Mortal Suns

by Tanith Lee

  Thon was not black, despite his colors—the black robes of his priesthood and soldiers, the black of his temples and his animals—hares, black foxes, the hill leopard, black sheep and goat and cow, the crow and raven. One could never for a moment confuse the warm ebony of human skin for the lifelessness of that other black. Besides, black, in this land, was not the color of mourning.

  He rears out of the darkness of the inmost shrine, where the four torches find him. He did so then and, in my mind, he does so yet.

  Thus: the sudden burst of light, upon that colossal, perhaps disembodied head, seen high in the black air—the face was corpse-white, the eyes dull silver ringed with red. The lips were purple, bruised but not from kissing. His teeth, yellow, pointed like stakes. And from this face, the hair strewn back as if by a gale—standing on end. The hair of Thon, the god of death, is blood, made of blood, the blood exploding from a wound, the blood we see in nightmares, if we have truly sinned.

  Of course, the statue is only nine feet in height. But to a child, or infant, crouching on the floor of the area already scattered with so many bones, the head will seem to swim in space, since he is robed in black like his priests, and has no form, is only like a pillar, without hands or feet, without torso, legs, or arms. He has no phallus. Evidently, for Thon is not the giver but the Taker of Life.

  “Do any remain?”

  It was a ritual question. Tonight it was virtually rhetorical. Sometimes the pious, consigning their unwanted babies or youngest children—none over the age of one year was acceptable—to the House of Thon, left provision. And so a secret priest would come, and administer a little food, for that particular child. In this case, the gift of gold was specifically for the god, that had been made most clear. This baby was to be left, in the sanctum, without covering or nurture of any sort. Thereafter, the decreed four nights would pass, and the three or four days before and between.

  Supposedly the slough of some woman of the queens’ courts, this one had only had to survive three days, four nights. That had been random, fate, dependent on the hour of arrival. Even so, newborn, it could not possibly have survived. The sanctum was also deadly chill, and the baby had lain stripped naked at the footless foot of the god, among the skeletons of all the others who had perished there through the centuries.

  “I will open the door, and see.”

  The ritual answer.

  They stood, the two priestesses of Thon, black-robed, the black mask, half a black eggshell, over each face, eyes glimmering at the slits, pitiless from more than shadow.

  Held high, the new torch flared.

  Bones like curious treasure, all shades, from brown to sheerest snowy white. And the black stretches where they had been pushed and swept aside. Here and there in the enormous room, were a few less clean, whose owners had died more recently.

  Below the edifice of the god, the baby lay, the daughter of Queen Hetsa, sixteenth Daystar of the Great Sun, the King.

  “Look—it’s moving.”

  “No. Some trick of the torch.”

  “We must be sure.”

  “Of course.”

  If any lived, it was now unlawful not to take them up. Seldom did any live, even those who had been fed. It was not an onerous or repetitive task, to descend to the floor of the pit. Once in a hundred times, perhaps, did they have to do it.

  When they bent over the baby it rolled its head, looking up at them. Its eyes were black, as if they had drunk up, wanting anything else, the dark. It had no voice. Had it ever tried, down here, to scream for rescue, or an answer?

  “What is the name?”

  “I forget—some dreadful one. The mother was insane.”

  “Not surprising. You see?”

  “It’s deformed. It hasn’t any feet.”

  “Nor it has. It’s accursed. Surely, we ought to leave it here, despite the law.”

  “I didn’t hear you, sister.”

  One of the priestesses of Thon bent and picked up the baby, which had come into the world so fast it had left its feet behind in the stuff of chaos. “Come along now, I’ll take it.”

  “No, I have it. I remember the name. Cemira.”

  Feeling the heat of a living body, after the frozen and ungiving stone of the sanctum, the child began finally, faintly to whimper.

  “Hush,” said the priestess. The child stared up into the black eggshell of face, the slits of pitiless eyes. Were they pitiless? Instinctively, the woman rocked the child, and carried it off, to where they would warm for it a little milk, which anyway might kill it, now, after this interval of famine.

