by Tanith Lee
As for Uros, he would have to make do.
That valley named for Two Miles was far larger. On every side the mountains went up, dressed in trees, confirming the valley floor as a stadium. Here Ipyrans had fought with each other their most primal battles, while gods sat on the mountain tops to see.
Passes came in through the crags at three junctures. All were bizarrely accessible, even in the worst winter.
But the ground itself, as Melendor had stated, was unreliable, and in the heavy snow like a third adversary, unkind to either side.
The Akhemonian troops, when they heard from the scouts the Ipyrans had put a force into Two Mile Valley, were scornful and outraged together. They thought they had got the hang of the winter campaign, which till then had been sieges and sudden attacks. The size of the Ipyran rabble was also disconcerting. Banding together in this way, they were reportedly ten thousand strong.
Nexor’s southern force had lost men. To the weather and the terrain more often than to skirmishes. Now they found themselves less in number than the savages of Ipyra.
When they came out on the wide natural terrace beyond the south pass into the valley, they saw, across the huge spoon of snow, deceptive and innocent as a sheet of white silk, the Ipyran camp. Perhaps only a hundred feet below, miles down it looked, in the glacial, crystalized, motionless air. The Ipyrans were black on the snow; where the mountain shadow spread, the enemy fires spangled. The scouts had not lied about their mass.
The Akhemonians extended themselves along the terrace flanks. In three hours it would be night. The stoical soldiery laid its fires. The few women who had struggled up with them, the pages and boys, set cook-pots on.
But in the Great King’s tent, Nexor was saying, “Let them rest an hour, then we’ll get down. The descent’s easy. Startle the foe.”
It was Lektos again who said, “My lord, you mean go straight down and start?”
An older man, a noble, said, “Great King, it will be dark in an hour or so.”
“We’ll be done by then,” said Nexor, beaming and hearty.
Klyton had just come in. He had previously sent a band of his Sirmians off to hunt. There had, for some reason, been a lot of deer sighted in the forest along the pass, fat deer despite the cold, and not shy. Now the men were coming in with glossy carcasses on the saddles.
He listened to Nexor’s words. Then spoke.
“No, my lord.”
Nexor looked round at him.
“No? What did you say?”
“They’ve been on the move all day. Yes, it wasn’t such hard going, but they need to get warm and to eat. If you like, we can go down in the hour before dawn, and be ready for the Ipyrans at Sunup.”
Nexor smiled. He looked away at another man. “Can you get your fellows ready in an hour, Adargon?”
“My lord, I—”
Klyton walked by Adargon, and stood a hand’s breadth from the King. In height they were matched. Nexor was a little heavier, but it did not give him psychic weight. Nexor met Klyton’s eyes, and stared.
“Great King,” said Klyton, his voice not raised, held level as a pherom blade, “I won’t fail you by sending on to the field of battle men too weary to serve your honor.”
“You’re disobeying my order. I’m your King.”
“It isn’t a game,” said Klyton, who had not heard the witch-priestess Evonissa speak in the Karrad’s hall.
Nexor’s eyes slid away, returned, slid away again. A King must have settled Klyton then and there. The tent was full. Nexor had argued. And no one had made a move to rectify the moment, for not one man was ready to scramble unneedfully to a fight in half an hour.
Outside, the shouts of Klyton’s command, crowding round the fat deer dinner his god-blessed luck had ordained for them, reached the tent like the notes of a turning tide.
“All right,” said Nexor. He was not even enraged, more… sulky. “Have it as you wish.”
Adargon’s men came over to Klyton’s campfires soon after the moon rose, Phaidix Anki riding above Ipyra.
The battalions brought wrung-neck chickens they had had from the last village, and their ration of beer and wine.
At first Klyton’s men, particularly the Sirmians, beat them off, softly enough, joking and laughing. Then Klyton walked out and said, “We’re brothers. Come on. The enemy is over there.”
