Mortal Suns (29 page)

Outside, the mountain walls fell through white-striped ebony stands of larch, to the white bear pelt of the pine forests. Far down in a gorge, a frozen glass waterfall hung fantastically, from boulders that seemed made of opal. Above, on a dense sky, achingly pregnant with oncoming snow, other mountains lifted in grave processional ranks, capped with niveum, their bastions changing with distance from sable to lavender. Only a single western peak had raised its eruptive cloud, but the early-dying winter Sun, a bronze plate, had now passed into it. The Sun would sink in the volcano, or seem to. They must, here, be used to the omen.

Melendor, less enthusiastic now, was complaining and grieving about their own men, forced unhappily to shift as they could in the ramshackle village-city. Then he broke off.

“Look, visitors.”

Uros, who had been peering into the sky, peered down. A trail of about twenty men was coming up the bad road from the gorge, leading their horses. They looked done up, and soon were near enough one could make out some bandaging.

Uros and Melendor rattled down the uneven steps to the Karrad’s hall.

Another
Karrad had sent the men, sent them with their wounds to show, to prove his communication.

The Akhemonians had crossed over in winter and commenced battle. Five strongholds had given way, two surrendering. There had been alarming portents—dead crows falling in a rain, Anki’s moon divided by a cloud in the shape of a sword, a weird voice that had been heard on the wind, seeming to call out to the Ipyrans,
Yield
.

Uros blinked. He reckoned himself too sophisticated to be moved by such stuff. He thought that his Karrad-grandfather probably was not. Uros strode forward.

“Karrad,” this was all one called them here, “clouds take odd forms. The winds in these crags can say anything one thinks of. My men tell me they cry out the names of girls they’ve left behind.”

If he hoped for a laugh from this, he got none. The grandfather sat pulling his sidelocks.

“As for the fortress towns—they were unprepared. We’ve had other word here, haven’t we, ten strongholds at least willing to join with us. That’s many thousand men. If Akhemony wants a snow fight, let’s meet them.”

The grandfather said, bleakly, “The Two Mile Valley is the only place.”

“Yes, sir. I’ve been hunting there.”

Melendor grunted behind him. “And it’s a rotten spot. Gulfs and topples, trees everywhere. All under seven feet of snow.”

“We can smash them there,” said Uros brazenly. He had not known boastful Ogon for nothing.

“You’re a brave warrior,” said the grandfather. Some of the men about the hall stamped and offered a yell. “I give you that,” he added, when they were quiet. “But wait a moment. Let Evonissa the priestess sacrifice, and take the reading. The gods may have something to say.”

Uros saw no harm in this, save that Evonissa would do it, and he did not trust her. Most women were against a war so near to home.

But they
all looked solemn. The Karrad sent word to his wife. Then everyone attended while she went off with her girls to the mud-wall temple in the yard. She was not seen again until the night had settled black.

She walked in, with her tame crow sitting on her wrist. All crows were sacred here, but this one had a white bar on its wing that made it Anki’s own. They said, Evonissa could speak its language to it.

She went to the king and bowed. She wore a dark robe from the sacrifice, with the silver knife still hung at her belt. Although generally women were not tattooed in Ipyra, she had on the palms of her hands, and at the center of her low, wide, intelligent brow, the Eye of the goddess, done with a green iris.

“Husband,” she said. This was all a queen called a king in Ipyra. “There is a balance, both cups equal. On their side and on yours, weakness and strength.”

“Did you read the entrails, the organs?” ritually asked the Karrad.

Evonissa replied, “The aspects were unusual. Something’s strange. I would guess the gods are at play.”

The hall went silent. And in the silence, its iciness seemed worse. They heard the moaning of the wind, which would outlive them all.

“What should be done?” asked the Karrad. He looked abruptly sly, but her face was unshadowed by anything other than knowledge.

“If I were a man,” said Evonissa, “I’d make a truce. I’d ask the Akhemonians for pardon. If we’re in a god-game, husband, who knows how it will go?”

Uros lost his temper. He shouted, “Yes, and present Nexor my head on a tray, to say you’re sorry.”

Evonissa glanced at him. She said, “The prince shouldn’t fear men before gods. What we do is nothing and soon over. But after life, who knows?”

Uros thundered, his thicker top lip making his speech unruly, and causing him to spit, “I want my time
now
!”

