Stepping down from her
bed, she prepares to follow the whisperers. She appears to be gliding in air as
she tries not to lose sight of them. They take her through this passage. A
passage hidden from the public eye for centuries and covered in green moss,
wild ferns and wet vines creeping over an old Moorish wall. In the far corner of
it, a creaky wooden door stands slightly ajar. Even the staffs here don’t know
of its existence. The embodiment of the silent voices sail through as the
princess follows them. They turn around when the princess stumbles on a dead
log. She rises, but she doesn’t wake up from her sleepwalk. She follows them until
they walk her through the great palace gates and to lead her further away and then
deep into the garden hedges. She is tired by now. She lies down on the stump of
a tree and slowly passes out. But she wakes up rapidly and finds herself here
not knowing how she came. But she must hurry and return to the palace. The
voices are gone!
At first she is
disoriented. She looks around. Her whisperers come back abruptly. They egg her
on. Before the minutes pass, a portal is opened and a shadow appears in the dark.
It begins to walk towards a door. Gawking at the figure with tears stained
eyes, her lips parted she clutches on to her shimmering dress of white pearls
in a panic. The voices come and go intermittently.
“Come with me, princess,”
commands a male voice.
“I ... I don’t want to,”
she hiccups and sobs.
“Where’re you taking me?”
“Come. You have a
mission to fulfil.”
“A mission to fulfil?
What mission would that be?”
“Take this.”
The male figure extends
a studded sword of precious rock asking her to hold it. In the dark, she slips
her tiny palm carelessly over the sword. She can’t stop sobbing. She wants to
break loose, run as fast as she can. But her hand was now locked in the iron fist
of this man on the sword; no matter, how much she squirms she can’t get out,
neither can she stop those tears.
“W---What’s this?”
“The voices will lead
you from here on?”
And they do. Those apparitions return to walk her through a
portal where all her seven cousins, the future rulers peacefully sleep. In a
trance, she picks them up one at a time and through the portal brings them out
near the fountain. With the sword in one hand, she holds their heads with the other,
while they sleep standing still like babies on opium. Then with the incisive
blade, she butchers them one after the other slicing through the neck. When all
the cousins are dead at last, she comes back to her senses as the ghosts leave
her to her memories. She looks at the massacre. Her opal eyes wide open this
time. Streaming blood at the fountains of the Twelve Lions, the severed heads
of the seven cousins lie amok on the paved path.
This disturbs her
fragile mental balance. The princess loses consciousness and lies with her dead
cousins. However, when she wakes up, she finds herself not at the fountain but
in her royal quarters with the psychologist and nurses pouring over her with deep
concern.
“What just happened?”
“You passed into a deep
sleep your royal highness from the effects of the medicine. We couldn’t wake
you up.”
“Did anyone get assassinated
in the palace?”
“Not that we know of.”
“Oh! Thank God for
that! It was all a horrific nightmare.”
“Was it? All of it?”
the psychiatrist asked.
“No, some parts are
true. I do hear voices. And I’m never happy.”
They sit looking at
each other. The princess holds the young psychiatrist mesmerised who can’t take
his eyes off her. After a while they
both smile wanly. But then as the legend goes, those princes’ were brutally
killed near about the same place and manner by unseen hands at some point in
history, within the palace of Alhambra. It is not know even to this day how or
why they were murdered.
THE END...
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