A feast began, and further men moved in from other stations, Lektos’ troops, and more. They brought what they could, and the roasted venison was shared with the rabbits, the chickens, and the drink. There was not enough wine to get drunk, which was as well, with the fight tomorrow. But by the light of the torches, some of the soldiers’ women danced, their faces and arms flame-polished gold. The men sang songs from old campaigns. Klyton sat with Lektos and Adargon, and one or two other commanders—most of the leading lights of the army in Ipyra.
From the smoke, maybe, the moon blushed rosy.
In his tent hung with crimson, Nexor dined with a meager scatter of sycophants.
They heard the songs.
Over the valley of two miles, the Ipyrans heard them, too. A joyous bridegroom sings before his marriage day, they said, in Ipyra. They listened to the joyous brideroom singing, and wondered if marriage would mean, for them, something else.
In the mid of the night, as the soldiery bedded down and slept, Adargon said to Klyton, under the ice green stars, “Akreon had your luck. Your hunt. That mountain you climbed. He would have done this as you have.”
“I aggravated the King,” Klyton remarked, lightly.
Adargon, it was sometimes said, of all the royal Suns after Amdysos, had most the likeness to Klyton. Yet they said, too, there was always with Klyton some other touch, the others royal from their blood, and Klyton royal as if from the breath of a fire.
“King,” said Adargon. “That one in the red tent?”
Pale Lektos said, “A ship with a buffoon for captain, sinks, or runs aground.”
They could not quite see Klyton’s face. His smile they saw. In those years, men and women both liked always best to have pleased him.
“Good night,” said Klyton. “We meet again, the hour before dawn.”
8
The Sun rose unseen in the morning. The sky was dark as a dusk. Far brighter than the sky, the snow looked back, staring white, between the clumps of trees, virgin and unmarked, dividing the two armies. This was soon changed.
The Akhemonians had got down the graded mountain easily, as their King had said, their weapons and harness muffled. When the part-light of day came up, the van was already forging forward over the valley.
The Ipyrans, who had been making offerings, left off and sprang to arms. This could not auger well. Afterwards they blamed it, their unavoidable impiety.
I see the battlefield from the air, as a bird would see it. I have no desire to go down. Though I have heard Klyton recount these events, this is the only view I truly have.
And so I behold the meeting clash of men, the advance, so tidy, like a parade, cloven and wrecked. Lightnings lit from swords. The cries of men coming up to me, so small they cannot mean very much. Udrombis had said, the gods would seem to regard humanity in just this way. Such little noises—of fury, terror, agony, despair—what can they matter?
The Akhemonians were outnumbered, but superior in their training and their tricks. Foot soldiers progressed, slewed away, returned, and cut out the center of the Ipyran force. While Nexor’s cavalry closed in the sides.
As Klyton rode over the snow, his men poured at his back, cheering him, and Adargon’s men after. Others followed. The whole army in Ipyra had rallied to Klyton, as to something gleaming and worthy of trust. So he looked, golden, infallible, if I could go near enough to see. But from the air he is only, my great love, my lord, another tiny glittering insect.
They fought. Then a rift came in the sky. On the Akhemonians’ right, the east cracked wide, and the Sun flared through. It was the Sunrise, coming late from the cloud, a blazing gue
st to the banquet of war.
The Akhemonians took it for a sign of favor, and the Ipyrans, the enemy of the Sun King, their sacrifices interrupted, were dismayed. The Sun seemed always in their eyes, as had happened at the first fortress, when Klyton scaled to the gates. The Sun beat hard on Ipyra. They said after, the men who fought and lived, that the heat of the Sun was stupendous, too much for a northern mountain day in winter. From the trees in the valley, icicles snapped off and darted down. The ground turned queasy. Foolishly, Ipyran men and horses slid, and before they could adjust themselves, Akhemony was always there, steady as if moving on a well-paved floor.
Probably it needed no more. But there was more.
As his allies grouped in about Uros, ganging to him, shouting out to him to triumph and save them, the wonder was worked that ended everything.
No doubt the sun had slushed the snow. The valley in winter was known to be treacherous.
