Free Dreams of the Compass Rose by Vera Nazarian Page A

she had ever seen death at such a scale.
    “ Mother!” he uttered incoherently. “It’s Mideinn! Mideinn! ”
    Her gaze was upon the young girl, whose glass eye-marbles stared, her right hand mangled, encrusted with something that appeared to be so much like a frosting of rust, delicate and dry, and her neck was at an odd angle. Half-slit, a cross-section was exposed, and all around was a thickened pool.
    “ I warned you when we were still on the other side,” the woman said through clenched teeth. “I warned you.”
    “ But not Mideinn . . . No—”
    “ I warned you on the other side.”
    Behind them, figures of death stood motionless, hooded, their silver breath curling in the wind, wafting gently over their shoulders, reaching forward with the claws of emptiness.
    Eyes of a small boy looked on, blind. They were lost in a haze of remote wilderness; he was lost. Lungs shuddered. He muttered the litany of a half-wit, between sobs, over and over.
    Suddenly he focused, turned with fury to the woman. “How can you be so silent now? What are you, heartless ice? Your daughter is dead!”
    She did not look at him but slowly nodded to the rest of the field, her face petrified. “And what of them? If I start crying now, I will not stop. There will not be enough tears.”
    She looked then at the youth. “And you too, Talaq—” Was that a touch of gentleness he heard?—“You must stop crying. It is not the time, not yet.”
    Through the constant hiss of the wind they heard the distant rich sound of a horn being blown.
    Living energy came to the woman’s eyes, and she glanced around, searching the horizon. No, those were not carrion birds. Dark moving human specks were noticeable far in the distance, with pennants waving on high. All in black silhouette.
    “ They surround us,” she said calmly.
    The youth shivered. The tension of his facial muscles reformed him suddenly into an older man. “I curse them! Burn!” he babbled, while death brushed gentle claws against his hair, “I curse the Gheir, for all their generations, and I curse you, Cireive, High King, taqavor! Burn! Burn!”
    Her eyes were blank as she replied, “Shhh. Do not waste your breath.”
    But he continued, his words interspersed with sobs and cackles. “Burn! Oh, gods . . . Not one soul alive! Am I the last of the able-bodied Risei? Gods . . . hear me, hear me, hear me. . . .”
    He turned to her, gasping suddenly, his litany coming to a full stop, so that there was a long moment of wind and silence. And then he took in a long shuddering breath, and whispered, “Oh, mother . . . What of the women back at the camp? And the old? The children?”
    Her answer was slow in coming. “I don’t know. Probably they took them all by now.”
    And then she too began to laugh.
    He watched her, seeing a madwoman.
    But she was sane. Oh yes.
    “ I can’t believe,” she whispered to herself, while death, standing at her side, pulled the chill edge of an abysmal cloak of night over her trembling shoulders, “I can’t believe that all it took was one day for treachery. He promised and I trusted his word. He promised. . . .”
    Suddenly she cried hoarsely, raising eerie shadowy echoes, “And all of this, all—it is my fault! ”
    Her head fell forward, as she struck her chest with her gloved fist, while the rest of her was stone. “I trusted his word. I could have been with them. . . .” she whispered.
    Talaq’s tears had long since stopped. He watched her as she slowly came to her knees before the body of her daughter, who had lived nineteen summers.
    With a steady hand the woman closed the eyelids of the corpse, then paused again. She reached out to touch the left hand of the fallen, pale as milk and already stiff, and withdrew a small ring from the index finger. Then she took out a small sharp knife and touched the girl’s hair, finding a bit of it that was unbloodied. She cut off a lock, soft and already dust-blown, with the texture