Mortal Suns (11 page)

She was a child. As Crow Claw forewarned her, now she is old; she thinks herself one still.

After Klyton had met my eyes with his in the Sun Temple, when I was seven, the world about me altered.

I did not seek Ermias, who was, apparently, my necessary foe. Nor could I talk to Kelbalba, who had gone away to her father’s house in the hills.

Instead I discussed my life with the turtle.

“If you go
that
way after your ball, then it will be.”

The turtle went the way I desired.

It was settled. I must work hard upon myself.

Not knowing that, only in Artepta, Charchis sometimes, here and there, now and then, but seldom, did brothers wed their sisters, I had decided that, when I was of the proper age, I would marry the unnamed boy-man who had looked at me. It was not I thought myself worthy of him—how could I be. Besides he was a symbol—I see it now—of something unknown, dangerous and alluring as the edge of a cliff. But I had been carefully tutored. There were gods. Their blood ran in my family.
They
would assist me.

I wove new
stories, about him. I made him songs, not knowing this was improper. He was the Sun as a youth, going out to hunt the Sunburned mountainsides. He lay sleeping in the shade, and the Daystar smiled upon him, and flowers grew into his hair to garland him.

Luckily, so solitary, wishing often to be private, I did not sing these songs in the presence of any but slaves. They were ciphers any way. Yet, when Ermias came, I fell simply to humming the tune.

“Twang, twang,” said Ermias. “What discords. What a dunce you are, Calistra.”

I put down the harp. My hands were cold.

Ermias seemed fatter by the day. How she hated it. There was a pouch under her chin, and a cushion at her waist. Despite her duties, she was infrequently, to my delight, in the apartment. Her lovers were liars, and she knew.

The year that Calistra was eight, and Sun Prince Klyton thirteen, war broke in Sirma. It was a matter of tribute to the Great Sun, which was refused. Conceivably they expected to be let off, having heard tales. But Farmer Glardor put down his pruning hook, and hefted his sword. With a thousand cavalry, many hundred foot, some siege engines and catapults, the troops marched south in bronze fall weather. Sirma was little. It would be a short campaign. Perhaps a farmer knew, weeds and tares must not be let come up, even in the onion patch.

“He swaggers too much. He doesn’t need to. He’s a prince. If Glardor stepped aside, it would be him. What does he need to show?”

Amdysos was watering his horse at the brook, downstream with the cavalry. At fifteen, he looked almost fully a man, magnificent enough, and he took his own advice, was modest and quiet-spoken where possible. His men liked him, and were not put out by his age.

Klyton looked less a man, more a wayward god in youth and armor. Something eccentric in the lines of him, something fantastic and magical, pleased. He was thought too young to be given a command, although Okos had apparently had one at thirteen, in the battles with Uaria. Some perverse idiocy had put Klyton too among the ranks of Pherox’s detachment. Amdysos had tried to change that. As Klyton said, it was like the school, where they split you from your friends to make you conscious of new ones, which had not worked.

Pherox, at
twenty, rode up and down the lines of men, mature man and warrior. He had fought before, small uprisings here and there, all called wars. Sufficient. His sword, as they said, had drunk.

Handsome, like them all, he had the darkness of his mother, black hair, black eyes, and an arrogance and coldness that made one bite the tongue.

It was a fact. If Glardor—not euphemistically “stepped aside,” but
died
—Pherox would be the Great Sun. Udrombis had borne him on a night of tempest. It had been a difficult birth. You could believe it of him.

Klyton let his gelding have the water. He watched it. He said, “Do you remember when Pherox took the apple—”

Amdysos roared with laughter.

Klyton did not turn. He felt the eyes of Pherox on them both. Pherox did not like their friendship. He had said openly that they were not only brothers but lovers, which had never been true, at least not true in the carnal sense. To Pherox, male love—of any sort—was shoddy. He should have read the legends. The Sun god’s many loves of every gender. But the strain that was, in Udrombis, burnished stone, and in Amdysos, pragmatism, was in Pherox—poison.

The incident of the apples had occurred when Klyton and Amdysos were boys, six and eight years old. Pherox was thirteen, Klyton’s age today.

Stabia had been given a gift of apples, some country present, nice enough, but too many. Klyton and Amdysos ate their fill, and then had a slave cast the apples in the air so they could try to split them flying, with arrows.

