2ND STROIA

THE SNAKE, THE EAGLE

I

FROM THE LOWER SLOPES of Mt. Airis, you could see over into Ipyra.

Steep gorges dropped to green forest, a green river sparkled, white with rapids. Beyond were cliffs and ravines, and in the midst, mountains which sometimes cracked and burst out with fire. In caves of sulfur, ancient women dreamed and sent strange messages to the world. Somewhere in the maze of the crags was said to be an entry to Thon’s kingdom underground, where Tithaxeli, the River of Death, inexorably moved, without seeming motion, towards the land of death.

Another way, one could look south and east towards the Lakesea. It was like a piece of sky that had fallen out of place.

“No chance of it, then.”

“Well, they said she was foraging towards Ipyra and might go over. We did our best.”

Amdysos, fourteen years of age, a Sun Prince, son of a dead Sun, was philosophical enough. One must do one’s utmost, try everything. That seen to, it was with the gods. He said so, quietly.

“The gods could have given her to us,” said Klyton. At twelve, he was more impatient, or perhaps it had nothing to do with his years. “I offered to the Sun. And to Phaidix, too, because the pig’s her animal sometimes, isn’t it?”

“I think so. Well. Well, maybe she’s in their protection.”

“A pig.”

“Perhaps she’s in farrow, Klyton. We may have to wait until all that’s done with.”

“What, and let her spawn ten or so monstrosities just like herself, to rampage over the farms and villages?”

The she-pig they spoke of was said to be of unusual size, twice or three times that of a normal animal. Now and then, it had happened, beasts that were too large, or even too small, appeared, especially in Akhemony and Ipyra. Klyton and Amdysos had seen, throughout their lives, the trophies on various walls, and at the rustic palace under Airis, for example, the skin of a boar that had been the height of a horse, and the deer skull, miniature as that of a rabbit, with perfect jutting horns.

They had wanted this pig, and gone out to get her, telling no one the plan. The farms round about had a name for her: Thon’s Daughter. It was that bad. She had killed seven times, the last a girl on the day after her wedding. Hearing of the family’s grief, Klyton’s eyes, which were the color of the distant green river, had filled with raging tears. However, it was never wise, however irritated one was, to be sharp with the gods.

“Of course, the people may have exaggerated,” said Amdysos now. “Don’t you believe the stories?”

“Do you?”

Klyton considered. He said, “The lion skull at Oceaxis, in the Great Hall. That’s real, isn’t it?”

“I always thought so. But—it could be a clever artifact. King Okos took the lion when he was fifteen. He speared it and cut the neck vein. But it’s enormous. Could he have?”

“Perhaps he had some help.”

“Oh, yes, there’s always that. And the spear could have been tinctured with a drug. Even so.”

“My mother,” said Klyton, “told me once she had a pet deer as a girl, that was only knee-high. It never grew.”

“That’s a small animal though. Giant size is another matter.”

They sat, looking down at Ipyra. The country had been quiet for some eight years. In the last argument with Akhemony, a rebellious force had ridden as far as the river below, painted and tattooed tribesmen, feral as wolves, and the conniving chiefs who owed the Great Sun fealty and wanted to forget. But Akreon had squashed the uprising with his sword, his army beating the rebels back, filling the water with corpses, passing on up into the crags. He had brought two wives back from that campaign in Ipyra, one of whom had now been, like Akreon, three years dead.

There were always some conflicts. Kings might even encourage them, you sometimes suspected, to keep the army trim. The talk was of trouble brewing southwards now, with Sirma. If so, it would be their first chance, the Sun Princes seated on Mt. Airis, to distinguish themselves in battle, since they were thought too young before.

The dogs were running about the forested upper slope, playing and barking, with no need to hold silent, their long hair streaming against summer green. Above, Airis had touched the sky and formed one solitary, foamy cloud.

Below through the trees, Klyton could make out the Akhemonian side curving through stages of fields and vineyards to the little town, with the summer palace perched on its rock. It had been a fortress once, until replaced by the Sword House, two miles along the mountain road. Udrombis brought her own court here in the hottest months, which meant Stabia had also come. Young men did not mind it. It meant less schooling, and this was wonderful hunting country. Soon, too, there would be the Sun Race. You could not quite see the stadium this far over.

Only the elusive quality of the demon pig had spoilt the day.

Klyton polished his knife carefully, though it had done nothing. This was a pherom blade, and had a pommel of deep red stone, incised with an eagle, his chosen blazon. Good weapons and gear should always be treated with respect. At twelve, he too was well-made, well-cared for, his skin like fine bronze overlaid with pure gold. He was long in the leg, his shoulders already wide for his age; he had clever musician’s hands, properly calloused. His profile could have come from one of the archaic coins—his looks went back some way. Plaited for safety, hair more gold than all the rest, hung to his waist.

Dark-eyed Amdysos, only a little less beautiful, stared down into Ipyra, but he was dreaming of valor and old wars. It was Klyton who was thinking.

The Heartbeat came faint but steady on this air as the drone of the bees, in the clover fields below. At Airis it was, of course, not so loud as in Oceaxis. They said, going away to a war, leaving the land behind, the sound behind, you heard noises in the head, and the stars turned over all night in your dreams. Leaving it gradually, on march, there was a sense of loss. Returning, in victory, it was worth any trial, better than the homecoming to family, wife or lover, to hear the sound again, beating, beating for ever.

Klyton was not thinking of the Heart. He smiled.

He said, “Did you see the girl in the temple, Amdysos? I mean the little one.”

“Which? Who?”

“The baby. She had topaz hair down to her lap. She outshone all the queens—not Udrombis, the rest. She’ll be something by the time she’s ready.”

Amdysos glanced at him, curious. He had already started with girls, and had been at pains to make little of it, in case Klyton should feel left behind. Klyton was only twelve, though one tended to forget. What was this, now?

“A child? Do you mean marriageable, or what?”

“Sun’s Light, no. Only a brat. Our half sister presumably, anyway. But pretty as pain.”

Amdysos offhandedly made the circle. This expression, meant to placate skittish gods of toothache and minor injury, had never appealed to him.

“Whose was she?”

“How do I know? Do you think I pounded about asking? I just noticed her. She was worth a glance. Of course, sometimes when they have it so young, they lose their looks at ten.”

“Oh. Indeed.”

“But it was odd. In the responses, she didn’t get up. They had to lift her by her elbows. And put her back. She was carried in a chair.”

“She’s crippled then,” said Amdysos. He scowled. “Such children used to be given to Thon.”

“That’s the old ways. What they do in the back hills. That’s if they don’t just leave them on the ground for lynxes and wolves.”

“It might be better. Would you want to live disadvantaged like that? It would be like going to battle with your hands tied together.”

Klyton said, slowly, “I’d rather have the chance at life.”

The dogs barked madly, and fell dumb.

Both boys looked up, and in their turn, changed to granite.

Up on the slope, a huge whitish shape had come out of the trees.

Through the year after Akreon’s death, there had been many portents. The moon was seen to be red, or steel. Stars rained into the Lakesea. And a spotless scarlet bull was born in the pens at Artepta, with a white sun-flash on its brow, a tuft from whose tail was sent to Akhemony, to gift the new King.

Maybe the pig was a remnant of these things.

She was not as mighty as they had said, but still, she was extraordinarily big, and though clearly female, her tusks extended the length of a man’s forearm.

She swung her head, looking at the two dogs, which had flattened themselves down now as though in homage. She did not seem angry.

Klyton’s hand twitched over the boar spears. His eyes glowed at her. If she was not enraged, he was. Half the day searching, and now this.

“No—wait—” Amdysos caught his wrist. “Look.”

Behind the pig trotted two little ones, the shade of pinkish amber, young as a morning, scarcely on their feet.

“She is a murderess,” said Klyton, very low.

“And a mother. She’s not going to run at us. The gods would curse us if we took her unprovoked, seeing the litter.”

“She’s sloughed out of season,” said Klyton.

“Yes, but she’s not a normal pig.”

The creature bent her head, snuffing at something. The leveling sun picked out in gold the lethal dainty bristles of her snout. Her tusks were white as snow, as if she had never done more with them than gore a tree.

She looked peaceful, grazing like a ewe.

Klyton rose, and rising, raised the spear. The action was fluid. A streak like one of the meteors tore down his arm, the spear stem—and then Amdysos shouted out.

The pig started. She jerked aside, as the spear, its cast interrupted, dropped well short. Rather than brace herself for a charge now, she shook herself, and swinging abruptly around, nudged the little pink pig-children away, over the rocks, and back into the green shadows of the wood. She might only have found the bare mountain too warm.

“By the Knife! Why did you—”

“I’d said. A mother.”

“Damn it, Amdysos. You’d give a cripple child to Thon. What does a bloody pig matter?”

“I’m sorry. It wasn’t right.”

Klyton flamed. In his fury he might himself have fallen straight from heaven. Amdysos, who was fearless in everything, turned his head, as if from a blow.

A wind rustled down the glades with the sound of sly laughter.

I had seen him too, my half brother, Klyton. I had seen them all, as I always did, those beautiful metallic princes, the Suns who were the inheritors of the Great Sun.

Taken out as I was, only for important events or festivals, this visual treat had assumed enchanted proportions. I craved it. I longed to gaze on them, the male gods I had been assured were my kindred. I saw few other than royal men there. Seldom men of any sort, anywhere.

The Demayia, the first celebration of summer, was marked by the carriage of the summer goddess, from her little house on the shore, to the Temple of the Sun.

I also had been ported to the temple, in my chair with golden clasps. I was dressed in saffron, for the goddess.

Truthfully, I do remember—oh, far more clearly than yesterday—that I looked across the vast space of the temple, into which, on these occasions, now clad as a princess, I might go. Through the curtains of incense and the rain of flowers falling from the solar chimney to the altar, I saw one of the Suns, golden, with eyes like dark emerald, and these fixed on me. I was seared to my bones, and looked at once away.

Never before had any of them, these lions, met my eyes. But I had not forgotten my first man, my glorious soldier, who had seemed despite everything I was told, to have rescued me of his own volition, from Death. He, it was a fact, had looked deep into my eyes on the road home, wrapping me in a fur against the coolness of spring, telling me I was pretty, and I would have liked his daughter. I had wanted to be his daughter. I had wanted to be his wife.

But Klyton—to my seven-year-old eyes, he at twelve years—was also a man. A hero, a deity, stepped from the paintings on the walls of the palace. And beside, him, my long-ago rescuer was only a flame to the Sun.

When Klyton looked, had he seen me?

I wanted so much to dream of him, but all I had that night were my waking dreams. Imagining I should meet him—but where, and how? Would he mind, that I could not walk? She had said, the Queen, they might not mind, if everything else were beyond reproach.

Fortunately, I had the sense to say nothing to my guardian. Ermias was fretful and snappish all that day. Mokpor was long gone by then, and her current lover had not appeared. She had gained some weight, which she did not like. She would even shout at her fat, as though it were some malign spirit which had attached itself to her without her consent or knowledge.

She blamed me. I had restricted her. She must always stay with me, was not free to roam, to dance with the other women, had nothing to pleasure her but sweets. I had ruined her life.

Curled in my bed, the luxury of which I now expected as a usual thing, I visualized meeting Klyton on a long stair. He paused and said, “Are you the one they call Calistra?”

The inchoate sexual excitement that comes before unforced physical impetus is strictly possible, flooded my body. For in my mind, my inner eye, he stood as real as in the flesh, his hair like carven sunlight, and his body hard, spear straight, and utterly alien; a lord of a second race.

So he stands still, my brother. In my inner eye. He will never change for me. Not a boy now, but a man. Thereafter ageless. For as long as I shall live.

Annotation by the Hand of Dobzah

My mistress took up just now, her Muhzum. It is of hyacinthine enamel, bound with silver. She opened it, and regarded for some minutes the contents.

She does not often do this now.

When she was younger, in her seventies and eighties, she might do it even once every day, usually at twilight. And then the color of the keepsake blended with the color of the sky, and so she seemed to hold the very sky in her hands.

Of course, the Muhzum contains all that is left of her brother, Klyton. The first Battle-Prince Shajhima gave it to her, but she has not yet told me when. It will be in the narrative, I expect.

The relic used to make her sad and then contemplative. Now, she held it like a new and unknown object. I asked if I could bring her anything. She said she would have the juice of a pomegranate. When I returned, the Muhzum had been put away.

2

A month and some days after I had first gone back to the palace at Oceaxis, I was carried into the presence of the Widow-Consort, Udrombis. I went in the arms of the same slave who took me about at the funeral. Even so, it drew some atteption; Ermias, walking by us, parried interrogation from those who approached. “I can’t say. You must wait and find out.” Doubtless that increased any speculation. I was only four, and felt bewildered, embarrassed even.

Of the Great Queen, I was frightened. Ermias had said Udrombis would have me hurt if she did not like me, which was very foolish of Ermias. If I had thought to blurt this out, she would have lost her guardianship, then prized, and maybe worse. Any way, she was left outside at an inner door.

Behind Udrombis’s apartments was a terrace. It looked down on the gardens and so to the inner sea. The day was rather warm, the almost tideless waters silky. In the gardens I could see a statue of a boy carrying an urn, from which burst a bush of yellow flowers.

The Queen sat in one of her cedar chairs. She still wore mourning, as she was in fact to wear it all her life. But she had put on golden sandals, and fabulous glittering jewels. It interests me now, to consider that she must have meant me to be impressed, had known I would be—I, who was then four, and might mean nothing at all. Again, surely, not vainglory. My awe was thought to have use.

The man set me on a stool, and left.

There was no one else.

She looked at me a long while, and when I lowered my eyes in fear, she said, “No, child. Look up.”

She wanted to see. And presently she got up and came over. As they do in the better slave-markets, she felt my hair, my skin, smelled my breath, examined, gently but inexorably, teeth and eyes. Last of all she lifted the skirt away, and explored with her eyes and fingers, the stumps which ended my legs.

Then she straightened. She clapped her hands, and a slave girl came out, graceful as a swan, which, then, I had never seen, and put a dish of little cakes by me, and a cup of the honeyed juice I preferred to milk.

I had pleased Udrombis. And she had shown me, without a word.

Being too scared still to try the cakes, which looked very appetizing, I slaked my nervous desert of a throat with juice.

She watched this too.

“You have learned some manners. Is that Ermias?”

“Yes, madam.” Ermias had instructed me how to address the Queen. Only on state occasions did all her alarming and child-unrememberable titles have to be employed.

“I must tell you, Calistra, the gods were unkind to you, but also generous.”

I sat, speechless, confused. What had the gods to do with me? I was nothing.

Udrombis rested her head on her hand, bending her eyes on me. They were black as night. And I must not look away. I trembled. Then she desisted. She looked instead out towards the boy with the flowers. This was her courtesy, her tact, and to a child of four.

“You have been deprived of feet, Calistra. But you have great beauty. You’re sweet and wholesome. There is only this one flaw. Understand now and for all time, you are a princess. Your mother was a Daystar queen, and your father the greatest man in the world, the Great Sun, Akreon. Though he is dead, he will live for ever in memory, and, my child, through you, as through all his children.”

Somewhere near, a bird began to sing in the garden.

Udrombis smiled. She said, “Do you hear the kitri? You shall be taught to sing as prettily. You shall have every skill a princess should have.” She turned one quick yet lingering look on me. It was meant to impress me, and it did. Her eyes were like black rays of light. “Your father has descended to the lower world. His immortality in this one must depend on us. You were sent away through an error. Your mother was foolish, but she’s gone. I stand in place now of this woman. I tell you, Calistra, that you are, despite your deformity, a fitting daughter of the Sun House. But you must strive. Since in one area you’re less than others, you must elsewhere excel them.”

I sat. I looked into myself. I was nothing. What could I do? All my delicious month here, in this place of wonders, after Thon’s hell, had been fraught with trepidation. An old woman, a phantom, had comforted me once, in a dream. Other than that, I had no reference.

I listened with my infant’s ears to Udrombis, from whom a power flowed like the magnetism of amber.

“You will be our treasure, Calistra. Because you can make, once you are grown, through your beauty, a marriage to serve this house. And, by that marriage, you will bring your father to life once more, in your sons. Do you understand?”

I faltered something. She knew I could not understand. She knew I would never forget her words. Nor have I forgotten them.

One might say that my life began after this, and that Udrombis, Sun-Consort, Great Queen, the Mirror of the Sun, King’s Mother, now a widow, gave it me. Hetsa had had no rights to dispose of me. But if Udrombis had not liked me, if I had been plain, if even, maybe, my fright had made too acid my breath, she could have had me killed, mercifully and painlessly, as she had killed my stupid, wicked, sad mother.

But I was a utility. The gods had robbed me and gifted me. I had use as a token of union and treaty, for the province-countries of the Sun Lands must always be secured. And beside, there were thought to be other lands, beyond the Endless Sea, which had—it seems—some end. One day, not Glardor, but one of the other Sun Princes sprung from Akreon’s loins, might foray there, and bring home another world to add to our own.

More even than that I, being attractive, when grown, could entice from men their seed. I could make new men. I could restore Akreon to the earth in form at least.

I had been given the apartments of my dead mother. Perhaps obviously, I thought Ermias owned the large rooms with their painted walls and crimson pillars topped by snakes, and in the outer room, the little pool, where the turtle played. I thought Ermias owned the turtle too, and so never even asked to feed it. This was my first request, two days after my interview. Udrombis had somehow made me know, with everything else, that Ermias did not have all the power there, that was—I.

“She’ll peck you. You may think she can’t bite, not having teeth. But watch out.”

However, the turtle was docile, and when I stroked her shell, that had on it a sort of shadow-map of some invented land, Ermias made a hissing noise, and went away.

Now to the rooms came new people, all women, but for one old man. He it seems had been a famous athlete once, at various sacred games. He instigated for me, through certain trained women servants, the exercise program that was to save my body from an utter distortion.

No more must I use canes, which might throw my spine awry. Now I must be lifted, and elsewhere learn to lift myself, and swing by a hanging bar, and, lying on the floor, curl and roll and twist, and, lying in the pool, juggle balls with the knees and calves of my legs. This at first amused me. Then I hated it and sobbed. The servants, thickset women who acted sometimes as assistants in the practice courts of the stadium at Airis, were patient with me. In their everyday role they were nothing, and might not touch, except in dire extremity, the body of a man. Having learnt the art of things from male tutors, however, they were in demand for work upon high-class women who had suffered any injury, or who had been harmed in childbirth. For this they were well recompensed.

They seemed not to dislike a child. They lured me with sports and confectionery to my work, and when I had mastered everything, to greater performance and better tricks, with promises of stories, and sometimes demonstrations of the most amazing contortionist abilities, which they had gained years before and never lost.

In two years, I would be nearly limber as a fish. Though I could not walk, I could twist and turn upon my bar like a snake off a column, and had all the agility of an accomplished child dancer—I, who could not put one foot upon the ground.

They were very careful nevertheless, that my muscles should not bulge or be overly stretched. Tasks done, they massaged me lightly by the pool, where I would lie, dreaming upon the image of the green turtle, who in turn gazed back at me with eyes knowing all things, or nothing.

Ermias was jealous. This must be true. Once she took to mimicing my antics, the fluid bends and turns of my arms and torso, screwing up her face as she did it. The older servant woman was there, the one with the scar along her cheek where once a charioteer had caught her, not meaning to, with his whip. She looked sidelong at Ermias and said, loudly, “Once there was a firefly saw a star. I can do that, said the firefly. But when the fly had done her very best, her fire went out. The star burns yet.”