  “The child is dead. She is dead, and your servant, Lord Thon. Accept her. Her name, Cemira, has been entered upon your list. She rests helpless on your knees. She is dead, and she is yours. Alcos emai.”

  After six days, once the fever had departed, and the baby was found able to see, hear, move and make noises, the priests pronounced her dead. That is, alive, and a slave of the Temple of Thon, in Akhemony.

  Whether cripple or whole, witless or wise, from now until her physical ending, she would serve here the blood-haired god.

  Alcos emai, used at the finish of countless prayers, means in that tongue, So it is.

  2

  I can see her quite distinctly, the child. This must be the first memory of self. She is leaning on her two little canes, with their rests propped under her arms. She wears the long, black child’s tunic that reaches to the floor, where her feet would be, if she had any. Under the tunic is the black, sleeved shift. Like all the children, all the priests and priestesses when unmasked in the House of Thon, she is waxy pale. She has a small pointed face like that of a small cat, cut from lunar opal, with big ringed eyes. Her mouth turns down, not from temper or displeasure, but like a dry flower that is dying. Her hair, between straight and coiled, is golden as the metal fringes on the robe of her father, the Great Sun, King Akreon, in the palace at Oceaxis—Lakesea—to the east. The father she has never, and never will ever see. Except—across the river of time.

  Someone called to the children, the five of them who were in the porch, watching the snow settle on the kitchen court.

  “You and you. You, you. You.”

  Although they were permitted to keep their given names, their only possession, the names were never spoken. Death was an eater of titles, as of flesh.

  The children approached the black-faced, unfeatured priestess. She was the tall, thin one they were particularly frightened of.

  “Why are you idling here? Haven’t you anything to do?”

  “The snow,” said the littlest child, a boy of about two and a half. Until the age of four—the sacred number—male and female went unsegregated. It had been noticed long before that sometimes the tiny girls could comfort the tiny boys, and the tiny boys lend the tiny girls a sense of duty. These were the male and female role—virtues, here, servitors, succorers, which were offered to them as ideals.

  Along with that, they had, from the third to the seventh year, a rudimentary schooling. To read the texts of the temple, copy letters, such things made them more useful. But, too, their work was in the laundry, in the kitchen, sweeping the long stone floors, clearing up old blood spilled by the outer altars.

  At twelve, they would learn more specific arts. The boys butchering and woodwork, and other skills to maintain the temple. The girls might make candles, sew, or rear the animals of the precincts, preparing them for their ultimate destiny of sacrifice or table.

  Any who were apt could rise, if there were a vacant place, to the ranks of the lowest priesthood. The god had chosen them anyway, by allowing them to survive the initial test, in the sanctum. They could expect no other life.

  Of the very few who dared to run away, generally the harsh mountains killed them. If not, caught by the grown servants of Thon, their own future incarnation—now lost—they were taken at once to a lower room, a sort of natural cave existing under the temple, and locked in there in blackness, with nothing but an injunction to speak a pray
er of apology. Unlike the sanctum, with its corpses and skeletons, there was no chance to outlive this punishment. The cave door was not opened again until half a year had passed. The remains were removed, and flung down the side of Koi, into a ditch that ran below.

  Sometimes there had been more than two hundred children together in the House of Death. From all Akhemony they might come, or farther. Now there were only eleven.

  None of the five in the courtyard had grown accustomed to snow, though they had seen it each winter of their not-yet four years of life.

  The boy, bemused, for a moment was made stupid.

  “It’s cold to touch.”

  “Is it? Is snow cold? Go out then, ninny, and lie down on it, and enjoy it.”

  The boy began to cry. Then stopped. He gave no other protest. None of them did so.

  He walked out into the court, and lay on the white covering, face down. He did not wriggle very much.

  After the priestess had counted slowly aloud to the number four hundred, also sacred to Thon, she told the child he might get up.

  He came back staggering, biting his lip at the scald of the snow, which had burned his cheeks.

  Then all five were sent about their business.

