Bring Down the Sun

by Judith Tarr

“Then your aunt is wise,” said Erynna. Her eyes darted toward the door, which had long since closed behind the last of the queen’s women. “Are we going in, lady?”

  “In a moment,” said Myrtale. “After you tell me true. Does he want me still? Or am I simply a hook he’ll set in Epiros?”

  Maybe she had been a fool to ask such a thing of a woman she had barely met. But she trusted her instincts, and those told her this stranger would give her an honest answer—whatever else she might do or be.

  Erynna tilted her head slightly. Her lips pursed. She said, “He wants Epiros. He wants everything, that one. He’ll take Greece. If he can, he’ll stretch his hand to Persia. And,” she said, “he wants you. He hasn’t touched another woman since he came back from Samothrace. At night he dreams of you. By day he broods, and when he sees a red-haired woman or a boy with long red hair, he roars like a bull. People say you’ve cast a spell on him.”

  “There was no need,” Myrtale said. She wanted to laugh and clap her hands and dance down the corridor, but she had been studying dignity. She allowed herself a smile and a lightening of her step as she opened the door into the queen’s house.

  * * *

  Arybbas took an unconscionably long time to ponder Philip’s embassy. Lagos seemed content to wait. There was hunting, there was revelry, there were games on the field where Myrtale had so often watched the young men at play.

  She had begun to feel the ways in which her choices had trapped her. As a priestess in the temple she could have escaped to watch the games, but as a princess in the palace she should not sully her eyes with the sight of naked men.

  She had no desire to go back to the temple. She did not even know if Promeneia still lived. She refused to ask or to care.

  She confined herself to the daily round of a royal lady, spun and wove fine crimson wool into a cloak for her husband to be and listened to the singer who had come up from Corinth to explore these wild outlands. In the mornings there were inspections of kitchens and servants’ quarters and the small but airy room where the queen dried herbs and brewed medicines. In the evenings the women dined together apart from the men.

  By the fifth day she had had enough. Troas’ example of unruffled serenity no longer inspired her. Philip’s gifts were a constant reminder of the choices that she wanted to finish making.

  Her new maid was deft and impeccably skilled. Myrtale would have wagered that Erynna liked to chatter, but she maintained a decorous silence. She had the art of patience.

  There was a time to cultivate patience, and a time to declare, Enough. Myrtale finished her day’s stint at the loom, then put on a fresh gown and instructed Erynna to plait her hair. The little snake had outgrown its bag around her neck; she cradled its basket in her lap while the snake explored her arm and, after a moment, coiled around it.

  Erynna was as silent as ever, but her eyes were bright. She moved cautiously around the small and deadly creature.

  Myrtale coaxed the snake back into its basket and laid it carefully in the corner where the sun shone most brightly in the day. As she straightened and turned, she found Erynna close behind her.

  The girl seemed determined to follow wherever she went. Myrtale opened her mouth to order her away, but closed it with the words unspoken. If she was to be a queen, she had to lose her predilection for solitude. No queen was ever alone.

  When Myrtale left the queen’s house, Erynna went with her, as silently attentive as ever.

  * * *

  The games were in their third day, but the king had not yet gone out to officiate. Myrtale found him after some searching, in the courtyard by Achilles’ shrine where the morning sacrifice was long since over. The day’s offerings of fruit and flowers and the bones of a young kid wrapped in fat were wilting or had gone cold, but the king took no notice.

  He was deep in conversation with a figure Myrtale had not seen or wanted to see since she walked away from the temple. At first glance Nikandra was the same as ever: tall and robust in her black robe, with her hair uncovered and her feet bare. Then Myrtale saw how thin her face was; how dark the shadows were beneath her eyes.

  Myrtale nearly turned and stalked back the way she had come. But if she did not confront the king now, it might be days before she could approach him again.

  They had not seen her in the shadow of the colonnade. The morning sun had come in under the roof where the altar was; it would blind them to anything beyond.

