Mortal Suns (34 page)

I said, “Ermias, you’ve been a friend to me. I regret I can’t do more for you.”

She put back her head and stared into my eyes. It was unnerving, suddenly to be conscious, in my gleaming exclusive happiness, of another life that was not his or mine.

She was thirty or more by now. She kept her attractions, her curly hair prettily dressed, her form voluptuous and graceful. I recall, she wore earrings shaped like moons.

“Another High Queen.” she said, “might have killed or banished me, because I went with him when she could not.”

Astonished, I felt a blush of shame in turn rush up my throat and face. I lowered my eyes, and ran my finger over the head of the white dog.

I said, diffidently, “Don’t you want anything? Ask me, perhaps I can see to it.”

Ermias stared on at me.

All at once she said. “You’re in the sunny mesh of fortune, madam. Oh—be careful.”

I met again her eyes. They were wide and dark. I thought of her in the doorway announcing fatefully Klyton, and her yellow dress.

“What
are you saying?”

“He—may not love you always,” she faltered.

Until then, I had never thought of that. It had been a task of many struggling, frantic years, to reach him. Now we were one. Tales of heroes end in bliss. I did not think to chide her.

“Why do you mention such a thing, Ermias?”

“What’s come to you—it burns too bright—” she cried out.

Had I called her in for this? I had learned with time a few forms of behavior, and now recalled them.

“I shall forget you said it. Ermias. Now go away. It seems in fact I must banish you. Go to the estate I’ve given you. Remain there.”

She fled me. She had cause. Another Queen, as she herself might have added, could have repaid her with much distress. Naively, I did not assume she had spoken from malice. I think she did not. She had done well, and might have done better, keeping my friendship. What then, oh what, seizes on us all, at such times, to make us speak what is not in us, like a bell struck by some unseen hand.

The lamps had been lit, and far beyond the pillared terrace, when I parted the shutters, the Lakesea lay winter-dim. In the gardens mist had gathered like ghosts. All I considered, was how Klyton had climbed to me up this wall.

I was young, I was young, and soon enough, marked as always by the flurry of our servants, he would be here, the trumpet note, the Sun’s rise.

I folded Ermias away in my mind. Deep in that chest I buried her cry,
It burns too bright.
That cry the wisewomen in Ipyra had been too wise to utter.

One scene does come to me, all at once, now, delineated more intensely than my coronation, than the first time even Klyton lay with me.

It is my bedchamber, in the earliest of some summer morning. I see the sunlight, pink as a cat’s tongue, on the high blond bed with its frame of citroen wood, inset with ivory, its ivory stems and feet, its patterned linen, and gauze curtains drifting like thin glass become smoke. The designs on the floor I see, the tiny squares of russet, mauve and rose. Gemli’s little shrine, with an electrum bowl of straw-colored flowers, that have filled the air all night with the cool aroma of pale fruits. The small flame there flickers, and makes each flower seem to stir, as if about to flutter away. The dog lies stilly sleeping at the bedfoot, and the sunlight through the drape finds also pink in his alabaster coat. On the walls the never-moving women are gathering unfading tamarinds. But they are motionless and sleeping too, the man and girl. Their long hair has mingled in the night, his bronzy gold with her fairness, which he compares to topaz. Yet, in slumber, their bodies have dropped quietly apart, like two halves of a broken shell.

And she has no
feet.

Soon they will wake, turn thirstily together, and be one again. The dog will shake himself, and the birds sing. Akhemony will ring with sunshine.

And when the second year sweeps in, we will gallop through its arch in our chariot of victory, behind the starry horses, the world running after with ribbons and music. Up, up, towards the scorching Sun.

U
NDER THE SLOPES OF AIRIS
, herders had pastured their flocks. They came up also from Ipyra now, to the thick summer grazing, and mingled mostly freely with the folk of northern Akhemony. Now and then there might be a spat, boys fighting over a patch of clover for their goats, or a ram that had mounted another man’s sheep. These things were put right usually before the Sun had set. It was becoming another lush summer, after quenching, full rains. There was more than enough for all.

