Princess of Dhagabad, The (25 page)

Chapter 14. Eyes in the Sand

You did not yet know you were close to
absolute power. You reveled in your knowledge as only a connoisseur
can revel in a rare collectible he acquired with great difficulty.
With a mere word you could fly up in the clouds or make the waters
of the raging ocean part before your feet. You could travel to any
distant corner of the world in the blink of an eye. You could do
almost anything you liked, and the awareness of your power made you
feel invincible. But because your rebellious spirit was never
content with any of your achievements, you felt the urge to put
yourself to more and more tests, so that you could constantly learn
new things and thus prove yourself to be up to your own standards.
It was at this time that you first learned about the endless
desert.

This knowledge was concealed in a book in the
library of Avallahaim, the oldest library known to you, where you,
having already learned an unbelievable number of things, kept
finding more and more left to learn. The book was written in the
magical script of the highest order, the one that can be read only
by the wisest of the wise. To common people, the pages appeared
blank; and to the mages and scholars who had yet to start on the
way to eternal knowledge, the script appeared as strange ornaments
of some kind or as chaotic lines, thoughtlessly scribbled by the
hand of a child. When you were first able to read this script, you
felt it as if suddenly seeing the light. You bristled with
excitement when, looking again at the familiar page covered with
senselessly intertwined lines, you suddenly saw a text telling of
strange, unknown places. Eagerly peering at the lines suddenly
filled with meaning, you read with wonder and disbelief something
that to a certain extent confirmed the words of the old Agritian
scroll. It explained why, to the part of your mind which in spite
of everything believed the anonymous ancient philosopher—why you
heard so little of djinns, besides the usual tales describing those
mysterious creatures as a special kind of lower demon. You learned
of the existence of the endless desert lying beyond the known
world, where these all-powerful spirits were exiled in order to
save the world from the dangers of their presence. You learned of
the imprisonment with which these spirits paid for their absolute
power, of the helplessness of these spirits in the endless desert,
and of the ancient temple that reigned over the sands—the temple
that contained the vortex of an unknown power, the temple that
could only be seen by those who were privy to the highest
mysteries.

The book described in detail ways of entering
the endless desert for those who might have liked to look their
destiny in the face before taking any irreversible steps. Entering
the desert physically required the creation of a portal, a door
between worlds, requiring enormous amounts of energy; and you
didn’t want to waste energy on something you didn’t consider to be
directly connected with your future. The other way, the way of
dreaming, allowed you to enter the desert when the mind is asleep
to the world of man, when the soul, separating itself from the
body, wanders freely in places inaccessible to corporeal men. Back
then, you chose this way of entering the endless desert; and now,
being an all-powerful spirit, you smile, remembering that the way
of travel you chose was, as you now know, the only way possible for
a djinn.

In a dream the blazing sunlight and the heat
could not touch you. You easily walked upon the unsteady surface of
the sand dunes toward the temple, barely visible in the hot crimson
haze ahead. You looked the endless desert in the face, trembling
with the excitement of learning something unknown, but in no way
connecting these ever-shifting sands, these ancient stone walls and
domes, with your destiny. You saw in the desert nothing more than
another piece of knowledge, similar to that which you had learned
from the dusty pages of old books, long forgotten on the shelves of
the biggest libraries, from the age-darkened scrolls containing the
sacred wisdom you so eagerly sought.

You rapidly approached the temple, peering
through the quivering haze of hot air at the ghostly outline of a
beautiful garden surrounding the ancient walls. And, moving faster
and faster, you barely had time to notice a dark glint in the sand
at your feet.

Stopping on the crest of a dune, you saw,
half out of the sand, a jar made of age-darkened silver. The cork
and the mouth of the jar were covered with wax, its dark surface
bearing the outline of an unknown seal. Looking more closely, you
discovered with surprise that the silver walls of the jar were
somehow transparent to your eyes and there, inside the dark jar,
you sensed a slight movement. Trying hard to penetrate with your
eyes the shadowy depths of the jar, you felt as if someone were
watching you from inside. You tried to dig the jar out of the sand,
but being present in the desert only in spirit, you weren’t able to
physically move a single grain. Suddenly, focusing your eyes
askance on the space surrounded by the walls of the jar, you saw,
looking straight at you, two huge eyes filled with pain
unimaginable even in your most horrible nightmares.

Reeling from the jar in terror, you fell flat
on the thick, unsteady sand and woke up with a scream in your
throat, overwhelmed by a long-forgotten feeling of fear and
emptiness. Trying to banish the horrible vision from your memory
you realized that from now on the stare of those unknown eyes would
haunt you forever…

A thin tongue of flame twists and flickers
right in front of the princess’s eyes. Listening closely she can
even hear the faint hissing of oil burning on the wick, barely
audible above the sound of the wind rustling the drapes. She always
considered oil lamps to be objects of mystery and enchantment; and
now, tired after a long sewing lesson with the demanding and
merciless Zulbagad, the princess is enjoying the quiet of her
quarters, stretching out on the floor and setting the only lighted
lamp in the room in front of her eyes.

