Mortal Suns Page 4

  Of all the times he could have been invited to the ceremony, the gods had allowed him this one. The sunset when the King had seen a vision.

  Ushered into the apartment of the Sun-Consort, Udrombis, in the hour before dinner, he found her as he had expected, cool and quiet. Nothing at all might have happened anywhere.

  She talked to him a few moments of his travels. She was known for her tact and her ability to put at ease the nervous … to make nervous too, those too much at ease. She had been lovely in her youth, at twelve, when the King had wed her. She was forty-eight now. Tall, heavy, faultlessly elegant. Her Arteptan blood showed in her ropes of jet-black hair, worn long despite their grayer strands, and the polished agates of her eyes.

  In another chair sat the other, lesser queen, the Daystar Stabia, the Consort’s close friend. They had been amiable companions for years and, if ever rivals, were so no more.

  Mokpor had noted, down a long lamplit room beyond this one, where two sleek dogs lay on the tiles, two male golden children, eleven and nine years old, playing a board game couthly, just out of earshot—one assumed, Udrombis’s youngest son, and Stabia’s only son. Friends also, apparently.

  He began to realize quite quickly, as she looked at his dextrous display of the cloth, that he was not really here to sell her anything. At least, not web-silk.

  “Such delicate fabrics. Yes. I will take those, and those. And Stabia, let me have this, for you.”

  Stabia inclined her head, “Thank you, madam. You’re very kind.”

  They were formal before him. And Stabia, the younger, was like a bolster. She would look more like one, in the selected silk.

  “Please sit, sir. Try those sweets, they’re quite tasty. I mustn’t keep you too long from your meal.”

  It was Stabia who rose, and gestured to the group of Maidens behind the chairs, that they might go. As they did so, moving on into the second room, they drew across a long heavy curtain. The two sons of the Sun were hidden.

  Stabia said, “The Sun-Consort wishes to confide in you, Mokpor. Don’t be agitated at what she says.”

  At once the scented hair rose on Mokpor’s head, and his belly griped. What was coming?

  “Queen Hetsa,” said Udrombis, in her mild, eloquent voice, “has taken you as her lover.”

  The chamber whirled. Mokpor watched all the decorations hurry past. He shut his eyes and tried not to wet himself. “High Lady—I have enemies—someone has—”

  “Lied? No. Of course not. You must understand, sir, my task, in this last third of my life, is to care for the household of the King. To this end, I have those who are able to tell me things. Your habit with the Daystar, Hetsa, is but one of many I’ve learned of.”

  Mokpor threw himself flat on the floor.

  To his horror, as he did so, he heard fat Stabia stifle a laugh.

  Udrombis said, levelly, “My desire isn’t to distress you. The King, I know, will never lie with Hetsa again. He was warned from it, after the stillbirth. He loves best his last queen, the little girl from the town. She’s only seventeen, even now. And she’s born him a pair of healthy children. If the King were to wish to see Hetsa again, he would inform me. I would then advise him that she was not quite well. That’s all. She does no harm, therefore, and nor do you. One must be sensible in these matters. There have been other cases.”

  Mokpor began to weep. It was Stabia who leaned over him and, of all things, wiped his eyes and nose briskly with a corner of her over-mantle. She, a queen, gave him his cup of wine. He drank it down.

  Sitting on the floor then, like one of their sons—he had been nine once, and his mother seventeen—he listened to what Udrombis wanted.

  “But—”

  “One has heard things. Strange things. I would like to know who or what had incurred such supernatural activity in the apartment of Queen Hetsa.”

  “Her women—Ermias—couldn’t you send for her?”

  “Ermias is a Maiden. Loyal to her mistress, I hope. You, sir, are this Daystar’s intimate.”

  Mokpor hung his head. One day, when he was elderly, this would make a story worth recounting. He would need to be elderly, to have got over the shock.

  Crow Claw had been located.

  Perhaps it was not so strange that Ermias had found her at last after dark, in the garden of Phaidix, under the wall.

