by Tanith Lee
When I stood up now, I was taller than she, though not quite finished growing.
Kelbalba gave me my new cane. She leaned up to my ear and whispered.
She said, in Artepta, in Charchis, brothers and sisters were sometimes wedded. She said her brother had slept with her for a year before they were found out. She said he was the only one who thought her desirable. He said she was a lioness and did not need beauty. It was he who gave her the amulet of Lut.
Ermias grew restive and told Kelbalba to stop muttering at me. But as we walked up through the palace, towards the Sunset, Ermias added I had a better color now, the women had done wonders with their cosmetics.
9
On the stairs, I was very frightened. It was the precipice flight of perhaps one hundred and seventy-four steps, that had winded Mokpor the merchant, up to the East Terrace and the great Hall.
Of course, I had become used to negotiating the stairs to Phaidix’s garden, and certain of the women’s apartments in the palace, where Ermias had taken me. But no stairway like this one. Besides, the cane was new—silver on pale wood, with a globe at its top of electrum. I did not trust the cane yet. It was too handsome.
Ermias walked behind. Her puffing kept my spirits up. We were both in difficulties and afraid of disgrace.
We paused at the landings for some while, admiring the forms of the Sun god.
At the top, we looked as if from a mountain, to the Lakesea. Ermias breathed in great chunks of air, and I shook. But it was a fine evening, and the water was flat and soft-looking, shadowy under a shadow-gathering eastern sky.
Two or three dozen people were on the East Terrace. They gazed at us, and gazed. When we were ready, that is, when Ermias was ready, we went on, she a pace behind me, haughty as a queen. Our slow gait attracted some attention too. For myself, I felt it painfully, but I soon heard afterwards that watchers decided me in turn intimidating. One who goes in dread and abjection hurries to get by. Who walks so leisurely must be proud, and cool.
I have let Mokpor already describe the Hall, but I was no less a stranger to it than he, and was filled by wonder, more so perhaps because it might also be said to be mine. The columns were gigantic, and the alabaster lamps of Artepta, already being lighted, and burning rosy on their stands of gilded bronze, lit every aspect, and every fleck of gold. The wall painting was of an old war. It had been done in the time of Aiton, who was the great grandfather of King Okos. They had not stinted on the blood, which one must observe all around, and fallen men stuck through, during dinner.
The floor, which Mokpor had not taken in—he was always a man for looking higher than he found himself—showed on the east side of the Hearth, the formation of the world; that is, the Sun Lands. One saw there how the continent, with its central sea and rays of islands, made, bizarrely, occultly yet overtly, the shape of the Sun.
On the west side, beyond the Hearth, lay open sea, with monsters in it and imagined lands. Certain things had come from the wastes of water beyond Artepta, Charchis, and the Benighted Isles. Curious beasts, the pieces of broken ships. Now and then, too, some traveler, lost by the will of the gods, who in ancient times was thought a devil, and put to death. The last of these had been shipwrecked on a float of wood, with one of their robes for a sail, at Kloa, in the year Okos died. They were two men, and it was said they had had skin the color of smoke.
Though the Kloans were barbaric enough, they sent an embassy to Artepta, so to Akhemony. It took a year, two or three years, depending on the version of the story. By the time Okos heard, the two men were dead by their own hand. They had pined, refused to learn more than a scatter of the words of the Isles, spat upon the altars of our gods, wept and lamented, raising their eyes to the sky in a tragedy beyond local comprehension.
So many people were in the enormous Hall. On the Hearth the wisp of magical fire burned, and above, the Daystars leaned to receive it.
A little dizzy still, I moved on, as I had been instructed.
The sky beyond the west doors was turning apricot, and there the buzz of a multitude turned my belly to ice—cool I was, indeed.
All this while I had hoped—and feared—to see Klyton. Now I did so, far off from me as the sinking Sun.
He stood with Amdysos, whom I knew at once from memory and description. He wore the crimson color of the Sunset Offering, and looked utterly a King, at twenty-one years of age.
