UNDER THE SLOPES OF AIRIS, herders had pastured their flocks. They came up also from Ipyra now, to the thick summer grazing, and mingled mostly freely with the folk of northern Akhemony. Now and then there might be a spat, boys fighting over a patch of clover for their goats, or a ram that had mounted another man’s sheep. These things were put right usually before the Sun had set. It was becoming another lush summer, after quenching, full rains. There was more than enough for all.
By afternoon, the land stretched beneath the sky’s warm bowl, showing slight movement, and purring with bees. Below, the fields were flushing to their green, and above, the trees that circled the lower mountain, had gained a green as dense in color as blood. The crag rose, cut clean as if carved from marble. Birds flashed down, and upwards. Sheep lazily grazed, or lay under the trees with thinking, watching faces.
A boy, having eaten ewe’s cheese and raisins, sat with his pipe, making a tune. If he had any awareness beyond the tune, his flock, he did not know it. And so, as a shambling unhuman figure crested the slope, he viewed it a moment with apathy.
The bright wall of the sky was at its back, undimmed by any cloud. The shape of the figure seemed all jagged edges, darkened, flattened, and uncouth, having no purpose in the day.
The sheep nearby under the tree started, and got up, and came trotting towards their keeper. Rising then in his turn, the boy let out a warning yell. Though he had barely seen what this thing was, the hair now was lifting on his neck. He wanted others, the men from farther off, with the herd dogs.
But the figure stopped quite some way from the boy. It had the semblance of a head, and used it, to look about, as if only just now had it evolved there, from some other country that was not like this one. Some country perhaps that had no sky, and no land.
“Keep back!” shrilly shouted the boy, standing in the white huddle of the sheep.
The figure in fact had not come on. Now it turned its head, such as the head was, in the direction of the boy. There sounded a breath like a punctured bellows. “What say?”
It, too, could speak in a fashion. The voice on the wheeze of breath was rough, breaking across the words—oddly just as the boy’s voice sometimes broke at the approach of manhood.
“Keep back—keep off—”
“Is danger?” asked the thing, which possibly was a man. And then, gently, in those tones of crunched shale, “Don’t fear, will help.”
At this moment two men dashed down from the higher pastures, with three big dogs. There were boar in the upper woods, and sometimes lions, one took no chances with a frightened call. Knives glinted. One man rushed straight at the creature, and the dogs bounded with him. All pulled up three feet or four feet away. But it was the dogs, bred for their fight, and who had tackled wolves only this winter gone, who went down belly-flat, showing their teeth, ears back, growling, not moving one inch closer.
“Came over the hill—” cried the boy.
The man who had got close to the figure backed off and the dogs backed off with him, slow, like stones moving.
“What are you?” shouted the man. “What do you want?”
The figure looked, as it seemed, aimlessly now. But the nearer man saw it had only one eye, a muddy watered black in a bloodshot and terrible, staring, bulging eyeball. Where the other eye had been was a pit, like the crater of a burned-out volcano.
Braver, and impatient the second man strode up and struck the intruder across the head. The creature reeled, and then peculiarly whipped back. Taking hold of its aggressor as he tried another blow, it had him at once over, and down on the ground. The thing stood above him, watching him with the repulsive eye. Even at this the dogs did not fly for its throat.
But it made no further attack, not pressing its advantage. The man presently struggled up, and limped aside.
“Leave it be,” he gasped, no longer so valiant.
The thing, unmoved, gazed up now at the sky. It would have been easy enough, as the herders said after, to have flung one of the knives, or a rock, at its big shape and so bring it down. But some new mood had begun to come over them, more than anger, or superstitious unease. Like the dogs at last, they felt themselves in the presence of something—not only uncanny, but crucial— something that had been seared by gods.
“Where this place?” the creature finally asked.
The men stupidly shook their heads. The boy shook away the sheep. The dogs lay belly-flat, and one, the mightiest, had urinated from fear. This sharp smell mixed with the stink of the holy and unholy figure, which other stench later they named as being like the reek of a butchered fowl-yard.
In a few moments more, the thing shambled away, as it had come, but going on now towards the south, and downwards in the direction of the fields and farms. When it was almost out of sight among the violet shadow of the lower woods, the men thought they had better follow it. There were women about below at their usual domestic chores, and cattle, and the vines.
They did not ask themselves why they had not answered the thing that this was Airis, under the mountain. It did not occur to them that they too, in that instant, had mislaid the country, and were lost, as if in alien climes.
Only seventy men made up the garrison now, in the Sword House at Airis.
It was a fort of ochre-plastered stone, built up into the rock. On one side, the sweep over to Ipyra, and its jade green river, from which came recently, of course, only friends. On the other side, rustic Akhemony.
The young captain had been bored enough that day, holding the fort while others went off hunting. King Klyton did not come up much to Airis now. He preferred to keep the summer months for battle training, or for inspections of his outer empire. Even Udrombis the Widow had not yet visited this year. Later there would be the Sun Race and games, but that was not yet. The captain found Airis fairly dull.
When he heard the commotion below, he went down because it was his duty to look into such matters. He expected the same as it had been the last two times, a feud between drunken farmers, an Ipyran sheep-stealer.
“Well?” he said, walking into the courtyard. There were two peasants who had ridden here pell-mell on ponies, animals and men steaming from their speed.
The soldiers looked bemused, or tickled.
“They say, sir, some—ah—demon has walked into the town.”
“A demon? That’s quaint. Of what sort?”
One of the soldiers laughed.
The shaggier of the peasants said firmly, “He came down from the hills under the mountain. Just appeared there in the meadows—”
“In a smoke-cloud?”
The peasant scowled. “It was like he’d come from the Ipyran country, but no one saw him come.”
“That’s a fact,” said the captain amiably. “None of us saw anyone cross, since herders yesterday.”
“He’s no demon. Not like a man, but—a man,” went on the peasant, brazening it out.
The captain nodded, and made a brisk gesture to a couple of sniggering soldiers to be quiet. The captain had recalled suddenly that, although he himself had seen the light in Oceaxis, and fought in the ranks under such Suns as Amdysos and Adargon, the captain’s granddad, whom he had liked, was not much different from this hairy peasant here. “What trouble is he giving you?”
“We’re afraid,” said the peasant simply.
That sobered the captain properly.
He could see this man was no fool, nor a coward, he had the courage-badge of scars on his arm, plainly written by a mountain leopard. Despite his garments and sweat, he stood straight and had not lost his temper, or his nerve, before the soldiers’ mockery.
“Why fear?” asked the captain.
“His body is broken all out of shape, but he still walks. His teeth are broken, and his nails long, like the dead. He’s strong. He threw Gol down, and that’s the first Gol was ever bested. The dogs and other beasts act oddly around him. Even the cocks started to crow when he came up, as they do for fire or an earthshake.”
“All right, a cripple. What’s he done?”
“He went up the path to the gate of the summer palace. There’s no guard there now, only the steward, and a dozen men, and slave women. He stood about there, then sat down.”
The captain said quietly, “Someone should feed the poor devil. Give him some slops and beer, and send him on his way.”
“One did,” said the talking peasant. He stood more straight with his news. “We’d put the women inside the houses, but old Thistle came out, and brought him a dish of softened bread in honey. He took it and sat looking at it with his one eye, which has no proper upper lid. He didn’t eat, and Thistle—someone’s trying to pull her off, but she struggles and squeals. And then she kneels down in the road and sobs.”
“And you should be kinder to your women.”
“It wasn’t that, sir. She was crying over and over about the Sun—”
“Wait. I don’t understand you.”
“I mean a Sun Prince, sir. One of King Akreon’s sons.”
Heat, then chill, passed over the captain’s shoulders and spine like swiftly tossed water. The yard was silent as a grave, and high up he heard a hawk scream in the iris of the light-clear sky. A hawk, but not an eagle.
“You tell me she was confused,” was all he said.
“Sir, she was crying like a little child. She’s old, but not silly. She sees to the womens’ ailments, and they get well.”
“So she was calling for protection from the Sun House. And you came here.”
“Sir, she wasn’t calling for help. She said this one—this thing—the broke ruin that slouched there over the honey-bread—she called him Amdysos, son of Akreon. The Sun come back from under the world.”
He left fifty-five men at the fort, and left them alert. Astonished, the captain had even had some notion Ipyra, forgetting her radiant marriage to Akhemony, had somehow staged these antics to draw off watch from the pass.
With fourteen of the soldiers, therefore, and the two peasants trailing after on their weary ponies, the captain went down to see for himself.
As they went, the road through the fields curled round above the descent to the lower plains, where the games were held, and so to the caves under the mountain where was run the Sun Race. The captain reined in, and gazed to that direction. Among his men, other heads were turning.
The spot was defined somberly in the end of afternoon, for the sun was going over beyond the mountain, the Daystar cool as a zircon. A pool of bright shadow, the Stadium lay below, where the chariots paraded before each Race. The holed rocks above were dark, mysterious, and shifting, against the mountain and the deepening sky. There was a marker on the mountainside, quite new. The gold showed redly at this hour. King Klyton had had it put there. Before the Race, a boy would go and pour wine over the mark. That was all.
Who could ever forget why. Who could ever forget that Race not two years gone? Even if you had not witnessed the event, in your mind you had seen it, not once, but many times.
The golden charioteer, the gem-work of team and chariot, bursting free of the caves—the thunderhead of gold which axed down to meet them—
And then the sparkling vision borne high, the prince of men caught in the talons of the god—a Sun god who was also the god of Death.
Some of the soldiers were right now making religious signs, ward signs against the power of Thon. If a man had escaped from Thon, would the god not be enraged? But no one came back from there, save in songs and stories.
When they reached the town, the Sun was still fingering sidelong the red columns of the palace. As they climbed up the road to it, they found the people from the deserted streets, the women at the crowd’s edges, children clinging in their skirts.
He was standing in the street now, with the palace looming up into the rock behind him, its face the color of warm curds, and the pillars bleeding. Even up there, were a handful of people on the terrace, servants from the house, and probably more were looking from the old war tower.
A crone—who must be Thistle—sat peacefully now in the dust.
The captain realized he had been avoiding looking at the crippled man. Now he must do so.
Though he stood upright, his posture was of one asleep, the torso slumped forward rather, over the legs, which were of unequal lengths, the arms hanging, also unequally, and the head drooping, with what there was of its hair frayed forward over the face.
A soldier cursed softly. Another let out a bitten-up cry. The captain did not know if this man believed he saw anything recognizable before him, or if he cried only at the idea of such a recognition.
One must be unheated and still, as water in a deep well. One must take one’s time, over this.
Yes, it was, or had been, a man. And he had been badly injured. You might see, in the outer lands, sometimes, victims of private or ritual tortures, who ended in such an approximate form. But generally they did not survive long enough to be gaped at.
The right leg was a good five inches more in length than the left, the right arm about the same in relation to the left arm. From the look, both had been broken in several places, and healed without benefit of doctors, or any assistant correction. The gods only knew how.
The body, where it showed through a patchwork of ragged stuff, that might well be ancient skins, was sunburned like mahogany, and demonstrated scars so awesome and vile, one did not expect to see them, save occasionally in war, and then not normally all together. The ribs had evidently been broken, mostly on the left side. There the body was like a stairway of loose jagged stones, just covered by the thinnest flesh. The feet were splayed and strange. The hands had lost fingers.
The scalp was all scars, a ridged tumulous of white and purple and black, with, in one area, a little space that seemed even to reveal the grim nudity of the skull-plate. From this medley hung out irregular clumps of hair, very long. The hair was mostly grey, or thin white as skimmed milk. But here and there, as sometimes happened in the old, there ran a skein of bronzed gold, shining and harsh with strength.
In his own chest, the heart turned, and thudded against the captain’s windpipe. He coughed, composed himself, and dismounted.
Reaching the crone in the dust, the captain leaned down. “Has he hurt you?”
“Oh no,” she said. She looked sad but not insane. “He wouldn’t.” “You can’t know that, mother.”
“I can. He was always fair.”
The captain did not argue. She was senile and fragile, and he, a young man with his wits.
He went forward, and only stopped three sword lengths from the cripple.
Here the horrible body-stink was enough to bring up his gorge. But the wheezing breath was worse, hitting him in gusts.
Controlled, and ready, the captain spoke.
“Old man, I won’t harm you. Look up.”
For some reason, he did not think for an instant the crippled man would understand speech. Even though the peasants had also assured the captain that the prodigy uttered.
But the torn and rendered head tipped slowly back, and the shoulders, unequal as all else, partly straightened.
The captain saw the watered black eye, like scummy ink, shorn of its lid, fixed on him. He saw the decayed mask of the face, itself burnt almost black by a pitiless Sun. The nose had bent. Only the mouth, though the shade of dried blood, was whole over the wreckage of the teeth.
The eye looked, and seemed to take in the armor, the metal and gilt, the white plume, the undrawn sword. The captain was aware, as seldom in battle, he had begun to tremble.
A breath went in at the puce lips, down through the twisted throat to the ladder of twisted ribs, and the rib-pierced lungs.
“Like,” said the crippled man, “an eagle.”
And the captain felt the thongs of his sinews loosen. Felt the hand of a god push him. He was on his knees. Behind him came the sharp rattle of his troop, the low wails and whispers of the crowd.
Somehow the captain spoke.
“It is Amdysos.”
Daibi sat on the earth floor, grinding nuts with the smaller stone.
The farm was, in a way, hers now. She was mistress. Her old father, who had been god-struck two winters back, and had the use only of his right side, and no use at all for his brain, she tended dutifully. But his decline had left her free to run over the hills to Elakti’s band. She had been entranced by the talk of magical elements, but also by liberty, women on their own without the tyranny of men, only the dead god—Amdysos—to watch out for.
