Mortal Suns (28 page)

When he went
to the King’s tent at dinner, Nexor said nothing. The King did not seem put out, or even interested.

Finally perhaps someone must have spoken. Nexor took Klyton aside as he was about to leave. The tent, hung with crimson, and heady with Orialian gums and wine fumes, seemed to have heightened Nexor’s reddish gold. Nexor spoke.

“What you did: pretty fair.”

Klyton said, “Anyone, my lord, could have done it.”

This was so true, it was insulting. But Nexor, who had not bothered with any of Klyton’s titles, or his name, and maybe did not recollect it, only nodded. Insulting Klyton in turn.

The early days of the march were uneventful. The weather shut down, white as sweetmeat, but not sweet. Within the vaulted forests, they progressed through an eerie pale shadow. Nothing else moved, as if all life had died, but for the black crows that came sometimes, and circled over gaps in the trees, watching them. The mountains jutted from the forests, blacker than the crows, with marble snow-scarps gleaming like mirrors. Into the null odor of winter cut sometimes a tindered sharpness. Soon enough, where the forest thinned, they looked up and saw a mountain that was awake, a pillar of brown smoke standing straight up from its cone. On the slopes below, a few maddened trees, nourished by the laval warmth, had broken into forward leaf and blossoms.

They passed a handful of ruins. The first fortress town was due on the eleventh day. The night before, Nexor addressed them in a jovial and, offhand way.

“We have nothing to fear, as you know. The rocks are sheer, but we’ll use catapults. I might ask for volunteers to climb up. We’ll see.”

The older commanders, the princes, glanced about at each other. Lektos, son of Akreon and a Daystar queen, said, “Sir, perhaps it should be thought out now. It will—save time tomorrow.”

Nexor smiled. “Don’t fuss, Lektos,” as if to some old nanny. “This is just why we came now. They don’t reckon to see us yet.”

“Sir, the Ipyrans know their own country. You can be sure they know we’re here.”

“You’ll
be saying next the crows are their scouts and will fly back and tell them.”

There had been some superstitious talk among the soldiers. Lektos said, without inflection, “The scouts
we
sent haven’t returned.”

“Holed up in a cozy cave,” said Nexor.

Klyton scrutinized this elected King, for whom the omens had been manufactured. He must be intent to seem valiant, and impervious: he was the Sun. Nothing could oppose him. Not an enemy, not his own kind. It had appeared he wished his initial act to be bold and decisive. For that, he had brought them into the snow, over the ice. He rejected all obstacles, had no personal nervousness, was not a coward. Nexor had no imagination at all.

Outside, Lektos had paused, quiet and grim under the stars. As Nexor’s gold was of a red sort, Lektos inclined to paleness, which lent him now a glow like blond pherom. Friends, his half brothers, stood round him, calming him, not speaking ill of the King, but explaining Nexor had not meant to dismiss or demean. Nexor was simply fixed on victory. Their eyes said other things.

Klyton thought how he and Amdysos would have digested all this. But all this would not have been, had Amdysos lived.

In the night, a band of men, conceivably only four or five hundred of them, galloped from nowhere into the camp, on their broad-backed mountain ponies, hacking down the sentries, and the soldiers who came out, half-armed, to meet them. The night changed from dark and pallor to a fitful scarlet, as flung torches set tents ablaze.

Klyton saw the faces of masculine Ipyra, as he had in a previous year, wolf faces without fur, but blotched by war paint, and embroidered by the incredible traceries of tattoo, pierced by teeth and firelit eyes. He killed six of them before they plunged away. They went up through the thinned out forest into the mountain skirts. As if to approve their action, a distant crag let off a sudden plume of muddy flame. Black ashes smelling of vomit floated down on the wind, with the retreating yells and yelps of the foe.

Next day, they got to the fort. Of course, it was halfway up a mountain. There was a shepherds’ path, treacherous as a slanted version of the river. When it was tried, the Ipyrans on the walls catcalled, and picked off the climbers with their bows and javelins. In return the catapults flung stones and burning straw, some of which at last lodged. Then the fort began to resemble the fiery, distant crag that they could see better from here. Under the fire’s cover, more men got up to the fortress gates. Before they could do anything, the Ipyrans had killed them.

