3RD STROIA

THE EAGLE GRIPS THE SUN

I

Annotation by the Hand of Dobzah

After her last dictation to me, my mistress Sirai was called from the tower. The Prince Shajhima, son of the Battle-Prince, took her to the bedside of his dying mother, Lady Chot. Sirai remained for the obsequies, which lasted seven days.

When Sirai returned here, she was exhausted, and even once it seemed she was recovered, did not for some while feel able to resume her history.

She said to me, sadly, that life is exacting. It is easy, she said, to forget this, when one is happy or secure.

She sat long hours gazing out across the empty waste. The powder of the sand blew strangely, forming dancing demons, as sometimes it will. Sunsets of red, and purple on the wings of storms, these she observed, and the brilliant stars by night.

“Dobzah,” she said, “perhaps I am meant to say no more. Perhaps I should not have begun.”

But I laughed and said she had done enough that to go on was only sensible. I have seldom seen her cast so low, not since she was very old.

At last she said, “Every word I speak will be like lead. But only for a while. Then the words lighten and become like stars. Yes, even when they turn in my hands and hurt me.”

She has been eight elahls without working upon her book. That is, for any who do not know, eight periods of four days; in all, the thirty-two days of the month of Muur.

As I took up my pen, she said, “The past seems strangely altered to me now. As if I saw it in a different way than ever I have. Even the palace at Oceaxis looks changed to me. Am I forgetting?”

I said, “It has been, as you yourself say, and so it is. Who will mind if something is misplaced, if only the heart of it is true?”

This was bold of me, but now and then, even with such a woman as Sirai, firmness and common sense are needed. She lives now half out of the world, and cannot therefore be expected to understand it.

Rain poured on Airis. It had come suddenly, turning the clear sky white. The mountain was glass in a cloud of smoking trees. In the fields, crops were flattened and the vines broke, the rain trampling the unready grapes so the air smelled strong of young and bitter wine.

Night came like an unloved guest.

There was a great silence. A priest had spoken, saying that there should be no mourning—the Sun had sent the eagle, and taken Amdysos to himself. Or so the whispered story ran on little dark feet about the fortress house, about its gloomy twists of corridors, its leaning stairs.

In the silence between the rain and the night, human things huddled to their wavering lights. For summer, it was very cold.

Either the god had chosen, or he had punished us. Best be still then, stoop low, speak softly or stay dumb.

The Sun-Consort, Glardor’s blonde wife, had quite properly assumed the royal apartment at Airis. Udrombis, the King’s Mother, had therefore been given the second greatest of the womens rooms.

It was a stone chamber, hung with heavy woven curtains to keep out draughts. In the fireplace, a brazier dully burned, but rain came in gusts down the chimney. Then the coals sizzled bright like angry eyes.

The Maiden who bore his message in was frightened. Serving Udrombis, she almost hid it. When she came out, she bowed.

“She says you may go in.”

Her eyes were wide.

But Klyton only went past her, off the bleak black stair into the chill and half-lit room.

She was in her cedarwood chair, which had been brought to Airis for her, as always. She had changed her light robes from the Vigil and the Race, and now wore something else, something made of a dark grey silk. There was even a necklace of pale stones round her throat. She sat upright, her head raised. There was no mark on her face, though even stone will take a mark, if cut deeply enough. But the face of Udrombis was like iron.

“What is it?” she said.

She spoke as if to a boy, someone in her care, whom she would notice and do her best for, even in this insane extremity.

Klyton shivered, and wrenched hold of his psyche not to cry out.

Hard nearly as she was, he walked over the floor, and cast at her feet a thick, shining, brazen rope.

“What—” she hesitated. She said, “I see. Your hair. An old custom. That is very generous. Won’t you save it and take it to the temple for him?”

Klyton looked into her eyes. His own were stretched wide like those of the girl at the door. Like the eyes of an animal caught by lightning.

His hair, untidily lopped off where the plait had been clubbed for the Race, reaching now only to his shoulders, had seemed to stand up on end. It was like a raft of Sun rays behind his face.

Udrombis saw he had not changed his garments nor washed off the dust and dirt of the Race. He smelled of the sweat of it, unbathed, and under that an odor like metal in a fire. It did not offend her, it braced her. He was a man. The very best of the men of this house who remained, now all the best was gone.

“Why are you here?” she said.

“Madam… “

She waited.

Klyton at last looked down. He drew a knife from his belt. He held it up for her to see. It was new, the pherom blade incised with gold, the hilt—a golden eagle. Light caught all of it, stayed on its edge which had been honed like a razor.

“What?” she said again.

Klyton dropped to his knees before her.

His voice burst out of him, rough and stumbling.

“I cursed him. I cursed him. Your son. Amdysos. It was in the caves. The Race—I thought they meant it for me. And then he went by to win. And I cursed him.”

She stirred. It was only like a coal settling in the brazier.

“Here’s the knife,” he said. “Tell me to use it. I will. I would have seen to it any way, but I couldn’t go—without telling you what I’d done. So you’d spit on my name not weep for it. I don’t deserve—”

“Wait,” she said. Her voice stayed his voice. He grew silent. She said, “When do you say you cursed him?”

“In the caves—just before he broke the Web—”

“Then your curse was nothing,” she said.

He threw back his head and glared at her. If she had been any other, he would have ranted at her that she was a fool. He swallowed and said, quite flatly, “No, madam, I cursed him. And that came at him. It’s mine. An eagle—”

“Hush.” she said. There was a slight impatience on her. She put her hand to her necklace and touched the stones, as if to chide them. “Listen to me, Klyton. I had warning of the eagle. I foresaw it, sweeping down. That was before we came here. My son’s destiny was already set. And the eagle—you suppose it yours, do you? You’re arrogant, Klyton. The eagle is the Sun’s.”

She saw plainly how he began to shake. He lowered his head once more. The knife dropped out of his shaking hand with a clatter from which the shadows of the room seemed to rear away.

“I meant to be done with myself. He was my friend—I loved him— I’d have given my life for him—to speak those words and then—”

“You think the gods are harsh,” she said softly, clearly, “but the gods are neither kind nor cruel. I think these emotions are unknown to them, or have other, lesser, names. Do we weep for the fly we swat away?”

“Udrombis,” he said.

She let his breach of etiquette and courtesy go by, as she would let go by all the rest.

It was not his work, what had come to Amdysos. Klyton loved him, would maybe have preferred to die in his place. Crow Claw had shown her, and perhaps for this, the future.

He was weeping now, the sobs rocking him, like a child.

She had seen Akreon weep, when their first son had died. And she had smelled this smell of labor, sweat and flame, on Akreon, just the same, after a battle when, unable to wait, he had tumbled her, and she had gloried in him, in his life. As if—as if she had known.

Udrombis rose. Klyton had slashed off the marvel of his hair. He had brought a knife so she might order him at once to die. He knew her well enough. He had trusted her with the fact of his sin, believing she would construct his death. So honorable he was, and clear as water.

“Stand up,” she said.

He got to his feet, taller than she, larger than she, the tears of his green eyes red-jeweled as the coals in the fire. He could not speak and she put her arms about him. Then he lowered his head and wept into her neck, into her black hair now all turning grey and white, as she felt it do, under her skin.

“You must go to the shrine,” she said, “and be absolved there. Make my son the correct offerings. He will be across Tithaxeli now, and ready to receive them. Don’t doubt he’ll forgive you. What are a few harsh words against a life of loyalty? You were like two brothers from one womb.” He nodded, burrowing in her shoulder, his tears so wet, his hands upon her arms so strong. “Trust no one else with it but Torca. He will be discreet. Tell him, the Queen asks it, too.”

She thought, here after all remained one son. The one she had not borne but loved, with Amdysos. Glardor was nothing, and Pherox was gone. Though Pherox had left boys, they were children. But now in her arms, Akreon’s strength made flesh. Akreon. Her lord, her love.

She did not acknowledge what she had thought. It was sloughed from her in a second.

She held him one further moment, then put him away. She said, firmly, “Stop this, now. There’s no darkness between us. Go directly to the shrine and make your peace with my son.”

We returned to Oceaxis in the rain. Mudslides slipped to the road. The storms were fearful. Such weather at this season had not been recorded for a hundred years, or more. No one was astounded. A terrible thing had happened, and would be attended by terrors and mishaps.

Men searched the northern borders of Akhemony. A man who had a vision of Amdysos, lying unharmed and as if asleep in a fiery nest, in volcanic Ipyra, was examined by priests. But even so, crossing into the north, no sign, no sight was, found. The giant eagle had itself not been seen again. But it was known well enough what such raptors did with snatched prey. They killed it, and fed.

For the younger son of a King, only forty days of mourning were given. We observed them.

I was brought two new garments, one the color of soured cream, and one dappled like the skin of a fawn. The court women went barefoot—and I, who always did so.

Of course, he had forgotten me. I expected nothing else.

Since Stabia did not invite me to the Hall or to her rooms, I stayed in my own place. I paced the chambers back and forth. That sound, of my silver feet, that whisper, like a snake—

It was Ermias, who went about among her friends, where, now, it was not suitable I go, who brought me the stories. Klyton, it seemed, had stayed behind at Airis, making offer ings for the dead. Awed, Ermias was also sulky. She wanted her lover back. She sensed what had happened would annul their affair. Just as I, in secret, sensed it, for myself.

Glardor came back to Oceaxis for the funeral ceremony. There was no body to cremate, as it had been with Pherox.

Instead we remained in the temple for three hours, as offerings were made and prayers spoken for the shade of Amdysos, so young and fair, a warrior and prince, the son of Akreon, Sun of a Sun. For Pherox, as a child, I had been spared this.

I sat in my chair; that was allowed me. I watched the beautiful animals, two pure white cows, and one crimson, a black bull for Thon, five snowy rams, brought wreathed and proud to the altar, and there immolated, for the benefit of Amdysos’s soul.

So much death, for a death.

Women fainted from emotion and standing. Udrombis stood like a statue. It was Klyton who spoke the oration. I had not expected this, not known he had returned.

He did not take very long, no longer, I suppose, than custom demanded. I heard no word he spoke, and cannot now recall them, but they would have been ritual words, of Amdysos’s valor and worth. Klyton was steady. His hands were steady as he poured the wine for his half brother.

Klyton’s beauty, which now must be lost to me for ever, was unreal, like a painting or a gem set into something rigid. He was like a god. And gods, I knew then, were never to be touched. Yet too, he was hollow. Had his spirit followed Amdysos down? Left only the body—

His hair was trimmed, and I missed its length. I think he saw no one.

And, as I say, I knew that he had forgotten me. I watched him without any fear, without any excitement or even quickening.

Ermias put her soapstone statue of Daia out. Although I did not question this, she said to me, “She played with and used me ill.” Amdysos might have warned her, you should not, whatever the provocation, be sharp with the gods.

Torca stood just inside the shrine, listening to the bees.

Something strange had happened, although after the events which went before, this strangeness seemed very mild. The unseasonal rains must have ousted the bees from their house among the orchards and fields of the plain. They came up the hill in an angry swarm, depleted and small, for they had lost many members in the downpour. Into the shrine they went, and took refuge among the rafters behind the altar of the god. Here still they clung, murmuring, crawling on the beams. Now and then two or three might buzz about the space. They were sacred to the god, and also to Phaidix. No one had touched them.

The bees had been in the sanctuary through the night, when Klyton stood here with Torca.

Torca had heard Klyton’s confession. At first, Torca’s tough heart had ached for Klyton. The gods knew, such a curse spoken to a friend before battle, if the friend should then be lost, was a stone to carry always, however far from the mind you pushed it. But then Torca saw that Klyton had accepted his cleansing, risen from it washed and whole. This surprised Torca. He had not thought the prince shallow. For though religion should console and heal, it was not to be in one split second, save for the most devout or naive. Klyton was neither.

And, though he seemed restored, Klyton did not quite come back. He was not entirely present. Even when they gave for the soul of Amdysos the ghost’s nourishment of blood and honey, milk and wine.

At the end, Klyton had thanked Torca, taking his hand. He made a handsome gift to the god, as before.

Torca thought then of the eagle feathers scattered by the cell, where Klyton had slept for his dream. Klyton had not revealed the dream—one did not. It was between him and the god.

As Torca considered the feathers of the eagle, reminding himself of the coincidence that they had fallen there, and of the monster which had next sprung down on the Stadium, plucking Amdysos away, several of the bees flew out and circled round the altar.

“They like the honey,” said Torca. “A good omen. Their kind will form a comb of sweetness for Amdysos in the Lower Lands.”

“Yes,” said Klyton. He watched the bees.

In the dim, dark light of the night shrine with the rain lashing outside, they had shone gold and silver, the sheens of the Sun and the moon. While in from the outer world, wet and shaking herself, walked Phaidix’s white cat.

When she meowed, Klyton turned. Looking at her perfect face with its silvery eyes, he seemed to have some thought, and then he was closed again, complete.

Klyton said, after a moment, “When I had the dream here, it promised me something. The Race—but I didn’t have the Race.”

“No one had the Race.”

“That’s true. But then, I was promised, I seemed promised —more.”

“The God doesn’t break faith,” said Torca. “But you must always be sure you haven’t misheard him.”

“Yes,” Klyton said.

Torca left him towards dawn, to see out the last of the watch for Amdysos, and went to his own cell, where a paper had come from Akreon’s Consort, Udrombis.

Her language, as he anticipated, was subtle and polite, but she told him she entrusted him too with the task of questioning those priests from the caverns of the Race, who might have overheard any words Klyton had spoken. No other chariot, it seemed, had been near. Torca was glad. Udrombis would have wished to be sure. And this … might have meant other things. He did not think she would have insulted him by asking him to become her assassin.

But neither did he relish work as spy. Unlike Klyton, she had had no qualms in putting service on him. For Udrombis, one knew, the Sun House rose paramount. And she valued Klyton, it seemed, like her own.

The priests when he tested them were ignorant. Half tranced by the ritual and the drugs of the caves, they had heard nothing above the pound of hooves, the clash of metal and thundering echoes.

Torca wrote to Udrombis in careful terms—being very certain she should behold all of them as unknowing. He wondered briefly if he was in any personal danger, seeing he had undertaken Klyton’s purification. But that was not her way. She had trusted him, and thought him, therefore, useful—retainable.

For the bees, they would perhaps make their comb again inside the shrine. It might be inconvenient, and soon enough it was. As the rain dried, and hot days returned with a lion-like ferocity, a priest was stung on the arm, which sting swelled up like a bladder and sent him delirious for three hours, a sacred number of the god.

2

Days went by. The rain ended and an awful heat began. Soon even the palace noticed its effects. The fruit that was served was overripe or withered. There was a dearth of milk, or it was too thin and tasted bad. Insects burst out where the flowers and fruits had been. My slave, Nimi, ran to and fro all day till she dropped, wielding her swatter and fan. By night, the filmy curtains were drawn fast about my bed, beyond which I heard the whine of poisoned things seeking me.

