by Tanith Lee
“Well …”
“Didn’t he guess the picture he made?”
“Evidently not.”
Glardor clove to his wife, now the Sun-Consort, but she was seldom seen, and barren. He had too, a score of illegal sons who, if it came to it, might cause trouble one day.
It was hot in the tent, and hot outside. Klyton’s own tent, over with Pherox’s troop, was hottest of all. The autumn weather was perhaps unseasonally warm, and here and there they had passed, on the march, carpets of spring flowers nosing from the soil before their time. Winter would find them presently, and put them down again.
The first Sirmian town was two hours’ march away in the morning.
Amdysos slept, no doubt, breathing deeply as he always did, as if slumber was a drink. Outside the tent flap here, a slave was snoring.
Alone, Klyton thought of dying. What terrified him, he found, was the length of his life that then would be unlived all that he meant to do, but which yet he had not found to do. It seemed to him that Glardor would not last as King, and in a curious state, between sleep and waking, he saw Glardor vanish, and Pherox too, somehow, brushed away like the too-early and unsuitable flowers. Then Amdysos was the Great Sun Amdysos, who would be exactly right, powerful and just, brave and self-controlled. Amdysos too would need Klyton, with his tinder-strikes of amusement and action, imagination, fire.
What might they not do then? King and King’s Commander. They two.
But if I die tomorrow—Klyton pushed his mind towards the god, to the Sun. I leave it with you. You must decide. If I am worthy, let me live and do bright and weighty things. Or let me go down into the dark.
Calm came then. The gods were reasonable. And Klyton knew himself not so bad.
Phaidix stood over him at last, not to drain his valor, only to bring him sleep. She was cold and pitiless and beautiful, her silver hair falling on his eyes, like the rain which, presently, unheard in slumber, laved the encampment and the hills.
The Sirmian town, seen through the downpour, looked like an anthill, high, mud-colored walls, a haphazard warren of buildings rising up and up the hill within.
Of course, you could hear the Heart still. Only the rain drowned it out.
The Sirmians had sling-throwers ready on the walls with a good range. Glardor’s force had had its rest half a mile back. Now they were marched in precipitately, and the stones came pounding. Horses screamed and slithered and men dropped on to the muck of the running ground. Glardor’s force was pulled back.
“There’s the weak place in the wall,” said the man on Klyton’s left.
Glardor’s Charchian strategist had pointed it out quickly, having analysed the messages last night from his scouts.
Two of the catapults were heaved forward, the crews under their awnings of straw and hide. There would be no attempts to use flame—the rain had taken that gambit from the hands of aggressors and defenders alike.
The first huge spoon was loaded with a rock the size of a door. Klyton watched from his horse as the gang let slip the restraining rope. The catapult-arm bounded forward, hit the buffer, and let off its missile, which fizzed over, tearing the curtain of water in half, and smashed, head-on, precisely where the mooted weakness was. And so it must have been. At once a massive crack slit through the Sirmian bastion. The catapult crew, the surrounding men, raised a cheer. Up on the wall, you could hear them now, groaning and calling on gods.
Klyton gentled his restive horse.
“Hush. Look. You’ve seen it before. Didn’t the dealer praise you to me? There’s nothing to it.”
The second catapult spoon was dragging back, being loaded up. The entire procedure was repeated. As the second stone went off, somebody cried to the town, “Hey, don’t you like our kisses?”
There was a laugh.
The stone went home like the first, and this time a gout of masonry exploded outwards.
That was enough. Men were running with their swords. Klyton thought, dismayed by a sudden peculiar inertia, almost boredom, Is this all?
Then, shouting, Prince Pherox turned on his black gelding.
“Go!”
Klyton kicked the horse. Despite its fidgits, battle-trained, it went at once. He pulled the spear into position beside his body. They were riding now, headfirst at the shattered wall, from which small lumps, like broken flesh, still tumbled down.