Daibi had spent all her former life in service to men. In the beginning there had been her father, and his two sons. But the sons were lost, one in a war, and one at a boar hunt under Koi. Meanwhile, Daibi watched her mother dwindle, ground away by hard work, like the very corn and nuts of the farm. The other daughters had been married off, but Daibi was the youngest, and finally evaded wedlock with some rough upland neighbor, being left to serve her rough father instead.
A month after his stroke, she was away with Elakti’s girls. Mostly she had stayed with them, only returning to the farm when she must. At such times one or two went with her, to assist, strong girls like herself, with round arms and tawny hair.
The father would have had something to say, if he had kept the use of his eyes and his speech. But then.
Grinding the pine nuts to flour now, Daibi sang very low under her breath. She had been made conscious of the shadow side of the magic, and did not want to attract worse fortune.
The morning mantled warm on her shoulders, and there was the aroma of the yellow peaches ripening over the door. But beyond the sun-rinsed yard, where the sacred marroi rose up, stem the color of red copper in its sheaf of vivid leaves, she could see the wall of the barn. And now and then, above the cluck of her hens, she would hear a funny little cry. The hens had become used to the noise, and resumed laying long before summer came again. But the half-wild cats, and the dog, avoided the barn. The dog sometimes snarled at anyone who came from there.
* * *
The previous summer, that spy Udrombis had positioned in Elakti’s makeshift household, had hurried back to the Lakesea, her pretext to fetch a physician for Elakti’s labor. So intent was the spy on her role as messenger that she left well before the birth.
At Oceaxis, she was astounded and filled with trepidation, on being hurried by a back way into the apartments of her patron. Although the spy had guessed her information was passed at once to the Widow-Consort, the spy had cautiously pretended ignorance. Never before had she met a true Queen face to face.
The storm which had wracked the hills was also here. Through high windows shone a deadly lilac glare, winged by darkness, cracked by flame. The room seemed lofty as a mountain cave, and in it there burned only the garnet mouths of a pair of braziers. To the tempo of the storm, filmy draperies crackled as if with sparks, the reflections and shades of furniture jostled. All the atoms of the chamber seemed alive and sinisterely changeable.
But Udrombis stood nearly immobile, her pale gown of hazel silk massed about her, her jewels gleaming like ropes and bunches of eyes.
“Tell me what you wish to say,” said Udrombis.
The spy wished to say nothing. She had given her message below. But she said it again.
“The spear-bride Elakti is in labor. It’s a difficult birth, and long.”
“I believe the birth of her other child cost her much effort.”
“Yes, madam. They said it was dangerous. And this is worse.”
“And you were sent for a court physician.”
“Yes, madam. The Lady Phelia sent me. I’d offered to go.”
“You were diligent.” Udrombis turned, and the brazier light drew her profile in fire. She seemed made of polished granite. She said, quietly, looking aside, as if from some curious courtesy, “You will await the physician. But there will be a delay. If you discuss with another this delay, you will die. Do you believe me?”
The spy hoped the storm and the darkness hid her, knew they did not. “Yes, Great Queen.”
“Expect nothing. The gods favor modesty. Good things will come to you.”
Outside the room, the spy’s bowel loosened, but luckily only let out a loud clap of gas. In the empty passage it echoed, ribald token of her mortal terror, to the glassy walls of godlike Kings.
She scurried away, and waited on Udrombis’s physician. She waited through the stormy night, the unsettled morning, until midday.
The ride back to the pavilion in the hills took some while, also. Not all wrung out, the storm wavered and boomed. The physician, an elderly and irascible man, journeyed in his slow litter, with two guardsmen, and a boy assistant on a mule. Rainless clouds cast gouts of purple, lightning burst behind trees. And the mule shied constantly, and once threw the boy, so they had to stop and pick him up. Perhaps it had been elected for its temperament.
A wine-red Sun was setting, dragging the storm away with it at last down into the Sea of Sleep: only then did they reach Elakti’s pavilion.
The spy, becoming an attendant again, slipped from her mount, and raced up the hill ahead of the rest. She must now appear eager and distraught. But in the fluctuating madder Sunfall, the pavilion seemed odd to her, morosely unwelcoming, threatening even, a ghost-place she had betrayed, and so aroused its curse.
Near the wall, the spy lessened her advance. She walked. There were no sounds but the herds of the storm wind, following the Sun downwards.
She went round, and entered the building through its kitchen yard. No one was there. And now night ascended, and filled the court nearly black. There were no lamps burning in the pavilion.
Frightened despite herself—since, after Udrombis, ordinary fright seemed redundant—the spy hesitated, for the physician and the guard to come up.
So, in the end, they entered together, by a door which hung open.
The rooms chimed hollowly with their voices, abrupt questions and calls. Then torches were lit, and, by the flare the pavilion was found to be deserted. They had gone in a rush. Here a lamp had burned, which had gone out. Here a bowl of soiled water stood. Here, there, crocks had fallen and been smashed. Clothes and hairpins lay scattered on the floor. Where the main bedplace was, they all saw plainly enough that something had gone on, a birth—or a murder. The mattress was daubed with blood. And twitching his nose, the physician declared he could scent the unique smells of parturition.
But nothing remained of Elakti or her child, nor of her women, nor the girls who had formed her lawless train. Only the remnants they had left behind, sudden, abandoned, spoke for them, as if of some eruptive flight from merciless enemies.
* * *
Through the months of summer then, as the Ipyran Queen Calistra traveled with her lord, the Sun King Klyton, men rode about the hills, from Oceaxis to Koi, from Koi over towards Melmia, or north to Airis.
These men were from the guard of Udrombis. They wore her lion badge in gold and silver. She had some rights, as a grandmother if nothing else, to search out the pregnant wife of her last son, Amdysos.
Up the hill, down to the valley, through the ripe green woods, along the fields, that even then were turning to the triple harvest home that marked that first year of a new King. The mobs of workers, little men and women on the apron of Akhemony, showed no fear of these lustrous guards. No wrong had been done. It was a time of reward and plenty.
So, there were no lies. No unwisdoms. And still, nothing was found.
The day came that five men, brilliant with inlaid bronze, the plumes floating scarlet and snow from their crests, rode up into the poor farmland somewhat out towards Mt. Koi. They saw how beautiful the farm had become, even this wretched hovel, its walls glowing like a rouged cheek, and hung with rosy peaches and grapes, and the red marroi, the tree of the Sun god, tall in its fans of heavy leaves, near the yard.
Their mood was not unkind. When the girl came out, they laughed and let her bring them wine cold from a pitcher, with butter stirred in. They picked the peaches off the wall, favoring her, and one of the men leaned over and gave the girl’s own peaches a squeeze. They were in a friendly mood.
She said, when they asked, she was called Daibi which they knew was for the goddess of carnal love. She glanced down when they whistled. But they showed they meant nothing too much, not dismounting.
Her father, she said, was old and struck stone-side. Some of her female kin helped her with the farm.
One of the soldiers said, as they had said to others, on the chance. “Is that a baby crying?”
Her brows were straight, her mouth serene.
“No. There’s a queer bird sometimes, sounds like that.”
Because they must, they searched the farm, the big lower room with its earth floor and grinding stones in three sizes, and the area for the animals in winter. They looked at the two upper rooms. In one, the sick man dozed, in the second were only the wide mattress, and a loom, hung with cobwebs—but she would not have much time, and Daibi might practice her weaving at a kinswoman’s house.
The two barns were empty, only the tethered cow by one, seeming not quite comfortable, as if she did not like the barn door. But the cow had a calf. Perhaps she was wary of strangers.
Of the little earthen cellar Daibi did not inform them, nor the trapdoor into it, over which stood the largest of the grindstones.
She and the others had sworn an oath to Elakti in the pavilion. Her spirits had told her she must stay hidden. And most of the girls had seen these spirits, telling her.
And so the guard rode away, not knowing that down there, in the cellar, all that while, Elakti had sat, her Sun-baked face flat as a slate. Holding in her lap the thing which sometimes did cry, but which the soldiers had not heard. The thing which, to Daibi’s mind, was not, anyway, a crying baby at all.
As she was scraping off the last of the flour into the jar, Daibi felt a shadow fall between her and the Sunlit door. She looked, and Phelia was there, the court Maiden, who normally seemed by turns nervous or haughty. Now she was both at once.
“My lady says you’re to come to the barn.”
Daibi stoppered the jar and stood up, brushing off her big hands on her coarse skirt. During the more-than-a-year Phelia had been here, her garments, too, had gone for rags. The Maiden now wore homespun with badly cobbled darns.
They crossed the yard through the scurry of the chickens. Against the Sun, the leaves of the marroi looked russet as plums, and the stem like blood-filled bronze. The barn was very ordinary, beyond it. Daibi’s mother had said the sacred tree brought the farm luck, but rather than any luck at all, it appeared to have brought Elakti here, magical and possibly accursed, for how else had she borne—
Daibi saw the women were coming out of the barn, as if to meet her. As last year wore, the band of girls had dwindled; Daibi had wondered if any had blabbed. Both slaves had run away, too, and probably been taken by wolves. And one attendant had gone to Oceaxis before the birth, and not returned in time to join their flight. All in all, Elakti was now served by twenty-one women.
Elakti moved out first. She wore a cheese-colored linen dress that Daibi’s mother had had for holidays. On her bare arms shone still the bracelets of a royal wife, colcai, silver. She had lost only one of her coral earrings.
The crone, bent over from two winters lived casually, came out pressed close to her queen. The crone’s mouth was turned down. She smacked her lips in unvoiced irritation over almost toothless gums. But she still found the herbs for Elakti’s court. The herbs that helped to bring the magic.
Daibi had stopped, and Phelia beside her. Elakti had her awful face, the face she wore when something was coming. And Daibi’s hair shifted at the roots.
Where was the child? It was often drugged with a posset, left in a hollow of straw in the barn. When they danced, up the hill under the moon, the child lay beer-stunned on a wolf pelt, fighting slowly with the fur.
Daibi even now, even so near, did not want to think about the child.
Elakti raised her arm. She had been thin before, now she had got plumper on the heavy food, the breads and porridges of an upland farm.
She pointed, away beyond the barn, towards the pasture where the few sheep grazed.
“See—see—fallen from sky!”
And the crone jabbered, dancing like a rheumaticky doll.
Into those fattening porridges went the herbs. But Daibi forgot this. A veil seemed lifted from her eyes.
There, on the rim of the shorn grass, something writhed and tumbled—claws and wings—
“The eagle,” Elakti cried. “Fighting with a leopard.”
“Eagle,” shrilled the crone. “Eagle with leopard.”
Daibi saw, as did nineteen others. They saw, in various forms, the same picture. A great bird with feathers of yellow flame and soot, that had snatched at a meal too big for it, a mountain leopard like turned cream, spotted, and scored with rents. The hooked black beak opening like two knives against each other, and the crimson oven of the leopard’s mouth. Then as they rolled, one huge paw wrapping speckled velvet round the neck of the thrashing raptor. The snarls and screams in a crescendo, a whirlwind of wings—the crack like a breaking sword—
Phelia with her hands pushed to her lips, shuddered and averted her eyes. Avoiding the herbal porridge, she had grown thinner for Elakti’s bloom. Devoid of the crone’s simples, Phelia saw merely this, one of the farm cats with a dead pigeon in its jaws.
“I’ve waited on this sign,” said Elakti, moving like a shade among them, touching them, a wrist, a shoulder. “The eagle must give up its prey. The victim rises in triumph. The Sun comes from under the world, reborn.”
Phelia perceived, beside herself, only one who was mostly sane: the crone. She squinted sidelong, muttering carefully, “Triumph, triumph, born again.”
Elakti now stood before Phelia like a clammy hot nightmare given flesh. To Phelia, Elakti said, boldly, gladly, “We will wash ourselves and our hair. We’ll make garlands. We’ll go down. Now is the time. My lord and husband Amdysos has returned.”
It seemed unlikely they could mount him on a horse, so no one tried. Instead the captain walked at his side, guiding him a little.
The captain felt embarrassed at his self-appointed task. This was a prince. More, since the thought could not be put aside, this was a high King, the Great Sun.
Over two hours it took them, to gain the shrine. By then it was evening. A bow of new moon was strung far up on a peach sky. The pines and marroi of the groves were darkening. When they reached the willows by the healing stream, their charge walked immediately away from them—until then he had been docile as a sleepy child. Amdysos, Sun King of Akhemony, bent over the horse trough, and using mouth and hands, gulped up great draughts of water.
One of the soldiers let out a sort of praying oath.
“Shut your noise,” said the captain.
He waited until Amdysos had finished his drink before leading him on, about the shrine, to the buildings down the slope.
Someone had been sent ahead. The patriach of the shrine was waiting. He was dressed in white, as all the priests here were, palms hennaed, the gold Sun symbol on his head. But he was a big, grey, oldish man. The insignia of his rank weighed on him, easily to be seen. The captain had noted him about, two or three times, at priestly works.
He sat frowning as the captain stood, and Amdysos stood, the ruined blackened face tilted a fraction, to clear the one eye of the lighted lamps.
“This—you say—”
“Sir. I know him. I served under Amdysos, a year or so back.”
“But I knew him too,” said the Chief Priest, without emphasis. And then, “My lord—will you come closer, and sit here with me?” Amdysos did not take a step. “Does he not recall his name and titles—”
“Sir,” the captain said, “we have to remember what came to him.”
They stayed quiet, remembering.
“This seems—incredible. Almost two years.”
The captain said, flatly, thinking of war reports made to civilians, “It carried him high up. It would have a nest—a stinking nest of twigs and boughs, full of old bones and rotted pieces of meat. And it would have attacked him. Somehow he killed it—he had a knife from the chariot. The God knows how long that went on, how long he had to wait for the chance. Then he must get down from the height—some sulphur mountain perhaps. He was torn and bludgeoned, and after, maybe he fell. No one to help. He’ll have wandered. Memory at last brought him this way. But his brain still rings to the ordeal. He’ll be better presently, among his own kind.”