The Lakesea looked so still, as if partly thickened, like a sauce. The gulls called with raucous mocking laughter.

There was a sickness in the town.

Stabia sent me a letter. She reminded me, for my own sake, I must be seen in the Great Hall at dinner, and at the Sunset Offering. I perceive this was her thoughtfulness for me, and she was good to recollect it. At the time it seemed to me she only desired me to suffer worse. I had though enough sense left to go, forcing my way up the enormous stair, with Ermias behind, gasping in the oven-hot cinders of each day.

In the Hall I saw nothing, only looking stupidly about, trammelled by Stabia’s old cautions against “forwardness.” Trying, nevertheless, to find him. I did not even know why. Perhaps only as sometimes the blind hanker after the Sun’s light, although they cannot anymore witness it. I knew I could now mean nothing to Klyton.

In fact, he was not there. He had gone with a force to Melmia, on Glardor’s command. Once-restive Sirma was Melmia’s neighbor.

At the dinners, I did everything Stabia had inculcated in me that I should. I ate a little, though I did not want it, and praised the cooks who had been able to contrive sweetmeats from the difficult fruit, drank sparingly, seemed to attend to the important harpers and dancing troops.

One royal woman certainly did not come to the Hall. I had heard her extraordinary keening once—lament was not done quite in this way in Akhemony, the crying never so loud. I had thought her voice to start with was that of a gull.

Elakti, Amdysos’s spear-wife, who had caused him so much mundane trouble, performed alone the noisy prolonged rites of Ipyran widows, rending out her hair, ripping her cheeks and bared breasts with her nails, even cutting her left arm to let blood fall for him to Thon’s country below. There began to be another tale, that she was pregnant again and had been shown early by a sign. Amdysos had left in her his burgeoning seed.

Kelbalba came for my massage, as she had always done since I started to walk. Sometimes she worked longer and hurt me, saying I was neglectful of my exercises. I was. She brought me little treats to eat, cakes bought in the town market, sound apples and ripe figs from pockets in the hills, which almost no one else could get. I did my best with them.

“Don’t be so sad,” she said. “He’ll be back.”

“No,” I said. “Everything has altered.”

“That doesn’t alter. That undone thing between a man and a girl.”

She took to oiling the turtle, and made me rub the shell to a mirror’s gleam.

Ermias accepted a new lover. He was a youngish noble and gave her outrageous gifts she should not perhaps openly have worn, a gold necklace with a polished diamond, a ring with a rare black pearl. He had heard she had belonged to a Sun Prince.

Glardor hurried away again to his estates.

They had sacrificed a white horse to the Sun, as they regularly did in Ipyra. Here it was, like Elakti’s rites, not usual.

I did not see the sacrifice, I am glad to say. It was performed at night, under the moon invoked as Anki, so Phaidix also should take note.

In my little garden, rogue roots and fierce weeds had almost obscured her altar. Brown ruined apples lay in the grass, devoured by wasps and flies. Nimi had found a dead cat among the trees.

A curious sense of waiting, as if for the sunset sounding of gongs, lay with the boiling dregs of summer on the land.

Like any sensible farmer, Glardor spent all day now, sunrise to set, tending to his scorching fields and vine stocks.

A large, bronzed man in a sleeveless tunic and straw hat, he was as ever most at home there, working among his freedmen and slaves. It had been related they called him only Father, as servants did with the master on the farms of nobodies in the back hills.

His Sun-Consort had also absented herself from the court to go with him. That big, blonde, greedy woman, who seemed to find no fault with anyone, had had enough of Oceaxis. She had no time for the extended ceremonies, the gossip and games. She preferred her loom. The outcome of the Race had upset her, too—someone reported she had exclaimed such things did not happen to ordinary people.

Some cows had got loose and in among the grain. It was an old story. Glardor and three of his freedmen went into the field and ushered them out. The grass was so burnt up now, they were already bringing the cattle fodder, but the blackened corn had enticed them.

As they got through, the cows and men, into the pasture, four or five bees flew up from a bush by the gate.

No one thought anything of it until Glardor clapped a hand to his neck. A dead bee tumbled away in a powder of saffron and black.

The senior freedman came to look, but Glardor waved him off. “It’s nothing. Poor bee, she lost her life for that.”

Five minutes later, Glardor said his throat was sore. He breathed very quickly, and the freedman saw his neck had swollen abnormally on the right side.

Glardor climbed on his donkey to ride back up to the house, but presently he turned very red and began to gasp for breath. They held him up and beat the donkey till it trotted. By the time they reached the farm, he had lost consciousness.

Glardor’s wife had been singing with her woman at the hearth, cooking the midday meal. Now she rushed out, and kneeling in the dust on the track, where they had laid him, she held her husband’s hand. A physician was brought from the village, and said the beesting had swollen up Glardor’s windpipe, and it must be pierced with a reed to let Glardor breathe. Glardor opened his eyes and somehow whispered the man might try. Then he indicated to the freedman the physician must not be harmed if he failed.

The reed went in, but either it was too late or missed the vital spot. A few minutes after, Glardor went into convulsions and died.

Only when he was quite dead did the Sun-Consort begin to weep. She had stayed dry-eyed not to inconvenience her dying husband nor alarm him further.

In Oceaxis she was, until then, generally sneered at behind the hand. Silly tales were told of her stupidity and bucolic preferences. Now they said she rose up stonily weeping, like an ancient queen, and spoke over the King at once a prayer of farewell, commending him to the god Below, binding herself with a vow that she would never love or turn to any other man, until she and Glardor should meet again, beyond the River.

3

Because he was swimming under the coolish water, for a while he did not understand there was a commotion up above. He took it for the water drumming in his ears.

When he surfaced, he thought the fat captain had been chastising—unfairly and again—a slave: the dropped tray, spilled wine, and nuts rolling on the green marble perimeter of the bathhouse pool. Then he saw the faces.

Klyton gripped hold of the rim and pulled himself out. He was naked, but most of them were. All but the messenger.

“What’s the trouble?”

The fat captain, who was pallid under his tan, said, “By the gods—by the Sun—”

It was the messenger who spoke. “Sir, the King is dead.”

Klyton felt something fall from him in a wave. It was not water. Perhaps it was all his days, until this instant.

“The King. You mean Glardor, the Great Sun.”

“Yes, prince.”

Klyton said, reasonably, “The Heart still beats.”

“Yes, sir. It took some while for the news to reach Oceaxis. The Heart will pause at Sunset tonight.”

Klyton experienced a ringing in his head. But it went off at once. He stretched out his right hand over the marble, an antique gesture. As the blonde Queen had done, he said, “Thon, receive well and with honor, a mighty King.”

Glardor had sent Klyton to Melmia with a few hundred men, part of the battle command which had belonged to Amdysos. In this there seemed some muddle-headed patriachal hope to find them all something to do to take their minds off what had happened at Airis. But Melmia, with its pleasure gardens and hot springs, lay against Sirma, from which, as elsewhere, notions of unrest floated like the geyser smokes.

Klyton had had the men drawn up for him. He addressed them from horseback, smartly but not showily attired, his cloak a washed-out grey for mourning.

He told them they had lost with Amdysos what could not be replaced, and he had lost that too, a peerless battle leader and a true friend. He now would do his best for them if they would do as much for him. They were his brothers, and he knew they would understand his pain was also great, for Amdysos had been his brother in blood.

What they had been watching for he was not sure, but they cheered him, rapping spear-butts on the earth and clacking on their shields.

Klyton did not predict much for Sirma, and in Melmia, which also had wineshops and prostitutes, whose high standards were matched only by their numbers, the difficulty would be in not letting his loaned troops go soft.

The garrison there proved the point. The last big skirmish, in which Klyton had participated, his first war, was long over. The garrison captain bulged with food. And by night, the stairs were busy with boys and girls going up to his apartment. Klyton organized drills, parades, hunts. Once or twice, Amdysos’s men came to him, as he had told them to, with their worries. They liked him, as Amdysos had always said, and as he himself had seen. Now, they began to be proud of him. Klyton had wondered if Glardor would have the sense to gift him, at last, a command, preferably this one. But he did not think about Amdysos, save in a ritualistic way. The soldier who visited Klyton, detailing a dream of Amdysos, a golden prince in the Lands Below, Klyton rewarded with a golden coin. But in Klyton’s heart, now, it was all a blank. Too much hurt, the too-swift passing of guilt—and that other omission—which he would not think of either, his sister. As if, by the sin of lusting after Calistra, he had betrayed them all and brought down the death of flaming feathers. He bolted the door of his thoughts against them both.

The morning the messenger arrived had been nothing special. Klyton swam every day, for the bathing arrangements were primitive and the pool electric. Sometimes after it you wanted a girl, and now and then he let himself have one. He selected black-haired girls currently, tall and laughing, with strong, sandaled feet.

When he had dressed, he called the captain in. A combination of the overly sophisticated and the superstitious, the man declaimed at length.

“… It’s a catastrophe. Is the God trying to destroy us? The mighty Akreon—then all his sons—”

“Not quite,” interrupted Klyton.

“Excuse me, sir. Pardon me. I meant, of course, by her Majesty Udrombis, the Consort. There are countless others.”

“Yes, we’re like a plague of rats, aren’t we.”

The captain again apologized, and bit his nails.

“The awkward thing is,” said Klyton, “they must go to the God now, to elect the King’s successor.”

“Indeed,” said the captain. “Will you wish to hurry back?”

“Hardly, Captain. You seem to miss the mark.”

The captain looked at him uncertainly. He admired, perhaps fancied Klyton, but did not like him. Klyton was not of the same breed. Having some royal blood, the captain would have favored being familiar, but a Sun was a Sun, and in these circumstances, who knew what he might ascend to.

“You see,” said Klyton, “those places which are somewhat unquiet may grow boisterous after this. For a while there’ll be no Great King in Akhemony. Some may try to—grab.”

“Sirma,” said the captain, intelligently at last. “Or—Charchis— Ipyra—everywhere, by God’s Knife.”

“Everywhere perhaps,” said Klyton. “But I am here.”

“You’ll take your troops, make a show of force, the crush of conquest,” declared the captain, happy now to have the turn of things.

Klyton smiled. It was the first time anything had amused him since Airis.

“Less a conqueror than a bridegroom.”

He took, nevertheless, all of his command out of the town. They were on the road south by midday. When the sky started to flush, they had already made camp among the dry woods.

Klyton walked round the tent lanes. He spoke to the soldiers. They were tense as bow-strings. He had wanted them out of the town when the Heart stopped.

The west deepened beyond the hill slopes. The older, wiser ones planted their spears and leaned on them. Some knelt. It was so quiet, the sound of a bird in the trees, oblivious to the themes and duties of men, shrilled loud as a bugle.

Klyton could hear the Heart. It was faint, almost supernatural, as he recalled from other journeys away from Akhemony. Some, he knew, could not hear it now, with their ears. It was in the bones.

The sky was like wine mixed with sulphur from the springs. Then a darkening came, like a veil across the land. And the Heart— was gone.

Klyton leaned a little to one side. That was all. Righted himself. Some of the soldiers sent up a noise, and their officers quietened them, like babies, these courageous and war-heeled men. The bird called again in the wood, and someone cursed it, then wept.

Klyton thought, I wonder what she—and pulled himself back from the thought as he had from the leaning of his balance.

His sister, forewarned, would be well enough. It was Ermias, doubtless, who would palpitate and swoon. But he would not think of any of that.

Up from the void that was death, the beating suddenly came again. For a moment, you were not sure. But it always came back, as nothing else could be relied on to do.

Red shadows crept down from the hills.

He thought abruptly of Amdysos by the stream, the first time they went to war, in Sirma. How they had jeered at Pherox, who had died. Klyton turned the eye of his mind away.

He went round the camp again, congratulating the men. The Heart beat, life went on.

It was afternoon, when they reached the Sirmian town. When he looked at it, it did not seem as he recalled, but that had been in heavy rain and the onslaught of battle. And they had repaired the walls.

He had brought only forty men with him, polished up, with a few fall flowers tucked into helmets and bridles. The rest were left above, where the town scouts could see them quite clearly, if they chose.

Sirma shared a union, in a half civilized way. What one town did, the rest would concur with. They had no high king, but called a council of their chiefs, when necessary. Their fealty, any way, was supposed to lie with Akhemony.

Glardor had not let the army raze these towns. Klyton acknowledged now that had been a fine and useful thing.

Nevertheless, it was nearly seven years ago. He would have to hope his luck was in. But when he thought this, it was as if he only played a part. Luck was not his to question.

The Sirmians let in the little force from Akhemony, the polished, apparently jaunty men, who acted well. The Sirmians looked sullen, and maybe disturbed.

At the house of the chief, Klyton and his officer were welcomed by a steward. Without a word said, the, steward brought forward a boy to taste the wine.

“That’s all right,” said Klyton. “I know you wouldn’t so offend the Great King.”

The steward’s eyes flickered. They had heard here the stopping of the Heart, or been told of it. But nothing else was said, until the chief walked in with his sons.

The former chief had died seven years back, along with that son whom Klyton had sliced, almost his first kill.

Klyton made sure they knew his title and worth. As the officer recited, he stood, looking the Sirmians over. The men wore embroidered tunics, and were barelegged for the heat. ‘The young ones had their long hair braided in side-plaits and twined with silver wire and ribbons.

The seven-year chief was about forty, lean and grisled, and with a moustache. He let the officer finish and then said, “Are you here to make war?”

“Nothing like that.”

“I remember you from the last war,” said the chief. Klyton had learned, these outland places reckoned a hundred years ago like yesterday. Ipyra was the same.

“You do me honor to remember.”

“You killed the chief’s Spear Tall Son.”

“I regret that, but it was in the fight. He died nobly.” And Klyton had a vision of the man, his cheek off, falling down to be trodden to death in the mud.

But the chief only grunted. “Akhemony rules us. Say what you wish.”

“I am a Sun,” reminded Klyton, “my father was the Great King, Akreon.”

The chief said stiffly, “You shine brightly upon us.”

“When I was here before, I was a youth. Now, as you see.” He held out his right arm, showing the old white scar. “Your women washed my wound clean. I recall a little maid. She was about six or seven then. My heart warmed to her, her gentleness.”

The dog-grey brows of the chief went slowly up. He pursed his mouth.

“My brother had many daughters.”

“She was, as I say, very young. She’d be about thirteen, fourteen, now …” Klyton waited. It was a gamble for he did not remember any such thing, some dear little veiled female child. There might almost certainly have been one, however. Or one near enough in age they could fob off on him.

The biggest of the chief’s sons spoke.

“Father, Bachis was in the house after the battle. She was a child then.”

