Soleri

by Michael Johnston

  As Arko watched it fail he sensed some deeper meaning. The machine was telling him something, but he didn’t know what it was. “What is this?” he asked, tugging at his beard as the spheres came to rest, the flames darkened, and the room went quiet.

  “That’s a question I’ve pondered for a great many years.” Suten stoked the brazier. “This instrument was crafted by the Soleri and imbued with their wisdom and light. It signals the yearly eclipse, but that is not its true purpose—it was designed to predict the coming of a single event, one it has now revealed. And that is why I have brought you here to be the new Ray.”

  “But those people, your citizens, think I am some sort of sacrifice to soothe their anger. When I become Ray their anger will only double. So why place a Harkan on your throne?”

  “The Devouring.”

  “What about it?”

  “Ever wonder what the name meant?” asked Suten.

  “The Harkans—”

  “Do not properly honor the Devouring,” finished Suten. “Yes, I know. I’ve heard of your games. The Devouring is a tradition that stretches back to a time before the empire, and even before the Soleri.” Suten drew in a long breath, his wrinkled features hidden in the darkness. He stoked the brazier, but the flames were gone, only embers remained, and their light was fading.

  “On the last day of the year, the moon devours the sun, but this is not the true Devouring. The very first Devouring was not just a dimming of the sun but a devouring of the land and the cities upon it. The stories of this first Devouring are etched in the burnt ruins of the Shambles and the worn temples of the Waset, in the fractured caverns of the Hollows and the crumbling fortresses of the Stone Reefs. In these places, there are walls that lay crumpled like parchment or shattered like glass. There are whole cities reduced to ash, leaving only desert.

  “Have you ever wondered why so much of Solus is built beneath the earth, why the Soleri chose to hide half of their great capital beneath the sand? Why the throne of the sun god’s children lies buried beneath the desert stones? And why the Soleri erected the Dromus, and the Shroud Wall? What were they hiding from? What did the gods fear?”

  Arko did not know, he was out of answers, out of breath too. A first Devouring. What did that mean? And what creature could devour the very landscape?

  “What do they fear?” he echoed.

  Suten shook his head—he didn’t have all of the answers, but it was clear the old man had been frightened enough to invite his enemy to stand with him as a friend. “The last Devouring is upon us. The moon and the stars are misaligned. The amaranth, the sun god’s sacred plant, is in scarcity. The people rioted, they set fire to the city of the Soleri and tore a priestess of Mithra from the wall; more will follow unless we have a leader who can hold this empire together by force of will alone…”

  “And you expect me to be such a leader,” said Arko. If the Soleri could not abide it and created their entire empire in preparation against a hidden, shadowy enemy, what could one Harkan accomplish against such a foe?

  Arko stared at Suten, speechless. He had expected death; he had not expected this. “I suppose you don’t know me very well if you believe me to be the kind of leader you require.”

  “In that you are incorrect. I know you well. They call you the Bartered King, but in truth you are the last true king. Save for the interloper who now sits on Feren’s throne, you are the only king untouched by the Priory. If I ally your kingdom with Sola, we need no longer prepare for another Harkan-led revolt. Only the outlanders will possess a force large enough to challenge us, but you have proven deft at subduing them.

  “Two decades ago, when Raden Saad and the armies of the Protector failed to hold back the San, it was you who sent their hordes scurrying back into the High Desert. You twice defeated their riders, while ours were forced to retreat. It was Raden’s defeat that led to the expansion of the outlanders in the first place. And if Amen Saad’s father could not hold back the hordes, surely the son cannot do any better. The house of Saad is unfit to rule, as is the Mother Priestess, who would only use the post to advance the interests of her cult. I’ve spent a great deal of time contemplating the matter. In a way, I’ve pondered this choice for your entire life.” The old man paused, his eyes were fixed on some inner distance, some memory. “I saw you once before, you know. Long ago, when you were only a child, during the second rebellion—the Children’s War. You must not have been older than four, sitting atop a horse at the head of your father’s soldiers as he rode out to meet Raden Saad on the battlefield.”

  My father. The Children’s War. The second revolt. Suten was talking about the day Arko’s father stood against the empire and secured his freedom. On that day, after the battle, Raden Saad, the former Protector, had agreed with a handshake that Arko Hark-Wadi would still be owed to the emperor, but the empire would not collect him, not that day or any day after. Not until today.

  “You were there?” Arko guessed the Ray was at least ten and twenty years when Koren met Raden in battle. “I never knew.”

  “No one did. I rode along in disguise, as one of Raden’s guard. I wanted to see firsthand the man who would destroy the empire.” Again, the old man’s eyes went out of focus, as if they were probing some unseen depth, a place seen only in memory. “Your father was a strong man. I admired him for his courage, for his conviction in denying your entry into the Priory. He nearly destroyed his kingdom to protect his family.” Suten stood up straighter, stretching as if his limbs hurt him. “My own father did little to protect his. My only brothers were murdered as my father quibbled over power. Your father rode out with every man in Harkana to protect you. My father despised Koren for that act, but I feared him, feared what Koren would do. In turn I feared and punished you and your family. I sent your son to the Priory as soon as possible. I married the Harkan beauty to a man who would not appreciate her, a lord with no power or prestige. I wed your younger girl to that miserable little lordling in Feren. I thought it would ruin your alliance with the Ferens, and it did.”