“Presently—his own kind—”
“I mean the court, sir. He’s King. After Akreon and Glardor, before any other,”
Then wine was offered, a dish of mixed fruits, grapes, apples; pomegranates, and a section of honeycomb. There had been bees in the shrine some months, apparently, then they went away, leaving the comb behind them like a gift of thanks. But when the captain took a little, and tasted it, the honey was stiff, and sour in flavor.
They brought in other priests, who had formerly spoken with Amdysos son of Akreon. A couple said that the Arteptan, Torca, should have been there, he had sometimes spent time with Amdysos, as with the King—with Klyton, that was.
Some turned pale and said they saw it was Amdysos. Others peered, and one even lifted up the lamp, and held it to the arrival’s flinching, skewing face, as if looking at a painted wall.
“I protest, sir,” said the captain.
The Chief Priest told the other one to desist. It was this other priest who said, “It might well be the prince, captain. What’s left of him. If such a thing were possible.
“It was a bird of giant size,” said the patriach. “There are feathers here, which it sloughed. Enormous.”
“If the god willed he survive,” said the captain, “it would happen. And it has.”
A silence dropped.
Amdysos spoke. “I am near the Sun.”
The Chief Priest rose, and his chair screeked on the floor, going backwards.
“My lord,” said the captain, gently, urgently, to the wreck that stood, foul and unreasonable, beside him, “my lord, speak to us. Tell us what we must know.”
But Amdysos lowered his head. His one eye went horribly opaque. It occurred to the captain he must have to sleep with it open, like a snake.
That night, Amdysos was taken by the priests, bathed and salved. They were used to the disturbed and unwell, and he gave them, anyway, no trouble. They investigated his wounds, both old and new. Hie had been hurt much as the captain had deduced—breakages, punctures—possibly exactly as had been described. There was another thing. Under the crippled man’s arms, and in the hair of his loins, was found a rash, which the priests treated, and claimed they could cure. It had been found before, they said, mostly among traders who sold, or kept as pets, such large birds as owls, or eagles.
“But there is another thing,” the Chief Priest said to the captain. “I can hardly keep it secret. Anyone can see how he is—whoever—whatever—he is.”
“What thing?”
“The ribs were crushed, and ripped inward. The left lung is healed, but severely damaged. It won’t ask very much to kill him. In any event, his life can hardly be long.”
The captain said, “All the more reason then, for going quickly to Oceaxis.”
The escort the captain organized was made up of thirty men. No longer did he think much of a plot in Ipyra. He did not even—curiously, he was not a fool—think how this must seem, what he did, in the reign of another King.
Amdysos rode in another litter, he was royal but wounded. Sometimes he soiled it; not always. Sometimes he would get out while it still moved, squat, for both functions, at the roadside.
How long had he lain in the hell of the nest? The captain did ponder this, as he rode along the sunny, pleasant route to the Lakesea. Some while, maybe, for the eagle might have wished to store this succulent, muscular young meat. Months, off and on? Perhaps he had fought it off a hundred times, and still been himself. But in the end, winning his race, himself no more.
He stank of it still, of the nest of the monster bird. How much would it require, of water, perfume, time, to wash him clean of the taint?
But also, it was his proof.
Perhaps then, he would reek until men acclaimed him.
And in Akhemony, among his own, his mind could be made whole.
The captain recollected, Amdysos, seventeen or so, Sun-born, flawless, a man, the sound material of Kingship.
At noon they halted. Among the roadside woods they ate some food. Amdysos did not stir from the litter. It was as well—he ate like—like an eagle—tearing, stuffing his mouth of snapped fangs—the men were not talkative. The horses were restive. Birds—small ones—had flown from the trees in sprays, and not come back. The woods were now empty, here, of birdsong.
During the afternoon of this concluding cumbersome lengthy journey, the green woods broke above, and sunlight ran down towards them, laughing and calling—local girls crowned with ivy and flowers, Sun white and brazen on their arms and molten on their ale-brown hair. One darker one ran first. She was not so toothsome. She had, you saw too, a long, plate-like face, and two wide, wet-black eyes.
But it was she, this one, who stood in the road, holding up her arms in the gesture of a primitive priestess, to halt them. Authority incarnate.
The captain had never seen Elakti, or certainly never seen her near enough to identify. But he knew the name, and that she had been missing.
He could see too that there were now others up the incline, men and women of the farms and villages, watching, waiting on her word. Not everyone had disapproved of her mad career. Foremost stood a slender and aristocratic woman, and an old hag. The woman carried some object, closely wrapped, and he thought it must be a baby, yet surely it was too bundled up for that—and the woman seemed not to like holding it much … an animal?
“He is with you!” the woman on the road sang out. “I am Elakti, his wife. And he, the Dead Sun.”
Then the captain understood her rights, even accepted who she must be. And something in him cringed; not only a crippled and stinking lunatic to escort, but now this insane hussy, and all to be kept with honor. For that very reason, disciplined, he got off his horse and went directly to her.
“Not dead, madam. Alive.”
“Risen,” she said.
He put her up on his horse. Followed now by the other women, some barefoot, all garlanded, conceivably drunk, and in tatters, and by the staring folk from the hills, the captain and his soldiers went on towards pristine Oceaxis, capital of Kings.
I see her distinctly, Queen Calistra. Only for a moment. She has risen from the bed where the pink cat’s tongue dawn has flicked her awake. White limbs, slender firmness, waist circled with light, her high white breasts with their two sweets, like peony buds. The shower of golden hair, down, down to her thighs, sun-silvered on one side—the silver feet into which she has eased—with all the forgetful nonchalance of repeated things. And now she bends to lace them on. Beautiful young girl that I was. Beautiful young crippled girl who has unremembered.
Only a moment. Then I become this being once again. I am Calistra. Great Queen of Akhemony and the Sun Lands, Sun-Consort, Mirror of the Sun, Jewel of the Heavens, wife to Klyton the Great Sun.
The silver feet are laced on. I pace to the side table, and pick up the cup of juice they have put ready. The dog comes, and rubs his white silk on my side.
“Do you miss him too? You should only love me.”
Klyton has been gone a whole night. The training of troops out beyond the town, discussions with his leaders, dreams of foreign conquest … He will be in the King’s Apartment by now. Soon I will see him.
The dog raises himself, putting gentle paws against my thigh. I kiss his head. He licks fruit juice from my fingers.
The shutters were thrown back and between the pillars I could look to the shimmering Lakesea. The water dazzled my eyes. Three gulls circled languidly, then another joined them. I glanced away, and saw their afterimages imprinted on the scroll of poems I was reading.
It was almost noon, and Klyton had not come to me yet. Business of the court and the world detained him. My impatience was heady, hungry for the reparation I would be given.
Some of my women were grouped about the room, rustling and chattering, playing board-games, embroidering. I was so used to them now, I barely noticed them.
I wore white sewn with green. The golden earrings in the shape of kissing birds tapped my cheeks and neck as I leant to the book.
These words meant nothing.
The white dog got up, and turned to stare across the room—Klyton?
But the door opened and my Chief Maiden entered. Her shut-lipped correctness now almost pleased me. At her arrival, the women grew quieter, as they seldom did for me, the Sun Wife. Yet the Chief Maiden had no urgency at all, which indicated this, whatever it was, had nothing to do with my husband.
The Chief Maiden—her name was Hylis—bent to my chair. “Madam, a person has been escorted to the palace. She has begged an audience with you.”
I said, careless, “No, she should plead with Queen Udrombis.”
“Madam, the woman is a priestess, From the Temple of Thon.”
Sinking, the four bright gulls turned black on the sequined sea. Thon’s number was four. I saw at once the four black pillars in place of mine, the bone capitals, and the drearily smoking bowl of ancient bronze.
Coldness sluiced down me, and as I rose, my legs felt leaden, attached by silver shackles to the floor.
“No one must ever leave the temple—”
But I myself had left it, rescued by order of Udrombis, twelve years back. Demonstrably there were special circumstances, on occasion.
“No, madam. But it seems they allowed it. She’s gone blind, has some wasting illness.”
“What does she want with me?”
“She says she was helpful to you and was a favorite of yours at that time—when your mother left you for safekeeping … in the temple.”
It was not that I had any terror or any real premonition. I had been taught superstition along with everything else, here in these palace-houses of Sun and air and light.
But I recalled the old priestess, vaguely enough, like a sort of fleshly ghost. Now, it is a fact, I remember her far better. A dim memory came that she had held me that day when the Heart stopped beating and all things quaked in fear and horror. Afterwards she had given me sweet porridge, and then the soldier came to take me away forever.
Had I thought of her since? I believed I had not. And taken up into the Sun, nothing had been further from my mind than she.
I looked round at the women. “All of you go out.” They obeyed, chattering again, offended, questioning. Perhaps they did not grasp I meant not to be embarrassed before them.
I told Hylis to fetch the woman.
Quite quickly, Hylis returned with her. The priestess was muffled up in her black, but unmasked now. Her eyes had a film over them, and she lent heavily, despite her thinness, on the shoulder of a thinner girl, a child about ten, also, evidently, from Thon’s Temple. As her black sleeve slipped, I saw on the child’s arm, the marks of a rod. And could imagine her back.
That House—that Death in life. I smelled it on them. I was glad that Hylis stood near me, immaculate and scented with perfume.
Using the child for leverage, the old priestess got down on her knees.
“Oh, shining lady, it does me good to find you in your high place. I have dared to entreat a kindness for a kindness. Pardon me.”
I had not recalled her, but even so. I had seen her in the temple, that moment when her mask had slipped. Those twelve years had passed, and she had been elderly then.
Not from arrogance, only from bewilderment, I failed to speak. She filled up the gap like an anxious spring.
“Have you forgotten how I sheltered you, after the terrible hour when the Heart Drum paused at King Akreon’s death?”
Her voice came to me. I knew it suddenly.
“I remember,” I said. “And then you gave me a salty soup to warm me.”
“Yes, yes,” she cried, grinning, clutching the child’s shoulder in a wrenching grip. The child’s uncovered face—should it not have been covered for traveling?—was white and sodden, the eyes downcast, hoping for nothing.
“You were so kind.” I said. “you allowed me to call you in secret by your name, though it was forbidden.”
“Oh yes,” she said, “what else. You were only a poor little scared girl.”
“I regret, I’ve forgotten your name.”
She told me promptly. I forget it now. In her case, I have expunged it.
“Well,” I said.
I watched again in memory, faintly yet surely, her sharp thin shape, poised like a pole, as she made the tiny boy lie down in the snow, while she counted slowly to four hundred
How desolate and shameful it seemed then to me that I recaptured her so completely, because she had been wicked, where the gentle priestess I had almost mislaid. Not quite entirely. I knew this face was not hers. I had never seen this face, for it had never been, till now, unmasked before me. It was porridge not soup, and I was never told any name. The gentle one would not have broken such a taboo, even with me.
“Wait outside now,” I said, “someone will see to you.”
Thinking she had won her prize, she gabbled on, but Hylis made an abrupt gesture and the child began to heft her up.
When they were out of my rooms, I said to Hylis, “Did they come with anyone?”
“One guardsman from the temple.”
“Have someone ask him the price I must pay for that child. Let him be paid the price. Give her into the charge of—” I thought and regained another human thing “—of Nimi. She will stay here, with my women.”
Hylis’s arched brows became octagonal. She did not often show surprise or disapproval.
“And the priestess?”
“She can go where she wishes, providing it is away from here. Whatever she wants and Thon allows.”
Hylis opened her lips. They stayed parted.
I said, “She was a liar. The one who helped me must have died. Udrombis would have this one flogged, but this is better. I’ll give her nothing, not even a punishment.”
My Chief Maiden drew her dignity back about herself like a fold of silk.
“Very well, madam.”
Cruelty summons cruelty, save in the weakest or the most strong.
Before that day there seemed to have been no rancor left in me, but now I had been made to glimpse again those wounds of early pain which never quite mend.
Thon’s Temple, bizarrely, had reckoned to please me, giving up to me this one friend. Well, I had saved the child. That was my answer to Thon, and conversely my gift to the gods of joy and safety.
I did not know they had already turned away their eyes.
As Hylis crossed the chamber, I began to hear a noise. Probably I had heard it already, and not considered it. Hylis, too. She halted and turned back.
“Is that shouting?” I said.
“I don’t know, madam—yes—it might be.”
“A crowd,” I said.
It was like the sound of certain festivals. And yet, not quite that sound. A mass of throats calling, demanding—
I walked on to the terrace. The gardens hid, with their wild arbors, the view of the town and the road. But something seemed to rise beyond them, some quiver in the air, smoke or dust, or maybe that disturbance which sometimes happens before a storm.
“Shall I go and ask, madam?”
How patient Hylis was with me. I instructed her to do so.
I stood then in the center of the room, and I felt as if for the first, its largeness the gleaming rarity of it, that had nothing to do with me. Had I not just been reminded thoroughly of what I was? Cemira, the serpent-beast. Cemira who had gone on the crutches of canes.
The sound was louder, but no more identifiable. Not anger—not fear—but neither gladness, nor praise.
Some momentous thing had occurred, and they had rushed to the palace to bring news of it. Perhaps the perfectly happy are above the sense of unease. I had believed myself perfectly happy, and invulnerable, too. But the shouting, lessening and building, ebbing, swelling, like some chanted song—seemed buzzing upward through the feet of silver, into my vitals and my heart.
I dreaded nothing. Yet my hands trembled a little.
Hylis was gone half of one hour, so the water clock told me. She came back unimpaired, not hurrying, her head held high. On her slim cheeks, the soft powder stared. She was pale. In her hand was a paper. She brought it to me without a word.
