“I am here, my Lady,” said Annaelit, waiting just a few steps away from the noble crowd. Egiras turned, seeing the storyteller’s familiar outfit and form. And the slanting almond eyes of the Princess widened with excitement, reflecting distant persimmon-gold fire. For even now oil lamps were being lit all around them in the gardens and all over the villa. She clapped her hands to attract everyone’s attention, and announced that it was time to return inside for the evening’s entertainment.
The noble guests followed her, and soon the party had spilled back from the balcony into a cozy chamber filled with warm golden glow and furnished with divans and soft pillowed lounge chairs.
“Make us laugh tonight, Annaelit!” exclaimed the Princess Egiras, settling into one of the seats. Here in the bright interior light, one could see her sleek beauty, her hair like a river of smooth jet waters, pouring in long waves to her ankles.
A few seats away, the tall dark-skinned man called Nadir sat back silently, watching her. His form was rich with contradictions. There was a sense of quiet contained power—merely in the capable way he folded his hands and the confident but gentle curl of his fingers which seemed relaxed yet were primed for movement in a split second. And in that same gentle silence he appeared self-effacing, and his clothing was so simple that it stood out from the rest of those present.
And yet the acute presence that was in his eyes gave him the demeanor of a lord.
“Before you begin your tales, I want to know the latest gossip,” said Egiras, taking a delicately fluted wine goblet from a servant. “So tell us, girl, what is it that I hear has happened this past night at the Palace of Lord Ostavi? Were you not there when he entertained the illustrious stranger Lord Dava? It is spoken all over the city that there was an imbecile drunken display on the part of both, and now they are the greatest of enemies—the dear fools. Well?
Have you any news?”
Annaelit bowed to the hostess and the rest of the fine gathered company. “I was there indeed, my Lady, and had the misfortune to observe some of it.”
“Hah!” exclaimed Egiras. “Tell us, what caused this fight?”
Annaelit smiled ruefully. “Words,” she said. “Words caused it.”
“Words always do. But what was the actual catalyst, the thing that made Lord Dava so utterly mad, as the rumors go?”
“Hard to say, my Lady. . . .”
Egiras raised one fine dark brow. “Don’t be silly. Tell us now, girl. No one will fault you for divulging only a bit more of what is mostly already known.”
“Very well,” said Annaelit, glancing at the red-headed Lady Makeia. “If you must know, the cause of it all is that Lord Dava fancies himself fatally in love with the Princess Makeia.”
“What?” It was Makeia’s turn to raise her brows. She laughed.
“Why, I do believe the tale grows more flavorful by the instant . . .” said Egiras in a purring tone, settling deeper in her chair. “Go on, girl, tell us the details of this infatuation.”
“But—” exclaimed Princess Makeia. “I don’t even know this Lord Dava!”
“Obviously he thinks he knows you, my sweet,” retorted Egiras.
“He also seemed to be extremely confused and the wine had gone to his head. I think he had seen a glimpse of the Lady Makeia somewhere.”
“How ridiculous,” whispered Makeia. And then she added, “Incidentally, would you say the Lord Dava is handsome?”
“Handsome enough,” whispered Annaelit. “But now, my Lady Egiras and the rest of my Lords and Ladies, would you like to hear me tell a tale?”
“I would rather like to know how handsome this Lord Dava is,” interrupted Makeia. “Do tell me more. Is he tall with great shoulders, and dark smooth skin, like Nadir here? Or is he fairhaired with pale eyes—?”
Annaelit was suddenly beginning to feel very light-headed once again. It was as though the events of the previous night were happening all over again and she was once again edging out of control. . . .
The truth, she thought to herself. Speak only the stark truth that is without embellishment and hence imbued with life’s sorrow. Think, idiot girl!
And she replied, “My Lady Makeia, if you must know, Lord Dava is fair-haired with pale, striking eyes. In fact, he is the very epitome of another man—a great ancient lord, the one who lived when the world was young and the wind blew in unnamed directions—the same lord who conquered a great empirastan that spanned most of the mortal world, and whose given name was Cireive. For, they say, he was fair as the sun.”
