Mortal Suns (2 page)

“Be silent,
you insolent old bitch—”

“I will say what I must.”

In the fire, a log burst. One more bloody reflected flame shot to the ceiling.

“Please … let her speak, madam,” said the midwife.

Hetsa snarled. She saw the midwife respected the witch more than a Daystar queen, but Hetsa had already known this. Her loins were leaden and cold, and perhaps she would bleed to death now, in the aftermath of this travesty. She might need a witch.

“Before you are rid of your child,” said Crow Claw, “you must name her.”

“
Name
her! Are you mad?”

“Madam,” said the midwife. She was bolder now she had understood she had nothing to fear. Witnesses could attest to her skills. It was the queen’s womb that was at fault. And there were too many well-born women in this room to kill. They would have to be bribed instead. “If you send her—
there,
she must have her name. She can’t go down into that place without it. You must take pity. It would be—a blasphemy.”

Hetsa buried her face in her hands, and tore her hair. The women were too unnerved to stop her. Besides, in this mood, she was very dangerous.

“Then I’ll name her,” said Hetsa at last. Sweat and powder had dried in lines on her face. Her mouth was red from biting. She looked hideous. “She shall be
Cemira.
”

One or two exclaimed, shocked despite everything.

“Madam—that’s the name of a monster—”

“And so she is!” screamed Hetsa. She reared up from the couch like a snake, shrieking, howling, until once again her body abandoned her to her emotions, and dropped senseless and silent.

Crow Claw
went to the shrine of Bandri and lifted up the bundle in its robe of rich silk that had been laid ready, but certainly not for
it.

The faces of the very old and of the utterly young sometimes resemble one another, and did so now.

“If it was a daughter, it was to have been called
Calistra,
” muttered the midwife.

Crow Claw looked down at the child. It gazed back blindly, moving a little, not crying. It was alive, and if one had not seen all, perfect.

“Well. She is Cemira now.
You are named.
”

“May we be forgiven,” someone whispered.

Two lamps, another and another, trembled, faded, went out.

His House had been built west in Akhemony, under Mt. Koi, many hundreds of years before, where the first black terrace of the mountain was laid by the gods. Above Koi, the Mountain of the Heart ascended. Here, of all places, the Heartbeat of the Land sounded most loudly.

It was a three-day journey, but in winter might take five, or seven days, depending on the roads.

The two soldiers rode blank-faced, in the black livery of the temple. Their swords and knives were honed, and their eyes sharp. Bandits grew more shy in the hills at wintertime, but were not unheard of, and although this mission was sanctified, now and then cutthroats and outcasts might chance the wrath of heaven. After all, there was the small casket of gold to be considered, a Daystar’s gift to Thon.

The person of the child was holy, and for this reason an ugly sallow priestess accompanied them, in her black-curtained litter slung between two ponies, and attended by an outrider. She fed the child at the infrequent stipulated times, with the watered milk of a black ewe. Almost continuously, already, the child might be heard wailing from hunger, and once the milk curdled, there would be no more. Lucky for it, the cold had kept the milk four days. And, although the peaks that rose above them were chalked with white, no snow had fallen here; there were making good time and would reach the House tonight.

Late in the afternoon, the road slanted upward again, the enclosing rocks drew away, and the slopes of Koi were fully and awesomely revealed, half darkly dense, half transparently drifting on the settling mist. Behind, Heart Mountain was itself an iron ghost. Ethereal, it rested its white skull in the dome of the sky, its base quite lost.

The temple guard drew rein. They, and the outrider, bowed to their horses’ necks, touching their own hearts that echoed the beating from the mountain core so exactly.

She too, the sullen and unlovely priestess, peered from the litter, touched her heart, and bowed. She did not bother to show the baby, only leaving it to wail on from hunger and cold and desolation, amid the cushions of the litter.

The great
Sun was down, on their left hand now, and the lesser sun, the Daystar, was herself setting, when the party reached the Phaidix Rock. At the spot where the pale marble Phaidix rode her mountain lion, her bow raised and tarnished silver arrow poised to catch, at some point of the night, the moon on its tip, the soldiers halted, and the priestess got out, with the pain-singing child in her grip.

