Dreams of the Compass Rose

by Vera Nazarian

  All things appeared to be as they had always been.

  And Lirheas the silent Prince lost his nerve. He needlessly hid away in his own quarters and cloistered himself with the ugly blinded creature, her eyeless face thoroughly bandaged now and her lips immobile.

  She was like a doll of flesh and silence.

  At first he tried speaking to her in a soothing voice, saying gentle words to draw her out. But she was a dead weight. Her vibrant energy, the sense of purpose that had drawn him to her in the first place before the act of blinding, was all gone, faded.

  Lirheas observed her immobility and terror consumed him, for he was no longer sure if he had done the right thing to take her thus, to refer to her as his intended consort. What a mockery indeed that he now called her his queen—when there had been no consummation. Such was the title bestowed upon the Heir’s wife.

  He was the Heir Prince of the taqavor. And she was but a shadow presence, not a wife. For months before the blinding the Prince had been obsessed by her, watching the woman who had been nothing more than a servant now exalted to serve his father in the role of Master Artist and work with the artisans and engineers as she directed the creation of the Compass Rose. Lirheas had been at her side often, asking her questions and watching her reply with wisdom and explain to him the natural workings of the world. She had an answer to every question, and her logic was pure, glorious, and sunlike in its clarity.

  Her eyes had been the most expressive features of her otherwise ordinary face. Through them he could just see something on the other side of this mortal world, something remote and nostalgic that filled him with a longing to soar, to search, to strive. . . . Her eyes had been what had made him look forward to every moment that he spent with her. For in her presence time seemed to slow to an acute glacial intensity, colors took on a rich aroma, and the air itself was solid with thought.

  Her blinding had come as a shock.

  She had said something to the taqavor, something that made the madman react in a way that had cost her the most precious thing that Lirheas had finally admitted he loved her for. And now she stood as she always had before a window of the Palace, her head turned sightlessly toward the open expanse. She must have felt the wind blow and the fresh air sweeping into the room, for how else could she know the direction of the open sky and the sun and the rest of the outside world?

  Because the queen without eyes stood and watched.

  And then one day the queen spoke.

  “What time is it?” she said suddenly. Her head was turned to the window as always, and her lips were slightly parted as though she were drinking in the breeze. Lirheas—sitting nearby in his favorite place at the small work table and reading from an old parchment from his own library—started.

  “Oh . . .” he said, confused at the very sound of her voice, “It is—I am not sure, some time after midday.”

  He arose in worry, and came tentatively to her side. “Is something wrong? Do you need something?”

  Since she had no name, he was never sure how to address her. And calling her “queen”

  seemed a sad insult.

  For the first time since her blinding, she laughed. It was a bitter, living sound, and he watched her lips curve.

  “I need to see,” she said simply, rationally, after her laughter had died away. She turned her bandaged face to him then, turned away from the window. “What is out there, my Prince?” she whispered.

  Lirheas felt a pang of old agony. He dutifully looked outside and said, “I will look for you. . . .”

  “Yes . . . look.”

  “I see gardens,” he spoke, coming closer to stand at her side, so that his shoulder nearly brushed her head as he leaned forward in the open window. “I see beyond that the walls of the Palace, and they are pale gray stone. Some parts look rose-tinted under the sun, and others look bluish with the receding shadows. It is an old granite stone, originally brought here from a distant land.”

  “Yes, I remember,” she said. “Look beyond the walls, and tell me what is there.”

  He stared, straining his eyes. “Beyond, I see the rooftops of the city. And then, the outside city walls, and then finally the desert. It is a brief stripe of creamy yellow, all that is on the horizon. Nothing beyond that.”

  The woman sighed.

  “Yes,” she said. “Nothing.”

  And although he tried to draw her out again, to speak to her, she was silent for the rest of the afternoon.

  The taqavor wanted something, but he was not sure what it was. He was no longer a young man, but he was not so decrepit as to feel ailments in his body or to forget what it was like to desire. But he was by now beyond the need for conquest, beyond carnal pleasures, and at the stage in his existence that demanded some acute mental experience.

  The taqavor wanted to know the nature of all things, and to fathom the mortal world that he had conquered from end to end. He wanted to feel its very edges pressing against him inside his mind.

  For, yes, there were edges and limits. To think otherwise hurt his head, and was thus unthinkable. He had blinded the woman who had dared to make him start to think beyond edges and limits, and anyone else who would ever again bring up such a thing would earn an even harsher fate.

  The taqavor wandered the empty halls of his Palace, the fragrant gardens, and often lifted his face up to the sun and closed his eyes. Doing that seemed to make a difference to the nature of memories that seemed to haunt him more than ever now that he preferred the solitude of his own thoughts.

  Cireive. . . . whispered the wind, in the ancient voice of a woman. He was not sure if it was the one who had birthed him and had sung to him her primeval songs or the one whom he had driven to the martyrdom of godhood by a singular method of destruction, or the one whom he had recently blinded.