By afternoon, the
land
stretched beneath the sky’s warm bowl, showing slight movement, and purring with bees. Below, the fields were flushing to their green, and above, the trees that circled the lower mountain, had gained a green as dense in color as blood. The crag rose, cut clean as if carved from marble. Birds flashed down, and upwards. Sheep lazily grazed, or lay under the trees with thinking, watching faces.

A boy, having eaten ewe’s cheese and raisins, sat with his pipe, making a tune. If he had any awareness beyond the tune, his flock, he did not know it. And so, as a shambling unhuman figure crested the slope, he viewed it a moment with apathy.

The bright wall of the sky was at its back, undimmed by any cloud. The shape of the figure seemed all jagged edges, darkened, flattened, and uncouth, having no purpose in the day.

The sheep nearby under
the tree started, and got up, and came trotting towards their keeper. Rising then in his turn, the boy let out a warning yell. Though he had barely seen what this thing was, the hair now was lifting on his neck. He wanted others, the men from farther off, with the herd dogs.

But the figure stopped quite some way from the boy. It had the semblance of a head, and used it, to look about, as if only just now had it evolved there, from some other country that was not like this one. Some country perhaps that had no sky, and no land.

“Keep back!” shrilly shouted the boy, standing in the white huddle of the sheep.

The figure in fact had not come on. Now it turned its head, such as the head was, in the direction of the boy. There sounded a breath like a punctured bellows. “What say?”

It, too, could speak in a fashion. The voice on the wheeze of breath was rough, breaking across the words—oddly just as the boy’s voice sometimes broke at the approach of manhood.

“Keep back—keep off—”

“Is danger?” asked the thing, which possibly
was
a man. And then, gently, in those tones of crunched shale, “Don’t fear, will help.”

At this moment two men dashed down from the higher pastures, with three big dogs. There were boar in the upper woods, and sometimes lions, one took no chances with a frightened call. Knives glinted. One man rushed straight at the creature, and the dogs bounded with him. All pulled up three feet or four feet away. But it was the dogs, bred for their fight, and who had tackled wolves only this winter gone, who went down belly-flat, showing their teeth, ears back, growling, not moving one inch closer.

“Came over the hill—” cried the boy.

The man who had got close to the figure backed off and the dogs backed off with him, slow, like stones moving.

“What are you?” shouted the man. “What do you want?”

The figure looked, as it seemed, aimlessly now. But the nearer man saw it had only one eye, a muddy watered black in a bloodshot and terrible, staring, bulging eyeball. Where the other eye had been was a pit, like the crater of a burned-out volcano.

Braver, and impatient the second man strode up and struck the intruder across the head. The creature reeled, and then peculiarly whipped back. Taking hold of its aggressor as he tried another blow, it had him at once over, and down on the ground. The thing stood above him, watching him with the repulsive eye. Even at this the dogs did not fly for its throat.

But it made
no further attack, not pressing its advantage. The man presently struggled up, and limped aside.

“Leave it be,” he gasped, no longer so valiant.

The thing, unmoved, gazed up now at the sky. It would have been easy enough, as the herders said after, to have flung one of the knives, or a rock, at its big shape and so bring it down. But some new mood had begun to come over them, more than anger, or superstitious unease. Like the dogs at last, they felt themselves in the presence of something—not only uncanny, but crucial— something that had been seared by gods.

“Where this place?” the creature finally asked.

The men stupidly shook their heads. The boy shook away the sheep. The dogs lay belly-flat, and one, the mightiest, had urinated from fear. This sharp smell mixed with the stink of the holy and unholy figure, which other stench later they named as being like the reek of a butchered fowl-yard.

In a few moments more, the thing shambled away, as it had come, but going on now towards the south, and downwards in the direction of the fields and farms. When it was almost out of sight among the violet shadow of the lower woods, the men thought they had better follow it. There were women about below at their usual domestic chores, and cattle, and the vines.

They did not ask themselves why they had not answered the thing that this was Airis, under the mountain. It did not occur to them that they too, in that instant, had mislaid the country, and were lost, as if in alien climes.

