Mortal Suns (43 page)

Choras, the Thon-child, held up a silver platter they had piled, winningly, with little girl treats, sweets and small fruits, and some wine and milk, and a meat bone in a napkin for my dog.

I saw Choras had been made pretty too. Her black hair was curled, her lips rouged, and in her ears were two tiny colcai rings.

We sat in the inner room, for the terrace looked now out on to desolation. The dog gnawed at the bone without any seemliness. He had been used to having an amber dish. The girls ate their sweets, and I drank some of the wine. Nimi asked after the doves and the turtle. Then she went to see. When she returned, long silver threads of tears were on her face. The doves had escaped through the undone cage, the unwatched door, over the open terrace. They were in the living trees, ruffling and cooing, no longer nervous. The turtle, she said, had died inside her shell. She was so very old, Nimi reminded us, had Kelbalba not said so? And now, maybe she had lived more than she wanted.

But we were young, I not so much older than they, and our leaden dignity of sadness did not last. New iridescent fear rushed quickly in where loss had been.

The guard was gone from my door, so Nimi had already advised me. Soon, another guard arrived, twenty men fully armed, whose leader announced that Klyton would presently be here.

But the smoke-tinctured day yawned on, and Nimi and Choras played a board game on the floor, and I went away in my clothes to sleep on the bed. The white dog pounced up beside me, not to be my guard, but for comfort.

As I lay there dozing, Klyton was pacing out a floor, while Adargon and others watched like gazing blocks of earth.

“I was
given
this,” Klyton said. “
All
this.”

But
Torca stood before him in the white and gold of the priest, his black beard dividing him, his black lips pressed shut, parting only to say, “My lord, it wasn’t given, but loaned. Now you must give it up.”

“What to? That
thing
you have in your temple.”

And, “Yes, sir. To the Lord Amdysos.”

And Klyton shouts now. He reiterates,
that
is not Amdysos.

But Oceaxis is in ferment, and although the men of bronze still ring the palace, still hold the road, the burnt places scream with their own voices, and thousands of men are out on the land, also men of bronze, and with them two thirds of the Sun Princes of Akreon’s line. Lektos lies on a bier with his arms by him, a wronged hero, his son close by. Udrombis’s mutilated cadaver is kept concealed in the Vault of Night.

When Klyton finishes his tirade, his faction—for this is what they have become—observe him with eyes cast sidelong. Eyes that seem to regret he is so young, perhaps a fool, and they have served this imbecile.

He had been like the Sun itself, but now he is a ranting child. The toy was given him. The gods gave it. He will not—
not
—render it again to the other one, the mysterious and god-reborn, whose rightful thing it is.

“Damn him,” Klyton says. He has left off shouting. His color cools. His beauty is all they perceive, and there is a weird lesson in it, for Amdysos’s beauty was struck from him, and he has been brought back a monster. The gods have chosen what is not the best.

“All right,” Klyton says. “Call the council. I’ll debate it there.”

But like water from a surface of fine polish, the world and its chariot are slipping from him. Udrombis and her cleverness are dead. He seems to hear a rumbling, a whistling and turning in his head, the noise of the town as the firestones smote it.

No, of course he does not think of me. He is alone among his loyal men. His back is to a wall that has been shaken down. Clear as the writing in the book of stone, he sees it all.

Annotation by the Hand of Dobzah

The nightingale
has come back, to the tree beside the pool under the tower. Sirai is pleased and sits listening as it trills in the blue dusk.

She reminded me that in Akhemony, they called it the kitri, the honey-bird. And of the song she made, which compares the nightingale to memory, flying as it wills, returning often to a particular tree, where sometimes it so sweetly sings. But shadows come also to the tree.

I
REMEMBER HOW THE ROWERS
sang on and on to the beat of a drum, louder than the heart of Akhemeny, working us through the hot, windless sea. They were Bulote men, the ship a Bulote ship, one of two he had taken at the little port of Belba. They had been turning for Oceaxis, but Klyton paid the men to put the cargo off, and board us instead. They did not know who he was, and took him for some Akhemonian noble. Their dialect is complex, and in it the word for king is like the word for lord. Only the title Great Sun has a separate meaning, and this was never used in front of them.

