Mortal Suns (18 page)

Ermias walked behind. Her puffing kept my spirits up. We were both in difficulties and afraid of disgrace.

We paused at the landings for some while, admiring the forms of the Sun god.

At the top, we looked as if from a mountain, to the Lakesea. Ermias breathed in great chunks of air, and I shook. But it was a fine evening, and the water was flat and soft-looking, shadowy under a shadow-gathering eastern sky.

Two or three dozen people were on the East Terrace. They gazed at us, and gazed. When we were ready, that is, when Ermias was ready, we went on, she a pace behind me, haughty as a queen. Our slow gait attracted some attention too. For myself, I felt it painfully, but I soon heard afterwards that watchers decided me in turn intimidating. One who goes in dread and abjection hurries to get by. Who walks so leisurely must be proud, and cool.

I have let Mokpor already describe the Hall, but I was no less a stranger to it than he, and was filled by wonder, more so perhaps because it might also be said to be mine. The columns were gigantic, and the alabaster lamps of Artepta, already being lighted, and burning rosy on their stands of gilded bronze, lit every aspect, and every fleck of gold. The wall painting was of an old war. It had been done in the time of Aiton, who was the great grandfather of King Okos. They had not stinted on the blood, which one must observe all around, and fallen men stuck through, during dinner.

The floor,
which Mokpor had not taken in—he was always a man for looking higher than he found himself—showed on the east side of the Hearth, the formation of the world; that is, the Sun Lands. One saw there how the continent, with its central sea and rays of islands, made, bizarrely, occultly yet overtly, the shape of the Sun.

On the west side, beyond the Hearth, lay open sea, with monsters in it and imagined lands. Certain things had come from the wastes of water beyond Artepta, Charchis, and the Benighted Isles. Curious beasts, the pieces of broken ships. Now and then, too, some traveler, lost by the will of the gods, who in ancient times was thought a devil, and put to death. The last of these had been shipwrecked on a float of wood, with one of their robes for a sail, at Kloa, in the year Okos died. They were two men, and it was said they had had skin the color of smoke.

Though the Kloans were barbaric enough, they sent an embassy to Artepta, so to Akhemony. It took a year, two or three years, depending on the version of the story. By the time Okos heard, the two men were dead by their own hand. They had pined, refused to learn more than a scatter of the words of the Isles, spat upon the altars of our gods, wept and lamented, raising their eyes to the sky in a tragedy beyond local comprehension.

So many people were in the enormous Hall. On the Hearth the wisp of magical fire burned, and above, the Daystars leaned to receive it.

A little dizzy still, I moved on, as I had been instructed.

The sky beyond the west doors was turning apricot, and there the buzz of a multitude turned my belly to ice—cool I was, indeed.

All this while I had hoped—and feared—to see Klyton. Now I did so, far off from me as the sinking Sun.

He stood with Amdysos, whom I knew at once from memory and description. He wore the crimson color of the Sunset Offering, and looked utterly a King, at twenty-one years of age.

But Klyton
wore dark purple, black leggings, and boots of black bullshide, his tunic with a border of broad red and gold. He seemed a King also. Of all Akreon’s glorious sons, these two shone out. But had Glardor been there, Glardor the Great Sun, they said now he would have looked what he was … a farmer.

I was on the women’s side of the West Terrace, though some women mingled more freely here. I noticed the greater ladies, older and more weighed with jewels, had kept decorously to the left.

From the town, the gongs were sounding, a rush of noise like insects, carried by the amphitheater of the shore.

Everyone seemed to have come out. It was all at once quite still. I held my breath.

A boy sang: “Splendor of leaving—”

Amdysos took the cup of incense and poured it down.

The Sun, orange in a mulberry cloud, dipped away. The Daystar hung like a polished diamond, or a tear.

Klyton—Klyton—the lines of his body, and his face, standing solemnly by. I cut myself upon his beauty. Pierced to the quick, I missed the Sunfall, I missed the incantation. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them, everyone was stirring. The sky was an extraordinary color, between amber and amethyst—how many Sunsets had I properly seen? I had seen
nothing
. Two rooms, a garden, the shore, a few apartments of the palace women, a temple. And—the House of Death.

“Are you well?” hissed Ermias in my ear.