Another rage of little lethal stones lashed through the rain, whining like gnats. The man on the left, knee to knee with Klyton, made a gasp as if to sneeze, and plunged from sight. His horse galloped on. In the next rows, twenty or more horses must have passed over him.
Klyton did not look back.
He put down his head, and just in time, a stone glanced off his helmet. Damnable Sirmian riffraff. He must try to be angry. Not too angry, keep steady. But none of it seemed remotely real.
The walls were huge now. They were up against them. Stones dashed down, and pieces now of broken-up furniture. The horse shied from a little table that perhaps, only a day ago, held someone’s supper dish and cup.
The enemy were here. They were riding out through the breach in the wall as the attackers came against it.
So this was an enemy.
Klyton felt at a loss. He raised his spear and cast it, with intemperate learned skill. It caught a man in the throat, as he had meant it to, and swivelling as this one fell, took another one down, also.
Klyton drew the blade from its scabbard. The sword, his first, had on its pommel, like the knife, an eagle.
I’m not awake. I must feel something—
Rising, standing up in his stirrups, Klyton shouted. His voice broke, as it never did now in speech, and from his lips issued an unearthly fearful shriek.
There was a Sirmian right in front of him, less than three sword lengths away, all at once, leaning in to him. The man had a vermilion ribbon tying back his long loose hair. His armor was spectacular, bronze with brass and colcai, the mix of gold and copper, decorating armlets and breast. No helm. Possibly he had lost it.
“Is that how you sound in bed, Pretty?” he said to Klyton. It was conversational.
All around, the red noise of fighting, the oaths, yells, and cries of pain. The jewels of red horse eyes that gleamed and went out, the lightning slash of swords, knives.
Klyton brought up his sword and sliced open the man’s cheek, so it hung from him like an ill-cut slice from a joint. The man had done nothing to him but jibe. Somehow he had moved so slowly, and Klyton, not seeming to, very fast. The man swung over and off his horse into the mud that was already, in places, richly scarlet.
Klyton was startled. He had not killed the man. He had an idiotic urge to search for him among the stampeding kicking hoofs. But then another man—another enemy—came hollering, and Klyton stuck him straight through, where the upper chest armor was undone at his ribs.
It was the press of horses now that carried Klyton in through the wall.
The buildings seemed to tower and reel over him, and he expected a further deluge of thrown matter, but nothing came.
Other riders were cantering after him. They yowled and yodeled, and echoes shot off the walls. Klyton did as they did. His voice did not break again. He sounded like the other men.
There was a barricade in the narrow street, barrels, an upturned cart. They jumped over it.
The other side, the houses clustered like honeycomb. Where there were doors, they were fast shut. No faces at the thin slots of windows. No sounds but for the insane cluttering of pigeons up on the flat roofs. And the rain.
Then more cavalry, their own, a surge of it, was thrusting through. The space was filled. A sea of horses, men, the upturned points of weapons. From all over the town came the noise, unmistakable now, of victory. And new screams, the screams of women.
“Gates have given,” said one, unnecessary. At the louder howls of pleasure, their horses reared.
So, it truly had been—only that. So easy. Flat, and nearly foolish.
&nb
sp; Someone was shaking him.
“Klyton—look at me. Yes, that’s better. You’re covered in blood. It’s not yours?”
“No, I don’t think … Wait, just this—” Someone, the man with the ribbon, or the other one he had killed close to, had slit open his right arm up to the elbow. A spectacular cut, not deep enough to be damaging. Just deep enough to leave a proper scar. “Most of it’s theirs.” Amdysos studied him. “You’ve done all right, then.”
“I think so.”
“Pherox had no good reason to send you in like that. He should have waited. It could have been chancy.”
“I expect he went straight in himself. He would.”
Amdysos glanced about. No one was listening. The men were using the hoofs of their horses to splinter doors, or laughing together, telling each other what they had done. “He did, but at the gate, with his bodyguard.”
Klyton said, almost idly, “I had a man’s cheek off. I didn’t mean to. I meant to kill him. He fell anyway.”