“Oh,” said Makeia. “Do go on.”
And, as Annaelit launched with regained smoothness into her Tale, it seemed a great weight of discomfiture, of tense self-doubt left her chest and shoulders. With every word she spoke her voice gained confidence, while there came a gathering of something electric in the air. The Princesses Egiras and Makeia and the others sat still and expectant, mesmerized by the curious music of the suddenly unfurling Tale. For Annaelit had caught them by surprise, and now held them by wonder.
“Before the Lord Cireive, handsome and fair-haired like a god of the sun, had become the great ruthless taqavor of all the mortal world,” spoke Annaelit, “he was first a young man and, before that, a small boy of great yearning.
“The boy called Cireive was born in the last embers of spring to a woman of ancient noble blood. Or maybe not—one legend says he was the son of a poor farmer’s wife who tilled the fields. In any case the woman never told anyone who the child’s father was, and thus incurred the rage and shame of her family. She bore the child alone and remained oddly silent all through the first seasons of his life, only singing to him softly as he suckled at her breast.
“It is said the woman’s songs were so haunting that she made the birds themselves grow silent in the gardens as they listened to her. And, as the child lay in her arms and listened too, he was imbued first with wonder and then with a longing to know the origins of things, of that sound that issued forth out of the woman who was his mother, and of the source of herself and himself.
“‘Why do you sing? Who am I, Mother?’ he asked, and legend says it was one of the first things he uttered. In reply, the woman held him tight to her, and said nothing at first, only smiled. And finally, after long moments of sun-warmed wind and silence, she said, ‘You are Cireive, my son. And I sing . . . you.’
“At first that answer was enough. For this woman, his mother, looked at him like the sun itself, warming him with the balm of her presence, and through her voice he felt connected to the whole canopy of day and night and sun and stars and earth and water and sky. Truly, she formed him with the sound issuing forth from her lips and her chest and her lungs, and in the forming made him a part of the universal fabric.
“But, as the boy grew and learned his place in the world, he learned that the song of his mother was but one small sound in the greater clamor all around him. And he also learned that he was made up of two things—pride and shame. He was a blending, half everything and half nothing. He was the son of a woman and the unknown. For he had one given name and yet no name at all, and his father was a ghost.
“As time flowed onward, the condition of having no real name became a complex thing of peculiar agony for the boy, even though he had a given name. A true full name could be bestowed only by the father—or at least that was the ancient tradition of their people. And one without a full name, thought Cireive, was no one at all.
“The boy Cireive yearned for the cloak of tradition to envelop him, yearned to be like all, like the ancients. And he grew accustomed to bearing the shame and the barbed words of others which reminded him of who he was, and who he was not. Eventually the barbs fell upon an impervious core that had become his inner self, for time had become a solid thing of many protective layers, encircling his spirit.
“No one knows what one thing was the catalyst, what brought him to the edge of bitterness and beyond it, but his spirit, being thus wrapped away securely, could no longer hear the words t
hat caused pain, and at the same time could not hear the distant perfect song that his mother sang and that was a silver thread between him and the all.
“By the time Cireive was a young man, he was veiled in layers of only himself. And such solitude, such separation from the world, made him first bitter, then panicked and frightened like a fluttering caged bird, and then a thing somewhat mad. For he no longer heard the world around him, no longer heard pain or joy, and only the ringing inner silence. And, being thus deaf, he was more than anything vulnerable to illusion.
“They say the Lord of Illusion took hold of him earlier than most. The Lord of Illusion spun a web of gentle comforting softness to fill in the emptiness and the fading memories, and to buffer him against the noise of silence. Then, from the embers of Cireive’s own memories, Illusion spun a new thread of brightly shining silver in place of the one that had been his mother’s song. And this thread connected Cireive not to the world but to things beyond and outside the universe, to the primeval dark that lies beyond the false wonder and veneer of Illusion—”
“What an odd story . . .” Egiras interrupted suddenly.