“Yes.”

As we straightened, two young lilting women came to me over the Terrace. Behind them, the smoke rose from the altar. The priest was going away. Amdysos, Klyton, had gone.

“Princess!” They were two I had met before, with Ermias; now they bowed to me, pink as the pearls of the outer seas. “Our lady, the Widow-Daystar Stabia, requests you will approach her.”

That was his mother. Stabia. They said she had been the Consort’s lover.

I glanced across the Terrace, emptying now, but for the knots of persons who lingered. Against the mauve-amber sky, a fat woman bulged, with her greying blonde hair intricately done. I would see, in a moment, she had green eyes—from her he had them, Klyton.

I realized he had asked this of her, publically to notice me. I knew also, she would tell Udrombis. Udrombis who, widowed ten years, was still a fabulous goddess of the court’s female life. She would punish me if she did not like me—was that still true? Oh, yes. Oh yes.

Walking to Stabia
across the mosaic, I heard the murmurs.
Who is she? Look how she glides along. Is she real, or a doll?

They said, too, I was—delicious.

Then, I did not absorb a word.

My ears buzzed as the voices did. I saw a round blot of light on the sky, which held stout Stabia, standing among her women.

But when I reached her, and had bowed, she smiled at me, not friendly, but as one warrior greets another, matched, so far respectful.

“Princess. My son spoke of his sister. Your mother was the Daystar Hetsa, I think. Your father, of course, Akreon, the Great Sun, before his death.”

“Yes, madam.” My voice seemed far away. She heard it better than I.

“I’m glad to see you at last. You must sit by me at dinner. And your Maiden with mine.”

Ermias beamed. I felt her smugness as my hands turned to snow, as I hung weightless on the Terrace.

“You’re very kind, madam.”

“No. Come on, look happy, now.” She leaned forward, and smackingly kissed my cheek. “There. Let them talk about that.”

Although now, I can look back and see others wrapped in scenes where, at the time, I was not present, this is one of the scenes I cannot, looking back, see well at all. It passed in a trance for me. I was stiff with fear. Yet bemused and dazzled, I believe I did not often, now, glance at my brother. But once, I do recall, when I did so, Stabia said to me with quiet sharpness, “They’re a fine sight, I agree. But to stare too much at the men’s tables can mean you’re forward.”

So I looked at the walls, with their safely gutted men, and the yellow columns. At the floor, which showed the world—
our
world.

The King’s place, raised up a step or two, was void, of course. But I saw his Consort, who sometimes now spent her time at the court, a big, blonde, ordinary woman up on the left of the dais, and also Udrombis, in her chair by a pillar there. The blonde Queen was greedy but well-mannered. Udrombis the Widow ate sparingly, and drank a little wine. When the harper came in, she called him to her. He bowed to the Consort, but to Udrombis he kneeled—he was from the Eastern Towns.

She was truly
like a lioness. Oddly, so was Kelbalba, whose brother had compared her to one. But how unlike. Although I had grown taller, Udrombis seemed to have kept pace. She was still a tower, and her ebony hair, roped with greyish silver, even now with one strand of white—they said she woke with it starting three days after Akreon’s funeral—was her crowning magnificence. Her mourning robes were the color of a lion’s pelt, and edged like that with black. She wore a necklace I had heard of, called the Seven Daystars, all large diamonds, cut so that they flashed and blinded.

I saw Elakti, too, the spear-wife of Amdysos, from my mother’s Ipyra. She made ripples all around her, complaining about a fruit with a worm in it, of the heat, once slapping one of her women in full view. Stabia made no comment beyond a crunching little laugh.

The many dishes of food were exceptional. I ate almost nothing. Stabia did not prompt me. She showed me I should take an occasional morsel, and, unlike Elakti, praise it. These things got back to the cooks. As Elakti should have learned by now.

Stabia stopped me drinking too much wine in my confusion, urging Ermias to fill my cup with a juice of summer roses. This perfumed taste brings back to me always that night I can scarcely remember.

There were dancers from Oriali.

When the harper began to sing, the Hall fell quiet. At first the music was only a delicate sound. He had the male sithrom and plucked it with a strong hand brown as wood.