“You insolent sow,” shouted Ermias. “I’ll have you flogged.”

“Been flogged,” said the woman. Unlike a princess, they had had no qualms at building up her frame as large as a strong man’s. “But I’d only take it now from the Sun Queen. Shall I go tell her you want that? Or will you try for me?”

Ermias grew red as a lamp. She went away, again.

The woman, whose name was Kelbalba, swung me round in a somersault from her big safe hands, catching my legs before any feet were needed.

“Scum rises to the top of the jar,” she said.

Then she told me a story in her rough voice, about the Daystar, and how she was the sister of the Sun, and loved him so much she would never leave him, although she always walked an hour behind him through the sky, to console men at his going down. The Daystar was not worshipped, she said, accept among the peasants. And yet, how lovely was her light, in the last of the evening.

My education was taken in hand.

The rudiments of reading, writing and simple numbers, which had been thrust at me in the House of Thon, were now expanded into long tutorials, which sometimes fascinated and sometimes irked me.

Religion, too, was taught to me. I learned that the Sun had no other name and was only one. I was lessoned in the proper observances and prayers, and on how to conduct myself in his temple. To which, at the greatest festivals, I was carried throughout the year.

I was taught the ways of lawless, obscure Phaidix, the moon, who at certain seasons might be invoked by women, under the name of Phaidix Anki, as a sorceress.

I learned that these two gods, with Thon, the Death Lord, were current in all lands of the continent, and most of its islands. But that there was also a pantheon of slighter gods in Akhemony, some immigrants from Artepta, Bulos, Ipyra, and elsewhere. All had their places.

It was Kelbalba who told me of Lut, the Arteptan dwarf god, whose part it was to watch over any who came into the world at a disadvantage, or later fell to one, the very poor, the sick, those smitten in brain or body. “Those the other gods forget,” said Kelbalba. I was nearly six then, when she spoke of Lut. She did not make anything much of the story, no more than of a hundred others. But when I said, curiously, that I supposed he would know about me, she said that she supposed he might. She had a charm of Lut, in blackened silver, and showed me it. She said, proudly, she had always been very ugly, and so adopted the god, although he lived in Artepta.

I marveled at that. I did not think her ugly at all.

Never, any more, was I allowed to walk, that is to use canes and swing about on them. At five or six, I often got in a temper at this. I had waited so long, perhaps expecting to get them back as another of my rewards for diligence at all my lessons.

It was explained to me all over again, that constant recourse to the sticks would deform my body utterly, because I had not finished growing, had scarcely begun.

So I had to be content, since they were adamant, with my chair with the golden clasps, which, as I grew, grew also, or rather was replaced always with a larger one.

The female slaves bore me to the cell of easement, even sitting me on the pot. I did not any more find this humiliating. They were, after all, slaves only, and lessons in my rights and worth as a princess of the Sun, had already taken hold. To move about, however, requiring always one other, and presently two, to bear me in the chair, was a cause of annoyance and frustration.

I would sit looking at the far end of the room, or the door to the room with the pool and my turtle—now she was mine—and chafe because I could not merely go there.

Dependency of any sort will rankle. A child any way is so dependent. It remembers worse. To be born helpless without language or any ability, surely we are all, at the commencement, the creatures of Lut, and at the end, with age, may go back towards him again.

Sometimes I was carried to a garden that ran under my apartment, reached by a small door. It was completely wild now, having been left untended since the time of Okos, for the moon goddess, who loves things untamed. Her shrine was there, black stone, and her statue, quite coarsely cut, but showing a lynx crouched at her side.

Once when they had put me there, near the outer wall under the vine, I saw a fox come through and a cub after her. They were in their summer colors, with a sheen like that on the Lakesea below.

I watched them gambol, and fight mock combats, springing at each other, hoping no one would come to frighten them. Then they were gone, away into some secret place of the garden, where the wild fruit trees had netted together and the grass stood high as I would have done, had I been able to stand.

Overhead, the Daystar was clearly visible, though it was almost noon, the hour when she is often shy of her appearance, so close to the Sun.

Looking up, I noticed, too, an old woman. She was dressed very darkly, but had heavy, dull-gleaming ornaments, a necklace of big somber stones, and a dozen bracelets. Although it was morning, she seemed to have offered something on the altar of the shrine. I could not see what.

Then she turned. I recalled her at once, she was the old woman who had soothed me that second night at Oceaxis, a century ago, when I was four.

She said, “Udrombis goes up to Airis for the hot months. But not you.” I shook my head. I did not query why she put my deeds together with the Great Queen’s. “They run the Sun Race soon. Have you heard?”

“To honor the god,” I said obediently, “through the caves under the mountain.”

“Yes, just so. Where have you been but Oceaxis?”

I shook my head again. Though a King might make military diplomatic progresses, and other portions of the court break off to travel, most of the household remained constant, in time of peace, by the Lakesea.

“You were once in the Temple of Death,” said the old woman.

When she said it, I did not feel afraid or threatened, as when, say, Ermias spitefully mentioned my awful beginning.

The old woman pointed away, over the wall.

“Down there is the sea. Go far enough, you will come to the Sun’s Isle. Have they told you?”

“Yes. Where the piece from the Sun broke off and crashed down. When the First King conquered.”

“Who,” she said, “do you think is the more powerful? Not a King? The Sun then, or the moon? Or Death?”

I puzzled. Such questions—not quite such questions—were put to me in the hours of schooling. But I did not know. The Sun gave life. The moon and Death took it away. A King could do both, but was also subject to both. She seemed not to want an answer any way.

She said, “Glardor is off again,” like an elderly market-wife speaking of some nephew.

Even I had heard how Akreon’s heir, the new Great Sun, was still, very often, on his estates. He liked the things of the earth. He planted, and tied vines. He would even take a turn with the plow. Glardor the Farmer they called him, out as far as Uaria and Charchis. For this reason perhaps, now and then, little eddies of trouble would stir, in Uaria and Charchis, in Ipyra, in Sirma. … What could a farmer know of ruling or war?

There was a silence then, but for the crickets in the grass. The Sun was lifting up high, and soon they would come to take me into the shade, for royal women had complexions like milk, unless they were ebony, as in Artepta.

“Did you come before?” I asked the old woman. I had forgotten the substance of our previous chat.

“Did I? When was that?”

“Years ago. I was a child.”

She did not laugh. She said, “We are all children. Oh look, now. That butterfly.”

I looked of course. And saw the butterfly, mint-green, with black eyes on its wings. And when I looked again for her, the woman, she was gone.

When the slave came, I said to her, “Who is that who comes in our garden and the rooms?” She stared blankly. “An old woman—like a queen.”

The slave did not know. But slaves, I then thought, knew very little, not understanding they are like the mice in the walls of an ancient house, going everywhere, privy to all things.

In the afternoon though, Kelbalba entered, and when I had finished my exercises, and we were sitting with the turtle, I told her of the woman I had seen.

Kelbalba said, gravely, without any attempt to alarm or deny, “That would be the old witch, Crow Claw. She died in the snow months.”

“Which snow months?” I gabbled.

“The last ones. They found her inside the door of the High Queen’s chambers, lying on the floor, as if asleep.”

“Then—it was a ghost.” Stunned, I did not argue.

“She was happy here,” said Kelbalba. “She doesn’t want to go away.”

“But Death takes—makes … Is there a choice?”

“Yes, if you’re strong enough.”

I dreamed that night I saw Crow Claw sacrificing a white hare to Phaidix, to whom no blood sacrifice was ever made. It was Phaidix who stole in by night and drank the life from the bodies of men and women, babies and beasts, but they died in a joy greater than any to be found on earth.

When Crow Claw had killed the hare, its soul jumped out of it, white as the moonlight, and she and it went away together, directly through the wall of the garden.

What was I, then, as a child? In wartime once, the pherom-steel, when hammered in the fire, was cooled by plunging into the blood of a living enemy. How had I been tempered? First miseries, then terrors, and so to a life which, if not in any way wholly carefree, was yet full of pleasures, and of boredoms, too. From that lesson, what was I learning?

At my seventh year, they began to teach me to sing, as Udrombis had promised, and to play the sithra, the little female harp which, being so light, was easily rested on my knees. I was not inept, but preferred to improvise, myself creating songs and melodies, not doing as they said I must. I made my songs from the history of the Sun Lands now being taught me, the stories of heroism and romance that caught my fancy. And I composed odes to geographical regions I had never seen, trying I think to bring them to me, since I could not go to them. When Mt. Airis was spoken of I longed to see it. I longed to sail across the Lakesea in a galley. I longed to sail the narrow winding straits at Artepta, and behold the monuments of smooth and shining stone rising out of the water, and the statues of strange beings, which spoke—a thing I did not know, even having lived there, sometimes happened at the Temple of Thon. In my head I went traveling, making up for myself these places and lands, reinventing them from what I knew, as they had told me the gods had done, at the very first.

For my arrogance I was reprimanded. Which helped me, for it made me worse.

Probably I should have been, after my start, a timid child. In some ways, I was. But I was forever darting out of cover. I was forever angry, sitting in my golden chair, beating my legs that had no feet against the lion-claws, until my calves were bruised and I cried.

It was I who wanted ghost stories, and then lay rigid through half the night. Oddly, I was never afraid of Crow Claw. If she had come then, I think I would have debated with her quite boldly on her state.

Then again, with certain adults I was stricken almost silent. A crushing rebuke made me shake, made me sick to my stomach, as did the dread of things not reckoned by others onerous—for example, the excitement of going to the temple, where I should see my beauteous male kin—before all those excursions, I vomited, until I was given a little wine, which would steady me. Even so, I would have died rather than miss the trip.

I had, too, unreasonable fears, or so they were called. Of a spot behind a particular pillar, where they must always leave a light. Of the sound cats made outside, fighting at midnight to honor Phaidix. Or a certain innocent food or drink. Yet—thunderstorms I loved.

Snow, however, made me melancholy, which was not so surprising. The bedcovers, shutters, and drapes of the palace had not yet blotted up the icy times at Koi.

What can I say of her then, this child?

She was a child. As Crow Claw forewarned her, now she is old; she thinks herself one still.

After Klyton had met my eyes with his in the Sun Temple, when I was seven, the world about me altered.

I did not seek Ermias, who was, apparently, my necessary foe. Nor could I talk to Kelbalba, who had gone away to her father’s house in the hills.

Instead I discussed my life with the turtle.

“If you go that way after your ball, then it will be.”

The turtle went the way I desired.

It was settled. I must work hard upon myself.

Not knowing that, only in Artepta, Charchis sometimes, here and there, now and then, but seldom, did brothers wed their sisters, I had decided that, when I was of the proper age, I would marry the unnamed boy-man who had looked at me. It was not I thought myself worthy of him—how could I be. Besides he was a symbol—I see it now—of something unknown, dangerous and alluring as the edge of a cliff. But I had been carefully tutored. There were gods. Their blood ran in my family. They would assist me.

I wove new stories, about him. I made him songs, not knowing this was improper. He was the Sun as a youth, going out to hunt the Sunburned mountainsides. He lay sleeping in the shade, and the Daystar smiled upon him, and flowers grew into his hair to garland him.

Luckily, so solitary, wishing often to be private, I did not sing these songs in the presence of any but slaves. They were ciphers any way. Yet, when Ermias came, I fell simply to humming the tune.

“Twang, twang,” said Ermias. “What discords. What a dunce you are, Calistra.”

I put down the harp. My hands were cold.

Ermias seemed fatter by the day. How she hated it. There was a pouch under her chin, and a cushion at her waist. Despite her duties, she was infrequently, to my delight, in the apartment. Her lovers were liars, and she knew.

3

The year that Calistra was eight, and Sun Prince Klyton thirteen, war broke in Sirma. It was a matter of tribute to the Great Sun, which was refused. Conceivably they expected to be let off, having heard tales. But Farmer Glardor put down his pruning hook, and hefted his sword. With a thousand cavalry, many hundred foot, some siege engines and catapults, the troops marched south in bronze fall weather. Sirma was little. It would be a short campaign. Perhaps a farmer knew, weeds and tares must not be let come up, even in the onion patch.

“He swaggers too much. He doesn’t need to. He’s a prince. If Glardor stepped aside, it would be him. What does he need to show?”

Amdysos was watering his horse at the brook, downstream with the cavalry. At fifteen, he looked almost fully a man, magnificent enough, and he took his own advice, was modest and quiet-spoken where possible. His men liked him, and were not put out by his age.

Klyton looked less a man, more a wayward god in youth and armor. Something eccentric in the lines of him, something fantastic and magical, pleased. He was thought too young to be given a command, although Okos had apparently had one at thirteen, in the battles with Uaria. Some perverse idiocy had put Klyton too among the ranks of Pherox’s detachment. Amdysos had tried to change that. As Klyton said, it was like the school, where they split you from your friends to make you conscious of new ones, which had not worked.

Pherox, at twenty, rode up and down the lines of men, mature man and warrior. He had fought before, small uprisings here and there, all called wars. Sufficient. His sword, as they said, had drunk.

Handsome, like them all, he had the darkness of his mother, black hair, black eyes, and an arrogance and coldness that made one bite the tongue.

It was a fact. If Glardor—not euphemistically “stepped aside,” but died—Pherox would be the Great Sun. Udrombis had borne him on a night of tempest. It had been a difficult birth. You could believe it of him.

Klyton let his gelding have the water. He watched it. He said, “Do you remember when Pherox took the apple—”

Amdysos roared with laughter.

Klyton did not turn. He felt the eyes of Pherox on them both. Pherox did not like their friendship. He had said openly that they were not only brothers but lovers, which had never been true, at least not true in the carnal sense. To Pherox, male love—of any sort—was shoddy. He should have read the legends. The Sun god’s many loves of every gender. But the strain that was, in Udrombis, burnished stone, and in Amdysos, pragmatism, was in Pherox—poison.

The incident of the apples had occurred when Klyton and Amdysos were boys, six and eight years old. Pherox was thirteen, Klyton’s age today.

Stabia had been given a gift of apples, some country present, nice enough, but too many. Klyton and Amdysos ate their fill, and then had a slave cast the apples in the air so they could try to split them flying, with arrows.

Pherox appeared. He lectured them on this waste of fruit. They were children. What did they know.

Then he picked an apple off the garden bench. It happened to be the showpiece of the gift, a fruit of green and red stained marble. They watched him, and at his unawareness, neither spoke out. When he took it directly to his mouth and champed on it in righteous fury, it broke a side tooth, which, to this hour, might be seen flashing its repaired cap of silver.

They had been friends from the beginning, from when Stabia and Udrombis had leaned together in the cool, scented rooms, and Klyton and Amdysos had fought and played like foxes on the floor.

Pherox did not think quickly enough, or look properly at things. About the look and feel of an apple, whether it were flesh or stone, at friendship that had nothing to do with ambition. At his own stance on the black Arteptan horse.

He had two wives, and both had given him, already, sons. He called them, Pherox, his flocks and herds.

“The Sun’s going,” said Amdysos.

Far up the hill, thinly, the priest might be heard singing out the incantation. Arndysos tipped a few drops from his wineskin into the stream … “Do not forget us.”

Pherox was gone. He had not bothered, as several had not, to salute the dying Sun. Campaign was different. The gods were not unreasonable. Still, if one could.

“It should be the first Sirmian town tomorrow,” said Klyton.

“Yes. How do you feel?”

“I don’t know,” Klyton said. “Keen, I suppose. Very, very brave.”

Brief but opaque, doubt drifted through both their eyes. Tomorrow they must, for the first time, kill a man. Or, they might—unbelievably—die.

Farmer Glardor gave a dinner for his captains, and for the Sun Princes who were in the camp.

Outside, the evening was gravid with storm. The thunder stumbled about the sky from north to south, east to west, banging against the winds that were rising. The trees bent, groaning, and dry leaves rattled between the tents like quills of thin metal. Those who claimed still to hear the beat of the Heart, mostly, now admitted they lost it.

When the strongest wine came, at the end of the food, Glardor gave a speech.

The younger men shifted uncomfortably, the eldest sat grim and unspeaking, drinking great quaffs. It was inappropriate, the speech. It concerned peace and the peaceful role of the Great Sun.

“He must bring life,” said Glardor, red-faced, expansive, his mantle loose, as one or two said later, as a whore’s dress. “Life to his fields. He must ripen the fruit and the vine.”

Pherox sat openly sneering. But he, too, kept silent.

Amdysos said, afterwards, when he and Klyton were sitting in Amdysos’s tent, “He wants his farm.”

“No, worse, he thinks Akhemony is his farm.”

“Well …”

“Didn’t he guess the picture he made?”

“Evidently not.”

Glardor clove to his wife, now the Sun-Consort, but she was seldom seen, and barren. He had too, a score of illegal sons who, if it came to it, might cause trouble one day.

It was hot in the tent, and hot outside. Klyton’s own tent, over with Pherox’s troop, was hottest of all. The autumn weather was perhaps unseasonally warm, and here and there they had passed, on the march, carpets of spring flowers nosing from the soil before their time. Winter would find them presently, and put them down again.

The first Sirmian town was two hours’ march away in the morning.

Amdysos slept, no doubt, breathing deeply as he always did, as if slumber was a drink. Outside the tent flap here, a slave was snoring.

Alone, Klyton thought of dying. What terrified him, he found, was the length of his life that then would be unlived all that he meant to do, but which yet he had not found to do. It seemed to him that Glardor would not last as King, and in a curious state, between sleep and waking, he saw Glardor vanish, and Pherox too, somehow, brushed away like the too-early and unsuitable flowers. Then Amdysos was the Great Sun Amdysos, who would be exactly right, powerful and just, brave and self-controlled. Amdysos too would need Klyton, with his tinder-strikes of amusement and action, imagination, fire.

What might they not do then? King and King’s Commander. They two.

But if I die tomorrow—Klyton pushed his mind towards the god, to the Sun. I leave it with you. You must decide. If I am worthy, let me live and do bright and weighty things. Or let me go down into the dark.

Calm came then. The gods were reasonable. And Klyton knew himself not so bad.

Phaidix stood over him at last, not to drain his valor, only to bring him sleep. She was cold and pitiless and beautiful, her silver hair falling on his eyes, like the rain which, presently, unheard in slumber, laved the encampment and the hills.

The Sirmian town, seen through the downpour, looked like an anthill, high, mud-colored walls, a haphazard warren of buildings rising up and up the hill within.

Of course, you could hear the Heart still. Only the rain drowned it out.

The Sirmians had sling-throwers ready on the walls with a good range. Glardor’s force had had its rest half a mile back. Now they were marched in precipitately, and the stones came pounding. Horses screamed and slithered and men dropped on to the muck of the running ground. Glardor’s force was pulled back.

“There’s the weak place in the wall,” said the man on Klyton’s left.

Glardor’s Charchian strategist had pointed it out quickly, having analysed the messages last night from his scouts.

Two of the catapults were heaved forward, the crews under their awnings of straw and hide. There would be no attempts to use flame—the rain had taken that gambit from the hands of aggressors and defenders alike.

The first huge spoon was loaded with a rock the size of a door. Klyton watched from his horse as the gang let slip the restraining rope. The catapult-arm bounded forward, hit the buffer, and let off its missile, which fizzed over, tearing the curtain of water in half, and smashed, head-on, precisely where the mooted weakness was. And so it must have been. At once a massive crack slit through the Sirmian bastion. The catapult crew, the surrounding men, raised a cheer. Up on the wall, you could hear them now, groaning and calling on gods.

Klyton gentled his restive horse.

“Hush. Look. You’ve seen it before. Didn’t the dealer praise you to me? There’s nothing to it.”