  Crow Claw had been making an offering of milk at the small stone altar. The statue was crude, very old. It smelled nastily of milk poured there. The moon goddess who had charge of the stars, did not care for blood, since when she hunted animals, or murdered men, their death was delightful and they did not bleed.

  “Crow, you have to come and see to Queen Hetsa.”

  “I’m too old.”

  Ermias raised her brows. She put, without delay, the silver ornament, a girl dancing, into the witch’s hand.

  “Take this. And come.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s sick and making a fuss. Screaming—”

  “Why?”

  Ermias bent near. “She says—feet are running about in her womb.”

  Crow Claw gazed up at the night sky. Phaidix’s moon was rising on the sea, the bow, strung with its invisible cord.

  “I have seen those feet. They scurry about her room.”

  Ermias made a sign over her heart, a protective, unbroken circle.

  “Don’t speak of that.”

  “Her girls saw it. Three of them have seen it.”

  “No.”

  “And the turtle, the ancient one. She sees. Her eyes follow them.”

  Ermias had come to Hetsa in the year after the business of the baby in Hetsa’s apartment. Ermias had replaced the chief of Hestsa’s women, who had fled back to her kindred in the hills. This girl had had dreams, of disembodied silver feet that ran and jumped—and skipped across the floors.

  Hetsa had heard nothing of any of this. The rumors had only eventually reached Udrombis.

  They climbed up a level of the palace, Ermias supporting the crone, now and then thinking of a grandmother in her father’s house, who had had no teeth. Crow Claw had teeth. She could bite with them, had left one tooth in a man’s hand, years ago.

  Ermias noticed it was the second time today there had been notions of teeth—some omen?

  In Hetsa’s rooms, the shadows are another color now. The raw greys and browns of mourning.

  The lamps tend to go out, as if the oil were bad.

  Hetsa lies wide-eyed. Her hands grip her belly. She feels them, kicking her, kicking her. The feet of the dead child left behind.

  The physician has examined her, and told her nothing at all is amiss. She is nervous; woman’s trouble, hysteria. That is the cause of this.

  But the physician’s medicine has not helped, and Hetsa knows.

  Beholding the witch, like the very last shadow bending near, Hetsa says nothing.

  Crow Claw peered down.

  “I see them,” the witch said presently. “They are there.”

  “What shall I do?” Hetsa sounded like a ghost. She expected soon to die.

  “Confess,” said Crow Claw. “That is all that must be done. Be open with your foulness, the deformed baby—what you did with it. The name you gave it. Tonight is a night among nights.”

  The women mumbled.

  Crow Claw folded her robes about her. In four years, she had aged not one iota.

  From the Great Hall, up in the sky, a cheerful loud noise blossomed with the dinner. The men were singing, maybe even the King. The queens would be chattering, laughing. And from the Hearthfire of the double Sun god, the semen-smoke would lift to the doubled hands of the Daystar. All was well. The Suns invoked, must rise tomorrow. The vision of the King could bode only good.

  “Confess,” said Crow Claw. “Or die.”

  Below in the garden, a black fox, got in at a hole in the wall, was drinking the milk of Phaidix under the moon.

  4

  As predicted, the Sun rose. The Daystar rose. In the way
of days, this one passed.

  Night came again, over the lands of the Sun, creeping through dark Artepta, enfolding watery Bulos in a cloak of shade, clambering now on the backs of Oriali, clasping Ipyra of the burning caves, pushing across the Lakesea, moonless in cloud, smothering Oceaxis, and gushing on to put out the colors and contours of the continent’s central basin, Akhemony, the “King’s Own Land.” At the mountains, the tide expanded, climbed the Heart and Koi and Airis; spilled, poured down into the waste of waves and islands that was Uaria, and so swept on into the mouth of the Unknown, the seas beyond the world.

  It was a three-day journey, but that was for those who would pause to rest. For these riders, posted with horses along the route, much of a day and a night sufficed.

  Coming as they must to the smoking House of Thon, in the darkness, they drew rein on the track, where, in their torchlight, the Phaidix rode her lion.

