she whispered, 'the side of the Truth.' She spread the lids wide. 'Hold hard, Meren!'
Meren grunted in acknowledgement and tightened his grip until it was as unyielding as a ring of bronze about his master. Samana slipped the point of the spoon under his upper eyelid and, with a firm, sure movement, eased it down behind the eyeball. Then, gently, she scooped the eye out of its socket. She let it dangle, like an egg, on to Taita's cheek, suspended on the rope of the optic nerve. The empty socket was a deep pink cave, glistening with tears. Samana handed the silver spoon to Tansid, who laid it aside and selected one of the bamboo needles. She held the point in the flame of the brazier until it scorched and hardened.
It was still smoking as she handed it to Samana. With the needle in her right hand Samana lowered her head until she was staring into Taita's empty eye socket. She judged the position and angle of the optic pathway as it entered the skull.
Taita's eyelids twitched and shuddered under her fingers, blinking uncontrollably. Samana ignored them. Slowly she introduced the needle into the eye cavity until the point touched the opening of the pathway.
She increased the pressure until suddenly the needle pierced the membrane and slid in alongside the nerve cord without damaging it.
There was almost no resistance to its passage. Deeper and deeper it glided. When it was almost a finger's length into the frontal lobe of the brain Samana sensed rather than felt the light check as the point touched the bundle of nerve fibres from both eyes where they crossed at the optic chiasm. The bamboo point was at the portal. The next move had to be precisely executed. Although her expression remained serene, a light film of perspiration shone on Samana's unblemished skin, and her eyes narrowed. She tensed and made the final thrust. There was no reaction from Taita. She knew she had missed the minute target. She drew back the needle a fraction, realigned it, then drove it in again to the same depth, but this time she aimed a little higher.
Taita shuddered and sighed softly. Then he relaxed as he fell into oblivion. Meren had been warned to expect this, and he cupped one strong hand under Taita's chin to prevent the beloved silver head from dropping forward. Samana withdrew the needle from the eye socket as carefully as she had driven it deep. She leaned forward to examine the puncture in the lining at the back of the eye. There was no weep of blood. Before her eyes the mouth of the tiny wound closed spontaneously. Samana made a humming sound of approbation. Then she used the spoon to ease the dangling eye back into the socket. Taita's eyelids blinked rapidly as it reseated itself. Samana reached for the linen bandage, which Tansid had soaked in a healing salve and laid ready on the marble table, then bound it around Taita's head, covering both of his eyes, and knotted it securely.
'As quickly as you are able, Meren, carry him back to his own chamber before he comes to his senses.'
Meren lifted him as though he were a sleeping infant and held his head against his sturdy shoulder. He ran with Taita back to the temple and carried him up to his room. Samana and Tansid followed them.
When the two women arrived, Tansid went to the hearth, where she had left a kettle warming. She poured a bowl of the herbal infusion and brought it to Samana.
'Lift his head!' Samana ordered, and held the bowl to Taita's lips, dribbling the liquid into his mouth and massaging his throat to induce him to swallow. She made him take the contents of the bowl.
They did not have to wait long. Taita stiffened and reached up to feel the bandage that blindfolded him. His hand began to shake as though pulsied. His teeth chattered, then he ground them together. The muscle in the point of his jaws bulged and Meren was terrified that he might hire off his tongue. With his thumbs he tried to prise the magus's jaws
apart, but suddenly Taita's mouth flew open of its own accord and he shrieked, every muscle in his body knotted hard as cured teak. Spasm after spasm racked him. He screamed in terror and moaned with despair, then burst into gales of maniacal laughter. Just as suddenly he began to weep as though his heart was breaking. Then he screamed again and his back arched until his head touched his heels. Even Meren could not hold the frail, ancient body, which was now endowed with demonic strength.
'What possesses him?' Meren pleaded with Samana. 'Make him stop before he kills himself.'
'His Inner Eye is wide open. He has not yet learnt to control it. Images so terrible as to drive any ordinary man insane are flooding through it and overwhelming his mind. He is enduring all the suffering of mankind.'
Samana, too, was panting as she tried to make Taita swallow another mouthful of the bitter drug. Taita spewed it at the ceiling of the chamber.
'This was the frenzy that killed Wotad, the northman,' Samana told Tansid. 'The images swelled his brain like an overfilled bladder of boiling oil until it could contain no more and burst asunder.' She held Taita's hands to stop him clawing at the bandage over his eyes. 'The magus is experiencing the grief of every widow and of every bereaved mother who has ever watched her firstborn die. He shares the suffering of every man or woman who was ever maimed, tortured or ravaged by disease. His soul is sickened by the cruelty of every tyrant, by the wickedness of the Lie.