Taking it, I thought it was from Klyton. But before all else I saw the Queen-Widow’s seal.
“Udrombis,” I said.
“The Queen’s messenger met me in the passage,” Hylis said.
I read quickly. The words refused their meaning to me—someone had made some error—a crowd of people—I must stay in my apartments.
“Why did you take so long?”
Hylis said, quite trenchantly, “I asked what was the matter. Not from her messenger, who wouldn’t have spoken.”
“What then?”
“Madam, they say a man came from Airis who claimed to be the Sun Prince Amdysos. The soldiers have brought him to Oceaxis. The King has been fetched.”
“That shouting—” I said.
“People from the villages, and some from the town. And some women are there calling out that the Sun has come up from under the world—the ritual call, as you know, madam, at the Dawn Offering. And some of them are saying Amdysos is the High King.”
“How could it be?” I said stupidly.
My white dog followed me as I paced to and fro. Hylis observed me gliding, accustomed to it.
She said, teaching me how to behave, “You should pay no attention, madam. The King will see to it.”
I sat in a chair and the dog moved to me, and put his head on my knee. I took hold of him softly, but not letting go.
Invisible, the shouting grew very rough. Then died choppily away.
Amdysos was dead. Even I had seen it happen. A tremendous mythical Death, supernatural and without chance. Who could come back from Death?
Yet I had had my omen. Thon would let go some.
I sent Hylis out. The scroll of poems had dropped on the floor. Klyton would come, at last, and then I should know it all.
The day was passing. Sometimes I heard the shouting chant come and go. It never now kept up for long. The soldiers must be stopping it.
Refreshment was brought me, though I had requested nothing. I drank some wine but did not touch the food. Later, a slave came to remove the dishes.
I slept a few minutes in a chair, and dreamed I was back at the base of Mt. Koi, going on my canes to drop blood in the noxious summer inner sanctum of Thon. The god reared on his column, but his face was only a skull, like all the skulls spread at his foot. I wondered when he had died, and if any other knew; whether I should speak of it or not.
Later still, Hylis came in with women to dress me for the evening. A gilded cast of light was on the sea, not a single gull.
“What is happening?”
“I can’t learn anything, madam. I did attempt to.” The palace was hushed, not in its usual late afternoon murmuring, fussing tone. Outside the birds sang as always, and flitted over the terrace space. Nothing had upset their kingdom, beyond the stalking of a cat or the passage of a slave.
But with evening came the Sunset Offering, and then the dinner in the Hall. A pang of revitalized blood shot through me. I thought that now I must hear and see. But I did not know what to expect.
Hylis brought me out a gown. It sparkled, a sky shade folded with rose red, the veins and tucks petalled by gold spangles. And the necklace of hammered gold, and the coronet of gold made like the spokes of the Sun.
“No, not those.” I said, as if they would scorch me. Hylis said to me quietly, “Queen Udrombis has expressed a preference.”
I was to be garbed then for display, and she had ordered it. One did not go against her, of course.
The women dressed me. On my left arm was clasped a coil of silver and electrum set with one turquoise the size of an ox eye.
As they were finishing my face, there was a flurry at the doors, and feet. Klyton had arrived, I thought, and stood up quickly. But it was not Klyton at all.
Udrombis surveyed me, and nodded her head. In turn, I must look at her. She had gone in mourning since Akreon. I could only recall her in such clothes. Nevertheless, she had not given up her superbity. The robe was of a grey dark almost to black, with borders of silver, and pearls stitched as lilies. Her jewels were the colors of suns and stars. Was she sixty? They said so. Her badger hair had been hidden away complete inside a headress of Artepta, a golden helmet set with chrysolitcs and jet, that had two scaled flaps falling down onto her breasts, each ending in the golden head of a lion with amethyst eyes. She had worn it at his coronation, Klyton’s, and to my coronation and wedding. The weight alone would have made another woman weep. But her eyes were smoothly dry and black as a summer night.
She raised one hand, and all the women flooded away, were gone.
She said, “Don’t ask me what I know, for I know nothing except what I have written to you, and your Hylis has discovered.”
No point in quibbling. Or asking. She would know if any did, and if she did but would not say, it must rest.
I said, “What shall I do, madam?”
“Sensible Calistra. Act as always. Nothing from the ordinary.”
Amdysos had been her son. But oh, one did not wonder if her heart beat.
“One thing,” she said, “show no dismay. Klyton won’t make the Offering. He is detained. Adargon will do it.”
“Yes, madam.”
My own heart, weighing like her helm-crown, wore down through my body, turning all of me to iron.
Then she said, “Once, when I was with Akreon the King, in Uaria, a madman broke through the guard and leapt against him. Akreon slew the man himself, with his own sword. After that we went on to the house where we were to dine. Neither of us spoke of it, either to our host, one of their little lords with a green moustache, or together. The danger wasn’t discussed, and so it withered. Do you understand me, Calistra?”
For a moment I saw her, young then, slight, and more malleable, yet still unbreakable, stronger than a pherom spear.
Now even in her shadow on the floor, some of her jewels glimmered from the gathering sky.
Up the stairs to the East Terrace I climbed, my women behind me. I recalled Ermias, panting as she followed me. Ermias, exiled to her estate. And then I dwelled a second on Kelbalba, who had left the trained girl for my massage, and gone away, saying not much, wishing me well. I had not bothered with it. I was Klyton’s wife.
Tonight, not myself, the steps winded me somewhat. I paused on the landings, before the golden altars of the Sun in his disguises, the horse with chariot, ram and bull, the eagle—yes, the eagle. The boar. Behind me, a Lakesea like melted steel under a sky that kept the savor of brass.
The air was fragrant with flowers, with subtle smokes. I could hear music, a sithra down in the Garden of the Sun. No longer any shouting detectable …
On the East Terrace, the young god presided in his marble marvel, hiding his loins in a Sunburst. Though reverenced at daybreak, a trail of smoke simmered up from some gum left burning there. I had never seen this before, at Sunfall.
There were people on the Terrace, as on the landings. They bowed, greeting me with several of my titles.
Was there tension, like that of the string of the sithra, in their faces, their spines?
I did not offer to the god. She had forbidden anything abnormal. Besides, I felt it once again, and so deeply now, what, after all, was I?
Through the east doors I went, as so many times since my exaltation, a princess, a queen, a woman walking on two feet.
The Hall, with its oval of dark yellow stems, slid by me, the fighting walls of battle, the gigantic lion skull, large as a man’s torso, an animal killed by King Okos in his boyhood. At the Hearth, the god kneeled twice, back to back with himself, black on a heart of fire. Smolders rose up to the waiting Daystars in the ceiling. Old King to Hag, Young King to Maiden. The Kings had eyes, the Queens none. But Mokpor told you this, long ago in my book. Did he inquire if women, then, should be made blind?
I stood on the women’s side of the West Terrace, my girls and Maidens about me. At Hylis’s order, two of them arranged the folds of my gown. Was I blind? I recall not a single face, only the blur of skin and hair and raiment and gems, in the Sun’s ending light.
He was low, the Sun, but not this evening spectacular, Amdysos had been seized by an eagle of gold and thunder, but this Sun would sink merely in drained afterglow. No mass of dyes was on the skyline, where Koi rose, and behind Koi, the phantom of the Mountain of the Heart of Akhemony.
The gongs were sounding in the town, a mile away.
I found I had braced my body and my mind—it was for the shouting to begin again below. But there was nothing other than the gongs. Even the sithra had been set aside.
Like diluted butter, the western sky.
The boy chosen tonight to sing the Sun down, piped up. His voice cracked a little on the first note. This had happened before. He was nervous, but at nothing more than his role. No one responded, and now his voice was pure as the light.
Splendor of leaving,
Beauty of going away,
We stand powerless at the Gate of Night.
I had heard these words on so many, many evenings, as I had often heard the welcoming ode of dawn, brought there with Klyton from our bed, where we had scarcely slumbered.
The words—meant nothing.
Do not forget us, O Greatest God.
Do not forget.
Adargon faultlessly offered to the Sun.
Incense was ignited, a drift of pinpoint lights, the musky steam rising as the pastel Sun sank down. The mild Sunset reminded us that death might be a simple matter.
Klyton came in late to the Hall, with Adargon and some of the other Suns. They were elegantly clothed, jeweled, fresh from the bath, laughing together. It might have been any evening when they had been kept behind on the business of war and Kingship. Save Klyton would have broken off, to make the Offering.
Klyton walked up the Hall. He gestured graciously to me, and to Udrombis, who sat a few feet apart from my own chair, but, no lower.
“Excuse my tardiness, ladies. There was work to do. But now I’m here. The sight of you makes me glad to have hastened.”
A courtly speech, playful, and light.
The laughter in the room was also light, and might be false.
It came to me that perhaps he had not officiated at the Offering because it was deemed ill-augered. To reverence a sinking Sun—as now things stood. My heart beat its slow hard iron, but I smiled and let him take my hand. He leaned down, and muttered in my ear, “Thank the God, not long now till bedtime.” He was warm. His hair had a scent of thyme and myrrh. His lips brushed my cheek, and at the touch my skin crinkled like the sea, tingling at proximity, to be stretched beneath him, and in my loins the twang of desire, out of rhythm with the heavy heart that beat too slowly now to match the Drum on the mountain.
As he walked to the King’s place and sat down, I gazed at him for a scatter of moments, never too long, for even in a wedded Queen, it must be thought forward. He had put on dark red, with a border of gold deer running. He had not overdressed, had not needed to. He was the Great Sun. His presence, his gracious, graceful lightness, were enough. Nothing had disturbed Klyton. Nothing had caused him an instant of doubt.
I had come to know him, not thinking that I did. This was a show, careful and clever, not a chink left open.
As I sampled the meats and conserves, the egg dish with its pretty decorations, the fruits and sugars, complimenting the cooks, drinking from the goblet sparingly—all Udrombis and dead Stabia had taught me—I, too, kept an uncreased surface. I, too, had not experienced one second of unease.
The harper sang. He was a man from Ipyra, with a special song for me about a golden flower that with its fragrance unified two lands. I barely heard it, but he was much applauded, and Klyton gave him a ring set with an emerald. So I sent to him, all across the floor, a yellow flower from the table and my armlet with the turquoise. He bowed very low. But I had seen, even missing most of the words of his song, how his eyes now and then darted. He had heard things, even if we were so inured to them.
Soon I could get up and leave, and presently Udrombis would also. Klyton would stay to drink a while. But Oceaxis knew he cared for me. They knew a King’s work had detained him all today. How natural then, that he should seek early the couch of his young wife.
For myself I did not know if he would then come to me. What he had implied might have no relevance to what he must do.
I thought that, even if he did visit my rooms, he would go first to her, to Udrombis who had made herself his mother.
In my apartments, I had myself prepared for bed, as on every night. Then I sent my women away. Some went to their own beds, some slipped off to others. I had never seen a need to reprimand them.
Hylis was last to depart the bedchamber.
She came and combed out my hair, in exact strokes that had no involvement in them, no interest, and I thought again of Kelbalba and of Ermias.
Hylis was faithful, reliable and without fault. She cared nothing for me. If I had struck her she would have dismissed my act as that of a royal woman in a rage. If I had kissed her, or clasped her hand in terror, she would have soothed me, and going out, forgotten me.
She said, “The King will come tonight, madam.”
For the first, it seemed, I saw how often my servants would give me these personal fragments. When he would be with me, if he would, even, sometimes, the hour he must leave—or that he was already gone.
“Thank you, Hylis. That’s enough.”
She put down the comb, anointed with saffron and myrrh—she had chosen perfumes to match with his. Her eyes were lambent and void as glass. She said, “Shall I see to your shoes, madam?” My shoes—the silver feet. Tactful, impervious Hylis.
“Don’t trouble. Good night, Hylis.”
She bowed and left me.
The lamps burn low. In the chamber with the pool, Gemli stands and palely gleams on the air, again in the water. The turtle is swimming, by night. I see her pass like a dark sigh through Gemli’s reflection. And in their cage the pink doves are nestled, two by two, to sleep. The white dog pads to my side. He stares at what I seem to be staring at, sees nothing in it, goes away back into the outer room.
Just so I gaze on this world of my youth, my Queenship, I Calistra, wife of the Sun, and as the dog did, I see nothing that makes, suddenly, any sense to me. And like the dog I turn away.
The door opens, the outer door. I glimpse the well-lit corridor, and hear men laughing, and then the clank of the sentry’s salute.
My husband enters the room and the door closes. The dog trots up to him. He bends and affectionately, gently, pulls its ears, just as he whispered his promise in mine.
Annotation by the Hand of Dobzah
Sirai stopped at this point, and clapped her hands. I looked at her, I suppose, aghast. She said I was like a child when the storyteller falters. But she did not smile. “Put down now,” she said commandingly, “what the Muhzum is. Yes, here. You see, Dobzah, I don’t want to do it. Say what the Muhzum is.”
And so I dislocate the narrative to describe the Muhzum, which is perhaps anyway familiar to you.
In our land of Pesh, the Muhzum was at first a keepsake of the dead. It was intended to retain a tangible momento. And so into a box would be placed a coil of hair from the corpse, perhaps a fingernail, a small bone even, or a tooth, or perhaps a drop of blood kept in a vial. Even now one may come on an old widow lady who has kept such a box by her, or see the lovely boxes kept in great houses, that are many hundreds of years old, boxes of silver and enamel, or poor little boxes made of wood or parchment, or out of two hollow stones. These keepsakes are mostly crumbled now, when one examines them. One wonders, how many tears are dried up in their dust.
