Mortal Suns (7 page)

Hetsa hated Udrombis in that instant. Hated her, priggish, stupid, dangerous, tyranical bitch.

“I can’t say to you, Hetsa,” said Queen Udrombis slowly, measuring out her doleful words, “that your act can be overlooked.” Hetsa gave a shrill cry. Udrombis ignored it. “You must come with me into the next room. There the priests have prepared the altar before Ia, who as you will know is our judge in Akhemony. In deference to you, I’ve added an icon of the Ipyran deity.”

Hetsa, insensible apparently to this kindness, got up, threw herself on her knees—Mokpor again?—and wailed. “Oh, madam— madam—don’t—”

Udrombis, too, rose up.

When she did this, she seemed to tower four miles over Hetsa on the floor.

The Great Queen’s mourning robes were of the palest grey, shot almost invisibly with silver. Her hair had been covered with a grey, soft gauze held by a circlet of milky amber. Her feet were bare.

“You must come with me now and confess to your indiscretion aloud, at the altar. There together we shall seek to secure for you a cleansed soul.”

“Madam—don’t—don’t—”

Udrombis said flatly, “What is it?”

“I don’t want to die!”

Udrombis sighed. “You needn’t fear death, Hetsa. Don’t be afraid. But I insist upon this.”

Hetsa floundered to her feet. She wrung her hands and tried to kiss the fingers of the Queen. Udrombis removed her person, slightly, and left Hetsa flailing at the air.

“Thank you—thank you—”

Beyond the curtain, in the tiled room where, on a side table of inlaid ivory, ivory figures stood against figures of bloody cinnabar, in some deserted game, the proposed altar had been set up behind a screen.

Here, at
the Queen’s instigation, before the statue of Ia, a creature with the head of a man and the body of a bird, perhaps an owl, Hetsa flooded forth her deeds.

When everything had been said, Udrombis, a priestess too by right of her station, cast down the costly incense for the god. And some even for the small Ipyran god, who was only a bird. The vapors lifted.

“It’s done. You are free of it.”

“Oh, madam.”

Hetsa did not think to ask Udrombis if the deformed baby had lived. Of course, it had not. Probably pious Udrombis, so sharp for the honor of the King’s house, was glad enough that it had died in the sanctum of Thon.

Udrombis then, with her own hand, an ultimate mark of notice that Hetsa did not miss, poured out for Hetsa a goblet of wine. Hetsa was happy to receive it, her mouth had been so parched. She reasoned that the Queen must wish some service from her, and to this end had terrified her, and let her go. Hetsa was somewhat concerned as to what Udrombis would demand. But anything was better than dying, at twenty-two years of age, in this apartment.

When the cup, of fine greenish glass, dropped on the tiles and smashed, Udrombis, having engineered the omen, was still not indifferent to it.

She had not wanted, anyway, to retain the cup through which she had, swiftly and painlessly, poisoned the Daystar Hetsa. And in something of the same vein, she had dispatched Hetsa herself. Udrombis took no interest in causing hurt or horror for their own sake. She desired all souls forgiven, to have their chance in death. But like any good wife, any good widow, now, she kept the floors of her husband’s house swept clean.

My father Akreon, the Great Sun of All the Lands, was found in his bed one hour after sunrise.

He lay on his back, most of his body under the furs and silken sheet. His face was serene and slightly smiling. Both his arms had been raised high, the big hands spread open, as if to welcome the Sun that was climbing up the window, at the couch’s foot.

At first, his
body-slave thought him alive. Then in terror learned that, though he held out his arms, they were hard as iron. As was indeed the whole of his frame, even his toes. Even his phallus, which was erect.

He was also lushly tanned. A day’s hunting in the spring forest could not have given him such luster. He was the shade of an athlete who has raced under the hottest summer sun.

The awe which accrued to this particular death was not, then, amazing.

Akreon’s father, my grandfather, King Okos, had died at the age of ninety, frail, and olive-colored as a cricket.

I came back to Oceaxis as the heir did, my half brother Glardor, who was almost thirty years my senior. He came with pomp, in some style. I, on the front of the soldier’s horse, my beautiful bronzen soldier that I loved, and whose name I have forgotten, as I forget little else—I wonder why that is? Is it I was not yet used to names? Or perhaps love itself, the purest love of childhood, has smoothed that name from the tablet, to keep for him his privacy.