  “And you, child, you, the useless one. Go back in there. You should be peeling vegetables since you can’t stand up. A curse, these misfits, these freaks. Thon should have taken you, but even he didn’t want you. Perhaps he’ll never let you die, you displease him so.”

  The freak, Cemira, went with downcast eyes. Most days she peeled vegetables and scoured pots, hour upon hour. Her hands were raw from the cold of the mountain temple, and the heat of the too-hot, greasy water, and cut by kitchen knives too large for her. And somehow these hands would twitch about as if looking for her feet. Of course, her feet would have saved her. She would not have been in the House of Thon, if she had been born with feet. She would have been a king’s daughter. But she did not know that.

  She moved slowly, and the watcher, the thin priestess, had an urge, not for the only time, to kick away the crutches and see this one fall. But she contented herself with another order.

  “Hurry! Be quick, you lazy idiot-child.”

  The outer room of the kitchen, where routine tasks were seen to, was dark and not warm. Beyond the window, as Cemira resumed her work, the snow dizzied down. Sometimes the flakes spun in through the unshuttered opening, and sizzled out in the flame of the meager brazier below.

  The, children rose at dawn, and retired at dusk. Summer meant a longer sweating day, winter a longer, icy night.

  Perhaps the seasons, the nights and days—that is, heat and cold, blackness and light—were the only proper markers of Cemira’s time. Was night, huddled on the narrow pallet, covered by one thin blanket, better than the monotonous and uncertain day? Yes, night was better, for with night, burning or freezing, eventually came sleep. But was summer better than winter?

  During the cold months, the children might have to lean into one of the wells to crack the ice with a stone. Once one had plummeted, and so died.

  The snow, miraculous and soft, was cruel. Yet silver shone in down-hanging icicles, and once, a living mountain lynx, the shade of milk, stood by the statue of Phaidix and her lion, also her beast, licking at her obdurate foot. Someone had said blood or malt must have been smeared there, but why? In the House of Thon they did not offer to any other god—not even the Sun. And Phaidix any way did not like blood. When the lynx melted away down the mountain, its flowery paw-marks stayed six days, in the closing ice.

  In summer, different flowers grew about the statue, and inappropriately about the porticoes of Thon. White and honey, the priests came with brands and scorched them away. But it must be done over and over, for the flowers came back, blooming on and on.

  From the courts, in summer, you might look up and see the kites and eagles, motionless, a mile high in violet air. When storms came down over the Heart Mountain, the sky hung alternately low, with enormous clouds, damson and smouldering black, and in them were the shapes of the mountains themselves upside down, or the shape of the temple, sculpted heavily in smoke.

  But in summer, too, on every forty-fourth day, each child, however young, must go, to sprinkle fresh blood at the pillar-base of the god in the inner sanctum. And then it stank, that place of bones. Worse than the butchers’ yard, worse than the latrines, worse than all worsenesses, that hole of death to which they had almost been added. After twelve years of age, there would be further duties in the sanctum. They had to do with the stacking up and tidying of the skeletons, and the washing of the face of Thon.

  Cemira was almost four. She had asked one of the kinder priestesses, the one who had taught her, prematurely, to sew, and sometimes rubbed scented fat into her hands, when their chapped soreness cracked and bled on the linen.

  “You’re in your fourth year. Almost four.”

  How did she know? She must have consulted the record of Cemira’s entry to the temple … Or she was that other one, who had rocked the baby in her arms.

  Two years earlier, sometimes, this priestess had taken Cemira on her knees, and brushed her hair for a long time. The priestess had murmured, above the shining, rippling fleece of the child’s hair, “You’re my baby. You’re my baby I should have had.” And, once, “They told me, it had golden hair, even in the hour of its birth.”

  Cemira, however, did not remember this. Only at her tenth decade will Sirai recall that Cemira heard it.

  Poor woman. Presumably she had lost her own child, either in reality or unstable fancy. Poor woman. She was kind, in her fashion.