Even from the air, as I wait now with the circling, optimistic crows, I see the huge, invisible hand punch downward. The sight is so curious, it makes at first no sense.
It is the snow, packed under the horses and men of Uros’s massed battalions, which has given way.
As it caves inwards, slowly, more swiftly, too fast, like children at sport the little figures slither down, and are gone into purple dimness. Sixty or seventy sword lengths, the measure of the Sun Lands, the funnel in the earth has opened. The waving arms, the sunny splash of falling spears, all these are part of the game. The game of children, flies, or gods—
The ground roared as it took them in. Uros, bellowing again as he had in the Karrad’s hall, Melendor, too astonished to cry out, went down with it, and after them, the snows rushed, and washed over, to bury everything in pillows of white death.
When the roaring stopped, a silvery column of ice-spray rose high from the place, like a beacon.
The battle—faltered. It was finished. Half the Ipyran force was gone. Akhemony gathered itself, watching, as the Ipyrans scratched for their dead, piled one on another seventy sword lengths down, under a bank of snow once more pristine, but for the marks of their digging.
Having unveiled himself, the Sun burned on. The sky was fantastically clear now, pastel as the youngest violets. From the mountains round about, slips of snow gracefully sailed down with the noise of mild sighs, booming in the gorges.
Nexor had accepted the surrender of the Ipyrans. He allowed them to continue digging out their dead.
The priests of Akhemony were making offerings now, on a make-shift altar in the valley. The smoke rose white on the colored sky.
The Great King’s army, tranquilized by its uncanny and abrupt victory, waited in silence, watching the smoke.
Nexor was ruddy and merry. He turned red-handed from the sacrifice. And made out, as his commanders did, a line of chariots and men moving carefully along the valley. They came from where the Karrad’s fort would be, Uros’s grandfather’s hold, but there were too few of them to suggest aggression.
The Great King raised his arms at his soldiers.
“The old dotard’s coming. To make peace. We’ll hang him here, from that handy tree.”
The men of Akhemony murmured. Nexor, as always, had misjudged their mood. When he should have courted them, he had stayed aloof. Now he was familiar. A rousing win against dire odds would have left them rowdy and still thirsty for blood. But what had occurred in Two Mile Valley had laid on them the shadow of an ultimate respect. In the prescence of gods, they had had the wit to lower their voices. But here was their High King, bawling and showing off like a nasty boy.
Adargon said, his voice carrying outward to the men, who repeated his words among themselves, “My lord, the Karrad’s old, and his son’s a child. He won’t have wanted to go against Prince Uros, who brought his own troops with him.”
“Yes?” said Nexor. He did not grasp what Adargon was saying. He turned and volleyed at the men, “Sack the town, eh, lads?”
Again the men murmured, and stepped from foot to foot. Someone called out, “They’ve paid their dues.”
And a grumble of agreement sounded.
“What? I give you a town to sack and you don’t want it?” Nexor chided them, ridiculous and inappropriate. He was like some uncle joshing with a squeamish infant. The army did not like this.
Then Klyton was standing by the King. There was a spray of blood like rubies on his breastplate, and a thin cut which bled across his cheek. Nexor had been somewhere in the fight. Where, they wondered. He was very neat and clean.
Klyton said, so they could hear, “My lord, let it go. There’s not much worth taking in Ipyra.”
Someone else called from the crowd, “I’d like to take a yellow-haired girl.”
Klyton glanced. He said, “But you don’t need to take her, soldier. You can charm her, surely?”
At that, the crowd went up in laughter. You could see them slapping the caller on the back, tipping his helmet forward over his eyes, since the Sun Prince had got the better of him, and quite right.
Klyton let the mirth die off. They had needed it. Then he said, “Show mercy, my lord King, to the Karrad. Even the God spared him.”
The two or three chariots, and the men who had entered the valley with them, had now been taken possession of by Akhemonians. They were being brought towards Nexor, on his high place, by the smoking altar.
Nexor pushed Klyton aside.
“I’ll do what I think proper.”
