Dreams of the Compass Rose

by Vera Nazarian

  But first she had to find it.

  The North-bound caravan came to a stop before an oasis of several palm trees, and a small ancient well that was now almost dry. This had once been called Golden Livais, after a miracle of destruction had taken place here, a whole town being transformed overnight into solid gold. It had been a miracle wrought of ignorance and tainted with greed. Legend said, they had tried to buy the favor of the gods with the bright clamor of gold in exchange for a replenishing of the water supply in a dwindling well.

  But the gods only give you back more of what you offer up.

  The gold had long since gone; fortune scavengers from all points of the Compass Rose had taken care of that. Not even ruins here. Only a new growth of trees remained, and the oasis persisted somehow.

  But now a woman stood here, having come out of nowhere, with transparent eyes and hair like sand.

  The caravan driver saw Caelqua from afar—or, rather, saw for a moment a bit of sun dislocated, a shadow of a candle flame.

  Upon approach, it was no longer there. But observing her up-close, there came a blurring in his vision, a moment of times mixing.

  “Who are you?” he whispered hoarsely, for his own throat was dry and he had not yet quenched his thirst by drinking from the well.

  But, as he looked further at her, cool water stood before his eyes. And it occurred to him that this woman might be one of the supposed immortals.

  “Are you Ris?” he asked carefully.

  Ris. Bringer of Stillness and Water, the Bright-Eyed Liberator, the Mad Sovereign of Wisdom.

  That name stirred something within Caelqua, another ancient memory.

  “No,” she replied. “But I have been touched by Ris and given a blessing of Water.”

  And speaking thus, Caelqua came forward and lifted her palms toward him, cupped together.

  The air shimmered and her flesh became transparent, flowing.

  He blinked, and now observed liquid dancing in the sun.

  “Drink,” she said. “And take me with you.”

  The caravan took Caelqua through the desert. She came with them wordlessly and they shrank away in awe, knowing from the first instant that she was different, one of the divine. The journey involved a number of days that all blended into one day of sun-spilled monotony, silence and the low hissing of the wind.

  Eventually, a great city showed itself on the Northern horizon, and a road emerged from the sands.

  They approached, blended with other rabble, and entered gates of iron past stone-faced guards into a place of living frenzy.

  Here the caravan and Caelqua parted ways, for they would stop in the city for only two nights and then head farther North. She, by contrast, knew that her journey ended here. Caelqua walked several hours through the urban chaos of agoraphobic marketplaces and claustrophobic alleyways. The city air was an astringent stew of garlic, human excrement and the perfume of roses.

  But Caelqua’s senses ignored the olfactory clamor and focused on one single scent. She smelled water.

  And thus she moved like a shade toward the heart of the city where stood a grand palace of white stone and garish gold.

  Water was within.

  And there was something very wrong.

  The tired queen with anemic skin looked down from her divan-throne past the barrier of veils and silk pillows at the woman with dull sand hair.

  Caelqua stood before her like a stilled fountain.

  “Who are you?” said the queen. “They told me you might help me. But I know that no one can.”

  “I am no one. And I am the only one who can redeem you.”

  The queen sat up with great difficulty and pulled the golden veils from her forehead. Her lips were white with approaching death.

  “You bleed,” said Caelqua. “Your woman’s cycle has not ended for many moons now. Your womb is refusing to close up, and thus your life is running out of you in rivulets of darkness.”

  “Yes. . . . How did you know?”

  But Caelqua said nothing. Instead, she stepped forward and touched the queen on the brow. And the queen felt a rhythm of blood begin in her temples.

  Guards tensed forward, but the queen stopped then with one weakly upraised palm. She stilled, and remained thus for a long span of moments beneath Caelqua’s touch.

  “I feel you. . . . An ocean. . . .” whispered the queen in vampiric ecstasy. Caelqua released her hold.

  “I require a sharp knife,” she said.

  “Do as she says!” said the queen. “You, give her your dagger!”

  A guard stepped forward with suspicious eyes, and slowly drew forth his ornate weapon. A moment of impossible silence.