  By the table where Cemira sat, peeling, cutting—already she was exhausted with sitting—leaned the sticks, the canes. They hurt her, but they were all she had. They meant mobility.

  She wanted to sleep. No one was there, though through the door, the kitchen moved to black forms, gushing with steam and thick with the odor of meats, for the higher priests dined well one day in four. Cemira let her head droop.

  She was immediately elsewhere. Where was it? In the sky. A bird carried her, the cloth of her tunic caught in its claws. Irrationally she was not alarmed. Below she saw the temple, the smallest thing in the world. Enormous clouds, quite solid, and touched rosily with a sinking Sun, formed buildings that were all like the temple, the only edifice she had consciously seen, but far more huge, more charming in design. Most wonderful of all, she moved without needing feet, and had no pain.

  A pot met the floor with a nearby crash. A lower priestess cursed the pot, and then must speak the prayer to Thon asking his forgiveness for her curse.

  Cemira woke. Exquisite escape quite over, she resumed peeling the roots. Returned to earth, and her crutches.

  Annotation by the Hand of Dobzah

  I can confirm that my mistress, Sirai, has to this day, under her arms, the faint small marks of her first wooden walking canes. These are two silver scars formed each like a sickle moon.

  3

  Countless legends, dramas and songs, in a variety of lands, are concerned with the notion of justice, of the severe payment for vicious deeds, and the rewards of honor and tenderness.

  Hetsa, the Daystar Queen, sixteenth wife of Akreon, had heard such stories often: they had run off her marble skin like rain.

  It was a spring afternoon. Hetsa was sitting in her royal apartment, awaiting her lover.

  The apartment had altered rather from the earlier scene, when it had been splashed by blood and bloody light, reeking of oils and aromatics and the act of birth. The walls were recently repainted, a token gift of the King’s. He had never been discourteous. Behind the pillars, on the creamy plaster, a procession of maidens, bearing fruit, accompanied by long-tailed birds, pipers, and garlanded gazelles, went prettily around three sides to a gilt shrine of Gemli, the Ipyran goddess of joy. A proper compliment, for Hetsa was the daughter of an Ipyran king. In fact the shrine had been placed at the very spot where Bandri, the birth goddess, had waited, over four years ago
. Now Bandri was nowhere to be seen.

  That same night, they had informed Akreon his child, a daughter, had died, a pity, but not, demonstrably, so unlucky and ill-omened as the truth. Nor such a tragedy as it would have been thought, had the baby been male.

  Nevertheless, in the month after the death-birth, Akreon took another new queen, a Daystar picked from Oceaxis itself. He had seen her at a noble’s house, where they had taken care he should. She had ankle-length hair the color of young barley, a pale yellow almost green, and she was just thirteen.

  As this Lesser Sun arose, Hetsa completely declined. She did not invite a lover for one whole year, but after that they arrived in generous quantities.

  That was not unheard of, or rather, providing nothing was heard, it was possible. Akreon had his own pleasures, and his several duties, as uppermost priest and war-leader of the land. He liked women as a pastime. He did not, intellectually, think about them. It was his steward, primed to the work, who from time to time suggested the generosity of a necklace, or a repainted chamber.

  Hetsa’s women were rustling and giggling in the outer room. They had a turtle, the size of a dog and with a shell like old jade, and were playing with it by the pool. It was supposed ancient, and able to predict things. Now certainly it raised its petted head, and the outer doors were opened.

  The merchant Mokpor came through, with one slave. His caravan had come back from the south this morning, and Hetsa had expected nothing less.

  Hetsa’s Maiden, Ermias, entered, bowed, and smiled secretively. For a second, Hetsa was irritated by this. She kept order by means of sudden malice, and presents.

  “Why are you grinning like an ape?”

  Ermias’s smile vanished at once.

  “I have toothache, madam. It draws up my mouth.”

  “Have the tooth pulled out then. Who has come?”

  “The merchant, madam. He’s waiting—” Ermias had meant to say, smiling still, impatiently. Instead she added, “In the outer room.”