Her words came low and jarring, and everyone surfaced out of the spell of the Tale. Annaelit paused mid-sentence, also thrown out of the rhythm she had created, and said, “It is actually a true story, my Lady. It happened to a real man, a very long time ago.”
“That’s what you storytellers always say,” said Egiras. “All your stories are invariably true and all your heroes sympathetic and fallible—for, no matter how powerful they are, they are always weak in some sense, vulnerable to one thing or another, and fall into temptation, even though in the end they may redeem themselves and save the world. How mortally dull! I am in the mood to hear a different tale. I want no weakness. No human weakness, do you understand, girl? I am tired of such.”
“But,” muttered Princess Makeia under her breath, “I would rather hear the end of this one.”
Annaelit bowed, and said, “What would you like to hear then, my Lady Egiras? I am afraid that most human tales deal with mortal weakness. Would you rather hear stories of gods?”
“I would like,” said Egiras, staring away into the distance at a lamp casting a golden sphere of glow, “tales that spin bright visions not of things that have been but of things that might come to pass. And no, gods are dull also, in their omnipotence. Tell us instead a tale never heard before, not of human pain but of impossible wonder.”
“And what is wonder, my Lady? And in what way does it differ from Illusion?” whispered Annaelit.
“If you need ask, then you do not know it. What kind of a Teller of Tales are you? I’d thought better of you, girl.”
Annaelit smiled. “I ask you because wonder is a personal thing that is different for each of us. I would know your wonder, for this is your House, and it is to you that I will tell this tale.”
“Ah, then you are a wise reader of souls after all, Teller of Tales. Very well. To me, wonder is that which I do not know and cannot know. Do you understand? It is something I can only just sense at the edge of my vision, something that pulls at me and gives me the urge to live, and which lies in the future ahead of us. And, unlike Illusion, wonder is a thing true.”
“Wonder is your next breath, Egiras . . .” Nadir said unexpectedly. “And Illusion is this very breath that you take now.”
“And what is that supposed to mean?” said the Princess, turning around to glance at the dark man with sudden intensity.
From Nadir came soft laughter. “Nothing,” he said. “It can mean nothing at all, my Lady. Take it however you will.”
But Egiras stared at him, without blinking, and said, “Maybe I should be the one to tell a tale. I will tell the story of you, Nadir, of how you came to be what you are now.”
“Then it would be a very boring tale indeed,” he retorted. “For I have spent most of my time serving you, and the rest of it studying the mystical art of war and the mundane soldier’s trade.”
“Yes,” said Egiras, “your tale is mostly dull and pathetic. And yet—may all the rest of this noble company listen closely now—I sent you away from me to learn from the masters in my own distant homeland. You have been to the Kingdom that lies in the Middle, and have seen the sun dissolve in exquisite gossamer mists of lilac and gold over the land of my ancestors—a land which I myself have never seen, since I was a tiny horrid child. Why do you think that would bore my guests, to hear of my homeland, an exotic place they will never know?”
“Maybe because it would only satisfy your wonder, and not theirs,” replied Nadir, a deepening remoteness in his voice.
“The Kingdom in the Middle—is that where you learned your impossible techniques of hand combat, Lord Nadir?” asked one of the guests.
“I learned there the art of defense,” Nadir said gently. “It is quite different from the art of aggression, with which I was already familiar in my soldiering. I came to the Kingdom in the Middle as a warrior and left it as a priest.”
“A priest? You never told me this,” Egiras said abrasively.
“You never asked. But do not fear, my Lady, it is irrelevant. For the god I serve has no name, and the god’s Secret Temple has no place. Besides, it is enough, this talk of times past. Let us instead allow the Teller of Tales to continue with the practice of her craft. Did you not want to hear a tale of the future?”
“Unfortunately,” said Annaelit, once again speaking, “I can only tell a certain type of tale today, one which is of the past and the present only. A tale of things that are real.”
“And why is that?” Egiras regarded her without blinking.