The Karrad said, “You can go away into the mountains, to some obscure hold. Winter there till your Nexor King has forgiven you.”

But Uros knew Akhemony did not forgive such sins as his. He did not want a life of squirreling about, ducking under walls and behind curtains, roused before first light to race from one concealing midden to the next. The awful life of the exiled fugitive.

“
Give
me my rights!
” he roared at his grandfather.

The Karrad shrugged. Uros had about a thousand men of his own here. The Karrad said, in his old voice, “The gods are playing. You might win. Whoever wants to fight beside you shall go. For my allies, they’ll take their personal augeries and their own decisions. For the sake of that girl who was your mother, I make truce yet with the Great King.”

Evonissa bowed her head. Her face showed nothing now, but a slight color in her cheeks. That night she sent her son away to the north, that was all. The Karrad must have agreed to it.

As for Uros, he would have to make do.

That valley named for Two Miles was far larger. On every side the mountains went up, dressed in trees, confirming the valley floor as a stadium. Here Ipyrans had fought with each other their most primal battles, while gods sat on the mountain tops to see.

Passes came in through the crags at three junctures. All were bizarrely accessible, even in the worst winter.

But the ground itself, as Melendor had stated, was unreliable, and in the heavy snow like a third adversary, unkind to either side.

The Akhemonian
troops, when they heard from the scouts the Ipyrans had put a force into Two Mile Valley, were scornful and outraged together. They thought they had got the hang of the winter campaign, which till then had been sieges and sudden attacks. The size of the Ipyran rabble was also disconcerting. Banding together in this way, they were reportedly ten thousand strong.

Nexor’s southern force had lost men. To the weather and the terrain more often than to skirmishes. Now they found themselves less in number than the savages of Ipyra.

When they came out on the wide natural terrace beyond the south pass into the valley, they saw, across the huge spoon of snow, deceptive and innocent as a sheet of white silk, the Ipyran camp. Perhaps only a hundred feet below, miles down it looked, in the glacial, crystalized, motionless air. The Ipyrans were black on the snow; where the mountain shadow spread, the enemy fires spangled. The scouts had not lied about their mass.

The Akhemonians extended themselves along the terrace flanks. In three hours it would be night. The stoical soldiery laid its fires. The few women who had struggled up with them, the pages and boys, set cook-pots on.

But in the Great King’s tent, Nexor was saying, “Let them rest an hour, then we’ll get down. The descent’s easy. Startle the foe.”

It was Lektos again who said, “My lord, you mean go straight down and
start?
”

An older man, a noble, said, “Great King, it will be dark in an hour or so.”

“We’ll be done by then,” said Nexor, beaming and hearty.

Klyton had just come in. He had previously sent a band of his Sirmians off to hunt. There had, for some reason, been a lot of deer sighted in the forest along the pass, fat deer despite the cold, and not shy. Now the men were coming in with glossy carcasses on the saddles.

He listened to Nexor’s words. Then spoke.

“No, my lord.”

Nexor looked round at him.

“No? What did you say?”

“They’ve been on the move all day. Yes, it wasn’t such hard going, but they need to get warm and to eat. If you like, we can go down in the hour before dawn, and be ready for the Ipyrans at Sunup.”

Nexor smiled. He looked away at another man. “Can
you
get your fellows ready in an hour, Adargon?”

“My lord, I—”

Klyton walked by Adargon, and stood a hand’s breadth from the King. In height they were matched. Nexor was a little heavier, but it did not give him psychic weight. Nexor met Klyton’s eyes, and stared.

“Great King,” said Klyton, his voice not raised, held level as a pherom blade, “I won’t fail you by sending on to the field of battle men too weary to serve your honor.”

“You’re disobeying my order. I’m your King.”

“It isn’t a game,” said Klyton, who had not heard the witch-priestess Evonissa speak in the Karrad’s hall.

Nexor’s eyes slid away, returned, slid away again. A King must have settled Klyton then and there. The tent was full. Nexor had argued. And no one had made a move to rectify the moment, for not one man was ready to scramble unneedfully to a fight in half an hour.

Outside, the shouts
of Klyton’s command, crowding round the fat deer dinner his god-blessed luck had ordained for them, reached the tent like the notes of a turning tide.

