Mortal Suns (26 page)

Events, naturally, had happened, although I paid them no attention. Returning to Melmia with his borrowed troops and the little Sirmian wifelet, Klyton had been ridiculed on one hand, praised on the other. The general story went about that he had lusted after Bachis all those years, and swept her up without dowry. Then put himself to total shame in the rubbish heap town, stones thrown, and oxen and chieftains lowing under the window, as he did business with her body.

Presently the tale changed, as his strategy was pointed up. To the town in Sirma, Klyton sent, at his own expense, some extra, very handsome gifts. He summoned the chief and his Spear Tall Son—that is the eldest—with two or three other relatives, to Oceaxis, and made a fuss of them there as his kin, for five whole days and nights.

They began to say Klyton had the wit King Okos had had, willing to make a firm strategic wedlock, and then cementing it in. Such niceties Glardor had never bothered with. Soon enough rustic Bachis, strewn with trinkets, had—unlike Elakti—a round, hard, budding belly. Her suite was small, but in a pleasant part of the palace. There was nothing to complain of.

And Sirma lay quiet, well stroked down and purring.

By then, Glardor’s funeral rites were long past. No spark had come for his cremation. It had been an overcast day of the drought, though lacking rain. They had had to use the priestly trick with the chimney.

Following this, from among Akreon’s sons, a Great Sun was chosen. He was selected by means of ancient precepts that must operate, should the descended Sun and all his foremost male offspring of age die in battle. Omens and signs, supposed to attend the process, were duly fabricated. The new High King was twenty-five years old, in the prime of his health, the son of a Daystar Akreon had turned to, they said, only that once.

I have not
until now spoken of Nexor. Nor do I summon any scenes of him, before the first ceremony of his Kingship. He was an effulgent, mighty prince, like them all, standing forward to receive the Winter Diadem, since his crowning could not come till next summer, the time of the Sun’s waxing. His hair was reddish, they said from his mother, a Uarian woman. No doubt the compliance of Uaria was considered, in electing him.

He had been in many wars, performed hardily, though never shone. He was said to be a forceful man, not weighty in Glardor’s manner. And Nexor had no hankering for the fields. He was, besides, young.

He stands up in my inner vision only like a puppet. I see no further than the bold face with its glimpse of Akreon. Their beauty, in those days, my half brothers, the lesser gods of Akhemony, was a weariness to me.

For Klyton, he was waiting. He had had two dreams. Besides, Udrombis had forgiven the single terrible transgression. And one night she called him to her after supper.

He found at once she had dispensed with all her power games, unless this was another played by default. A chair with golden lions’ heads on arms and feet had been set for him. Her chair of cedar-wood was not one of the larger ones. He did not at first quite believe, but came to see, the golden chair was that which Akreon had used, when in private with her.

It was strange there, that evening. The winter dark not quite dispelled by the soft lamps of Arteptan alabaster, her lion desk crouching in the blue-black shadows. Before a shrine of the god, a flame fluttered redly. Klyton knew all her apartment at Oceaxis, all save her sleeping chamber. With the years the rooms had grown smaller, as had she. Tonight they had, peculiarly, the feel of an open place—not especially cold, yet peeled wide somehow to heaven, the watching eyes of other beings.

“I have
something for you, Klyton,” said Udrombis. She brought it to him—she had sent the women away. As she put it in his hand, he saw how the white had flooded her hair since Airis.

“A ring—”

“It was Akreon’s ring. His hands enlarged with age, and work. He said it was a pity to alter the gold.”

The ring was a knotted round of golden leaves, holding one searing cat’s-eye, an unflawed, greenish topaz. By the richness of it, the gem’s quality, the workmanship, he knew it was worthy of a King.

“I wish you to have this, Klyton,” she said.

“I’ll treasure it, madam.”

“You were clever in Sirma. I was pleased with you. A little matter, but such little pebbles, laid all together, make a hill.”

“So I thought.”

They sat down, and he drank the wine laid ready. She had poured it with her own hand, as she had brought the ring.

“I’ve something less happy to say.”

“Have I offended?”

“No. You’ve been busy at a prince’s affairs. Your mother, have you noticed, has lost some weight.”

“I hadn’t, but I expect she’s pleased. The stairs have been annoying her.”

“It is an illness, Klyton. Your mother is sick.”

He put down the cup.