The second catapult spoon was dragging back, being loaded up. The entire procedure was repeated. As the second stone went off, somebody cried to the town, “Hey, don’t you like our kisses?”

There was a laugh.

The stone went home like the first, and this time a gout of masonry exploded outwards.

That was enough. Men were running with their swords. Klyton thought, dismayed by a sudden peculiar inertia, almost boredom, Is this all?

Then, shouting, Prince Pherox turned on his black gelding.

“Go!”

Klyton kicked the horse. Despite its fidgits, battle-trained, it went at once. He pulled the spear into position beside his body. They were riding now, headfirst at the shattered wall, from which small lumps, like broken flesh, still tumbled down.

Another rage of little lethal stones lashed through the rain, whining like gnats. The man on the left, knee to knee with Klyton, made a gasp as if to sneeze, and plunged from sight. His horse galloped on. In the next rows, twenty or more horses must have passed over him.

Klyton did not look back.

He put down his head, and just in time, a stone glanced off his helmet. Damnable Sirmian riffraff. He must try to be angry. Not too angry, keep steady. But none of it seemed remotely real.

The walls were huge now. They were up against them. Stones dashed down, and pieces now of broken-up furniture. The horse shied from a little table that perhaps, only a day ago, held someone’s supper dish and cup.

The enemy were here. They were riding out through the breach in the wall as the attackers came against it.

So this was an enemy.

Klyton felt at a loss. He raised his spear and cast it, with intemperate learned skill. It caught a man in the throat, as he had meant it to, and swivelling as this one fell, took another one down, also.

Klyton drew the blade from its scabbard. The sword, his first, had on its pommel, like the knife, an eagle.

I’m not awake. I must feel something—

Rising, standing up in his stirrups, Klyton shouted. His voice broke, as it never did now in speech, and from his lips issued an unearthly fearful shriek.

There was a Sirmian right in front of him, less than three sword lengths away, all at once, leaning in to him. The man had a vermilion ribbon tying back his long loose hair. His armor was spectacular, bronze with brass and colcai, the mix of gold and copper, decorating armlets and breast. No helm. Possibly he had lost it.

“Is that how you sound in bed, Pretty?” he said to Klyton. It was conversational.

All around, the red noise of fighting, the oaths, yells, and cries of pain. The jewels of red horse eyes that gleamed and went out, the lightning slash of swords, knives.

Klyton brought up his sword and sliced open the man’s cheek, so it hung from him like an ill-cut slice from a joint. The man had done nothing to him but jibe. Somehow he had moved so slowly, and Klyton, not seeming to, very fast. The man swung over and off his horse into the mud that was already, in places, richly scarlet.

Klyton was startled. He had not killed the man. He had an idiotic urge to search for him among the stampeding kicking hoofs. But then another man—another enemy—came hollering, and Klyton stuck him straight through, where the upper chest armor was undone at his ribs.

It was the press of horses now that carried Klyton in through the wall.

The buildings seemed to tower and reel over him, and he expected a further deluge of thrown matter, but nothing came.

Other riders were cantering after him. They yowled and yodeled, and echoes shot off the walls. Klyton did as they did. His voice did not break again. He sounded like the other men.

There was a barricade in the narrow street, barrels, an upturned cart. They jumped over it.

The other side, the houses clustered like honeycomb. Where there were doors, they were fast shut. No faces at the thin slots of windows. No sounds but for the insane cluttering of pigeons up on the flat roofs. And the rain.

Then more cavalry, their own, a surge of it, was thrusting through. The space was filled. A sea of horses, men, the upturned points of weapons. From all over the town came the noise, unmistakable now, of victory. And new screams, the screams of women.

“Gates have given,” said one, unnecessary. At the louder howls of pleasure, their horses reared.

So, it truly had been—only that. So easy. Flat, and nearly foolish.

Someone was shaking him.

“Klyton—look at me. Yes, that’s better. You’re covered in blood. It’s not yours?”

“No, I don’t think … Wait, just this—” Someone, the man with the ribbon, or the other one he had killed close to, had slit open his right arm up to the elbow. A spectacular cut, not deep enough to be damaging. Just deep enough to leave a proper scar. “Most of it’s theirs.” Amdysos studied him. “You’ve done all right, then.”

“I think so.”

“Pherox had no good reason to send you in like that. He should have waited. It could have been chancy.”

“I expect he went straight in himself. He would.”

Amdysos glanced about. No one was listening. The men were using the hoofs of their horses to splinter doors, or laughing together, telling each other what they had done. “He did, but at the gate, with his bodyguard.”

Klyton said, almost idly, “I had a man’s cheek off. I didn’t mean to. I meant to kill him. He fell anyway.”

“That happens. You can’t always be tidy in this sort of thing.” “Did you?”

“Yes. At least three men. From the look, you had fifty.”

“That one … he had a purplish ribbon in his hair like a girl, but he called me a girl—or a catamite—something. It wasn’t that it worried me. You know, what the sword-master said, they do it to rile you. Don’t lose a cool head.”

“Oh,” said Amdysos. “A purplish ribbon. Was his armor fine?”

“Yes. He had colcai on it.”

“Don’t tell Pherox,” said Amdysos. “I think you did for the chief’s son.”

Klyton shook his head. He felt the same. Nervous now with, wanting to be doing something else. This must be wrong. They had told him of cowardice, ordinary fear, cold strategy, and battle-madness. What to do with each. This had been none of those. It was like sex the first time for a woman this—he had not been able to—to enjoy it. With some women, Amdysos said, they never could.

“So what?”

“You’ll get his arms, sword and so on. You’ve defeated him. He’s probably dead by now, if he went down.”

Glardor the Farmer rode into the Sirmian town. He had imposed a certain order, stopped most of the rapine and theft. He told the defenders they would be fined, but they must come on to the next town, to act as envoys there. He wanted to save bloodshed. His soldiers were not too pleased. Akreon had always let them have the first town or city of a campaign, even a small one. It taught the foe a lesson. And it was a Fighter’s just deserts.

As they were standing in the square, where the market would be in time of peace, and all this was being digested, Klyton, looking up, saw a girl appear on a roof, quite close.

She was an extremely lovely girl, with long, dark tresses and fiercely flushed checks. He thought her about sixteen, old enough to be married and to have lost today her husband, but she was smiling. She had a basket on her hip.

A silence came, as the sullen murmurs from the soldiers died away.

Into this the girl called in a high silver voice, “Will you have an apple, gentlemen?”

It was an incongruous cry, made odder by an uneducated Sirmian accent.

Then she began to fling the apples at them.

The soldiers dodged, cursing, partly entertained. They could get her down quickly enough. She was insolent, and surely even Farmer Glardor would not deny her to them now. Then a few of the apples struck home. The Akhemonians did not like the sting. There was growling, and men striding now, to get up on the roof. The omen too was not lucky. The apple might symbolize a woman’s pelvis, but was also the fruit of Phaidix, whose silver apples were a gift that signified approaching death.

Amdysos said to Klyton, without expression, “When they catch her, they’ll use her till she’s pulp. He won’t stop that, now.”

Just then, an apple whisked over their heads. It was meant perhaps for the King on his roan horse. It slammed instead directly into the face of Pherox.

Pherox’s head was punched backward. He arched on the black horse, letting go the reins. The gelding reared. And Pherox went flailing from its back.

He landed hard on the square, and there, between the legs of men and horses, his half brothers, like the rest, saw him spasming, cawing, hawking, clutching, seeming to try to vomit, violent—then feeble. Finally turning the color of cold ashes. Amdysos started forward. Already others were running, too late.

Pherox, blood and slime coursing from his mouth and nose, was almost still. His eyes were wide open, standing out like those of a hanged man.

The square was full of roaring.

On the roof someone had reached the girl. She was squealing with laughter. Still laughing, as she was thrown down, still laughing as she was torn open.

To those who worshipped Phaidix, despite stories of sweethearts and mothers, it was no surprise a female might be vicious, ruthless, or courageous. And they had seen already, most of them, she too had killed her man.

Klyton was sitting in a side room of the chief’s house. He was stiff and embarrassed. The women, veiled, had washed him and seen to his arm, under the direction of Glardor’s own physician. This was the ritualistic sign of their servitude to the conquering Akhemonian men. No doubt, they were grateful Glardor had spared them rape. They did not overtly object to the Great Sun and his commanders talking over the battle, in the ax and knife hung, raftered hall, where last night their own little king, husband, father and son, had sat.

Sometimes they looked, slavishly, from the corners of their veils. They knew one of the Suns had perished, and that a Sirmian woman slew him. As a matter of course, any drink or food here would be tested for poison.

If there were any further attempt to insult, or take life, the town would be razed.

Amdysos came to the room in the late afternoon.

He admired Klyton’s bandaging. He, Amdysos, had none, not a scratch, though he had taken five men.

In the end, they were silent for a long while.

“It was a freak—it was a prank of the god who likes to play pranks.” One did not speak this god’s name. Amdysos added, “I know you. You’re thinking we talked about it. The apple that broke his tooth years ago.”

“We did, Amdysos.”

“All right. And she threw an apple. And the silver tooth got knocked out, and he swallowed it into his windpipe and it choked him. It could have happened, that same thing, a hundred ways in battle. We didn’t bring it down on him.”

“No.”

“Maybe,” said Amdysos, “we had foreknowledge.”

Klyton said, in a cold voice, “Will you tell Udrombis what we did?”

“My mother? I should think not. She has enough to bear. It’s only four years since she lost the King.”

“Glardor’s King.”

“You know what I mean. Women mourn longer. She still wears the colors. No, I wouldn’t tell her.”

Beyond the window, the unending rain went on. The afternoon was dull, but in the puddles there still ran the galvanic red stain that had been the life of men.

Amdysos said, “By the way, that man was dead.”

“Which man?”

“The man with the ribbon.”

“I’d—forgotten.”

Amdysos came and stood directly in front of him. Klyton looked up.

“Leave this behind you,” said Amdysos. “We’re not guilty of anything. I know that I’m not. And I know you.”

“I didn’t wish him dead.”

“Of course you didn’t. You’re a prince. Leave it behind.”

Klyton got up. He walked up against Amdysos and put his head, for a second, on Amdysos’s breast. It was the symptom of a sudden childish fright and hurt: the numbness of war was going from him. But, too, in the days of Okos, of which they both knew rather a lot, it had been the tacit symbol, this gesture, of fealty, from a lesser king to the Great Sun.

“They’ve stripped the Sirmian armor. It’s with your gear. There was another man too, someone said you took him, and perhaps speared another. The men liked you. You were valiant and didn’t mess about. Straight through the wall, they said, with a battle cry.”

“Do you remember that pig at Airis?” Klyton said.

“The big she-pig? Yes.”

“It’ll be winter soon. She’s fair game then. We’ve left it long enough.”

Amdysos grinned. “That’s better.”

The rain ran on and on. It wore you away, that sound, but the worst sound was to come, the women keening, and Udrombis in her utter noiselessness of grief.

Klyton knew he had seen them pass in his heart, Glardor and Pherox, and Amdysos rise like the Sun. And he, by Amdysos. Two Suns together. No. One must not think of that.

4

For highborn women of the court, not actually royal, there were always ways. If you must finally wed virgin, and often a sophisticated man would overlook it, providing you brought enough money and status with you, a wisewoman could give you a mixture. Applied, it caused a temporary dryness and tightening. He would feel you were not easy, see that he hurt you, and perhaps you bled. That was what, in simple terms, virginity amounted to. There were other draughts if your courses came late, to bring them on. A pregnancy carried to term, if unwanted, was rare. This was women’s business.

Only the highest women were kept sealed till marriage, for they made possible the treaties, and the marks of favor.

Ermias had had many lovers, and reckoned to garner an excellent marriage when her stint as guardian was done. She would be pensioned with enough goods and gold to make her an appetizing match. But she had wanted her looks too, to catch a husband who was young enough, and handsome.

Now, at just twenty-four, Ermias was a pillow, spillingly fat. Her neck was like a frog’s, with only a crease to show the demarcation of her chin. Her breasts had grown shapeless. Instead of bangles, rings of flesh garlanded her ankles. She waddled.

All Akhemony, all Oceaxis, was prone to lament. As the rain rushed down, down rushed the tears. Pherox had died in Sirma. And though another three towns had fallen since then and the campaign was almost done, this could not restore his life.

So, the sound of Ermias, weeping, was only that other sound brought indoors for me. I sat in my chair, listening, wondering if I too must weep, if his soul might be lost if I did not. Though insignificant in myself, I had heard legends where such things happened.

But he was not Klyton. If Klyton had been slain, I would have died at once. For any unknown other, there could only be regret.

At last the weeping stopped or, as it turned out, paused.

The door opened, and Ermias came through.

In the lamplight, her eyes seemed bruised and the whites were red. Her puffy face was worse than ever, blotched with crying.

It was nearly my supper-time, and I thought she had come to say I must have my bath, now. Instead, she stared at me, stared on and on.

“Look at you,” she said, eventually.

I shifted a little. She was not my friend.

“Oh the gods!” cried Ermias, “why have they done this to me? Why? Why?”

In that moment I thought she too had lost someone in the war. Truthfully, I was not yet pleased to see her unhappy, she who was always so unkind, merely perplexed.

I said nothing.

Ermias said, “You filthy little monster, crouching there. Why aren’t you all a mass of fishy blubber, like me? It should be you, you little beast.” The tears came again, bursting out of her, sparkling like jewels in the light. “I’m so ugly. So ugly. But you—you—do you know what the women say about you, Calistra? Because they never see your legs, your feet? Eh?”

Now the full force of her malevolence bore in on me. I must give her some tribute or it was war.

I shook my head.

Loudly, she cried: “Snake. That’s it. They say you’ve got a snake’s tail under your skirt. Or you are a fish.”

The horror of this was dull. I was frightened of her, her vehemence, the strength of her emnity so massively displayed. There is too that terror which comes when civilized barriers, however flimsy, break down—perhaps children recognize this more swiftly than adults. Besides, fish, snakes—were beautiful, those I had been shown.

Ermias was drunk, I think, from a lot of wine.

“It’s you—you’re unlucky—you’re a curse on me—”

She spun heavily about, and ran from the room, lumbering, knocking over as she went a small table.

The door between the rooms stood open. I saw her throw herself on her couch, the place where for years she had slept, and frequently done with her lovers that incomprehensible thing which made noises.

Now she noisily cried, in an awful manner. She choked and struggled for breath. It was a real agony, this, for her. One should never dismiss pain of whatever sort. The child who cries for a lost toy, the woman who weeps at the loss of her loveliness, they have their station, beside the greater tragedies of this world. If you have been brought down to tears, who may say you have no right to shed them.

Then I was mostly frightened in a new way. I wanted her to stop. To stop her. Yet I felt a wave of satisfaction, too. She had made me cry often enough. Let her suffer now.

But she kept on and on.

In one corner of the outer room, the water-clock dripped the seconds. The little silver galley had risen a handspan up the bowl, and still she wept.

A window curtain was drawn for night, not yet the shutters for winter. I heard the Lakesea, and beyond that, the Drum of the Heart, hearing it as one seldom did, and like a fresh sound.

I was, as I have said, trained to be very agile, and I wriggled around and down from my chair, something I never normally assayed. When I was on the floor, I began to crawl on hands and knees.

Probably my intention was only to shut the door, shut out her cacophony. But then, as I moved, it seemed I was not going to do that, but something else.

Just then, I saw the table, which Ermias had knocked over, was again standing upright. The warm lamplight lit, upon its top, a goblet, one I used, rather small and made for a child, of gilded bronze. It had not, I thought, been there before. But maybe it had.

Behind the table stood Crow Claw, who was a ghost. She looked solid enough, in her dark things, her dark gems shining, and her old eyes. She out one finger to her lips, and I glanced towards the outer room. Ermias was aware of nothing but her own wretchedness.

I looked back. Crow Claw indicated the cup with her forefinger, and nodded.

Did she mean I should drink from it?

She shook her head. She pointed now into the outer room.

I cannot say that I debated any of this. I suppose I did not quite believe in Crow Claw now; I had not seen her since that time in the garden. She could not be actual. Then again, she had done me no harm. She would not seek to poison me, or even Ermias, since that would be a murder at my hands. I trusted Crow Claw, that is the riddle, and its answer.

So I took the cup off the table—there was only, apparently, some more wine in it—and crawled on with urgent difficulty, through into the outer room, all the long way to the knees of Ermias.

When I touched her she sat up with a start.

“Keep away! How did you come out here?”

“I only crawled. I do it for exercise in the morning.”

“Keep off. I don’t want you—you’re a curse on me.” She reared up her head on its flabby column. “You snake.”

“Don’t cry,” I said. “You’re pretty.”

Why did I say it? I loathed her by now. And yet, she broke my heart.

She gaped at me, and I held out the cup.

“Look, this is nice.”

“What is it—what have you put in it?”

“Nothing.” I took the cup back, and drank a mouthful. It was undiluted and went directly to my head. I felt soothed, consoled. No wonder people liked it. I held it out again.

Ermias took the cup and held it, not drinking. She looked at me, and her face peculiarly began to change. It was as if her true face was looking through, out through the fat, the spitefulness, the cruelty. Her true face, her true eyes, curious, considering.

After a long while, she spoke softly, her voice cracked and nasal from her tears.

“What I said—I didn’t mean that. About a snake.”

Then she raised the cup and drank it off.

She appeared very odd now, the true face fading back, but its knowledge still in her bloodshot eyes. She was exhausted, older, wiser.

“Come and sit here, by me,” she said. She helped me pull myself on to the couch. Then she put her arm around me. It was as if suddenly she found how much simpler it was to like rather than to hate me. And I, after a moment, rested my head on her side. Her fat was warm and fragrant. She was comfortable. Her hair smelled of tears, like the sea.

“I know a rhyme,” said Ermias presently.

She told me. It was a funny one about a monkey. We laughed. Then we lay back. There was no one in the inner room. We slept against each other until the slave brought my supper. Then Ermias got up and went away.

When she returned it was bedtime. She brought me a monkey made of confectionery.

“Don’t eat it all now. Save some for tomorrow.”

“I won’t eat him.”

She looked disappointed. I explained I thought him too nice to eat. I laid him on my pillow, which he made very sticky. I kept him for years, until at last he fell all to bits, hard and dry and tasteless as pieces of gravel.

By the time the army came back in victory from Sirma, with two hostage chiefs, and the mourning for Pherox, and a bride for Glardor who, they said, he treated with courtesy and never bedded, Ermias had lost a vast amount of weight. She was never to be again a slender girl, but became instead curvaceous and voluptuous, and light as a feather in the dancing on the shore, which I shall come to.

I have no notion, not one idea, of what if anything was in the cup.

To me, Ermias was never again seriously harsh. If she did snap, she presently followed it with a kiss. As a child I did not interest her, yet even so, she spent with me more time, if rather impatiently, seeing to my clothing, so I grew splendid at the festivals. Sometimes she took me with her, privately from the rooms, the slaves carrying my chair, to visit her friends, the Maidens of the court.

In this way, my world enlarged. And seeing myself, as I slowly altered under her guidance, had a fuss—perhaps false—made of me, and absorbed their chatter, I determined that, by the age of twelve, I must have found a way to be wed to Klyton. Although, of course, I could only be one of several wives, and although I did not think he could ever love me, or expect him to, I believed I would be content. I did not even fear for my cherished privacy. I imagined that, in the household of a prince, I could keep it just as well. Meanwhile I told no one my obsessional secret. It was magical. I held it near.