“Is she unwed?” asked Klyton, looking radiantly at them. If she was, his luck—the luck he played he must hope for—was in. For they married them early here, earlier even than Akhemony.

They were not beyond, maybe, disposing of another husband, presented instead with a prince from Oceaxis. Or they might refuse. If they refused, then they had war very much on their minds. Marriage was surely better. A tie like this did not come their way every hour —a free asking, not a war-taking. And if they wanted it, they were bound. They would be his kin, and their daughter a princess. They could not, under any ordinary provocation, raise swords any more against Akhemony, which meant that probably neither would any other town of the region.

Glardor had not properly seen to it. The wife he took, though from Sirma, had been from another town. Unbedded, so disgraced, she had any way died inside a year of homesickness or overindulgence, in which a lover may have played some part. No new alliance with Sirma had been fashioned. But then, who would ever have thought a season like this would occur, without a Great Sun.

“Unwed. Yes. She’s timid,” said the chief.

“I’m charmed. I shall be very gentle. But, also I must have her today. I’m sorry the wedding has to be so canteringly done. That’s possible?”

The chief gnawed his moustache.

“Customs are to be observed.”

“Of course. Everything. But I must ask, quickly.”

They were all scowling. But they knew what was offered. Besides, perhaps they were sick of skirmishes they could not win, the flower of their men cut down, their women weeping.

“Let me present a handful of tokens, poor things,” said Klyton. He nodded to the two slaves, who undid the saddle-chests. Some attractive silks from Melmia were got out, some carved boxes, and a jewel or two. He explained there were wine casks outside, leathers, some weapons they could delight him by accepting. It seemed quite lavish, on the spur of the moment. Klyton had ransacked the captain’s hoard, much to his distress.

As they picked over the barter, the chief moved close to Klyton. He looked long into Klyton’s face, and one had the impression of a dog again, which sniffs to scent the vigor and nature of a man.

“You have to come to our temple. We worship Perpi here, the marriage-maker. And someone must go to the womens side and tell the girl.”

Klyton felt sorry for her. But not very much. He would not harm her, and she would have a glorious time in Oceaxis, out of this dung-hill.

The temple of Perpi seemed made of dung, its color, and slight tang, overlaid by the incense.

Once the offerings had been seen to, and they had garlanded him, and requested he utter various religious sentences, the bride was brought. She was small and slight, reaching only to his breastbone. Under the veil, he glimpsed a darkish fall of hair. Her hand trembled when they put it in his, but she had been staring at him, off and on. Perhaps it was not from fear.

It was a proper up-country marriage. After the wedding, he must go around the town with her, in a rickety chariot drawn by two white oxen with gilded horns. The crowd gaped and gurgled, and threw flowers, looking astonished. They wanted their money’s worth of him. It was their right. He stayed good-humored, and when one stone dropped in the cart with the half-dead flowers, only drew in his escort a little.

He refused to spend his honey-night in the town. He sorrowfully explained he had business elsewhere and had indulged his whim too long. They had some tradition of a bride being carried off to her husband’s house, so allowed him to do so.

She brought with her an entourage of one thin slave girl, and the slightest baggage. They had not bothered with a dowry, for peace with Sirma was that, and they had no reticence about showing him they guessed.

Klyton did not see her unveiled, his wife, until they had rejoined the camp. Then in his tent, when he suggested it, she instantly put off the covering. She was not pretty, but neither displeasing, with a white skin and pale tawny eyes. Her hair was brown, and had been washed and braided with mauve beads. Around her neck was a necklace of rough silver discs, and these were all the riches she brought.

He had had them bring some things from Melmia he thought she would like, some decent fruit, and a cake in the shape of a ring. She picked at the food, and gazed about her and at him, in rushes, then looking down at the floor. In the coppery lamplight, he began to note she was very frightened, worse than he had suspected.

Klyton saw it might be difficult to reassure her. She was not one of the free girls who yielded to him from desire. They had said she was timid.

Eventually, he lowered the lamp, and led her to the bed of rugs. He could not spare her, because to have her was all part of the treaty he had made. Not to penetrate her would be the worst insult of all, and could leave the union invalid.

He made love to her as tenderly as if he had genuinely yearned for her all those seven years. But in the end, finding she would not or could not soften her nerves, he parted her body and sought her out. Then he found what the impediment was—or rather, that there was none. She was not a virgin. She had been properly deflowered, and in Sirma, it seemed, they knew none of the herbal arts of court women.

At once, she burst into tears. He stroked her hair, tried to recall her name, recalled it.

“Bachis, it’s all right. I’m not angry.”

“Yes, yes, you’ll strangle me now.”

“Why would I? Only you must tell me when it happened. Does your father know of it?”

“No—no—oh, no—he would have strangled me.”

So much strangling for such a little matter. Despite what he had said, however, he was raging, and held the rage away from her, as he would a feral beast. If the Sirmians had thought to cheat him—make a laughing-stock of him—for what pact could hold on this?

“Calmly, Bachis. See. I won’t hurt you. Tell me who knows.”

“Nursey,” said Bachis, childishly, clasping her hands, “but she died.”

“No one else?” Of course, they had not bothered to check her virginity, there had been no time for such age-old barbarisms. And he had made no demands.

“No one else.”

“But the man? Bachis, that I do insist on knowing.”

“He died, too.”

“How?”

“There were bandits and he fought and his horse threw him down.”

“And who was he, Bachis?”

She buried her face in her hands. Then, through her fingers, told him. “Arpon.”

Klyton sat back from her. “Who was Arpon?”

She said, only a rustle in her throat, “My brother.”

After a time, when he did not speak, the bride sprinkled her story on the air, in quick, tiny drops. She was a simple girl, not much above a child, even in her fifteenth year. If she had been given to Klyton in the expected condition, she would have lain here wild with joy. His beauty daunted her, but then all men were meant to daunt her, and he was like the god.

Since she was ten, Arpon had discovered a way of sneaking in to her. At first, he had only caressed, invading her mouth with his tongue. When she was twelve, he commenced to use her as a woman. She had stretched in fear beneath him. She had wished him dead. But when the death-spell she and Nursey had, years before, concocted, seemed at last to work, Bachis was stricken by fresh terrors. Would the gods punish her?

“No. Your virginity was sacred to Phaidix. You were raped. She’ll protect you.”

Bachis relaxed somewhat. All at once she sank back on the rugs and drew up her skirt with an awful, sly, placating, false lasciviousness, just what she must have employed for her brother.

“It’s all right, Bachis. I won’t bother you tonight. We’ll pretend we have, shall we.”

And down in the wells of her pale brown eyes, he saw a slither of disappointment, which now disgusted him.

He left her to sleep, and went to sit in the other end of the tent. Quite soon he heard her softly snoring. She had had a busy day.

When he slept himself, he did not know it. He stood in a dark place, and said over and over, “Her brother, her brother.” Stars glittered and shot by, tipped on Phaidix’s arrows.

Had he been shown the mirror, himself and Calistra?

Was he in some hell, sent there to atone?

The stars flashed past and on, and were no more, and then he saw he had immovably reached the bank of a river, which was black and very still.

On a rock which jutted from the water, a static flare of gold, which was a man, stood waiting for him.

Amdysos carried no mark of any mishap. He wore the clothes from the Race, gleaming and perfect. But his face—his face was closed behind a golden priestly mask.

Then he spoke. His voice was recognizable, though pure and far off, as when he had officiated sometimes in some religious rite.

“Klyton,” he said, “don’t you remember the bees at Airis, in the shrine?”

“The bees …” Klyton said.

“Glardor,” said Amdysos through the priest’s mask.

Klyton thought in the dream, how Glardor had died of the sting of a bee.

“And Pherox,” said Amdysos, “dying of the silver apple. And I of the eagle of gold.”

“I was afraid,” said Klyton, “to remember the bees.”

Yet through him, like a tempest of fires, some splendor came, returning. And in the dream he retraced the other dream, when he had been the eagle above Akhemony, and the world was his.

“What you felt before the Race,” said Amdysos.

“I—feel it now, again.”

“Your way,” said Amdysos, “is made certain.”

“But I thought that way was for both of us. For myself, and for you, as my King—”

“I was the sacrifice,” said Amdysos the priest. “I have gone down into the dark that you may soar up into the sunlight.”

“The God—is too harsh—”

“No prize is given for nothing. We are gone from your path. Take your trophy, Klyton, or you demean my death.”

At his table in the tent, Klyton woke with a leap of flame. Blazing, he stood, and all the space seemed swirling, burning, till it settled, and only the golden light poured on through his brain. He had become a ghost, but now the web tore from him.

And hearing the girl snore on the rugs, a million miles below the height of his fate, he laughed aloud.

He recounted this to me later, all this, as a true dream, sent by the god. But I do not think it was.

I, Calistra, was in Oceaxis that night, as I had been, night on night, day on day, left like a shell upon a shore.

The Heart had stopped, and begun again. Prepared, I had only waited out the interval. It felt of death, as in the whirlwind of Thon’s temple it had. But what had stunned me then seemed now far less. I had learned of other separations. And I did not die.

That night, this night. As Klyton dreamed his true dream, I lay awake.

The lamp does not show a circle of rose red on the ceiling, as once it did. They have changed its position. Lut crouches by Gemli.

They have an understanding now. Lut, like the others, has forgotten me, since I am no longer quite a creature of his band.

In the morning I will wake, and day on day, night on night, time will pass. Kelbalba will scold me and make me dance and exercise before her. I will do it in a dream unlike the dream of Klyton.

And a morning will arrive, and Ermias will appear, wearing the jewelry her noble gave her, yet angry, scornful, showing her teeth like a cat.

“Well. He’s wed.”

Uninterested, I will glance.

Ermias will shake her curls. “The precious Prince Klyton. Some slut he’s wanted seven years in the flea pits of Sirma. Couldn’t wait, they say. What tastes he has, for a Sun. And she brought no dowry. He was so eager.”

And walking to the window, forgetting all the dictates of policy and alliance, how treaties are made to hold nation to nation, I will see him for one second in the arms of a lovely goddess-like girl. And the Lakesea will turn green before my eyes and stream into a narrow, fiery line, as I loudly weep my soul from my body, and Ermias, in horror, clutches me back from the brink where already I have tumbled down.

4

Winter came. I see again an early morning in Phaidix’s garden, when the last tall brassy flowers were black, burnt by frost to sugar, crumbling at a touch. Snow bloomed on the mountains and closed the higher roads. Hot stones put into my bed, and under my silver feet, to warm them before I should draw them on. And Ermias, she too I recall, very straight and still as she stood behind me, reflected in the electrum mirror Stabia had sent. Ermias and I said nothing to each other of that other morning when I, like a frost-burned flower crumbled into my tears of blazing glass. It was not like her, to be so reticent. And she was kind to me. She brushed my hair herself, sending Nimi away. What went through her mind? No doubt that I was simply a poor dolt, inevitable victim of unsuitable obsession. Yet she treated me with dignity.

For myself, I did not cry again where any could see me. And now there were no helpers, no one came to tell me it was Calistra he wanted, none other. Though Stabia had delivered the costly, promised mirror, she did not add any message.

I went to the Hall one night in three or four. I stayed until the harpers were finished, or if there were no harpers, until the men’s singing began. I sat among the women, but not close to any of the queens. Of course, I must have seen them, Stabia with her amiable brisk ways, Udrombis, with the new tide of white breaking through her black hair. Even Elakti, who now was present, sitting with one hand pressed to her stomach, which still looked perfectly flat. But they were not real to me, as he had not seemed real. And if I saw him, he was less real than anything, now. I marvel at myself, partly for the remoteness I felt on seeing him. But this Klyton moved behind a pane of crystal. He was further from me than the sky.

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

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

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

And Sirma lay quiet, well stroked down and purring.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A ring—”

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

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

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

“I’ll treasure it, madam.”

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

“So I thought.”

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

“I’ve something less happy to say.”

“Have I offended?”

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

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

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

He put down the cup.

“Why didn’t she—”

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

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

“What should I do?”

“Nothing. Will you leave it with me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One man did not, could not wait.

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

“I lost the Race for you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you think?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” said Ermias.

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

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

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

“I’m well, prince.”

“Let me speak to your lady alone.”

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

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

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

“Calistra,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somewhere I found a voice which whispered that love was the truth.

“Oh, the God, Calistra—I’ve wanted you I think from the first, when you were that child in your chair. But now this woman made all of silver with hair like a sigh out of the Sun—”

“You have a wife—”

“I have Sirma, not a wife.”

He kissed me again. He held me pressed close, and bent me in his arms, and on my breasts his lips and hand came knowingly and known, and through me a river of ice melted away into the wine-hot torrent of desire. It was so sweet, tears ran from my eyes. He kissed them up, drank them.

As he held me again inside him then, grown into his body, he said, “It can’t be, Calistra. Only just this once. The gods aren’t unreasonable. Just this one time.”

And then he put me back from him and let me go, and now I was alone in space, and round me howled the cold of empty millennia, and the whine of broken stars.

“Do you understand?” he said.

“No.”

“You’re a woman. A creature of the wood. Phaidix rules you. Lawless. But there are laws, Calistra. This isn’t for us. Do you blame me for touching you, now?”

“I love you,” I said, very low.

“Your love is sacred to me. That’s all it must ever be.”

I felt the old vertigo of standing, but stayed rigid, upright. There was nothing I could say. I was fifteen, and he a prince, and a man.

But he had wanted me.

At the door, Kelbalba struck with the palm of her hand. “Someone has come, prince, from the King.”

“The King,” said Klyton. He laughed shortly. With no other farewell, he turned and left me. In the outer room, I heard him pass like fire. The slam of the outer doors.

When Kelbalba entered, I said, “Not now, Kelbalba,” and she went away.

6

That night, Elakti, the spear-wife-widow of Amdysos, ascended into the hills above Oceaxis. She too was Ipyran, all Ipyran, and any alliance value in her was gone with Amdysos. Moody and snappish and discontented always, there had been some notion, since she wished to leave the court, that the back of her might be the best side.

She had wished too to practice certain rites of her homeland for her husband. They were not smiled on in Akhemony, where the priests stood before the people with the gods. Already there had been some talk that Elakti had summoned a crone into her apartment, where they slaughtered a black dog. Phaidix, in her witch form of Anki, would sometimes accept blood.

The pavilion in the low hills was meant for summer, but slaves had been sent ahead to make it useable.

Elakti rode there in a litter between two mules, uncharacteristically not once complaining at the day-long, bitter journey. Her Maiden, her two women, and the pair of female slaves, shivered and wept at leaving the comforts of the palace behind. The Maiden had, by nightfall, a dripping cold, and went about the new domicile voiding her nose and sneezing dolefully. Even to this Elakti returned slight heed. She was changed.