  “I can’t delay him much longer,” Arybbas said. “He’ll be wanting an answer—and so will his king.”

  “You know what that answer has to be,” said Nikandra. “If Macedon needs Epiros, it will come begging soon enough. You don’t need to sell our niece to Philip.”

  “He seems honestly to want her,” said Arybbas, “and she wants him. He’s a good age, still young; none of his wives is as well bred as she. It’s a fine match, as the world sees such things.”

  “That is not the world she belongs to. She is meant for other things. Higher things.”

  “We know what she thinks of that,” Arybbas said dryly.

  “Yes, you do know,” said Myrtale.

  It was gratifying to see how they both started and spun. She lifted her chin and fixed them both with a hard stare. “There’s nothing for me here. You know that, uncle. The Mother brought me to him; now he’s sent for me as he promised. What is there to think about, except how soon to send me and with how great a dowry?”

  Nikandra looked ready to spit, but it was Arybbas who said, “The Mother gave you the Mysteries in their fullest strength. But they’re over; he went back to his place as you went back to yours. Here is where you belong, child. If none of the Hymenides is to your liking, we’ll find you another husband.”

  “The Mother has found me one,” Myrtale said. “His ambassador is in the field, waiting for you to judge the games.”

  “Are you sure you want to marry Philip?” Nikandra asked.

  Myrtale’s eyes flashed to her. The first, heated words died unspoken. “I am sure,” she said. She was proud of her calm.

  The arch of Nikandra’s brow made clear how easily she saw through it. “He is a manly man,” she said. “A man’s man, a king among men. He’ll rule the world if he can. Are you strong enough to stand against him?”

  “I’ll stand beside him,” said Myrtale.

  “No woman stands beside such a man. He rules alone. Everyone—woman or man—is subject to his will.”

  “He knows the Mother,” Myrtale said. “He worships Her.”

  “He uses Her as he uses everything: to gain power. I know that kind of man, child. Are you strong enough to withstand him? Truth, now. Are you?”

  “Yes,” Myrtale said. “I am.”

  They shook their heads. They did not believe her.

  To them she was only a child. She would never be more. She was not a woman; above all, she was not the Mother incarnate.

  She could not tell them what she was. The law of the Mysteries forbade her.

  Even for this she would not break that silence. It might not sway them in any case; they were firm in their conviction that she belonged among the sheepfolds and not in the courts of kings.

  She left them to decide her fate, as they thought, between them. They could do as they pleased. And so would she.

  Eleven

  Myrtale could not face the queen’s house just then, however welcome a refuge it had been. The games had taken over the field without: the sound of shouts and cheering echoed in the courtyards.

  It was market day in the town. Myrtale let the crowd take her, drifting in its currents until she found herself outside the wall, hovering on the edge of the sacred grove.

  She had never meant to come here. She turned away, perhaps too abruptly. There was nowhere to go but up: up the mountainside.

  All that while, Erynna had followed without a word. Myrtale veered between resentment and gladness. As she clambered up the steep slope, following a goat-track that seemed determined to find the most d
ifficult way and conquer it, she decided to be glad of the company. If nothing else, Erynna could catch her if she slipped.

  The track doubled and veered, but after a sweating, scrambling and occasionally heart-stopping while, it rose to the summit of the ridge. The vale of Dodona spread below, the long narrow valley hemmed in by mountains with the grove and the walled town and the temple in its heart. Myrtale turned her back on it and lifted her eyes to the sky.

  “Will you bring down the sun again?”

  Erynna’s voice startled her. She had heard it so seldom, she almost did not recognize it.

  “We can draw down the moon,” Erynna said, “but you outdo us all: you bring down the sun.”

  Myrtale’s face must have been blank. Erynna grinned her sharp-toothed grin. “They sheltered you from knowledge, didn’t they? Such strength; such power and glory, all gone to waste. They would mate you with a lapdog and bury you in their mountains.”

  “Tell me what they’re afraid of,” Myrtale said.