“Why didn’t she—”

“She doesn’t know it, not quite. But I’ve spoken to her physician.”

Klyton frowned. A boy’s affection, a slight, half-sinister sadness, brushed him. He had gone far from Stabia, as a man must. But she was yet his mother.

“What should I do?”

“Nothing. Will you leave it with me?”

Klyton said, “Stabia has always loved and trusted you utterly, lady. If you will assist her, I’d leave it nowhere better.”

Udrombis inclined her head. For a while they sat in silence. He thought of his boyhood, but could not keep hold of the past. The shadows flowed in the lamps’ pulse. Drapes moved, as if figures shifted behind them. The god seemed on his stand to smile, and then to frown as Klyton had; it must be a new icon, Klyton did not remember it from before.

At last, her voice
came up from the night. “I have lost my sons. You will lose Stabia. Now, you are my son.”

Klyton rose. He went to her and kneeled at her feet as he had that time of the abyss.

“I dreamed of Amdysos,” he softly said. “When I was in Sirma. He glowed in the darkness of Thon’s land. He seemed—to give me the life he should have had.”

Looking up at her, he saw she had become old, but she had achieved with age the glamour of the mystic Hag, the dark of the moon, when Phaidix herself became old, and walked in disguise unseen across the world.

Her black eyes gleamed like the topaz in the ring, as she gazed down at him.

She said, “We know, you and I.” That was all.
We know.

One man did not, could not wait.

Melendor was the friend of Uros, Uros the friend of usually boastful Ogon. Uros did not have legitimacy on his side. But then, while Uros had been got by Akreon on a Daystar’s wild-haired Maiden, Ogon and Melendor belonged to the outer kindred, nobles, not sons of Akreon at all.

“I lost the Race for you.”

“That was your choice. Any way, if you’d won—that
thing
was out there. The God punished the winner.” Ogon, his hair just growing straight where he had chopped his locks askew, freeing himself of the bat in the caves, turned from Uros. “It isn’t a debt.”

Uros shrugged. He had followed after Ogon, down a side-working of the old mines. In the dark there they had miserably joked about the mishap. When they came up, the world had changed—Amdysos was in the sky.

“The gods are trying to lesson us,” said Uros.

“You’re wrong. Anyway. I don’t want this.”

“All right. But the line of the Kings is stale,” said Uros stubbornly. It was his stubbornness which had made him track Ogon into the working, to be sure he had survived. Like this, you saw Uros did not have the fineness of most of Akreon’s sons. One shoulder was set too high, his nose was thick and his mouth too thick in the upper lip.

“It’s a
madness on you,” said Ogon. And walked off.

But stocky Melendor said, “Go to your folk in Ipyra? Stir them up? What are you aiming for?”

“What do you think?”

“I think,” said Melendor thoughtfully, “the priests’ law makes this happen, by delay. According to the law, Nexor has to wait for summer, to be full crowned. It’s as if there’s meant to be this time—for someone to step in.” He looked lovingly at Uros, with whom, indeed, on cold campaigns, he had shared more than the blanket. “They say, the man who risks nothing gains nothing.” He was like a huge boy off on an adventure. But Uros wanted what he always vaguely had. Aiton had taken the crown in just this fashion. That was long ago. But so was last year.

Perhaps it was madness too. The drama by which the three direct heirs of Akreon had been removed. Akreon’s own finish. The gods offered a cup of gold. You had to reach for it, or always wonder.

Uros, Melendor, their households and men, these last numbering jointly at nearly one thousand, rode north. They managed it, surprisingly, with some secrecy. Reportedly there was a local trouble, a feud in the hills, where Uros had a farm. He was heading there. With the real journey, despite the increasingly hard going, they got to Ipyra, and over the partly frozen river, inside a month. Uros’s rough-haired mother had been, in her turn, the illegitimate daughter of an Ipyran Karrad, a little king. So to the Karrad, Uros went.

Ipyra, like her restive mountains, seemed always ready to erupt. In the stone hall with its roof of beams and thatch, above the mud-village city of the king, Uros declared the hour was right for conquest, that Akhemony lay luscious and helpless as a fallen peach, soon to be rotten. Nexor was no use. All the strong sons were dead.

Among the torch smoke they cheered him, it seems, while the dogs scratched for fleas. The Ipyran royalty ate a roast of mountain lion, which sour meat was reckoned to make them proof to all ills, and valorous in battle.