When presented to Amdysos, and conscious he did not want her, Elakti had given vent to all her sense of misuse. She had had recourse to the crone quite early on, wanting love-potions to bind Amdysos to her. They did not work. Elakti knew she had no beauty, but she had a curious pride, and a great awareness of wrong done to her. The awareness of wrong had caused her to nag, to censure, and to blame. The pride made her fierce and vicious, and in her own way, brave.

The first child she bore was a girl, an ugly, skinny infant, with her own sallow complexion and dark, unshining hair. It had no look of the Sun House. To no one was it a wonder Amdysos did not like it. Nor did Elakti. Leaving for the hills, she had presented it for keeping to its nurse at Oceaxis.

The second child, within her now, sown on a short night visit of her reluctant polite husband’s, had been slow in showing. Now Elakti evidenced some signs. Unlike the first pregnancy, and most pregnancies Elakti had seen, her belly had not swollen particularly outward, in the normal, apple-like roundness. Rather, her body seemed to have been filled, like a loose sack, with fluid, from just below her breasts to the mound of her sex. She appeared more fat than fecund.

In early summer, she would bear the child. It would be a son, this time, the crone had assured her, a son like the Sun, metal-fine as his father.

When they came from Airis and told her Amdysos had been carried away by the giant eagle, she had fallen on the floor and screamed, tearing at her hair and cheeks. In Ipyra, this was what a woman did, on losing her lord; Elakti saw no reason to adapt. And because she was so often overlooked, she made her outcry especially loud, she keened on and on, although forbidden to do so, to remind them all she had been a prince’s wife. She had not even seen the dreadful event, since they had also left her behind in Oceaxis.

Now Elakti glanced about at the pavilion. Shutters were attached to its many summer windows, heavy wool curtains hung for warmth, braziers and fires were everywhere, giving not much heat. There were only three rooms, and a kitchen across a yard. The cells of easement were also outside. Only Elakti and the Maiden could have an indoor pot.

Everyone but Elakti was in despair. She alone seemed not to mind the cold, the snow across the hills, the three dead rats lifted from the frozen cistern.

They ate a makeshift meal, Elakti, the crone and the Maiden, before the one central hearth, while smoke puffed up to a ceiling hole above, through which, in return, snowflakes drizzled down.

The Maiden sneezed. “I’ll be glad of my bed, madam. Though it’s a hard one.”

“Not yet,” said Elakti.

The Maiden gazed at her lady in dread. Phelia had royal blood, but only a drop. So they had sent her to wait on this unjust and insane barbarian. Already Phelia carried two thin scars on her arm from Elakti’s former tantrums. Elakti did not strike out now very much. Maybe this was worse.

The women huddled at the brazier had also caught Elakti’s two words. They did not look at her.

Elakti said, “The moon is full tonight. There’s an altar here, isn’t there, Mother?”

“Yes, yes, altar, altar,” mumbled the crone, her wizened old toothless face buried in her gruel. She alone found this service better than the back alleys of the town.

“Tonight, madam—?” questioned Phelia, her heart a stone.

“You must understand,” said Elakti, straightening herself suddenly, and raising her right hand in an uncouth and primal gesture, some religious signal of Ipyra, “Amdysos is not dead.”

None of them spoke.

Whatever her craziness before, she had never gone so far to the brink as this.

“Amdysos,” said Elakti, “my husband, will return to me. They’re all in error. Those fools. He lives. He will come back. But I must assist him.”

The altar, which was dedicated to Phaidix, stood in a grove of pines. The snow was thin on them, but thick on the ground, in places slippery as a glass goblet.

In itself, the altar was not much. A rough hewn slab, without carving. The moon fell full there, however, like a spill of milk, and beyond, above, the hills lifted up and up, and the height of the air was bordered by the white teeth of the two mountains.

In the pristine quiet; the Heart Drum sounded shakingly loud.

Elakti stood some time in her furs, listening to this. The Heart did not sound for her, but for Amdysos it did, and so eventually she matched her chanting to it.

To Phelia, and the young women of Akhemony, Elakti’s wails and screeches were like the awful noises of a savage animal. She did not feel the cold, and threw up her bare arms out of her wrappings. Soon her face was mad and blind in a sort of ecstasy, the eyes rolled back. They had never thought her genteel, or fair, but now, through all their unease and wretchedness, they began to be awkwardly impressed by her. Unconfined by foreign walls, she grew dominant.

Surely she had loved him. Decidedly, from her, streamed a sort of ragged power.

The crone scampered about the altar, strewing herbs, and liquids from vials. At length, out of her robes, she pulled a dead and bloody rabbit—the god knew where she had procured it—and slung it down.

“Anki!” screamed the crone, to match the howling of Elakti.

No wonder they did not take cold, the two of them, so bustling were they.

Phelia thought she would perish. She closed her eyes. Shut in this way inside her head, she started to hear a dreadful extra noise. Above the beat of the Heart, the crackling of the winter night, the slender whistle of the stars—a rhythmic, appalling booming—

Thinking she was fainting, Phelia opened her eyes. She saw Elakti’s women, the slaves, the crone, all but Elakti herself, staring upward, to the tops of the pine trees.

Phelia looked too.

The moon was enormous and searingly pale, freckled with uncanny faint blemishes. Now across its face there flew a gigantic bird, firstly black, next flaming white as it cleared the lunar disc. From the unbelievable wings spread out a booming gush of sound, like waves from the core of the ocean. Phelia thought she saw a flash of eyes, each circular and blanched as the moon itself. Snow blew from the trees at the downsweep of the bird’s passage. Its shadow covered them in darkness, and slid away.

“A big owl,” muttered one of the women. She made the circle sign for protection, the circle like the circle eyes of the bird.

But the crone shrilled from the altar: “It was eagle! The ghost of eagle. Anki sent it! To show, to show.”

Elakti lowered her arms.

“My lord,” she said, “Amdysos, the Dead Sun.”

Phelia drew in her breath too sharply and began to cough. The phrase was blasphemous, yet almost holy. The Sun descended under the world to regions of sleep and umbra. The Sun could not die.

The sky, but for the scalding moon, the stars, was vacant now. The moon also had moved a fraction to the west.

Elakti went to the altar and stood over it, oblivious. They would have to wait for her, however long she dawdled. It had been, had it, an owl?

Before a hearth fire at Oceaxis, Stabia raised her eyelids. She was drowsy. Now and then, she had started to have a little pain, and Udrombis, her Queen, made a draught for her, that took it away. Udrombis. She sat like a lioness in her chair. When did her hair go so white? Was it only the firelight? How terrible old age was, to dare to mark even her.

“Rest, my dear,” said Udrombis. And when Stabia slept again, Udrombis said, more softly than the ash shifting on the coals, “Your son will be a King.”

7

“Who heard of a campaign in winter? Apart from in a book—or in extremity?”

“Perhaps he thinks this is extremity.”

“Ipyra isn’t that eager. She’d have waited for spring to start.”

“That’s the plan then. To take her unprepared.”

Klyton shook his head, and woke. He would not have needed to question and discuss this with Amdysos, as he had just been doing, in the dream. But in the dream they were boys still. They had been hunting, and were cleaning their knives. Even so, Amdysos had been masked in gold. It seemed quite natural in the dream. Probably the charitable dead always partly concealed themselves; they would have changed so much—

He sat up. Outside the tent, a wind yowled, its voice thick with cold and rage. Through the leather walls came the wind-flickering grey gloom of predawn.

Klyton’s servant brought him hot beer from the brazier, with a little spice mixed in.

“That’s good, Partho.”

The servant grinned, pleased at recognition. He was a Sirmian, a gift to Klyton from his father-in-law. At first the boy had been awkward, but Klyton was patient; goodwill, once won, was worth having, particularly in war.

Father-in-law, and his other-town kin, had sent a thousand warriors, too, to bolster Klyton’s command. He had asked the chief graciously if it might be possible, he would understand if not. But his new relatives were still eager. Doubtless the men sent here with him were not of the absolute best, but Klyton’s drill captain had got them into some shape in the days before they marched.

With Amdysos’s command, now his own, Klyton’s battalions numbered three thousand men. Nexor had said nothing to this. Klyton had anticipated some word, even of displeasure, but Nexor did not bother. He wanted, it seemed, only to go headlong at Ipyra.

They crossed the border under Airis, in a blizzard. The river, that was so green in summer, became a different thing with the snow. The ice at first held up, a white table in places split by black and silver rock. But above, to the west, the rapids never entirely froze, there was always the chance of motion. Suddenly, with a warningless gush, an area of plates broke up in the ice. Men and horses slipped away into ink black water, in seconds too numbed even to shriek. Most were hauled out. The army began skidding in panic to the farther shore, or pushing back to the shore it had come from. Beasts bellowed, and men swore and screamed. A shambles.

Klyton, already safely across, looked up and saw Nexor sitting his horse above, in the snow-clad forest, gazing back, not moving. Klyton went down the line. Finding a trumpeter, he got the signal sounded for standstill, then rode to the river’s edge. In the stampede, more plates had broken. A long crack, like a crack in a white dish, ran for twenty-five sword lengths. At the trumpet, most of the floundering had stopped. Klyton shouted the most distant men off the ice, and ordered the nearer sections to continue over. To show them it could be done, he took his horse back down, and stepped it out into the middle of the river. There was a rock there, and he knew well enough he could take hold of it if the worst happened. But it put some sanity into the men, who then came on quietly, cheering him once they were safe on shore.

Other commanders had come down by then. Soon the sun would set. It was agreed the rest of the army should stay on the far side of the river, make a bivouac and wait for night. An hour after sunset, the crumbled ice froze hard again, and men and beasts got across intact.

Klyton had done no more than had been there to do. But it was effective, even showy. He saw this, mostly, later, when he heard how his own men were vaunting him round the camp. The Sirmians especially.

When he went to the King’s tent at dinner, Nexor said nothing. The King did not seem put out, or even interested.

Finally perhaps someone must have spoken. Nexor took Klyton aside as he was about to leave. The tent, hung with crimson, and heady with Orialian gums and wine fumes, seemed to have heightened Nexor’s reddish gold. Nexor spoke.

“What you did: pretty fair.”

Klyton said, “Anyone, my lord, could have done it.”

This was so true, it was insulting. But Nexor, who had not bothered with any of Klyton’s titles, or his name, and maybe did not recollect it, only nodded. Insulting Klyton in turn.

The early days of the march were uneventful. The weather shut down, white as sweetmeat, but not sweet. Within the vaulted forests, they progressed through an eerie pale shadow. Nothing else moved, as if all life had died, but for the black crows that came sometimes, and circled over gaps in the trees, watching them. The mountains jutted from the forests, blacker than the crows, with marble snow-scarps gleaming like mirrors. Into the null odor of winter cut sometimes a tindered sharpness. Soon enough, where the forest thinned, they looked up and saw a mountain that was awake, a pillar of brown smoke standing straight up from its cone. On the slopes below, a few maddened trees, nourished by the laval warmth, had broken into forward leaf and blossoms.

They passed a handful of ruins. The first fortress town was due on the eleventh day. The night before, Nexor addressed them in a jovial and, offhand way.

“We have nothing to fear, as you know. The rocks are sheer, but we’ll use catapults. I might ask for volunteers to climb up. We’ll see.”

The older commanders, the princes, glanced about at each other. Lektos, son of Akreon and a Daystar queen, said, “Sir, perhaps it should be thought out now. It will—save time tomorrow.”

Nexor smiled. “Don’t fuss, Lektos,” as if to some old nanny. “This is just why we came now. They don’t reckon to see us yet.”

“Sir, the Ipyrans know their own country. You can be sure they know we’re here.”

“You’ll be saying next the crows are their scouts and will fly back and tell them.”

There had been some superstitious talk among the soldiers. Lektos said, without inflection, “The scouts we sent haven’t returned.”

“Holed up in a cozy cave,” said Nexor.

Klyton scrutinized this elected King, for whom the omens had been manufactured. He must be intent to seem valiant, and impervious: he was the Sun. Nothing could oppose him. Not an enemy, not his own kind. It had appeared he wished his initial act to be bold and decisive. For that, he had brought them into the snow, over the ice. He rejected all obstacles, had no personal nervousness, was not a coward. Nexor had no imagination at all.

Outside, Lektos had paused, quiet and grim under the stars. As Nexor’s gold was of a red sort, Lektos inclined to paleness, which lent him now a glow like blond pherom. Friends, his half brothers, stood round him, calming him, not speaking ill of the King, but explaining Nexor had not meant to dismiss or demean. Nexor was simply fixed on victory. Their eyes said other things.

Klyton thought how he and Amdysos would have digested all this. But all this would not have been, had Amdysos lived.

In the night, a band of men, conceivably only four or five hundred of them, galloped from nowhere into the camp, on their broad-backed mountain ponies, hacking down the sentries, and the soldiers who came out, half-armed, to meet them. The night changed from dark and pallor to a fitful scarlet, as flung torches set tents ablaze.

Klyton saw the faces of masculine Ipyra, as he had in a previous year, wolf faces without fur, but blotched by war paint, and embroidered by the incredible traceries of tattoo, pierced by teeth and firelit eyes. He killed six of them before they plunged away. They went up through the thinned out forest into the mountain skirts. As if to approve their action, a distant crag let off a sudden plume of muddy flame. Black ashes smelling of vomit floated down on the wind, with the retreating yells and yelps of the foe.

Next day, they got to the fort. Of course, it was halfway up a mountain. There was a shepherds’ path, treacherous as a slanted version of the river. When it was tried, the Ipyrans on the walls catcalled, and picked off the climbers with their bows and javelins. In return the catapults flung stones and burning straw, some of which at last lodged. Then the fort began to resemble the fiery, distant crag that they could see better from here. Under the fire’s cover, more men got up to the fortress gates. Before they could do anything, the Ipyrans had killed them.

So they sat ringed round the snowy rocks, watching the town and fort escalate in flame, and then put it out.

Klytan remembered the former wars here, and what he had noted from his time in them. In summer weather, the mountains had some overgrowth, plants and bushes. These gave shelter, and a means to climb more safely. Even then such high places as this one sometimes needed to be starved out. That was simpler in the hot months, too. Now the besieged food would last, the water stay clean.

Having put out their fire, the Ipyrans danced on the walls.

Nexor came amongst his men, on his large red horse. He said, Well, they must sit and wait.

That night the snow dropped again, with the little black flakes mixed in.

Klyton walked through the camp with a couple of the others. The soldiers looked up from their spitting bluish fires. Some of the men had frostbite, and most were chilled to the bone. At their posts the sentries craned, ready-armed, staring at the swoops of a land indomitable above, robed over in pines below, which could hide almost anything.

In the dark, the luminous volcanic mountains gave a misleading witchlight that stained the stars.

Lektos said, “Even Glardor would never have pushed us into this muck.”