  Erynna paused. She seemed slightly taken aback, but then she clapped her hands and spun on the stony height. Myrtale held her breath—the drop to either side was sheer—but Erynna’s feet never touched the edge, though more than once they came close. “You,” she said. “They’re afraid of you. When you were born, there were portents. The sun blazed at midnight, and the stars fell in a fiery rain.”

  “That’s not true,” said Myrtale. “There were no omens at my birth. I’ve seen the records; I know.”

  “Records can be changed,” Erynna said. “Truth can be forgotten. You were born to be a power in the world. Your three priestesses knew. They deliberately turned their backs on it.”

  Myrtale sat on what grass there was. In spite of the sun’s heat, she was cold. “Why? What did they see?”

  Erynna shrugged. “Power in hands other than theirs. The end of their world. They think they can stop it with fear and ignorance. Those are poor weapons at best—and worse when that ignorance turns on all who share in it.”

  “Suppose you tell me what I’m ignorant of.”

  “A world,” Erynna answered. “Have you ever wondered how you brought down the sun?”

  “It was the Mother,” said Myrtale, “working through me.”

  “The Mother is no stronger than Her instruments. Your strength is remarkable.”

  “Strength? For what?”

  “Anything,” Erynna said. “Anything at all.”

  It was testimony to the priestesses’ teaching, or lack thereof, that Myrtale had never thought such things of herself. She was royal born, bred to serve the oracle. When she dreamed, she had dreamed of what she thought were great things: to be queen, to be mother to a king. The rest she had called nightmares: eyes watching, powers lurking, a constant sense of something just beyond the edges of her awareness.

  Erynna was hinting at more. The hunger that had always been in Myrtale, that had driven her to reach higher and step farther than her elders would allow, now had a root and cause. It filled her heart so full she could hardly bear it.

  “What am I?” she demanded of this stranger who seemed so wise. “What am I supposed to be?”

  “What would you like to be?”

  “I don’t know,” Myrtale said. “I was never afraid of anything, but it seems I know nothing. I can read and write Greek, I can recite the poets, I can spin and weave and do fine embroidery. I know how a queen commands her household. I’ve been initiated into Mysteries. A king has asked for my hand. What else is there? What other things can I be?”

  “With such power as you have, lady,” said Erynna, “you can stand face to face with gods. The sun is in your hand, and the moon is your servant. You can put on wings like an eagle and fly, or call to the dead and they will answer.”

  “May I turn men to swine, then, and set trees to dancing with the power of my voice?”

  “Whatever your knowledge allows,” Erynna said.

  “Ah,” said Myrtale. “There’s the flaw in the dream. It’s not all given to me out of what I am. I have to earn it.”

  “Isn’t that true of all things worth having?”

  “I suppose you can teach me,” Myrtale said.

  She meant to mock, but Erynna nodded, as grave as she could ever be. “I came for that. My sisters and my elders chose me, raised and taught me, to teach as much as I know. If you will learn, I have the knowledge to give.”

  Myrtale’s heart beat hard, but her head insisted on facing a colder truth. “You’re not from Macedon. You’re from Thessaly. Where the witches are. Even I have heard of those.”

  “The world thinks it knows us,” said Erynna. “That’s ignorance and fear.”

  “A great deal of fear,” Myrtale said.

  Try as she would, she could not help but shiver with it. Thessaly’s witches had an evil reputation.

  Erynna was wicked enough, with her quick wit and her flashes of knife-edged humor, but Myrtale would not call her evil. Nor was she hideous, as her kind were said to be.

  She might be a trap, and all her words and smiles might be lies. It was possible. But Myrtale was inclined to trust her. What she offered, no one had ever suggested, or hinted that it was possible.

  Myrtale was hungry for it: a hunger that maybe overwhelmed caution, but she told herself she could be wary. She could take the teaching without succumbing to whatever dangers might come with it.

  “I always knew,” Myrtale said slowly, “that I was more than I was allowed to be. But I never imagined that I might be as much as this.”