  And here, unsheathing their swords, they saluted her, the armed men. The metal of the, swords, pherom-steel, had been made in the earliest times from her fallen stars.

  That which watched in the House presently sent out four black figures on the road.

  No word exchanged. Nothing. The horses sidling a little, hard held. A faint luminescence in the valleys below that might indicate that morning was appearing in a dream. No other thing, save, somewhere, hundreds of feet above, the trickle of one tiny pebble.

  The watchers on the track watched from their ovoid faces. The men sat their horses, meeting hidden eyes.

  Then the riders wheeled about, and raced on over the passes of Koi, their torches breaking wreaths of gold.

  They must reach the crown of the land, the Mountain of the Heart, before the Sun returned.

  An ultimate noise roused the five youngest children in their dormitory. The night had been cold, and four of them had doubled together two by two, for warmth. Only the freak, Cemira, had been left alone.

  With their heads ringing from the clashing squall of the gong, they dropped from their pallets and stood up, to meet this new disaster. For the gong was only sounded in a time of calamity. They had been told that long ago.

  As four poised on the icy floor, Cemira swung herself upright by use of her canes. Like all of them, she was naked. She hung there, the slender white verticals of her legs ending where the ankle bones should have begun, like stalks from which, the flowers had been cleanly, tidily, severed.

  “The most terrible has occurred.”

  The priestess spoke to them in a voice of coldest iron. It must be, as once or twice had been threatened, the end of the world.

  Two began to sob.

  The priestess shouted, once. They were dumb.

  “Dress yourselves. Come to the Death Altar. Be very quick. If you are late, you’ll be beaten. To mark you for life.”

  Life? She would have no fear of world’s end, even when the mountains collapsed and the sky broke on the roof in fragments.

  They ran about when she was gone, pulling on their clothes, moaning, and presently rushing out. Cemira was the last only because it was more awkward for her.

  As her sticks swung her hurtfully through the passages, she was passed by priests and priestesses who also ran, speechlessly.

  Yes, the world was to end.

  Was she sorry? She did not question herself, this little girl. She had only miseries to lose. The one who taught her to sew, any way, soothing her chapped hands, had sometimes told her of another aspect of Thon. Then he was the Veiled One, who shut the eyes of the sufferer with his gentle breath, and brought the Sleep of Night, which might be full of beautiful dreams.

  The Death Altar lay in the forepart of the temple. It was the sole public hall of the house, to which, very rarely, suppliants might come, wishing to show honor to some deceased relative or lover. But usually such people would take themselves to temples of the towns, not here. For Thon’s house in the hills of Akhemony was not kept for remembrance.

  When the child reached the hall, it was packed full, and full too of the smells of unwashed morning bodies and mouths, and the rope-thick smoke that gusted from the Altar. Nearby, a black cow stood tethered, tossing her head in fear, for she scented old blood around the drain, which could never quite be washed away.

  There was no chanting. No words were being said. There was no true sound.

  The child listened. She heard her heart beating. No, it was the Heartbeat from the mountain, the Heart of the Land of Akhemony. This was what she heard.

  All her life, her four into five years, she had heard it, and mostly here, so loud, so omnipotent in this place. Heard it so long, she no longer heard it at all, although every hymn of the temple took its tempo from that beat.

  The smoke roiled into the roof, up to the wide black beams. There was no statue. Thon showed himself only in the sanctum. They said, he was too terrible for others to look on until, presumably, they must.

  She was sorry for the cow. She had fed it yesterday. They had told her in the kitchen it need not be killed for another month, and that was for food, which would have been better, because the butcher’s yard was kept quite clean, and there it might not have noticed the odor of blood—

  Nearby, another child, adrift in the adult crowd, threw up from terror on the floor.

  A priestess turned, quickly, and slapped it.

  Yes, yes, let the world end now.

  I see myself as if from above. I see myself standing there, as I had then to stand, on my canes. Almost mindless I was with lack of life and knowledge. I weep for her, that little child I was.