Only seventy men made up the garrison now, in the Sword House at Airis.

It was a fort of ochre-plastered stone, built up into the rock. On one side, the sweep over to Ipyra, and its jade green river, from which came recently, of course, only friends. On the other side, rustic Akhemony.

The young captain had been bored enough that day, holding the fort while others went off hunting. King Klyton did not come up much to Airis now. He preferred to keep the summer months for battle training, or for inspections of his outer empire. Even Udrombis the Widow had not yet visited this year. Later there would be the Sun Race and games, but that was not yet. The captain found Airis fairly dull.

When he heard
the commotion below, he went down because it was his duty to look into such matters. He expected the same as it had been the last two times, a feud between drunken farmers, an Ipyran sheep-stealer.

“Well?” he said, walking into the courtyard. There were two peasants who had ridden here pell-mell on ponies, animals and men steaming from their speed.

The soldiers looked bemused, or tickled.

“They say, sir, some—ah—
demon
has walked into the town.”

“A demon? That’s quaint. Of what sort?”

One of the soldiers laughed.

The shaggier of the peasants said firmly, “He came down from the hills under the mountain. Just appeared there in the meadows—”

“In a smoke-cloud?”

The peasant scowled. “It was like he’d come from the Ipyran country, but no one saw him come.”

“That’s a fact,” said the captain amiably. “None of us saw anyone cross, since herders yesterday.”

“He’s no demon. Not like a man, but—a man,” went on the peasant, brazening it out.

The captain nodded, and made a brisk gesture to a couple of sniggering soldiers to be quiet. The captain had recalled suddenly that, although he himself had seen the light in Oceaxis, and fought in the ranks under such Suns as Amdysos and Adargon, the captain’s granddad, whom he had liked, was not much different from this hairy peasant here. “What trouble is he giving you?”

“We’re afraid,” said the peasant simply.

That sobered the captain properly.

He could see this man was no fool, nor a coward, he had the courage-badge of scars on his arm, plainly written by a mountain leopard. Despite his garments and sweat, he stood straight and had not lost his temper, or his nerve, before the soldiers’ mockery.

“Why fear?” asked the captain.

“His body is broken all out of shape, but he still walks. His teeth are broken, and his nails long, like the dead. He’s strong. He threw Gol down, and that’s the first Gol was ever bested. The dogs and other beasts act oddly around him. Even the cocks started to crow when he came up, as they do for fire or an earthshake.”

“All right,
a cripple. What’s he done?”

“He went up the path to the gate of the summer palace. There’s no guard there now, only the steward, and a dozen men, and slave women. He stood about there, then sat down.”

The captain said quietly, “Someone should feed the poor devil. Give him some slops and beer, and send him on his way.”

“One did,” said the talking peasant. He stood more straight with his news. “We’d put the women inside the houses, but old Thistle came out, and brought him a dish of softened bread in honey. He took it and sat looking at it with his one eye, which has no proper upper lid. He didn’t eat, and Thistle—someone’s trying to pull her off, but she struggles and squeals. And then she kneels down in the road and sobs.”

“And you should be kinder to your women.”

“It wasn’t that, sir. She was crying over and over about the Sun—”

“Wait. I don’t understand you.”

“I mean a Sun Prince, sir. One of King Akreon’s sons.”

Heat, then chill, passed over the captain’s shoulders and spine like swiftly tossed water. The yard was silent as a grave, and high up he heard a hawk scream in the iris of the light-clear sky. A hawk, but not an eagle.

“You tell me she was confused,” was all he said.

“Sir, she was crying like a little child. She’s old, but not silly. She sees to the womens’ ailments, and they get well.”

“So she was calling for protection from the Sun House. And you came here.”

“Sir, she wasn’t calling for help. She said this one—this thing—the broke ruin that slouched there over the honey-bread—she called him Amdysos, son of Akreon. The Sun come back from under the world.”

He left fifty-five men at the fort, and left them alert. Astonished, the captain had even had some notion Ipyra, forgetting her radiant marriage to Akhemony, had somehow staged these antics to draw off watch from the pass.