  Then Caelqua took the knife from him. And with it she slit her own wrist. A spurting fountain of hueless water began to pulse from her vein, and she offered it to the queen.

  “Take my Water and drink, for even Ris drank once from my wrist. For that act of quenching, Ris has given me Water in exchange for my mortal Blood.”

  The queen fell upon the hand in mindless hunger and pulled at the open vein with her succulent pale lips. She drank for a long span while the court watched in terrible wonder. Finally she tore herself away, satiated, and there was a new, manic energy in her eyes.

  “You have given me my existence, the one thing that was no longer mine,” said the queen.

  “I feel it now, this new strength! My womb is closing even as I speak, and my flow has ceased. What miracle are you? I have everything, and will give you anything you ask!”

  Caelqua looked into her eyes, and for the first time there was a smile on her face.

  “I ask,” she said, “for the Past.”

  There was an old place of stones and sand outside the city, a place where they buried their dead. The queen had given Caelqua a fine litter and servants to attend her, and a robe of ivory silk. Those, and a consultation with the temple Oracle, whose Voice had directed Caelqua here in her inexplicable search.

  Caelqua walked past the ancient monuments and gravestones, looking for a specific one. The Past was buried here, the Oracle had said, and it is what you seek. And Caelqua looked for it now, her vision blurring with many waters, mindlessly taking in the sunlit expanse of white stone and sand.

  She moved, drifting over the earth, and came upon a large antique tomb structure that was mostly below ground. Here, at the entrance, obelisks of cypress had sprung, reaching for the sky. And here stood a man, his back turned to her but his skin showing him to be of a dark race, and his hair tight and coiled like snakes of midnight.

  Something started to beat wildly in Caelqua’s heart then, at the sight of him.

  “Nadir!” she pronounced, her still voice cracking with emotion for the first time. “Nadir, it is you. But how you’ve grown!”

  The man turned to face her, tall and muscular like an ebony god, with skin like dates, and warm eyes.

  “Yes,” he replied. “I am Nadir.”

  In response, Caelqua came forward with a wildness, her whole form wavering for an instant from flesh to a column of water and then back again. With one raggedly expelled breath she moved into his arms.

  “I am Caelqua!” she said, shuddering against his chest. “Do you remember me, little brother? Remember how Grandmother-–who was Ris—used to call you a little demon?

  Remember how we wandered together and how we suffered, and how you promised that you would grow up strong and fight injustice—and I can see that you have—”

  The man called Nadir received her and held her close in silence, allowing the torrent of her words, and then whispered gently, “Yes . . . I remember. I know you now, my sister. Only—what happened to your bright fiery hair?”

  “Ah.” She breathed ragged bitter sobs. “It matters no longer, but my hair is now like the desert. For I have been one with it for many summers, as many as it took you to grow up from a child into the handsome man that you are now.”

  “How many summers has it been, indeed?” he said, his lips formi
ng the sounds over her brow, while she could hear the rhythm of his strong southern heart. She felt the flow of blood, the subterranean currents of it moving through his flesh, and her own waters responded in sympathy, surging within her and overflowing with intensity, bringing the excess of moisture to her eyes.

  He turned her face to him gently and saw the tears brimming. “Why, Caelqua!” he said, stricken by the sight of the water. “You weep for your foolish younger brother?”

  “Yes!” she cried. “Oh, yes! I weep for the moments of your life that I have missed, for your growth and the changing of your voice, for the strengthening of your arms, and the endless cycles of sunlit days that deepened the color of your skin, for the coming of force into your eyes. . . .”

  He looked at her, taking her in, all of her. She was now stamped like an indelible afterimage of the sun in his mind’s eye. And his mouth curved easily now with the receptiveness of love.

  “But you have missed nothing much, sister!” he said. “For I am all here, every day and moment that comprises me, every compounded breath that has marked the passing of time. You see the years before you rolled into one. Now, rejoice, for the Past is no longer a fleeting thing, and you have caught up with it at last. . . .”