Up the road, straight now as a rule, stood the oblong portico of the Temple of Thon, the House of Death.

Two pairs of black pillars—four, Thon’s sacred number—with carved whitish capitals of bone, and the ancient black-bronze bowl between them, the height of a man just before full growth, was sending up its never-ending stream of smoke.

Leftwards, the road tumbled gradually away. Far down there, the decayed sunset of the greater Sun still hung a cloud-caught drift of frigid, mauvish red, into which the Daystar was vanishing with only a silvery streak. Up the flanks of both mountains ran a single, deathly, colorless ribbon, Koi’s the brighter.

In the House of Death, an eye was always watching.

Now, out of the impenetrable black of the doorway, two black figures came. Within their hoods, a black void was to be seen, as with the door.

Although the soldiers were Thon’s, and had been so, each of them, for ten years or more, they were not immune. Their features pointed, hollowed. One was sweating in the bitter air.

It was the priestess who spoke up.

“I bring a daughter for Thon.”

The two black figures stood immobile. All light drained from Koi, from the Heart. On the road, dusk gathered and swelled. The Phaidix shone strangely for a moment, like ice, and was extinguished.

“Enter then.”

The voice, disembodied, did not come from the beings on the track, but out of some vast mouth-chamber of the temple itself.

Boldly, perhaps only because her ugliness had made her a fool, the priestess went quickly forward, up the road, towards the temple.

As she did this, the two faceless figures turned about, and moved ahead of her.

Soldiers and outrider
followed. They knew quite well that for them there would be austere comforts in this place: mulled wine, and roasted meat, of a hare perhaps, a creature sacred to Thon; beds warm enough, if not luxurious and no one to share them. Nothing then, to fear. Even so, they hung back as they rode, on their very bones, these men, making towards that doorway of high, impenetrable black, beyond the smoking bowl that smelled of storms and wormwood.

For the child, it gave one last lost squeal, and grew as still, quite properly, as death.

My first memory.

Of the earliest memories, only one, which is composed of dozens, one image repeated and repeated, perhaps changeable, ever the same. The memory of Death.

It is the Arteptans who are black. A mysterious and scholarly race, their cities, tombs, and monuments of polished stone, tower beyond the ground, touching sky, as elsewhere, usually, only the landscape does, the architecture of gods.

Thon was not black, despite his colors—the black robes of his priesthood and soldiers, the black of his temples and his animals—hares, black foxes, the hill leopard, black sheep and goat and cow, the crow and raven. One could never for a moment confuse the warm ebony of human skin for the lifelessness of that other black. Besides, black, in this land, was not the color of mourning.

He rears out of the darkness of the inmost shrine, where the four torches find him. He did so then and, in my mind, he does so yet.

Thus: the sudden burst of light, upon that colossal, perhaps disembodied head, seen high in the black air—the face was corpse-white, the eyes dull silver ringed with red. The lips were purple, bruised but not from kissing. His teeth, yellow, pointed like stakes. And from this face, the hair strewn back as if by a gale—
standing on end.
The hair of Thon, the god of death, is blood, made of blood, the blood exploding from a wound, the blood we see in nightmares, if we have truly sinned.

Of course, the statue is only nine feet in height. But to a child, or infant, crouching on the floor of the area already scattered with so many bones, the head will seem to swim in space, since he is robed in black like his priests, and has no form, is only like a pillar, without hands or feet, without torso, legs, or arms. He has no phallus. Evidently, for Thon is not the giver but the Taker of Life.

“Do any
remain?”

It was a ritual question. Tonight it was virtually rhetorical. Sometimes the pious, consigning their unwanted babies or youngest children—none over the age of one year was acceptable—to the House of Thon, left provision. And so a secret priest would come, and administer a little food, for that particular child. In this case, the gift of gold was specifically for the god, that had been made most clear. This baby was to be left, in the sanctum, without covering or nurture of any sort. Thereafter, the decreed four nights would pass, and the three or four days before and between.