Another one shook his head at him. “Nexor is King.”

Klyton felt for a moment like a boy, that boy he had been on the first occasion, at Sirma, split off into Pherox’s command, the army sweeping him along like a torrent in spring. But he had not felt enough, then. Now the power of this very night took hold of him. The Sun journeyed beneath the earth. But the Sun would come back.

He said, “Men make mistakes. But the God is with us.”

Nearby, soldiers at a fire heard him, and looked up. One soldier rose. He was a bear of a man, flaxen-haired. He laughed at Klyton with pure joy and said, “There speaks a Sun. Akhemony is the God’s own.”

From all the nearest fires they were raising their wine bottles, their old leather cups, toasting Klyton because he had spoken shining words, here in the black ice of alien winter night.

Partho, still burnished from the accolade of the beer, dressed Klyton, and brought him a piece of bread kept warm from the oven. Eating it, Klyton heard the wind had dropped. He went out. He gazed straight through the camp, up the mountain to the fortess town.

It had sounded like a filthy day, starting, but no. The yowling wind seemed to have been caught and caged. The sky had opened its doors to a flooding dawn. The Sun was rising free, over the camp, hitting the mountain face with strong yellow rays.

Klyton observed keenly the blackened walls, the seam where the catapult bolts had done some harm. And the glint of spears.

There was a low sonorous noise, more than the mumble, clink and clatter of the wakening camp.

A pane of white snow peeled abruptly from the mountain and tipped off and away, falling into a northern gorge with a strange soft crash. Klyton felt the earth grumbling under him. He braced himself like the men outside Melmia, when the Heart had stopped. In the camp there were cries and exhortations. A standard leaned over, a tent collapsed. From the burning crag, one tuft of copper phlegm shot up. Then the rumbling ceased. The volcano had cleared its throat with a small earth tremor.

But up on the Ipyran walls they were howling. Klyton looked and saw some of the damaged wall had gone, like the snow.

The Sun was behind Klyton. He could feel it like a supporting, pushing hand, the hand of a proud father, thrusting him forward to achieve some potent enterprise.

All around him the Sirmians were standing up, staring at him, as if they guessed now he would want them for something. And the men who had been Amdysos’s command, they were crowding over too.

Klyton raised his voice. “The God’s spoken. He wants them out of there.”

Worse than Nexor, surely, with his story book of warfare in winter. To go up the bare rocks now—but the Sun was in the defenders’ eyes, and they were apparently afraid. Perhaps their walls had always stood firm. Perhaps they had been given other omens.

“I’d like to see if I can get to the top,” Klyton said, almost casually. “I don’t ask anyone to come up with me. Unless he’d like the fame.”

Ten minutes before, even discussing matters with Amdysos in the dream, Klyton would not have thought he would say any of this. But the gold hand pushed at his back. The hand promised to thrust him on, but to hold him, too.

He did not know how he looked to them, the soldiers standing before him, or what they saw. He heard only later.

The Sun blazed about him, giving him an aura of wild fire. He flamed, his hair, his eyes, the wings of light. But more.

One cloud had come up with the Sun, the color of honey, edged with brilliance, and it had taken a curious form.

Klyton heard one of the Sirmians murmur, “He is in the hand of the God.”

For the cloud had the image of an enormous hand, holding, supporting above, the disc of the Sun, while with the lower fingers, flexed like those of a man, it seemed to curve about the body of Klyton.

Klyton partly turned at length, and saw this too. He was not startled. The men who watched said that he smiled.

Already Partho had moved up, and was arming him, the light body armor, the helm and sword.

The men of his command struggled into their gear.

Over a thousand followed him as he ran lightly down and away from the camp.

Luck was in it as well. The catapult crews, not waiting for any order, but seeing the state of the wall, had loaded up and begun a bombardment. The Ipyrans were involved with that.

Others on the rock, noticing a Sun-flash stream of men pouring up the dangerous steep path from below, flung out their spears and stones.

But the clear sky of rising Sun was in their eyes, and the fulvous cloud swung down, casting a shadow over the climbing men.

Of the more than a thousand who followed Klyton, nearly a thousand escaped serious hurt.

The outcrops of the slope offered peculiar holds.

When they came to the gates, poor rough things, which any way the quake had loosened, it was not so hard to break in. Hand-o-hand then, on an Ipyran floor, they fought.

But the Sun had come in with Klyton’s band. They radiated light and hooted with happiness, cutting men down with their morning swords.

When they stopped for breath, the Ipyran prince had already arrived to surrender, holding out his hands for chains, his women clinging, weeping around him.

At first, Uros’s grandfather, the Karrad, had been welcoming. He seemed to think Uros had brought an embassy from Glardor, who, it transpired, they still believed in these backlands to be alive, and King. Uros explained. He said, with Glardor gone, a nobody had replaced the dead, someone thought safe. But the gods had punished Akhemony, and she was ripe for plucking.

The Karrad was an old man. In his riven face, the faded tattoos had crumpled together, so his skin looked to have been made of brown leaves. But he had sharp sight. He glared at Uros.

“What are you saying, boy?”

Uros said what he was saying.

The Karrad thought. For a moment his bright eyes flashed. Then his mouth drew down. He said, “I got your mother on a village woman. My legal daughter was sent him,” he meant Akreon, “as a Daystar spear-bride. But he preferred the servant, who whelped you.” Uros stood impatiently, fiddling with his rings. “We are always at war with Akhemony. We hate the Sun Kings, but also honor them. It’s a rite between us, our wars. The gods made us like a pin to nip them, lest they get too comfortable. Now this,” said the Karrad, “your notion, goes too far.”

But there was a murmur then from the men about the stone hall. They began to shout at the Karrad. It was an eternal law in Ipyra, the king must always listen and give weight to his lords. In the end, they cheered Uros. Antique legends of outland Sun Kings, made from just such situations, were rehearsed.

However, though the messengers went out from stronghold to stronghold, though fervent replies came back, the Karrad looked sidelong at his byblow grandson.

Uros, actually, was more wary of the Karrad’s wife.

The Karrad had taken her late, when the other royal women had died, and she was a great deal younger, and had borne him one son. This boy was still a child, black-haired and handsome, yet with ancient eyes. They whispered the soul of a long-ago hero had come back in him. Evonissa, the queen, was herself a priestess of Anki. Although she deferred, of course, to the Karrad, she had power of her own, and was said to foresee things.

Uros had inquired why she did not foresee the death of Glardor in Akhemony. Someone told him, hushed, that looking in her sorcerous mirror, she had told the Karrad an interval would come among the Great Kings. That was all, and not everyone had understood her, till Uros appeared.

She said, Evonissa, nothing against Uros, but now and then in the cold, smoke-choked hall at night, he felt her eyes on him from the womens’ place. She was a good-looking woman, small, firm and strong, with lively crinkled dark hair falling to her waist. She had pretty eyes, but he did not like them much. For when she looked at him, he felt something—not conniving or even antagonistic—he did not know what it was. But then, she was only a woman, an upland queen. So what?

There came an afternoon Uros was fretting at one of the great open balconies of the Karrad’s house, which in summer must be pleasant and scenic, and now was scenic and direly cold. Melendor, wrapped in lynx furs, stood grumbling at his back.

Outside, the mountain walls fell through white-striped ebony stands of larch, to the white bear pelt of the pine forests. Far down in a gorge, a frozen glass waterfall hung fantastically, from boulders that seemed made of opal. Above, on a dense sky, achingly pregnant with oncoming snow, other mountains lifted in grave processional ranks, capped with niveum, their bastions changing with distance from sable to lavender. Only a single western peak had raised its eruptive cloud, but the early-dying winter Sun, a bronze plate, had now passed into it. The Sun would sink in the volcano, or seem to. They must, here, be used to the omen.

Melendor, less enthusiastic now, was complaining and grieving about their own men, forced unhappily to shift as they could in the ramshackle village-city. Then he broke off.

“Look, visitors.”

Uros, who had been peering into the sky, peered down. A trail of about twenty men was coming up the bad road from the gorge, leading their horses. They looked done up, and soon were near enough one could make out some bandaging.

Uros and Melendor rattled down the uneven steps to the Karrad’s hall.

Another Karrad had sent the men, sent them with their wounds to show, to prove his communication.

The Akhemonians had crossed over in winter and commenced battle. Five strongholds had given way, two surrendering. There had been alarming portents—dead crows falling in a rain, Anki’s moon divided by a cloud in the shape of a sword, a weird voice that had been heard on the wind, seeming to call out to the Ipyrans, Yield.

Uros blinked. He reckoned himself too sophisticated to be moved by such stuff. He thought that his Karrad-grandfather probably was not. Uros strode forward.

“Karrad,” this was all one called them here, “clouds take odd forms. The winds in these crags can say anything one thinks of. My men tell me they cry out the names of girls they’ve left behind.”

If he hoped for a laugh from this, he got none. The grandfather sat pulling his sidelocks.

“As for the fortress towns—they were unprepared. We’ve had other word here, haven’t we, ten strongholds at least willing to join with us. That’s many thousand men. If Akhemony wants a snow fight, let’s meet them.”

The grandfather said, bleakly, “The Two Mile Valley is the only place.”

“Yes, sir. I’ve been hunting there.”

Melendor grunted behind him. “And it’s a rotten spot. Gulfs and topples, trees everywhere. All under seven feet of snow.”

“We can smash them there,” said Uros brazenly. He had not known boastful Ogon for nothing.

“You’re a brave warrior,” said the grandfather. Some of the men about the hall stamped and offered a yell. “I give you that,” he added, when they were quiet. “But wait a moment. Let Evonissa the priestess sacrifice, and take the reading. The gods may have something to say.”

Uros saw no harm in this, save that Evonissa would do it, and he did not trust her. Most women were against a war so near to home.

But they all looked solemn. The Karrad sent word to his wife. Then everyone attended while she went off with her girls to the mud-wall temple in the yard. She was not seen again until the night had settled black.

She walked in, with her tame crow sitting on her wrist. All crows were sacred here, but this one had a white bar on its wing that made it Anki’s own. They said, Evonissa could speak its language to it.

She went to the king and bowed. She wore a dark robe from the sacrifice, with the silver knife still hung at her belt. Although generally women were not tattooed in Ipyra, she had on the palms of her hands, and at the center of her low, wide, intelligent brow, the Eye of the goddess, done with a green iris.

“Husband,” she said. This was all a queen called a king in Ipyra. “There is a balance, both cups equal. On their side and on yours, weakness and strength.”

“Did you read the entrails, the organs?” ritually asked the Karrad.

Evonissa replied, “The aspects were unusual. Something’s strange. I would guess the gods are at play.”

The hall went silent. And in the silence, its iciness seemed worse. They heard the moaning of the wind, which would outlive them all.

“What should be done?” asked the Karrad. He looked abruptly sly, but her face was unshadowed by anything other than knowledge.

“If I were a man,” said Evonissa, “I’d make a truce. I’d ask the Akhemonians for pardon. If we’re in a god-game, husband, who knows how it will go?”

Uros lost his temper. He shouted, “Yes, and present Nexor my head on a tray, to say you’re sorry.”

Evonissa glanced at him. She said, “The prince shouldn’t fear men before gods. What we do is nothing and soon over. But after life, who knows?”

Uros thundered, his thicker top lip making his speech unruly, and causing him to spit, “I want my time now!”

The Karrad said, “You can go away into the mountains, to some obscure hold. Winter there till your Nexor King has forgiven you.”

But Uros knew Akhemony did not forgive such sins as his. He did not want a life of squirreling about, ducking under walls and behind curtains, roused before first light to race from one concealing midden to the next. The awful life of the exiled fugitive.

“Give me my rights!” he roared at his grandfather.

The Karrad shrugged. Uros had about a thousand men of his own here. The Karrad said, in his old voice, “The gods are playing. You might win. Whoever wants to fight beside you shall go. For my allies, they’ll take their personal augeries and their own decisions. For the sake of that girl who was your mother, I make truce yet with the Great King.”

Evonissa bowed her head. Her face showed nothing now, but a slight color in her cheeks. That night she sent her son away to the north, that was all. The Karrad must have agreed to it.

As for Uros, he would have to make do.

That valley named for Two Miles was far larger. On every side the mountains went up, dressed in trees, confirming the valley floor as a stadium. Here Ipyrans had fought with each other their most primal battles, while gods sat on the mountain tops to see.

Passes came in through the crags at three junctures. All were bizarrely accessible, even in the worst winter.

But the ground itself, as Melendor had stated, was unreliable, and in the heavy snow like a third adversary, unkind to either side.

The Akhemonian troops, when they heard from the scouts the Ipyrans had put a force into Two Mile Valley, were scornful and outraged together. They thought they had got the hang of the winter campaign, which till then had been sieges and sudden attacks. The size of the Ipyran rabble was also disconcerting. Banding together in this way, they were reportedly ten thousand strong.

Nexor’s southern force had lost men. To the weather and the terrain more often than to skirmishes. Now they found themselves less in number than the savages of Ipyra.

When they came out on the wide natural terrace beyond the south pass into the valley, they saw, across the huge spoon of snow, deceptive and innocent as a sheet of white silk, the Ipyran camp. Perhaps only a hundred feet below, miles down it looked, in the glacial, crystalized, motionless air. The Ipyrans were black on the snow; where the mountain shadow spread, the enemy fires spangled. The scouts had not lied about their mass.

The Akhemonians extended themselves along the terrace flanks. In three hours it would be night. The stoical soldiery laid its fires. The few women who had struggled up with them, the pages and boys, set cook-pots on.

But in the Great King’s tent, Nexor was saying, “Let them rest an hour, then we’ll get down. The descent’s easy. Startle the foe.”

It was Lektos again who said, “My lord, you mean go straight down and start?”

An older man, a noble, said, “Great King, it will be dark in an hour or so.”

“We’ll be done by then,” said Nexor, beaming and hearty.

Klyton had just come in. He had previously sent a band of his Sirmians off to hunt. There had, for some reason, been a lot of deer sighted in the forest along the pass, fat deer despite the cold, and not shy. Now the men were coming in with glossy carcasses on the saddles.

He listened to Nexor’s words. Then spoke.

“No, my lord.”

Nexor looked round at him.

“No? What did you say?”

“They’ve been on the move all day. Yes, it wasn’t such hard going, but they need to get warm and to eat. If you like, we can go down in the hour before dawn, and be ready for the Ipyrans at Sunup.”

Nexor smiled. He looked away at another man. “Can you get your fellows ready in an hour, Adargon?”

“My lord, I—”

Klyton walked by Adargon, and stood a hand’s breadth from the King. In height they were matched. Nexor was a little heavier, but it did not give him psychic weight. Nexor met Klyton’s eyes, and stared.

“Great King,” said Klyton, his voice not raised, held level as a pherom blade, “I won’t fail you by sending on to the field of battle men too weary to serve your honor.”