Before my attendances at the temple now I was cold and rigid. Sometimes I did not even see him there. Then I was sick of loss. He never looked at me again—had forgotten me. But I asked the gods to remind him. I had become aware I was not quite worthless. The praises of the women convinced me.

If there were any talk of war, I asked for news, though naming none. I named him at night. I prayed for his life every evening before closing my eyes—to visualize him better.

Otherwise, I studied more vigilently with my harp, learned to sing many songs, excelled in my exercises, offered to Gemli on the wall, and reminded the green turtle—with the gods, my sole confidante in this matter—that only four years, three, two years, now, lay between us and an almost perfect joy. But, how to manage it.

5

Seated on her terrace, Udrombis, the Widow-Consort, looked down into her summer garden.

There, her youngest son, Amdysos, a tall, golden nineteen, was arguing quietly, concentratedly, with his friend, Stabia’s son, Klyton.

On a second couch, Stabia sat, embroidering slowly, with great care, golden wool the color of the hair of both these Sun sons, into a mantle of dark orange.

Stabia’s eyes were not so strong now. She made her way from practiced skill, and every so often, would hold the cloth her arm’s length away, to be sure of the effect.

“He is very angry.”

“Yes,” said Stabia, “so he is. It’s his impatience. He was angry last year, too. Next year—Sun protect us!”

She laughed low, and Udrombis, also smiling a little, took a sip of the tawny Ipyran wine.

Only royal kindred, the highest nobles, or princes of high stock from other lands, might compete in the Sun Race at Airis, through the caverns under the mountain. It symbolized, this race, the going down of the Sun into the Sleep of Night under the world, and his return in glory. To compete was a crucial and sanctified honor, and there were always many who wished to be considered. There might be only thirteen racers. They were chosen in the temple by lot.

At sixteen, eligible, Klyton had waited his turn—and got nothing. Neither, that year, had Amdysos.

This year—yesterday, to be precise—Amdysos had been chosen. Klyton, who had offered three white pigeons to the god beforehand, had nothing.

“I tell you, it’s not luck,” Klyton was saying, standing pale and set under the stone figure with the urn of flowers. “They doctor the lots. Didn’t you know?”

“I didn’t. Don’t. It has to be random—the god chooses—or it would be a blasphemy.”

“It is one, damn it.”

‘I know you wanted it. It’s a chance to shine. You deserved it. It should have been you, not me.”

Klyton checked. His face changed. “No, of course not. You. You had to be chosen. You’ll win. Amdysos—it isn’t I grudge you. I just wanted—” He stopped. His face of seventeen years, and several centuries of pure-bred beauty, broke into a boy’s grin—became human. “Oh, there’s always next year. You’ll win any way. So I’d rather not make a fool of myself, coming in second.”

“Second place is quite honorable.”

“It’s for mice.

Amdysos laughed, and on the terrace, Stabia sighed. “There,” she said. “It’s all over. That’s how my son is. Like a summer storm. Frowns thunder. Then the sky clears. Mind you, Amdysos calms him. He has your trick of that.”

“My trick?” Udrombis raised her brows.

“Yes. Remember, when I used to call you the Sorceress.”

“That was long ago.”

Both women paused, looking out through the garden now, seeing other times.

“I recollect when I could climb the stairs without stopping,” said Stabia. “And I didn’t need to hold my embroidery a mile from my face, or stand back a mile from the frame, to see it. And I was a pretty girl. But you. You don’t change.”

“I’ve changed.”

Stabia glanced at her Queen. Udrombis still wore mourning, the most pastel brown. It became her very well. They had, these women, been lovers once. Those caresses had melted from them with the years, leaving them still each a little holding the other’s inward shape. Stabia had no fear of Udrombis, although she knew, without a doubt, was it ever necessary, Udrombis would kill her. She admired Udrombis, had faith in her. Nothing would ever be done without good reason, or uncouthly.

Klyton turned now. He called up to Stabia, “Which flower shall I bring you, Mother?”

“Oh, something yellow, dearest,” said Stabia, noting the convenient yellow flowers framing his head like a festal wreath.

“And for you, my Queen?” he said.

Udrombis said, “The smallest flower that’s in my garden.”

He bowed low, and went off, Amdysos laughing still at his shoulder.

Klyton, too, had been in love with Udrombis, when a child. Stabia had told her, not artless, nor untruthful.

Udrombis said, “May I be frank, Stabia?”

“With me, what else.”

“Your handsome, valorous son. He is everything one hopes for. He has courage, and wit and brains. He shirks nothing. But these moods—tell me. Women. Has he … let me use the charming Orialian expression, slaked his thirst?”

Stabia frowned her brow worse than over the needle. “The gods know. I’d say not. He likes them. He isn’t one for men that way. But if he’s done anything—now, I’d be the last to know.”

“From what little Amdysos has said of their adventures,” said Udrombis, “I think, as you do, he hasn’t, perhaps. My own sons were forward in that. Even Glardor.” Here, a tinge of faintest distaste colored her tone. Glardor did not appeal to her. To her, he was not a King, not the material of which Kings were formed. Though who, in any case, could have followed Akreon?

“I suppose,” said Stabia, “I’ve been lax. I should have put more of the tastier slaves his way. They all coo over him. I’d have thought one of them might have managed it any way.”

“He may prefer free women. Your son is very fastidious.”

“There are opportunities there, too.”

“Possibly, concerned as he is with male enterprises, he may have missed them.”

Stabia put down her embroidery. She saw, longsightedly, Klyton returning, with a yellow lily from a lower terrace, and a tiny white daisy—impudent, obedient, loving—for Udrombis.

“There are the summer dances in the groves, for the goddesses. Amdysos … knows.” Stabia clasped her hands. “Men go there and spy. It’s the tradition. The women are bound to accept only the most decorous overtures, but we know it goes further than that. In my day—it was different.”

“I am older than you,” said Udrombis. “In my day, it was exactly the same as it is now.”

Klyton came and kneeled before her.

The Widow-Queen looked into his face.

“Is that the very smallest flower?”

“Yes, madam. I nearly missed it. A snail showed me.”

“What reward will you have?”

“A kiss.”

Udrombis beckoned him, and as he stood on the Stair, kissed his cheekbone. He smelled of Sun and health, male aromatics from the bath, of sexuality too. On his arm, the narrow white scar from Sirma. Four years ago the, gods had given him that badge, and to her another scar, all hidden, the death of a son.

But perhaps she loved Stabia’s son, also Akreon’s seed, as her own. And for this reason, Glardor had been sent to try her, and Pherox killed, and only her golden Amdysos left, the recognizable child of her womb.

The kitri, the honey-bird, often came to sing in the groves by the Lakesea. Even at night, she made music. Sometimes, there was other music too.

The shore below the palace had been planted with gardens in Okos’s time, but then let go wild. The salt wind altered the grass. But the trees, cedar, myrtle, tamarind, the red marroi of the god, held fast.

By night, women of the court stole out there like the kitri.

There were the two altars on a rise, side by side. Clello, the goddess of love, white marble with lemon hair. And Daia, the goddess of love-desire, black-haired, ruby-lipped.

They held hands, these goddesses. The statues were quite recent. Everyone knew the women sought them, even slaves from the palace, or low wives from the town along the shore. Only the girls and Maidens of the queens danced there after dark, in long lines, their hands joined like the hands of the goddesses, to the notes of flute and sithra, and tiny shaken bells.

It was exquisite, the sight of it. The Sun had gone down inland about an hour ago, the Daystar was sinking. A lilac glow lingered through the sky.

But in the groves torches, the shade of electrum, burned ever more redly, picking out the lines and curves of things, the gathers and pleats of dresses, the flames of eyes and jewels, the small sand-flowers that had rooted in the salty turf. The leaves on the trees were black, then sudden brilliant jade as torchlight shone through. Between, in the shadows, might be anything, demons, spirits, or gods come down to see.

Beyond, a glimpse, here, there, the luminous near-tideless wash of the murmuring water, the slender waves folding over and over, rimmed with silver yet from the sinking star.

A certain light has still the power, near dusk, to bring me back again to that place, that hour, when I was twelve years old in Oceaxis.

I had never been invited before. A princess, I should not have been there. Had I known, this was how lowly they reckoned me, one of their own. Of course, I could not go off with any man, even if one had wanted me, a cripple, the girl with the tail of a snake or a sea fish, under her skirt. It was safe enough. She meant it kindly, Ermias; she had said I did not get enough fresh air.

She had put on me, too, my most elegant dress, the dark green web-silk with lines of silver in it, from Oriali, and borders of rosy pomegranates. From my ears hung the greenish pearls of the Bulos rivers, where men dive down for the quarter of an hour, or more, searching, sometimes dying.

For a year, since my menstruation began, my face was painted. I was a woman. There had been queens as young, younger, than I.

I watched them dance, the steady rhythm that wended in time to the always heard, unheard Heart, then quickened to play between the Heartbeats.

The women were laughing, had been drinking wine, crowned with myrtle and leaves of the holy marroi. There were faint flowers too on the tamarinds, filling the air with scent. The dresses brightened, saffron, orange, white, as they passed. Every face was the same—alight with amusement, excitement. Mine, too. I leaned forward from my chair, and clapped my hands in time to the little drum.

“Look—over there—do you see? We are being watched!”

This was the tradition of the groves by the sea. In the legend, the goddesses were dancing on a shore. Night came down, and Clello wore a dress of starlight, but Daia had kept the red of sunset for her gown.

Two mortal men, the sons of a king, and very comely, heard their music. Intrigued, and then aroused, the men spied upon the goddesses, who, seeing them, kept up some while the pretense, before drawing them in among the trees. The finish of the story is apt to their natures. Clello inspired a lasting noble love, and in the end took pity and gave the youth a human wife exactly in her own image. But Daia’s swain went mad, and when she refused again to lie with him, hanged himself on the tree which took his name—the Saberon—which to this day has pendant blossoms in the shape of a hanging man. Unlucky, this tree—ironically—was uprooted in the groves.

Having caught the whispering, I looked in my turn.

Indeed, there was a group of men, perhaps seven of them, standing a little way back from the dancing ground. The torchlight found their faces under the hoods of their cloaks, and glints on their ornaments. One did this courting in one’s best.

The women went on dancing, but now the line of them broke apart. They turned, showing their bodies in the thin summer dresses, their upheld arms with bracelets of gold.

A man laughed now, warm, and demanding.

It was a signal. Giggling, flaunting, the women left off the dance altogether. They fell away into groups, like flower-heads, waiting.

Who the suitors were, I have no reason to recall. Only one. Amdysos had been too tactful to come. A friend or two, I think. Others. Those who had walked to the shore on previous nights.

It was full dark now, the correct time. Fireflies winked in the bushes. I saw Ermias, big and luscious, tossing her curls, move out to greet one man who seized her silver-corded waist in both his hands, catching her, pulling her at once to his mouth.

He was standing back, but the torchlight described him, brazen upon his face that was a mask of metal. He did not look uneasy, bashful. I wonder what it cost him,, to be bold, there in that arena, taxing as any combat, to a man. At the time, I did not know.

It was a miracle to me. That Klyton was there, under the trees, the torches showing him to me.

But he did not look at me.

He crossed straight over to a girl with long, silky, lemony hair, like Clello on the slope above. He held out his hand, and she, blushing now, breathing fast, with bright eyes, went to him.

I had known pain, pain of many kinds. One reasons, it will pass, and then all will be as before, before the pain, kind days of nectar. But pain, once it has found you, will return. So life is.

What should I do? I could not even run away.

I sat in my chair, and in the centre of me, heart and viscera, the unrealized bud of my loins, the blackest agony and despair dredged down.

It was in this moment that one of the musicians, rising, carried his torch across the grove. Klyton looked up to see the light, and saw instead myself.

My dress—the color of his eyes by night.

Though I was stifled by my heart, I would not look away.

He glanced at the girl he had selected, said something soft, put a kiss into her open palm. When he came from her, she only bridled a little. He had promised her he would not be gone for long. She knew him a Sun Prince, the glamorous Klyton who, they said, was a virgin still. She would wait.

But he walked over the clover-grass to me, and when he was by me, he halted, looking down and on and on, into my face.

“Should you be here, little girl?” he said.

I said, “Ermias brought me.”

“Who is Ermias? Your Maiden?”

“My guardian.”

“Yes, you’re very young.”

Tears flooded my eyes at once. He thought me a child. And what was that girl’s waiting to mine? I had waited for five years.

“You’re a princess of the house,” he said. “That’s right, isn’t it? Daughter of a Daystar.”

He did not, unlike the waking dream, know my name.

“I am Calistra, daughter of Akreon.”

“Good,” he said. He nodded. “Be proud of that. I’m Klyton.”

“I know.”

He did not ask me how—all my furtive questions, not to stir unwelcome interest in my curiosity. Probably he thought we were born with knowledge of him, as such men—the beautiful, the brave, the god-inspired, the innocent—do.

“Well,” he said. He was still looking in my eyes. He said, “Your eyes are like silver, Calistra. She shouldn’t have brought you here.”

I said, to protect her, “She wanted me to have the air. She takes care. No one insults me.” I drew in breath. “It’s because I can’t walk.”

His eyes left mine. They travelled down me, my slim girl’s body with its breasts, that I had had almost two years, to my skirt’s end, the pomegranate border.

I shut my eyes. I felt a wave of tingling and terrible unhappiness, such as I had never had, not even in the House of Thon.

I said, “I haven’t any feet, my lord.”

To my surprise, perhaps my horror, I was not certain, he said, “Yes, I’d heard of it.” He added, “I asked someone, once.”

I could not look at him now. Before, it had seemed we might go by my disadvantage. Now I felt the utter weight of it like stone tied to me. How could he not mind? He, this god, this Sun. I wished I was dead.

His eyes were on my face again. I felt them, like lights or heat, but I did not look now.

“You must miss it, not walking. Or to dance.”

Of course I had missed it, but nothing was of any importance any more. I would die in the night of misery.

Then his hand came down and brushed my hair. It was like a healing touch. Flame flooded through me. I raised my eyes. My heart beat now so much I could not speak or breathe. I hung from him as the Daystar hung from the Sun, they said, by a chain of gold invisible to the eye.

“You shouldn’t have been left this way,” he said, firmly. “What were they thinking of?” I thought he meant the grove, Ermias again. I did not care. Could not answer, any way. “Calistra, leave it with me. I’ll do what I can. Didn’t they see, you’re like—” he stopped. He said, “Akreon would have brought you out. You’re not only a night–flower. You must be seen in daylight, too.”

I understood none of it. I wanted him to stay, looking down at me, for ever. But my physical response to him, so close, so real, was overwhelming, nearly devastating. Also, I wished that he would go away. For a little while. Only a little. So I could breathe again.

And he did go away then. He smiled, and mildly tapped the earring in my left ear, so it swung. “Leave it with me,” he said again. Then he turned and went back to the glowing girl, who walked away with him into the shadows, on two slender, arching feet.

Strangely, I did not die that night. Nor did I sleep until the dawn began.

Ermias thought I had a fever. I did not want to eat, to be got up. I did not want anything. Did not know anything to want. Only Klyton, who had gone away.

Three or four or five days passed like this, I forget how many. She was threatening me with the physician. She had not seen the prince talk to me, and those that had, had their own concerns. He was my brother. It had been courteous of him, to greet me, and either proper or improper, depending on how one viewed the scene.

A slave brought me his present. It was wrapped in silk, and when undone, found to be a bracelet, marvelously made, a dancing girl twisting about a ball of green pearl. The metal was colcai. It fitted perfectly.

He had written the message himself.

My sister, who has the name of Calistra.

Have you forgotten me? I hope you have not. I am sending someone to you. Do what he says. When we meet again, you will stand before me. We will walk together through the palace. Do your part, and I vow this to you.

Yours under the Sun.

KLYTON

Klyton, you brought me pain. So much pain. You took from me first the virginity of my soul. The omens were very clear, but I did not see them, as I ran upon the sword.

6

It was a month before my new teacher came. I had been expecting him daily, between trembling anxiety and overpowering anticipation. I was fearful too, afraid of failing in this. For if I failed, worse now than losing my own incredible chance, I would lose Klyton.

Kelbalba had returned, four days after Klyton wrote to me. She had been summoned to the prince—oh, her luck, the blessing; she shone for me with his reflected light—and she explained what was to happen. She seemed dubious, and was careful how she spoke. She told me at once it might be no use.

But I had only one verdict: Klyton had decreed it—it must answer. If it did not, I would bear all the black despair of unsuccess, the guilt of unworthiness. The utter loss of all.

As the month waned away, she put me through my paces. At everything I had been taught, on my bar, in the exercises on the floor, I was, she said, splendid. She praised me. But then she said, “This is a wholly new thing you must learn now. You haven’t wasted, and that’s to the good. But your muscles will need to go another way. And, Calistra—will hurt.”

I already knew.

She had held me, and let me take most of my own slight weight on the stumps of my ankles. Presently the pain and vertigo made me cry out.

“Worse than that,” said Kelbalba. “Much worse.”

“I must,” I said. “I’ll bear it.”

“You are all Sun children,” she said. “In my village, I’d have been ashamed to be so valiant. But we were only clay.” I do not know if she meant to imply her irony, or real awe. I think she only said what she thought.

She began anyway to make me do fresh things, working always with my knees, my thighs, the calves of my legs, my spine, and had me standing upright, minutes together, gripping her hands. She rubbed the ends of my legs with a solution that smelled of vinegar-wine and burned me.

The man, my tutor, arrived on a hot morning when the Lakesea was like a line of heated steel beyond the window, decorated above by two or three white gulls, and the red pillars of the room blazed as if also heated within.

Everything smelled of life. Birds were singing, the gulls calling, and I was feeding the turtle a salad of her favorite herbs and weeds.

Abruptly it had occurred to me, I do not know why, that I had been born in this very room, almost thirteen years ago.

But rebirth was hurtling on.

The door opened. Kelbalba walked through, and nodded to me. Then she let him come in. He was something to see, coal-black, with a black beard to his waist.

Torca, though more than part Arteptan, had lived in Akhemony for twenty years. Before that he had roamed the outlands of Ipyra. He had been a doctor with the armies of the kings of Uaria and Charchis. He had fought with Akreon’s forces in several campaigns. He had a reputation as a man prized by the gods, having been nearly killed six or seven times, in war or by accidents, and survived.

He had a leg made from the knee down of solid wood. He had fashioned it himself, strapped it on to replace an amputation, and learned to use it. Once the master of it, he made himself serviceable to others. I had never heard of him, for such things were not common chat among the high women at Oceaxis. But in Airis he was known, for he had become a priest there, who served the shrine, and assisted at the Race.

Klyton had sought him out. If Torca took his time in coming, he announced afterwards, it was to test me. Speaking so many tongues, he was perfect in the accent of each land or region. So I could be in no doubt when he said he had left me the days in which to see that I was mad and in error, and for Kelbalba to frighten me into better sense. Finding me still insane, he scowled and said I should be sorry. How right he was.

Looking back, my impulse is to hurry through this section of my history. Even now, the injury, the awful doubt and dismay, scratch at my heart. Though she has become another, that one I was, Calistra, perhaps for this very reason, I do not like to dwell on her suffering and her humiliation. We say here, in Sin Dhul, City of the Moon, sometimes the potter, seeing the pot is taking the wrong shape on the wheel, must crush it again, to reform it better.

Probably I will be too quick, in my explaining.

