Conjuring Dreams or Learning to Write by Writing

  Echo

  Soft, like a breath against her back, the sensation of caressing woke her, sliding sensuously to her neck, bringing her breath to an involuntary gasp. Too freshly wakened to think clearly, Echo turned to her unseen companion and felt a splash of her own disappointment that he wasn't there.

  She didn't need the smoldering sexual warmth growing at the back of her mind to remind her that it was a choice she had made. Who could know better than she the urgency Kamon felt for her, but whose longing would she heed? She slithered into clean linens, not fine, but well-mended as befitted a servant of the Sultan's household. Her bare feet scuffled softly over the hard-packed dirt floor until she reached the kitchen where dirt gave way to stained and worn stone.

  The head cook, already up some time ago, nodded absently to her as she entered, no joy or anger evident in his face or in her mind. Of them all, only he was inscrutable to her, his face like stone, but his touch as delicate as a lover's as he basted and spiced.

  Echo bent and hoisted up the heavy tray, laden with dates and sweetmeats, pastries and thick black coffee. Others would come for the trays of the Sultan and his sons, who rose later, for the trays of the mysterious harems housed in the rambling palace. But the lesser relatives, the daughters, nephews and cousins, they were hers to feed.

  After eleven rooms and three trips back to the kitchen, she stood before the last door, the last breakfast in her hands. Some had slept through her entrance. Others reached for her playfully as she danced by them, their idle lust unmistakable and just as obviously transient. Others ignored her as if she were so much furniture, unconscious to her comings and goings, cognizant only of the food left in her wake.

  Until here. She breathed a prayer that he would be sleeping, then wondered if she really prayed? Why was his breakfast always the last to be served? With a bracing breath, she pushed through the door softly and padded across the carpeted floor to the table. Without a sound, the tray was set gently and she turned to escape, thankful, perhaps, that there was no indication that he was awake.

  And then a wave of longing washed over her, like the surge of the sea, filling and drawing her with its undertow, unrelenting, unstoppable. She didn't need to turn back to know that he stood behind her, that his breath came fast and hot, for she was breathing the same. Years of pushing foreign emotions to the back of her mind stood no chance against the overwhelming rush of sensation, the flood of passion, of yearning.

  "Echo." Did she hear it or feel it? Her nerves tingled with such tension that she couldn't tell what was her ears from what was her mind. "Why do you go so quickly, Echo? Stay with me." The request was a caress and she felt it to her depths.

  "I am only the serving girl, no fit companion for a prince," she said colorlessly, unwilling to turn around.

  "So you've said, but I don't agree. My heart doesn't agree." He walked up closer until she could feel his breath warm against her neck. "You say nothing to me, your face unreadable, but your eyes, your eyes from the beginning spoke of an untapped depth of passion. You will not let your mouth, your face, speak of love, but I can feel it surround you until I can almost see it shimmer like a mirage."

  "I am no one."

  "I don't know who you are. I don't care. I only know I need you, whatever your station. Weeks you have come and gone, refusing to acknowledge what you feel, what you are."

  "I am a servant only."

  His hands reached up and gripped her arms gently as he pressed himself against her back. She closed her eyes at his touch. "You're a person, a woman. You have feelings just like me and the harem girls and the Sultan. Show them to me. Love me. Don't torment me any longer. You have to know I love you."

  What was more painful? Hearing words that only a concubine could merit or the absolute knowledge that the words were true because she could feel his love vibrating through her bones, tearing through her soul like a sandstorm, stripping all away to leave only its own abrasive fury.

  "I know," she whispered, wavering under the strength of his desperation, trembling with the depth of his frustration.

  "Stay with me!"

  "I am a servant. I cannot refuse you."

  His grip tightened and he whipped her around to face him. Her eyes absorbed the glorious riot of his uncombed locks, the sensual fullness of his mouth but, more than anything, the intense gaze from topaz-colored eyes, blazing now with near fury. "That's not what I want! I want you to feel as I do, to know what it is to be swept away in an inexorable storm. Can you feel nothing?"

  What must she withstand? For weeks and months he had asked her, begged her for her love, as his thoughts and longings pounded her until his heartbeat thumped so loudly in her ears, she could barely make out his words. Frustration rose in her, though whether hers or his, she couldn't tell —could never tell with him.