In recent times, although that is before I was born, the Muhzum became also a battle object, a thing of power. By obtaining such trophies from one who had been slain, a warrior could take dominion over the spirit of the deceased, which then could not afflict him after. They have been used too in magic, to summon up the dead. We may know many such stories.
The first Battle-Prince Shajhima took death tokens from the brother-husband of Sirai. But later he gave to her the Muhzum box, of hyacinth enamel that is like the sky.
Sirai says now to write the holy words, Sharash f’lum. She tells me I must also say what is their meaning. I finally protest that in Pesh, we know. But Sirai says, “Pesh is not all the world.” And though, now, surely Pesh is all the world, I will explain. Sharash f’lum is spoken at the end of a prayer and means, So it is through God’s will.
He has flung away the mantle, the tunic, the jewelry, leggings, boots, leather and linen. His groin lifts a fire to me, one shaft of fire from the golden fleece.
Klyton puts me gently on the floor, and keeps one arm under my head. He penetrates me almost at once. But I burst to a blossom of lust—his scent, his skin—his hair rains gold on gold and I am molten and I die. His own cry is low, muffled in my breast.
Soon he releases me, then picks me up and carries me to my bed, pushing aside curtains like thought. Once we are there, he begins again.
A frenzy. Lovers. Stars explode and perish in our bodies or the night. It seems an act of Death, not life. Is Death so wonderful? Or more wonderful—
“What can I tell you that you’d understand, Calistra? It doesn’t make much sense. Yes, a crowd came and they shouted. Some dolt from Airis had brought him, this wreckage of a man. A soldier, a captain—he should have known not to. And that bitch Elakti was there, prancing about with a trail of women, filthy and half out of their minds with some drug. The soldiers dealt with that. Then the temple sent to me. They wanted him, this—thing. Presumably human once. Amdysos,” Klyton said. He gave a short harsh laugh. “He would have been the first to say, Put it out of its misery. It shouldn’t go on living in that state. How do I know this? Well, we had a conversation, once.” He had left the bed. The night was hot, thick with the nocturnal taste of flowers, the peppery scent of sex and skin. He paced back and forth, naked. His strides were swift, and the dog, which had jumped up to keep in step with him, drew away and sat down. “But it isn’t Amdysos. God’s Heart, I’d know. He’s Below. I’ve had—true dreams of him there. I’ll keep him in my brain and thoughts, I’ll do him honor. But that—that—God knows what it is. Some crippled felon set on in a mountain village down in Ipyra. Wandered to Airis. Taken up. Mistaken. A fluke of fortune. Yes, I glimpsed it—him. It wasn’t for me to go and inspect—Anyway, the priests want to and so they can decide. This is beneath the King, or beyond him. And Torca is there—do you remember Torca—of course you do. He was in the Sun Temple on religious business. He has a level head. And he knew Amdysos at least as well as he knew me.”
I said nothing. I had not spoken, nor asked him anything. He had simply begun to tell me.
“The Queen,” he said. Then he said, “I mean, Udrombis. I had to go to her of course, and explain what went on. I’ve never known her fumble. She was magnificent, what I’d expected. That’s good. It’s enough to make her ill, such a tale, this madness. She mourned him and knows him to be dead. I wish Stabia were alive,” the first I had ever heard him say this. “Udrombis loved my mother, and confided in her, I think. It would have been a consolation. She’s like a goddess in metal, but under it—this must make her sick.”
He stopped. He stood in silence, not moving. The dog wagged his plume of tail, then left off. Some minutes passed. I said, softly, “Won’t you lie down, and sleep?”
Why did I say this? Oh, my training, I imagine, as a virtuous and careful wife. As a woman. Adjunct and servitor, the rose upon the way which must have no thorn.
He only said, “Sleep? Yes. Later. Could it be, Calistra, that it is him—are such horrors conceivable? I had my signs, Calistra, portents of pure gold. The God showed me it would all be mine, but not how—would I have tramped up over his back to get it? He would have been the King and I his right hand. That was enough—I thought it was enough. But how could I serve—that—how could the Sun Lands hold together in the grip of that?”
I said then, “Did they ask it of you? To give it over to—Amdysos?”
“He is not Amdysos. If he were, do you think I could resist? But no, the priests took him out of harm’s way, to examine him. By the light of the God. By use of their tricks and sorceries, too, I suspect. They can only reveal he isn’t Amdysos. I’m content with that. Let them do it. Then the crowd can see. Would you believe—enough people for a festival—most of the town it looked to be. Were they so ill-content with me? Yes, those very ones that threw you flowers and brought you lambs. Howling about the curse of the God. As if I—I gave him to the eagle.”
He turned. The lamp fluttered and I saw, lit on the buckle of his belt which he had tossed aside, the eagle of red gold that had been his blazon since he was a boy.
He said, “I dreamed I was an eagle, Calistra. Before the Race. But he forgave me all that. Could I speak openly at his shrine, if he wanted vengeance?”
Klyton sat down on the bed. “My brothers, the princes, how they argued. Only Adargon kept steady. A few others. They can all see some stake in it. It would tear Akhemony apart. Lektos gathered five hundred men and went over to the temple. To guard the doors. But what does that mean? I let him go. To make a rumpus could do worse. Calistra, it wasn’t Amdysos.”
“No,” I said.
He lay down beside me. He said, his eyes hooded and untransparent, “How can I sleep?” And, slept, gone as the dead sometimes are, before the lids of his eyes could close.
I lay next to him, and the dog stole up light as a breeze, and rested along my side. I stroked the dog, but in my mind saw only the temple at Oceaxis, the under-room where I had been taken before my coronation, to swear my oaths to darkness, to the shades, to Thon, for a Queen remains a Queen even in death. They were strange chambers, those, not hideous as Thon’s Temple had been at Koi, yet filled for me with ominous mysteries, and a weird shiver like black wings.
So intrusive was my picture, on that night, of this spot and what went on there, that, even from the landfall of my old age, I can fashion or detect no other.
Ancient stone, pillars ringed by gold and brass, a floor painted with the maps of the Lands Below, into which Tithaxeli flowed, the River of Death. By a leaping brazier like a fever, I saw the priesthood, black clad there, interview the smashed thing from Airis. Even Torca I saw, in my imagined vision intransigently clothed as when first I saw him, in my youth, in leathers, his wooden leg clacking, coal-black, the black beard grown again down to his waist.
But the deduction of the priests I did not conjure. So abruptly it had come, this storm. It was not real, and could alter nothing.
When I woke at Sunrise, Klyton had left me already.
The room was not of great size. A prince among the priests sat to one side, and nearby, with his slate, a scribe. The light was artificial, from tall open lamps, fitful therefore, yet not really misleading. Less so than daylight, for one took more care. The Ipyran had come in, Elakti, in her hill dress. She had danced about, and then one of the brown young women had led her aside, and the guard got both of them out of the room.
Then Torca was able to concentrate upon the man.
Torca had previously asked various things, to none of which had the man—and a King, too, was a man—replied.
His stink was horrible, reminding one of rottenness, even after all the salves and bathing. Torca had breathed it in, grown used to it. It was no worse, probably, than a tent of the wounded in war. These, too, were injuries which would kill. A wonder they had not already done so. In itself, you could say there was something in that.
The man’s one eye had not fixed on, nor followed Torca. It seemed to gaze inward, perhaps did so, to some unnatural sight.
Torca touched the man lightly, on his right arm. Torca was prepared for any reaction, even to having to defend himself.
But only the eye revolved now, and looked full at him. In the eye was a core of lucency. Before it went out.
“Tell me,” said Torca, “about the eagle.”
To his surprise, the man spoke at once.
“Eagle is God.”
“Why is that?”
The man sat back in his chair. Everything was changed. His face was grave and thoughtful. Torca made himself keep very still. The priests had administered herbal tinctures and these too might mislead.
“Up to God we go,” said the man, “on wings. On anvils of fire God beats at us. To smooth us. Then plunged in flesh and blood we are, to cool the fire.”
Torca held his breath. Not from the stink.
The man said, consideringly, “Fell before done.”
After a long wait, Torca asked, “You fell, before the God was done with you?”
But the being had lain back in its chair. It stared upward at the ceiling of the chamber.
Torca felt time washing over him in waves, minutes, hours, days, years. He coaxed now, almost a mother’s tone. He took hold. Once he lifted the inert element of the being into his arms, held it eye to eye.
But its eye was asleep now, perhaps. And it would not speak again.
After many hours—days, years—still would not speak. It had said all it had to say.
These words Torca read again and again from the slate, afraid the scribe had scribbled them wrongly, or that he, Torca, was forgetting.
The higher priest, standing up, spoke to Torca.
“Cease now. It’s enough. We know. We have the other evidence.”
Torca shook himself. Yes. They knew. There was other evidence. But almost, this did not matter. Lord or offal—truth had been given voice. It was truth that counted.
Yet later, waking from brief slumber Torca put all that away. God had sent them to live on earth. And there was enough in hand.
The tall room was as Torca recalled, not from his own experience but the descriptions of others. The Widow-Consort had not given over her apartments to a now High Queen. Udrombis kept her state here, as she had since her thirtieth year, when Akreon first had these rooms furnished and painted for her. Perhaps, although they said he had stayed faithful to her for longer, he had lost some of his heat. In the years before, she had slept always in his bed, having only a tiring room apart.
Torca composed himself. He had put on ordinary dress, not clad himself as a priest. She had summoned him. He wanted to display he did not, with her, have to represent the temple, that he had chosen to. Nor for that matter, was he solely a priest.
She in turn, when she entered—had she delayed for a purpose? Most of what she did had one—was dressed very simply. She wore only one jewel, the circlet of peal that supported the mass of black and white hair. She seemed to acknowledge he would not be impressed by glamours, and that this she knew.
They sat.
She offered him wine. A young woman poured it then left the jug and went away.
Udrombis, even at sixty, reminded him of the basalt lions crouching at her desk. The reality of the world was very real.
“You were thoughtful,” she said, “to attend me so swiftly.”
“Naturally, madam, I’ve come as soon as I was able. I would have sent word to you, in any case. As I have to the Sun, Klyton.”
“The Great Sun,” she said.
Torca put down his cup.
“Yes, madam, the Great Sun, Klyton. But there is this problem.”
“The creature taken to the temple. What are the priests doing there, to be so long over it?”
Torca said, “They’re working to be sure. It would be unforgivable to fail this trial the gods have set us all.”
Her face was very still. In her eyes he saw the tips of swords, and black drops of fatal medicine.
“Madam, I knew Prince Amdysos—as well, that is, as I have known Prince Klyton, before his coronation.”
“Then you can have no doubt,” she said.
“I have none.” He waited. He met her eyes, knowing that she would read him.
“What are you saying?” she asked.
“I have no doubt, madam, or rather, as slight a doubt as is inevitable, given the circumstances. His appearance and condition, the fact,” he paused, searching selected the words that would do, “the fact that his wits are tainted, perhaps only temporarily. We must hope so.”
“Torca, I think you find something in this that makes a joke.”
“No, madam. He is Amdysos. I am as sure as I can be of this, or I wouldn’t burden you. For it must be a burden of great grief and immeasurable distress. To see him so brought down.”
“I haven’t seen him,” she said. “I have never seen this man.” Her face remained still.
“Perhaps you would know him too, better than any other. He is your son.”
Then she rose. She moved away two or three steps. Her robe hissed as it passed over the tiles, like a warning to be wary, but wariness had no part in this, could have none. He, too, got to his feet.
“My son was blessed, mighty, clean, and wise. He would have made a fitting King. But he died.”
“The gods have sent him back to you.”
She turned slowly. His belly grew cold from her gaze, but he held her gaze.
He said, “Pardon my words, great lady. I can’t lie to you. You wouldn’t thank me for it later.”
Then for a second, she put her hand up over her mouth, and through her hand he heard her say the name of her last, lost son … “Amdysos.”
“I have to tell you,” Torca said, “the temple will give voice as I have done. Yes, many of the priests are sceptical. Some have even railed against the others for bringing a deformed man into the holy precincts. But most have seen—”
“How are you certain?” she said. She had no expression now. “How can you be? I was told of his state.”
Again he must pause. The god revealed, but also silenced. “A sword, bent and blackened in a fire, may still bear its insignia, which, if one knew it quite well, can be deciphered. A turn of the head, a way of standing, yes even as now he must stand. There’s an authority about him that comes from old training, and out of history itself. How else did the captain from Airis know him? And then, there are—the things he says. He talks … of an eagle, and of a high place. He speaks of the Sun.”
“A madman!” she cried.
She had lost all her boys. In her youth, also, three male children died in the birthbed, one before she had borne Glardor. Did she see ghosts, the greater, and the smaller, all pulled in with this one? However she appeared, whatever her strength, she was a woman, too. But never had he known or heard of her without control. It was only for a second, as before when she spoke the name. It was enough. She, too—she, too, had a belief in this.
“He has let go the full grasp of language, madam. But his remarks are pertinent, to the miraculous facts.”
“Someone has somehow taught him then,” she said, “how to speak, how to go on.”
“The God,” said Torca.
Udrombis flashed her face aside. She resumed her chair and waved him back into his. He was not quite sorry to sit down. His leg of wood was hurting him as if it gnawed at him to run away.
Torca hauled himself the other way, up on to the firm and rocky ground.
“Madam, allow me to tell you why I know it is the God. Allow me to excuse to you my avowal that this is the Prince Amdysos, your son, who should have become High King.”
“If you can,” she said. She put her arm on the arm of the chair, and rested her chin on this hand. Was it possible she trembled? Her eyes bored into him.
“You recollect the spear-bride Amdysos took, Elakti, the Ipyran.”
“Yes. She vanished in the hills.”
“Elakti bore Amdysos a child, a girl, who I think has been cared for here in the palace. This child was quite normal.”
Udrombis raised her brows. “Yes. An ugly girl, but without other blemish.”
