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