  "Yes! No! I don't know! How can I know? How can't I? Your thoughts are so strong, so filling, so pervasive, how can I tell when your desire ends and mine begins? I can tell that you want me to love you, but how can I tell that I do? All I can feel is your heat, warming me through to the center, filling me with a need like I have never felt, filling me with an unquenchable thirst, but how can I know if it is only a reflection of your hunger, your thirst, your longing until I can't tell if I'm even there anymore! Don't you see?"

  He stood there, mesmerized, as she spoke as a person to him at last, not the impassive slave. Only now was her face animated, transformed from its chiseled beauty to a living canvas on which he could trace a remarkable parade of emotions, tumultuous, hectic, glorious. "No. Tell me, tell me at last," he pleaded, entranced anew as he finally saw the woman he had always believed lay at her core.

  As the fresh wave of adulation crashed through her, Echo's eyes filled with tears of frustration. "How can I tell you I love you, though I feel it travel through me like a wind? How can I tell you I need you, when your need is filling me so completely? You ask if I feel nothing—I feel everything! I feel your frustration that I have not answered your call. I feel your confusion as I tell you of my gift—my curse. I have gone a lifetime, feeling the thoughts, the emotions of those around me until it is all I can do to find my own thoughts among them, but with you, I can hear only what your heart is shouting. If my heart calls, too, I cannot catch its whisper in the windstorm."

  "Then you do understand my longing. But you claim you can feel as I feel? . . . "

  "Feel my heart," she said softly, pulling his hand to her heaving chest. "It beats in tempo with your own. How can I give you a heart I cannot even find?"

  He started and pulled his hand away. "Are you a witch, that you can know my mind?"

  Her legs suddenly too weak to hold her, Echo dropped to some cushions. "I don't know. I have no family, no past, just a foundling on the Sultan's doorstep, but I cannot remember a time when I couldn't hear the thoughts of those around me, that I didn't feel as they did."

  His momentary fear forgotten, discarded, he crouched beside her. "I don't care who you are, what you are. Love me. Let me love you. From wherever it springs, you feel the unrelenting hunger, the need as I do. I know it." He took her hair in his grasp and feasted briefly on her own hungry mouth. "Come to me. You want this as I do."

  "I don't know," she said softly, her genuine regret glistening in her eyes. "I can let us both feed from this desire, but we cannot know if it is ours or yours alone. Can you be content with the reflection of your love?"

  She didn't need to see his eyes to know his conflict. Almost he said yes, whatever the cost, but this was no fleeting lust to be satisfied with an hour on the cushions. It was a bottomless chasm that could never be satisfied with less than a lifetime, with less than an equal devotion. "I must have your heart for my own."

  She regarded him sadly before finding her feet. "Then you must let me find it."

  Then, sudden as a lightning strike, she felt an incredible pressure in her chest, a pain that made it impossible to catch her breath. For an instant, she felt as though her heart stopped
beating altogether, but Kamon slapped her, wakening her with the raw power of his concern. As she recovered, she was unsurprised to hear the keening, the wailing that denoted the death of someone of importance. The word had not reached this corner of the palace as of yet, but she knew it was the Sultan who breathed no more.

  "I must go. It is a day of great mourning and I will be needed in the kitchens."

  He nodded, but as she left, he whispered, "Find your heart, Echo. For it is needed here."

  In the kitchen, as she had expected, the room was a flurry of activity. Tension, even to those insensitive, would have been hard to miss for it was on days such as this that a mistake could cost a servant his head. The death of the Sultan was a terrible thing, not because of the loss of a self-absorbed, gold-hungry Sultan, but because of the discord as his sons scrambled for his lands, his titles and his possessions. Nineteen sons, but only one would be Sultan.

  Before he died, it was common knowledge the Sultan had changed his heir half a hundred times to keep his sons in line. Always, however, it came back to Madeer, first general of the Army with too much power for any of his siblings to expect to unseat him alone. Echo shook her head sadly for Madeer's sadism was legendary, and only if the princes banded together could they hope to oust them. But no, the princes were scrabbling, too consumed with their individual ambitions. Madeer, the merciless, was going to take the title, take the wealth and woe unto those who would gainsay him.