They did not want to go, either. But they were given gold.

A temple to Thon Appidax sat on the shore, facing out the way we would be making, to the Island. It was not like the houses of Thon elsewhere in the region. As Appidax, Thon is a youth, comely, with long black hair, a form the Death god assumed once, when he went, unusually, wooing. For the sake of that human lover, Thon Appidax may be placated, and asked to desist—or at least to wait. The dying often sought such shrines, to beg more days, or those on a dangerous journey bribed the god.

From the temple,
which had four pillars dyed with cobalt, and a roof of red tile, our sailors and rowers came to the ships, laden with amulets and blessed bread for the voyage. The oracle, an old sightless woman masked only by her blindness, had assured them only one of the party would suffer immediate death. Though they were unnerved as to whom that would be, the felling of one among so many seemed worth the risk. Besides, the fatality might be in the ranks of the noble and his men, not theirs.

Adargon had said, “Klyton, my lord, no one goes there now. The Island is cursed.”

“Then it will suit me, won’t it. No, naturally I don’t mean that. The thunderbolts were my omen, Adargon. I must go where I am shown. That brought me the crown of the Sun Lands. I won’t believe the gods intended it to be snatched away.”

He had spoken very much in this vein. He would pace, or sit almost still twisting something—a knife, a fruit—in his hands. And he would say to us, those close about him,
I was given the Kingship. This was never meant. There will be a way to put it right.

As we rode from Oceaxis, he had already decided on a portion of his course. He had Daystar wives in Uaria and Oriali, little girls he had wed deliberately too young, then garlanded and gifted, kissed on the lips, and left intact with their families, until they should be fifteen or sixteen, as old as his present Sun Queen, Calistra. But with Artepta a betrothal had been arranged, a princess of eighteen years, daughter of one of the triumvirate Pehraa, their kings, who ruled always by three, and whose bloodline had run also in Udrombis. This princess had been kept for the Sun House. Artepta was a powerful and isolate land, peaceful and slow to move, but with a vast army of priest-warriors, and the capabilities for many things, which the scholarly reckoned above anything known elsewhere. Esoterica, magic, marvels of architecture and science, and weapons, too, beyond anything employed in the upper Sun Lands. One had heard the tales of what Arteptans were. Udrombis had been an awesome ambassadress, though only partly of their blood. And I do not forget Torca who had enabled me to walk, and helped drive Klyton from his Kingdom.

Klyton
said to me, “I must marry this woman, and perhaps another daughter, from one or other of the three kings. Don’t mind it that I seem to value these women. You see why.”

I was meek and affectionate, pliant to his will, trained like the dog. And so much had gone against him. I must not, even in the slightest thing. It was not that I had come to be afraid of him, not yet. But, as once before, I seemed not to know him. He radiated a hard and fascinating light. Not much more than a thousand men, some three hundred of them Sirmians, had followed him from Oceaxis. Those held by the fire of him, hung from his Sun, now too brilliant, and now in cloud.

We had been making for Sirma, so it was thought. Then Klyton drew us up again, northeast, to Belba. He had said to Adargon, no ship would have put out from Oceaxis for the Island.

At Belba, he gave the bulk of the soldiery over to Adargon, and in the wagons put presents, selected on the night we chose our possessions for our future life. “Go and speak to them in Artepta. You have my letters to the Pehraa. Add what you like. Only the facts. You only need set them out. I am King. Artepta is always gracious, and worships justice, and so on.”

With about sixty men loaded on the larger Bulote ship, a vessel of two oar-banks and double sail, Klyton put himself and his household, such as it now was, with ten guards, into the lesser galley that had fifty rowers and a single sail the color of brown Bulote mud.

Our ship had for her figurehead the goddess of the river up which they had sailed into the Lakesea. They wreathed her but bound her eyes. They did not want her to see the direction they were steering her. Which was to the Sun’s Isle where a piece of the Sun had fallen, in the time before time.