“That happens. You can’t always be tidy in this sort of thing.” “Did you?”
“Yes. At least three men. From the look, you had fifty.”
“That one … he had a purplish ribbon in his hair like a girl, but he called me a girl—or a catamite—something. It wasn’t that it worried me. You know, what the sword-master said, they do it to rile you. Don’t lose a cool head.”
“Oh,” said Amdysos. “A purplish ribbon. Was his armor fine?”
“Yes. He had colcai on it.”
“Don’t tell Pherox,” said Amdysos. “I think you did for the chief’s son.”
Klyton shook his head. He felt the same. Nervous now with, wanting to be doing something else. This must be wrong. They had told him of cowardice, ordinary fear, cold strategy, and battle-madness. What to do with each. This had been none of those. It was like sex the first time for a woman this—he had not been able to—to enjoy it. With some women, Amdysos said, they never could.
“So what?”
“You’ll get his arms, sword and so on. You’ve defeated him. He’s probably dead by now, if he went down.”
Glardor the Farmer rode into the Sirmian town. He had imposed a certain order, stopped most of the rapine and theft. He told the defenders they would be fined, but they must come on to the next town, to act as envoys there. He wanted to save bloodshed. His soldiers were not too pleased. Akreon had always let them have the first town or city of a campaign, even a small one. It taught the foe a lesson. And it was a Fighter’s just deserts.
As they were standing in the square, where the market would be in time of peace, and all this was being digested, Klyton, looking up, saw a girl appear on a roof, quite close.
She was an extremely lovely girl, with long, dark tresses and fiercely flushed checks. He thought her about sixteen, old enough to be married and to have lost today her husband, but she was smiling. She had a basket on her hip.
A silence came, as the sullen murmurs from the soldiers died away.
Into this the girl called in a high silver voice, “Will you have an apple, gentlemen?”
It was an incongruous cry, made odder by an uneducated Sirmian accent.
Then she began to fling the apples at them.
The soldiers dodged, cursing, partly entertained. They could get her down quickly enough. She was insolent, and surely even Farmer Glardor would not deny her to them now. Then a few of the apples struck home. The Akhemonians did not like the sting. There was growling, and men striding now, to get up on the roof. The omen too was not lucky. The apple might symbolize a woman’s pelvis, but was also the fruit of Phaidix, whose silver apples were a gift that signified approaching death.
Amdysos said to Klyton, without expression, “When they catch her, they’ll use her till she’s pulp. He won’t stop that, now.”
Just then, an apple whisked over their heads. It was meant perhaps for the King on his roan horse. It slammed instead directly into the face of Pherox.
Pherox’s head was punched backward. He arched on the black horse, letting go the reins. The gelding reared. And Pherox went flailing from its back.
He landed hard on the square, and there, between the legs of men and horses, his half brothers, like the rest, saw him spasming, cawing, hawking, clutching, seeming to try to vomit, violent—then feeble. Finally turning the color of cold ashes. Amdysos started forward. Already others were running, too late.
Pherox, blood and slime coursing from his mouth and nose, was almost still. His eyes were wide open, standing out like those of a hanged man.
The square was full of roaring.
On the roof someone had reached the girl. She was squealing with laughter. Still laughing, as she was thrown down, still laughing as she was torn open.
To those who worshipped Phaidix, despite stories of sweethearts and mothers, it was no surprise a female might be vicious, ruthless, or courageous. And they had seen already, most of them, she too had killed her man.
Klyton was sitting in a side room of the chief’s house. He was stiff and embarrassed. The women, veiled, had washed him and seen to his arm, under the direction of Glardor’s own physician. This was the ritualistic sign of their servitude to the conquering Akhemonian men. No doubt, they were grateful Glardor had spared them rape. They did not overtly object to the Great Sun and his commanders talking over the battle, in the ax and knife hung, raftered hall, where last night their own little king, husband, father and son, had sat.
Sometimes they looked, slavishly, from the corners of their veils. They knew one of the Suns had perished, and that a Sirmian woman slew him. As a matter of course, any drink or food here would be tested for poison.