He is burning in the flames of sacked cities, and dying on a thousand battlefields with the vanquished. He feels the despair of every lost soul who ever lived. He is looking into the depths of hell.'
'It will kill him!' Meren was in anguish almost as intense as Taita's.
'Unless he learns to control the Inner Eye, yes, it may indeed kill him.
Hold him, do not let him harm himself.' Taita's head was rolling so violently from side to side that his skull thumped against the stone wall beside his bed.
Samana began to chant an invocation, in a high quavering voice that was not her own, in a language that Meren had never heard before. But the chanting had little effect.
Meren cradled Taita's head in his arms. Samana and Tansid wedged themselves on each side of him, cushioning him with their bodies, to prevent him harming himself in his wild struggles. Tansid blew perfumed breath into his gaping mouth. 'Taita!' she called. 'Come back! Come back to us!'
'He cannot hear you,' Samana told her. She leant closer and cupped her hands round Taita's right ear: the ear of Truth. She whispered to him soothingly in the language of her chant. Meren recognized its inflections: although he could not understand the meaning, he had heard Taita use it when he conversed with other magi. It was their secret language, which they called the Tenmass.
Taita quietened and cocked his head to one side as though he was listening to Samana. Her voice sank lower but became more urgent.
Taita murmured a reply. Meren realized that she was giving him instructions, helping him to shutter the Inner Eye, to filter out the destructive images and sounds, to understand what he was experiencing and to ride the torrents of emotion that were battering him.
They all stayed with him for the rest of that day and through the long night that followed. By dawn Meren was exhausted, and collapsed into sleep. The women did not attempt to rouse him, but let him rest. His body had been tempered by combat and hard physical endeavour, but he could not match their spiritual stamina. Beside them, he was a child.
Samana and Tansid stayed close to Taita. Sometimes he seemed to sleep. At others he was restless, drifting in and out of delirium. Behind the blindfold he seemed unable to separate fantasy from reality. Once he sat up and hugged Tansid to him with savage strength. 'Lostris!' he cried.
'You have returned as you promised you would. Oh, Isis and Horus, I have waited for you. I have hungered and thirsted for you all these long years. Do not leave me again.'
Tansid showed no alarm at his outburst. She stroked his long silver hair. 'Taita, you must not trouble yourself. I will remain with you as long as you still need me.' She held him tenderly, a child at her breast, until he subsided once more into insensibility. Then she looked enquiringly at Samana. 'Lostris?'
'She was once queen of Egypt,' she explained. Using her Inner Eye and the knowledge of Kashyap she was able to scry deep in Taita's mind to his memories. His abiding love of Lostris was as clear to Samana as if it were her own.
'Taita raised her from childhood. She was beautiful. Their souls were intertwined, but they could never be joined. His mutilated body lacked I he manly force for him ever to be more to her than friend and protector.
Nevertheless, he loved her all her life and beyond. She loved him in return. Her last words to him before she died in his arms were 'I have loved only two men in this life, and you were one. In the next life perhaps the gods will treat our love more kindly.'
Samana's voice was choked, and the women's eyes were bright with tears.
Tansid broke the silence that followed: 'Tell me all of it, Samana.
There is nothing more beautiful on this earth than true love.'
'After Lostris died,' Samana said quietly, stroking the magus's head, 'Taita embalmed her. Before he laid her in her sarcophagus, he took from her head a lock of hair, which he sealed in a locket of gold.' She leaned forward and touched the Periapt of Lostris, which hung round Taita's neck on a golden chain. 'See? He wears it to this day. Still he waits for her to return to him.'
Tansid wept, and Samana shared her sorrow, but she was unable to wash it away with tears. She had travelled so much further along the Road of the Adepts that she had left such comforting human weakness behind her. Sorrow is the other face of joy. To grieve is to be human.
Tansid could still weep.
By the time the great rains had passed, Taita had recovered from his ordeal and learnt to control the Inner Eye. They were all aware of the new power within him: he radiated a spiritual calm. Meren and Tansid found it comforting to be near him, not speaking but revelling in his presence.
However, Taita passed most of his waking hours with Samana. They sat day after day at the temple gates. Through their Inner Eyes they watched everyone who passed through. In their vision each human body was bathed in its own aura, a cloud of changing light that displayed to them the emotions, thoughts and character of its owner. Samana instructed Taita in the art of interpreting these signals.
When night had fallen and the others had retired to their chambers, Samana and Taita sat together in the darkest recess of the temple, surrounded by effigies of the goddess Saraswati. They talked the night away, still using the arcane Tenmass of the higher adepts that neither Meren nor the apsaras, not even the learned Tansid, could understand.