“You’re disobeying my order. I’m your King.”

“It isn’t a game,” said Klyton, who had not heard the witch-priestess Evonissa speak in the Karrad’s hall.

Nexor’s eyes slid away, returned, slid away again. A King must have settled Klyton then and there. The tent was full. Nexor had argued. And no one had made a move to rectify the moment, for not one man was ready to scramble unneedfully to a fight in half an hour.

Outside, the shouts of Klyton’s command, crowding round the fat deer dinner his god-blessed luck had ordained for them, reached the tent like the notes of a turning tide.

“All right,” said Nexor. He was not even enraged, more… sulky. “Have it as you wish.”

Adargon’s men came over to Klyton’s campfires soon after the moon rose, Phaidix Anki riding above Ipyra.

The battalions brought wrung-neck chickens they had had from the last village, and their ration of beer and wine.

At first Klyton’s men, particularly the Sirmians, beat them off, softly enough, joking and laughing. Then Klyton walked out and said, “We’re brothers. Come on. The enemy is over there.”

A feast began, and further men moved in from other stations, Lektos’ troops, and more. They brought what they could, and the roasted venison was shared with the rabbits, the chickens, and the drink. There was not enough wine to get drunk, which was as well, with the fight tomorrow. But by the light of the torches, some of the soldiers’ women danced, their faces and arms flame-polished gold. The men sang songs from old campaigns. Klyton sat with Lektos and Adargon, and one or two other commanders—most of the leading lights of the army in Ipyra.

From the smoke, maybe, the moon blushed rosy.

In his tent hung with crimson, Nexor dined with a meager scatter of sycophants.

They heard the songs.

Over the valley of two miles, the Ipyrans heard them, too. A joyous bridegroom sings before his marriage day, they said, in Ipyra. They listened to the joyous brideroom singing, and wondered if marriage would mean, for them, something else.

In the mid of the night, as the soldiery bedded down and slept, Adargon said to Klyton, under the ice green stars, “Akreon had your luck. Your hunt. That mountain you climbed. He would have done this as you have.”

“I aggravated the King,” Klyton remarked, lightly.

Adargon, it was sometimes said, of all the royal Suns after Amdysos, had most the likeness to Klyton. Yet they said, too, there was always with Klyton some other touch, the others royal from their blood, and Klyton royal as if from the breath of a fire.

“King,” said Adargon. “That one in the red tent?”

Pale Lektos said, “A ship with a buffoon for captain, sinks, or runs aground.”

They could not quite see Klyton’s face. His smile they saw. In those years, men and women both liked always best to have pleased him.

“Good night,” said Klyton. “We meet again, the hour before dawn.”

8

The Sun rose unseen in the morning. The sky was dark as a dusk. Far brighter than the sky, the snow looked back, staring white, between the clumps of trees, virgin and unmarked, dividing the two armies. This was soon changed.

The Akhemonians had got down the graded mountain easily, as their King had said, their weapons and harness muffled. When the part-light of day came up, the van was already forging forward over the valley.

The Ipyrans, who had been making offerings, left off and sprang to arms. This could not auger well. Afterwards they blamed it, their unavoidable impiety.

I see the battlefield from the air, as a bird would see it. I have no desire to go down. Though I have heard Klyton recount these events, this is the only view I truly have.

And so I behold the meeting clash of men, the advance, so tidy, like a parade, cloven and wrecked. Lightnings lit from swords. The cries of men coming up to me, so small they cannot mean very much. Udrombis had said, the gods would seem to regard humanity in just this way. Such little noises—of fury, terror, agony, despair—what can they matter?

The Akhemonians were outnumbered, but superior in their training and their tricks. Foot soldiers progressed, slewed away, returned, and cut out the center of the Ipyran force. While Nexor’s cavalry closed in the sides.

As Klyton rode over the snow, his men poured at his back, cheering him, and Adargon’s men after. Others followed. The whole army in Ipyra had rallied to Klyton, as to something gleaming and worthy of trust. So he looked, golden, infallible, if I could go near enough to see. But from the air he is only, my great love, my lord, another tiny glittering insect.

They fought. Then a rift came in the sky. On the Akhemonians’ right, the east cracked wide, and the Sun flared through. It was the Sunrise, coming late from the cloud, a blazing guest to the banquet of war.

The Akhemonians took it for a sign of favor, and the Ipyrans, the enemy of the Sun King, their sacrifices interrupted, were dismayed. The Sun seemed always in their eyes, as had happened at the first fortress, when Klyton scaled to the gates. The Sun beat hard on Ipyra. They said after, the men who fought and lived, that the heat of the Sun was stupendous, too much for a northern mountain day in winter. From the trees in the valley, icicles snapped off and darted down. The ground turned queasy. Foolishly, Ipyran men and horses slid, and before they could adjust themselves, Akhemony was always there, steady as if moving on a well-paved floor.

Probably it needed no more. But there was more.

As his allies grouped in about Uros, ganging to him, shouting out to him to triumph and save them, the wonder was worked that ended everything.

No doubt the sun had slushed the snow. The valley in winter was known to be treacherous.

Even from the air, as I wait now with the circling, optimistic crows, I see the huge, invisible hand punch downward. The sight is so curious, it makes at first no sense.

It is the snow, packed under the horses and men of Uros’s massed battalions, which has given way.

As it caves inwards, slowly, more swiftly, too fast, like children at sport the little figures slither down, and are gone into purple dimness. Sixty or seventy sword lengths, the measure of the Sun Lands, the funnel in the earth has opened. The waving arms, the sunny splash of falling spears, all these are part of the game. The game of children, flies, or gods—

The ground roared as it took them in. Uros, bellowing again as he had in the Karrad’s hall, Melendor, too astonished to cry out, went down with it, and after them, the snows rushed, and washed over, to bury everything in pillows of white death.

When the roaring stopped, a silvery column of ice-spray rose high from the place, like a beacon.

The battle—faltered. It was finished. Half the Ipyran force was gone. Akhemony gathered itself, watching, as the Ipyrans scratched for their dead, piled one on another seventy sword lengths down, under a bank of snow once more pristine, but for the marks of their digging.

Having unveiled himself, the Sun burned on. The sky was fantastically clear now, pastel as the youngest violets. From the mountains round about, slips of snow gracefully sailed down with the noise of mild sighs, booming in the gorges.

Nexor had accepted the surrender of the Ipyrans. He allowed them to continue digging out their dead.

The priests of Akhemony were making offerings now, on a make-shift altar in the valley. The smoke rose white on the colored sky.

The Great King’s army, tranquilized by its uncanny and abrupt victory, waited in silence, watching the smoke.

Nexor was ruddy and merry. He turned red-handed from the sacrifice. And made out, as his commanders did, a line of chariots and men moving carefully along the valley. They came from where the Karrad’s fort would be, Uros’s grandfather’s hold, but there were too few of them to suggest aggression.

The Great King raised his arms at his soldiers.

“The old dotard’s coming. To make peace. We’ll hang him here, from that handy tree.”

The men of Akhemony murmured. Nexor, as always, had misjudged their mood. When he should have courted them, he had stayed aloof. Now he was familiar. A rousing win against dire odds would have left them rowdy and still thirsty for blood. But what had occurred in Two Mile Valley had laid on them the shadow of an ultimate respect. In the prescence of gods, they had had the wit to lower their voices. But here was their High King, bawling and showing off like a nasty boy.

Adargon said, his voice carrying outward to the men, who repeated his words among themselves, “My lord, the Karrad’s old, and his son’s a child. He won’t have wanted to go against Prince Uros, who brought his own troops with him.”

“Yes?” said Nexor. He did not grasp what Adargon was saying. He turned and volleyed at the men, “Sack the town, eh, lads?”

Again the men murmured, and stepped from foot to foot. Someone called out, “They’ve paid their dues.”

And a grumble of agreement sounded.

“What? I give you a town to sack and you don’t want it?” Nexor chided them, ridiculous and inappropriate. He was like some uncle joshing with a squeamish infant. The army did not like this.

Then Klyton was standing by the King. There was a spray of blood like rubies on his breastplate, and a thin cut which bled across his cheek. Nexor had been somewhere in the fight. Where, they wondered. He was very neat and clean.

Klyton said, so they could hear, “My lord, let it go. There’s not much worth taking in Ipyra.”

Someone else called from the crowd, “I’d like to take a yellow-haired girl.”

Klyton glanced. He said, “But you don’t need to take her, soldier. You can charm her, surely?”

At that, the crowd went up in laughter. You could see them slapping the caller on the back, tipping his helmet forward over his eyes, since the Sun Prince had got the better of him, and quite right.

Klyton let the mirth die off. They had needed it. Then he said, “Show mercy, my lord King, to the Karrad. Even the God spared him.”

The two or three chariots, and the men who had entered the valley with them, had now been taken possession of by Akhemonians. They were being brought towards Nexor, on his high place, by the smoking altar.

Nexor pushed Klyton aside.

“I’ll do what I think proper.”

A cloud went over the Sun.

An impossible dark bloomed, muffling the valley. It was like that phenomenon which is known in Pesh as an eclipse.

The soldiers made sounds, staring up, gesturing signs for protection. Nexor, too, put back his head to see.

It was not a cloud, but a bank—of birds. The crows of Ipyra, jet black, hundred on hundred of them, and in the midst of them another bird, far larger, which seemed to pull on the rest by the storm of his wings.

“Nexor,” Klyton’s voice rang out, speaking the King’s name without title, “pay attention to that. If you won’t hear me or any man, listen to the sky.”

He said to me that as he uttered these words, the hair stood up on his head. In the deep cold of the mountains, no longer warmed by supernatural Sun, a comb of ice passed through the hair, the nerves and bones, of almost every man present.

The edge of the Sun tipped free of the bank of flying birds. But the light of the solar orb was lax now. And the colossal shade sank in over the Akhemonians, clustered to the altar; over the Ipyrans, who had ceased scraping out their dead.

It was a moment for stillness, but Nexor shouted again. He shouted those words of his he should not have had, ever, to use. “I am the King!”

The giant within the raft of crows was an eagle, they said. It was very large in size, though nothing like the monster at Airis. Nevertheless, seeing it, the soldiers began to cry oaths and prayers. Many fell on their knees.

And the eagle dropped from the cloud of crows. It beat downwards, and on its wings came all the dark heart of the sky.

Now must be given the answer, for Nexor had proclaimed himself what he was, the chosen of the god.

The Sun disc was all free now. Light broke over them. They saw, every man who dared to look, something pure white burst away from the eagle, and descend.

Shining bright as a pail of milk emptied from heaven, it dashed directly upon Nexor’s head, bared for the sacrifice, over his face and shoulders, down all his unsoiled armor. Anointed, he stood, spluttering, blinded, wildly wiping at his eyes and mouth, while his priests and servants, horrified, stayed rooted to the ground.

But from the army of the Great King another music began to rise, low at first, then boiling up and over.

The eagle lifted away. The birds of omen flew northward. The army rocked in its lines, squalling with joy, telling itself through its tears of ultimate amusement, the news, until several thousand voices took up those words as a lawless, bronzen chant. “The God—the God—the God has shat on Nexor.”

When the old Karrad had his interview with Akhemony, on the cold road, Nexor was not to be seen. It was Klyton who spoke to the Karrad, with Adargon at his side.

The Karrad had dignity. With dignity he held out his hands, in the traditional manner, to be bound.

Klyton said there was no need for that. He understood the Karrad had been threatened by Prince Uros, his grandson, and had had no choice.

With these sentences, the Karrad concurred.

All this while, his comely, deep-breasted wife stood in the chariot with him. She had put on her priestess’s black but, around her neck was a copper ring set with milky green agates. She gazed at Klyton without insolence or modesty, from her two smoky eyes and the third eye embroidered on her brow.

Finally Klyton spoke also to her. “You can bring back your son, lady. There’s nothing to fear now.”

She said, straight out, “Make sure alliance with Ipyra, lord. Then we shall be safe.”

Klyton nodded. “I think so. But there are no daughters in your house.

Just then from across the valley, the soldiers’ chant, which they were still lovingly indulging in, drifted. Adargon grimaced, but Evonissa turned her head, listening.

After a minute, she looked again at Klyton. She addressed him clearly.

“The gods disdain to bring down a little man. They like to make him tall before they break him, as we make beautiful the beast for sacrifice.”

Klyton added to me, when he detailed her words, “I wasn’t certain, whether she spoke of Nexor, or of Uros.”

Of course, he could not know, as now I know too well. It was of Klyton himself that Evonissa spoke. Her third eye had seen through his shining day fires, to the greater spire of night beyond.

In the following month, most of the lords and Karrads of Ipyra came in, wrestling with the winter passes, to give homage to Akhemony, in the person of Klyton. Nexor had been put away like a poor knife in need of mending.

Among thc Karrads, there was one who brought a small army with him, declaring them as loyal to the Sun Kings as the Akhemoian troops. This man was, like dead Uros’s kindred, old, yet he rode by horse to the meeting, and had walked over the passes. Though his hair was white, it had been golden, and the beard he kept showed this still.

He had brought a present for the King. Klyton received it. The gift was a book, a marvel, with pages of stone inscribed by a silver chisel, and polished with the dust of diamonds. The covers were also of stone, clasped in bands of electrum. It took two men to carry it with style. The contents, said the bearded Karrad, concerned legends of Phaidix Anki. In other words, here, it was a tome of sorcery.

Klyton was impressed by the book. He said the King would be given it, and would not quickly forget such a token. The bearded Karrad chuckled. He must have heard new-risen Nexor was having an early sunset.

“I never broke my faith with Akhemony,” the bearded Karrad announced. “In my mind, I’m bloodkin still to mighty Akreon.”

Klyton bowed. “I didn’t know it, sir. How is that?”

“My daughter was a jewel, a rare yellow-haired girl of Ipyra.” If Klyton considered the portent of the soldier’s called-out words, he put it by. “King Akreon beheld my daughter and wed her. She was some while a Daystar of the Great King, but her flowers withered of sorrow after his death. Her name was Hetsa.”

9

Happiness comes sometimes in dark disguise. As sorrow comes now and then hidden in a festive dress, with garlands in its hand.

I see, from time’s vantage, down that long cliff of my century, they walk together now, in my fifteenth year, and each is masked as the other.

Annotation by the Hand of Dobzah

When Sirai had said these words, she paused some minutes then told me to set the paper by. Two days elapsed before she instructed me again to write.

* * *

From Oceaxis, winter withdrew itself. Moist days of cool Sun had tempted the buds on the trees, miniature flowers under dead leaves. The Lakesea was enamel smooth. Even the turtle roused herself, waddled from under my high bed, and sat in a gem of sunlight by the little pool.

