Mortal Suns (32 page)

Perhaps he had chosen the time, the hour of the lamps when our eyes find the color again which a fading Sun took away.

As two more servants approached me and put down a tall electrum mirror on a stand of gilded bronze, a third undid a cat-shaped glass flagon, and let me sniff the balsam of Ipyra’s forests. It was utterly unlike the stuff I had offered the gods for Stabia. As if he had known.

By then,
he had walked through into the room. And the lamps did their office, too, for him.

I got up. I bowed. The women were rustling all about me like half-settled moths; fluttering for his beauty, ritually, but it was only partly pretence.

Now I must face him, and see him.

He had dressed himself richly for our meeting, a proper courtesy. In the lampglow the armlets and collar of gold, the golden borders of his tunic, and his hair, made him one with the light. He was winter-tanned from wind and sun on snow. And against this frame his eyes took a metallic gleam, like the surface of swords.

What had I ever seen when I looked at him? A god, of course a god. And the gods were far away, unlistening, their kindness incidental,
accidental
. If they should speak of love, it was only as a man would caress the neck of a favorite dog.

I withdrew my eyes from Klyton, and godlike, smoothed the neck of my living present, the milk-white hound. Its eyes were black, reflective, two more valuable jewels.

Klyton had somehow come right up to me.

He said, “I thought you’d like that the best.”

“He’s very fine. Thank you, my lord.”

“I’ve heard the view from your terrace is pretty. I have never seen it. Show me.”

He was moving me, his hand on my arm. We were going through the room, the women, to the pillared terrace, which had not yet been shuttered for the night.

My Maiden, the women, followed us. The slaves at the lamps, the shutters, hesitated, and turned to mellow carvings.

Klyton left me. He strode to look down from the terrace into the gardens. The moon was rising, little more than the shaving of a white pearl. Two stories down, guards passed at intervals. Klyton hailed one of these and there rose up the clank of a salute.

He is so handsome, so miraculous, he means nothing at all, this King-to-be. I remember when he was a boy. He was only a prince, and I—I had come from the House of Death.

He retraced his steps to me and, bending, ran his hard, golden hand, stamped with a fresh black scar, over the head of my milk-white, moon-white dog.

“I’m glad you are well.” he said to me.

He did not
touch me any more. Without any further words, he turned and left the room, passed through the group of women, Sun through cloud, was out of a door which careful servants closed.

I went to the dinner in the Hall, as Squeaky, had I asked him, would have told me I must. Klyton was there, feted like the god he now was. The harpers rendered songs of sublime heroes hidden from enemies on mountain sides, disguised as mortal, revealed in youth by valiant deeds.

The more I watched Klyton—surreptitiously, of course, the less I knew him. But I never had known him.

After the most important harper had sung and Udrombis had sent me some fruit to try, and I had done so, I left the Hall.

Once able to dismiss the butterfly flock of women, I stood alone by my terrace, one shutter pulled back.

The pillar where I rested my hand was chill. The night was a luminous pane, and the warmth of summer had not yet come. The Lakesea resembled endlessly folded silk under the slender hip of Phaidix’s bow. All the gardens were black, composed of secrets. There would be dusks when the women danced there. I would see lights near the shore, a fringe of fireflies.

I then, felt old. It is strange. With age has come the knowledge that what I felt was accurate enough. Save I was old within a young skin.

Down from the high raised Hall, a great roar rushed, extra-ordinary, like fire. Probably the princes were harping now, and the wine poured over among discarded garlands.

Sleep was softer than the fur across the bed. And then it lifted like a lid. Calistra lay, her eyes wide on the darkness. A door had opened, closed.

Over the length of the room, on Gemli’s shrine, the apricot-colored flame stooped, and straightened. It showed half the outline of a tall male figure, the roped drop of a cloak. The girl in the bed did not speak, and the man moved to her over the floor of night.

Her attendants, that host of them, slept in their own apartments away across the outer room. One slave must keep watch by the doorway but presumably she had slumbered—or been bribed?

The man trod
noiseless as a leopard. From him came the scents of bruised garlands, wine and heat, and of the tindery tamarinds in the gardens. Shadow hung on him. Yet Gemli’s flame described his hair like gilding. He still wore his own garland—ormis, myrtle flowers.