So
they sat ringed round the snowy rocks, watching the town and fort escalate in flame, and then put it out.

Klytan remembered the former wars here, and what he had noted from his time in them. In summer weather, the mountains had some overgrowth, plants and bushes. These gave shelter, and a means to climb more safely. Even then such high places as this one sometimes needed to be starved out. That was simpler in the hot months, too. Now the besieged food would last, the water stay clean.

Having put out their fire, the Ipyrans danced on the walls.

Nexor came amongst his men, on his large red horse. He said, Well, they must sit and wait.

That night the snow dropped again, with the little black flakes mixed in.

Klyton walked through the camp with a couple of the others. The soldiers looked up from their spitting bluish fires. Some of the men had frostbite, and most were chilled to the bone. At their posts the sentries craned, ready-armed, staring at the swoops of a land indomitable above, robed over in pines below, which could hide almost anything.

In the dark, the luminous volcanic mountains gave a misleading witchlight that stained the stars.

Lektos said, “Even Glardor would never have pushed us into this muck.”

Another one shook his head at him. “Nexor is King.”

Klyton felt for a moment like a boy, that boy he had been on the first occasion, at Sirma, split off into Pherox’s command, the army sweeping him along like a torrent in spring. But he had not felt enough, then. Now the power of this very night took hold of him. The Sun journeyed beneath the earth. But the Sun would come back.

He said, “Men make mistakes. But the God is with us.”

Nearby, soldiers at a fire heard him, and looked up. One soldier rose. He was a bear of a man, flaxen-haired. He laughed at Klyton with pure joy and said, “There speaks a Sun. Akhemony is the God’s own.”

From
all the nearest fires they were raising their wine bottles, their old leather cups, toasting Klyton because he had spoken shining words, here in the black ice of alien winter night.

Partho, still burnished from the accolade of the beer, dressed Klyton, and brought him a piece of bread kept warm from the oven. Eating it, Klyton heard the wind had dropped. He went out. He gazed straight through the camp, up the mountain to the fortess town.

It had sounded like a filthy day, starting, but no. The yowling wind seemed to have been caught and caged. The sky had opened its doors to a flooding dawn. The Sun was rising free, over the camp, hitting the mountain face with strong yellow rays.

Klyton observed keenly the blackened walls, the seam where the catapult bolts had done some harm. And the glint of spears.

There was a low sonorous noise, more than the mumble, clink and clatter of the wakening camp.

A pane of white snow peeled abruptly from the mountain and tipped off and away, falling into a northern gorge with a strange soft crash. Klyton felt the earth grumbling under him. He braced himself like the men outside Melmia, when the Heart had stopped. In the camp there were cries and exhortations. A standard leaned over, a tent collapsed. From the burning crag, one tuft of copper phlegm shot up. Then the rumbling ceased. The volcano had cleared its throat with a small earth tremor.

But up on the Ipyran walls they were howling. Klyton looked and saw some of the damaged wall had gone, like the snow.

The Sun was behind Klyton. He could feel it like a supporting, pushing hand, the hand of a proud father, thrusting him forward to achieve some potent enterprise.

All around him the Sirmians were standing up, staring at him, as if they guessed now he would want them for something. And the men who had been Amdysos’s command, they were crowding over too.

Klyton raised his voice. “The God’s spoken. He wants them out of there.”

Worse than Nexor, surely, with his story book of warfare in winter. To go up the bare rocks now—but the Sun was in the defenders’ eyes, and they were apparently afraid. Perhaps their walls had always stood firm. Perhaps they had been given other omens.

“I’d like
to see if I can get to the top,” Klyton said, almost casually. “I don’t ask anyone to come up with me. Unless he’d like the fame.”

Ten minutes before, even discussing matters with Amdysos in the dream, Klyton would not have thought he would say any of this. But the gold hand pushed at his back. The hand promised to thrust him on, but to hold him, too.

He did not know how he looked to them, the soldiers standing before him, or what they saw. He heard only later.

The Sun blazed about him, giving him an aura of wild fire. He flamed, his hair, his eyes, the wings of light. But more.

One cloud had come up with the Sun, the color of honey, edged with brilliance, and it had taken a curious form.