The princess is rarely alone, and she usually
doesn’t miss solitude; but now, after a long and busy day, she is
enjoying the stillness around her, broken only by the rustling of
the light drapes and the faint hissing of the flame. The only
person she wouldn’t mind seeing now is Hasan, but she is trying
never to summon him without need. It seems to her that lately Hasan
has started to show a little more interest in the world around him
and a little less of his calm passivity. She is afraid to scare
away this new state of his mind, which is such a big step forward
compared with the time they first met, when he was closed off from
her and the rest of the world behind the tiny iron shutters. She
knows that Hasan likes to do many different things in the palace
during the times when she does not require his presence, for
instance, during her needlework lessons with Zulbagad—lessons that
her mother insists upon, as if trying to compensate for her
otherwise boyish upbringing. She heard that Hasan spends his free
time in the library or visits various parts of the palace and talks
to various people. Alamid and Nanny Airagad tell her that everyone
in the palace, from the cooks and the stable-boys to Selim, the
captain of the guard, eagerly await these visits and show great
attachment to Hasan. She thinks with sadness that as she is growing
up she seems to be having more and more duties that prevent her
from spending time with her djinn, and that the number of these
duties will grow even more when she finally becomes an adult.
Absorbed in her thoughts, she watches with unseeing eyes the
flickering of the light on the elaborate ornaments of the yellow
lamp, feeling a growing desire to see Hasan, to sit with him in the
semidarkness of her room, to share with him the silence, to feel
his comforting closeness and the quiet presence of his thoughts
penetrating her confused mind.

Out of the corner of her eye the princess
sees a slight movement in the room, a movement without any
sound.

“Hasan?” she asks without turning.

“Yes, princess,” Hasan replies. She sees from
her position on the floor a pair of bare feet appear in her view,
feet sinking deeply into the pile of the carpet.

The princess rolls on her side and looks up
at him. The lamp doesn’t give enough light to see his face, but it
seems to her that he is looking her straight in the eyes, and that
he is smiling.

“Sit with me, Hasan,” she asks. “I am so
tired…”

Hasan lowers himself to the floor in front of
her, leaning back against the wall and crossing his legs to assume
the position that the eastern sages call the meditation pose. The
princess admires the graceful ease of his movements, forgetting
that he can hear her every thought.

She pulls her knees up to her chest, curling
on her side and resting her cheek on her hand. Now they form
something like a circle—he sitting, she half lying—around the lamp
that throws flickers of light on their faces and hands, and on the
marble floor around it.

“I wanted to see you very much, Hasan,” the
princess confesses. “But I didn’t want to call you here without
need.”

“I felt it, princess,” Hasan answers
softly.

The princess raises her face and looks at him
searchingly.

“What were you doing before you came here?”
she asks, gathering all her courage. She has wanted for a long time
to ask Hasan about his activities when she is not around, but only
now does she feel daring enough to venture the question.

“I was playing chess with Selim, the captain
of the guard,” Hasan says with a laugh.

“How many moves did it take you to win,
Hasan?”

“To be honest, I was curious to see how many
moves I could make
without
winning, princess, and at the
same time learn a lot about the inhabitants of the palace.”

“Even about me?” the princess asks,
laughing.

“Heaven forbid, princess!” Hasan exclaims in
pretended horror. “No one in his right mind would ever dare to
gossip about the heiress to the throne of Dhagabad!”

The princess laughs, feeling her tiredness
gradually fade away to make room for the happy, carefree feeling
she always has when she sits with Hasan in the quietness of her
quarters, talking as she does now about nothing in particular. She
tries to imagine Hasan playing chess with Selim, a wiry, incredibly
striking, middle-aged man with a huge gray mustache, whom she has
seen many times at the palace ceremonies. She cannot imagine Hasan
talking to Selim about the inhabitants of the palace over a game of
chess, but she knows so little of Hasan and his relationship with
other people that she is scared to even think about it. The
princess remembers Zobeide with her perfect beauty and the
horrifying shadows shifting and changing in the ancient depths of
her emerald eyes. Zobeide—the Highest Priestess of the Elements.
Zobeide—the fay that made such a terrible time for the caravan
traveling to Megina. Zobeide—the woman whom Hasan calls his friend
and who shares a past with him to which the princess has no access.
The princess narrows her eyes in the dim light of the oil lamp that
suddenly seems painfully bright to her tired gaze. She forces
herself to concentrate on the flickering twists of the fiery tongue
and slowly, unnoticeably for herself, gives in again to the
enchantment of its endless play.

“This flame twists as if dancing, Hasan,” she
says with a sigh, completely absorbed in a pleasant numbness
similar to the effect brought on by music. “If you look at it long
enough, you can imagine that the flame encloses a tiny figure
circling in an endless dance. It is so beautiful!”

“You would probably have liked the Cult of
the Dance,” Hasan says thoughtfully.

“The Cult of the Dance?”

“It was one of the cults of the Great Goddess
that existed on the shores of the Great River Ghull in the desert
land of Aeth. The Temple of the Dance was one of the oldest and
most perfect temples created by man. It was built to look very
simple, but it was balanced according to the laws of the world
equilibrium. Because of that, even when the cult was completely
destroyed, the temple retained the spirit of the cult in its walls.
There were rumors among the highest mages that, entering the
temple, one could see a ghostly likeness of the sacred dance.”