“Elakti was again with child at the time of the Sun Race, in the year Amdysos was lost.”
“She was. But I have said, no one could find her since she ran away. The child may have been born dead, up there.”
“The child survived. She brought it with her when she returned to Oceaxis.
“I heard she had returned. I heard nothing of a child.”
“It is barely that. Barely a child. The women hid it. Only in the Sun Temple did it come to view.”
Udrombis said, “What significance does that have? You imply this child is deformed? Amdysos needed a woman of beauty to make for him fair children.”
“Elakti’s second child, Amdysos’s child—Madam, the child is deformed in the same way that the sire is crippled. Its arms and legs are of unequal length, its body twisted, and though it has both eyes, one is malformed, the same one as is missing in the man. The child is a mirror to the ordeal your son has undergone; the gods have forced the child to stand as proof of it.” Udrombis drew in breath. He heard this. Torca said, “But there is another thing, a difference.” He waited, but she did not speak. He said, “Tufts like feathers grow in places on its body. And it has a head like that of a bird. The head of an eagle. This is no exaggeration, lady. I saw it close. It had the smell of an eagle too, as he has, now. What has happened is a hideous and awful event. But there’s no avoiding it, no chance to escape from it.” He got up again and bowed low. She did not move. “I’ll go from your sight, madam. You will be glad to see me gone.”
“Yes,” she quietly said. “Yes, Torca.”
He went, limping the sweat clinging on his back. But it was not she who had made him afraid.
Akreon.
He had been, as the Great Sun must, without flaw. Amdysos also he had formed in this mould. But if Amdysos truly lived on, half destroyed, the shambling parody of a god, human decay, corrupt and earthly mortality—was it not this which would draw the wrath of heaven upon them? And the House of the Sun, gold and cinnebar, thewed marble with blood of flame, the hearts of lions—besmirched, spoiled. What else could come to it but the plummet to the abyss.
Udrombis went into an inner room. From a chest she took a mantle of dark orange, embroidered by golden thread.
Stabia’s women had woven it, Stabia embroidered it with great skill, despite her then increasing long-sightedness. How old had Amdysos been at that time … nineteen, surely. And Stabia’s son, his friend, his brother, Klyton, seventeen years.
This mantle, Stabia had offered to Udrombis. It was a color she had worn in youth, the female orange that was the handmaiden of a King’s scarlet. She had not divined that Stabia was working this for her, the elaborate stitchwork the softness. “Oh, no, my dear. I’ll never wear such a color again. You know that.” And Stabia, sadly saying, “But, your looks. Always to wear mourning—why not for the Summer Festival?” Udrombis shook her head, and seeing Stabia’s face, took the mantle in her arms. “But no other shall have it. It will lie on my bed in winter. It will remind me of him.” And Stabia had laughed: “He was a King.”
Udrombis took the mantle now and sat by a window, which looked out across her garden, the garden meant for a Sun Queen, that Calistra had not thought to request, and that Udrombis had not thought to render up.
Stabia had eventually begun to feel the pain to be more than pain, to be what killed her. She had nevertheless feigned ignorance, blaming a greedy, aging woman’s poor digestion.
There came the night, some while after Klyton’s crowning, when the royal pair, god and goddess, were away in another land.
“Do you know,” Stabia had said, sitting in that room with the almost matching chairs, where Calistra had sat, and Udrombis had told her she would be Klyton’s Queen, “do you know, I feel so very old tonight. I think I’m near the Gate.”
“Which gate is that?” Udrombis asked her, calmly.
“Oh, Death. What else. But the path’s too hard.” Stabia had lifted up her face, and in the lamplight of that dark, Udrombis saw the memory of Stabia’s girlhood, a Stabia only voluptuous, and lively, her bright eyes and, tangled hair, and how their hands met on the comb, and their lips over the goblet. How long ago, far as some distant shore to which the boats no longer traveled.
“Let me prepare something to help you sleep.”
“And to take off the pain,” said Stabia, astutely. “My Sorceress. Only you can do it. But always it comes back, like a lean black dog with knives for teeth. This morning I cried. I cried just from the pain. Silly old woman.” Stabia had shut her eyes, as if she feared to see pain also in the eyes of her Queen, or else not to see it. “I always thought,” said Stabia in a stubborn small voice, “an hour would come you might need to be rid of me. And I never minded that, because I knew you’d have a deft hand. You’d never make me suffer. And I loved you, I love you so. Don’t be angry, my darling one—I loved you more than him, yes, more than our Sun King, Akreon. Much more.”
Udrombis took her hand. In remembrance now she seemed to take it again, among the folds of the mantle.
“Do you see,” said Stabia, “what I’m asking for?”
Udrombis had risen. She mixed the draught without subterfuge. If Stabia recognized the ingredients she did not say. They were only those which Udrombis had employed before, to kill the pain and bring sleep. In a greater quantity they would end pain and sleep together. As now.
Stabia had accepted the glass of thin, greenish crystal. She kissed the brim, rather than the lips of a lover.
“Thank you.”
“It will take a little while,” Udrombis had said. “The pain goes first, then comes serenity. Time for you to reach your rooms and prepare. To offer and to pray, if you wish. I will pray here for you and make the offering. About two hours. Is it too quick?”
“Of course,” said Stabia, “if I had life. But life’s already stolen. Two hours are exactly all I need.”
Udrombis kissed her forehead, and went on holding her hand as Stabia drank, and said, “It tasted very nice. You know how I like my food.”
Udrombis said, “Your son is King. His children will rule this world.”
Stabia sighed. “May the gods watch over him. And over you. I’ll see you in a hundred years, my Queen. I’ll wait for you then, by Tithaxeli, with a garland of the black roses they say grow there.”
When Stabia had gone, Udrombis offered to the Sun at the altar in her rooms. She gave him a rare incense of Artepta, wine, and drops of her own blood. Into the offering flame, the last she let down a golden collar that Akreon had gifted her. So great was her respect for the woman she had assisted to depart.
And Klyton would rule. His children would rule after him.
Was it then for this they had dwelled here, and suffered and stayed proud and strong?
For a creature like a smashed, brainless bird?
And was it her own—her son—No. No. An apple, a bee, an eagle—these had taken her sons. Phaidix, and the god.
Klyton, too fastidious to go and see, knew this.
And Akhemony, which had feasted on nectar and wine, should, not be made to eat the leavings of the jackal.
That night Crow Claw was seen by many about the palace at Oceaxis. Calistra, the Queen, did not see her.
For several she glided, Crow Claw, across some thoroughfare, vanishing through some wall.
In the wild garden, a slave beheld her at the altar of Phaidix, but Crow Claw stood motionless, and the slave took her only for some lesser noblewoman of the house.
Nimi, the Sun-Consort’s slave, was sitting with the new attendant, the child from Thon’s Temple, for whom Calistra had expressed a fancy. This girl, almost ten years old, was yet mostly dumb and breathless from her sudden flight. With huge eyes she watched as Nimi, accustomed now, set out the figures of an easy game, in her little cubicle, and a dish of delicious sweets.
Then Nimi glanced up, her earrings twinkling, and saw Crow Claw standing in the wall. Indeed, inside, among the painted figures there.
Nimi who was more of a nurturer than a slave, had care for the unnerved child. And so she did not shriek. Nimi too had now and then heard tell of a deceased wisewoman of the palace, who wore crow black and rich gems.
Crow Claw’s face was neither benign or malignant. But in her hand she held a narrow alabaster vessel, and upending it, poured out a stream of fiery embers to the floor.
Nimi, not unaware of symbols, recognized the sequence of a death.
Then Crow Claw smiled at her and said. “It’s nothing, girl. After, is everything.”
With this she faded, as a shadow fades with the coming of the moon.
Nimi looked away, and seeing the little Thon child two years her junior, had turned and seen and was frightened—despite or because of her origins—Nimi said. “She’s only a guardian of the house. It’s all right. She often goes about. You’ll get used to her. Now, will you play yellow or red?”
Night lay always inside the hill. Above, the three tiers of the temple, white and hot with color, stretched to the glittering chimney that by day enticed the Sun. But in the rock beneath, as in the sea beneath the world, was darkness.
Calistra had rarely heard of the Precinct of Night. It was a secretive place. In the sumptuous euphoria of her coronation and marriage, it had enfolded and left her like a cloud.
Those that saw the guarded litter pass, imagined some woman of the palace went through the town. Those that noticed the litter borne up towards the temple paid some attention, for armed men stood about the terraces now and a Sun Prince, Lektos, son of Akreon by a Daystar of Akhemony, kept the main doors. But the litter and its guards were muffled and had no device. Maybe the young Queen had sent someone, or the Widow had sent another.
There had been some confusion and noise in the town a day or so before, when the rumor spread. Dead Amdysos had returned. Women had danced and screamed, throwing flowers upward to the Sun. Soldiers dispelled the women and the crowd. There had been three women they took away. They must have been peasants, from their clothes. One carried a bundle that seemed alive and made a hoarse, mewing sound—some animal perhaps, meant for sacrifice.
The town of Oceaxis was uneasy. From Sunrise the Sun had beaten on it, and at the wharfs the fish market began to stink even before noon. A Sunset, thunder-red, lit by flickerings over towards Mt. Koi, ushered in a night like smothered velvet, smeared with misty stars.
Inside the temple hill, Night was also close and airless, and set with uncanny stars, but it had a roof and walls of stone.
Lektos, standing in the upper temple, before the altar, had called aside his men. A woman alone did not much alarm him, until he saw who it was.
He wore full armor, as if for a battle, and the sword had been drawn, gleaming, in his hand. He bowed. He knew, she had never thought much of him, but he was not privy to her other thought, that she might need to have Lektos dealt with now. Udrombis’s spies had told her, he was not quite content, less jealous of Klyton’s Kingship, than eager for action. Lektos was happiest in times of strife. But he knew to be cautious of her.
She had put on her almost-black, and at her throat blazed the necklace of fabulous diamonds, the Seven Daystars. There were rubies of three shades on her hands, rose and purple and crimson. Her hair was roped with gold. All this the litter had obscured, but now the lamps of the temple showed it off. Near by, the enormous altar under the O of the fire chimney, dwarfed Lektos to a shiny toy.
“I regret you felt obliged to come here, madam.”
“Please,” she said, “don’t trouble yourself.”
Brushed aside, he bridled up like a girl overlooked in her best dress. He had been this too, had he, in Ipyra, going against Nexor?
“Why are you here, lady?”
“This is between myself and the priests. I won’t rob you of more of your time.”
She sailed by him, and the priests came and took her away. Leaving him biting his lip and wondering. He would have said to her, as he had to Klyton in the palace, that he was here to keep safe the honor of the temple, to prevent riotous mobs arriving. At no single moment had Lektos so far claimed the man-thing which had been brought to Oceaxis, was anything much. And yet, if pressed, passionately Lektos would have declared that, if the man were indeed Amdysos, the sword of Lektos was ready drawn, to defend his inalienable rights.
That Udrombis had not bothered to question him and so receive such answers, demonstrated she already knew them quite well, and thought them irrelevant.
Udrombis trod down into the black Precinct. Behind her the great door thudded to, but this did not unnerve her. She was not easily upset, had never been. Sixty years had taught her, too, that most omens are nothing, or intended for others.
The stairway ran down into the hill, lighted at intervals by brazen bull’s heads that spouted fire from nostrils, jaws. The bull was the Sun creature that linked the Sun to the earth. Once the solar god had been driven underground to fight with this bull, which was both himself and his foe, the deity in two aspects, of patron and of ravisher.
The pair of escorting priests kept at Udrombis’s side. They were masked in bronze, in the faces of old men.
Under the earth the Sun went, and the old. Udrombis moved fluidly. She did not have the stiffness nor the tread of an aging woman.
At the stairfoot, the Precinct of Night opened, chamber upon chamber, circumvented and enmeshed by numerous passages, slopes and steps. It was a labyrinth, not quite impenetrable to those accustomed to it but to any other a wilderness. There must always be a guide.
In the third chamber, vast squat pillars held up the black-stained roof. From black beams hung the fretted lamps of Artepta and Oriali, letting fall pieces of light like silver coins.
A black-robed priest was waiting. He bowed to her as Queen, and she to him. He was not masked, being a keeper of this place, his features nondescript, yet banked with priestly power.
“I greet you, once Mirror of the Sun, Wife-Widow and Mother of Kings. Your messenger informed us you wish to regard him, the man who is your son.”
“Who is claimed to be,” she corrected.
“Great lady. The testing is done. Though not as you recall, this is Amdysos.”
Torca, now this one. Soon all Akhemony would hear it. And that toy warrior in the temple above, pale, inflammable Lektos.
She had been driven here, as the Sun was driven, to meet an enemy who was—perhaps—part of herself. For she dreaded it might be a fact, as Torca had told her. This thing—Amdysos. The parody, the crumbled effigy.
She meant that it should be put to death quite soon. She would have herself the power to see to it, without defacing any other god. And if it were the remnant of her son she was to kill, she was determined now to know her sin. How else could she wrestle with it? How else be absolved?
Udrombis said, “Then you have decided. I have yet to do so.” She had served a King. These priests were only men. “But let me see him, certainly.” And the priest bowed to her once more.
She sensed conspiracy among them, but it was the plot of those who thought themselves right. Torca had written to Klyton. She guessed Klyton had refused to come here, look for himself, and this might well be fear, not aesthetics. She could forgive Klyton this. He had wished to retain the other picture of his friend. There had been times, too, when she had assisted Akreon, sparing him. A King must not bear all.
Given this creature’s physical condition, what she had been told of it, not only by Torca, it would be simple enough to remove—though all the priesthood, all the little Lektoses, stood against her. It was the woman god, Phaidix, who had made shadows.
