crested the dunes, and rock formations hid occasional spots of oasis. Here, nomad tribes would stop and set up their tents, and here caravans often met to exchange wares an
d transfer news of the greater world to all the corners of the Compass Rose.
At one such spot of oasis a dozen caravans had come together—a horse trader, several gemstone merchants, a wood importer, and other lesser vendors. The temporary market was erected for a matter of days only, after which all would proceed their own ways, having acquired and sold new property.
The boy paused before the clearing, hidden by an outcrop of rock. His heart started to beat loudly in his temples, and internal waters went coursing wildly through his flesh. There was fear, uncertainty, hopeless despair. Dared he enter this camp?
He considered for a moment, standing in the midday sun, while the liquid at the rim of the cup that he held trembled in the wind. Eventually he pulled the pack-beast gently closer to him and absentmindedly lifted the wooden bowl to its muzzle.
While the mangy old creature drank, he watched the scene before him, the moving people, braying mules and loaded camels, the mayhem near the watering hole, and the fine expensive tents. This was no ordinary market scene, for he could tell there was old noble money here, in the very manner of cloth draping the tents, and the rich woven blankets of the beasts. And then he looked to the side, to the edge of the tallest tent, and saw a wonder. A horse with skin of mother-of-pearl.
To say this is no exaggeration. The colors moved and rippled in the sun from the palest cream pearl to sudden flows of lavender, then tints of lapis, and a wash of metallic green, and then sudden rose. And then, the next second one blinked, the pearly hue returned, like a scene prior to a dispelled mirage. The beast moved gently, milling from one foot to the other, and its flanks and back glittered in the light as though oiled with the thick flammable material that is sometimes found seeping through the earth in certain faraway Western places, and creates filmy rings of rainbow upon its liquid surface.
The horse was tied with at least three long ropes to different poles that had been driven into the sandy ground, and was guarded by two well armed soldiers.
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