  He did not think of her much, that last one. And yet maybe once or twice she appeared on the periphery of his awareness, for she had been responsible in part for his insatiable curiosity. Cireive. . . .

  And for a moment he was nothing more than a small child, not worried about the nature of that whisper, hearing only what was safest, his mother’s voice calling his name. And for that one moment taken out of time, like a fragment of a broken mirror, Cireive the taqavor of the world smiled innocently and remembered. . . . Fields of amaranth. They rose like crimson and green waves upon an anchored ocean as the wind swept clusters of feathered magenta filaments. The filaments stirred—tails of a peculiar animal of many limbs, with irregular fluid movement—and the rich grains remained hidden within the secret depths.

  The world was covered from horizon to horizon, it seemed, with this growth. And he stood at the base of the hill rising just above the edge of the field and looked out, barely seeing over the tall stalks of many feet in height into a floundering sea. . . .

  Were he to walk down and enter this field he would drown as stalks of amaranth closed far over his head, that of a young boy still only half grown.

  “Mother!” he would often cry out. “Let’s go inside and play! I want to hide under the red flowers!”

  The musical voice—even in his memory, or maybe because it was but a memory—always came from behind. “Wait for a moment, Cireive,” she would say every time. “You go on ahead and I will come after you, in just one moment. I dropped the basket.”

  And when he tried to turn and look for her, she would again say, this time with a peculiar urgency, “Don’t wait for me! Go on, son. Hurry now! See how beautiful grows the amaranth. Go and hide inside and I will come to look for you! But you must be very quiet until I find you!

  When I count to three, you run!”

  He heard her start to count off, and then he burst forward like a calf full of springing energy, running head-first into the red and green downy wonder. . . .

  The amaranth obscured him immediately, but like all children of the plains he knew his direction well, and never got lost. Within minutes he would be able to retrace his steps if necessary. But not now, no
t this time.

  Now they were playing a game. Stifling his welling exuberance and giggles he raced deep into the field with eyes closed to avoid the slapping leaves and brushing filaments, wanting to burst but holding himself back.

  Soon his mother would be behind him, making a great deal of intentional noise like a crashing large cat of the plains.

  He would hide by throwing himself to the ground, gasping for muffled breath, face against the rich soil in the darkness, his lips brushing the roots of the plant that he had rearranged and drawn upright overhead to obscure the path behind him.

  He lay panting, his breath slowly stilling, and listened for her approach. But after long moments there was only silence. The wind moved the ocean of growth over his head, and he heard the shimmering hiss as the filaments and stalks of the plants streamed in the breeze. . . .

  Where was she? The little boy in him would suddenly grow impatient, but she had told him to stay and hide in silence, and that she would come.

  She always came for him, and it would be no different this time.

  And so he waited at the bottom of the living ocean of air and leaves and filaments until the silence became overwhelming, so that he could hear the slower beating in his temples, and time itself hung in the air between his cheeks and the scattered sun overhead. At some point he thought there were distant voices, sounds of the unknown, lower, masculine and disturbing on some level he could not explain. He also thought he heard his mother’s voice in the distance, and it was different also.

  But then the wind came, blowing stronger, and he no longer heard anything except its hiss in the feather-filaments of amaranth.

  After some long while of confused inaction, the boy Cireive finally decided to move, sucking in a breath that allowed his lungs to expand and his full consciousness to surface.

  “Mother?” he said loudly, no longer interested in the game and instead feeling lost and claustrophobic.

  There was no reply.

  “Mother!” he tried again, this time yelling at the top of his young lungs. “Where are you, mother?”

  The wind whistled against the blades of the plant all around him. Springing up too fast from the ground, he lost direction, just for a moment only, while his mind reeled. And then he ran back, arms ahead of him, slapping away angrily the endless growth that had now become the enemy. . . .

  When he came out of the field there was no sign of his mother. Her basket lay abandoned, and several wild fruits and dirt-covered roots that she had gathered earlier had rolled out to lie nearby.

  The boy Cireive stared at this, breath catching, while a cold of the unknown came to him. His lips mouthed the word that was not her name but which represented her. And then he sat down at the foot of the hill in the shallow grass, with his back to the hill and facing the field. He sat thus in a trance of coldness, of inexplicable time distortion, until it had grown dark and it was more than time for him to return home—for them to return home. Time spun from out and from under him, and Cireive, taqavor of the world, came awake to find himself standing on a shaded marble walkway. On both sides grew tall cultivated vines of exotic rose blossoms held up by a fine grillwork fence.

  The blossoms were of a slightly magenta hue, and maybe it was their similarity to the feather wisps of the plant of his childhood that had triggered his reverie. He stood, suddenly feeling himself tiny, and the plants on both sides of him were tall amaranth, growing over six feet tall, obscuring the sky. . . .

  Cireive’s blond barely graying head trembled under the onslaught of the past. Rapidly he walked back into the cool darkness of the Palace.