I had heard of the successes from Ipyra. Ermias had garnered too the story of Nexor’s disgrace. He had proved a ruffian and an idiot—and finally the god sent a sign of disapproval too exotic to ignore. She did not tell me what it had been.

Klyton and the Sun, Adargon, led the army now, though Adargon, it seemed, stepped back somewhat. He was nearly thirty, and had said, reportedly, everyone had seen in Glardor’s day what happened when men of his age took on leadership too late.

Had Nexor been full-crowned, all this might have been more difficult. But, as dead Melendor had declared, the time from winter to summer seemed to have left a space for trial. For Nexor himself, with a small entourage he had gone to consult the wisewomen in Ipyra’s most volcanic heights, far to the north. He knew now, at least and at last, when to be absent.

“The certainty is Klyton will be made Great Sun,” Ermias said. She looked straight at me. Then lowered her eyes.

“Yes,” I answered idly. Why would I care? He was my brother, one of many. He had never held me as a man holds a woman, lit fire in me with lips and hands. For was it not Klyton who taught me afresh that he and I might never be lovers, undoing all the house I had built upon my longing, tearing even my fantasies in pieces.

How had I lived since that night? God knows. I cannot remember. I lay deep in a sea of somber cold that made any winter midsummer noon. And in this hell, I had turned him about, my brother, my beloved. I had reviewed his thoughtless cruelty, his irrational and sudden strides towards me—then, forgetful, away. He had his life, where every second counted like a link in some endless gleaming chain. A woman was, as the saying went, a rose upon the way. Ornament, passtime, comfort—nothing of moment, ever. In my newborn cold, cold anger, I would not curse him. But I withheld my prayers. And see, he had done well enough without them.

Ermias reined her tongue, chose her words. She had often had to do it with my mother, Hetsa.

Nor did Kelbalba anymore broach the subject of my love. No one had had to inform her. She had seen my face that night he came to me and left me. She talked of other things, and sometimes told me her tales, but not very much. She knew I had far less tolerance now for dreams.

By her garments and bearing alone, I knew the woman for one of Udrombis’s Maidens. She bowed slightly to me. She said, “The Queen-Widow of the Great Sun Akreon, wishes you to present yourself at the third hour of afternoon.”

In my inertia, I was not immediately very unnerved. But I thought, once the woman had gone, that I must have erred in some way. How? I had no scope to commit any crime. And then I thought perhaps Udrombis had discovered Klyton’s unchaperoned visit to me. This did frighten me. I had learned much of her. She was severe, ruthless, uncompromising. And I—was nothing, easily swept away.

Of course, I had agreed, as I must, to go to her. I dressed with care, also putting on two or three jewels; for one of my rank to appear slapdash would not earn her approval.

Apart from the Hall, and here and there at various ceremonies, I had not seen Udrombis all those years.

I recalled, as I glided at my slow pace through the walks of the palace, how she had leaned in the shape of a bow when the monstrosity, the eagle, ripped her son up into the murderous sky. Even at such an instant, she did not evoke pity. She was a woman of power and marble.

In the passage that led towards the Queen-Widow’s rooms, I saw Crow Claw. I knew it was she, a thin, black-clad figure, coming out as it seemed from a doorway—but no door was there—and turning into an alcove from which, when I reached it, she had vanished.

What this sighting could mean I had no idea, nor was there time to ponder. Or to question Nimi, who was following me.

The doors of the royal apartment lay ahead, and a waiting woman, not Crow Claw, hurried from the alcove to usher me on.

Udrombis received me in the room with the hearth, an intimate room, for friends. Her garments were impeccable, as ever, and muted, though her rings blazed, and she wore a cache of emeralds at her throat.

The cedar chair she sat in was one of her smaller thrones. At first I did not reason anything from this, being too anxious.

I bowed to Udrombis. She watched me and watched on when I had straightened up. Then she rose, without one word, and moving up to me, inspected me from head to toe. She felt the stuff of my dress, too, and a piece of my hair. Inevitably I recollected when I had been brought to her as a child, and she had gone over me as they did in the slave-market. But she was still the Sun Queen, Glardor’s wife had counted for nothing. Perhaps no other could.

“Calistra,” she said. “I hope you’re well?”

“Thank you, madam, yes.”

“Sit there.” I sat in a chair only by one stage smaller than her own.

“The promise of your infancy has blossomed,” she said. “I’ve long admired your ability to walk, and the elegance of the performance, which vastly exceeds that of many born with two feet. You have spirit, and cleverness.”

Again I thanked her. On the hearth the fire fluttered over scented logs. My mouth was dry, as it had been in her presence when I was four.

“But,” she said, “you dress too plainly. No, I don’t reprimand you, Calistra. That you’re modest has done you credit until now.”

Now?

She sat down. She gazed into her fire, giving me an interval to collect myself. But I lay scattered in bits, and could not do it.

In these very rooms she had administered poisons, so I had heard over the years. Or she had crushed with some more merciful blow.

“You will have heard,” said Udrombis, “Ipyra’s settled. More firmly settled than for several years. That’s Prince Klyton’s work.” My breath clenched of itself. In a motionless maelstrom, I stared into the hearth. “Klyton has written to me. He has suggested to me something that I’ve meditated on.” I was glad I was not standing up. Dizziness passed through me in a wave. I heard her say, “I will read to you a few words from his letter.” Then came the rustle of the fine Arteptan paper lifted from its box. She read me the few lines in a calm, almost inexpressive voice.

When I looked up, I saw as if for the first time: the fire quivered on the white strands of her hair, which now, like snow on obsidian, had almost obliterated her darkness. And for a second I did not know who she was. But she was Fate, as Ermias had been, entering in her yellow dress, and Crow Claw too, manifesting, vanishing.

Klyton had put it to the Queen that my mother, Hetsa, had been the daughter of a strong king in Ipyra, a man who disdained to take up arms against Akhemony. I, therefore, half loyal Ipyran, and half the blood of the Sun House, possessed unique worth, should I be taken to wife by any Great Sun crowned this summer.

“Evidently,” said Udrombis, “the incestuous marital union of brother with sister goes unrecognized in Akhemony. However, Klyton points out that, should it be claimed instead that you are the daughter of Hetsa by Glardor and not Akreon—for which reason you were concealed briefly by your mother when a baby—you would remain the progeny of a Sun King, and the next Great Sun, when chosen, would stand as your uncle and not your brother. The union of uncle with niece is credible, in certain circumstances.” I sat like a statue, or one dead. Udrombis said, “Of course, it offends your honor to accept bastardy, where you are the legal daughter of Akreon. You must forgive me that I request the sacrifice of you, to secure Ipyra.”

My lips parted. Having lost my mind, I got out one name. “Elakti—” Even though I had forgotten who Elakti was.

“Elakti’s kindred raised the sword in this war, against Akhemony. Besides, the woman is crazed, running about the hills like a wild cat, with a train of servant girls, rending live rabbits with their teeth.” I shivered. She thought, or pretended to think, it was for that. “One is disgusted. But she carries the seed of Amdysos, it seems, and must be safeguarded, as best we can.” There was no mark on Udrombis’s face. I suspected, disorderedly, she believed Elakti’s pregnancy a lie, or some hysterical sterile swelling. God-like Amdysos could have had nothing to do with it.

Someone came in, just as when I was four, and brought me a reward, on this occasion premature. Wine in a fragile goblet, slices of candied winter fruit, transparent, too exquisite to eat.

To manage the cup without spilling it took all my skill. The wine tasted bitter and cold, like the milk of iron.

“Well, Calistra you must reply. To be the Sun-Consort, wife of the Great Sun. This is an enormous mountain all at once before you. But to a woman who has learned to walk without feet, perhaps, a little thing?”

I said, or some creature inside me used my voice to say, “Whatever you want of me, madam. Whatever is best.”

“Answered wisely. I expected no less.”

To this day, I judge her dealings with me then were as simple as she had presented them to me. But even I had seen how she prized Klyton, and now I know that, without admission, she prized him also as a man. Yet she had no jealousy, no edge. For Udrombis, the honor of the house came first. And I truly believe she did not know I loved him—she truly could not imagine that one such as Calistra should so have dared. Note then, this strand of naïveté woven in her robe of dominant power.

But I was not, even then, quite unaware. I saw her sip her wine, and I wondered, what was its taste for her? Doubtless also bitter, always bitter now, as her hair now always would be white.

10

Again, everything alters, in Calistra’s world.

We are to be moved. We rise.

Lost to me, the garden of Phaidix, the room with the snake-topped pillars in which I was born. Lost to my turtle, her pool.

And to Ermias, her status as Maiden. She is to be only a lady attached to a princess, for Udrombis has selected and sent me a new Maiden. Ermias says nothing to me. Does it not matter, after all, seeing that she will come to be the lady of a Sun-Consort, all of whose women are named Maidens, higher than any ordinary Maiden could reach?

There are so many women, now. Women to see to garments, and to see to bathing and anointing, to the hair and the nails. And slaves—countless girls—to wait on every whim. I search for Nimi in their crowd, and locate her, finely clad, with little jewels in her ears. We have all gone up, lifted by the Queen’s disinterested hand.

But no. She has an interest in our value. We serve the House of the Sun. For the diadem of which she has chosen Klyton.

We are physically higher too, in the upper storys of the palace.

I have five great rooms which open off the central chamber, and a set of luxurious cells to content my chief women.

This, the central chamber, amazes me.

A terrace looks towards the Lakesea, between long, mulberry pillars. At night shutters and draperies are pulled close, but on the fine days, this side of the room is all a heaven of atmosphere and light. Below, the palace gardens, and then those other ancient gardens which cascade to the shore, where long ago, as a child of twelve, I sat, and Klyton found me.

Because my turtle is mine, they make for her a new pool. This pool is much larger, and its floor is laid with leaf-green tiles. A statue of Gemli, taller than I, poises on the rim. She is painted and lovely, and nearby is an enormous cage with six pale pink doves. Once the doors are secured, the doves are let out, and fly around. Any droppings are wiped away at once by one of the slaves, whose name I have not learned.

Somehow I keep Kelbalba. I have explained it was she who helped me to walk.

She and I, then, one afternoon, staring, in the room with mulberry pillars. From the gardens beneath breathe the scents of tamarind, the myrtle, the marroi, on an orchestra of crickets, and with that, the sea, which has now a louder voice.

“Whose rooms are these?” questions Kelbalba.

“Calistra’s rooms.”

We smile. My smile dies the first.

I have new dresses. One a ripe, deep red blood-color, the blazon of the Sun Kings. There is, among the ornaments, a headdress like a great wreath. It is formed from the petals of gold flowers, the gold traceries of leaves, and golden wheat-ears, symbol of fruition, of the earth mated to the solar sky.

In this gown and this crown, I go first to the Hall, and sit, as she has told me to, close by Udrombis.

I see myself like a beautiful doll, near to the Widow-Queen’s chair. And how, every so often, she confers with me or sends me some sweet or fruit to try.

None of this is overlooked.

Disgraced Nexor had taken no High Queen. Glardor’s widow is gone. I notice instead, Klyton’s Sirmian wife, Bachis, her tawny hair plaited with Bulos pearls, her belly like a bladder under pale silk. Once she raises her eyes to me, flits them away.

She is to be my little sister, if I am to be his … I think you are looking at me now, asking of yourself, and me, what then I felt. From the air, I gaze down and see Calistra. For her heart, imagine the constrained turmoil of a waterfall. Her mind is the river in spate. Nothing stays.

In my land of shadow I had began to debate. Now I was woken quite roughly from my shadow, into a brilliant dream. There was no place to find my balance. I felt a strange terror, and more than glad, I was finally rebellious. If I, so little, was to be made Queen of the World, I was at last entitled to anger.

He returned in the late spring. He had been busy in Ipyra, settling her in his own fashion, visiting the chiefs and kings, taking them gifts, and letting them see the smart soldiery of Akhemony for themselves. But what had started as a war had become a progress. Adargon went with him—Lektos had come home to speak volumes of Klyton’s worth, in the councils at Oceaxis. The Karrad, my grandfather, Hetsa’s sire, traveled with Klyton, too. Ipyra had not often had so much trouble taken with her. Like a groomed horse or a human cunningly flattered, she began to show her friendly side.

The blossoms of the gardens had made way for green. The troops marched in through the town, and the first roses were torn out to award them a carpet.

No one said I must go to shower Klyton with flowers. As once before, I stayed in my rooms.

Akhemony had by then decided. It was all settled. From the Sun Temple uncurled the thick pall of the offerings, visible to me from my terrace over the trees.

I had a new tutor. He was a skinny, squeaky-voiced priest; his task was to teach me the manners of my ascension—the religious duties and day to day behaviour of a Sun-Consort.

But I was used to learning. I had learned such a lot.

Klyton, his formal reception over, went first to see Udrombis, and next, his mother.

I was conscious Stabia must be ill. She had not come to the Hall for more than two months. Ermias no longer gossiped to me, and my Maiden was a perfect icon, her slim mouth closed on anything but the platitudes of her service to me. It was Nimi, burnishing my turtle’s shell, who whispered that Klyton had only just been in time, for Stabia was near to death. An exaggeration, as it happened. Or rather, a prediction.

Even in my tumult, this checked me. Stabia had been, for a moment, a guide in my desert. More, she had seemed my friend. There was a shrine for the most royal women on the upper roofs, that now I had access to, and so I went there and made an offering of perfume for Stabia. Squeaky, my priest-tutor, had told me exactly which substance must be employed in every circumstance. But as the jam-sweet odor of the scent drifted with the smoke, and melted in the sky, and birds sang carelessly in the gardens, I knew how useless this was, and how redundant. Never before, I think, had I detected the true distance of the gods, their inattentive quality. Passionately, in all my tribulations, I had kept some faith. Was it perhaps curious or apt, that as my wish came home to me, I lost it?

The Squeaker had decorously hinted that I would be the next person Klyton should call upon. My closemouthed Maiden also intimated that I must get ready.

So I, like the offering, was laved in perfume. I was dressed in white and wound with gold. Over my hair, they set a golden net with silver stars, and into this were fastened flowers pink as the caged doves. I thought of the flowers cast before Klyton on the street. I, too, was to be his carpet, something fragrant and pliable for his glory to step on.

The day had passed. They were kindling my lamps. This procedure had taken a few minutes in my former apartment. Now it was a great business.

As the hollow familiar caves of rooms blushed into light, Klyton arrived at my door.

I received him in the outer room, where all the lamps were burning. Two of his servants appeared first, and put down a pinewood chest bound with brass. This they flung open as though before a market crowd, to reveal a heap of shimmering cloth and tinsels, while ropes of purple gems spilled artfully on the floor.

Then came another servant, leading forward a milk-white hound on a gold leash, which moved daintily up to me, ignoring the turtle, who drew in her head under her shell.