Udrombis, a clever woman, had not wanted me much to be seen, until she had got a look at me herself. She did not know what she would find. Typically, in the way of her justice, I, being royal, must live. But I might be all Hetsa had thought me. I might not be much use.

I entered the palace again by night, and perhaps I had been drugged just a touch.

Huge ceilings float over me, and the torches swim and flash. Horses’ hooves echo along my brain. Then, a soft bed, the first soft bed I have ever known, and this, like sleep itself, enfolds me, and I sink down, to fly among the eagles in heaven.

A massive storm raged over Akhemony. The sky was black and the clouds curdled with lightning. The water of the inland sea was churning, serpent green. Hailstones, that some claimed burned, fell in the streets of Oceaxis.

I myself have read the records and histories, which showed that, with every Kingly death, such extremities of weather displayed themselves.

At the death of an earlier Sun King, a solar eclipse occurred, bringing such fear that many killed themselves on the spot. But that had been long ago.

In any case,
before noon the wind dropped. The almost tideless sea, and every fire in Oceaxis, stood still, and was flattened, as if by great invisible hands.

The Sun Temple had been laid, stones brought, they said, by eagles, on a natural height above the town. Pines and cedars clothed the hill, the sacred trees of the Sun god’s shade. And near the hill’s head, the oak trees, and red marroi, from whose bark was distilled the occult drink of priestly visions. All these had bent and rushed to the wind, and now were stones. It was dark as twilight, or so I recall, as we climbed the hill, in hundreds, everyone on foot. Everyone, of course, save I.

The temple was built upon three terraces. It was white, but the columns painted ochre, rose, scarlet, and gilded with burnished bronze and hammered gold. The roof lifted too, into a column, a white chimney flecked, as it seemed, with specks of diamond and emerald, blinking eyes of green and silver fire. This chimney was itself the height of a tall tree.

No one had said anything to me. No one had prepared me. I had been got up, washed, and given—to me amazing—food. They had dressed me plainly. Now a muscular slave carried me in his arms. He did not like me. I was used to that. But at his side walked such a pretty, pretty woman. She entranced me. Her curling black hair, with glints in it; her earrings. She, too, wore the plainest weave, and I could tell she was angry, or unnerved. She disliked me also. I did not know yet, properly, her name was Ermias, and we were all in disguise. Udrombis had decreed I had some rights, covertly, to behold my father’s funeral.

First the drums began to rumble. They were the lesser drums of the temple, but matching themselves to that other eternal Heart Drum which I, in my lifetime, have heard broken not once but thrice.

Above our immediate crowd, the merchants and traders, the minor officials, and captains’ wives with their servants, up there, the highest persons. And in their ranks, unlike our own, the strictest segregation. To one side were the courtiers, the lords, and to the other, the noble women of the King’s court.

But one’s eye went higher yet. To the upper terrace. Oh yes, surely they too must be gods.

Grey and brown were the colors of mourning in our lands. Yet, aloft, such browns, such greys, fawnskin, lion-pelt, the most dappled silks, the pearls of the deepest rivers.

The princes stood
to the male side, the right, near where the fire-basket blazed up on its stand against the thick sky, top bowed and spread like the very shape of the cedars.

Foremost were the sons of Udrombis. Her youngest, Amdysos, golden, handsome, eleven years old, clad in a grey that was white. And his elder brother, Pherox, a youth named for the metal of swords, and who had a silver tooth, his black hair like the lion’s mane. And, before them, the oldest son, the heir, the King, Glardor the rising Sun.

No one would know now, gazing up to him, that he had been, even one moment, unready.

He was so like the King, the King who had died. He had got, from nature, the tan the King uncannily had had, the kiss of the god. For Glardor was a man for hunting too, and for husbandry in open fields. Around his brow ran the band of lead that betokened his loss. His garments were of sober grey, with one stripe of bullion the width of an arm.

Behind these three sons of the Consort, ranged the other sons, the men and boys got on Daystar queens. All were comely, all seemed honed by the promise of perfection. The fruit of the princesses of north and west, of east and south, the province-kingdoms of the Sun. But near Amdysos, stood his friend, the son of Stabia, who was friend to the Queen.