“Don’t be frightened,” he said. “Do you know me?”

“Klyton,” Calistra said.

“I won’t harm you. I wanted to see you—out of that swirl of women. Udrombis has told you. You and I.”

She said, “You are to be Great Sun. I am to wed you.”

“Sun-Consort.” he said. “You talk as if it were nothing.” She heard him laugh, very low. “But it isn’t so much to us, is it? Only like the air. We were meant for this, Calistra.”

Calistra sat up slowly. Her filmy garment she kept within the cover of the fur, pulling it round her to conceal her arms and breasts. But farther down the bed, she noted, as perhaps he had not, the lapse beneath the blankets, her ultimate nakedness. Had he remembered? She could not spring up to run away.

Klyton sat on the bed’s side. He seemed at ease. He said, “You mustn’t be upset. I haven’t disgraced you. I saw to it Adargon’s man has the watch below. I climbed up when he was relieving himself. For decorum’s sake. But if he saw me, he knows who it was. And your slave girl is one I know as well. There was even a shutter left ajar.”

Calistra shook her head. These facts were irrelevant. “Why?” she said. She heard her voice, an isolated, glassy note.

“Why do you think?”

His hands reached her in the dark, slid over her and
through
her—she was drawn out of her wrappings into the warmth of the shadow. And the shadow was clean breath tinctured by wine, smooth flesh and muscle, and his tasseled hair brushing heavy on her throat. She turned her mouth from his. At this he sat away, releasing her. “Forgive me. If you don’t want to. I’ll wait, of course.” He had been so sure of her, still seemed so. He did not breathe quickly, was not yet urgent. Not even disappointed.

Who was he? He controlled so much, yet climbed up the wall like a boy … The faint light gave her nothing, only the line of his cheekbone, his brow and nose and lip. His lashes, one sequin in one eye. The wide shoulder and the costly gem that pinned the cloak and had a heart of scarlet.

“You told me,” she said, “we must remain apart.”

How small her quarrel was. Why speak of it?

But he
said, “The gods showed me otherwise.”

I love you
, she thought. The words were only the echo of another cry. Inside herself she turned—like a fish, a serpent—seeking to find the way back to him.

And thought, terribly,
He is no longer that same one I loved
.

In reply, oddly, he said, “The gods have changed me, Calistra. I was almost afraid of it at first. The power, this
power
they’ve given me. I can
take
, and
make
. I’ll see Akhemony certain, and then stop the Sun Lands fighting one with another—I’ll give them something else. Have you heard of the other mythical land? The place beyond the outer ocean? I think now it does exist. It’s there for us, and I shall have it. Calistra. I’ll have all the world. Ah, darling girl, how beautiful you are.”

He leant forward. The garland dropped away.

She realized the lamp shone only but fully upon her, illuminating her for his inspection, her face unpainted, sheer, her hair loose in a sheet of paleness, her throat, her breasts distinct now under the gossamer nightrobe. She seemed soaked in luster, and felt her own loveliness as she had never done. She had never seemed to herself so actual, so present. And where the dark hid her, from the ankles down, where she was not, even at her
feet
, as before, she tingled with liveness.

“You’re mine,” Klyton said. “You know this, Calistra. You knew it before I did. Won’t you give yourself to me? In two months, you’ll be crowned my consort. And we’ve
waited
—”

She belonged to him. It was true, she had always comprehended. And in the somber mirror of his unseen face, she glimpsed the vision of her own profound mystery, for the first.

Stretching out her hands, she put them on his chest, pushing lightly against him, not to thrust him off, but to contact the reality of his flesh.

His breathing changed. He leaned to her once more.

“Let go of yourself, Calistra. Give yourself to me. I won’t allow you to fall.”

It was as if, deep in the well of self, she sensed the dawn, and swam upward towards it. Not understanding, not even in desire, but primitive instinct. No other thing had any importance.

He took her face in his hands like a silver cup, and drank from her mouth. And she became only wine that gave itself to be drunk.

Klyton was to have the world. She became the world. He had filled her with his soul, his power, his splendor.