  “Will you learn, then, lady?” Erynna asked. Her words were cool, but her eyes were intent. She wanted this as much as Myrtale.

  That sharpened Myrtale’s mistrust, but it did not turn her aside. Quite the contrary. “Whatever you have to teach,” she said.

  Erynna grinned and sprang.

  Myrtale crouched, spun—and reached inside herself. It seemed she had all the time there was. She could see how the sun’s rays struck the ground, and how the earth arched its back to receive them.

  She bent the air just so, until the light turned molten and the sun’s arrows made a shining wall around her. It was a beautiful and a simple thing. Surely any child could do it.

  Erynna tumbled backward with a cry. The earth shifted to catch her.

  She lay on the edge of the precipice, all laughter gone from her. Her eyes were open and aware; her breath came light and hard.

  When Myrtale touched her, she flinched. Myrtale pulled her back onto more solid ground. “Don’t do that again,” Myrtale said mildly.

  Erynna shuddered so hard her teeth clacked together. “I … may not have as much to teach you as I thought.”

  “You have everything to teach me,” Myrtale said. “What I did was all instinct. It needs knowledge. Skill. Discipline. I learned that in the temple; it’s none the less true for that the priestesses taught me.”

  Erynna nodded. Her shaking had subsided. “They did train you well, all things considered. And now you know what is in you. What I have to teach, for the most part I can teach wherever we are. But for the first lessons, which are most dangerous, we had best be apart from the world.”

  “For how long?” said Myrtale.

  “As long as necessary,” Erynna answered. “A few days, we can hope.”

  Myrtale looked down into the valley. It seemed as if days had passed, but the sun had barely marked the passage of an hour since she began to ascend the ridge. The games below the palace wall had shifted from footraces to races on horseback. After that they would contest with weapons.

  Men had a ceaseless thirst to be the best—the fastest, the strongest. Women were not supposed to care for that, not in the old world and not in this one.

  Myrtale must not be a woman, then, because she wanted to be more than any woman had ever been, or any man, either. She had everything a woman had, and greatest of all, the power to bear a child. But she had a man’s strength of will, or what was reckoned a man’s in these days.

  Sh
e turned back to Erynna. “Go. Fetch what we’ll need. I’ll wait for you here.”

  Erynna did not ask why Myrtale would not go back into Dodona. She simply nodded and began the steep descent.

  * * *

  Myrtale lay on the top of the world, basking like a snake in the sun. She had gone out of the queen’s house to demand that her uncle give her to the Macedonian king. She still wanted that, but the world had shifted perceptibly.

  She could not be among familiar people or in familiar places until she knew herself again. Nikandra had asked her if she was strong enough to hold her own against Philip. She knew she was—but here against the sky, she knew also that strength alone was not enough.

  Erynna would give her what she needed. No doubt Thessaly would expect something in return. That was always so in this world or any other.

  When the reckoning came, Myrtale would pay it. Maybe not as the Thessalians expected—but that would be as it would be. They were the eyes she had felt on her back all her life, the watchers in the shadows who had followed her wherever she went. They were the reason why the Mother’s priestesses had raised her in ignorance, warded and shielded her so that she knew nothing of what she was.

  They had been biding their time, waiting to slip beneath those walls, hoping to suborn her strength and turn it to their own purposes. That was as clear as the pattern of the games below her and the hawk’s flight above.

  All of them, witches and priestesses alike, had taken her for a fool—as if ignorance and innocence were the same, and stupidity ran side by side with it.

  She smiled. It was not a smile any of them would have been comfortable to see. They needed her, or none would have taken such pains either to corrupt her or to keep her from being corrupted.

  She had had enough of living her life as her aunt would wish. These people, too, might hope to use her for their own ends. She would use them instead. She would be no one’s tool, or weapon, either.

  Twelve

  “Do you think she’ll see sense?” Arybbas asked as Polyxena—who since she returned from Samothrace had insisted she was Myrtale—stalked off with rather impressive dignity. Troas had been teaching her to carry herself like a queen.