Pherox appeared. He lectured them on this waste of fruit. They were children. What did they know.

Then he picked an apple off the garden bench. It happened to be the showpiece of the gift, a fruit of green and red stained marble. They watched him, and at his unawareness, neither spoke out. When he took it directly to his mouth and champed on it in righteous fury, it broke a side tooth, which, to this hour, might be seen flashing its repaired cap of silver.

They had been
friends from the beginning, from when Stabia and Udrombis had leaned together in the cool, scented rooms, and Klyton and Amdysos had fought and played like foxes on the floor.

Pherox did not think quickly enough, or look properly at things. About the look and feel of an apple, whether it were flesh or stone, at friendship that had nothing to do with ambition. At his own stance on the black Arteptan horse.

He had two wives, and both had given him, already, sons. He called them, Pherox, his flocks and herds.

“The Sun’s going,” said Amdysos.

Far up the hill, thinly, the priest might be heard singing out the incantation. Arndysos tipped a few drops from his wineskin into the stream … “
Do not forget us.
”

Pherox was gone. He had not bothered, as several had not, to salute the dying Sun. Campaign was different. The gods were not unreasonable. Still, if one could.

“It should be the first Sirmian town tomorrow,” said Klyton.

“Yes. How do you feel?”

“I don’t know,” Klyton said. “Keen, I suppose. Very, very brave.”

Brief but opaque, doubt drifted through both their eyes. Tomorrow they must, for the first time, kill a man. Or, they might—unbelievably—die.

Farmer Glardor gave a dinner for his captains, and for the Sun Princes who were in the camp.

Outside, the evening was gravid with storm. The thunder stumbled about the sky from north to south, east to west, banging against the winds that were rising. The trees bent, groaning, and dry leaves rattled between the tents like quills of thin metal. Those who claimed still to hear the beat of the Heart, mostly, now admitted they lost it.

When the strongest wine came, at the end of the food, Glardor gave a speech.

The younger men shifted uncomfortably, the eldest sat grim and unspeaking, drinking great quaffs. It was inappropriate, the speech. It concerned peace and the peaceful role of the Great Sun.

“He must bring
life,” said Glardor, red-faced, expansive, his mantle loose, as one or two said later, as a whore’s dress. “Life to his fields. He must ripen the fruit and the vine.”

Pherox sat openly sneering. But he, too, kept silent.

Amdysos said, afterwards, when he and Klyton were sitting in Amdysos’s tent, “He wants his farm.”

“No, worse, he thinks Akhemony
is
his farm.”

“Well …”

“Didn’t he guess the picture he made?”

“Evidently not.”

Glardor clove to his wife, now the Sun-Consort, but she was seldom seen, and barren. He had too, a score of illegal sons who, if it came to it, might cause trouble one day.

It was hot in the tent, and hot outside. Klyton’s own tent, over with Pherox’s troop, was hottest of all. The autumn weather was perhaps unseasonally warm, and here and there they had passed, on the march, carpets of spring flowers nosing from the soil before their time. Winter would find them presently, and put them down again.

The first Sirmian town was two hours’ march away in the morning.

Amdysos slept, no doubt, breathing deeply as he always did, as if slumber was a drink. Outside the tent flap here, a slave was snoring.

Alone, Klyton thought of dying. What terrified him, he found, was the length of his life that then would be unlived all that he meant to do, but which yet he had not
found
to do. It seemed to him that Glardor would not last as King, and in a curious state, between sleep and waking, he saw Glardor vanish, and Pherox too, somehow, brushed away like the too-early and unsuitable flowers. Then Amdysos was the Great Sun Amdysos, who would be exactly right, powerful and just, brave and self-controlled. Amdysos too would need Klyton, with his tinder-strikes of amusement and action, imagination,
fire
.

What might they not do then? King and King’s Commander. They two.

But if I die tomorrow
—Klyton pushed his mind towards the god, to the Sun.
I leave it with you. You must decide. If I am worthy, let me live and do bright and weighty things. Or let me go down into the dark.

Calm came then. The gods were reasonable. And Klyton knew himself not so bad.