Supposedly the slough of some woman of the queens’ courts, this one had only had to survive three days, four nights. That had been random, fate, dependent on the hour of arrival. Even so, newborn, it could not possibly have survived. The sanctum was also deadly chill, and the baby had lain stripped naked at the footless foot of the god, among the skeletons of all the others who had perished there through the centuries.

“I will open the door, and see.”

The ritual answer.

They stood, the two priestesses of Thon, black-robed, the black mask, half a black eggshell, over each face, eyes glimmering at the slits, pitiless from more than shadow.

Held high, the new torch flared.

Bones like curious treasure, all shades, from brown to sheerest snowy white. And the black stretches where they had been pushed and swept aside. Here and there in the enormous room, were a few less clean, whose owners had died more recently.

Below the edifice of the god, the baby lay, the daughter of Queen Hetsa, sixteenth Daystar of the Great Sun, the King.

“Look—it’s moving.”

“No. Some trick of the torch.”

“We must be sure.”

“Of course.”

If any lived, it was now unlawful not to take them up. Seldom did any live, even those who had been fed. It was not an onerous or repetitive task, to descend to the floor of the pit. Once in a hundred times, perhaps, did they have to do it.

When they
bent over the baby it rolled its head, looking up at them. Its eyes were black, as if they had drunk up, wanting anything else, the dark. It had no voice. Had it ever tried, down here, to scream for rescue, or an answer?

“What is the name?”

“I forget—some dreadful one. The mother was insane.”

“Not surprising. You see?”

“It’s deformed. It hasn’t any feet.”

“Nor it has. It’s accursed. Surely, we ought to leave it here, despite the law.”

“I didn’t hear you, sister.”

One of the priestesses of Thon bent and picked up the baby, which had come into the world so fast it had left its feet behind in the stuff of chaos. “Come along now, I’ll take it.”

“No, I have it. I remember the name. Cemira.”

Feeling the heat of a living body, after the frozen and ungiving stone of the sanctum, the child began finally, faintly to whimper.

“Hush,” said the priestess. The child stared up into the black eggshell of face, the slits of pitiless eyes. Were they pitiless? Instinctively, the woman rocked the child, and carried it off, to where they would warm for it a little milk, which anyway might kill it, now, after this interval of famine.

“The child is dead. She is dead, and your servant, Lord Thon. Accept her. Her name, Cemira, has been entered upon your list. She rests helpless on your knees. She is dead, and she is yours.
Alcos emai
.”

After six days, once the fever had departed, and the baby was found able to see, hear, move and make noises, the priests pronounced her dead. That is, alive, and a slave of the Temple of Thon, in Akhemony.

Whether cripple or whole, witless or wise, from now until her physical ending, she would serve here the blood-haired god.

Alcos emai
, used at the finish of countless prayers, means in that tongue,
So it is
.

I can see her
quite distinctly, the child. This must be the first memory of self. She is leaning on her two little canes, with their rests propped under her arms. She wears the long, black child’s tunic that reaches to the floor, where her feet would be, if she had any. Under the tunic is the black, sleeved shift. Like all the children, all the priests and priestesses when unmasked in the House of Thon, she is waxy pale. She has a small pointed face like that of a small cat, cut from lunar opal, with big ringed eyes. Her mouth turns down, not from temper or displeasure, but like a dry flower that is dying. Her hair, between straight and coiled, is golden as the metal fringes on the robe of her father, the Great Sun, King Akreon, in the palace at Oceaxis—Lakesea—to the east. The father she has never, and never will ever see. Except—across the river of time.

Someone called to the children, the five of them who were in the porch, watching the snow settle on the kitchen court.

“You and you. You, you. You.”

Although they were permitted to keep their given names, their only possession, the names were never spoken. Death was an eater of titles, as of flesh.

The children approached the black-faced, unfeatured priestess. She was the tall, thin one they were particularly frightened of.

“Why are you idling here? Haven’t you anything to do?”

“The snow,” said the littlest child, a boy of about two and a half. Until the age of four—the sacred number—male and female went unsegregated. It had been noticed long before that sometimes the tiny girls could comfort the tiny boys, and the tiny boys lend the tiny girls a sense of duty. These were the male and female role—virtues, here, servitors, succorers, which were offered to them as ideals.