They walked on through the labyrinth. Udrombis made no special note of the way. She did not need to. Some priest would guide her back to the great stair.
And she saw no portent either in her descent to the Underworld, which this domain symbolized, her descent that anticipated a going up again.
Actually she recognized the vaulted passage, the swoop of the vast door-mouth and the cavern of chamber beyond. She had come here once, to make her coronation vows.
Thus, Calistra, too, had seen this room, which was hardly like a room. The walls were lost behind the streamers of rusty smoke, rising out of silvered tripods. Above, the ceiling curved up, held, it seemed, almost randomly by groups of pillars, whose capitals were the heads of horned beasts. In the uneven dome of the ceiling, stars sparkled, hard as daggers. They had been set in constellations resembling those visible in the lands overhead, but thicker, and more luminous, as the dead were said to see them, though far, far below and under ground.
The priesthood of the Precinct was stationed everywhere here. They tended the braziers, and the several altars, all of which dripped black.
The air was very dense, breathless and cloying. It smelled of dark aromatics, and entrails from the immolations.
There was no sound but for the high singing that the ears supplied.
Udrombis stopped when the priest indicated that she should. He spoke low to her, his temple-trained voice resonant and theatrical, not touching her at all.
“I ask, madam, you don’t speak to him, as yet. Recall, in spirit he has come up from the country prefigured here. Therefore, he rests. There is some way to go towards the light.”
“Very well,” she said. She was impatient, but did not reveal it.
He went in front of her now, and led her on, and she saw there was a curtain, a sparse silvery net, which went gliding up. What was then displayed did check her.
A travesty. In a tall, ebony chair, a man was sitting. And at his side, in a chair of ivory, a woman. Who held on her lap a child.
The red-grey light, the coins from the lamps, the blast of the torches, gave them over strangely to be seen. But they were like the murals of Kings. Friezes that showed Kings, with their Consorts and foremost heirs. Just so Akreon had been depicted, and she beside him, Udrombis, holding the infant Glardor.
She was affronted, but she said and did nothing.
The priest said to her, “You may go to that marker on the floor, madam. The golden line.”
She thought how arrogant they were, and that their power was too big. If Akreon had lived, this one would not dare say any of this. But if Akreon had lived, there would be no need. Or Glardor even. Or Pherox. Or … Amdysos.
Was it Amdysos in the ebony chair?
Udrombis went forward to the golden chain they had stretched across the black marble of the floor. She was perhaps eight sword lengths from the group of King, Consort, heir. She focused her eyes, which were acute, upon them.
Who had put them out like this? Was it for her sake? No, surely not, some part of the ritual they had conducted.
It was Elakti, the spear-wife, the insane woman, who had taken the place of the Consort. She wore a sable gown in keeping with the Precinct, and a ring of creamy stones held off her swarthy hair. Her eyes were large and brightly mirror-blind; some drug had been given her. The child was wrapped close in white. The silver border of the cloth sank heavily in, over its face. It sat, or maybe slept. Udrombis could not make out the horrible deformities Torca had spoken of. But the child was of no importance. Neither Elakti. As with the man, when needful, it would not be so taxing to be rid of them. If Torca had not lied, they were an offence upon the earth.
Udrombis turned her eyes to the man who took the place of the King.
She had made certain of the rest, before she did so, not from reluctance or dread, but in order she could dismiss everything else from her mind.
What did she see?
Seated, he did not look very unusual. They must have cleaned him, calmed him, drugged him too, no doubt. His hands lay on the arms of the chair, and it was not particularly apparent that they were unmatched. The legs, one foot supported on a footstool, gave a similar effect of the normal. His head drooped a fraction. But he was not disgraceful. Not even unregal, but like an actor taking the part of a king. A small king, of course. Not the Great Sun.
The face was raddled, and as she studied it, through the freckle of the lamps, where the torch fire did not reach, gradually she made out the eye which had gone, and the dirty white leer of the other eye, shorn of a lid.
In repose, the face was unfrightful, but sad. A poor creature, definitely mortal, but brought down, and with a broken nose.
It was not Amdysos. Her womb had not carried it. Whatever woman had brought it forth, it had not been of the glorious seed of Akreon.
But then—they were chanting, and nearby a gust of fire brushed up. All lights, all shadows altered. And for one moment she saw—she saw— a face she knew—a face of flame and gold, of judgment. And tenderness.
She had made a sound. The priest turned to her. But next second there came another noise, across the distance.
The child was wriggling, as young children do. It was struggling. And suddenly the mother, mad Elakti, had let it go.
Straight to the floor it dropped, the child, and—not human, unhurt—righted itself at once, as an insect might. As it did so the shawl of white and silver unraveled from it.
Udrombis stood, imperious. She gazed, not flinching, at the demon-beast which had somehow grown in Elakti’s curdled belly.
It was the priest who drew away.
The demon child began hopping forward. Hopping—yes, like an ungainly bird better at flight. But it had no wings, only the two stubby and unequal arms.
Its legs were skewed. The head—the head was held forward also, pointing at Udrombis. The nose, if a nose it was, slanted downwards, and the chin angled steeply up. A beak. Between, a sort of squashed, lipless mouth, that now, again, let out a high, hoarse, meowing screech, and a black tongue like a worm.
One eye was a slit, a slash of costive yellow. The other stared. Wide open, round, seeming lidless too, the color of a baked egg that burned.
The skull was flat. Something grew on it. Fur, feathers—
As it hopped on and on, Udrombis did not move.
It hopped right up to her, and with a hand like a wooden claw, took fierce, almost pleading hold of her skirt.
“Well,” she said clearly, “what do you want?”
All her days since she had been a Queen, others had done, mostly, what she required of them. Where not, she had dealt with it. And always she had been guarded. That day the assassin leapt upon Akreon in Uaria, a circle of ten men had instantly thronged around her.
But now the priesthood hung back, either in amazement or simple slowness, because their time was now different from her time, her time and that of the demon imp which was an eagle.
And grasping her skirt in its claws, it climbed, it raced up the stone figure of Udrombis. Before she could push it away or hurl it from her, it had reached her waist, her breast.
And then it stared up precisely into her, eyes, and in the stare was all the unreasonableness of utter chaos.
As the claws went into her, they lurched it upward again, and it was face to face with her. Udrombis made an attempt at last to strike it down. But it was fixed, fixed in her flesh. She screamed spontaneously yet belatedly from pain, and then the claws thrashed up.
Some of the priests sprang forward now. Before they could reach her, the demon had torn her open. Amid a pandemonium of pummeling, ripping, flailing—her eyes vanished, her hair seemed to explode—blood spurted and hanks of gold-plated black rained down on carmine roots.
Udrombis wore a butcher’s apron. Her face was a mask unlike any other, a torrent of red. This turned here and there, noiseless, sightless, seeking. But she fell heavily, the demon still attached, still busy. As the running priests surrounded her, the demon jumped aside. It darted out its tongue. And the chamber paused. It was so little, there among the sprawl of limbs and silk and sprinkled pearls, only the size of a child not much more than a year old.
However, Phaidix’s shadows must have reached for it. It slid between robed legs and was reeled off into nothingness.
Udrombis knew she must push off the agony and blindness, and rise. But Crow Claw was there, the old witch from the palace at Oceaxis. Udrombis remembered the vision of the eagle. After all, it had returned for her.
She was angry. She was not prepared. But Crow Claw had always been insolent.
The pain wafted to a distance. Lifting from it, she saw the pain lying on a floor as dark as a River by night.
The priests stood over the body, knowing it only by its dress, what remained of the hair, the well-kept hands glittering with crimson blood and rubies.
Once more, events begin with a sound. It is the cry of grief common in Akhemony. I had heard it when Pherox was killed in Sirma, though with Glardor’s death I do not recapture it at all. Now it is loud and immediate, and the walls of the palace throb like a lamplit shell.
Presently, Hylis came in.
Her face was dusted white. She bowed.
“The news is terrible, Great Queen.” I waited, suspended. She said. “Udrombis the Widow-Consort, is dead.”
This was surely impossible. How many others must have reacted as I did? I shook my head. But I said, “When?”
“At the temple. Something unspeakable occurred.” Hylis made a sign against evil or wrath. She said. “A creature—tore away her face.”
I thought she meant the monster supposed to be Udrombis’s son. But I could not believe in her death, so colossal her presence and her status had been. And so the manner of her death was itself a myth.
Something made me dispatch Hylis to Klyton’s rooms. I had been taught long ago, by the squeaky priest, that even I did not go to the King without first sending my courier.
But Hylis came back and said Klyton was not there. He had gone at once to the temple.
I visualized his courteous regrets at the death of Stabia, but Udrombis was perhaps much more to him.
The wailing was dying off. They did not keep to it long, here, unlike Ipyra.
I sent Hylis to her bed.
The night was nearing its cusp, when it passes over into morning. I had been sitting in my retiring gown, but now I threw it off, and dressed myself again, not calling in the women, who would sob and chitter, their eyes glaring on me to see what I would do.
It seemed I must be ready.
The white dog followed me about. Finally I sat and took his head between my hands, but caressing him my mind was working oddly, as if before a journey, when things must be prepared.
After the dinner, Klyton had left the Hall early, and he was in his rooms, the King’s Apartment. Perhaps a strange moment to describe them, but to me the image is intrusive. The walls were plastered the purest white, with white marble, and pillars of red marble that had Sun-ray tops of gold. On the walls were depictions of the Sun god hunting, the gold leopards and albino lions leaping joyfully to be speared. Around the ceiling were painted patterns in thick purple. In the floor was the mosaic of a procession of the god. The bed was of marroi wood inlaid with nacre, and the hangings were the Sunburnt yellow of apricots, the bedcover the purple-red of the flesh of grapes. What supported the hangings were six white marble horses, the height of two men together, carved rearing. There were other rooms for reception and bathing, and for study, with books and scrolls on shelves from the floor to the roof. But I remember this bedroom. I had slept with him in it now and then, and the horses had watched with unbridled mouths over our lovemaking. A lamp large as a six-year-old child hung from the ceiling. It was pure gold over a frame of pherom, and when it was refilled with oil., three slaves were needed to bring it down and raise it on its chain. I know it hangs there no longer. I saw it drop.
Akreon had not used these rooms in his last years. Perhaps uncharacteristically, Glardor, when in Oceaxis, had taken them. They came to Klyton with their paint touched up, everything fresh and in order.
At the far end of the bedroom was a screen of pierced sea-ivory. Behind this stood the shrine Klyton had made for his brother, Amdysos.
The garland from the Hall, tamarind and ormis flowers, was on Klyton’s head still; he was a little flushed by the wine.
He had made an offering to Amdysos with a priest to assist him, pouring shavings of a scented resin, an exquisite bird with tarnished feathers letting go its blood.
The priest made no comment upon the living possibility of Amdysos. When he was gone, Klyton stayed, talking to his friend.
The oil was low in the wonderful lamp and he had called no one to refill it. The flame at the shrine hung still and bright. The doors of the shrine were thrown back, and Amdysos gravely smiled and gleamed, his wings outspread.
“I did give you those,” Klyton murmured. “The wings of the eagle. Do you remember, in Ipyra, I shot an eagle and dedicated it to you? What have I done wrong? I had my omens—the Sun, the cloud like a hand. The dream when you spoke to me. You don’t do that now. Have I offended you? What did you want me to do, sit by and let Nexor play at being a King? I don’t believe you grudge me this. Then why has this—this cretin been sent against me? For the sake of the God, Amdysos, why did that idiot at Airis think this was you? And that bitch Elakti, that you loathed, with a child so deformed, and in such a way—it makes a mockery of your death. A mockery, Amdysos. Give me some sign. Come in a dream if you won’t speak here. I’ve asked you to. I’ve begged you. What must she think, your mother, Udrombis. It must tear out her heart, all this. And there should be some method to be rid of it all, something quite easy. But as things stand—” Klyton raised his voice. “What are you meaning? That you’ve nothing to say to me? That would be like you, turning your back on me. Why do you think we quarreled that bloody day? Your silence, your stubbornness. Not now, Amdysos. Give me a sign—”
There came the crash of a fist upon the outer doors.
Klyton turned with a curse and left the shrine standing open, the sweet smoke going up. A slave met him at a doorway.
To the news, Klyton listened. Reaching up, he took off the garland, and let it go. To the slave he said only, “Get out.”
From beyond the closed doors they heard his roar. They had never known at any other time, in triumph, in anger, in war even, Klyton to give out such a sound.
Presently, he came like a flung stone through all the doors. He shouted for an escort of fifty men. Some of the younger slaves were crying in terror, at Klyton’s rage, at Udrombis’s death—not from any love, but as if the world had given way. An old slave man came and spoke quietly to them. At any other time, Klyton would have turned to him—“Thank you, Sarnom.”
Klyton whirled them all off with violent gestures. He grasped a mantle round himself and buckled on his sword. As his hand met the pommel, a carnelian incised with an eagle, he gave a laugh. But his face was as they had never been shown it. It had no mind behind it, only this fury, and the green eyes were stretched wide, with a kind of blood-lust one sees in animals, as they take their prey.
It was Adargon who came, armed and running, the fifty men gathered ready below.
“My lord—God’s Heart—the Queen-Widow—”
“Yes, I know,” said Klyton, so light it only floated on the boiling surface of him. “They told me.”
“You’re going to the temple.”
“It seems the priests have barred the inner door, the way into the Precinct. And Lektos has let them.
“Lektos,” said Adargon.
They ran down through the palace, which was making now its noises of shock and sorrow and panic.
As they emerged into the court, thunder split the night above.
Klyton tilted back his head. He shouted in a harsh male scream, up into the sky. “Yes! You’ve spoken. Yes.”
