The woman stood watching him. He could see now that there were translucent ghosts of eyes in her empty sockets, and that this was the reason they could never close. Her ghost-eyes glittered, moist and soft and receptive.
“I never left you, my child,” she said then, speaking for the first time since they had entered the tomb, and he recognized her afresh for he knew that voice, singing to him out of the depths of antiquity.
The woman took a step forward so that she was just before him, close enough to look into his own eyes. “How you’ve grown,” she said gently, and he saw her form was fluid and shimmering with otherness. She reached forth with her hand and laid it on his cheek.
“My . . . Cireive.”
And her ghost eyes were suddenly very liquid, so liquid that they pooled with richness, and the water came in a rivulet down her cheek.
“Remember what really happened, child. . . .”
Memories struck him wildly then, sharp images of the growing field of amaranth, tall stalks and leaves covering his head, and he was running, a small boy, running and crying for his mother.
Except he was not running in search of her. Instead he was running away, far away from her, leaves striking his face, running madly.
For he had left her there at the edge of the field, just as he had found her, quiet and dead at the bottom of the scarlet amaranth sea. He had sat down at the edge of the field then, with his back turned to it, and he had looked ahead and muttered to himself until dusk.
“How did you die?” whispered Cireive, the boy-old man in puzzlement, trying so very hard to remember. “What happened to you, mother?”
But the woman without eyes was again silent. Her form shimmered, and her ghostly eyes, now cloaked in a mantle of eternity, took on a deeper richness, the eyes of another, of a woman who was not a goddess and yet was not quite mortal, for she was suspended between times and she was unable to die, because of him, because of what he’d done.
“You!” cried Cireive, recognizing her suddenly, wildly—a woman whom he had seen coming forth from the field of amaranth many summers after he was a young man, in the same place where his mother had disappeared, carrying with her a small crying child that looked so much like himself and yet unlike.
He had almost forgotten. It had happened so long ago.
“Cireive,” the strange woman had said to him, knowing out of nowhere his name. “I have stepped from time, and I am waiting for you, even as I hold you here, hold you back from the abyss of the bottomless well. . . .”
“Who are you?” he had said harshly, already a bitter man and a warrior. He heard the incomprehensible words, and he looked at her, seeing an old glimmer of something familiar, something that he should know.
She pointed to the child and then to himself.
“No!” he had exclaimed, taking an involuntary step away from her. “I do not know you, whoever you are, nor this brat! One thing is sure, it is not mine!”
But the woman stood watching him, and her eyes were in that instant impossible to describe, for the depth of ancient color they contained, showed times mixing in her pupils.
“I hold you, Cireive,” she repeated. And then the next thing she said was a puzzle: “The soul is a flower, severed from its stem, bearing seed, planted at birth, reaped in death, but never discarded in the bottomless well.”
And stricken by a sudden panic, he, who had not been afraid of hordes of armed men, ran from her, ran as he had so many years ago as a little boy. He turned around eventually, and looked down at the field of amaranth from the top of the hill that he had scaled in his frenzy. She was not there.
Maybe she had never been there in the first place.
Cireive gasped for breath, surfacing in the here and now, where the wan moonlight of the tomb illuminated a woman with empty eye-sockets who stood like an upright corpse before him, waiting for something.
“Who are you?” he repeated, feeling the space of the large airy chamber close in on him as though he were in a cocoon of stems and leaves and branches, with filaments of magenta streaming just overhead.
“Wrong question,” she said in that same peculiarly familiar voice. “Ask instead who you yourself are.”
“Ah . . .” he muttered, taking a step back from her as the cocoon of ghostly flowers growing all around him began to close in even more. And then he cried, “I am Cireive, taqavor of the mortal world, and my empirastan is all this that you see around you! All of it!”
The woman smiled. “There are walls around you. Indeed, you are Lord of them, but nothing else, not even yourself. Don’t you understand this, now of all times?”
Cireive frowned, his brow furrowing in effort. He stood considering, dislocated suddenly, and for a moment the world went dizzy.
“I am Cireive,” he said. “And I have conquered the lands East, West, South, and North of the Compass Rose. The directions did not exist before I named them. I name all things. I name you!”
“And yet,” she countered in a soft ghostly voice, “you cannot. For your names have no substance and are temporary designations. You named me ‘you with the knowing eyes,’ and then you named me ‘holes for eyes.’ You never named me at all, for you never learned my true name. Just as you have never known the women who serve you and for that matter the men.
“For, a true name is not given but observed and derived from the fabric of one’s being. Look at me now and tell me what you see.”
“Another game!” he exclaimed with false levity, while cold gathered about him, tightening the cocoon.
“If so, then play along with me, you who are taqavor of the world. Or are you afraid of a woman without eyes and without a name?”
Cireive lunged backward, but things were pressing on him from all sides, invisible things with stalks and wide leaves and filaments that brushed against his skin, making the hairs on the surface stand on end.
“Well then,” she said. “What will you take away from me next? Strip me of my hair? Peel away the skin and then the flesh from my bones? Dig deeper yet, into the marrow, to seek the essence that comprises me, and which is still beyond your reach?”
