Lords of the East - Library

[Quirl]

Qara-Suu: Rogue's Gallery (Nasreddîn Tasköprülüzâde: Lord of Terror)
Baghdad (November 8, 1185)

The boy sat silently in his quarters for several minutes, licking his lips. There was a question on them.

In the other end of the room, Kamelya was bathing. Her robes were laid down beside her, crumpled up like a thick patch of dirt on the fine marble floor. She was running a sponge over her shoulders, clinching them so that the water inside would fall down her dry skin—then she would dip the sponge again in a nearby bucket, repeating the process.

The boy peaked inside, seeing the old woman sitting in the middle of the floor. He saw the fair white of the witch’s skin, cracks running down it like aged oak. He saw patches of freckles on her shoulders, areas scarred by the sun and aged by time. But the woman wasn’t ugly. Indeed, she had a strange allure about her even a boy as young as he could recognize. Not attraction; but something... else. So, the boy just continued to watch, waiting for his master to finish before he could ask his question.

But Kamelya asked first...

“Boy.”

Her voice surprised him. He had not known she was aware of him. He swallowed hard, unsure how she might react knowing he was spying on her.

Then the woman turned around to peak from behind her freckled shoulders—her blind eyes looking directly at the boy. “You stalk as if wanting to ask something…” Again, the boy swallowed. He was still unsure of how to react. “Well?” Kamelya continued, and the boy looked up at her. “What is it?”

“The people here…” the boy began, stopping for a moment to avoid appearing too eager in his questioning—looking down at the floor and struggling to find his words. “They speak of the ghūl and of their successes in the North. They speak of the Qara-Khağan and of his prowess in battle… and how of he is not human.” He swallowed. "I... I even hear they call him Terör Efendisi now—Lord of Terror. But..." He cleared his throat, shuffling his bare feet on the cold marble floor and, again, trying to find his words. Then he looked up at her, “but I know so very little about the Khağan… of Nasreddîn.... of where he came from... of who he is... anything.”

The old woman narrowed her eyes and at first the boy thought she was angry with him. But the witch made no sudden movements. She merely continued to hold the sponge on her shoulders—resting it there as it continued to drip a few more stands of water down her spine. Then the woman nodded. “What is it you’d like to know?”

“Where did he come from? Who is he? What is he?” The boy stood there ashamed for a few moments at his outburst of questions, embarrassed at his own curiosity. But as always, Kamelya stood perfectly still—perfectly unreadable.

The woman set the sponge on the floor and pulled her robes up over her shoulders. She tied it around her neck and then held her hand over her head. She waved for the boy to enter and he did—coming inside and standing just behind her… eager to hear of Nasreddîn from the the only person to have known him before he came to the steppes.

“I come from a land very far from here,” Kamelya began. “Very… very far from here… where very few have ventured and returned.” She sat on the floor facing the wall at the other end of the room. She didn’t bother to turn around to tell her story to the boy's face, but she knew that he was listening—she knew he was hanging on her every word. “I was exiled, you could say… and I have wondered the world for a very long time.” She smiled. “On one such wandering, I came across a desert.” She turned around just for a moment to smirk at the boy over her shoulder. “Not like the deserts here… no… sooo much more vast was this desert.” She turned back around and placed her fingers into her lap, focusing her blind eyes back onto the wall. “No trees… no rocks… no animals… nothing but sand and sky. And in the distance… mountains so large they held up the clouds.”

“In the Far East?” The boy asked.

“Yes,” Kamelya replied—a little surprised he had heard of such a desert. “I suppose some merchants here travel through it when wishing to avoid the lands of the Qara-Khitai.” She sighed. “But… regardless… that is the place Nasreddîn was born.”

“In the desert?” The boy asked, a confused look on his face. “How? Why did you go in if you were pregnant? Where were you going?”

“I was going nowhere,” the woman replied, turning around again for a moment to return the stare of the boy. “When you’ve lived as long as I have, you realize there is no place to go... one place is just as good as another here.” She turned around and began clicking her fingers together above her knees. “As for the birth… I was not pregnant when I went in.”

“Then how?” The boy asked.

Kamelya sighed and narrowed her eyes on the far wall. Though she was blind, the boy could tell she was staring at something—perhaps actually seeing whatever memory she was recalling now inside her mind. Finally, Kamelya shifted on the floor and began to roll her head, letting the old bones inside crack as she let out faint grown. “What a memory…” she began. “Hard to recall it all.” She stopped her squirming for a moment and let out a cryptic smile. Then she continued, “I can barely recall it all now… but one night I fell asleep in the desert—just lying there in the vast nothingness that place was. The sky was dark—black clouds hiding an orange dusk… or was it dawn? I can’t recall. But... regardless… I fell asleep there. And when I woke up... there was a man.”

The boy shifted. “A man?”

“A figure… rather—one I would suppose was a man. He was on top of me when I awoke—tearing off my robes and grunting wildly into my ear. I resisted… but I was no match.”

The boy stayed silent for several seconds. Unsure of what to say.

Kamelya continued. “I awoke the next morning... unsure of what had happened. My robes were torn and I bore the marks of his assault… but there was no one in sight… no foot prints—nothing left behind. Just... me... the desert.... and the sky.”

“What happened next?”

Kamelya smiled. “I reached the edge of that desert and stepped on the first blade of grass I had seen for months… ahead of me were the mountains… snowy peaks and green trees I forgotten the beauty of. And I set up camp at the base there… the desert at my back and the snow at my front.” Her smile dropped. “I had been vomiting… cramping… feeling weak. I thought leaving that desert would help, but…”

“You were…”

“Yes,” Kamelya replied, tapping her fingers on her knee and taking in a deep breath. “I was pregnant.”

“How'd you make it past the mountains in such a state?”

The woman smiled and began to stand up, turning around to face the boy—her blind eyes turning downwards to meet his. Then, suddenly, her smile dropped and her milky white eyes suddenly became very serious. Her voice grew hoarse and she replied, “Willpower.”

The boy nodded, inquiring nothing further—unsure of what to think of the story and the woman herself, now.

The grin on the woman's face resurfaced and she started towards him. She laid a hand on the boy's head and rustled the hair there. Then she began to walk away—exiting the room and leaving him behind her, the boy standing quietly at the doorway as she left.

But as she continued to walk away, he suddenly spun around on his heel behind her. He had one last question to ask—a question he wasn't sure he wanted the answer to, but one he had to know—he had to ask. "My Lady..."

Kamelya turned around slowly to face the boy—the white glow of her eyes catching on the dim candlelight in the next room—her wiry gray hair masking slightly the image of her face.

"What..." the boy swallowed, unsure of how to ask—unsure of what he wanted to know and unsure of the implications of knowing. "What... is he?"

In the candlelight of the next room, Kamelya smiled at him. She just stood there with that smirk, no evidence of an answer tracing her grin and no words coming to offer aid. She simply stood there... then turned around—heading off to her bed chambers and leaving the boy standing there at the doorway.

The boy stood there for what seemed several minutes. His eyes kept wandering to the lone candle on the other end of the room. He watched it fidget on the wick, moving back and forth attempting to put itself out. His eyes wandered then to the shadows it cast on the walls—the shadows that seemed, to a boy's imagination, like the monsters and demons he'd sometimes see in his nightmares. But he was awake now and the monsters seemed very real. In fact, overall, it seemed to him the lines between dreaming and awake were being blurred...

... and monsters were real.