Klyton heard one of the Sirmians murmur, “He is in the hand of the God.”

For the cloud had the image of an enormous hand, holding, supporting above, the disc of the Sun, while with the lower fingers, flexed like those of a man, it seemed to curve about the body of Klyton.

Klyton partly turned at length, and saw this too. He was not startled. The men who watched said that he smiled.

Already Partho had moved up, and was arming him, the light body armor, the helm and sword.

The men of his command struggled into their gear.

Over a thousand followed him as he ran lightly down and away from the camp.

Luck was in it as well. The catapult crews, not waiting for any order, but seeing the state of the wall, had loaded up and begun a bombardment. The Ipyrans were involved with that.

Others on the rock, noticing a Sun-flash stream of men pouring up the dangerous steep path from below, flung out their spears and stones.

But the clear sky of rising Sun was in their eyes, and the fulvous cloud swung down, casting a shadow over the climbing men.

Of the more than a thousand who followed Klyton, nearly a thousand escaped serious hurt.

The outcrops of the slope offered peculiar holds.

When
they came to the gates, poor rough things, which any way the quake had loosened, it was not so hard to break in. Hand-o-hand then, on an Ipyran floor, they fought.

But the Sun had come in with Klyton’s band. They radiated light and hooted with happiness, cutting men down with their morning swords.

When they stopped for breath, the Ipyran prince had already arrived to surrender, holding out his hands for chains, his women clinging, weeping around him.

At first, Uros’s grandfather, the Karrad, had been welcoming. He seemed to think Uros had brought an embassy from Glardor, who, it transpired, they still believed in these backlands to be alive, and King. Uros explained. He said, with Glardor gone, a nobody had replaced the dead, someone thought safe. But the gods had punished Akhemony, and she was ripe for plucking.

The Karrad was an old man. In his riven face, the faded tattoos had crumpled together, so his skin looked to have been made of brown leaves. But he had sharp sight. He glared at Uros.

“What are you saying, boy?”

Uros said what he was saying.

The Karrad thought. For a moment his bright eyes flashed. Then his mouth drew down. He said, “I got your mother on a village woman. My legal daughter was sent him,” he meant Akreon, “as a Daystar spear-bride. But he preferred the servant, who whelped you.” Uros stood impatiently, fiddling with his rings. “We are always at war with Akhemony. We hate the Sun Kings, but also honor them. It’s a rite between us, our wars. The gods made us like a pin to nip them, lest they get too comfortable. Now this,” said the Karrad, “your notion, goes too far.”

But there was a murmur then from the men about the stone hall. They began to shout at the Karrad. It was an eternal law in Ipyra, the king must always listen and give weight to his lords. In the end, they cheered Uros. Antique legends of outland Sun Kings, made from just such situations, were rehearsed.

However, though the messengers went out from stronghold to stronghold, though fervent replies came back, the Karrad looked sidelong at his byblow grandson.

Uros,
actually, was more wary of the Karrad’s wife.

The Karrad had taken her late, when the other royal women had died, and she was a great deal younger, and had borne him one son. This boy was still a child, black-haired and handsome, yet with ancient eyes. They whispered the soul of a long-ago hero had come back in him. Evonissa, the queen, was herself a priestess of Anki. Although she deferred, of course, to the Karrad, she had power of her own, and was said to foresee things.

Uros had inquired why she did not foresee the death of Glardor in Akhemony. Someone told him, hushed, that looking in her sorcerous mirror, she had told the Karrad an interval would come among the Great Kings. That was all, and not everyone had understood her, till Uros appeared.

She said, Evonissa, nothing against Uros, but now and then in the cold, smoke-choked hall at night, he felt her eyes on him from the womens’ place. She was a good-looking woman, small, firm and strong, with lively crinkled dark hair falling to her waist. She had pretty eyes, but he did not like them much. For when she looked at him, he felt something—not conniving or even antagonistic—he did not know what it was. But then, she was only a woman, an upland queen. So what?

There came an afternoon Uros was fretting at one of the great open balconies of the Karrad’s house, which in summer must be pleasant and scenic, and now was scenic and direly cold. Melendor, wrapped in lynx furs, stood grumbling at his back.