  By dusk, it could already be seen that Echo's predictions came to fruition. Brothers and cousins stood in chains in the courtyard as Madeer, clothed in ill-fitting cloth-of-gold, sneered from his throne. "There are too many here who would take my throne if they could," he said at last, reveling in their fear as they waited to know their own fates. "Have their heads removed at first light."

  As the cold words echoed off the marble columns, down in the kitchen, Echo felt a hundred tendrils of fear as the princes recognized their fate. The reprieve until morning meant only lonely hours with no activity but to strain against immovable chains and contemplate the life one would never now lead. Brothers, cousins, even sisters and mothers feared for themselves or their loved ones, and Echo felt them all. Except, she could feel nothing from Kamon.

  When she retired at last to her spot on the floor, the rest of the condemned fretted quietly in the back of her mind, but she could sense no flicker of Kamon among them. His absence plagued her, tormented her until she could not restrain herself from creeping up to the courtyard, from slipping behind a somnolent guard and picking her way carefully past the chained victims until she stood by him.

  He sat up straight, neither dejected nor elated. His eyes looked toward an unseen distance, his face as impassive as that of the cook. "Kamon," she whispered.

  His eyes didn't waver, but she could feel him at last, his relentless longing surging again through her, but restrained as with a great will. His voice was unmoved and calm. "You should not be here. It would be your head as well if you were caught. Go."

  "I couldn't feel you. I needed to know you were . . . I fear for you."

  "I don't." There was a slight twinge of fear she felt that belied his words, but it was squelched even as she recognized it. "If I have a fear, it is that my love for you may cost you your life." Another finger of fear stabbed through Echo, again from him, but this one was not so easily silenced.

  "I— How can I serve you, master?" she asked, helpless, unable to tear herself from him, despite his outward indifference and his obvious wish that she protect herself by leaving.

  He opened his mouth to create the word "Leave," but, instead, his eyes strayed at last and found hers, held hers. "Have you a heart you can give me? I won't need it for long. Tell me that your heart has found a voice to love me with."

  She wanted to say, "Here it is. Take it," if only to give him comfort. Or it was his need for those words she was feeling, but even now, even as heartsick as she was that he sat in the dust of the courtyard, strapped by chains, condemned to die, she could not tell if it was his misery she felt or her own, if it was his love that consumed her, or her own. "I cannot."

  The power of his emotions intensified to white-hot strength for another instant and then began to ebb as he brought his passions beneath his control once more. "No one will ever fault you for your honesty," he admitted wryly, tearing his eyes from her face and sending them again into the great beyond. "Now go, before your death magnifies my own discomfort tenfold."

  Chastened, ashamed that she could not have given him the comfort he craved, that he merited, Echo slunk away. Tomorrow, he would be no more and could not even take a kind lie from her with him to comfort him in his grave. Stretching herself once more upon the floor, she knew that sleep would forsake her. Tomorrow, Kamon would die without knowing if she would mourn his passing, would die without her knowing if she would mourn him.

  It was nearly daybreak when she finally slipped into a fretful sleep. At the first pure rays of sun, however, she was wrenched painfully from her fitful slumber by the brief sensation of unbelievable pain. It had begun.

  Frantically, she searched among the frightened thoughts in her mind, searching for thoughts that matched his mind, his soul, that she could use to know that he still lived. She could find nothing.

  Unbidden, her feet pushed up beneath her and she was running, through the room in her sleeping shift, through the kitchen where only the cook showed any signs of life, and that only to watch as she ran out again. Her bare feet stumbled on the marble floors and she bounced against more than one column, before she arrived breathless at the crowded balcony, where the rest of the household watched as the sons and nephews and cousins of the late Sultan went to meet him.

  Echo could not bring herself to look upon the body, with its severed head, so she searched the prisoners until—at last—she saw him. He stood silently, stoically, his eyes elsewhere until she found him. Then, as if he could feel her presence, he lifted his head and found her eyes instantly. With the look came the wistful pang of unending longing, but stronger, so clearly she could almost hear the words in her ears, he thought, "If you love me or if you do not, stay as far from this as you can. Do not risk your life for me." He held her gaze only long enough to register her recognition of his message before going back to the contemplation of nothing.

  Bewildered, confused, dazed by the strong emotions pulsing through her as another prince met his doom, Echo backed away from the balcony, turning to find her way back to the kitchen.

  There, with his hands idle for the first time in her memory, waited the cook. "I thought you would be back." For an instant, she thought someone else must be talking for she had never been directly addressed before. "What are you going to do?"

