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He is torturing her, thought Lirheas the withdrawn Prince, watching passively from a few feet away beside his father.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.
Abruptly she spoke once more. It was visibly difficult for her to say this. “My people, back at the camp. I— ask you to treat them with mercy in their slavery.” She spoke this and then she lowered her gaze.
Cireive’s heart jumped again, coupled with an unexpected stirring in his loins. Observe her reaction now, when she hears. . . .
“I have been more merciful than you think,” he said quietly, so very slowly. “I take no prisoners, no slaves. Their deaths were quick. I ordered my soldiers to be skillful in their slaying, and strike only the throats, or a direct blow to the forehead or the heart. Sometimes it works best when the great vein at the throat is severed with a quick slash.”
He ended and observed her.
For the first time there was something on her face, a jerk of a muscle. In an almost surprised voice she said, “You—killed all of them? All of my people?”
Cireive’s breath caught in his throat. He drank in the change in her, while his loins engorged.
“You killed—the children? So I and my son are the last of Risei?”
“Yes,” he said, modulating his voice into perverse sympathy. Cireive was a master of appearances.
“Why? Why did you have to kill them all?”
“They were a hindrance.”
“Oh, gods.”
“You, Ailsan, have been brought to this by the will of gods, yes.”
She looked away, her eyes alive now and in dismay. “It is my fault,” she whispered. “All my fault.”
“No!” His voice cut into her. “You were a puppet, and had no choice. Your coward neighbors would not help you. They knew my force and would not. While your insolence made you blind to what I am. I would have swallowed you with your army no matter. Even now, you know it. Look at me!”
“No. . . . If only I had been there, to lead them.”
He laughed, beginning to tremble in surges of violent pleasure that he could barely conceal.
“Then you would have been dead alongside them. Approach me,” he said. “And kneel. I am your proper Lord now.”
Her eyes widened. “Damn you, I will not! Never now!” Her speech was quick, fierce. She too trembled now, and he would never know why. He would never see that the death figure, which had not once left her side, now suddenly scrambled forward. Like a horrible parody of a simian creature, death grappled Ailsan, straddled her back, and wrapped cold silver bone-arms around her throat in a chokehold.
Ailsan was now frozen, staring off to the side, no longer looking at him. She had moved on beyond his reach.
A thrill of helpless admiration ran down his back. Inwardly, he trembled to such an extent that he could no longer stop, and in the tremors felt scalding waves, felt oceanic currents of liquid sun race in his veins. He was on the verge of a sensual explosion, and it would take so very little to carry him over the edge of the precipice into climax. Only the added anticipation of seeing her completely broken before him held him back now.
“Take her away, bind her,” he said to the guards very curtly, because lust madness was upon him, and he was losing control.
His orders were carried out. With their exit, relief and the cool evening wind from the outside, from the great expanse, entered the tent.
Ailsan spent a painful night, bound with ropes, abandoned on the bare earth floor of a filthy tent. She had been disarmed and deprived of her fine outer clothing, left with only a shift under-tunic. Her well tuned but no longer young body ached after hours of such treatment. Her thoughts, however, were on her son only, an anchor of sanity. Not even death lying beside her like a lover could distract her fevered, singleminded thought.
Talaq . . . she thought, if you only knew how much my innards bleed for you, how much I know your hurt, despite my outward demeanor. . . . My son.
They had been immediately separated upon capture, despite mutual protests. She had not been told where he was. She had been told nothing.
At dawn she was roused from a pretended sleep and taken outside into a thick milky gray curtain of vapor.
Eventually the grayness thinned, and a sea of army tents was revealed all around her, stretching to a horizon of nebulous silver mist. Fires were smoking already, small dislocated suns, the giant camp alive.
After several minutes, Talaq was led by two guards to join her. He had been stripped of his finery also, naked down to the waist and shivering, barefoot. His dark, longish hair was clotted, but there was a man’s glow in his face, washed by the first morning rays of the sun. His back was straight and stiff as a board. Behind him, death stood with singular pride, today of all days.
“Mother!” he cried, a smile dawning in his eyes. And then he spoke with dignity. “My Queen.”
They were not allowed physical contact.
Soon, the taqavor himself appeared. Tall and magnificent, he emerged out of his tent followed by guards, while a slow building rumble went up all around as his soldiers saluted him. He ignored them all. Coming to a pause before Ailsan, his gaze was on her alone. Then he said quietly, without any preliminaries, “I would know if you are ready to bow before
me.”