Perhaps he had chosen the time, the hour of the lamps when our eyes find the color again which a fading Sun took away.

As two more servants approached me and put down a tall electrum mirror on a stand of gilded bronze, a third undid a cat-shaped glass flagon, and let me sniff the balsam of Ipyra’s forests. It was utterly unlike the stuff I had offered the gods for Stabia. As if he had known.

By then, he had walked through into the room. And the lamps did their office, too, for him.

I got up. I bowed. The women were rustling all about me like half-settled moths; fluttering for his beauty, ritually, but it was only partly pretence.

Now I must face him, and see him.

He had dressed himself richly for our meeting, a proper courtesy. In the lampglow the armlets and collar of gold, the golden borders of his tunic, and his hair, made him one with the light. He was winter-tanned from wind and sun on snow. And against this frame his eyes took a metallic gleam, like the surface of swords.

What had I ever seen when I looked at him? A god, of course a god. And the gods were far away, unlistening, their kindness incidental, accidental. If they should speak of love, it was only as a man would caress the neck of a favorite dog.

I withdrew my eyes from Klyton, and godlike, smoothed the neck of my living present, the milk-white hound. Its eyes were black, reflective, two more valuable jewels.

Klyton had somehow come right up to me.

He said, “I thought you’d like that the best.”

“He’s very fine. Thank you, my lord.”

“I’ve heard the view from your terrace is pretty. I have never seen it. Show me.”

He was moving me, his hand on my arm. We were going through the room, the women, to the pillared terrace, which had not yet been shuttered for the night.

My Maiden, the women, followed us. The slaves at the lamps, the shutters, hesitated, and turned to mellow carvings.

Klyton left me. He strode to look down from the terrace into the gardens. The moon was rising, little more than the shaving of a white pearl. Two stories down, guards passed at intervals. Klyton hailed one of these and there rose up the clank of a salute.

He is so handsome, so miraculous, he means nothing at all, this King-to-be. I remember when he was a boy. He was only a prince, and I—I had come from the House of Death.

He retraced his steps to me and, bending, ran his hard, golden hand, stamped with a fresh black scar, over the head of my milk-white, moon-white dog.

“I’m glad you are well.” he said to me.

He did not touch me any more. Without any further words, he turned and left the room, passed through the group of women, Sun through cloud, was out of a door which careful servants closed.

I went to the dinner in the Hall, as Squeaky, had I asked him, would have told me I must. Klyton was there, feted like the god he now was. The harpers rendered songs of sublime heroes hidden from enemies on mountain sides, disguised as mortal, revealed in youth by valiant deeds.

The more I watched Klyton—surreptitiously, of course, the less I knew him. But I never had known him.

After the most important harper had sung and Udrombis had sent me some fruit to try, and I had done so, I left the Hall.

Once able to dismiss the butterfly flock of women, I stood alone by my terrace, one shutter pulled back.

The pillar where I rested my hand was chill. The night was a luminous pane, and the warmth of summer had not yet come. The Lakesea resembled endlessly folded silk under the slender hip of Phaidix’s bow. All the gardens were black, composed of secrets. There would be dusks when the women danced there. I would see lights near the shore, a fringe of fireflies.

I then, felt old. It is strange. With age has come the knowledge that what I felt was accurate enough. Save I was old within a young skin.

Down from the high raised Hall, a great roar rushed, extra-ordinary, like fire. Probably the princes were harping now, and the wine poured over among discarded garlands.

Sleep was softer than the fur across the bed. And then it lifted like a lid. Calistra lay, her eyes wide on the darkness. A door had opened, closed.

Over the length of the room, on Gemli’s shrine, the apricot-colored flame stooped, and straightened. It showed half the outline of a tall male figure, the roped drop of a cloak. The girl in the bed did not speak, and the man moved to her over the floor of night.

Her attendants, that host of them, slept in their own apartments away across the outer room. One slave must keep watch by the doorway but presumably she had slumbered—or been bribed?

The man trod noiseless as a leopard. From him came the scents of bruised garlands, wine and heat, and of the tindery tamarinds in the gardens. Shadow hung on him. Yet Gemli’s flame described his hair like gilding. He still wore his own garland—ormis, myrtle flowers.

“Don’t be frightened,” he said. “Do you know me?”

“Klyton,” Calistra said.

“I won’t harm you. I wanted to see you—out of that swirl of women. Udrombis has told you. You and I.”

She said, “You are to be Great Sun. I am to wed you.”

“Sun-Consort.” he said. “You talk as if it were nothing.” She heard him laugh, very low. “But it isn’t so much to us, is it? Only like the air. We were meant for this, Calistra.”

Calistra sat up slowly. Her filmy garment she kept within the cover of the fur, pulling it round her to conceal her arms and breasts. But farther down the bed, she noted, as perhaps he had not, the lapse beneath the blankets, her ultimate nakedness. Had he remembered? She could not spring up to run away.

Klyton sat on the bed’s side. He seemed at ease. He said, “You mustn’t be upset. I haven’t disgraced you. I saw to it Adargon’s man has the watch below. I climbed up when he was relieving himself. For decorum’s sake. But if he saw me, he knows who it was. And your slave girl is one I know as well. There was even a shutter left ajar.”

Calistra shook her head. These facts were irrelevant. “Why?” she said. She heard her voice, an isolated, glassy note.

“Why do you think?”

His hands reached her in the dark, slid over her and through her—she was drawn out of her wrappings into the warmth of the shadow. And the shadow was clean breath tinctured by wine, smooth flesh and muscle, and his tasseled hair brushing heavy on her throat. She turned her mouth from his. At this he sat away, releasing her. “Forgive me. If you don’t want to. I’ll wait, of course.” He had been so sure of her, still seemed so. He did not breathe quickly, was not yet urgent. Not even disappointed.

Who was he? He controlled so much, yet climbed up the wall like a boy … The faint light gave her nothing, only the line of his cheekbone, his brow and nose and lip. His lashes, one sequin in one eye. The wide shoulder and the costly gem that pinned the cloak and had a heart of scarlet.

“You told me,” she said, “we must remain apart.”

How small her quarrel was. Why speak of it?

But he said, “The gods showed me otherwise.”

I love you, she thought. The words were only the echo of another cry. Inside herself she turned—like a fish, a serpent—seeking to find the way back to him.

And thought, terribly, He is no longer that same one I loved.

In reply, oddly, he said, “The gods have changed me, Calistra. I was almost afraid of it at first. The power, this power they’ve given me. I can take, and make. I’ll see Akhemony certain, and then stop the Sun Lands fighting one with another—I’ll give them something else. Have you heard of the other mythical land? The place beyond the outer ocean? I think now it does exist. It’s there for us, and I shall have it. Calistra. I’ll have all the world. Ah, darling girl, how beautiful you are.”

He leant forward. The garland dropped away.

She realized the lamp shone only but fully upon her, illuminating her for his inspection, her face unpainted, sheer, her hair loose in a sheet of paleness, her throat, her breasts distinct now under the gossamer nightrobe. She seemed soaked in luster, and felt her own loveliness as she had never done. She had never seemed to herself so actual, so present. And where the dark hid her, from the ankles down, where she was not, even at her feet, as before, she tingled with liveness.

“You’re mine,” Klyton said. “You know this, Calistra. You knew it before I did. Won’t you give yourself to me? In two months, you’ll be crowned my consort. And we’ve waited—”

She belonged to him. It was true, she had always comprehended. And in the somber mirror of his unseen face, she glimpsed the vision of her own profound mystery, for the first.

Stretching out her hands, she put them on his chest, pushing lightly against him, not to thrust him off, but to contact the reality of his flesh.

His breathing changed. He leaned to her once more.

“Let go of yourself, Calistra. Give yourself to me. I won’t allow you to fall.”

It was as if, deep in the well of self, she sensed the dawn, and swam upward towards it. Not understanding, not even in desire, but primitive instinct. No other thing had any importance.

He took her face in his hands like a silver cup, and drank from her mouth. And she became only wine that gave itself to be drunk.

Klyton was to have the world. She became the world. He had filled her with his soul, his power, his splendor.

And as she clung to him she beheld him now, as if the lamplight shone suddenly through her, on to him. She met his fire with the torch of her surrender, through every surface of her skin.

Pressed back into the bed by his weight and his body’s near-metallic hardness, she flew, suspended from his strength, as he bore her up on wings as wide as Sunrise.

Her virginity was gone already, torn by the accident as she learned to walk. The first pain of the storm-strokes of human lust altered, in an incandescent spasm, to a bursting sweetness that turned her inside out. Winged with light, as he was, she soared through illimitable inner space. In the grip of an eagle.

Klyton was the Sun.

How had she ever doubted the gods? They were her kindred.

11

Along the shoulder of the hill, the shrieks came now almost continuously. It was afternoon, but no birds sang. Crickets indifferently drizzled. A cloud sent down its ominous indigo shade, which ran from hummock to hummock of the high grass, like spilled water.

The summer pavilion had improved with the coming of warmer months, and some cartloads of necessary luxuries brought from Oceaxis. With the settling of Ipyra, Elakti’s status grew less suspect and more cherishable. There was still a spy in her makeshift household, however. Through this woman, one of Elakti’s two lesser attendants, the news filtered back that Elakti stayed both mad and heavy with child. Other details of her life also, more fluidly, reached the court. How wonders were supposedly performed at wild ceremonies in the hills, huge animals and spirits manifesting. That Elakti had been joined by a band of lawless girls from nearby upland farms, even from the town, females who had been disowned or, alternatively, were thought touched by divine unreason.

It seemed the insane acts at the pavilion did no harm. Elakti, who might have become quite unacceptable in a palace of the Sun Kings, was for the time being permitted to go on in her crazy career.

Last night, as the spy had this morning duly reported to her messenger, there had been another frenzy under the full moon.

The women had caught and killed a deer, not with their bare hands and teeth, as the rumors had it, but with spears, for the girls of the farms often learned hunting perforce. This meat they roasted on a fire in the pine grove by the altar, allocating a raw portion to the goddess Anki.

Then they danced and sang to Amdysos and to Phaidix and pregnant Elakti screeched and jumped, though by now enormous, her black hair whipping over the moon’s face.

All the women, Elakti and the spy included, got drunk.

Also with the wine had been chewed peculiar herbs of the hills, which Elakti’s witch crone recommended. The spy secretly avoided the herbs, pretending to take them or spitting them out. She had informed the Widow-Queen Udrombis that it was undoubtedly these herbs which caused the appearance of huge, snow-white lions, gigantic tarry foxes, for she herself never saw them. The one appearance she had witnessed, she did not mention. To tell of a supernaturally large bird, possibly an eagle, in the winter after Amdysos’s loss, had seemed tactless.

The spy woman came back from her walk with the messenger, and began ordering the preparation of food in the yard kitchen. Presently Elakti’s first shriek cracked through the morning air. Until now Elakti had never screamed by day.

The other slave flew in from the cistern, having broken her jar. About the yard, the uncouth farm sluts sprawled to sleep off their drinking, roused and gaped, from round peasant faces and greasy disordered tangles.

The spy turned contemptuously, but Elakti screamed again.

Phelia, Elakti’s Maiden, hurried into the yard. She was vivid and horrified, as she had been all winter and much of the spring.

“Where is the old woman?” demanded Phelia of the spy.

“I don’t know, lady.”

“Find her. Find her at once. The mistress is in labor.”

They found the crone gathering her dubious simples along the hill, and brought her back.

She cackled and prepared a brew. Elakti gulped it and slept for an hour. Then she woke up and resumed her screams. Under the sheet her belly heaved, like a tempest in a sail.

Phelia stood dithering, twisting her hands.

“She should be at Oceaxis. The child’s too early. The last birth was difficult.”

The spy, seeing her chance, piped up. “Shall I take a mule and ride down, lady? The roads are all passable now. I could be there by evening.”

Phelia sent her. In this way, the spy missed a good deal.

Through the day, Elakti screamed on, and kicked the sheet in buffets. Her face was deadly yellow or bright red, and sweat streamed from her. She cursed with words Phelia shuddered at, but had heard from her before. She snatched Phelia’s hand, which had tried to rearrange her pillows, and bit it.

Clouds rolled in across the Sun, amethyst, and languid slaty plum. From the upper hills there was no sound beyond the crisping of the crickets. Everything, but they, stayed dumb before Elakti’s strident agony.

“Why must I suffer this? Why must a woman suffer this? The gods the gods—I piss on the cruelty of the gods—” railed Elakti, and then she screamed for Amdysos, wailing how he would have held her, bracing her effort with his strong arms. Unlike, apparently, the first time.

“He’s behind the moon, he lives there, in the dark. My husband the Dead Sun—who will return—look down and pity me.’”

Phelia bound her bitten hand, from which the blood streamed. She had not eaten the magic herbs either. Like the spy she always pretended. Phelia had seen none of the sorcerous creatures who circled the altar.

Now, observing Elakti, writhing and tumbling on a birthing couch unfit for any royal woman, Phelia clasped her heart in a new fear. For the thing in her mistress’s belly churned and bulged, bestial, abnormal and obscure. It had no look of anything natural. Indeed, it never had, for Elakti’s burgeoning shape had always seemed grotesque.

It could not get out this being, whatever it was. Would it work its escape with claws?

In the coils of an incredible fright, Phelia rushed from the room.

Above, the cruel gods might have heard Elakti’s vituperation. Lightning split the clouds, the thunder crashed and guttered through the hills. No rain fell.

Nevertheless, Phelia was quite wrong. The child would soon be born.

The spear-bride-wife Elakti leaned on the chaos of her bloody, rumpled bed. The room was in silence. No one made a noise. And she, cleared of all her screams, pointed at the crone with one blunt wooden finger.

“What have you done?”

“I? Done? Done nothing.”

“Those herbs—some wickedness.”

“No, lady. Done nothing.”

“You shall be skinned alive. My girls will see to it.”

The crone crouched low. She hid her face in her robe. Elakti’s women whispered, and were still.

Elakti sank back. She shut her eyes.

“They punish me. Always. Amdysos, cry to the gods, for me.”

The room was full of shadows, also turning the color of cinnamon as the storm lapped up all light. Even the bloodstains had lost their cheerful red.

In one corner, a rough stone image of Bandri, goddess of birth, smuggled there by one of Elakti’s girls, watched indifferently. She seemed to say, All things may occur. Even this.

“How have I deserved it? What shall I do?” Elakti asked, but of no one in the room.

The crone crackled, “Child comes too fast. Too eager.”

The child lay on the bed. It was wrapped in a piece of cloth. But still, despite Phelia’s care, it was partly visible.

No one looked at the child.

No one spoke.

Outside, the swarthy lightning flashed, the clouds were mute black with nightfall, in the dying afternoon.

How are we to live?

There is no sorrow unknown to men.

Birth sends us to a house of shadows,

And at the end, to Night.