I would get up, eat a little, take my morning bath. Then Kelbalba would soak the stumps of my legs in a solution of acid fire. After my new exercises, Torca came in. I would be lifted up and put down into two pits of agony. And in this way, through the days, I would travel. Often I fell. They caught me, or let me go down. Their hands led me, or betrayed. Or there were two traitorous sticks grasped with my own terrified fingers. My eyes were always wide, like those of a rabbit that sees the snake. I lost my virginity during this time. Actually and physically, I do not speak now by allusion. It tore open in one of my many tumbles, my legs sprawling so violently that, had it not been for all my work on my body before, I think both would have been broken. Feeling the other tearing, I knew, but did not speak. I could not care.

I was in pain, any way, from the first, all up my legs and into my crotch, into my very womb. Soon all of me hurt so much that, even after the bath and the massaging which came with evening, I lay weeping, unable to sleep unless hammered down into the dark with the strongest soporifics.

Even up my neck and into my skull, I hurt. And there was, too, the aggravation of the scarlet cord, which had been tied up my body from both my legs, into my hair. Torca had said this was to instruct my brain that as my legs flexed, it must respond. The cord duly wrenched and pulled. I cannot describe fully the mass of agony I became, but it was the thunder-colored pain described by certain poets, shot through with notes of sheerest razor white. And all this, to keep my feet.

My feet.

When I first saw them, I felt a mixture of delight—and revulsion.

They had been fashioned to Torca’s specification, but in the silversmith’s shop. I was no soldier, but a princess of the Sun House.

They were of silver, mixed with iron and pherom at the sole, then padded here with leather which would, as time passed, be resoled as with any shoe.

And, they were in the form of feet, slender and strong, the very ones I would have had if I had not left them behind in the chaos lands, in my rush to be born. They had toes, and every one a nail of gold. They had anklebones, slim and fine as a dancer’s. They rose a little above the ankle, and here, too, was a rim of rolled gold. Inside they were hollow, holding each a sack stuffed with layers of down, into which the stems of me were inserted. The filling would need constantly to be replaced. You would think such boots soft and supportive, putting your hand far into them. Who made them did their very best. Others have not fared so well.

From the ankle-parts, four rods of silver rose to half the height of my calf. Between the rods, a mesh of silver wire. The lacings were silver ribbons, such as ladies had for their hair, or their most frivolous sandals.

When the slave put them before me, Torca said at once I would need all this to be done again, as I grew. There was a slight smile on his face. It did not occur to me then, the expense of such riches so often repeated.

They were strapped on as I sat. When I rose, for a moment I felt my power. I was upright. I was supported. I stood—upon my own feet.

Then I was dizzy. I remembered when the Heart had stopped—had mine? And beginning my first lesson despite that, sickened, bemused, I found the daggers in the softness.

That first night, my legs ran with blood. And for weeks after. Beyond the times of blood, were worse things, when my own flesh sheared from me. The unguents of Kelbalba saved me from further mutilation. I heard Torca tell her, frankly before me, that he would have her recipe if she would sell it to him. He had seen men lose a whole limb to gangrene from such labor as mine.

In my dreams, I was whirling through air, while beasts gnawed my legs night-long. They ate upward. They would have my center, they would rape me with teeth.

I woke screaming from what little sleep I had.

7

Perhaps it was still summer …

I think not—there had been leaves caught in russet webs across the garden trees—and now the leaves were gone.

I lay shrieking. I refused them. I refused the feet. Instruments of torture, they stood in their silver purity, with their toenails of sunny gold. And by them, new silver laces, and the red cord.

“No—no—I won’t—no—no—”

Kelbalba lifted me. She held me hard, not the hug of friend or mother, but of the warrior in the thick of battle.

“Come on, girl. Don’t you know how well you do? He says, old Black Beard, he says you are braver than any man he’s known. Braver than he was, with the wooden leg. Come on, come on. Or I’ll slap you. I have a bet on you with my sisters at the stadium. I said you’d walk unaided by Winter Festival. Do you want to make a mock of me?”

But I had a fever from my wounds. I lay, and feebly cried for my beloved, who had brought me to this pass.

“The prince? Your Klyton? What does he care? He’s off at Melmia, with half the court. He’s forgotten you. You must make him remember.”

Later, when drugs and possets had washed me quiet, she told me the story of how Phaidix kills with pleasure, her lethal arrows tipped with sweetness. But life is bitter. To live one must put up with it. Then, taking my sithra, she strummed a gentle air of the hills. She sang to my feet, which she said I had, although they were not visible. She said they must make friends with the feet of silver. Then all would be well.

She had a hoarse voice, but it calmed me. I slept better than for months, and in the morning, stiff as a board from only a day without moving, got up and called for the silver feet, and put them on.

Then I walked the length of the room, using only the walking sticks, and not complaining once, though rivets of ice and fire were driven from my groin to my eyes.

It would be almost another year before I could walk unassisted. And rather more before I would walk in the halls of ordinary men.

She brought the god Lut to my rooms that winter I was thirteen, and garlanded him herself for the festival, with red berries from the marroi, the Sun’s promise of summer’s returning.

“Tell him you hurt,” said Kelbalba, folding her big arms, the scar on her cheek wriggling like a snake. “You can say anything to him. He won’t mind you whining or crying. He understands all that. And that you’re more than that. He forgives weakness and despair, yet values courage.”

He was in the form of a hunchback, with bandy legs and a bulbous nose. But his mouth smiled grotesquely. It was sharing a joke with his own, those such as I. He was made only of greyish wood, but they had polished him, and he was half a foot high.

I made my ruinous way, in the hollow feet, with one cane, and put him on Gemli’s altar. The flame dipped, as if she were offended, but I meant to offend her. I said, “Give joy, Gemli, goddess of joy, to his kind.” But then I poured her wine and sprinkled perfume. I asked Kelbalba what Lut would like.

“In my village, the dwarf girl put him between her legs. He likes that.” She could be coarse enough, and I had heard plenty from her, which no longer made me start. “From a princess, just a kiss.”

So I kissed Lut’s brow. I gave him some raisins, too. The winter fruit that year was very succulent. Perhaps he was truly pleased, because before spring, I was doing rather better, though I had a great way to go.

It seemed to me I had certainly been forgotten by all the palace. Udrombis had spent no time on me after the first interview, and I scarcely remembered her, only her important name. Ermias was much away. For Klyton—well, I had no word at all. One day I took off the colcai bracelet which, till then, I had worn every hour, even in my pain. It left a green mark on my wrist.

Torca noticed quickly.

“Where is your bangle?”

I said nothing. Ermias, who sometimes attended me in the evenings when I was in my right mind, had tutored me too, in the hauteur of my rank.

Torca said, “You should wear his gift. “He gave it you to bolster your endurance and your spirit.”

I shook my head. The cord had been dispensed with by then. But still, when I did such a thing when standing, a wave of vertigo might take me, and did so now.

As I stood at the floor’s middle, on the tilting sea of pain, I heard Torca say, “It came from his first battle honors. The metal was taken from a foe’s armor. A man the prince killed in war. Melted down and refashioned, for you.”

Men killed each other in war. I had been told so. It was correct for them. Klyton was a hero, could be nothing else. I said, “I honor his present. I won’t wear it again until I see him.”

Torca, black and bulky, shrugged, and limped about. He did not dress as a priest away from the sanctuary, but in a gentleman’s leather and linen. His wooden leg lunged like a cane, having no bending parts, as my feet did not. I had been shown I could only ever hope to shuffle.

I stood discouraged. The pretty bracelet had come from a man in death. Klyton, who sent me no word, had meant to help, but had no real interest in me. Doubtless, this was not unreasonable.

Across the room, Lut leered at Gemli. And she, royal and unflawed, her head poised high, looked away.

Winter passed like the moon. Spring spangle-veiled Oceaxis. I was steadier and walked with less pain. But I moved like a deformed old woman. I moved like a monstrosity. I had remembered my earlier name. Cemira—the thing. The bracelet lay in a box.

Late summer brought another small war, with the tribesmen in Ipyra, now. They said Glardor had refused to take another “spear-bride wife.” Amdysos, Glardor’s direct heir, was to have the treat.

Ermias went to watch the troops ride back into Oceaxis, I had declined to go. I would have to leave off my unmanagable silver feet, and be carried in my chair. I had torn my hair and wept, again. Lut crouched in the sunset, watching me, and from the town, once or twice, I heard the far notes of trumpets.

What can there be for me? My thought, in darkness. Whatever I do, there is nothing for me.

Still sometimes, my stumps sloughed off the wrecked skin. But for the rinses of Kelbalba, I would have stunk, to add to my horrors. Instead, the room smelled of medicine, as if for someone chronically sick.

If this is my portion now, how shall I live?

I thought I would die soon, and did not care.

Then in the night, I woke to silence but for the rasping of crickets beyond the window. Somewhere a kitri sang, as it had in the groves, but fitfully, a broken song.

A shadow bent over me.

I was afraid, as never before.

“What do you want, old woman?” And then—how cruel, how terrible these words: “Don’t you know, old crow, you’re dead?”

“Am I?” she said, indifferently, Crow Claw, who was a ghost. “Well, never mind it.”

Then she painted something cool on to my legs, and—just as if Kelbalba had told her—all over my nonexistent feet, following their shape exactly.

The lamp before Gemli had burned very low. I could scarcely see Crow Claw, but yet I could not make a mistake.

“No one loves me,” I said. It was not the cry of a child. I said it, in a way, to excuse myself. The rotting of my skin, my loneliness and inability.

Crow Claw said, “Then you must love yourself enough for two, or three.”

When I woke in the morning, the light shone like silver all over the room—for someone who had not been there had pulled back the drape. The silver feet seemed to be dancing a little, in their corner, as if they had been skipping about all night, and only now settled to pretend they were still.

I had heard the whispers—Ermias—of how my own unattached feet were glimpsed in these rooms. Hetsa, my mother, who had not wanted me, appalled by such sightings, had grown ill and died suddenly.

As I looked at the silver feet I thought, Not I, but they know how.

Presently, after the morning rituals, I was put into them and I myself laced the ribbons, which were new again that day. I have heard of something like this in trying to master another tongue—though I did not myself find it so. All at once—it is in your hands, and under your heart.

I took my honey cup, half full, and walked over to make an offering to ugly, grinning, sensible Lut.

Kelbalba gasped.

She said, “Done!” And then, “Do you know? Can you do it again? For when Blackie comes? He’s too clever, that one. I’d like to see his face.”

“You lost your bet any way,” I said.

“Never had bet. What do you think me? I was trying to make you spit fire, girl. But now you’re walking.”

I was. It would need much burnishing. It would need great pains, of care not hurt, to get it right. I have heard them say, years later, that Calistra did not take steps, but glided, as if on runners, and pulled by some invisible uncanny creature to which she had harnessed them.

The feet slid along the floor. One could not raise them, or barely. They knew their way, my body followed, easy, in the dance. They made a faint ssh-ssh, the leather soles over the metal. So yet, I was a snake.

8

Annotation by the Hand of Dobzah

Seeing it is one of my tasks to lace on to my mistress Sirai, every morning, her Feet, I will repeat now that they are no longer of bright silver. She lets them stay tarnished black, though clean within, and refilled at intervals with down. Of course, her lowest legs are scarred quite massively, she calls these marks her “hoofs,” and laughs at them.

I believe that if it cost many in the beginning such work to walk, they would crawl about till the end of their days.

She has seen what I write and says I must strike it out. She tells me all men, all women, are different from each other, what is simple to one may be a severe penance to another, and conversely. She says that in her walking she was motivated by her love, and since love has always motivated her, and is the gift of God, she cannot be judged, nor any other less fortunate.

I therefore pretended to erase what I had written, but have decided to let it alone. It is like her to say what she has said. But I would have no one think that she did not achieve a great thing. That would be to mislead and wrong those who read here, far more than my mistress.

The Sun shrine at Airis stood—perhaps still stands, for strangely, I do not know—above the town, but away, facing the mountain across the vineyards, grain fields and orchards of the plain. It is an hour’s ride from the palace-fort, by a good road.

Steps cut white in the hillside lead there, to the sacred groves of marroi and pine. The cedar of the god’s shade leans through yellow Maiden willows to a spring, which is reckoned healing.

The shrine is foursquare, a roof of gilded tiles on pale walls, with deep ruby pillars. The priests’ house, with its guest quarters and rooms of meditation, stretches down the slope behind, through the trees. You are meant not to see it, for the Sun, in his aspect of hunter and priest, likes solitude.

Red grapes wound around the lintel in summer and fall. No one stops them, they are the god’s bounty, like all things that grow and live. You see, I cannot give up speaking as if the shrine remains. Like all things of a god, of course, even if brought down, it does.

Klyton tied his horse by the cedar, where a trough was filled up daily for animals to take refreshment. He drew out the bronze cup and drank from the spring. It was a day of heat. He was nineteen, soon to be twenty.

Going into the porch of the shrine, he saw it cool, and smoky with shadow within. You could just see the glimmer of the god at his altar. Klyton touched the bell that hung outside.

After a minute, a priest came up the hill, and surprised Klyton, jogging his memory out of place.

“Are you here, Torca?”

“My lord,” said black Torca, approaching with his dragging walk, but a man of power now, in a white robe, the palms of his hands painted red, and a gold round for the Sun on his forehead. “Please be aware, sir, my service is here. However much I take joy in serving you elsewhere, when I may.”

Klyton nodded. “I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to insult your vocation, Torca. It was any way a priest I wanted to speak to. But—since it’s you—can you tell me how my sister does?” Torca stood. Below, the spring sounded its ruffling rilling music. A harsh bird called in the sky, and Klyton glanced up. “They said there was a giant eagle spotted over Airis. Is it true?”

“Perhaps, my lord. I’ve not seen it. Meanwhile, your sister has no need of me. I believe she’s written you a letter.”

“Has she? I haven’t had it. Or—perhaps. The last fighting—you’ll have heard. A horde of bandits under Koi. I’ve been busy.”

“No doubt. No doubt your sister will have expected no reply.”

“But you say she doesn’t need you. What is it? Did she give it up?”

Torca stood on. Then he looked past Klyton, who was if anything an image of the Sun, into the plain below.

“No, my lord. She doesn’t need me now because she’s learned all I can teach. Kelbalba stays for her massage, that’s all.”

“Then—can she walk?”

“Didn’t you suppose, sir, she’d learn? You were so full of hope and passion at first, when you persuaded me to go.”

Klyton stared into Torca’s black eyes. “Are you chiding me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well. I’ve been remiss. It isn’t I hadn’t thought of her at all. Is she as pretty as—what is it—two years ago?”

“My lord, there are no women of the line of Akreon less than lovely.”

Klyton raised his brows. “And she walks?”

“Like a goddess. I don’t lie. I never expected it, but I’m used to rough and ready men in the wars. She was trained like a dancer. She moves—like a dance. Slowly, you understand. She can never run, or hurry. She’ll never climb a stair without her cane. But on level ground, on the floors of a palace, my lord—well. You should go and see.”

“Is she in the life of the court?”

“No.”

“Udrombis, then, knows nothing of it?”

Torca said no word.

Klyton, feeling himself to be a boy again, drew himself up, royal and tall and hard with Sun. “I’ll see you’re rewarded properly, Torca, beyond the fee. And the woman—Kelbalba, was it? She must have something, too.”

Torca unnervingly bowed. He showed Klyton that Klyton was sacrilegious, reducing a priest of the Sun to a servant who had done a service.

Klyton worked a ring off his finger. It was heavy gold with a green beryl. “I’ll give this to the god. To thank him. After that, can I talk to you, as a priest?”

“I should guess so, my lord.”

“It’s about the Race.”

When the Sun declined and evening drew on, flocks of birds fluttered up from the plain, to feed by the spring, where the priests left grain and seeds. They were the creatures of heaven. One heard at this hour, over their twittering as they gorged, then settled in the groves, the voice of the white pet cat, sacred to Phaidix, meowing discontentedly, shut in the priests’ house. At other times she might do as she pleased, but this hour was given safe to the birds.

Klyton, having prayed, and presented a young buck deer to the god, watched out the evening offering to the Sunset.

Do not forget us …

He frowned as he listened. What had he done that evening before Akreon died? He had been off somewhere with Amdysos, and later they had played the board game in Udrombis’ rooms. And neither won.

Amdysos was at Oceaxis with his unwanted wife, Elakti. She was the bony, sallow daughter of some chief-king at Ipyra. Amdysos had had her; despite Glardor’s performances, it would have been an insult to her and her clan not to have done so, and wars once had been founded on less. One year later, she had borne a girl, as skinny and ill-favored as she. Amdysos said she wailed at him, the mother, growing dangerously hysterical, something the women of Ipyra were famed for. He avoided her as much as honor allowed. Glardor the Farmer had been at fault here. For Glardor himself should have wed her. It would have been a greater honor for her kin, and the King would have more excuse to let her alone.

The problem was, any way, finding sufficient to do. By now some position should have come the way of Amdysos, the last King’s last son. But he was only there. The bandits of Koi, a task really beneath them, had been a divertion, for such Suns as Amdysos, Klyton, and those others, children of the lesser queens, who thought themselves worth more than a seat at the tables in the Hall.

Klyton had put this by.

He wanted the Sun Race. For this he had come up here. Since sixteen three times he had been left out, while Amdysos had raced twice. And, once, had won. But it was more than that. You could not speak, even brother to brother, of what lay within the caves of the mountain. It was a passage into manhood, needful as war, and sex.

Now Klyton came to ask the god to relent, to select him, and if not, to tell him why.

Amdysos had said, “You take it to heart too much.”

“It’s my right.”

“If the god doesn’t choose—”

“Oh, and did the Sun choose Elakti for you?”

They had not parted friends.

Observing the priests, Torca as well, at their own measured life, and presently eating in the house at the long scrubbed table, with its earthenware bowls and cups, and he, a King’s son, in one of the five princely chairs reserved for princes and kings, Klyton reasoned with himself. He doubted that the lots were connived at. Where would be the sense or gain? And besides, it would be a blasphemy.

Even so, coming here, making a lavish offering of gold, incense, and meat, gifts to god and priests alike, Klyton felt quite strongly the answer could not be cold.

He ate sparingly, as they advised, and went after supper with the old slave woman, who served the altars, the only woman allowed to attend there.

As they crossed the woods on the hill, the dark had roosted like the birds, folding down its broad inky wings, and stars blazed in patterns. Only the spring sounded now. The Heartbeat, unheard. And though the white cat passed, and the old woman saluted her for Phaidix’s sake, the cat was silent as a ghost.

On the threshold of the guest cell where he was to commune with the god, through the night which was the shadow of his day, Klyton stopped still. The old woman pulled off his boots, strong as an ox, and looked into his eyes.

He had thought she was probably senile, but now, in starlight, Phaidix’s moon not yet high, he saw the curious intelligence in her face.

“Ask him, and he will,” was all she said, the ritual words. Before she went, he pressed a silver coin into her hand. Then she said, “Thank you, lord master. May it be a good dream.” But then again, as she went up the hill to the house, he heard her laugh, short and sharp, like a fox’s bark.

When he had shut the door, he undid his belt and took it off with the sword and knife. He stripped in the windowless place, and laved all his body with the chilling water in the urn.

Then going to the altar at the room’s center, he lit, with the tinder, the single lamp.

Coppery light rose up, and touched the ceiling, which was only a foot above him.

Klyton spoke softly, wondering if any listened. Whatever else, the god would do so.

“My fourth time to be drawn for the Sun Race. Your holy number is five. But now I must have it. I ask it of you. Or tell me why not.”

The flame curled over in the lamp. Klyton smelled a powdery, fermented smell. It was some drug in the oil. Well, the god spoke through a dream. If you did not sleep, how could he reach you?

