Mortal Suns (3 page)

Along with that, they had, from the third to the seventh year, a rudimentary schooling. To read the texts of the temple, copy letters, such things made them more useful. But, too, their work was in the laundry, in the kitchen, sweeping the long stone floors, clearing up old blood spilled by the outer altars.

At twelve, they would learn more specific arts. The boys butchering and woodwork, and other skills to maintain the temple. The girls might make candles, sew, or rear the animals of the precincts, preparing them for their ultimate destiny of sacrifice or table.

Any who were apt could rise, if there were a vacant place, to the ranks of the lowest priesthood. The god had chosen them anyway, by allowing them to survive the initial test, in the sanctum. They could expect no other life.

Of the
very few who dared to run away, generally the harsh mountains killed them. If not, caught by the grown servants of Thon, their own future incarnation—now lost—they were taken at once to a lower room, a sort of natural cave existing under the temple, and locked in there in blackness, with nothing but an injunction to speak a prayer of apology. Unlike the sanctum, with its corpses and skeletons, there was no chance to outlive this punishment. The cave door was not opened again until half a year had passed. The remains were removed, and flung down the side of Koi, into a ditch that ran below.

Sometimes there had been more than two hundred children together in the House of Death. From all Akhemony they might come, or farther. Now there were only eleven.

None of the five in the courtyard had grown accustomed to snow, though they had seen it each winter of their not-yet four years of life.

The boy, bemused, for a moment was made stupid.

“It’s cold to touch.”

“
Is
it? Is
snow
cold? Go out then, ninny, and lie down on it, and enjoy it.”

The boy began to cry. Then stopped. He gave no other protest. None of them did so.

He walked out into the court, and lay on the white covering, face down. He did not wriggle very much.

After the priestess had counted slowly aloud to the number four hundred, also sacred to Thon, she told the child he might get up.

He came back staggering, biting his lip at the scald of the snow, which had burned his cheeks.

Then all five were sent about their business.

“And you, child, you, the useless one. Go back in there. You should be peeling vegetables since you can’t stand up. A curse, these misfits, these freaks. Thon should have taken you, but even he didn’t want you. Perhaps he’ll never let you die, you displease him so.”

The freak, Cemira, went with downcast eyes. Most days she peeled vegetables and scoured pots, hour upon hour. Her hands were raw from the cold of the mountain temple, and the heat of the too-hot, greasy water, and cut by kitchen knives too large for her. And somehow these hands would twitch about as if looking for her feet. Of course, her feet would have saved her. She would not have been in the House of Thon, if she had been born with feet. She would have been a king’s daughter. But she did not know that.

She moved
slowly, and the watcher, the thin priestess, had an urge, not for the only time, to kick away the crutches and see this one fall. But she contented herself with another order.

“
Hurry
! Be quick, you lazy idiot-child.”

The outer room of the kitchen, where routine tasks were seen to, was dark and not warm. Beyond the window, as Cemira resumed her work, the snow dizzied down. Sometimes the flakes spun in through the unshuttered opening, and sizzled out in the flame of the meager brazier below.

The, children rose at dawn, and retired at dusk. Summer meant a longer sweating day, winter a longer, icy night.

Perhaps the seasons, the nights and days—that is, heat and cold, blackness and light—were the only proper markers of Cemira’s time. Was night, huddled on the narrow pallet, covered by one thin blanket, better than the monotonous and uncertain day? Yes, night was better, for with night, burning or freezing, eventually came sleep. But was summer better than winter?

During the cold months, the children might have to lean into one of the wells to crack the ice with a stone. Once one had plummeted, and so died.

The snow, miraculous and soft, was cruel. Yet silver shone in down-hanging icicles, and once, a living mountain lynx, the shade of milk, stood by the statue of Phaidix and her lion, also her beast, licking at her obdurate foot. Someone had said blood or malt must have been smeared there, but why? In the House of Thon they did not offer to any other god—not even the Sun. And Phaidix any way did not like blood. When the lynx melted away down the mountain, its flowery paw-marks stayed six days, in the closing ice.

In summer, different flowers grew about the statue, and inappropriately about the porticoes of Thon. White and honey, the priests came with brands and scorched them away. But it must be done over and over, for the flowers came back, blooming on and on.