“Because, my Lady, that is the will of the gods. Tonight is the Night of Truth,” said Annaelit, with a look in her eyes that made even Egiras finally glance away. “And on this night I can speak only of things that have come to pass, or things that are happening even as we speak. I can tell you many wondrous tales of mortal lives. Some of these lives you have heard of previously. And yet tonight you will hear their stories told differently, unembellished and real, as they really came to pass.
“If you crave wonder, there is the true tale told to me by one called Ierulann, once a Guard of Law and now a storyteller, who related to me the details of the final changing of the City of No-Sleep from a state of oscillating madness to one of serene permanence. And, if that is not to your taste, there is the even more peculiar tale of a woman captain, called Lero and reputed to be insane, who commands an unsinkable ship.”
“Lero . . .” Egiras repeated. “Why do I know this name?”
“Because we have once been on her ship,” said Nadir. “Long before we came to this city, we sailed the Eye of Sun to cross the endless ocean that you hated so. . . .”
“The Eye of Sun! Yes, I remember now, the ship, the endlessness,” mused Egiras. “The sun itself was different, not like it is in the desert, but sharper than daggers striking my eyes, as it reflected off the green then gray then blue expanse of cruel water, everywhere, as far as the edges of the world. I remember being onboard, and the balmy wind and the sour rotting stink of salt, all permeated with nausea. . . .
“I would watch the huge canvas sails unfurl and fill with ravenous wind. The main sail had the image of a great almond-shaped eye on it, within a golden sun—an intensely peculiar symbol painted in garish shades of blue. Then, having tired of sails and with nothing else to observe but your shadow at my side, Nadir, I would watch for days and nights on end how the tall strange captain stood staring at the heavens, noting the position of the noonday sun at the zenith, and the stars attached to the celestial dome, and comparing them to old charts and objects in the seascape unnoticed by the rest of us.
“There was a strange object on deck, to which the captain often referred—a marvelous thing floating in a bowl of water, with sixteen points, like a star. They called it the wind rose, and also a compass, for it pointed North always, and one could tell the rest of the directions from it.
“I neve
r knew the captain’s name, never cared to notice she was a woman. And yet I remember somehow, despite myself: Lero. How odd. They all seemed to obey her as though she could sink that ship with one word. What perfect terror she invoked.”
“Not terror,” whispered Nadir. “There are other reasons why one would serve.”
At that, Egiras laughed. Her beautiful face contorted, marring the smoothness of her ocher porcelain skin, and then she spoke in sarcasm. “If one serves for any other reason then one is a fool, and deserves the fate of servitude.”
“There is another tale I can relate,” said Annaelit, sensing the pressure of unspoken things resonating between the Princess and the man, “a tale of a woman we all know, Belta Digh, who owns a popular tavern in this very city. It is rumored, and surely it is true, that Belta Digh’s tavern serves a drink that takes your pain away. They say she once made a deal with death itself, and in the doing she redeemed a mortal life, and redeemed death also from the old curse of a goddess. Oddly enough, this is the very same goddess, Risei-Ailsan, that came into being through the will of the man called Cireive, the one whose tale I began to tell you.”
“Strange indeed,” Egiras said, “that these tales of yours seem to be connected, almost in a circle. Or did you intend for this to happen, sly Teller of Tales, so that you could return to the original story?”
“Oh, good!” put in Princess Makeia. “I care not what is connected, but I do want to hear of this ancient taqavor with his sun-hair and his mysterious bargain with the Lord of Illusion.”
“Not intentional at all,” said Annaelit. “Rather, these tales have one thing in common, and that is the share of truth they convey. And there is one more tale I have not mentioned yet, one of such immediate truth that I do not dare to even speak of it, for it will bring fear to all of your guests, my Lady. And to you.”
Saying that, Annaelit lowered her eyes.
Egiras’s attention was caught. She watched the storyteller in silence, pondering. And then she said, “You make me curious. What kind of tale would make me afraid? And why? I would hear it.”