If there were any further attempt to insult, or take life, the town would be razed.
Amdysos came to the room in the late afternoon.
He admired Klyton’s bandaging. He, Amdysos, had none, not a scratch, though he had taken five men.
In the end, they were silent for a long while.
“It was a freak—it was a prank of the god who likes to play pranks.” One did not speak this god’s name. Amdysos added, “I know you. You’re thinking we talked about it. The apple that broke his tooth years ago.”
“We did, Amdysos.”
“All right. And she threw an apple. And the silver tooth got knocked out, and he swallowed it into his windpipe and it choked him. It could have happened, that same thing, a hundred ways in battle. We didn’t bring it down on him.”
“No.”
“Maybe,” said Amdysos, “we had foreknowledge.”
Klyton said, in a cold voice, “Will you tell Udrombis what we did?”
“My mother? I should think not. She has enough to bear. It’s only four years since she lost the King.”
“Glardor’s King.”
“You know what I mean. Women mourn longer. She still wears the colors. No, I wouldn’t tell her.”
Beyond the window, the unending rain went on. The afternoon was dull, but in the puddles there still ran the galvanic red stain that had been the life of men.
Amdysos said, “By the way, that man was dead.”
“Which man?”
“The man with the ribbon.”
“I’d—forgotten.”
Amdysos came and stood directly in front of him. Klyton looked up.
“Leave this behind you,” said Amdysos. “We’re not guilty of anything. I know that I’m not. And I know you.”
“I didn’t wish him dead.”
“Of course you didn’t. You’re a prince. Leave it behind.”
Klyton got up. He walked up against Amdysos and put his head, for a second, on Amdysos’s breast. It was the symptom of a sudden childish fright and hurt: the numbness of war was going from him. But, too, in the days of Okos, of which they both knew rather a lot, it had been the tacit symbol, this gesture, of fealty, from a lesser king to the Great Sun.
“They’ve stripped the Sirmian armor. It’s with your gear. There was another man too, someone sai
d you took him, and perhaps speared another. The men liked you. You were valiant and didn’t mess about. Straight through the wall, they said, with a battle cry.”
“Do you remember that pig at Airis?” Klyton said.
“The big she-pig? Yes.”
“It’ll be winter soon. She’s fair game then. We’ve left it long enough.”
Amdysos grinned. “That’s better.”
The rain ran on and on. It wore you away, that sound, but the worst sound was to come, the women keening, and Udrombis in her utter noiselessness of grief.
Klyton knew he had seen them pass in his heart, Glardor and Pherox, and Amdysos rise like the Sun. And he, by Amdysos. Two Suns together. No. One must not think of that.
4
For highborn women of the court, not actually royal, there were always ways. If you must finally wed virgin, and often a sophisticated man would overlook it, providing you brought enough money and status with you, a wisewoman could give you a mixture. Applied, it caused a temporary dryness and tightening. He would feel you were not easy, see that he hurt you, and perhaps you bled. That was what, in simple terms, virginity amounted to. There were other draughts if your courses came late, to bring them on. A pregnancy carried to term, if unwanted, was rare. This was women’s business.
Only the highest women were kept sealed till marriage, for they made possible the treaties, and the marks of favor.
Ermias had had many lovers, and reckoned to garner an excellent marriage when her stint as guardian was done. She would be pensioned with enough goods and gold to make her an appetizing match. But she had wanted her looks too, to catch a husband who was young enough, and handsome.
Now, at just twenty-four, Ermias was a pillow, spillingly fat. Her neck was like a frog’s, with only a crease to show the demarcation of her chin. Her breasts had grown shapeless. Instead of bangles, rings of flesh garlanded her ankles. She waddled.
All Akhemony, all Oceaxis, was prone to lament. As the rain rushed down, down rushed the tears. Pherox had died in Sirma. And though another three towns had fallen since then and the campaign was almost done, this could not restore his life.