Then I heard the words. They were of a princess shut in a tower of bronze, noticed by the Sun god and carried away. It was an old tale, girls had swooned over it for centuries. But as I felt their faces turn, like grass-heads against the wind, I came to see that it was my cipher, I the girl shut away, that the power of the Sun and of life had rescued.

I lowered my eyes and bowed my head.

When the song was done and other ditties were sung, the princes performing with their own harps here and there, to a high standard that did not match the harper’s, Stabia told me very low, I had behaved well. “What a son I have,” she said. She sounded exasperated, and impressed, and—unsure.

He had gifted the man to sing as he had; one did not bribe a professional artist.

In the
end, they threw open both sets of doors on the warm summer night, and people wandered on the terraces to view the stars, and look where the moon rose on the sea.

Stabia got up, and bowed to Udrombis, the blonde Consort—who was still eating—then swept me out with her own.

That was the end of my first evening in the Great Hall at Oceaxis. If he looked once at me there I did not know. I was as exhausted as if I had run upon my silver feet for thirty miles.

In the half dark under the stair, at the west end of the Hall, in the lower Sun Garden, Amdysos said, “I have to go in to Elakti tonight. It’s six months since I visited her. She makes a fuss.”

“I’d have her poisoned,” said Klyton.

“No, you’ve a soft heart.”

“Something else would be soft. I don’t know how—”

“Well, let’s not talk about it. I wanted to ask you about the girl.”

“Oh, which?”

“Don’t play, Klyton.”

“You mean our sister?”

“We have so many. I mean the girl who had silver shoes.”

“No. Her feet are silver. Like her eyes, in all that pale gold.”

“I thought so. It’s the crippled one, isn’t it? Cemira—isn’t that her name?”

“
Calistra
. The other name’s a curse her bitch of a mother put on her. I’ve learned a lot. Do you know, she was sent to Koi? To Thon’s Temple—like some useless peasant brat they couldn’t afford to feed.”

Amdysos looked towards the mountains, just visible, painted in metal by a lifting moon.

“It was harsh. But this can’t be right, not this.”

“What?”

“The thing
you did. Getting Stabia—and the song. Udrombis, I gather, had looked after the child.”

“Udrombis left her to grow up in two rooms. Only her woman showed Calistra any life.”

“And you, of course.”

“You think it was a mistake. But you
saw
her.”

“I agree, she’s a pretty little thing. Maybe it will be of use. A good marriage—why not. But Klyton—”

“What
now
?”

“She’s in love with you.”

Klyton turned round and gazed long at Amdysos. Klyton’s face showed nothing at all. He said, at last, “She looks up to me. Why not? She’s hardly seen any men.”

“She is in love with you. And—Klyton, her body’s warped. Can you doubt her mind will be? It isn’t her fault. Poor creature. But you’ve brought her on too far, and much too fast.”

“You’d have left her with Thon. The
poor creature
. I recollect this conversation with you that day at Airis. You were in error then, and still you are.”

Amdysos shrugged. “All right. We must differ.”

“At Airis,” said Klyton suddenly, “I shall have the choosing lot, and race.

“You can’t know.”

“Can’t I. Watch it occur. And I’ll take Calistra there. Yes. She can come to the Sun Games, and hold the Vigil with the rest, when we ride through the caverns.”

“Don’t do it, Klyton. You’re making too much of her. What will happen when you lose interest, as you must?”

“Maybe you can’t yet give me orders, Amdysos. Maybe you aren’t yet King.”

Amdysos stepped back. His face fell, and set. “What are you saying to me? You can’t think that of me—that I dishonorably want Glardor’s place.”

“How do I know what you want. You get the best of every bloody thing. You’ve got your own command for battle. You race every year at Airis—”

“Not every—”

“And say not one word of what is in it.”

“I can’t. It’s sacred. It’s the god’s.”

“You can do anything. You can prod your ugly mad wife from the backlands, that would make any other man puke, at will. And you know my sister is an incestuous little poor deformed not-even-human whore, better left to die on a mountain. What can I know of
you
, Amdysos?”

“You’ll be sorry you said this, when you consider.”

“Who’ll make me sorry?”

“We’re not boys, to scrap over an argument.”

“No. Not boys.” Klyton
turned and strode three paces. Then he stopped. And Amdysos, kingly and silent, clenched in his breathing.