They had called their council in Oceaxis. By then, a deputation had come from the Sirmian troops in Akhemony led by a kinsman—so he called himself—of Klyton’s: one of the spear-wife Bachis’s uncles. He declared the Sun Lands would be plunged into anarchy if the King was no longer King. But the Sirmians were thought mostly savages, and did not have the weight of savage Ipyra, who had not yet learned the plan. If Klyton sent the Karrad-king, my grandfather, any word, I do not know. Probably not. Ipyra might fly either way, to Klyton’s standard or back into her rebellions.

The days
dragged on for me there, shut in the tiny continent of my royal rooms. Food was brought, elaborate and artistic, and I shared these feasts with my dog and my two women, Choras, who was ten, and Nimi who was only a year or two older. One of my new guard came in to remove the dead turtle. My throat closed and ached at this, but no tears would come. He said he would have them scour out the precious carapace, and bring that back to me. Then I felt a piercing. I told him no, she must be buried with her shell intact upon her. But I saw his eyes. So I said, distractedly, I had changed my mind, we would see to it ourselves. I did not want to offend him, because danger seemed all around. Nimi and I carried the turtle to a huge chest, and put her down on silks, and covered her. Choras sprinkled spices. We locked and sealed the chest from the air, and got it away into the vacant rooms my women had occupied. I wrote on the lid in the script of Akhemony:
A faithful one lies here. Leave her untouched. Alcos emai.
Ancient queens had buried pets in this manner in the distant past, having the caskets installed later in their own tombs.

As for the doves, they never returned. Like the doves, my women. It interested me vaguely when we were on the road from Oceaxis going South at first towards Sirma, that Bachis the spear-wife, and her child, had managed to keep most of their small retinue. She might as well not have bothered, for Klyton set all but one girl and the Maiden loose on the road, as too much baggage.

I had told Klyton, in their hearing, that Nimi should now be my Chief Maiden, and Choras a Maiden too. Nimi blushed with delight. Her mercenary innocence warmed me. Choras only gazed at me raptly. To her I was almighty, having rescued her from Koian Thon. I would do no wrong, and could, ultimately, never myself come to harm. And this unmercenary faith chilled. But I scarcely noticed. They were only there, with the dog.

Through all the days and nights until that afternoon, I had not seen Klyton. He had penned me one letter. He told me he was sorry for my discomfort. It would soon end.

Then, when he came—without all the customary flurry, for no one was there to make much fuss—he had people with him. A guard, and a secretary, an old slave he had kept by him since boyhood. The slave took an itinerary of my wants, and Klyton led me aside into my—our—bedroom, where despite the ravishing food I was brought, no one had been to sweep or tidy, to see to the perfumes for the bath, or clean it.

“Calistra—”

This was when
I saw again that I did not know my husband. He burned so bright. He laughed and the shining coins of his laughter struck the walls.

“I’ve brought you down. The God knows, no fault of mine. Trust me, it won’t be for long. Isn’t that what the hearty peasant says to his wife in the bad year when the orchards don’t ripen? The God’s Heart, Calistra. What can I say?”

Then he told me they had made the fake Amdysos High King, that he was to be crowned Great Sun. Certain of the princes, jointly, would rule for him, until his recovery was complete.

“Recovery—what, put back the crushed brain and sew it in, as they do in Artepta? This mad, crippled stick—because of a shower of thunder-stones blown in from some fire mountain of Ipyra—yes, that’s what Torca—even Torca—says they were. Volcanic debris. And for this—for this—But then, Torca believes that obscenity is his true King. I know Torca. He’d never sink down to this unless he did believe it.” And after that, pacing across the room, Klyton began one of his speeches, which till then I had not heard. How the gods had chosen him, making him wait, preparing and purifying him, snatching Amdysos away, the sacrifice, leaving the enthroning world to Klyton. And this—this was some aberration as if some word spoken in a fever were taken as the pronouncement of destiny. The fever would pass. They would see what they had done. Then they would cry after Klyton and he would forgive them, and gather them again into his hand.

I listened. The dog listened. Outside I heard the old slave talking sensibly to Nimi.

Did I grasp that Klyton’s golden sentences were only decorated ribbon’s tied about a rotten fruit, as they do it in so many markets in time of festival, to hide what must at last be smelled and seen?