But Klyton wore dark purple, black leggings, and boots of black bullshide, his tunic with a border of broad red and gold. He seemed a King also. Of all Akreon’s glorious sons, these two shone out. But had Glardor been there, Glardor the Great Sun, they said now he would have looked what he was … a farmer.
I was on the women’s side of the West Terrace, though some women mingled more freely here. I noticed the greater ladies, older and more weighed with jewels, had kept decorously to the left.
From the town, the gongs were sounding, a rush of noise like insects, carried by the amphitheater of the shore.
Everyone seemed to have come out. It was all at once quite still. I held my breath.
A boy sang: “Splendor of leaving—”
Amdysos took the cup of incense and poured it down.
The Sun, orange in a mulberry cloud, dipped away. The Daystar hung like a polished diamond, or a tear.
Klyton—Klyton—the lines of his body, and his face, standing solemnly by. I cut myself upon his beauty. Pierced to the quick, I missed the Sunfall, I missed the incantation. I closed my eyes.
When I opened them, everyone was stirring. The sky was an extraordinary color, between amber and amethyst—how many Sunsets had I properly seen? I had seen nothing. Two rooms, a garden, the shore, a few apartments of the palace women, a temple. And—the House of Death.
“Are you well?” hissed Ermias in my ear.
“Yes.”
As we straightened, two young lilting women came to me over the Terrace. Behind them, the smoke rose from the altar. The priest was going away. Amdysos, Klyton, had gone.
“Princess!” They were two I had met before, with Ermias; now they bowed to me, pink as the pearls of the outer seas. “Our lady, the Widow-Daystar Stabia, requests you will approach her.”
That was his mother. Stabia. They said she had been the Consort’s lover.
I glanced across the Terrace, emptying now, but for the knots of persons who lingered. Against the mauve-amber sky, a fat woman bulged, with her greying blonde hair intricately done. I would see, in a moment, she had green eyes—from her he had them, Klyton.
I realized he had asked this of her, publically to notice me. I knew also, she would tell Udrombis. Udrombis who, widowed ten years, was still a fabulous goddess of the court’s female life. She would punish me if she did not like me—was that still true? Oh, yes. Oh yes.
Walking to Stabia across the mosaic, I heard the murmurs. Who is she? Look how she glides along. Is she real, or a doll?
They said, too, I was—delicious.
Then, I did not absorb a word.
My ears buzzed as the voices did. I saw a round blot of light on the sky, which held stout Stabia, standing among her women.
But when I reached her, and had bowed, she smiled at me, not friendly, but as one warrior greets another, matched, so far respectful.
“Princess. My son spoke of his sister. Your mother was the Daystar Hetsa, I think. Your father, of course, Akreon, the Great Sun, before his death.”
“Yes, madam.” My voice seemed far away. She heard it better than I.
“I’m glad to see you at last. You must sit by me at dinner. And your Maiden with mine.”
Ermias beamed. I felt her smugness as my hands turned to snow, as I hung weightless on the Terrace.
“You’re very kind, madam.”
“No. Come on, look happy, now.” She leaned forward, and smackingly kissed my cheek. “There. Let them talk about that.”
Although now, I can look back and see others wrapped in scenes where, at the time, I was not present, t
his is one of the scenes I cannot, looking back, see well at all. It passed in a trance for me. I was stiff with fear. Yet bemused and dazzled, I believe I did not often, now, glance at my brother. But once, I do recall, when I did so, Stabia said to me with quiet sharpness, “They’re a fine sight, I agree. But to stare too much at the men’s tables can mean you’re forward.”
So I looked at the walls, with their safely gutted men, and the yellow columns. At the floor, which showed the world—our world.
The King’s place, raised up a step or two, was void, of course. But I saw his Consort, who sometimes now spent her time at the court, a big, blonde, ordinary woman up on the left of the dais, and also Udrombis, in her chair by a pillar there. The blonde Queen was greedy but well-mannered. Udrombis the Widow ate sparingly, and drank a little wine. When the harper came in, she called him to her. He bowed to the Consort, but to Udrombis he kneeled—he was from the Eastern Towns.
