Dreams of the Compass Rose

by Vera Nazarian

  Cireive walked straight ahead past them all, and several of the neighborhood boys waved at him and cried out bold greetings in their play language. But he ignored them all and continued forward.

  His house lay within the confines of the town, and the room that he and his mother occupied was just next door to another family, sharing with them a thin wall and an outside entrance. To get to his own room, Cireive had to pass through his neighbors’ one.

  “Where is your mother, boy?” asked the old man who sat in his usual place at the entrance. He always asked that same question, but today Cireive paused before him and glared with all the intensity his small frame could muster.

  “I’ve lost my mother,” he said. “She did not come home? Did you see her enter, Grandpa?”

  The old one scrunched a face that was already furrowed like a cracked jar of mud. “Where is your mother, boy?” he said again, for he was daft with time.

  “Don’t talk crazy, Grandpa!” said Cireive. “Did you see her, or not? Tell me! Tell me! ”

  But the old man shook his head, and began to mutter.

  A young woman came out, dark-haired and smooth, probably his mother’s age, carrying a heavy bowl. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Why are you shouting?”

  And then she looked the boy over, saying, “You are a mess, Cireive. Your face is covered with dirt. Go on in and wash yourself, piglet. Where is your mother, anyway?”

  And at that instant something burst in him, seeing this woman and hearing her say this, which somehow was such an ordinary thing. And yet it terrified him, seeing that these adults also did not know where his mother was. Everything suddenly became terrifying, because he knew that he was completely alone.

  And Cireive bawled, huge tears rolling down his face. He wept in public for the first time in his self-aware life, not caring that he was a grown boy of six summers, and words came squeezed out of him, random and tattered words. . . .

  “My mother is gone . . . she was supposed to go in and look for me, but she didn’t, and I waited, and then I heard some strange men’s voices passing by, and then I waited again, and then I came out and she wasn’t there, and she is not here either!”

  By now the neighbors had all come out, and the young woman of his mother’s age took him to her and held him tight and rocked him against her. He was still sobbing, sobbing.

  “Where is the boy’s mother?” a man said. “Did she not come home tonight from the field?”

  “I saw those strangers come riding from the same direction,” said someone else. And then they were holding Cireive and shaking him and questioning him. “Did you see the men come by?” they were asking. “Did these men talk to your mother, did they do anything?”

  “I don’t know!” the boy cried. “I did not see, I don’t know!”

  A crowd gathered. Tired, drawn, sun-burnt faces of grown men he knew, faces of stone frowning all around him, closing in, the swelling hum of the disturbed hive.

  “We need to go look for the boy’s mother!”

  Twilight had grown heavy, and in the new darkness they lit torches. Cireive trembled, holding onto the hand of the woman who was his neighbor, holding it as tight as a death grip.

  “Show us where you last saw her, boy!” they were now saying. And he huddled further, covering his face against the cotton robe of this woman who stroked his hair. In the growing darkness he was led forward through the center of town, and the woman walked with him, supporting him from the back and the shoulders while he continued to sob and tremble.

  They walked up the hill and beyond it, torches flickering like angry orange eyes in the night, and within the hour had come to the edge where the blackness of the field stretched in all directions like an ebony sea.

  The moon rose high, tumbling like a quarter of an apple across the abyss sky. The men bearing torches had scattered, and they entered the field at the edges, like a necklace of light.

  At some point someone found the dropped basket that Cireive’s mother had left lying, and the tumbled fruits.

  But there was no sign of the woman herself, though they searched the field in the vicinity, sweeping rows of growing amaranth methodically.

  Eventually the moon began to sink to the horizon and drowned in the field. The search was abandoned for the night, and Cireive was taken home by his neighbors. The woman who was so like his mother pulled him along in the darkness, until they came to their communal dwelling. Here the boy was made to eat at the neighbors’ table, and eventually put to sleep in his own room next door.

  There was no one else in the room with him, which made the night uncustomary and terrifying. He fell asleep struggling against the dark evil which all children knew about, and which so obviously rushed in when the fire was extinguished and when others left the room. . . . Evil, which preyed upon those who had lost their mothers.

  Lirheas watched his father rave, watched the memories being regurgitated, hearing things that were new, that he had not known before.

  There was something that brought subtle unease, hearing the older man talk thus, something with a faint whiff of taint in the very telling of it, as though time itself were being filtered through a penumbra of illusion.

  “Was she ever found, my Lord father? I am sorry. . . . I wish I had known my grandmother, seen her for one brief instant, just once. As it is, I see her only from this ancient story you tell.”

  The taqavor grew silent and stared at him. And then he smirked, saying, “You see nothing, boy. And you still do not understand. But then, you never can. Get out of my sight, for I grow tired of your stupidity and your questions.”

  And with that he turned his back on the Prince. He returned to his plaything in the stone pool of the Rose.

  Lirheas could do nothing but stare in unfulfilled silence at his father’s hunched back. Eventually he too turned away and left the hall.

  The queen without eyes was in the same place he had left her. More and more she was like an inanimate thing, not a living being—pliable and yielding, and yet as remote as the horizon.