She took a step forward, closer to him again, the bottom of her robe sweeping lightly against the intricate floor tiles strewn with ashes of the flowers. Ghostly eyes, brimming with liquid, once more filled her empty eye-sockets, and the liquid was overflowing. . . .
“Mother,” he said, “what is happening? What am I? And what are you?”
“You have hungered for the truths of this world for so long,” she replied. “All the while you have ravaged the world within your grasp. The oceans are overflowing with the blood of your conquest and creation of the greatest empirastan that spans the world. And yet the desert grows around you and around this city, and one day the ocean will close in, and you will be an island all alone. Indeed, you already are.”
A knot was forming in his throat, even stronger than the pressing of terror. From the corner of his eye he saw the opened coffins filled with ashes, and pale shapes of growth rising, crawling vines reaching for him.
“You died, mother!” he exclaimed in the voice of a boy. “You scared me so much because you were so still and yet your skin was still warm. I was so scared, so cold and scared! You were warmer than me still, almost alive. And I wanted to shake you and yet I could not! I could not stand it, I had to run! Don’t you see why—?”
The woman with the ghost eyes continued to weep before him as she said, “I had died, my child, and it was not your fault that I had, nor that you were frightened and that you ran. But don’t you know that you kept me from the cleansing and renewing cycle of death, you kept me frozen in time, because of the injustice you had done in my name? Remember, Cireive! For that night you returned to the village alone, and you brought them back and they searched for me in futility. And the next day, when they came back again and found me at last, you lied to them, and blamed those strangers for my death!”
“No! No, mother!” muttered he, shaking. “No, I
did not, no. . . .”
But the woman’s words were now a river of time, flowing wildly and not to be contained.
“And the people of our village believed you,” she said. “Remember how the mob turned upon those innocent strangers who had stopped in our village to trade, and how they took them and stripped them, and lit torches from the bonfire of cut amaranth—do you remember now, my son?”
“No,” sobbed Cireive. “I remember the flowers burning, the red feather tendrils curling into ashes, so pungent with smoke. . . .”
“They put me on that fire, Cireive, and my body—now truly cold—went up in flames, while my essence remained in anguish, for around me were the living cries of the innocents, the twelve men who did not properly speak our tongue and thus could not defend themselves, twelve who could do nothing but struggle against the ropes as they lay surrounding my body, being punished for a crime they did not commit. . . .”
“It did not happen!” he snarled. “No! It was so very long ago, but I remember it clearly, the flowers over my head as I was hiding, and their voices as they spoke to you, and you replied—”
“They spoke to me briefly, true, those foreign travelers,” said the woman-ghost. “But, far from meaning harm, they only asked me for the direction of the village. They were kind men. While their skins were darker that ours and of an olive hue, their faces were warm and unthreatening, and they thanked me from their hearts before continuing on toward town.
“They were the last to speak to me in this life, Cireive. For after I watched them go, after I'd turned my back to resume our game and was about to go looking for you, I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my chest. It was so intense that I dropped the basket before I could even straighten myself. And then for a moment I still stood up, was still upright in spirit, while my body collapsed and lay on the ground at the edges of the great field.
“I had so wanted to run to you, my son! So intense was my desire, so much unfinished business, and yet my heart broke and then stopped its living pump, and my body was useless. Death with her shimmering scythe stood a few steps away, ready to take me by the hand gently, but I—fool that I am—shook my head at her and instead remained standing there near my still warm body.”
In the moonlight, the woman’s translucent eyes spilled forth a stream of tears, also ghosts. Cireive, weeping himself, watched with peculiar detachment their unreal passage, and wanted so much to put his hand there and feel their nonexistent moisture against his fingers, and to maybe feel the warmth of her cheek one more time after so many years.
“I was still there when you came back at last, my little boy Cireive. And when you saw me and when you ran in terror, I flew in spirit at your side, wanting to breathe warmth and relief into your being, but you never felt me, never heard my spirit cry. Instead, from great fear you sank into shock, and then into madness, and eventually, when twilight came, you returned to town. As you passed by the strangers, they had just began their trade with our people. An odd idea had come to you, and you somehow knew they had spoken to me, and in your denial of truth you wanted to cast blame upon someone. So, when the initial search for me was over for the night, you lay in bed, and I stood there at your side, and I saw a shadow approach you.”
“It was He, ” whispered Cireive, remembering suddenly a little boy’s fevered imaginations of moving shadows in the empty lonely night. “He came to me in the evil darkness, called there by my fear. . . .”
The woman without corporeal eyes nodded slowly. “Yes, I know,” she said softly. “The Lord of Illusion comes to us in our darkest moments, for that is when we are most vulnerable to a loss of reason and open to rebellion against the universe.”
“He painted the Illusion so clearly in my mind’s eye,” said Cireive. “I could almost see how the strangers came to you and attacked you and beat you and forced you.”
“Yes, you remember that version even now, even though none of it happened. It is the same thing you told our townspeople the next morning. And yet I cried out to you with all of my being, standing there between you and the Lord of Illusion, I cried and shielded you until dawn, and eventually He was gone, having done only partial harm, but His dark intent had taken root within you, and it was enough. . . .”