From the courts, in summer, you might look up and see the kites and eagles, motionless, a mile high in violet air. When storms came down over the Heart Mountain, the sky hung alternately low, with enormous clouds, damson and smouldering black, and in them were the shapes of the mountains themselves upside down, or the shape of the temple, sculpted heavily in smoke.

But in summer,
too, on every forty-fourth day, each child, however young, must go, to sprinkle fresh blood at the pillar-base of the god in the inner sanctum. And then it stank, that place of bones. Worse than the butchers’ yard, worse than the latrines, worse than all worsenesses, that hole of death to which they had almost been added. After twelve years of age, there would be further duties in the sanctum. They had to do with the stacking up and tidying of the skeletons, and the washing of the face of Thon.

Cemira was almost four. She had asked one of the kinder priestesses, the one who had taught her, prematurely, to sew, and sometimes rubbed scented fat into her hands, when their chapped soreness cracked and bled on the linen.

“You’re in your fourth year. Almost four.”

How did she know? She must have consulted the record of Cemira’s entry to the temple … Or she was that other one, who had rocked the baby in her arms.

Two years earlier, sometimes, this priestess had taken Cemira on her knees, and brushed her hair for a long time. The priestess had murmured, above the shining, rippling fleece of the child’s hair, “You’re my baby. You’re my baby I should have had.” And, once, “They told me, it had golden hair, even in the hour of its birth.”

Cemira, however, did not remember this. Only at her tenth decade will Sirai recall that Cemira heard it.

Poor woman. Presumably she had lost her own child, either in reality or unstable fancy. Poor woman. She was kind, in her fashion.

By the table where Cemira sat, peeling, cutting—already she was exhausted with sitting—leaned the sticks, the canes. They hurt her, but they were all she had. They meant mobility.

She wanted to sleep. No one was there, though through the door, the kitchen moved to black forms, gushing with steam and thick with the odor of meats, for the higher priests dined well one day in four. Cemira let her head droop.

She was immediately elsewhere. Where was it? In the sky. A bird carried her, the cloth of her tunic caught in its claws. Irrationally she was not alarmed. Below she saw the temple, the smallest thing in the world. Enormous clouds, quite solid, and touched rosily with a sinking Sun, formed buildings that were all like the temple, the only edifice she had consciously seen, but far more huge, more charming in design. Most wonderful of all, she moved without needing feet, and had no pain.

A pot met
the floor with a nearby crash. A lower priestess cursed the pot, and then must speak the prayer to Thon asking his forgiveness for her curse.

Cemira woke. Exquisite escape quite over, she resumed peeling the roots. Returned to earth, and her crutches.

Annotation by the Hand of Dobzah

I can confirm that my mistress, Sirai, has to this day, under her arms, the faint small marks of her first wooden walking canes. These are two silver scars formed each like a sickle moon.

Countless legends, dramas and songs, in a variety of lands, are concerned with the notion of justice, of the severe payment for vicious deeds, and the rewards of honor and tenderness.

Hetsa, the Daystar Queen, sixteenth wife of Akreon, had heard such stories often: they had run off her marble skin like rain.

It was a spring afternoon. Hetsa was sitting in her royal apartment, awaiting her lover.

The apartment had altered rather from the earlier scene, when it had been splashed by blood and bloody light, reeking of oils and aromatics and the act of birth. The walls were recently repainted, a token gift of the King’s. He had never been discourteous. Behind the pillars, on the creamy plaster, a procession of maidens, bearing fruit, accompanied by long-tailed birds, pipers, and garlanded gazelles, went prettily around three sides to a gilt shrine of Gemli, the Ipyran goddess of joy. A proper compliment, for Hetsa was the daughter of an Ipyran king. In fact the shrine had been placed at the very spot where Bandri, the birth goddess, had waited, over four years ago. Now Bandri was nowhere to be seen.

That same night, they had informed Akreon his child, a daughter, had died, a pity, but not, demonstrably, so unlucky and ill-omened as the truth. Nor such a tragedy as it would have been thought, had the baby been male.