“All right,” said Nexor. He was not even enraged, more… sulky. “Have it as you wish.”

Adargon’s men came over to Klyton’s campfires soon after the moon rose, Phaidix Anki riding above Ipyra.

The battalions brought wrung-neck chickens they had had from the last village, and their ration of beer and wine.

At first Klyton’s men, particularly the Sirmians, beat them off, softly enough, joking and laughing. Then Klyton walked out and said, “We’re brothers. Come on. The enemy is over
there
.”

A feast began, and further men moved in from other stations, Lektos’ troops, and more. They brought what they could, and the roasted venison was shared with the rabbits, the chickens, and the drink. There was not enough wine to get drunk, which was as well, with the fight tomorrow. But by the light of the torches, some of the soldiers’ women danced, their faces and arms flame-polished gold. The men sang songs from old campaigns. Klyton sat with Lektos and Adargon, and one or two other commanders—most of the leading lights of the army in Ipyra.

From the smoke, maybe, the moon blushed rosy.

In his tent hung with crimson, Nexor dined with a meager scatter of sycophants.

They heard the songs.

Over the valley of two miles, the Ipyrans heard them, too. A joyous bridegroom sings before his marriage day, they said, in Ipyra. They listened to the joyous brideroom singing, and wondered if marriage would mean, for them, something else.

In the mid of the night, as the soldiery bedded down and slept, Adargon said to Klyton, under the ice green stars, “Akreon had your luck. Your hunt. That mountain you climbed. He would have done this as you have.”

“I aggravated the King,” Klyton remarked, lightly.

Adargon, it was sometimes said, of all the royal Suns after Amdysos, had most the likeness to Klyton. Yet they said, too, there was always with Klyton some other touch, the others royal from their blood, and Klyton royal as if from the breath of a fire.

“King,” said
Adargon. “That one in the red tent?”

Pale Lektos said, “A ship with a buffoon for captain, sinks, or runs aground.”

They could not quite see Klyton’s face. His smile they saw. In those years, men and women both liked always best to have pleased him.

“Good night,” said Klyton. “We meet again, the hour before dawn.”

The Sun rose unseen in the morning. The sky was dark as a dusk. Far brighter than the sky, the snow looked back, staring white, between the clumps of trees, virgin and unmarked, dividing the two armies. This was soon changed.

The Akhemonians had got down the graded mountain easily, as their King had said, their weapons and harness muffled. When the part-light of day came up, the van was already forging forward over the valley.

The Ipyrans, who had been making offerings, left off and sprang to arms. This could not auger well. Afterwards they blamed it, their unavoidable impiety.

I see the battlefield from the air, as a bird would see it. I have no desire to go down. Though I have heard Klyton recount these events, this is the only view I truly have.

And so I behold the meeting clash of men, the advance, so tidy, like a parade, cloven and wrecked. Lightnings lit from swords. The cries of men coming up to me, so small they cannot mean very much. Udrombis had said, the gods would seem to regard humanity in just this way. Such little noises—of fury, terror, agony, despair—what can they matter?

The Akhemonians were outnumbered, but superior in their training and their tricks. Foot soldiers progressed, slewed away, returned, and cut out the center of the Ipyran force. While Nexor’s cavalry closed in the sides.

As Klyton rode over the snow, his men poured at his back, cheering him, and Adargon’s men after. Others followed. The whole army in Ipyra had rallied to Klyton, as to something gleaming and worthy of trust. So he looked, golden, infallible, if I could go near enough to see. But from the air he is only, my great love, my lord, another tiny glittering insect.

They fought.
Then a rift came in the sky. On the Akhemonians’ right, the east cracked wide, and the Sun flared through. It was the Sunrise, coming late from the cloud, a blazing guest to the banquet of war.

The Akhemonians took it for a sign of favor, and the Ipyrans, the enemy of the Sun King, their sacrifices interrupted, were dismayed. The Sun seemed always in their eyes, as had happened at the first fortress, when Klyton scaled to the gates. The Sun beat hard on Ipyra. They said after, the men who fought and lived, that the heat of the Sun was stupendous, too much for a northern mountain day in winter. From the trees in the valley, icicles snapped off and darted down. The ground turned queasy. Foolishly, Ipyran men and horses slid, and before they could adjust themselves, Akhemony was always there, steady as if moving on a well-paved floor.