“Enough indeed,” echoed the taqavor. He looked at the woman, and then his gaze slipped down to the hand in which she still held the long, thin, razor-sharp needle-dagger.
“All these years of compounded slaughter and darkness, my empirastan, ” said Cireive.
“What have I done, mother. What have I done. One long interminable . . . Illusion.”
And, saying that, he reached across the space between them and took the dagger out of her unprotesting fingers, while she continued to stand before him, blind and yet all-seeing across time.
For a moment only, they looked at each other in silence.
“Will this free you, at last?” he finally said, raising the blade.
“No,” she whispered and in her eyes there was utter anguish, while at the same time he swept the razor forward at an angle and then suddenly, swiftly, he returned it with an old warrior’s skill, and struck it deep into his own chest.
Time blurred.
When next it focused, Cireive stood in the same place in the sepulcher with the moon streaming its bright radiance down through the skylights.
But now two shadowed forms stood before him. Directly opposite him was the woman without eyes. The other, just at her side, was a cloaked figure of interminable opacity, its skeletal silver hands holding a long staff upon which was a moon-shaped blade of unknown metal and rippling rainbows.
“You cannot escape this easily,” said death in a voice of echoing nothingness. “The deaths of thousands are still upon you, and they weigh you down. I cannot carry all that weight of mortal agony and suffering that is your Burden, and thus I cannot take you.”
And the skeletal one pointed with one bone-finger to his chest where was lodged a slim dagger of razor metal. Cireive looked down at himself, at the black stream of blood that had stained his chest. And all of a sudden he heard within himself the strange terrible resounding silence of a stilled heart.
What am I? he cried in madness. Help me!
“I cannot take you,” repeated death. “Not like this. Lighten your burden first, and then I will come for you at last.”
But how? he cried for the second time, realizing only then that he was unable to form words, for his dead lungs did not compress air, and thus the sound had emerged only in his mind. But death had turned her back to him, and begun to walk away, shimmering into nothingness against the walls of the sepulcher.
Help me!
And the woman without eyes, without a name, who was and yet was not his mother, stood before him, ghostly tears streaming down her face.
Please, he whispered in his mind, Mother, please don’t leave me this time!
And then he wailed, and howled, and it was not the sound of a human being, but of a peculiar unnatural beast.
Who am I? he growled and wept. What am I that I cannot die, that not even death would claim me?
Time was frozen around him, and he could feel its sterile walls pressing in, no longer empty red flowers born of Illusion, no longer the scent of ashes. Time stood choking him with its edges just outside of him, just at his periphery. . . .
He was in a walled cocoon outside the universe.
The bottomless well.
Who am I? the beast without a name whispered, reaching with its once human appendage forward, toward her. . . .
Mother. . . .
And the woman remained, at the edge of him. Her form shook with weeping, for she could do nothing now, even though she was so close, and she was between times. I can see you at last, the beast spoke. You are so real, and I can name you now. Your name is Amarantea, for you stand among the blossoms of the great field, as simple and unyielding and as beautiful.
“I thank you for your beginnings of true vision,” she whispered. “And yet that is n
ot my name.”
Who is she, then? his inner voice said, For I know her somehow, and I know this name. Who is Amarantea? She is within you!
And the queen without eyes and without a true name replied, “Amarantea was the mother of your son. The one who came forth from the field of red flowers carrying a child that you denied at first. He, that child, was the one who was never the son of your flesh, but then became the son of your conscience. All those years of darkness, he was the silent one who kept you back from the very edge. And you never knew it, just as he never knew.”
I had no son, then, remembered the beast. And yet Lirheas became my son, from the moment my eyes fell upon his little form. He reminded me of something.
“He reminded you of yourself, of what you had been and could have been in innocence, had you not come before the sway of the Lord of Illusion.”
Moments of silence. Moonlight began to fade in the skylights as the moon sank from its zenith.
The beast sank also, to its knees, and then lay forward with its head resting against the cold tiles of the floor of the sepulcher. It remained thus for long interminable flowing moments of time, muttering with inhuman lips against the stone, muttering words of regret and agony, and repeating the name “Amarantea.”
The woman without eyes stood before it with infinite patience.
And then at last the beast raised its distorted face toward her, and it said, She is gone, and I can never find her to beg her forgiveness, for I cannot even remember her, or remember hurting her. Such is the great power that Illusion has upon me. I do not remember. And yet I must remember her, Amarantea!
“Then I will once again bring the purgatory of Remembrance to you,” said the woman. “For you left Amarantea at the edge of that field—just another faceless woman, just as years ago you had left your dead mother—while you took her son away from her, and you ordered your soldiers to set the field to flames. The flowers burned as you watched for the second time in your life their red crowns and filaments turn to ash, and you observed Amarantea burning also, saw her scream in agony as she died while you held her infant son—crying and choking from the smoke—while silence and detachment were firmly lodged within you, and you felt nothing from beyond the first wall of Illusion.