Adargon put his hand on Klyton’s arm and Klyton turned, a snarling lunatic. Adargon who also had never beheld Klyton in this shape, faced him solidly. “My lord, don’t let them see. They’ll think hell gapes enough already.”
Klyton’s eyes seemed to give off a shot of fire. Adargon, even Adargon, started. But then they heard the tearing shriek.
They turned and stared, and in the courtyard, men called aloud, while the horses swerved and squealed.
The thing came blazing down, sizzling, and shattered on the paving. Red fire ran like dye and glittered out.
“A thunder-stone—a bolt from heaven—” Adargon blurted.
Klyton’s eyes had cleared somewhat. He was back inside them. “Look. More of them.”
The soldiers and the slaves, the Sun Prince and the King, stood with their heads tipped back, as if at some scenic instruction.
From the thunder-riven dark, the stars had sped away, or else they were dashing down to the earth. A rain of shrieking fires was falling like hail. As they hit the ground they smashed, each a vessel of seething matter that burst. On the palace roof, rattling, glittering. Through the garden trees they rushed. A blow of fire ignited, and there were black silhouettes before a curtain of red. Everywhere, the thunderbolts were cascading. The sky was birthing them. And on and on they came.
Klyton ran to his horse, mounted it, and held it wheeling, neighing, as the groom tumbled away. Seeing this, those who had held back, also mounted up, while their servants ran for cover.
The band of men raced from the palace, a stream of bronze and steel, along the shore road towards the town of Oceaxis, while the rain of fire-coals plunged all about them, lighting their path with kicks of fire, and from the sea crashed waterspouts of the form and heat of smelted swords.
The wild gardens, and the groves that led towards the. sea, were burning. I stood transfixed on my terrace, watching the deluge of the thunderbolts, and seeing the trees flare up to cups of gold. Birds swarmed from the conflagration, black, like bees, on the red cloud of the smoke. They blew between the shards of fire. Their cries and wings sounded like the cries in the palace, and my women’s commotion and rushing. Slaves rushed too, below, with vessels of water, which they spilled in their terror.
The sound—the sound—beyond the screaming and the outcry of the birds—notes like the missiles of a million miniature catapults, the air unseamed—
But down there, twelve years old, I had sat while the women danced. The sky so tranquil that evening, and the lucid sea silken on the shore. And Klyton came to me the first.
The tamarinds cooked with an appetizing smell. The air smelled, too, of metals, and a yeasty fermentation. And of lightning.
I wished the women would die to stop their noise. Where was Hylis? Even the white dog had run away, and in their cage the doves huddled all together, trembling like the firelit leaves.
By the time Klyton and his men reached the town, several houses were on fire there. The streets were full of scurrying slaves, the town guard called out, drays with water-barrels pulled by half-petrified donkeys, men and women who cried and milled about, their heads muffled from the fiery storm. The thunder-stones seemed less, but as Klyton climbed above the town to the Sun Temple, whose building had been begun, it was said, by eagles, Oceaxis spread away like a map, and was a scene of punishment, and nightmare. The ruddy pall of the fires, the smolders, the constant abstracted human movement, one great house that had gone to a pillar of flame, and sent up a tower of pitchy smoke. And through it all, the livid bolts which still intermittantly fell. On the temple hill, the crying sank back to a rumble, but now and then the gongs were beaten in the town, to warn, perhaps of a new conflagration. Beyond the harbor, the sea looked bubbling, and not like water. Klyton turned his face to the temple and rode on. And the pines and cedars, the huge oaks and marroi, draped the town from view.
Lektos had come out and positioned himself at the stairs’ top, on the uppermost terrace. Behind him, the temple burned yellow from the torches and the lamps, and two hundred of his five hundred men, stood in ordered ranks, their shields in front of them. In Lektos’s hand was yet that naked sword.
Klyton dismounted. Adargon and ten others walked behind him up the steps. It was enough. Klyton was the Great Sun.
Lektos, though, did not give way. He waited, the shields at his back.
The smell of smoke was acrid in the groves and on the stair. But the thunderbolts seemed not to have fallen here at all, or if they had, they had done no damage.
Klyton reached the terrace, and Lektos. They faced each other, and Lektos said, “My lord, the Queen-Widow—”
“Yes.” said Klyton. “Why do you think I’m here?”
Lektos faltered, but did not falter sufficiently. He did not shift. And at his back his men were like icons of soldiers, unseeing, shields locked.
Adargon said, “Stand aside, Lektos. The King is here. Can’t you see?”
Lektos said, “My lord the King—the King is behind me. The priests say so. In the temple. The King—is Amdysos.”
Klyton bellowed. His voice smote the trees and rang like a hammer on an anvil. “Your King came up from a pit—your King has killed my mother—your King—Get from the way!”
“Not—not Amdysos,” Lektos warbled, backing a step, firming himself and standing still again, “the child—it rent her and ran off into the passages—they closed the doors to keep it in and hunt it—but it was the instrument of the God—”
“Udrombis!” Klyton bellowed. In a movement like that of some machine, his hand loosed the sword with the eagle in its pommel. In one smooth stroke, he cut the weapon from Lektos’s hand. Lektos was open-mouthed, foolish now. And in the silence they heard again the outcry of the town, and the whistling of another of the bolts falling somewhere near, but below the trees. Klyton said gently, “Move yourself.”
Lektos planted himself more steadfastly.
“Someone shall fetch a pr—”
Klyton’s sword stripped through the light: a flare, a dart of color. It had taken Lektos, who was generally armored, between throat and collarbone, where the throat-piece and helm had been dispensed with. Lektos hiccuped, face splashed with his own blood, and turned slowly around, crashing face-down before his men.
The shield wall disbanded. The soldiers leaned at angles, staring. A young handsome man, with a scarred chin, made one stride forward. He was a son of Lektos’s earliest youth, by a woman of the palace. Neither Klyton nor Adargon knew his name, but Lektos had been reasonably good to him.
He said, blatantly and loudly, “You killed him, but you’re not the King anymore. Amdysos is. Can’t you see all the gods are raging at you, throwing fire down from heaven? They chastised the old witch—” incredibly he meant Udrombis—“for her poisonings and plots. It’s you, Klyton, who must step down.”
And Klyton looked at him, at the sword the boy had drawn and the baleful libertine eyes. Klyton cut sideways now, and took off the hand with the sword, and as this adversary also slumped away, sightless with surprise, the other soldiers on the terrace came trampling forward, swearing and yelling, their eyes not blind at all but bulging with horror and anger.
The world truly gave way. They fought Klyton, there on the terrace. The army of a King, clashing against a King’s sword their own. And others now were pounding through the trees, not knowing who it was they must war with, but knowing it was war.
Adargon dragged Klyton back down the stair, both men hacking away the attack as they went. All but two of their ten were gone. Adargon howled for the rest of the escort, forty men, and as these cleared the area below, forced Klyton towards his horse. “Leave it, my lord—Klyton, leave it—they’re too many and they’re out of their minds—”
Klyton remounted. His face was bloodless and empty. He allowed Adargon to push him from the riot. Those of the escort that could, extricated themselves from Lektos’s battalion in the sacred groves, and galloped after, killing, as they went, men in armor and on foot—who were only shouting to know what had gone on.
All the women had vanished, as if they had felt and taken exception to my fear of their fright. As the gardens by the shore faded to a blackened wasteland, little birds that had flown into the trees beneath my terrace, fluttered anxiously, piping, unable to settle. Slaves called to each other in the gloom. They had not, before, needed lamps, and now everything was dark, even though the cruel moon had risen on the Lakesea. The smoke had veiled her and colored her like a hyacinth. I thought I saw the drawing of the face of Phaidix there, a profile with one indifferent and unlooking eye.
In the room with the pool, the turtle would not come out of her shell. She had ceased to be an animal and become instead a cold slab of onyx. The doves continued to huddle together. I spoke softly to them, but they paid no heed. Did they blame me? To the beast, men seem like gods, able to do and cause so much. Therefore, are not all things in their power? And when the lamp goes out or the plate is bare, or the snow comes, that too must be their fault. I pondered, wandering my hollow rooms, if we then misjudged the gods, who were able to do and cause so much that we could not, and yet perhaps, like us, must sometimes wait helpless on the whim of other, mightier beings.
I had seen a red glow pulse above the hidden town, but that too had died away. The levinbolts had ended. At the edge of my terrace one lay that had burned only for an instant. It was merely a gritty ash now, that would be easy to sweep aside.
A hand scratched on a door. I gave admittance, and one of my women entered. I asked her where Hylis was, and the woman lowered her eyes. “I don’t know, madam, but I was sent to you. They say, keep to your rooms.” This was like before. Perhaps I knew, for what else had I done? “Bring me some juice, and water, please,” I said, for I had drunk dry the pitcher. She bowed and went, and when she had gone, I asked myself who “they” had been, that “sent” her. In any case, she did not come back.
The palace, after the commotion, was now deathly still. I had heard horses once, and men’s voices lifted, but that, too, ceased without explanation.
At last I walked to the outer doors and opened them. The guard there did not turn to look, and he was no man I knew, but then, when did I notice them?
“I wish to send word to the King,” I said.
“Pardon me, madam. I can’t leave my post here. One of your women …”
“My women have disappeared.”
His eyes then slid to me. I was young and a fool, the eyes seemed to say, no other Queen would let herself be abandoned so. And he, for his bad luck, must linger here to guard this imbecile.
“Some have gone away,” he remarked, enigmatic.
The lamps were failing, but another light crept in the corridor. It was the dawn beginning.
I left the guard and moved again into my chambers, to watch the harsh Sun appear, as the cruel moon had done, over the sea which was a lake.
Now I seem to picture those eyes, that face, repeated, the shuffling of their booted feet, between the torchlight and the rising of the Sun. Men urged and tugged away, uneasy at the gods, thinking of the riddle and the death in the temple, and hearing of Klyton’s deeds there. The soldiers of Akhemony, ordered that night to ring the palace round, slipping off in twos or threes, then by two hundreds and three thousands. Glancing back perhaps, to note that high golden roof, the landmark of Oceaxis—See that? The palace.
As the Daystar followed the Sun, both of them wan and soiled from the smokes, the King’s House, perched above the land, hollowed out as I had felt it to be.
An hour after Sunrise, someone came in not knocking, or else knocking so lightly I never heard.
I went into the outer room.
There stood my slave, pretty Nimi, and with her the child from the Temple of Thon, and on a leash they had the white dog, who seeing me, wagged his tail and smiled.
“Lady Calistra.” said Nimi. By this title she nearly always called me, though I had risen to be High Queen. I had never chided her. Had I never felt myself quite Queen enough? “Here we are. We found your dog. Choras caught him, he was afraid. But there was some food in the kitchens.”
Choras, the Thon-child, held up a silver platter they had piled, winningly, with little girl treats, sweets and small fruits, and some wine and milk, and a meat bone in a napkin for my dog.
I saw Choras had been made pretty too. Her black hair was curled, her lips rouged, and in her ears were two tiny colcai rings.
We sat in the inner room, for the terrace looked now out on to desolation. The dog gnawed at the bone without any seemliness. He had been used to having an amber dish. The girls ate their sweets, and I drank some of the wine. Nimi asked after the doves and the turtle. Then she went to see. When she returned, long silver threads of tears were on her face. The doves had escaped through the undone cage, the unwatched door, over the open terrace. They were in the living trees, ruffling and cooing, no longer nervous. The turtle, she said, had died inside her shell. She was so very old, Nimi reminded us, had Kelbalba not said so? And now, maybe she had lived more than she wanted.
But we were young, I not so much older than they, and our leaden dignity of sadness did not last. New iridescent fear rushed quickly in where loss had been.
The guard was gone from my door, so Nimi had already advised me. Soon, another guard arrived, twenty men fully armed, whose leader announced that Klyton would presently be here.
But the smoke-tinctured day yawned on, and Nimi and Choras played a board game on the floor, and I went away in my clothes to sleep on the bed. The white dog pounced up beside me, not to be my guard, but for comfort.
As I lay there dozing, Klyton was pacing out a floor, while Adargon and others watched like gazing blocks of earth.
“I was given this,” Klyton said. “All this.”
But Torca stood before him in the white and gold of the priest, his black beard dividing him, his black lips pressed shut, parting only to say, “My lord, it wasn’t given, but loaned. Now you must give it up.”
“What to? That thing you have in your temple.”
And, “Yes, sir. To the Lord Amdysos.”
And Klyton shouts now. He reiterates, that is not Amdysos.
But Oceaxis is in ferment, and although the men of bronze still ring the palace, still hold the road, the burnt places scream with their own voices, and thousands of men are out on the land, also men of bronze, and with them two thirds of the Sun Princes of Akreon’s line. Lektos lies on a bier with his arms by him, a wronged hero, his son close by. Udrombis’s mutilated cadaver is kept concealed in the Vault of Night.
When Klyton finishes his tirade, his faction—for this is what they have become—observe him with eyes cast sidelong. Eyes that seem to regret he is so young, perhaps a fool, and they have served this imbecile.
He had been like the Sun itself, but now he is a ranting child. The toy was given him. The gods gave it. He will not—not—render it again to the other one, the mysterious and god-reborn, whose rightful thing it is.
“Damn him,” Klyton says. He has left off shouting. His color cools. His beauty is all they perceive, and there is a weird lesson in it, for Amdysos’s beauty was struck from him, and he has been brought back a monster. The gods have chosen what is not the best.
“All right,” Klyton says. “Call the council. I’ll debate it there.”
But like water from a surface of fine polish, the world and its chariot are slipping from him. Udrombis and her cleverness are dead. He seems to hear a rumbling, a whistling and turning in his head, the noise of the town as the firestones smote it.
No, of course he does not think of me. He is alone among his loyal men. His back is to a wall that has been shaken down. Clear as the writing in the book of stone, he sees it all.