  And then he laughed, and once again drew her into his arms, saying, “Oh, there is so much I have to tell you! Come, you must meet my children, and their mother, the woman who is the joy of my heart! You must see the house in the city where we live—”

  But as he spoke these things, Caelqua freed herself from his embrace very suddenly, growing still. She continued to look at him while the wind blew her desert-sand hair into a frenzy and the heedless sun scalded them both.

  “Nadir,” she whispered. “Little demon, apple of my eye. . . . Nadir. I cannot come with you, and both you and I know it. This is but a Moment. A Moment has been granted to me wherein I may reclaim a bit of my only love, which is yourself, and see in you the years made transparent and formed into one thing of flesh and blood.”

  “Sister . . .” he began.

  But she interrupted him violently, like a drowning one grasping for a bit of flotsam, floundering. “Don’t!” she said. “This brief meeting has been a gift given to me, and maybe it has been a moment of equal wonder for you. But it must now come to an end. For—I now travel outside the normal flow of Time, and even now feel the beginning urge, the pull to return to my own state of being. While you—beloved brother of mine forever—must live out the rest of your life, and your children will grow, and their children, and the sands of the desert will move in, and this city itself will fold in upon itself and buckle under the weight of centuries. And maybe then, some day, I will once again be compelled to step into Time, and maybe your great-grandson or daughter in another Place will come forward also to greet me before proceeding with their own flow of personal eternity.”

  “Caelqua. . . .”

  “I am now a being of Ris, and in me run her waters.”

  “Caelqua!” he cried, and for the first time his own dark eyes brimmed full with moisture. But she drew her hand forward in an odd powerless farewell and took a weak step backwards, all the while her form shimmering and beginning to transform into a pillar of liquid. It was dissolving already.

  Nadir reached forward grabbing hold of transparency, crying out one last time as he watched the pillar start to sink softly into the incandescent bleached sands. And all around the place where she had stood the sands were discolored with the darkness that is born of moisture, discolored with life.

  The wind stood still, and there was silence.

  Nadir stood like a bereaved child or a very old man, and watched white powder cover the last trace of her, the very ghost. . . .

  “You have done well,” came a woman’s voice. The queen herself stepped forth from the shadows of an ancient sepulcher to watch him. “You gave her what I promised.”

  Nadir started, then immediately lowered his face in obeisance and hung his head before the queen of this city.

  “I have done as you asked . . .” he replied faintly. “The goddess of the spring mistook me for her ancient brother, my holy ancestor, the first man to bear our name. And as a result your promise to her has been fulfilled. Now the curse is lifted from your womb, my queen. I am happy to have served you so . . . well.”

  The queen only nodded to him with tired eyes, and motioned for servants to bring forward a heavy purse.

  “Receive your payment,” she said, turning away, glittering with golden veils in the sun. Nadir bowed and took the weight of metal coins covered by silk. He could feel it, the weight of gold.

  Gold for water.

  And suddenly a memory came to him, one not his own. . . .

  They had tried to create water from gold, but only gold comes from gold. And now he would always have water to remember her by.

  Nadir turned to the receding form of the queen and her retinue. He was still clutching the moneybag, and he could feel it clanking inside, solid smooth metal. The voices of his ancestors clamored in his mind, crying to him. The wind of the desert started to rise once again, blowing the ever-present white dust of desolation. You did not even see my children, ancient sister. Now that you’ve moved on from the Past into the Future, how will they remember you? Indeed, who will remember you?

  But, as he stood in the silence of the desert, Nadir heard within himself a rhythmic heartbeat, a pounding at the temples.

  Internal waters rushing though his veins. Through him. They would always be thus within him.

  And he thought he heard Caelqua’s laughter in his very veins, with each pulse. You think you have given me a false gift, brother of my heart? the waters sang. Don’t you know that, while you gave me the Past, I also gave you the Future? They are one and the same, with no end and no beginning, only a line of waters running through it all, binding us. The Spring of waters is Time.

  And you and I will meet again and again, simply when one of us chooses to Remember. The purse of gold fell on the desert sand, slipping from his fingers with a sound of bells. It lay there, and the wind immediately carried fine grains to sprinkle the fabric. Nadir walked slowly, his sandals sinking lightly in the powdery whiteness. Ahead of him was the distant mirage city. Behind, stretched the desert.