And as she
clung to him she beheld him now, as if the lamplight shone suddenly through her, on to him. She met his fire with the torch of her surrender, through every surface of her skin.

Pressed back into the bed by his weight and his body’s near-metallic hardness, she flew, suspended from his strength, as he bore her up on wings as wide as Sunrise.

Her virginity was gone already, torn by the accident as she learned to walk. The first pain of the storm-strokes of human lust altered, in an incandescent spasm, to a bursting sweetness that turned her inside out. Winged with light, as he was, she soared through illimitable inner space. In the grip of an eagle.

Klyton was the Sun.

How had she ever doubted the gods? They were her kindred.

Along the shoulder of the hill, the shrieks came now almost continuously. It was afternoon, but no birds sang. Crickets indifferently drizzled. A cloud sent down its ominous indigo shade, which ran from hummock to hummock of the high grass, like spilled water.

The summer pavilion had improved with the coming of warmer months, and some cartloads of necessary luxuries brought from Oceaxis. With the settling of Ipyra, Elakti’s status grew less suspect and more cherishable. There was still a spy in her makeshift household, however. Through this woman, one of Elakti’s two lesser attendants, the news filtered back that Elakti stayed both mad and heavy with child. Other details of her life also, more fluidly, reached the court. How wonders were supposedly performed at wild ceremonies in the hills, huge animals and spirits manifesting. That Elakti had been joined by a band of lawless girls from nearby upland farms, even from the town, females who had been disowned or, alternatively, were thought touched by divine unreason.

It seemed the insane acts at the pavilion did no harm. Elakti, who might have become quite unacceptable in a palace of the Sun Kings, was for the time being permitted to go on in her crazy career.

Last night, as the spy had this morning duly reported to her messenger, there had been another frenzy under the full moon.

The women had caught and killed a deer, not with their bare hands and teeth, as the rumors had it, but with spears, for the girls of the farms often learned hunting perforce. This meat they roasted on a fire in the pine grove by the altar, allocating a raw portion to the goddess Anki.

Then
they danced and sang to Amdysos and to Phaidix and pregnant Elakti screeched and jumped, though by now enormous, her black hair whipping over the moon’s face.

All the women, Elakti and the spy included, got drunk.

Also with the wine had been chewed peculiar herbs of the hills, which Elakti’s witch crone recommended. The spy secretly avoided the herbs, pretending to take them or spitting them out. She had informed the Widow-Queen Udrombis that it was undoubtedly these herbs which caused the appearance of huge, snow-white lions, gigantic tarry foxes, for she herself never saw them. The one appearance she had witnessed, she did not mention. To tell of a supernaturally large bird, possibly an eagle, in the winter after Amdysos’s loss, had seemed tactless.

The spy woman came back from her walk with the messenger, and began ordering the preparation of food in the yard kitchen. Presently Elakti’s first shriek cracked through the morning air. Until now Elakti had never screamed by day.

The other slave flew in from the cistern, having broken her jar. About the yard, the uncouth farm sluts sprawled to sleep off their drinking, roused and gaped, from round peasant faces and greasy disordered tangles.

The spy turned contemptuously, but Elakti screamed again.

Phelia, Elakti’s Maiden, hurried into the yard. She was vivid and horrified, as she had been all winter and much of the spring.

“Where is the old woman?” demanded Phelia of the spy.

“I don’t know, lady.”

“Find her. Find her at once. The mistress is in labor.”

They found the crone gathering her dubious simples along the hill, and brought her back.

She cackled and prepared a brew. Elakti gulped it and slept for an hour. Then she woke up and resumed her screams. Under the sheet her belly heaved, like a tempest in a sail.

Phelia stood dithering, twisting her hands.

“She should be at Oceaxis. The child’s too early. The last birth was difficult.”

The spy, seeing her chance, piped up. “Shall I take a mule and ride down, lady? The roads are all passable now. I could be there by evening.”

Phelia sent her. In this way, the spy missed a good deal.

Through
the day, Elakti screamed on, and kicked the sheet in buffets. Her face was deadly yellow or bright red, and sweat streamed from her. She cursed with words Phelia shuddered at, but had heard from her before. She snatched Phelia’s hand, which had tried to rearrange her pillows, and bit it.