It was as though they realized that the time of parting would soon be upon them, and that they must take full advantage of every hour that was left to them.
'You do not throw an aura?' Taita asked, during their final discussion.
'Neither do you,' Samana replied. 'No savant does. That is the certain way in which we are able to identify each other.'
'You are so much wiser than I.'
'Your hunger and capacity for wisdom far outstrip mine. Now that you have been granted the inner sight, you are entering the penultimate level of the adepts. There is only one above where you stand now, that of the Benevolent Immortal.'
'Each day I feel myself grow stronger. Each day I hear the call more clearly. It is not to be denied. I must leave you and go on.'
'Yes, your time with us here has come to an end,' Samana agreed.
'We will never meet again, Taita. Let boldness be your companion. Let the Inner Eye show you the way.'
Meren was with Astrata and Wu Lu in the pavilion beside the pool. They reached for their clothing and dressed hurriedly as Taita came towards them with a firm step, Tansid at his side.
Only now did they realize the extent of the change that had come over Taita. He no longer stooped under the burden of age, but stood taller, straighter. Though his hair and beard were silver still, they seemed thicker, more lustrous. His eyes were no longer rheumy and myopic, but clear and steady. Even Meren, who was the least perceptive, could recognize these changes. He ran to Taita and prostrated himself before him, hugging his knees wordlessly. Taita lifted him up and embraced him. Then he held him at arm's length, and considered him carefully.
Meren's aura was a robust orange glow like the desert dawn, the aura of an honest warrior, valiant and true. 'Fetch your weapons, good Meren, for we must go on.' For a moment Meren was rooted to the ground with dismay, but then he glanced at Astrata.
Taita studied her aura. It was as clear as the steady flame of an oil lamp, clean and uncomplicated. But suddenly he saw the flame waver, as though touched by an errant breeze. Then it steadied, as she suppressed (he sorrow of parting. Meren turned from her and went into the living quarters of the temple. Minutes later he came out again, his sword belt buckled round his waist, his bow and quiver slung over his shoulder. He carried Taita's tiger-skin cloak rolled upon his back.
Taita kissed each of the women. He was fascinated by the dancing nuras of the three apsaras. Wu Lu was enveloped in a nimbus of silver, nlu>t through with shimmering gold, more complex and with deeper toning than Astrata's. She was further along the Road of the Adepts.
Tansid's aura was mother-of-pearl, iridescent as a film of precious oil
floating on the surface of a bowl of wine, changing colours and tones incessantly, shooting out stars of light. She possessed a noble soul and a Good Mind. Taita wondered if she would ever be called to submit herself to Samana's probing bamboo needle. He kissed her, and her aura thrilled with a brighter lustre. In the short time they had known each other they had shared many things of the spirit. She had come to love him.
'May you attain your destiny,' he whispered, as their lips parted.
'I know in my heart that you will attain yours, Magus,' she replied softly. 'I will never forget you.' Impulsively she threw her arms round his neck. 'Oh, Magus, I wish . . . how I wish . ..'
'I know what you wish. It would have been beautiful,' he told her gently, 'but some things are not possible.'
He turned to Meren. 'Are you ready?'
'I am ready, Magus,' Meren said. 'Lead and I will follow.'
They retraced their footsteps. They climbed into the mountains where the eternal winds wailed around the peaks, then came to the start of the great mountainous pathway and followed it towards the west. Meren recalled every twist and turn, every high pass and dangerous ford, so they wasted no time in searching for the right road, and journeyed swiftly. They came again to the windswept plains of Ecbatana where the wild horses roamed in great herds.
Taita had had an affinity with those noble animals ever since the first of them had arrived in Egypt with the invading Hyksos hordes.
He had captured them from the enemy, and broken the first teams for the new chariots he had designed for the army of Pharaoh Mamose. For this service Pharaoh had awarded him the title 'Lord of Ten Thousand Chariots'. Taita's love of horses went back a long way.
They paused on their journey across the grassy plains to rest after the rigours of travel in the high mountains and to linger among the horses.
As they followed the herds they came upon a rift in the bleak, featureless landscape, a concealed valley along whose course bubbled a string of natural springs, with pools of sweet clear water. The perpetual winds that scourged the exposed plains did not reach this sheltered spot, and the grass grew green and lush. There were many horses here, and Taita set up camp beside a spring to enjoy them. Meren built a hut from grass sods, and they used dried dung as fuel. There were fish in the pools and colonies of water voles, which Meren trapped while Taita searched for