  “We have no need for an alliance with Feren,” Arko said.

  “Some feel otherwise, our generals are among them. They fear the lower kingdoms.” Suten gave Arko an admiring glance, “Lately, I have come to see my fear as nothing more than jealousy. Your father loved you enough to wreck his kingdom for you, how could I not envy such a man?” Suten stood up straight and looked him in the eye. “We are all children of the Priory. Where others have succumbed, your line has tried to do what is right, in spite of everything I have done. You carry the blood of Koren Hark-Wadi—you have more strength than you guess. Stop mourning your setbacks in the old wars and use that strength. Think on this: Sola was not always an empire and its leaders were not always conquerors. The rulers of the Middle Kingdom were wise and compassionate men. You could restore the values they once instilled in our people. The empire is a tool; it can be used for good as well as evil. The men you despise, the ones who subjugated your kingdom, are mostly dead. I am one of the last and I choose to begin anew. You are that beginning.” Suten glanced one last time at the great throne room. “I am done here.”

  “Where will you go?”

  Suten smiled, his gaze distant. “To my vineyard in the Denna hills. It is quite lovely this time of year. I hear this year’s harvest is excellent.”

  “And if I say no? If I refuse the position?” Arko had no interest in fulfilling this man’s designs, Devouring or not. Suten Anu had engineered the marriage of his youngest daughter to Roghan Frith and given his eldest to a man who could not love her, and when Ren was three years old, he had demanded Arko deliver him to the Priory. Some did not surrender their boys until they had reached a decade in age at least.

  Arko had more than once pictured his hand on Suten’s throat. He had dreamed of taking back the Amber Throne of the Soleri. He could start now, he could take Suten’s life, expose the emperor’s absence—a good enough start to a revolt. He took an aggressive step toward the Ray.

>   Suten retreated but did not wince, and Arko guessed he was not the first king to menace the Ray. “You will not refuse. I offer you the Soleri Empire. Only a fool would refuse such an offer and you are no fool.”

  Arko’s head was spinning. The world had no center anymore, and he—he would be First Ray of the Sun. By all rights, he was the emperor. Free to arrange the world as he saw fit. Was he really capable of such a thing? To decide who lived, who died, who received power and who had it taken away? Was this really where his life had brought him? He saw that it would be foolish to deny Suten’s request. No hatred he held for the man could overcome the appeal of what Suten offered. Arko Hark-Wadi would be the First Ray of the Sun.

  But what of Suten?

  Arko studied the aging Ray. A vineyard in the Denna hills was it? A peaceful retirement after a life spent in service to the empire?

  Suten held out his hand and offered Arko the glowing citrine, the stone that had once rested on his own forehead. “Take this,” he said. Suten picked up Arko’s hand and placed the jewel in his palm.

  It was heavier than he guessed. He tightened his fingers around the stone, his thoughts revisiting the grief Suten had thrust upon his family—Ren’s gaunt face, Merit’s bitterness, Kepi’s tattered dress.

  There would be no vineyard and no peaceful retirement. Not for a man such as this.

  Arko Hark-Wadi swung and in a single blow took the life of Suten Anu, First Ray of the Sun.

  In death, Suten looked like any other man, old, withered, and afraid.

  Arko pressed the jewel to his forehead. “A life for a life,” he said to the empty throne room. “You are correct, I do carry the blood of Koren Hark-Wadi. And my father was not a forgiving man.”

  And thus would begin Arko Hark-Wadi’s stewardship of the empire, wrought in blood and light, marked by the cries of a dying man.

  THE WAKING RITE

  22

  Sarra Amunet wore black on her first day in Desouk.

  The sun had not bowed to the emperor. The crowds in the city of the Soleri had torn her surrogate from the wall. Mithra had shown his displeasure. As the Mother Priestess of the cult Sarra felt it necessary to acknowledge these indignities, so she went to the temple of Mithra at Desouk and told the Dawn Crier to leave the temple. Today the Mother Priestess would perform the duty of her lowest acolyte. As the morning light raked the temple columns, she sang to the statue of the sun god an ancient hymn, “The Song of Changes,” a sweet and simple tune about the sowing and growing of the amaranth. She didn’t much like singing or the recitation of prayers, she preferred her scrollwork, but she sang the song anyway. She needed her priests to believe that she had been saved by Mithra’s hand, so she walked the prayer circle, tracing a careful ring in the temple’s center.

  Priests gathered to watch, some simply congregating as they did each day to honor the god, others whispering about her miraculous flight from Solus. The false story of her escape from the crowds was already spreading through the empire. The chatter was all around her, but she pretended she could not hear it.

  As was custom for the Dawn Crier, she fasted throughout the day, pausing only to catch her breath or to take a draught of water. The fasting and the singing made the day drag on, and she let her exhaustion show on her face. Today she must look penitent, contrite. She must appear humbled, and grateful. The people must believe that Mithra himself had ferried her through the riots on the last day of the year. They mustn’t know that Saad put his sword to my breast, that my cloak was ripped and the crowds nearly tore me limb from limb.