Nevertheless,
in the month after the death-birth, Akreon took another new queen, a Daystar picked from Oceaxis itself. He had seen her at a noble’s house, where they had taken care he should. She had ankle-length hair the color of young barley, a pale yellow almost green, and she was just thirteen.

As this Lesser Sun arose, Hetsa completely declined. She did not invite a lover for one whole year, but after that they arrived in generous quantities.

That was not unheard of, or rather, providing nothing was heard, it was possible. Akreon had his own pleasures, and his several duties, as uppermost priest and war-leader of the land. He liked women as a pastime. He did not, intellectually, think about them. It was his steward, primed to the work, who from time to time suggested the generosity of a necklace, or a repainted chamber.

Hetsa’s women were rustling and giggling in the outer room. They had a turtle, the size of a dog and with a shell like old jade, and were playing with it by the pool. It was supposed ancient, and able to predict things. Now certainly it raised its petted head, and the outer doors were opened.

The merchant Mokpor came through, with one slave. His caravan had come back from the south this morning, and Hetsa had expected nothing less.

Hetsa’s Maiden, Ermias, entered, bowed, and smiled secretively. For a second, Hetsa was irritated by this. She kept order by means of sudden malice, and presents.

“Why are you grinning like an ape?”

Ermias’s smile vanished at once.

“I have toothache, madam. It draws up my mouth.”

“Have the tooth pulled out then. Who has come?”

“The merchant, madam. He’s waiting—” Ermias had meant to say, smiling still,
impatiently.
Instead she added, “In the outer room.”

“Is he. Has he the web-silk from Bulos?”

“Oh yes, madam.”

“And the riverine pearls?”

“I’m sure.” Ermias wondered uneasily if she would need to have a tooth pulled in point of fact. Hetsa remembered, curious things, and might in two months’ time, demand to look in her mouth. But no, Errnias would say she had sought out old Crow Claw. The witch was not so often seen about now, but one could always pretend. Crow Claw’s magic would easily put right one of Ermias’s perfectly sound molars.

“Send him in
to me. His slave may stay outside. And shut the door. I don’t want them all running to other maids, with stories of what I’ve bought. That happened last time. No sooner had I got my dress made up, than that cunning one, that serpent Stabia, appeared in just the same embroidered stuff. She’s too old to wear it and too fat, and should have known better.”

“Yes, madam.” Ermias thought that Hetsa should also recollect leaning at her mirror of burnished silver, and sighing, while Ermias dressed her hair, over the little poem Mokpor had sent her. “His eyes are like stars,” Hetsa had exclaimed. Perhaps they were, they needed to be, when his poetry was so bad.

Ermias went to the middle door and waved Mokpor peremptorily forward. As he modestly obeyed, she saw him give her a look, her slender form and darkly curling tresses, probably her gold earrings too. Not an utter fool, Mokpor. When the queen was done with him, Ermias might be available. He smiled. Ermias tossed her head, letting him admire her supple neck that was three years younger than Hetsa’s.

“Radiant Sun!”

Mokpor knelt gracefully on one knee, as the middle door closed at his back. Kneeling was the manner of Oriali, the Eastern Towns, from which he had come. It also displayed his fine legs, in pale leather boots and firm leggings. Deliberately, he always misnamed the queens, not as Daystars, but as Suns, an honorific allowed only princes, and the Sun-Consort.

“Well, you’re late.”

“I was delayed.”

“You dawdled.”

“How could I, my glamorous and gleaming one? How
would
I, when I was to come here?” His starry eyes flashed. His fair hair sparkled with attention, thickly curled, like the narrow Eastern beard around his jaw. She had said, she liked his trace of accent.

He was exceedingly well-dressed. Hetsa’s patronage had decidedly helped him. That first evening, when he had come with an example of the new liquid flame-red dye from Artepta, he had seen at once, his luck was in.

Now Hetsa signalled languidly to his box. Oh. She was in a mood.

“What have
you got to show me?”

Mokpor took another chance. He rose, strode to her, and lifted her to her feet as easily as if she were a doll, squeezing her close. “My blazing need for you, my queen. Can you feel it?”

Hetsa turned her face. Mokpor chased her mouth with his own, and caught it. After a moment she responded to his kiss.