She was truly like a lioness. Oddly, so was Kelbalba, whose brother had compared her to one. But how unlike. Although I had grown taller, Udrombis seemed to have kept pace. She was still a tower, and her ebony hair, roped with greyish silver, even now with one strand of white—they said she woke with it starting three days after Akreon’s funeral—was her crowning magnificence. Her mourning robes were the color of a lion’s pelt, and edged like that with black. She wore a necklace I had heard of, called the Seven Daystars, all large diamonds, cut so that they flashed and blinded.
I saw Elakti, too, the spear-wife of Amdysos, from my mother’s Ipyra. She made ripples all around her, complaining about a fruit with a worm in it, of the heat, once slapping one of her women in full view. Stabia made no comment beyond a crunching little laugh.
The many dishes of food were exceptional. I ate almost nothing. Stabia did not prompt me. She showed me I should take an occasional morsel, and, unlike Elakti, praise it. These things got back to the cooks. As Elakti should have learned by now.
Stabia stopped me drinking too much wine in my confusion, urging Ermias to fill my cup with a juice of summer roses. This perfumed taste brings back to me always that night I can scarcely remember.
There were dancers from Oriali.
When the harper began to sing, the Hall fell quiet. At first the music was only a delicate sound. He had the male sithrom and plucked it with a strong hand brown as wood.
Then I heard the words. They were of a princess shut in a tower of bronze, noticed by the Sun god and carried away. It was an old tale, girls had swooned over it for centuries. But as I felt their faces turn, like grass-heads against the wind, I came to see that it was my cipher, I the girl shut away, that the power of the Sun and of life had rescued.
I lowered my eyes and bowed my head.
When the song was done and other ditties were sung, the princes performing with their own harps here and there, to a high standard that did not match the harper’s, Stabia told me very low, I had behaved well. “What a son I have,” she said. She sounded exasperated, and impressed, and—unsure.
He had gifted the man to sing as he had; one did not bribe a professional artist.
In the end, they threw open both sets of doors on the warm summer night, and people wandered on the terraces to view the stars, and look where the moon rose on the sea.
Stabia got up, and bowed to Udrombis, the blonde Consort—who was still eating—then swept me out with her own.
That was the end of my first evening in the Great Hall at Oceaxis. If he looked once at me there I did not know. I was as exhausted as if I had run upon my silver feet for thirty miles.
In the half dark under the stair, at the west end of the Hall, in the lower Sun Garden, Amdysos said, “I have to go in to Elakti tonight. It’s six months since I visited her. She makes a fuss.”
“I’d have her poisoned,” said Klyton.
“No, you’ve a soft heart.”
“Something else would be soft. I don’t know how—”
“Well, let’s not talk about it. I wanted to ask you about the girl.”
“Oh, which?”
“Don’t play, Klyton.”
“You mean our sister?”
“We have so many. I mean the girl who had silver shoes.”
“No. Her feet are silver. Like her eyes, in all that pale gold.”
“I thought so. It’s the crippled one, isn’t it? Cemira—isn’t that her name?”
“Calistra. The other name’s a curse her bitch of a mother put on her. I’ve learned a lot. Do you know, she was sent to Koi? To Thon’s Temple—like some useless peasant brat they couldn’t afford to feed.”
Amdysos looked towards the mountains, just visible, painted in metal by a lifting moon.
“It was harsh. But this can’t be right, not this.”
“What?”
“The thing you did. Getting Stabia—and the song. Udrombis, I gather, had looked after the child.”
“Udrombis left her to grow up in two rooms. Only her woman showed Calistra any life.”
“And you, of course.”
“You think it was a mistake. But you saw her.”
“I agree, she’s a pretty little thing. Maybe it will be of use. A good marriage—why not. But Klyton—”
“What now?”
“She’s in love with you.”