  As the darkness crept across the open-air temple, her thoughts drifted. She pictured her childhood home in Asar, the rocky little keep where her family weathered the wet season. She thought about the family she left behind in Harkana. She remembered Arko, bitterly, and her daughters more fondly. I’d like to see their faces again. She had sworn she would never return to Harkana, but perhaps the girls would one day come to her.

  As the sky darkened and the air grew cold, she heard the cries of the young boy, Khai Femin, echo in her thoughts. The image of Garia’s severed limbs flashed at the edges of her vision. Sarra wondered if she had acted wrongly, if she should not have sent Garia to stand on the wall. Was there another way—something else she could have done? No. She needed to put Amen Saad in his place, to halt his aggression. By her own estimation, she had been only partially successful in subduing the young Protector. The matter of succession was still unsettled. Saad remained a threat.

  Sarra realized she had stopped singing. The cold air made her skin prickle.

  The sky was black, and only one or two priests lingered at the temple, shuffling their feet as they hummed the song.

  She drew her robe about her and left the temple, bowing slightly as she stepped outside of the prayer circle.

  Sarra wore white on her second day in Desouk. She attended to her duties in the temple, ordaining acolytes, and celebrating the start of the new year, the first days of Soli, the first month of the Soleri calendar.

  On her third day, when the formal duties of the Mother Priestess were complete, Sarra journeyed high into the Denna hills, to a place where the ancient amaranth fields sheltered in green vales beneath walls of sheer rock. Months ago, the Mother Priestess had uncovered a narrow opening that had once been a doorway, but had centuries ago been covered by an avalanche. Her priests had done their best to remove the obstructions, clearing a narrow passage that led to a set of underground chambers. A young priest who had only just arrived in Desouk, Nollin Odine, waited by the entrance to the excavation, sitting atop a pile of stones, studying a scroll. He was a scribe of the Hierophantic Order, the interpreters of sacred symbols. At a very young age he’d made a name for himself deciphering texts written in hieratic script. She’d heard the boy spent all of his time studying scrolls. Her priests said he ate with a scroll in one hand, and slept often with another beneath his head. Ott had joked that the boy had been glimpsed on the privy, a parchment in his lap, tearing off corners to wipe himself as he read. She hoped his ample knowledge would be of some assistance.

  “Come,” Sarra beckoned warmly. “Follow me, Nollin.”

  “It’s Noll. If that’s okay?”

  “Noll.” She ushered him toward the narrow shaft, lifting the edges of her robe so the hem wouldn’t drag as she slid between the stones. She was eager to show him the mountain chamber, to hear his thoughts on the curious inscriptions that had puzzled their most talented scribes. In their effort to decode the markings, her priests had requested scrolls and clay tablets from across the empire, including Harkana, and her daughter Merit had been kind enough to allow her request. But they had made little progress in their work.

  A few steps in, the passage swelled, the walls opening into a vast rotunda hewn from amber stones.

  “Where are we?” Noll asked.

  Sarra took an oil lamp from the wall and raised it to the distant ceiling. At the dome’s apex, rusted iron bars half sheltered an oculus. “This is a storehouse,” Sarra said.

  “For the amaranth?”

  “Yes, an old one. We are standing at the base of a grain depository. The priests dropped seeds through the oculus.” Sarra pointed to the opening above. “The grain was stored here and emptied through there.” She motioned toward the floor, then the passage through which they had entered.

  “It is a sacred place,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

  “Yes, the storehouse once sheltered our sacred crop.”

  The amaranth. Not even a plant, but a gift from the gods themselves. When mixed and ground, the leaves of the amaranth formed a thick paste that made the dry soil of Solus fertile—so vital that the priesthood of Desouk, in whose domain the oases existed, had long ago woven the sowing and harvest of the amaranth into their religion. Only a priest or priestess could touch the seed and tender the plant.

  “A year ago, you sent a large number of translations to the repository, translations of imperial scrolls dating to the reign of Den, dur
ing the War of the Four. One of those documents, a lengthy chronicle of grain shipments, contained this storehouse’s location.”

  “Those scrolls were centuries old.”

  “Two centuries. Sekhem Den, last in his line, erected the storehouses. His builders left their marks.”

  “Yes, I’ve studied Den, but I don’t see the connection. What interest do we have in old storehouses?” Noll asked.

  Sarra laid the lamp on the chamber’s grain-speckled floor. The room darkened. She cupped her hands against the stone, scraping sand and pebbles into her palms. She raised her hands to show the young priest what she held. Amber kernels lay among the dust and sand. “See these seeds?” she said. “What if I told you these seeds, and ones like them—the seeds hidden away in the empire’s vast storehouses—are the last fertile amaranth seeds in the empire?”

  Noll shook his head. “I don’t understand. I saw a field of amaranth on my walk this morning.”

  Sarra’s eyes darted around the empty chamber; even in the safety of Desouk she was careful where she spoke. “You have served only as a hierophant—am I right?”

  Noll nodded. “I’ve only just arrived from the southern islands.”