“Never.”
She looked at him sideways, through slitted eyes. Slits, to hide the razor edge of her anger. His lips quivered. “Well then,” he said. “Well. Guards!” He turned to one of the men holding Talaq. “You, take out your sword and kill him, through the heart.” The words were clear, deliberate.
It was all too quick. Ailsan suddenly trembled. She bit her lips, then raised a hand to her mouth, and bit her band. She said nothing.
Talaq, his eyes wide, even now surprised, suddenly straightened. “Mother,” he said, in a loud, strangely measured voice, while behind him death slowly unfurled its cloak to its full measure and stepped forward to embrace him at long last. “Do not bow. He will kill me anyway, later. Save your dignity—”
“I love you, Talaq! My son! ” she then cried, her eyes maddened, while simultaneously a soldier’s sword pierced Talaq, cutting off his words. He slowly crumpled to the ground, with a small, no longer human sound.
Ailsan heard the wind blow in her temples. Or was it her blood? Overhead the sun was rising, dispelling the last of the mist.
You did like I told you. You stood and you never cried, she thought. And then, I have never said this to you, Talaq. . . . Did you hear me? Did you hear, this last time, I wonder? This she thought while she wailed.
It was the long scream of a carrion bird. So inhuman that Cireive held his breath through it. Ailsan then suddenly moved. She took a step toward the corpse. Then faltered. Then, slowly, she went on her knees. Silent dry seizures convulsed her body. And, after a while, water came out of her eyes, flowed down her face, endless—all in silence. There was something horrible about this convulsed, sobbing silence.
Then, just as suddenly, she made herself stop.
“You—stupid, stupid man,” she said to Cireive, her voice steady and hoarse, tears struggling with laughter. “Do you—realize—I would have bowed to you— yes, if only you’d waited? You—killed him, and you gave me no chance! I am human, not metal, I cannot be plied so easily. I—” She went silent, gulped, still shaking in her paroxysm, then allowed her hands to fall weakly to her sides.
She remained on her knees, having no strength to do anything else. At her side, death also kneeled, waiting.
Cireive’s face was stone. “Bow to me now, then,” he said.
A few steps away, the taqavor’s son Lirheas looked down, wiping some dust speck from his eyes.
It would seem that such extended misery deserves a respite, thought the Prince. What is the gods’ will at times such as this?
“I spit on you now,” said Ailsan to the father of Lirheas. And then she said a soldier’s obscenity.
Cireive looked at her intensely for a moment, then came forward. His hands closed with grips of iron upon her shoulders, and he literally raised her off her knees. And then, as she stood, he swung his right hand and slapped her resoundingly across the face, with sterile precision. Ailsan did not resist, falling from his hold like a thing of straw. She bent forward, once more on her knees, her face touching dirt. She was no longer shaking but immobile, a few feet from the still warm dead body of her son.
Then, after moments of complete silence, as guards and onlookers watched with impassive masks of faces, a new trembling came in a wave over her form. She lay and shook with delirious laughter, then slowly raised her face, throwing back her dark filthy hair, and grinned like a skullmask at the taqavor.
“Go ahead, mother-scorned, do what you will, kill me! I am the last, now. And what then?”
Her eyes were rabid.
For the first time, Cireive’s outward semblance of calm crumbled. His mouth narrowed, his chin shook.
What was it that she said. . . ?
“Take her—take the mad bitch out of my sight!” he cried, ending in a falsetto. And then added, as the soldiers began to comply, “Give her thirty lashes, then tie her to a post, under the sun, and give her nothing for a day! Let no one approach or speak to her, upon fear of death!”
No, the fever coursed through Cireive’s mind, I can never kill her, not until she breaks. I must see that.
Ailsan had learned to shut out pain an eternity ago, when she was still a child. “Think nothing,”
she was taught. “Dwell on the things within you, never on the outside world. Listen to sounds in your hazy memories, and never to the sounds at your ears. Look around you with blindness, with the inner vision of unfocused thoughts. And when the pain becomes too great, then lose yourself, and become it, enter the heart of pain. Understand it, and above all, never resist.”
Her day was a haze of pain, interspersed with nothing. Thinking nothing, she did not allow herself to think of her dead. Somehow, she knew, for some intangible reason, she had to continue being.
Nothing any longer mattered, except for being. Occasionally waking up to herself, feeling silver death finger-bones at her throat, she would say her name in her mind. Ailsan. I am Ailsan, Queen of Risei. I am . . . Ailsan.