Phaidix stood over him at last, not to drain his valor, only to bring him sleep. She was cold and pitiless and beautiful, her silver hair falling on his eyes, like the rain which, presently, unheard in slumber, laved the encampment and the hills.

The Sirmian town,
seen through the downpour, looked like an anthill, high, mud-colored walls, a haphazard warren of buildings rising up and up the hill within.

Of course, you could hear the Heart still. Only the rain drowned it out.

The Sirmians had sling-throwers ready on the walls with a good range. Glardor’s force had had its rest half a mile back. Now they were marched in precipitately, and the stones came pounding. Horses screamed and slithered and men dropped on to the muck of the running ground. Glardor’s force was pulled back.

“There’s the weak place in the wall,” said the man on Klyton’s left.

Glardor’s Charchian strategist had pointed it out quickly, having analysed the messages last night from his scouts.

Two of the catapults were heaved forward, the crews under their awnings of straw and hide. There would be no attempts to use flame—the rain had taken that gambit from the hands of aggressors and defenders alike.

The first huge spoon was loaded with a rock the size of a door. Klyton watched from his horse as the gang let slip the restraining rope. The catapult-arm bounded forward, hit the buffer, and let off its missile, which fizzed over, tearing the curtain of water in half, and smashed, head-on, precisely where the mooted weakness was. And so it must have been. At once a massive crack slit through the Sirmian bastion. The catapult crew, the surrounding men, raised a cheer. Up on the wall, you could hear them now, groaning and calling on gods.

Klyton gentled his restive horse.

“Hush. Look. You’ve seen it before. Didn’t the dealer praise you to me? There’s nothing to it.”

The second catapult spoon was dragging back, being loaded up. The entire procedure was repeated. As the second stone went off, somebody cried to the town, “Hey, don’t you like our kisses?”

There was a laugh.

The stone went home like the first, and this time a gout of masonry exploded outwards.

That was
enough. Men were running with their swords. Klyton thought, dismayed by a sudden peculiar inertia, almost boredom,
Is this all
?

Then, shouting, Prince Pherox turned on his black gelding.

“
Go!
”

Klyton kicked the horse. Despite its fidgits, battle-trained, it went at once. He pulled the spear into position beside his body. They were riding now, headfirst at the shattered wall, from which small lumps, like broken flesh, still tumbled down.

Another rage of little lethal stones lashed through the rain, whining like gnats. The man on the left, knee to knee with Klyton, made a gasp as if to sneeze, and plunged from sight. His horse galloped on. In the next rows, twenty or more horses must have passed over him.

Klyton did not look back.

He put down his head, and just in time, a stone glanced off his helmet. Damnable Sirmian riffraff. He must try to be angry. Not too angry, keep steady. But none of it seemed remotely real.

The walls were huge now. They were up against them. Stones dashed down, and pieces now of broken-up furniture. The horse shied from a little table that perhaps, only a day ago, held someone’s supper dish and cup.

The enemy were here. They were riding out through the breach in the wall as the attackers came against it.

So this was an enemy.

Klyton felt at a loss. He raised his spear and cast it, with intemperate learned skill. It caught a man in the throat, as he had meant it to, and swivelling as this one fell, took another one down, also.

Klyton drew the blade from its scabbard. The sword, his first, had on its pommel, like the knife, an eagle.

I’m not awake. I must feel something—

Rising, standing up in his stirrups, Klyton shouted. His voice broke, as it never did now in speech, and from his lips issued an unearthly fearful shriek.

There was a Sirmian right in front of him, less than three sword lengths away, all at once, leaning in to him. The man had a vermilion ribbon tying back his long loose hair. His armor was spectacular, bronze with brass and colcai, the mix of gold and copper, decorating armlets and breast. No helm. Possibly he had lost it.

“Is that
how you sound in bed, Pretty?” he said to Klyton. It was conversational.

All around, the red noise of fighting, the oaths, yells, and cries of pain. The jewels of red horse eyes that gleamed and went out, the lightning slash of swords, knives.

Klyton brought up his sword and sliced open the man’s cheek, so it hung from him like an ill-cut slice from a joint. The man had done nothing to him but jibe. Somehow he had moved so slowly, and Klyton, not seeming to, very fast. The man swung over and off his horse into the mud that was already, in places, richly scarlet.