Klyton went to the pallet and lay down.

For a moment, it was the cell, and dark but for the lamp. And then a gleaming copper column stood up through it, and through the room the priests were passing in their white robes, through the very walls, and next right through each other. And as this happened, sparks were struck body upon body, and hovered unextinguished in the air.

Klyton, Klyton, said a voice.

“I am here.”

But it said nothing else.

Instead the ceiling dissolved, and he saw the sky of night, sequined with too many stars, each brilliant as a jewel, as the Daystar herself.

Klyton felt himself leaving his body. For a moment he fought this—and then he went up, and a power coarsed through him like nothing of the earth. And opening great wings, he soared out into the highest air, up among the stars, that were now each large as a queen’s silver mirror, hanging, turning and chiming about him.

He knew himself. He was the great eagle above the peak of the mountain. He felt his goldenness, the wings like flame, the beak of metal, and the eyes that were suns by night.

He flew.

Below, Akhemony, but more—the other lands that lay about her skirts, Ipyra, Uaria, and islands that drifted out like pebbles on the glittering darkness of the sea.

The world was his subject. It was his.

Again the voice spoke to him.

Not before, since then it was not yours. Now is the time for you.

He turned, wheeling, and saw his shadow skim over the earth in the shape of a sweeping sword.

Fire buoyed him up. And then he felt the silken rope which hung from his claws.

He looked. Though free to fly through the roof of the gods, he was secured safely to the mountains and the land. A being that was partly a woman and partly a serpent, held him, her slim white hands gripped in and gripping his claws, her face upturned, stretched and exquisite, like the face of a girl in sexual ecstasy, which first he had seen at Oceaxis.

Her mirroring silver tail coiled down and down.

He might fly as he wished, and she would anchor him. Though he might touch the gods, become the Sun, she would keep for him the citadel of the mortal ground.

Fire and air. Earth and water.

A paean of glory and gladness roared in him and seemed to burst him asunder, just as orgasm had seemed to, that first time. But it was life, not Death. And the god had answered all.

Riding to Oceaxis, Klyton’s two attendants found him unusually quiet. Normally he would speak, and joke with them, from time to time. He was one of those princes who, from his height, stayed gracious, even amiable and entertaining, when things went well. Upset or angry, he was seldom unfair, but often terse. They thought now this was the case, and let him be.

The road was excellent, and they only stopped once, for an hour, at noon. They reached the town at Oceaxis after midnight, skirted it, and went on to the palace.

They then expected he would lie in a little the next day, but he was awake before dawn. He went up to see the Dawn Offering on the East Terrace.

After breakfasting, he was gone, with only the slave boy, who carried, in a roll of parchment, the astonishing thing the old woman had found, on the threshold of the shrine at Airis.

A slave opened the double doors, and Klyton entered the outer room. It was not so very large, this former apartment of one of the lesser Daystars, but pleasant enough, with a pool, a tiled floor, and a big turtle lying dozing there.

From the inner room came a faint noise of a slow drum, playing between the Heartbeat.

“Tell her,” he said, “her brother, Prince Klyton, is here.”

The slave bowed again, very low. Then she folded her hands, eyes lowered, and said, “You can’t go in, my lord. None of her ladies is here.”

“Then fetch one. Go on, hurry up.”

He did not speak roughly; the slave was pretty and had behaved correctly. She ran out, and he sat down on one of the chairs to wait.

Behind a screen of sea-ivory and oak, stood the bed of the chief lady, his sister’s Maiden, who should be here. Probably, if she was absent at this hour, she was in another bed entirely.

Did everyone treat Calistra so carelessly? Only the slave had had decorum, and she was a child.

Then the outer doors opened and a short but massive woman entered. She had rings of copper on her bulging arms, worn quite bare like a man’s, and a scarred cheek. She glared at him, making him want to laugh, to charm her.

He rose, as if for a queen.

“Lady, I’m Calistra’s brother.”

Kelbalba glared on. “Honor to you, prince, Son of the Sun. Which brother?”

He did laugh now. And through her eyes then flicked a glint of disapproving approval—a look he was used to from all sexes.

“The brother who sent Torca to her. Klyton.”

“Ah,” said Kelbalba. “My paymaster.”

“I stand reproved,” he said. “I gather I haven’t paid you enough. But I heard you were any way beyond price, Kelbalba.”

At her name, evidence he had recalled it, and once meeting her, she seemed slightly mollified, and stopped pretending she herself did not recall.

“The Maiden Ermias is away,” she said. He noted, she did not gossip or imply anything bad. “But I can be your chaperone, if you wish to go in. My lady’s at her exercise, but everything’s quite in order. No harm.” She moved towards the doors. “She glad will be you come here.”

From the lapse of her syntax, he sensed a genuine feeling. Klyton said, “Wait. Would it distress her, do you think—not to announce me. I’d like—to see her.”

Kelbalba frowned. “Spy on her, prince? Catch her out?”

“No. I fear she’ll be angry with me, or cold. Or she’ll cry. I’ve not been as attentive as I should. I’d like to look at her, once, before anything else starts.”

“Oh, she isn’t that way,” said Kelbalba. “Still. Let me look first. Then, if I say, you can.”

“Thank you, lady.” He was mischievous. He glowed like the Sun outside.

“Who is this lady?” snapped Kelbalba. “I was born a slave and freed for the stadium, like a horse.”

Then she went to the middle door, and undid it a crack. She peered in, and now he heard the notes of a shell-harp with the drum, and a soft, rhythmic whispering, as of a heavy silken gown.

After a moment, she removed her face and showed it to him, blank. She stepped back, and gestured him to do what she had done.

She said after, “Another, I’d have thought he only wanted to check his money well spent. But he was like a bridegroom with a chance to see the bride before they meet. A heat came off him. He smelled good, like new bread and oil of cedar. Who wants to say no to beauty?”

Klyton did as Kelbalba had, what women did, peeping round the door. But his self-irony at this was gone in one moment. Because, in this way, unseen, he saw Calistra dancing.

The inner room was finer. Akreon had always been generous, and Hetsa, who was Calistra’s mother, was a stupid woman by all accounts. She would have thought to have the best in her privacy, not make an impressive show outside to visitors.

Snake-topped red pillars held the ceiling, and on the walls was a delightful sensuous mural, of girls and young animals, and Gemli in her golden shrine with something grey crouched before her, a sort of dwarf. They were sharing a peach and a cup of wine, it seemed.

On the smooth reflective floor, the harper sat with the great white shell, flushed pink and strung with red-washed strings, which fell out in tassels over his knee. The female drummer drummed, a black musician, from Artepta, probably. The harper must be sworn to Daia Donis, that is, proven aroused only by his own gender, or he would never have been permitted unwatched in the room of a young Akhemonian princess. Customs elsewhere, of course, were more slack, as if male artists had no weapons.

The girl moved over the floor, and light fell on her from the wide window, the flame of sunlight rising up on the Lakesea.

She had her back to him, and her hair was a sheet of quivering, glistening blond-whiteness shot with threads of gold, a substance that, if it could have been woven on a loom, would make rich the one who sold it. It fell to her thighs, glimmering and swinging, heavy yet weightless, flaring out a little at her movements, like frayed silk, or crystal foam from the morning sea.

Her white arms, sleeved in open pastel ribbons, were like snakes … turning, boneless.

All the while, she glided forward, away from him, glided as if on wheels—slowly, slowly, to the beat of the drum. And then, astonishing him—she slid her left foot to the side, her skirt rippling as it followed the silken action of her leg, and dipped over sideways from the waist down and down, almost touching the floor, brushing it with her luminous cloud of golden hair.

He would have believed at that second this could not be Calistra. He understood as much. But in the very instant he must have doubted, the light struck off a flash. She wore—not silver shoes—but feet of silver, the very feet he, Klyton, had discussed with Torca, saying she was too fair to have anything less.

And then, swimming through air, turning, her waist that swayed like a supple slender stem, the curve of hips, the line of her breasts, full for a girl’s, high and pointing so the mouth went dry, and, so around, facing now the door, gliding now towards the door. The whisper of a mysterious robe was the susurrous of her feet upon the floor.

Serpents, her arms, her body, and her hair floating out behind her now. In the heart of the gold, a white throat, and poised upon it, a face so beautiful, so remote, lost in the dance—it was barely human.

He had meant to push the door wide and surprise her. A young man’s trick.

But instead, he drew back. He let out the breath he had been holding.

It was this she heard.

Through the door-crack, he saw her stop quite still. She held up her hand, and the music broke off.

Then Klyton made out, as seldom consciously he did, the Heart beating from the mountain. And his own heart, going rather faster.

“Who’s there?”

It was a girl’s voice. Clear and musical. But from that alone, he could never have guessed. As he had not on the shore two years ago.

Then he pushed the door, drawing himself together, upwards, swelling, swaggering, to display his glamour, trying to ignore that another part of him was also doing exactly this, upright as a rod of bronze, to greet his sister.

Annotation by the Hand of Dobzah

She laughs at this point, my mistress, and says, “They will think it some silly old woman’s fancy that once she was young and beautiful. Never mind. It’s only as he told me, after. Unless he lied, which others might have, perhaps.”

I will therefore say here, that since I am half the age of Sirai, I never saw her as a young woman, though as an older woman she was and is impressive enough. In my childhood though, I heard her spoken of by those who saw her, unveiled, in her youth. Women can be jealous, but she was seemingly too astonishing to inspire that. Instead, one likened her to a rose, and one to a star. The name he gave her, the Prince Shajhima—Sirai—means, as we know, The Risen Moon.

I say no more.

In the morning I rose early, because I would generally wake early. I bathed, and ate the fruit and drank the juices they brought me. Then they painted my face—only dark for my eyelids and around my eyes, some color for my mouth. It was the etiquette of a princess.

I dressed in something light, and then did my exercises. In the midst of these, as I was going about to music, he arrived.

When he threw open the door, it was if the Sun burst in through another window.

He was all gold. I could hardly see him.

I did not know who it was.

Within my memory, where I had kept him, he had grown almost faceless. The glimpses, now and then, at the temple, had not restored him. He had lost his features, like a statue, to the weather of my emotions.

In the middle of the floor I stood rooted. The musicians scrambled up, bowing low. He was a prince—a king—what did I know?

I bowed, I think. Perhaps not.

He walked forward, then he stopped.

He said, “You come to me, Calistra.”

For myself, I moved like a fool. But when I was close he caught my hands.

“My beauty!” he exclaimed. “Oh, the God, oh Calistra. Best girl. If you weren’t my sister, I’d wed you.”

His face was full of fire. I mean, high-colored and also incandescently glorious. I knew him now, because he was all I had dreamed of, and if you dream of leopards, you know one after all, as it tears out your soul.

Presently he said, “Why are you crying? But I thought you might.”

I said, taught by various rules, “I am glad you’ve come to see me.”

“I was away too long. Forgive me. War—such things. But you, you’ve won all your battles.”

I cried because he had said those words that damned me. From the women, in ordinary conversation, I had had my clues. Now he had told me. A girl did not marry her brother, here.

But he drew me close. The top of my head was at his breastbone. I heard his heart. It was the Heart of the World. I felt his heat, too, but did not know it for the lust the leather under his tunic kept from me. I felt also such power on him, as he did. He knew already, he was the chosen Sun—and yet, did not know.

Wishing to die, between joy and despair, I sensed his destiny in the same half-hidden way, the gifts which he brought from the shrine at Airis.

When he summoned his slave and gave me, out of the parchment, the eagle’s feather, I was not surprised.

“There was a larger one, can you credit it? They kept that, of course, for the god. But Torca said this one must be mine. And I give it to you.”

Set quill-down on the tiles, it reached to my breast. It was tawny, marked black at the root, with edges like raw saffron. The tendrils were like wire. When I touched them, they gave off a thrumming sound, like a ghost harp.

“For you,” he said again. Then, “Calistra.”

These silver feet were not the first he sent me. I had outgrown those. Kelbalba said my spirit-feet, those I had left behind, possessed each pair. Now as I stood before him, I felt them. They tensed and tingled.

I wished to die. I longed to live.

And I lived.

Soon after that—I do not think we said much more—Ermias returned. She was flustered, but Klyton showed her at once he was not out to disgrace her for her absence.

He said he would have people come to us after the noon meal, jewelers and those with cloth. He said she was to make me ready to visit the palace Hall tonight. And she must attend me.

“You’re a lovely woman,” said Klyton, to Ermias, “You’re not only a guardian now, you’re also her Maiden. Choose as well for yourself. Something fine. And some jewels. I expect you to be expensive, or I’ll be angry.”

Ermias was breathless. When he was going out, he caught her and kissed her mouth. I did not see this, although I heard her gasp.

She was as full of him any way, through the afternoon, as if he had had her, electric as storms. And she talked as if privy to his thoughts.

This would be a show of me, tonight. Even the Widow-Consort was still at Oceaxis. Only the Great Sun—Farmer Glardor—was missing, off, as so often in recent years, on his estates. Amdysos took the King’s place at the Dawn and Sunset rituals. And tonight, I too, should be there.

She was also pleased with me, Ermias. Now I was bringing her to the Sun’s center, where she had been meant to be. She said, not describing it, because to tell me now that once I had had to crawl on hands and knees, did not seem fitting to her—that she had not mislaid my kindness to her when I was a child.

I had no will to choose anything from the overwhelming display in the outer room. I sat stroking the turtle, properly indifferent, actually stunned. But Klyton had told Ermias she must try to match my garments to my hair, and so she took for me the white silk, and over that a skein of translucent Bulote web-gauze streaked with gold.

Cunningly, she chose silver ornaments for my ears and wrists, but for my neck a snake of rolled gold, with eyes of emerald. In this I think she was only naive—I, the serpent, and he green-eyed. Or not. Who knows now, and I cannot ask her.

For herself she selected a dark wine-red material. And for her jewels, only a necklace of copper flowers, set with tiny coins of garnet. It would be valuable enough to add to a dowry. She would assure him later, in the dark, she had wanted a token only, since it came from him.

Women stitched all through the afternoon. Sometimes they sang as they worked, as rowers do.

After they had bathed me and laved me with essences under Ermias’s eye, after I had been fitted and dressed, my waist and arms cinched with silver, my ears hung with it, gold on my neck, my hair plaited, piled up, let down, and woven everywhere with little bees of green lapis, I sat in my chair, nearly as sick as I had been when a child.

“You must also wear this,” said Ermias, and brought me a bracelet, the dancer of colcai he had given me before.

“No,” I said. “Put it away.”

It was the past. I was afraid of it. I must not love him. Yet, living, I died of love.

The strong wine of Uaria steadied me. Kelbalba, who stood by, told me a story to divert me, as they painted my face again, and put gold on my fingernails to match the gold nails of my silver feet.

“The Sun’s Isle. There is a wine from there,” said Kelbalba. She held one of my hands, careful not to spoil the drying paste. “But it poisons. There are monsters on the Isle and only heroes go there. There were priests there once, who guarded the piece of the Sun which lies there, in its temple. But they died. The strength of it was too great for them. It takes a hero, to survive.”

When I stood up now, I was taller than she, though not quite finished growing.

Kelbalba gave me my new cane. She leaned up to my ear and whispered.

She said, in Artepta, in Charchis, brothers and sisters were sometimes wedded. She said her brother had slept with her for a year before they were found out. She said he was the only one who thought her desirable. He said she was a lioness and did not need beauty. It was he who gave her the amulet of Lut.

Ermias grew restive and told Kelbalba to stop muttering at me. But as we walked up through the palace, towards the Sunset, Ermias added I had a better color now, the women had done wonders with their cosmetics.

9

On the stairs, I was very frightened. It was the precipice flight of perhaps one hundred and seventy-four steps, that had winded Mokpor the merchant, up to the East Terrace and the great Hall.

Of course, I had become used to negotiating the stairs to Phaidix’s garden, and certain of the women’s apartments in the palace, where Ermias had taken me. But no stairway like this one. Besides, the cane was new—silver on pale wood, with a globe at its top of electrum. I did not trust the cane yet. It was too handsome.

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.

Klyton said, “What you’ve said tonight, shows you to me. I thought you someone else.”

“For the sake of the God!” Amdysos lowered his voice. “Be reasonable.”

“I would rather,” said Klyton, “shine.”

He passed through the garden, brilliant by day with red and gold, the colors of the god, black now with night, spearing a path by the torch-glare of rage. He shone indeed, like arson through the dark.

After a few minutes, Amdysos, heavy as lead and conscious of duty, climbed to the apartment of Elakti, where the women were in tears, a mirror on the floor, and vials of scent broken. She shrieked and wept, and when he possessed her, later, sunk her nails into his back in hatred, not pleasure.

But Klyton found Ermias where he had arranged to do so. He complimented her on her dressing of Calistra, he asked two or three things about Calistra, before they lay down. He knew the hands with which Ermias stroked and clutched him, had run over Calistra’s skin, and that Ermias’s mouth had kissed Calistra’s mouth in childhood. When Ermias screamed, he saw Calistra bent backward under him, her hair streaming, her face in ecstasy, a silver snake, the feather of an eagle, and broke inside the body of Woman like the boiling sea.

10

Udrombis lay sleeping in the wide carven bed. Four pillars run about by golden vines upheld a canopy and curtains of white gauze, to keep out summer insects. Beyond this filmy box, the room was vast, lambent only with night. At the tall gold shrine to the Sun in his form of a young man, a vague glow in the lamp of yellowish alabaster, cast off strange verticals of dim shape, the edges of a clothes stand, a chair, a vessel on a table. Nothing more. The doors were shut and the Maidens slept in small rooms of their own. Outside, the guard who stood, a story down, was silent at his post.

The Queen opened her eyes. She was quite awake. She had trained herself to such alertness from her earliest youth, having heard a story once of war that came in the night, and of a warrior’s preparedness.

Through the curtains, only the usual, things, darkness, hints of color from the lamp.

But then the lamp flickered, and went abruptly out.

This was not a cause for alarm, only someone would need to be reprimanded tomorrow. There could not be enough oil in the lamp, and it was impolite to let go out the light before a god.

Udrombis sat up, and pushed aside the curtain. She would refill and relight the lamp herself.

At this moment, she made out, black on black, the form of a woman, standing over against the closed doors which had not opened, about twenty-six sword lengths away.

Udrombis knew who this was. The one who had always been able to get in, anywhere and at all times. Crow Claw. The one who was many years dead.

The Queen rose. She did not attempt to draw on her mantle. She said, quietly enough, “What do you want, old woman?”

Crow Claw shook her head.

There was in the dark a shimmer all about her, so that she had become properly visible, the same as always, ancient in her black and ornaments. She held out her old hand, and from it poured a trail of thick, black, gleaming dust.

It hit the floor, and a spurt of light sprang up, like flames.

From this, smoke columned upwards, blacker than pitch.

In the smoke, a tiny thing, turning and flashing, fiery gold, small as a gnat.

Udrombis stood still, watching. There were tales enough of Crow Claw’s embassies. Being dead now, she must come from the world below. She crossed the unpassable River Tithaxeli, without trouble, and reentered the earth at whichever spot she chose.

This must be, Udrombis thought, a warning of her own death. She had had no symptoms otherwise, and rather than horror, she was prepared to receive and employ the warning. In this way she would have space to do anything she thought needful, before her departure. Death’s kingdom, she suspected, was not precisely as depicted by priests, and the simply religious. But even so, she had nothing to dread. She had lived firmly in adherence to the tenets of her class and kind. After all, if Crow Claw had withstood it, she, Udrombis the lioness, would certainly survive the journey. And in that place, it was possible she might be young again, even as young as twelve, her age when she had married Akreon. Thinking of finding him, himself a young man among the dead, she did not hanker to remain above ground.