And again, darkness.
Cireive, taqavor of all the lands to the right and left and face and back of the rising sun, Lord over Gheir, found no peace that day. Not once did he go to see her, or even deign to inquire of her progress, but nothing else was on his mind. Like an apparition she filled the moments of his daylight. When night came, and he lay in his tent knowing that she was so near, he tossed and could not sleep.
He hated her, hated the queen of Risei, the last one—now, the queen of the dead. Oh, how much he hated. He imagined her bleeding back, imagined how the fine razor-sharp whip had torn into her flesh earlier that day, again and again, cutting, piercing. . . . He imagined how her body had arched at each stroke, pride cast aside, a cry for mercy squeezed from her lips. When slumber finally did overcome him, he would wake up again in sweat, from a dream of her. Only this time she was inviting him, welded tight in his embrace, her body receptive and infinitely yielding under his, and there was again that familiar fire in his loins. Then, fully awake, he became aware of a real pang of desire, and lay, eyes dilated, through the darkness of night, until another bout of sleep came to plunge him into one more tortured abyss. This transpired again and again.
Just before dawn, he woke up. He could no longer endure it. He was obsessed. Wrapping a fine heavy cloak about him against the chill of morning, the taqavor stepped quietly out of the tent and into the cold vapor. He made a calming gesture to the guard, who tensed immediately in his presence.
He walked less than a hundred feet before coming upon her. Superstition . . . his thoughts tumbled. I must not. Must not look at her . . . I must not . . . I. . . . His delirium was broken abruptly. In the whirling mist, tied to a weathered narrow trunk of a barkless ghzad tree—the kind that was to be found everywhere now, for miles upon miles of sparse obstinate growth, as they had moved deeper into this cold region—she stood, loosely tied. It was an exquisite torture, these loose bonds. She could not quite fall, yet neither could she straighten up. Her figure was twisted oddly forward, black stringy hair hanging in clumps, dampened by the night. A fragile husk. It seemed the wind could carry her away with one single draft, blow her out of existence along with the mist. And yet—
Cireive was delirious again. His eyes did not notice her sorry condition, only the way the part of the rope tied high on her waist emphasized the full curve of breast. Two strong children she had whelped, and yet her body remained flexible and powerful like steel. Once again, a fire crept to his loins, and he hardened.
Quickly, silently, he approached her, reached out for her, and then knew nothing for the duration of that embrace. Apathetic, her head lolled sideways, fell against his chest. He grabbed her by the hair then, to raise her head, and stared at her in the first light of dawn. . . . In a hollowed face, deathly listless eyes. Lips dry and cracked, parched. An imprint of thirty lashes somewhere on her back.
Slowly, she focused her gaze, as if only now realizing his presence. Something gurgled in her throat, maybe because death’s stranglehold around her windpipe was tightenin
g, as death straddled her wounded back with its silver bone-thighs. “Talaq . . .” she whispered, “You killed . . . him . . . them.”
His whisper came urgent in retort. “It is the past, oh Ailsan, the past, now over . . . You are with me, I am your Lord, you hear, you can bear another child, strong, yes, my child. . . .”
With a surge of strength she drew away. Then she said in a loud cracking voice, “You slobbering pig. Unbelievable. After all you have done to us, you expect this from me?”
In animal reflex, he grabbed her by the throat, hissing, “Be silent!”
She laughed weakly, so much like the skeletal hag that was behind her. “Ah, yes. Now you are afraid your own men would know of this one small weakness of yours, is that so? Should I scream loudly and make them come running, and shame you before them? No, I don’t think it’s worth it.”
In answer, her arm was twisted painfully behind her torn savaged back. She did not blink, but continued smiling. Indeed, an odd fire had now come to her eyes.
“Go on, break my limbs. It would take more than that to break me . . .” she whispered eagerly, with sudden raving energy. “Nothing now . . . Nothing left that can touch me. You’ve used up your last and greatest bargaining treasure, fool—my son. . . .”
“I will tear you apart, bitch! I—”
“Oh, is that so, brave goat? Then let me tell you—by gods, are you just blind, or a madman?
Don’t you know, don’t you understand, I’m the one with power over you, can’t you see?” she went on fiercely.
“A rabid bitch—”
Her teeth bared. “No, a jackal! Wild, yes, the last of my kind—you made me so—can you for a moment conceive it? Can you conceive being the last, the only—”
Dreams of the Compass Rose Page 7