  Within him was Caelqua’s Spring.

  DREAM FOURTEEN

  THE STORY OF TIME

  Listen closely as I tell you the story of time.

  Time is a spring of waters, a thought hurtling forward to shape its own footholds just before they land.

  Time is the needle of the Compass as it is drawn to a point that is your future. For that is where you will be. Thus, where and when are entwined, and only the Compass Rose of your intent separates you from yesterday and tomorrow.

  * * *

  The queen without eyes stood before an arched window overlooking a sea of gardens, in a grand city that was in the very middle of all the lands that comprised the world. She was not a queen by birth, but rather by affliction. For at the moment of losing her sight at the hands of palace guards upon the taqavor’s decree, she was taken by the eccentric son of the taqavor, Prince Lirheas, to be his bride.

  It had been months, or maybe weeks, or maybe only days since her blinding. The blinding was a punishment for attempting to speak what she considered to be truth. And time seemed to have slowed down since.

  She was a horrific sight, thought the servants who were made to attend her. An ugly cripple, a creature with two open sores in her face that refused to heal.

  What made it even more intolerable was that the queen had once been a servant herself, attending the taqavor’s House of Wives, and for lack of a true name had been called “you with the knowing eyes” by the taqoui and concubines for her clever perceptiveness and the ability to tell wise stories. They still remembered her in the House of Wives as the young woman who had filled the unmarked emptiness of their existence with bright swatches of wonder. They could still hear her words in the shape of living dreams th
at stood up and imbued languid evenings with a purpose.

  And now, for obvious reasons, the designation “you with the knowing eyes” no longer applied.

  “You with holes for eyes,” some servants called her behind her back, upon first being assigned to her. Then they shortened it to “holes for eyes” and spoke it wickedly. But not for long. The name persisted, but the wickedness itself transformed to pity. And as the cruelty was shed in its place grew a peculiar acceptance, as they who served her came to know her nature.

  "Holes for eyes" was a being of gentle quietude.

  When Prince Lirheas had first taken responsibility for her, she was reeling in shock and bleeding from the punishment meted out by the taqavor. Initially, the Prince had concealed her in his quarters and had called the palace physicians to attend her and heal and comfort her wounds.

  The new queen’s eye-sockets were filled with unguents, and her face bandaged with soft sterile gauze. The gauze—expensive, exotic, and delicate as filaments of silk—encircled her head in a band, blending with her light skin, but stood at cross-purposes with the plain darkness of her hair.

  The queen was dressed in royal finery that she could not see, or appreciate except by tactile means, and she stood or sat or moved like a limp puppet, doing just as she was told and speaking almost nothing. In the same manner she lay in the Prince’s bed, and her remoteness made him afraid to touch her.

  And so he would lie equally frozen at her side, night after night. Not once had Lirheas put his hands on her after the first instant he had held her atrophied body, moments after the blinding, and watched the beast that was his father rant about “seeing without eyes.”

  It seemed the taqavor had forgotten her immediately, saying nothing to Lirheas in that moment when the son stood up to his father—as though it didn’t happen. Or maybe the taqavor simply chose to pretend ignorance for the time being, and turned away, muttering to himself, to play.

  He played with his current favorite toy, spinning the weighted wooden Rose of the great Compass that floated in a stone pool in the center of the palace—the same object of marvelous engineering that she had designed for him to represent his boundless empirastan. The Prince’s father, the taqavor, was a madman, it was clear now to all, and he was obsessed with truths and details of the world, such as the nature of the Rose. The taqavor did not seem to notice his son’s act of defiance. In truth, it might have been better for Lirheas if he had, if he had raged and threatened and opposed his son’s decision to take the blind woman as his queen, for it would have forced the Prince to stay in his new course of courageous rebellion and to grow stronger. But as it was, Lirheas’s single outburst was like the breaking of one great wave upon a cliffside, and when it was over the wave dissipated, while the cliff stood unaffected.