  Annotation by the Hand of Dobzah

  I wish to say that, at this point of her narrative, tears ran from the eyes of Sirai. But only for a moment. I have never seen her weep before except for another, but it is always very swift. I tried to catch one tear once in a bottle. When she saw what I did, she burst out laughing at me. And her tears stopped.

  Up on the peak of the Heart, it was possible to see, across the earth, the initial trace of light that must be a messenger of the Sun.

  The riders had reached the lower platform. They might go no further. Perhaps, they could not have done, for here the Drumbeat juddered them, made them dizzy and half faint. The land—seemed to dance. One man staggered down from his horse. His torch fell. He lay full-length on the ground, clutching at the rocks.

  All about, the gathered height, still, in disturbed darkness, spring-dashed with the most silver, or the most dirty snow. But above, the pinnacle-peak, its round, dim disk of cave, was garbed gleaming in clandestine virgin white. And where the stream darted over and down, not long unfrozen, catching torchlight, the magical greenish flowers grew.

  The priest who had ridden with them, the Sun priest from Oceaxis, had come to the boulder where the horn hung on its chain.

  The chain was rusty. He must scrape and scrabble to reach the instrument. Having it, he did not wipe the filthy lip, that would be sacrilege. Since boyhood, one of four, he had been trained to sound such a horn, against this hour. He lifted the horn to his mouth, drew breath into his mighty lungs, that a diver for pearls in the Bulote rivers might have envied. He kissed the horn lip. Tang of age and bitterness—

  Even over the rampage of the Drum, that thundered and blasted down at them, turning the mountain in a cauldron of sound, the horn was audible. A lost and appalling lowing had come from it, and went on, like the cry of the world herself.

  Then the priest, breath exhausted, let go the note, which hung a moment more above the thunder of the Drum, swilled between cliffs of stone and air, paled like dye in water, vanished.

  Shivering, the priest got up again. His life had been, partly, for this. It was unthinkable he would ever have to do it again.

  He, and the soldiers of the King, stood, agonized and one-dimensional, between land and heaven.

  Then—

  Then.

  The Drum, the Heart—

  Stopped.

  One of the soldiers screamed. He clapped his hands to his head. A fellow caugh
t him and threw him down before he plunged to his death over the ledge of the mountain.

  And now, only this …

  The wind whined, curled over, and came back, whining. They heard the tinselly crinkle of the waterfall.

  The horses shook their heads, the bridles jingling.

  The priest spoke softly, not to bruise the Heart-stopped air: “The Great Sun is dead.”

  In his youth he had known this, once, at the death of Akreon’s father. He had not been on the mountain then, he had been younger, then. He buried his face in his hands, and stood motionless, as the soldiers swayed or reeled, or crawled around him.

  The temple was built of shrieking. In the midst of it, as they ran against her, as they fell and tumbled on the floor, Cemira hung on her canes, and saw the throat of the cow slashed by a howling priest, her outcry tangled in all the rest.

  After that the world spun over and Cemira sprawled, just as the thin priestess had wished to see.

  Cemira lay on the floor, kicked and stumbled on by others with feet.

  Her head tolled an abysm of emptiness. It was as if she had gone deaf. Or, had died.

  The blackness covered her, and yet, still conscious, she bobbed on the sea of it. This must be death. And death was as horrible as living.

  But someone now snatched her up. She was borne, whirling, through the whirling world, away and away. She clung with all her might. Did she wish after all to survive, then? This curtailed body, did it have the temerity to long for life?

  “Ssh. It’s the worst moment. In a second—it will be over. Hush. My baby. I know, I know. Hold me. Yes. Oh, let the gods make it end!”

  Unknown to Cemira, known to the priestess who held her, the kind priestess who had sought her in the maelstrom, up in the peak of Heart Mountain the drummer was already taking up again his Drumsticks. To him, maybe worse than to any other, this abysmal hesitation in the rhythm of his days. He craned into the gloom of the sanctified cave, his flaming madman’s eyes straining upon the reefs of time, seeking the new moment in which—to resume.

  It came.

  The sticks flared high, struck down.