Meanwhile Ogon, though he had sworn otherwise, boastfully betrayed Uros to Nexor, the new Great Sun.

Ipyra had her own inner
alliances. She had never been very quiet. Though winter might now hold them back, spring would come, unlocking the ice of the rivers, unlocking the roads and the hearts of warriors.

My mother, Hetsa, was the daughter of a Karrad, an Ipyran king. I was half of Ipyran blood.

I did not think of it, ever. I had been taught early to regard my other side, the blood of Akreon.

The talk in the palace at Oceaxis was of war again. I knew Klyton would be going to fight, as generally he did. What could I do, what could it mean? Nothing, nothing.

I dreamed three or four times instead, that someone had stolen my silver feet. Again, as in childhood, I must sit hopeless in my chair, at the grudging mercy of those who would carry me, but all of them had gone away.

Kelbalba often remained in the evenings. She brought chestnuts to roast at the hearth or in the brazier, while the turtle slept under my bed—which had been changed, apparently at the order of Udrombis, to a large platform on clawed feet.

I hear that voice still, Kelbalba telling me her hoarse tales of the hills, and of an earth before recorded time. Sometimes I would forget, minutes long, the slough of misery in which I had sunk, the ache so deep I no longer felt it, even as it crippled me.

The Winter Festival was past. One night, when I thought Ermias away with her lover, she scratched at the door and came into the inner room. She wore a dress of warm, flaming yellow, and seemed herself like a live flame, her hand uplifted, and the pink of blood showing in it, her face flushed and eyes contrastingly so dark and still, like a messenger of mysterious extraordinary news. She was.

“Madam,” she called me that now, “the Sun Prince is here.”

I turned my head. She seemed to have spoken in an unknown tongue.

It was Kelbalba who disjointedly said, “The Lord Klyton mean you, is it?”

“Yes,” said Ermias.

I
stood up. I now felt I burned, but inside myself I was cold and heavy as the snow. I did not know what to do.

Then Klyton was in the doorway, moving Ermias gently aside with his hands.

“Kelbalba,” he said, “I hope you’re well.”

“I’m well, prince.”

“Let me speak to your lady alone.”

Ermias said, flat as a slate, “That’s not proper, sir.”

“Oh, isn’t it?” He glanced at her. I wondered how she could bear his gaze. She could not. She stepped away and out into the other room.

Kelbalba said, “We’ll wait by the pool. That does.” And strode past him. She shut the door, and he and I were alone in the red-pillared chamber, which had only the fire and the brazier to light it, and chestnuts scattered on the floor.

“Calistra,” he said.

Though his clothing was dark, every gold thing on him glimmered. And his hair, which was already growing long again. His face looked no more unreal and far off. It shocked me by its humanness. In his lustre he was almost ordinary, come down from the height to earth. And it seemed he remembered my name.

He told me later I was pale as the ice. He said I stared at him, and he had met such eyes across a shield. But I did not know what I did. I had ceased to be, and drifted there, an atom, in the air.

“You’re displeased at my neglect. I deserve that. And now I can’t even stay, only a few minutes. Nexor wants to march on Ipyra before the spring. It’s original. And there are things to be done. He’s given me Amdysos’s command, at least. But I don’t know if any of that interests you.”

I moved my head. I said, foolishly, “I’ll pray for your safety, my lord.”

“Yes. I’d value your prayers.” With no prelude he walked across and took hold of me, not by my shoulders, but his hot, hard hands on my waist. “You’re taller,” he said. Then he raised one of his hands and ran it behind my neck, up into my hair, cupping my skull. He bent his head and put his mouth on mine. I had not expected it, yet from all my dreams of long ago, it was familiar to me, this second, as my own body. His lips were warm, they parted mine. As his mouth possessed mine, my flesh, the room, the world gave way, and I hung from his hands and mouth in whirling space. I had never known such fear or divine delight. Had never, in my most profound dreaming, imagined it.

When he
lifted his head, I lay against him, folded into his body, safe for ever and for ever lost. I heard him breathing, and felt as once before the thud of his heart which had become my own.

“Calistra,” he said. My name was a star. I had no thoughts, had forgotten all things and might have been dead, so extreme had become my life. “Listen to me,” he said, “my brother said you loved me. Is it the truth?”