  “I learned nothing of my mother,” Lirheas told her softly. “But I learned something of his. I pity him because of it, and yet—”

  “Look outside my Prince, and tell me what is out there,” said the queen without eyes, apparently ignoring his words.

  And when Lirheas moved to comply, wordlessly approaching the window, she suddenly reached out with her hand and touched him on his arm. Her fingers were cold, and he could feel their inflexible ice through the fabric of his sleeve. And yet his arm burned in that place with a sudden tunneling of the senses, a focus on nothing but her fingers, her light touch. . . .

  “Thank you,” she said. “You have a strange ability to bend your will for the will of others. And I heard what you said, about your mother and his.”

  “Oh,” he said, his arm still burning. And then, while the wind came in a fresh warm gust from the window, he put his arms around her and held her in a full embrace for the first time since that one time in the beginning. It was a touch which was light and tentative for fear of hurting her, but it was an embrace nevertheless.

  In this butterfly-gentle embrace she became pliant. It seemed she melted into flowing water in his hands, her flesh a single warm current. He held it as it coursed, and he too felt his flesh melt and dissolve until the solid outlines that constituted his being were blending with hers in a peculiar moment taken out of time.

  He looked up at the window, seeing the haze of the sunlit day, feeling the breeze upon his face, as he dissolved into her, and he said, “I see the horizon and—”

  “And the yellow sands in the distance,” she finished for him, speaking with a muffled voice, for her face was buried in his chest. “The sun rides halfway up, maybe less, the sky, and there is a shadow of lavender and indigo upon the right of the city walls. It all blurs into the distance. . . . And there is the fleeting shadow of a bird!”

  “Yes!” he exclaimed. “How did you know?”

  An
d the queen without eyes raised her bandaged face to him. Her lips curved into a perfect smile, and spoke eloquently as though they were her eyes.

  “I can see everything now,” she said softly—so lightly that he had to draw near her to hear the caress of her lips. “I see through your eyes now, my Prince.”

  The days were now languid and warm. Prince Lirheas walked gently at the side of the queen without eyes, along the sand-and-gravel path in the gardens. They passed by tall flowering blossoms, and when he looked the queen would smile and comment upon them, seeing exactly what he saw.

  And yet it was clear that she saw even more.

  “That green prickly growth that you call cactus, see the tallest, oldest one,” she said. “Look upon its heart and see the flower that appears not once every seven years, as is the misconception of many, but only when, with the passage of time, it has reached its flowering age after which it will bear short-lived flowers every season. See the petals, colored a shade of rose and soft whiteness, see how the colors flow. They are more bright than any other living thing in the desert, because they have conquered time to appear and just as quickly fade away. It is a rare sight indeed.”

  “I never knew,” he whispered, taking her hand.

  At that touch she smiled, her lips curving generously, speaking more eloquently than eyes. And as he watched her smile, it occurred to Lirheas, with a stab of worry, that if ever he were not to be at her side, if ever she were to be on her own, how would she see? Who would be her eyes?

  But the question faded inside him softly, for that possibility did not seem a part of their reality, did not seem to matter.

  They walked farther, passing the House of Wives and the gallery of marble that was the courtyard. Here the fountain pools were silent like mirrors, for these days the taqoui rarely came out to enjoy the sun, and the taqavor rarely came out to enjoy them. As Lirheas watched the calm surface of the water in the pond, smooth and without a blemish, the queen without eyes said suddenly, “He is getting old, you know. His time is approaching.”

  And the Prince nodded silently, knowing exactly what she meant, and not being sure how he felt about it. For the beast who was his father was an ever-present burden in the back of his mind. And yet pity now encroached in his perception, for Lirheas recognized madness and evaluated it in a different light.

  But pity dissipated quickly, for the very next month there came a pronouncement that chilled his blood and the blood of many in the Palace.

  Without any explanation, the taqavor had ordered a hundred and fifty-three coffins built—

  the exact number of taqoui and concubines that were left in the House of Wives. Prince Lirheas came before the taqavor as bidden in the great central hall of the Compass Rose. He stood silently, watching his father pace back and forth. The taqavor’s once blond hair was now streaked with whiteness, for it seemed that Cireive had aged overnight. But his walk was undaunted and sprightly as he moved through the room, muttering.

  “There you are,” he said, seeing his son. “I want you to supervise the building of a marvelous structure. It is to have a great carved dome, marked North, South, East, and West, and within it, I will place their coffins.”

  “Whose coffins?” said Lirheas.

  But the taqavor giggled, and said, “Why, the flowers, of course. The ones they burned in the gardens, the ones that were red and tall, and grew everywhere. I told them only to cut down the flowers, but they burned them too. And now there is no place to dispose of their ashes.”

  “My Lord Father,” said Lirheas, “why must we bury flowers? Can we not toss their ashes over the earth, and grow new ones?”

  The taqavor approached him, turning on his heel, and leaned forward, so that his face was inches away from that of his son. “What an idiot you are, boy,” he said. “Any gardener will tell you that ashes improperly disposed ruin the fertility of the soil. As to why we bury them, I will tell you why. Because it is how it is done.”