  Servants greeted him, but he cried out, in a high voice that cracked as though he were no older than twelve summers, “Cut all of them down, all the flowers of that crimson color! I want no red or magenta or other such abomination in my gardens! Cut them down and burn them!”

  And because he was the taqavor of the world, the servants complied. Dozens of gardeners were sent to strip the gardens of all flower-bearing plants of a reddish hue, and the destruction that was wrought within an hour was such that dust arose in a cloud of pallor to obscure the once lovely gardens. Mixed in with the dust, were petals of crimson and torn bits of red. The wind swept them like rose snowdrifts, lifting their filaments up to the highest balconies of the Palace, and higher still, over the walls and into the world beyond.

  Prince Lirheas noticed the crimson and dust swirling in desolation outside his window, yet he did not have the heart to tell the blind woman at his side what had come to pass. But somehow she knew it. The blind queen turned her bandaged face to the wind and strained forward, breathing the tainted air.

  “What is happening?” she said softly. “Tell me.”

  “I think they are burning the gardens,” he said. “My Father’s latest mad decree.”

  Lirheas neared her, and he touched her lightly on the shoulder so that she grew tense and motionless, instinctively not trusting anyone’s touch.

  “Please,” he whispered then. “Forgive me . . . for not being there when it happened, when he—the beast—had this done to you.”

  His hand, the fingers that touched her shoulder gently, were trembling.

  “My Prince,” she replied, “you have always been there when you could. You are not like him at all, do you know? As though you are not his son.”

  And then she added, her voice infinitely gentle, “There is nothing to forgive when one is blameless. Tell me, did you ever know your mother? Was she like you? She must have been a kind woman.”

  “No. My mother died soon after my birth, I was told.”

  The queen’s lips curved into a tired smile. “She was fortunate, then. The gods took pity upon her and allowed her to escape an existence with him. How did she die? Did they tell you?”

  Lirheas frowned while his memories attempted to fly back to that obscured time, past all the dark things that had happened in the interim, dark things he did not want to recall. There had been hushed whisperings in the Palace. He had paid little attention to them, but then he had been just a small child and did not know what was worth paying attention to; it had not interested him at that point.

  There was little said thereafter about his mother. In fact, he did not even recall if her name had ever been spoken in his hearing.

  But now suddenly, all these years later, with the sightless face of the blind queen before him, Lirheas was tormented by an urge to know. Who had his mother been? And, even more so, what kind of a peculiar creature was he that he had never wondered about this earlier?

  “I don’t know,” he said after a long pause of stilled thought. “But I must now find out.”

  The taqavor was in his most beloved place, the central hall of the Compass Rose, when his son Prince Lirheas came to him with a question.

  “Forgive me, my Lord Father,” he said in a measured wooden voice, steeling himself for anything. “I want to know the name of the woman who had gave birth to me, my mother. What happened to her? How did she die?”

  The taqavor tore himself away from the floating four-point star that pointed in the same direction always, a tendency he himself named “North.”

  He looked at his son with his earnest face, a younger man who had always been quiet and reserved throughout the years, and who now suddenly came into focus before him, out of nowhere, out of time.

  “What’s this?” said Cireive. “What do you ask?”

  “My mother,” repeated Lirheas. “Who was she?”

  “How should I know?”

  Lirheas strained to keep his breath even. “I am your son,” he said. “Who else would know such a thing but my father?”

  The taqavor raised one eyebrow, then his eyes moved away to look into nothingness. He then just as quickly looked back at the younger man, and approached him. Lirheas wanted to step back from the sickly intensity of the gaze, but held himself in place.

  “Who else?” said Cireive. “I am your father, yes. I am also your mother!”

 
And then the taqavor smiled and began to cackle, his voice sending up harsh echoes in the stone hall.

  Lirheas looked at the madness before him, but he was now beyond caution, beyond fear, in a singular place of clarity, which required him to persist.

  “What was her name?” he said. “You must tell me. Try to remember, please. . . .”

  The bark that came in the next instant made the Prince’s heart weak.

  “Oh, I remember, do not doubt!” cried the taqavor in a shrill voice, again advancing on his son. “You think me insane, don’t you, boy? Well, think what you will, but I remember it very well! It is the one thing that is with me always, and the one thing that I will never forget. Never. Never! ”

  The last word came as a scream.

  “Then tell me,” said Lirheas, with a false outer calm.

  The taqavor laughed. He chuckled, then guffawed, then paused to listen to the macabre echoes he made and giggled, pointing with his hand to the sound as though it were something to be captured in the air like a summer fly.

  “I will tell you,” he whispered. “For she lives in my dreams. . . .”

  Blue twilight had come to hang thickly over the amaranth field when the boy finally rose and walked up the hill slowly. He had left their basket behind and he was on his way home, which lay on the other side of the hill.

  When he came to the row of outlying houses and the clearing where the well stood, he saw horses and strange men. They had stopped near the well, and there was loud talk and many foreign accents. Some of the townsmen had come out to barter, and now were discussing news of the outer lands.