The golden gnat flickering in the smoke had grown larger.

She saw now it had a shape. It was—a bird.

This seemed dainty at first, this tiny delicate thing, passing in and out of the post of smoke.

But now it had enlarged again, and so went on enlarging. It was not a sparrow of the aviary or garden. It was, in miniature, an eagle.

It soared and stooped, it circled. The size now of a house cat—she saw it had gripped something in its claws and pulled it from the smoke. Now it hurtled free into the ceiling—it was large as a dog, and its wings expanded, touching the rafters. In its grip was a sun disk.

Both eagle and disk, both swelling on and on, seemed made all of gold. They glittered, blazed. And the eyes of it, the apparition, were molten.

Surely this could not be a forecast of Death?

The beak was like golden steel. It parted and let out a bellowing scream.

Huge now, the size of the room, it spread the sparkling pinnions of its awful wings, and dashed straight at her, bearing the roof upon its back.

She heard its harsh rushing, the boom of its wings. She smelled its poultry smell, the stink of old blood, the cold spice of the upper airs. Its feathers struck her face, her breast, spun her. She dropped down on the bed. It felt of metal, every feather fashioned on the anvil of heaven. Its claws scraped over her back and the golden disk burnt her with a heat that came directly out of the sun.

When it was gone, the glare of it gone, the noise and heat and stink and terror, Udrombis got up again.

Crow Claw too had vanished away, and only the yellow lamp glimmered, full of oil and undisturbed, before the feet of the god.

11

Traveling to Airis, with the Widow-Queen’s party, took some days. I went with Stabia, in my own litter slung between two horses, and Ermias sat with me. She was full of anticipation, yet bored. Then she would remember her new lover, Klyton the Sun Prince, would soon be at the palace-fort there, perhaps ahead of us. I had gathered enough from her indiscreet sighs and hints—she spoke only of a highborn dalliance—to have guessed. My feelings I cannot describe. Who has ever loved very young, and seen the lover go willingly to some close friend or enemy, will understand.

In turmoil I rode towards the mountain. And all about, Stabia and her women, Udrombis and hers—they said the Widow-Consort was not quite well, no one knew how, she was so strong—and several others thought appropriate to the journey. Needless to say, Glardor’s left-at-home wife came too, but not Elakti. She must have been with trouble persuaded from it, for we had already been told, Amdysos was to race again, and this year Klyton, for the first, had been chosen by the lots.

Along with us went the summer baggage. A favorite bed, chairs, dishes, ornaments and clothes, instruments and embroidery stands, and even one of the lighter loom-frames, in parts, for Glardor’s blonde wife liked her weaving as she liked her food.

My own baggage was slight.

The days were all dust. The land went up on the left hand, to hills and forests, from which shy, affronted deer sometimes looked down on us. To the right descended a plain with skirts of barley and wheat. There had been a giant she-pig hereabouts, some years before, but she had disappeared, and no one claimed to have killed her. Currently there were tales of enormous birds, whose wings spread broader than the height of three men. They had been seen fighting above the Sun god’s shrine, and feathers fell like spears of iron and gold. Having been gifted with one, I hid it and kept quiet.

By night we were put into tents hung inside with soft perfumed draperies. Stabia was often alone with the Widow-Queen. Even I heard a joke or two, softly murmured. But Ermias said, decidedly, they were now too old for any such nonsense. Love-desire was for the young.

She, almost thirty, had put in her corner of our tent, a pink soap-stone Daia, on a little stand. Every night, Ermias offered wine to her. Once Ermias reached a peak of pleasure in her sleep—or some other way—and cried out. I knew the sound, and pretended I had not heard, as usual. My pillow was wet. Unlike my Maiden, I made no noise over my crying.

The palace-fortress was rocks, with large stones stuck upon them, plastered only to the front a ripe fruit yellow. The columns were red as rust, but a tower ran up, and the walls were notched for shields, and for slingshot, arrows and spears.

We were there five days before all the princes and men had come to join us. Nine days before the sacred Race of the Sun.

I sat playing my sithra. I had made a new song to him, my brother that I must not love as I did. But I gave him the name of the Sun himself, so I might sing it, over and over, never mind who went in and out of my stony little room.

“Is that the Daystar’s dusk lament for the Sun? How sad it is!” cried Ermias. “One would think you knew. You’re a true artist, Calistra.”

But I recalled how she had been vicious when I was a child, and jeered at my playing.

When she saw the tears on my face, she came to me, cuddling me in her warm arms. She plied me with dates and sweets. It was not her fault. Why should I expect her to refuse him, when I would have died under the wheels of his chariot?

Somewhere in the town, the women they called the Spiders of Phaidix, were spinning the Web for the Race. I knew nothing of it, or barely, everything was spoken in a code. It was sacred, one must not say too much. But now, as Ermias tried to console, I saw I had walked through a web in that disused room. It clung about my unfeeling silver foot. I did not fathom any omen.

Outside the narrow window, Airis rose, green and brass, to a violet pane of sky. One saw the Daystar often, morning, noon and afternoon, for the air was very clear. Eagles wheeled over. But they were only birds, seven foot of wings, no more.

When I did not go to dinner that night, the first night he was at the fort, he sent me next day a present.

It was a brooch in the form of the Daystar, gold-washed silver, as usually she was shown, with the Sun’s rays behind her hair, and a tiny mirror in her right hand, this one of dark jade.

His letter said he was sorry to think I might be ill. He hoped I would, by that evening, be better.

Perhaps I was a spoiled child, who thought, by avoiding the social dinner again, I could make him come to me himself. But at Airis, the hall was much smaller, and crammed by nobles, dogs, servants and slaves. Traditionally they roasted the hunters’ kill at the central hearth. Fat splashed, flames spattered. Scents of meat and perfume and the beeswax candles and the oil of lamps rose, and hung in a thundercloud under the blackened ceiling. When the lights were bright, the room seemed all eyes.

I had been afraid enough, these alien women around me, watching. Stabia with her perhaps-kindly hawk’s green stare.

To sit so, packed in, boiling and stifled, and have him there, not even able to look at him, as a forward woman would—I could not bear it.

The second night, I kept to my room. And the third. Nothing was said. Not by Ermias, who, enraptured, crept away after the feast—to be with him.

After the noon meal on the fourth day, there was an upheaval from my slave and Ermias in the annex. Unannounced, Stabia swept in on me. Though padded with her fat, she had a presence.

When not sitting to read or play my sithra, I would pace slowly, endlessly about. Twelve or more years of sitting kept me now, even when not at exercise, on my feet.

She slapped together her hands.

“So, you’re not sick.”

Not knowing what to say, I said nothing.

Stabia pointed to my chair. “Sit down.”

“No, madam—you must sit.”

“That’s better. Always recall, manners before all things. At least until one is a friend.”

I blushed, and she sat in my chair. She waved me to the stool, and I accepted it. She watched me closely. She said, “You move like water flowing. In a slave-market you’d be worth a few coins, I can tell you. What do you think you are? Don’t know. I’ll help you, then. A beauty and a rarety. The Consort herself—oh, I don’t mean that one, Blondie, I mean Udrombis—has told me you are her treasure. After the first night you came to the Hall, she said to me how pleased she was, you were worthy now of a Sun King. You should put faith in her. She’s a being of the highest order. Now, why don’t you come to the hall here at night?”

“I’m—I find it—I—”

“You’re scared as a rabbit. Poor fool. Look at you. Give me your youth and half your looks, and a quarter your grace, I’d have the place on its knees. Learn to see in your mirror, Calistra. What metal is it?”

“Silver, madam.”

“Electrum’s better. You shall have one. Study yourself. Gods don’t give you a gift to see it pushed under the bed like the night-pot.” She took a candy from my dish, ate it, and took another. “Two are all I’ll allow myself when visiting.” She said, “All the court knows what Klyton’s done for you. If you shut yourself away, you shame him.”

I stared, astonished. “But—”

“Listen to me. A woman is an ornament in this world of ours. More than that, naturally, but we disguise it. He has made them notice you, and now you make it as if he came to table with his latest war trophy left off. They ask why. Was it dishonorably got? Is it worth less than appeared. Is he a cheat. What is it—do you hate him?”

“Hate—who?”

“My son. My only son. Klyton.”

I felt the blood ignite in me, up the column of my body, from my loins to my heart to my forehead. Even my hair seemed alight. But I stared her out. She let me do this, then she nodded. “So it isn’t hate. What would you do for him then?”

Everything lost, I tossed my head. “Die for him.”

“Good. By the God’s own Knife, I began to doubt you had the ichor of our house. But if you’d die for him, then to come to supper is nothing, is it? Eh? Well, answer.”

Despite myself, I smiled. At this, Stabia smiled too.

“No, madam. I didn’t understand.”

“Oh, of course not. Now you do. You’ve had no proper instruction. This other thing …” she paused, and ate her second sweet, licking her fingers to get all. She said, “You’re too young for it yet. I don’t hold with this bedding at twelve, fourteen. Some are fit for it and some not. Girls now need longer. Flowers bloom at their own rate, and when you force them they lose their petals to spite you.”

I was at sea. I gazed into her face, but now she looked out of the window at the mountain.

Stabia said, “He wants you, you know, just as much. He has that curly hussy out there because her hands have been all over you. How do I know? Amdysos sent him off to the groves. That was the first time for him. Seventeen is late. I’ve taken notice, since then. It was the Consort put me wise.” Dumbfounded—he wanted me?—I waited. “Let him be patient. And you. In a year, maybe. You’ll need to be careful, but I’ll see you have a woman who knows what you should do and take. Yes, you’re royal, but the most you can hope for in the end, my dear, is some lesser king of another country. And he won’t quibble if he doesn’t have to take a dagger and skewer to open a woman of the Sun House.”

Was I shocked? I doubt it. She spoke as freely as some of the Maidens, coarse and to the point. The sentiments for which, twenty years before she might have been killed, were not startling because they went against nothing in me. I wanted what she told me I might—incredibly—have. The long-term future, with its banishment and sordid little marriage to another, in this fire, meant nothing.

“While you’re with us, you and he—why not. You can be my daughter. Under my wing. That will make it easy.”

Returning to this now, I see that shocked I should have been. For Stabia went against her true goddess in this one matter. Suggesting that Klyton and I might be lovers, however carefully, however much unknown, was as far from the rules of Udrombis as the earth from the sky, To the Widow-Consort, a princess must remain a virgin before marriage, as surely as a prince should not.

I think therefore someone had unlocked for Stabia the closet of coming time, a very little way. Searching, I do not see that scene, nor guess how it had happened. But half the court, half the continent, played at magic. Someone had read some portent for her, perhaps, and telling her, Stabia had known a truth.

She had no shadow, yet somehow, without shouldering her fate, she was aware that in this year where I and Klyton would wait, all things must change. And she herself sail down the River of the Dead, leaving him behind upon the raft of mortal life.

12

Now I have come to that place where I must speak of something sorcerous, harrowing, unthinkable. It is not I do not know how to tell it, for I saw it, and need only relate what I saw. Nor is it I think you will doubt me, because if you have read so far, we have trusted each other, a little. No, it is only some things can never be consigned to paper, nor even to the stone and clay tablets of the priests. Some things are too big, and too inhuman. They should be written once in fire, or water, and then left to smolder out, or wash away.

Yet, I cannot proceed unless I speak of this, from which after-events hang like jewelry chains from a hook of bronze.

Thus:

The caverns at Airis, sacred to the god, run through one side of the mountain’s base. There had been mining there two hundred years before, until signs from the god forebade it.

You descend the plain on the western side, into a lower plain, a valley, where the mountain veers up into heaven, and everything seems above you, the glinting eastern dot of the shrine, and south, the defence tower of the palace.

Here, on the plain’s floor, was a stadium, where at this time, for three days—one of the Sun god’s numbers—horse races were staged, wrestling and combats with swords, shooting with bows, and other masculine arts. But there were shows also about the stadium, racing dogs, lions who danced, and men who ate fire. All around, a market was set up, selling horses, the white sheep of the mountains, who have horns like the crescent moon; silks and scents and foods of every land known under the Sun. There were even little botched-up temples of many foreign gods. Bandri was there, whose priestesses, black and white, all with padded bellies, sold amulets and statues to women pregnant, or desirous of being so. And Lut I heard of, too, though I was not allowed to go, represented by a herd of men and women who, it was said, were freaks, one having an enormous head, and another a tail, and two girls, lovely as swans, but joined at the waist with only two legs between them. Although apparently, a pair of all the other things were located below the waist, or so Ermias, horrified, mentioned.

I felt quite sorry for Ermias now. I was kind to her. Then again, I was not frequently alone in her company, but in with Stabia’s flock. Klyton, despite my—now desperate—nervousness, I had seldom seen in the fort, and then he never turned my way. He was most often with the chariots and horses at the stadium.

Before the vast doors, Torca stood, torch in hand, looking down into the valley.

From here, the two-horse chariots assembling on the racing track, seemed of a comfortable size to pick up in his palm. From their metalwork shot flares of light, and off the bridles and headstalls of the horses, trails like sparks. There was, at the Airis Games, no chariot race but this one. They would take one turn, pacing around the track, then come out on to the slope that led to the base of the mountain, where they must pause for the litany.

While the Race was run, a period of, perhaps, half an hour, or a little less, or a little more, the crowd in the stadium, which included the Great Sun himself, would stand. Not until the first and winning chariot burst from the mountain’s gut, upon the opposite ridge, could any man, or woman, sit.

He had thought of the girl. She had been told to see to herself, having extra padding put inside the silver feet. And she might need her cane, and the arms of her Maiden and her slave.

Strangely, Torca wondered how this would be for her when she had grown old. She would not, surely, be able to do it then. But he did not think she would live much beyond forty years—the deformed from birth seldom did. Even he had now, with his leg, no long expectations for himself, and each year was a bonus. He had been careful to let her know none of that.

He turned his mind back to the ritual.

The young men, Suns, and nobles of the House, and this year princelings from other lands, had been cleansed. They had watched since last night’s sunfall until the mid of night. Then they slept. They were cautioned. No women must be even in their thoughts, or anything else.

Breakfast was hearty, the meat of a boar, the Sun animal, with summer greens and barley bread. So much wine, no more.

After that, another bath, and the oils and unguents. Dressing in their finest—each looked more gorgeous than the morning. Like a bride on her wedding day, no man who rode the Sun’s Race seemed less than beautiful.

In the caverns, it was possible to die. It did not happen often, but it might. Those who perished there went to the Sun Below, to serve, him through the region of darkness under the world.

The man who won was, for the next three days, the Sun himself.

Torca thought it might well be Klyton. Though Amdysos had triumphed before, he was too steady, too wise. A race needed fire. Especially a race to honor the Sun.

Across from Torca, the other chosen Priest of the Doors, face masked in gold, and in the black robe fringed by red that marked the Sunset-like descent into the caverns. Torca, beneath his mask, had cut and shaved off his beard. It grew quickly, and in two or three months would be as good as the old one.

In the sunlight, the torches were transparent, but bright from the terraces of the stadium. Yet it was the chariots were made of fire.

The caverns, a system of wide caves, had been fashioned with walks and drives, in the time of Aiton. Earlier it had been more dangerous. Even so, the workings of the old mine kept it treacherous enough, and on the walls, the arcane paintings, which it was blasphemy to speak of, could startle a newcomer, and even shy the horses.

Nevertheless his money would have been on Klyton, if it had not been sacriligious to bet.

The sky was very clear, and the Daystar showed, following after the Sun like a gold-white hole in heaven.

The chariots were turning now, coming around to where the slope began.

Everyone in the stadium was on their feet.

He must direct his mind inward, to clandestine, holy things. But Torca thought, Have I forgotten something?

It was as if someone had whispered to him, during the night. He had heard, and meant to remember, but forgot. There was now no help for it, for time moved onwards like the Sun.

His chariot was of red marroi, the sacred wood, and inlaid by gold-skinned bronze. He had had it built last year, for this. Sympathetic magic—by making ready for a thing, you caused it to happen. But Klyton had not been drawn to race last year.

Now it was refurbished, polished, like a red, silken mirror. He wore its color, and ornaments of gold. Every man there wore the Sun colors, even the Charchite prince, who wore a color like colcai.

Klyton had slept only two hours. But he felt light and strong, his head as clear as the sky, and like the sky, with the two bright thoughts in it, the Race that was the Sun, and—the Daystar thought—the girl on the terraces of the stadium.

He had made her out. She wore the cloth he had had them send her. Not gold, but silver for her eyes. She shone like the moon amid the crimsons and ochres. But he had sent her a token too, a necklace of heavy golden disks. Ermias stood by her in dark yellow, which did not suit her. She looked better in her skin. But so Calistra would, and he must think of neither.

Klyton had lain with three women two days before the Race, to empty himself. Only one had been Ermias. All three had been … Calistra.

The thirteen chariots moved in the traditional manner, one rank five abreast, the next three, and the next three. In the last rank, as drawn by the lots, only two cars. Two was the moon number, given by Phaidix, the five and two threes being the Sun’s. It was not that the two was an unlucky place, but those who drew it made the moon goddess an offering at her little outdoor altar beyond the shrine. She liked the open air.

As Klyton, who with the Charchite, had drawn the rank of two, poured honey and white wine, the white cat came and jumped to lick the drops. By the time the Charchite walked up, she had run away.

Amdysos was in the first rank of three.

They had not spoken beyond a few civilities. It had been hard on them. All their lives, since boyhood, they had grown used to speaking.

But Amdysos would not budge and Klyton would not shift.

Klyton thought, primed now with the flame of the Race, Whoever gets this, we’ll talk after. Magnanimous now, because excited, unnerved, ready, Klyton wanted to be friends again. It occurred to him, too late, it would have been better to exchange warmer words before setting off. But after all, if there had been fresh anger … anger was as bad for this as sex.

Klyton thought, He’s almost unflawed. I have to teach him this. It’s the Queen, it’s Udrombis. Her codes. She’d sweep away a rock, why not a man. If I hadn’t seen Calistra, I might have thought as he does. She isn’t like the rest. That child in the market-fair, with two heads—not like that.

Klyton’s horses were close to the tint of the chariot. Groomed, they gleamed like water, more like red wine.

He thought, Why does my pulse race for this, and not for a war? He had felt no true fear, no elation in any battle. The notion came now, sudden, electrifying, as they turned up on to the slope, Did I know then the god had me in his hand, and I was safe, for he wouldn’t let me die?

And then, as they stopped, the huge doors rearing, shut stone, carved with a terrible beast, all jaws, to swallow them, Klyton, his head singing, thought, It’s no use saying Amdysos may win. Or any man, but me. This is mine. It is all to be mine. All. All! I am the eagle. What I see belongs to me by right. From land’s edge to edge of sky. The Race and the world.

“Who stands before the Gate of Night?”

“We, the children of the Sun.”

“Beyond this place, the way leads into darkness.”

“We shall take that way.”

The ancient words echoed over the slopes of the mountain, and around them, in the stillness, sounded the faintly beating Heart. The hollow of the mountain carried everything to the stadium below. A cough could be heard from here.

The priest to the left—it was Torca—leaned and touched with his light the offering bowl on its golden stand. A comber of madder-red purled up.

“The Sun descends. You who descend, do not forget us, for the dark enjoins you to remain. But day awaits. Rise up. Return.”