  And then he drew away again, laughing, and said, “Now, go and build me a mausoleum for the flowers! And if you do so I will tell you about your mother. Don’t you want to know?”

  Prince Lirheas attended the area in the heart of the palace gardens where rose granite and marble from a distant quarry were piled in blocks, in preparation for the building efforts. Architects of the taqavor came to make measurements, and they all stared at the woman without eyes who stood at the side of the Prince, and who spoke quiet words of knowledge.

  “You calculate the structural supports that will be required to erect the dome,” she said. “Let me help you measure the curves of the arches of wood needed, in proportion to the weight of underlying stones.”

  “Your craft is great. And yet how can you assist us, o queen, when you no longer have eyes?” said one artist engineer who remembered her, for he had worked with her before in the creation of the Compass Rose, the single object that defined the empirastan.

  “She has the use of my eyes,” replied Lirheas. “And we will therefore proceed. I was told merely to supervise, but now I will also create.”

  And the architects and engineers obeyed, allowing the queen without eyes to approach their work, and with her the man who never left her side.

  Over days and weeks the structure of marble grew like an exotic flower, and at the apex that held the dome were constructed rows of skylights to allow in the celestial lights during the day and the night.

  For there was to be no other illumination within, nothing to disturb the pristine brass of the coffins, and the peculiar ashes they were to contain. . . .

  There were no more blossoms of any hue left in the gardens. While the domed structure was being constructed by the engineers, the gardeners shook their heads in regret and continued to harvest the flowers of all living plants, on a daily basis, in order to avoid the anger of the taqavor of the mortal world.

  For the taqavor walked the grounds pedantically every morning. And the more he looked the more new shades of rose or red he found, even when in fact they were not. But who was to argue with him?

  “Amaranth,” he was heard to mutter. “It is everywhere, red abomination. . . .”

  “Of what does the Lord speak?” the gardeners said to one another. “What is this red flower that he names?”

  “It does not grow here, although it could,” spoke up one very old gardener. “And some think it is a weed, while others who know better plant it at the eve of summer and harvest it before the first cold for the wondrous grain and the leaves. It is a hardy plant that likes the burning desert sun and the cool forest and the mountains equally. Amaranth is sown and reaped in the land of my birth. Our Lord knows of it because the taqavor has traveled the whole world from end to end, which is his great empirastan, and in every place he must have seen it.”

  “You seem to know much of this amaranth,” the gardeners persisted. “Tell us then why the Lord hates this flower so much?”

  But the old one shrugged at that point, knowing in truth only as much as anyone, and regretting that he’d opened his mouth in the first place.

  And so they continued to purge the gardens, and to whisper in fear among themselves. The piles of harvested blossoms of all varieties grew to be so big that even burning them had become a major chore, and there was no place to put the ashes. The Palace itself became a madhouse of anguished confusion, reeking of smoke and felled blossoms and ashes that were carried to the rest of the city on the fiery desert wind.

  The coffins of brass were wrought by the most skilled metal-workers, and placed one by one in the central chamber of the round domed structure which was now complete. Each one of the coffins had been decorated with fine etchings including patterns that resembled a certain flower, according to the descriptions of the taqavor, who insisted upon this peculiarity. The workmen who carried in the coffins made frequent warding signs against evil, for it was thought to be bad luck to mock the gods and death itself by using boxes designed for the dead to dispose of other things.

&nbs
p; But in the end the deed was done. Then for several days gardeners and other Palace servants carried bags filled with ashes and filled the open coffins to the brim, packing them down as was needed, before going to bring more ashes.

  There was no end to them, the ashes of the flowers. The plants seemed to grow back as quickly in the gardens as they were being cut down and burned. Very soon there were no gardens left but stumps of trees and uprooted holes in the shallow earth where rose bushes had once flourished. Underneath the disturbed earth, sand was soon revealed, for the gardens had been planted on top of soil brought here to the heart of the desert from other places. The taqavor continued to walk along the gravel paths, on both sides of which were upturned earth and sand and wooden debris. And yet he looked about him as though he saw growing things, and his lips continued to mouth words that only he heard. Sometimes he would raise his hand and point to somewhere just overhead where he saw ghosts of swaying leaves and featherlight crowns of blossoms of a mauve and scarlet hue. They continued to grow all around him, tall and thick and boundless, fluttering in the wind and invisible to all.

  Dawn came upon the desolate palace grounds, and upon its first precarious light there came from within the House of Wives cries of terror and despair. There was the clangor of metal, the yells of guards, and the shrieks of women roused from slumber and herded outside in their fine silk and satin shawls.

  The taqoui and the concubines and all their female servants were taken by armed palace guards to the domed structure of veined rose marble, smooth granite and delicate enamel hues in the center of the ravaged gardens.

  “Why?” cried the first and oldest of the taqoui in anguish. “What have we done to deserve such treatment from our Lord, whom we love and worship with all our beings, and whose children we bear?”

  But the guards who had brought the women here lowered their gazes and would not reply. Instead, the women were left alone in the semi-darkness of the structure while the doors were locked behind them.