A cloud went over the Sun.
An impossible dark bloomed, muffling the valley. It was like that phenomenon which is known in Pesh as an eclipse.
The soldiers made sounds, staring up, gesturing signs for protection. Nexor, too, put back his head to see.
It was not a cloud, but a bank—of birds. The crows of Ipyra, jet black, hundred on hundred of them, and in the midst of them another bird, far larger, which seemed to pull on the rest by the storm of his wings.
“Nexor,” Klyton’s voice rang out, speaking the King’s name without title, “pay attention to that. If you won’t hear me or any man, listen to the sky.”
He said to me that as he uttered these words, the hair stood up on his head. In the deep cold of the mountains, no longer warmed by supernatural Sun, a comb of ice passed through the hair, the nerves and bones, of almost every man present.
The edge of the Sun tipped free of the bank of flying birds. But the light of the solar orb was lax now. And the colossal shade sank in over the Akhemonians, clustered to the altar; over the Ipyrans, who had ceased scraping out their dead.
It was a moment for stillness, but Nexor shouted again. He shouted those words of his he should not have had, ever, to use. “I am the King!”
The giant within the raft of crows was an eagle, they said. It was very large in size, though nothing like the monster at Airis. Nevertheless, seeing it, the soldiers began to cry oaths and prayers. Many fell on their knees.
And the eagle dropped from the cloud of crows. It beat downwards, and on its wings came all the dark heart of the sky.
Now must be given the answer, for Nexor had proclaimed himself what he was, the chosen of the god.
The Sun disc was all free now. Light broke over them. They saw, every man who dared to look, something pure white burst away from the eagle, and descend.
Shining bright as a pail of milk emptied from heaven, it dashed directly upon Nexor’s head, bared for the sacrifice, over his face and shoulders, down all his unsoiled armor. Anointed, he stood, spluttering, blinded, wildly wiping at his eyes and mouth, while his priests and servants, horrified, stayed rooted to the ground.
But from the army of the Great King another music began to rise, low at first, then boiling up and over.
The eagle lifted away. The birds of omen flew northward. The army rocked in its lines, squalling with joy, telling itself through its tears of ultimate amusement, the news, until several thousand voices took up those words as a lawless, bronzen chant. “The God—the God—the God has
shat on Nexor.”
When the old Karrad had his interview with Akhemony, on the cold road, Nexor was not to be seen. It was Klyton who spoke to the Karrad, with Adargon at his side.
The Karrad had dignity. With dignity he held out his hands, in the traditional manner, to be bound.
Klyton said there was no need for that. He understood the Karrad had been threatened by Prince Uros, his grandson, and had had no choice.
With these sentences, the Karrad concurred.
All this while, his comely, deep-breasted wife stood in the chariot with him. She had put on her priestess’s black but, around her neck was a copper ring set with milky green agates. She gazed at Klyton without insolence or modesty, from her two smoky eyes and the third eye embroidered on her brow.
Finally Klyton spoke also to her. “You can bring back your son, lady. There’s nothing to fear now.”
She said, straight out, “Make sure alliance with Ipyra, lord. Then we shall be safe.”
Klyton nodded. “I think so. But there are no daughters in your house.
Just then from across the valley, the soldiers’ chant, which they were still lovingly indulging in, drifted. Adargon grimaced, but Evonissa turned her head, listening.
After a minute, she looked again at Klyton. She addressed him clearly.
“The gods disdain to bring down a little man. They like to make him tall before they break him, as we make beautiful the beast for sacrifice.”
Klyton added to me, when he detailed her words, “I wasn’t certain, whether she spoke of Nexor, or of Uros.”
Of course, he could not know, as now I know too well. It was of Klyton himself that Evonissa spoke. Her third eye had seen through his shining day fires, to the greater spire of night beyond.
In the following month, most of the lords and Karrads of Ipyra came in, wrestling with the winter passes, to give homage to Akhemony, in the person of Klyton. Nexor had been put away like a poor knife in need of mending.