Klyton turned round and gazed long at Amdysos. Klyton’s face showed nothing at all. He said, at last, “She looks up to me. Why not? She’s hardly seen any men.”
“She is in love with you. And—Klyton, her body’s warped. Can you doubt her mind will be? It isn’t her fault. Poor creature. But you’ve brought her on too far, and much too fast.”
“You’d have left her with Thon. The poor creature. I recollect this conversation with you that day at Airis. You were in error then, and still you are.”
Amdysos shrugged. “All right. We must differ.”
“At Airis,” said Klyton suddenly, “I shall have the choosing lot, and race.
“You can’t know.”
“Can’t I. Watch it occur. And I’ll take Calistra there. Yes. She can come to the Sun Games, and hold the Vigil with the rest, when we ride through the caverns.”
“Don’t do it, Klyton. You’re making too much of her. What will happen when you lose interest, as you must?”
“Maybe you can’t yet give me orders, Amdysos. Maybe you aren’t yet King.”
Amdysos stepped back. His face fell, and set. “What are you saying to me? You can’t think that of me—that I dishonorably want Glardor’s place.”
“How do I know what you want. You get the best of every bloody thing. You’ve got your own command for battle. You race every year at Airis—”
“Not every—”
“And say not one word of what is in it.”
“I can’t. It’s sacred. It’s the god’s.”
“You can do anything. You can prod your ugly mad wife from the backlands, that would make any other man puke, at will. And you know my sister is an incestuous little poor deformed not-even-human whore, better left to die on a mountain. What can I know of you, Amdysos?”
“You’ll be sorry you said this, when you consider.”
“Who’ll make me sorry?”
“We’re not boys, to scrap over an argument.”
“No. Not boys.” Klyton turned and strode three paces. Then he stopped. And Amdysos, kingly and silent, clenched in his breathing.
Klyton said, “What you’ve said tonight, shows you to me. I thought you someone else.”
“For the sake of the God!” Amdysos lowered his voice. “Be reasonable.”
“I would rather,” said Klyton, “shine.”
He passed through the garden, brilliant by day with red and gold, the colors of the god, black now with night, spearing a path by the torch-glare of rage. He shone indeed, like arson through the dark.
After a few minutes, Amdysos, heavy as lead and conscious of duty, climbed to the apartment of Elakti, where the women were in tears, a mirror on the floor, and via
ls of scent broken. She shrieked and wept, and when he possessed her, later, sunk her nails into his back in hatred, not pleasure.
But Klyton found Ermias where he had arranged to do so. He complimented her on her dressing of Calistra, he asked two or three things about Calistra, before they lay down. He knew the hands with which Ermias stroked and clutched him, had run over Calistra’s skin, and that Ermias’s mouth had kissed Calistra’s mouth in childhood. When Ermias screamed, he saw Calistra bent backward under him, her hair streaming, her face in ecstasy, a silver snake, the feather of an eagle, and broke inside the body of Woman like the boiling sea.
10
Udrombis lay sleeping in the wide carven bed. Four pillars run about by golden vines upheld a canopy and curtains of white gauze, to keep out summer insects. Beyond this filmy box, the room was vast, lambent only with night. At the tall gold shrine to the Sun in his form of a young man, a vague glow in the lamp of yellowish alabaster, cast off strange verticals of dim shape, the edges of a clothes stand, a chair, a vessel on a table. Nothing more. The doors were shut and the Maidens slept in small rooms of their own. Outside, the guard who stood, a story down, was silent at his post.
The Queen opened her eyes. She was quite awake. She had trained herself to such alertness from her earliest youth, having heard a story once of war that came in the night, and of a warrior’s preparedness.
Through the curtains, only the usual, things, darkness, hints of color from the lamp.
But then the lamp flickered, and went abruptly out.
This was not a cause for alarm, only someone would need to be reprimanded tomorrow. There could not be enough oil in the lamp, and it was impolite to let go out the light before a god.
Udrombis sat up, and pushed aside the curtain. She would refill and relight the lamp herself.