Each man said, singly now, one after another, “I pledge. I will return.”

Klyton heard his own words, like another man’s.

Two accolytes lifted the offering bowl away, and from the higher slope, boys sang in piping voices.

The song was old as universal memory. It spoke of the Sun beneath the earth. It was a dirge, but at the end, rose into a shining shout of joy.

As it ended, the doors of stone grated on their runners, and the mouth of the monster split slowly into two.

Beyond, within the mountain, Night awaited them, for an instant black as the waters of Death River.

But then the priests who stood along the upper ledges there inside, the first group of five, dipped their torches to the cups of oil.

There was a mumbled gush of combustion, and flame sprang out, showing, rocked by fantastic shadows, the vaulted intestines of Airis, ribbed purple and black, and with the fangs of stalactites depending, scarlet at their ends, as if recently fed on blood.

The girl stands on the terrace, among the women. The silver dress is cool, blood-heat only, the heavy necklace of gold is hot. She knows she must stand some time. Already this pains her, but she does not notice.

She watches, and sees the long slope to the stone mouth, and the chariots going up. She watches them halt, and hears, as does all the attentive crowd, the prayer and its responses. While some of the audience, soft as docile praying infants, speak them too.

Across the face of the mountain’s lowest bulkhead, where for centuries they have cleared all but scrub away, she can see too, the figures of the waiting priests, and finally very clearly another great cave-mouth. From this the victor of the Race will, at last, emerge, his passage through secret night and death completed. And after him, the others, though not all still in their chariots, and seldom all the horses. Over the mouth of this blind-dark, wild and uncanny cave, goes a curious twinkling of the sunlight, caught there as if on strands of impossible dew.

No one talks of what lies between the two mouths in the rock. Or, if ever they have, never to a woman.

Calistra watches as Klyton goes into the maw of the mountain.

Ermias is breathing like a small scented hog at her ear. The little slave, Nimi, is still, as if changed to salt.

The dark has swallowed him, Calistra’s beloved.

She believes it conceivable, she will never see him again, but over there too she hears the steady respiration of Stabia, her friend. He will return. But if he does not win—

Men of an era before time had come into this place. For these evidently, it had symbolized the same, the fall and return of the Sun. For in that way they had painted on the rock. Probably not sophisticated enough for chariots, if they had even had the wheel, they had run the whole route. It would be safer running, then.

At first, a channel went through, with the five priests, two on one side, three the other, standing by the bowls of fire, upright, masked in gold, like icons. The chariots folded into a huddle here, you could not ride more than three abreast.

Then the light flared up again, in a darkness ahead, and they came out into the first great cave.

On the high ledges, more than thirty priests were poised. The bowls they had lit had started up the bats which lived there, and which wheeled and flapped, dipping down low above the heads of men and the ears of the horses. But you trained your team to such things, with flags on cords, or tame birds. Not a secret betrayed; most caves had bats. The horses stood it, with lashing tails and jinking. Then the men were spreading them out neck and neck across the platform.

The floor was level, and a hundred yards ahead, a new mouth of blackness waited. Its lighting was the signal to start off.

There was no further ritual, and no jockeying for position. You waited where you were able, here. No advantage in it. And for many, no knowledge of what lay ahead.

The horses stamped, the bats swirled up towards their nooks above.

A trumpet sounded, deep in the mountain.

The entrance ahead burst to golden light.

New tumults of bats rushed instantly out of it, and to meet this streaming mouth of light and dark, between the shadows’ leaping, every chariot tried to fling itself.

Klyton saw the Charchite slip back at once. A prince of Ipyra on his left went next. Lords of Akhemony, several known to him for years, were all around him then suddenly gone.

No one warned you. None must say. There was an old story of a prince who won by wringing knowledge of the Race from a Sun priest. But after his success a disease fastened on and killed him, and the priest was slain by a bolt from heaven. You did not ask. You did not tell. Perhaps, there might be a hint … but there had been none.

And so, whether to run fast or slow was a matter of choice, knowing nothing of what lay ahead. Except, there was this, you might study those who had raced here before. There were five. Only one had done it twice and been once the winner: Amdysos.

Klyton came in behind Amdysos’s chariot. It was dark cypress and inlaid with cinnabar. He wore white and gold, himself like one of the priests.

They had been friends. Amdysos was his guide, going quite fast. After this, all would be well. After this, brothers again.

Beyond the first cavern, the way was narrow once more. Presently, two chariots struck together, collided, and Klyton heard the cacophony, rage, frustration, and the shrill of horses. But that was behind, and he, Amdysos, and five more, kept on. Those other six, left behind, must do the best they could.

Down the narrow way they galloped, the second Ipyran princeling now in the lead, after him, two together, Akreon’s byblow, Uros, and stocky Melendor, and then Ogon, who was a boaster, and who had raced here last year. Then Amdysos, and a man whose name Klyton could not summon. Last, Klyton himself. As they went, one more chariot came rumbling up. It was the Charchite, broken through the muddle of the collision. He gave a scream as he passed Klyton, careering next between Amdysos and the nameless one. The four forward chariots parted for him, crushed to the walls, and then the Charchite and the Ipyran were gone into the fading of the light ahead.

The bats, which had withdrawn, dived again. They ripped through Klyton’s aura, the nerves of his body now stretched beyond the flesh, through the physical strands of hair that had come loose from their clubbing. One bat brushed his temple, another settled a moment on the left-side horse, fluttering like a black ribbon in its mane. Klyton saw the wink of red eyes in its rat mask. He sprung the whip and cracked it just clear of the bat. You were not permitted to kill them, they were the creatures of Thon, allowed here by the Sun god as a reminder. But the bat dashed up and was gone.

Amdysos, though far enough back, was checking his team.

Guided, Klyton checked too.

Away behind there was a crash. A man’s voice raised in grief, perhaps in pain.

Behind, too, the lights were dimming down.

Ahead, new light—a new entry—the channel opened abruptly wide.

Klyton heard the leading Charchite scream again, not from triumph now. And hauled harder on the reins.

Even so, erupting out into the second cavern, he was not prepared.

In front and above, caught in the fresh flush of light, a lowering wall seemed to bar the way. On it was the huge picture of a thing painted apparently in blood and night, which uncoiled its curling tongue to clasp the disk of a crimson Sun. Enormous, it seemed you must run into it all, and be lapped up too.

The Charchite had clapped his hands across his face. His team bolted to the wall, and stopped there, the chariot swerving round and going over. He had been lucky. Two yards more, there was a drop of twenty feet.

The Ipyran screeching prayers, rushed at the wall, and went in through a tiny hole below, which had also now come to light.

The terror of the wall painting poured over.

Klyton saw the priests who stood like stones along the walls. Here their faces were masked in black. How could you be sure they were only human?

Amdysos was going faster, and Klyton too urged on his team. Coming to the opening, instinctively he ducked his head, and drove under the thing on the wall.

Before him—far before—the Ipyran, sole leader now, ran howling still, his yellow horses snorting and prancing.

Ogon, Uros, Melendor, Amdysos—the nameless one dropped back—Klyton passing him. Bizarre, the man’s name surfaced as he did so, but was left behind.

The need to gain ground, as in any race, felt paramount, yet must be subdued by will. The Ipyran was maybe not clever, snatching first place so soon—this much already one saw.

But others too were closing from behind, a roar of hoofs and wheels. No time to look. The bats had flown up again—you did glance there, and saw them clustered like black bunches of grapes with scarlet beads that were bunches of eyes. Venom dripped from their mouths. Echoes now went through the skull. The head spun. Clear it. Again, the way narrowed.

More painted images—what now? On either side was the Sun’s disk, colored a dreadful dying red. It fell in stages, depicted always lower, behind the bars of the stalactites, seeming—as they ran—itself to fall. And then came a steeper slope ascending, and on the walls were the awful bulbous shapes of men who had lived once in the world, men with the heads of stags and foxes and lions, and over all the black clutching form of Night, whose mouth, like the bats’ mouths, slopped poison down. It stank here, of death, and the light faltered, and the echoes drowned—

Klyton was cold inside his heat. The sweat felt thick on him, and the fine hairs stood along his spine, the strong hairs crawled on his scalp. Just so worms would feel, that went through and through if you were left, when dead. For this they burnt you, to save you such dishonor.

But all men die. All men, high or low. Happy or accursed. Even the King, in his sleep, like a woman or a child—

But not the eagle.

Ogon had got a bat in his hair. It had flashed down on him as if called. He was shouting, cutting chunks from his locks with his knife, to get it out. His horses floundered; he went to the side, and trundled out of control down a mysterious side passage, some old working of the mine.

Seeing it, Uros, his friend, set off after. Do friends do this? In battle I would, Amdysos. But not—here. This is nothing to do with life. It is the fight with Thon, knee to knee, for the Sun must rise, and to lose my brother and my friend is nothing to the safety of the world—

Now, all at once, a swerve in the track—and chaos. Walls rushing in, or chopped away—

The track was thin, in parts less than the width of two chariots. He saw the priests stand aloft, far spaced in groups of three, two on one side, one man another. They lit their fires as the riders approached, as before, but now the light was murky and greenish, and their faces were masked in silver, and their robes were grey, the color of mourning …

Either side hung the ancient workings, crumbles of stone ballasted by poles and shafts of oak, with great pherom stays. Drops of a hundred, two hundred sword lengths. Veins of metal left alone, gleamed transparently, like tears or saliva.

The paintings on the walls had in some areas disintegrated, flaked off. But one saw enough. Things with huge white eyes, the beasts of Night Below. They leaned to dead men, eating of them, pulling out the ropes of their viscera, and like flowers, their hearts.

The Ipyran was slowing, he was weeping. There was madness in Ipyra. Their vaporous caves, where skeletal women sang of horrors—he should not have come here—all at once he stopped his chariot, drew rein, and got down as if on an avenue. He walked to the rockface, under the picture of a snake that had men in its teeth. Here he kneeled and wove to and fro, crying. While his horses stood champing, and shaking their feet and heads, spraying foam like cream.

Someone would have to come back for the Ipyran. The priests would see to it.

The remaining chariots curved round them.

Now Melendor was whipping up his team. He had raced the Race before—it must be safe to do so. Yet Amdysos kept firm, his horses going only at a pouncing trot.

As Klyton went by the Ipyran in his ecstasy of madness, he saw the man had clawed his face, the way women did there for a loss.

And from behind now too, the nameless man, his name truly left behind, for Klyton could not again recapture it, was all at once thundering up again, with others at his back.

The echoes rolled about in Klyton’s skull. It would be easy to fall down, to lie there, in the green dark-light.

Although Amdysos, the guide, trailed a little, Klyton cracked the whip again, lightly, over the backs of his team.

The chaotic route was leveling, and ahead another cavern loomed, its lights rising from night.

But the bats as always were coming out again, as if signalled.

One huge red bat, with eyes as white as those of the hellish things on the walls, hurtled straight at him. Klyton swung himself aside, and the horses bundled together, unwieldy as a pair of carter’s ponies. And then the red bat was by, and Klyton heard behind him an exclamation, not even loud, after which there was the unmistakable crunch of a chariot wheel going over a dip.

The unnamed lord fell with a cold call that was not even properly that, and quickly over. The chariot, wheel-lodged and tilted, stayed sideways on the track, the horses still as statues, washed by torch-green sweat. Vague as ghosts, other chariots rammed together, trying to steer aside. A shambles. The cursing and grinding faded like a dream.

For here again came breaking light, and the next cavern—Melendor and Amdysos spilled over in to it, and now Klyton, who flung up his head, while the horses reared in terror, nearly jerking from his control.

From the ceiling of the rock hung down the robes of Night, the long, black, rusty chains of Night, and caught in them, the masks of a thousand grimacing skulls. Jangling and clattering, and the bats swooping, and the sound of laughter—but whose?—and along the walls the unhuman priests, garbed at last as they said that Thon was garbed in his crypt, white faces and red manes and purple lips and disks of metal on the eyes—

Melendor, who had done this before, had even so lost the mastery of his team. They circled, jounced, bucked around the space, setting the chains ringing worse, and Amdysos pulled hard back, and Klyton saw the chance before him, the long, up-swollen sweep that sprinted for a hole of jet black ahead. The priests ahead would light the darkness as he came up. They had done so every time, hearing the riders come on. And the other two could be got by here.

Anything might be beyond, this had been here, something worse than this—but Klyton did not pause. He had been patient. Now in the lines of Amdysos’s body he had seen a sort of answer. The Race of the Sun was won not necessarily by speed, but by endurance. But one must have more than that.

Here, here, the chance; Klyton knew himself in the hand of the gods, who, however many they might be, had one hand only, and that larger than worlds.

And so he raked with the whip across the air, and his horses bounded forward. There must always come at last a time to take the risk, and to jump the chasm of fate. After all, they had shown him. He was the eagle, and had wings.

Passing Melendor and Amdysos, they ran.

13

Each time they lit the torches, Ermias cried out. She clutched my arm, as if I might not have bothered to see.

“Look: The first cavern’s passed. Look: The second cavern!”

The passage of the leading chariots in the mountain was communicated to the priests on the rock outside by some unknown method. As torches illuminated the stages within, so they did outside.

Now at each spangle of white light on Airis, the crowd shouted. Its noise was growing. They were dancing on their feet, clapping, crying out names and prayers, and the people below, from the town, were bawling like one huge bull with several thousand throats. Though to bet was blasphemous, no doubt there had been a few.

I think, at the third lighting, I began to turn cold. It grew in me as if from a seed. I blossomed with ice, and thought it only fear for him.

The torches had lit up far along, I cannot recall the number of them, when the shriek sounded above, deep into the sky, and between us all and the Sun was brandished a flail of cavorting, awesome shadows.

Every head must have gone up. Ermias was one of many women who screamed. Even little Nimi let out a yip of fright.

Over our heads, three eagles fought. Two were very large, but one was a monster. It was the being that had let fall its feathers by the shrine.

They were black against the high Sun. As they thrashed and soared, and dived and rent, between the claws and beaks the Daystar glittered on and off like a startled eye staring in heaven.

All about me, men and women cowered. Most were crawling beneath the benches. On the stadium floor below, men had thrown themselves flat, and horses had slipped their tethers and were galloping away.

It was Nimi who tugged at me, and made me kneel.

“Before the gods—” she said.

She put her arm round me. She was little more than a child, about ten. Ermias had curled up tight as a snail, moaning.

But I could not help it. I continued to look up, abject, but caught in fascination. So one gazes at the drawn sword which comes to make an end—yes, I can swear to that, too.

In this way, though, I noted Stabia had been put into cover by her women and that, some distance off, Udrombis sat like an effigy in her chair, not stirring, while her maidens were face-down on the terrace.

The eagles ripped at each other. Some spots of blood splashed quite near me. It was almost black, and it smelled of fire, and of ordure.

Their shadows shut together, and broke, and the interrupted sunlight splintered like lightnings everywhere.

Suddenly one bird veered away. It slid sharply down the sky, as if along an invisible hill, then righted itself and flew raggedly off. A feather drifted from it, along the line of the air, bright as goldsmith’s work. But that was the smallest one. The other two fought on.

Bronzen men were running up the terrace, the guards of the King’s House. I could not now, in the confusion, see the men’s side, nor Glardor; it was as if the very noises of alarm and avian war had blocked him away.

A man had positioned himself with a bow.

I heard Udrombis then, her smooth voice carrying, itself like a shaft.

“Put that down. Are you mad? They have their own business, and belong to the Sun.”

He did not know what she had been shown, at Oceaxis, but shaken by her censure, where he had been prepared to face the might of the eagle, the soldier put down the bow.

After the green light of death, the witch shawls and chains and bones, Klyton plunged into utter blackness. He had expected momently the torches to light there as, in all other parts of the caverns they had. But no light came. He rode now, fast as in battle, and in pure Night.

The horses were whinnying, and he called loudly to them, letting them have at least his strength on the reins, his known voice: “We’re with the God. Trust the God. In his hand.”

And then the way sloped steeply up. Rushing, racing, all things, time and life and silence, they tore upwards on its back.

When from the dark—came light.

Now. Unlooked-for.

Light like the levin-bolt that had slaughtered the blasphemous priest.

Here on the last stretch, the priesthood awaited the novice, and all men, since to gods, all men are novices. And as he ran night-blind, they struck the tinder and flung it in the bowls of oil, as always they did. And outwards exploded brilliance, as for the child newborn, a dawn not kind but unbearable and searing, after blind-dark, the sheer killing white blindness of the Sun.

Klyton half glimpsed those priests, only five again, in gold raiment, gold-faced, but everything was one thing. For he could not see. Not even the exquisite woven net of silver and gold thread, which the women, the Spiders of Phaidix had spun quite unsecretively, to close the exit from the mountain in silk.

As he reeled there, only twenty feet from it, and the horses, all to pieces, shrilling and bursting against each other, and the chariot crashing against the rock, hopeless—some merchant wagon on the road in the hands of an idiot—as his dream and his faith gave way, then came Amdysos, his brother. Pouring past like a wind of flame.

And Amdysos laughed.

Perhaps it was only delight that once again he would win the Race of the Sun. Or it was, for once, malice.

“Damn you—curse you—” Klyton’s mouth let go the words—he had been betrayed by the gods, so what did kinship or mortal love matter? “You bloody trickster—you never told me—some hint would have done—damn you down to all Thon’s hells—”

But Amdysos was gone. Like a golden vision, he rode his horses straight at and through the flimsy tinsel Web, out on to the flanks of Airis, in victory.

The brain of the giant eagle, carved by the gods from amber fury, burned, as he gouged out the eye of his adversary, and clawed through his wing.

Seeing this one, like the first one, turn over, and, better, cascade in a storm of feathers and blood straight down, crumpling, spinning, to the mountain and the river beyond, the victorious eagle screamed his champion’s scorn.

He, too, had won.

Did he know then, that in that instant, another had won his race with life and death?

Does destiny touch even birds and demons with jealousy?

On his enormous pinnioned wings, the length of three tall men or more from brazen tip to tip, the eagle circled over, and bending his head, his lion’s eyes glared down and saw the glittering thing spring from the mountain’s belly in a spray of silver and gold.

There can only be one king. All kings know this.

The eagle gripped the day, gathered himself, and like a spear, he fell.

All those who had got under the benches came struggling, scrambling out. Most were on their feet. Some were shrieking and some pointing. So many hands and voices, thrust towards that place upon Airis’s purple flank. Even the priests were moving, running.

A great cry would always greet the victor. Not like this.

As the thing of gold gushed, beating and roiling, in on him, like a wave spewed from the heart of the Sun, Amdysos dropped the reins of his chariot, tried to pull the knife from his belt.

No sound came out of him, and even the knife did not come from its sheath.

Next second, the eagle had hold of him.

His hands smote it two or three times, as a baby’s fists smite the great arms and body of a full-grown man. Then it had him, and had lifted him straight up. Reins snapped, the horses, wailing, went pelting down the fair paved track that would return them, and the chariot, unharmed to the stadium floor.

In the air, Amdysos shouted only once.

None heard what it contained, the shout, an appeal to gods or to men, anger or despair or only human panic. It was already too little.

The eagle rose as if weightless, and carrying what was weightless, up and up, into the peak of the dark violet sky.

As they dwindled, they sparkled, beautiful, the gilded feathers, and the golden man.

Udrombis, the Queen, had finally stood. Oddly, her body had shaped itself like a bow. Her veil had fallen from her hair. She did not raise her hands.

No one now made any sound, not the tiniest murmur. Although from the Mountain of the Heart, the Heartbeat of Akhemony went ceaseless on, and on.