For nine, this boy was very tall, very beautiful. They said he had a chariot already, nor quite a toy one, and he and Amdysos raced in miniature the sacred Race of the Sun that was held at Airis in the summer, by grown men, for the amusement of the gods. But they invented its obstacles, since no man who had faced them must reveal them.

On the other side, farthest from the fire, were the royal women. The dead King’s queens, seventeen in number, and their daughters—countless, these—drooping in their dove and rain shades. But there, the last and youngest queen, sheltered at the side of the Consort, the little girl from Oceaxis, weeping openly in her veil. Her sons were babies. They had been left behind.

The harps were conjuring the musics of lament. A boy priest raised his arms, almost in an imitation of the gesture of the corpse, whose arms, for dignity, had been broken to fit the bier.

How are
we to live?

There is no sorrow unknown to men.

Birth sends us to a house of shadows
,

And at the end, to Night.

They were bearing forward the body of the King.

The chariot approaches, a chariot of steel, painted with closed eyes, drawn by white geldings—Death does not procreate. Drapes like cobwebs trail the road.

Out comes the bier, open. Only Akreon has been gloriously dressed for this day. He wears crimson and gold. From his cadaver waft the sweetest, most appetizing odors. He smells like confectionery from a kitchen I have never yet known. And the bath of a rapturous and celebrated courtesan.

I saw him ascend the stair. Up the terraces, borne high. I think I glimpsed his face, but it was painted, and flowers had been put into his hair, a wreath of white narcissus, the best the spring could give, since the green blossoms at the Heart must not be plucked.

In the hall of the temple was enormous space. The roof, about the tapering O of the chimney, had stars set into a ceiling stained violet like the sky. Phaidix kept her altar on the female side, but the watch flame was out. The giant altar of the Sun lay under the chimney, empty but for its two fires.

The chanting was now like the sound of bees in a cavern, or the noise one hears in the head when one is sick. How do I know? I was a child in the crowd below the terraces, yet, I have seen it, the going up of my father.

Four of his soldiers lifted Akreon to the altar, where he stretched, magnificent, between the two dishes of fire, an offering to the god.

Udrombis, the Consort, stepped forward. She tore her garment, a religious gesture, its passion foreign to her, yet executed with such control, such forethought, it had great power. Beneath the robe of sand and silver, another of white and silver. With her right hand she scattered upon her lord the funeral wine meant to represent her heart’s blood, as—outward show apart—perhaps it did.

At this moment, the sky above the temple portentously cleared.

A rift appeared in the cloud, and the Sun, at its apex, seared through the aperture of the chimney. To those within, the intimates of the dead, his children and women, the wonder was vouchsafed.

A shaft, burning like molten gold, split suddenly down through the funnel of the chimney, where every facet of a gem scorched out in reply.

The Queen
stepped back.

Directly upon the breast of the King, the shaft was fired, striking the jewels of his collar, so that a splash of fire shot back into the air. For some moments, he lay suspended, seeming to levitate in a blaze of light, and then, unconscionable, undeniable, the thin smokes began to issue from his body.

Those in the temple held their breath, perhaps. Or waited, with instructed silence, still, like the trees, as stones.

The smoke unfurled, massing, permeating the temple with the scent of rare spices and perfumes.

As the King’s body erupted into brilliant flame, the priests’ voices, the boys’ clear altos and the sonorous bass, sprang like the fire to uprushing life.

Akreon’s body was burning, there on the altar of the god. For the god had sent his fire to bring this chosen son into the upper air. The god received Akreon, and the priests sang loudly, as if in joy, and triumph.

From the terraces below, the smoke was visible now, pouring up towards the golden wheel of Sun, and breaking sky. The air was heavy with a delicious and cloying odor.

The slave who held the child murmured very low, “He is going up. My eyes witness the ascension of Akreon, the Great Sun.” All the crowd was murmuring this.

The child stared in vain, striving to see the body of the King, sailing to heaven in the grip of an eagle, but seeing only … smoke.

Is it possible I wondered even then, on the nature of what God might be?