  "He wants me to stay away."

  "Yes." He stated it as a fact.

  "He fears for my life and what could I do anyway?"

  "Hmm." He waited an instant. "But what do you want?"

  "I don't know."

  "So you say, but who is in your mind that you cannot push aside? Why can you not find your own thoughts?"

  She should be wondering how he could know all this, she thought idly, but somehow it didn't seem to matter.

  "Never mind me, what I know, what I think. What do you feel?"

  "How should I know?" she hissed, her frustration a stone in her throat.

  "How can't you? Do you think that because you can live the emotions of others, you cannot feel for yourself? Have you grown too lazy to create your own passion? You can see his signature on his thoughts. You can determine the pedigree of the emotions you have always felt. Who do you lie for when you claim you can you not find it on your own? For yourself or for him? What do you want? Say it, feel it. Emotions are yours to control, not the other way. What do you want?"

  "Him!" she screamed, as if it were torn from her throat. "All I ever wanted was him!"

  The cook nodded wisely. "Then you had better hurry. Your man is last, but there are only five others between him and death.
"

  "But what can I do? I'm just a servant."

  "You are more than that, just as I am. You are more than an empath, you're a reverberation. The emotions are yours to control. You have spent a lifetime learning how to stifle the emotions of others. You have learned at last how to meld your own passions with another's until their individuality cannot be discerned. It is in you to twist, augment and manipulate emotions for your own use, and his protection. Send it back to the source with the force of your emotions to strengthen it and you can achieve what you will."

  "How can I?"

  "Did he not say he could feel your emotions like heat lightning about you. The power is there and has always been. You need only focus it."

  "How do you know?" she asked, already turning toward the door. For an instant, she was bombarded with a clarity and strength of emotion even Kamon's had not attained, a glimpse at a lifetime spent in feeling and feeding the emotions around one, like one who would mold clay.

  "I know as only one of us could. Hurry!"

  Without another word, her feet found the hall, the steps and she was pounding down them gracelessly, noisily, concerned only with getting there in time. Before she expected it, she all but tumbled out onto the dusty bloodied courtyard and saw him, the last of the Sultan's male relatives, bent beneath the uplifted executioner's sword. She was a servant, with no rights and no power, and he had begged her to stay away from these dangers.

  But he had her heart. "Stop!"

  "Stay away," he hissed, head bent, but Echo ignored him and the pleading emotions he sent through her. Instead, she knelt and addressed the young new Sultan, "Please release him, your majesty. We will leave and never return if you will spare the sword. He is no threat to you."

  "Nor are you, but you will die next for interrupting my entertainment," the Sultan drawled, signaling his guards.

  "Release him or know no mercy," she warned. "You arrogant, misshapen, self-indulgent fool!"

  At the unaccustomed insult, she got Madeer's attention, clear enough from the wave of fury she felt flare in him. "Kill them both!" he spat.

  "Your choice," she whispered as she took mental hold of his fury, his hatred and strengthened it with the depths of her love, even the love she could suddenly feel from the cook, from Kamon, still kneeling below the sword. The hatred became a violent, nearly untamable thing, but she subdued it and then added her fear to it before catching Madeer's eye—and sending it back to him.

  Caught in the throes of an unaccustomed wave of emotional power, the young Sultan rose, gripping his head in great pain, screaming, until he fell. His lifeless body convulsed twice more and then ceased.

  An unearthly silence filled the courtyard, but Echo could sense the cumulative fear of a hundred people who stared in horror. Fear from all but Kamon. "Release him," she told the guard and he leapt to obey. Kamon rose slowly to his knees, staring in stark admiration at the woman he loved.

  "Are you a witch?" She took a moment to think, contemplating her compatriot who was already gone, having accomplished what he had come here to do.

  "I don't know, but you are now Sultan. There is no one else to take the title."

  If there were those among the guard who might, in other circumstances, challenge Kamon's right to the throne, they feared the witch at his side too much to argue.

  "It is not the title I want."

  "I can offer no more. I cannot give you my heart, for it is yours already."

  So it was, on the first day of Kamon's forty year reign, that Kamon earned the speechless respect of his subjects as he took that powerful, dangerous witch in his arms and kissed her. When he wed her, he sealed that respect for the length of his reign.