by Tanith Lee
But nothing remained of Elakti or her child, nor of her women, nor the girls who had formed her lawless train. Only the remnants they had left behind, sudden, abandoned, spoke for them, as if of some eruptive flight from merciless enemies.
* * *
Through the months of summer then, as the Ipyran Queen Calistra traveled with her lord, the Sun King Klyton, men rode about the hills, from Oceaxis to Koi, from Koi over towards Melmia, or north to Airis.
These men were from the guard of Udrombis. They wore her lion badge in gold and silver. She had some rights, as a grandmother if nothing else, to search out the pregnant wife of her last son, Amdysos.
Up the hill, down to the valley, through the ripe green woods, along the fields, that even then were turning to the triple harvest home that marked that first year of a new King. The mobs of workers, little men and women on the apron of Akhemony, showed no fear of these lustrous guards. No wrong had been done. It was a time of reward and plenty.
So, there were no lies. No unwisdoms. And still, nothing was found.
The day came that five men, brilliant with inlaid bronze, the plumes floating scarlet and snow from their crests, rode up into the poor farmland somewhat out towards Mt. Koi. They saw how beautiful the farm had become, even this wretched hovel, its walls glowing like a rouged cheek, and hung with rosy peaches and grapes, and the red marroi, the tree of the Sun god, tall in its fans of heavy leaves, near the yard.
Their mood was not unkind. When the girl came out, they laughed and let her bring them wine cold from a pitcher, with butter stirred in. They picked the peaches off the wall, favoring her, and one of the men leaned over and gave the girl’s own peaches a squeeze. They were in a friendly mood.
She said, when they asked, she was called Daibi which they knew was for the goddess of carnal love. She glanced down when they whistled. But they showed they meant nothing too much, not dismounting.
Her father, she said, was old and struck stone-side. Some of her female kin helped her with the farm.
One of the soldiers said, as they had said to others, on the chance. “Is that a baby crying?”
Her brows were straight, her mouth serene.
“No. There’s a queer bird sometimes, sounds like that.”
Because they must, they searched the farm, the big lower room with its earth floor and grinding stones in three sizes, and the area for the animals in winter. They looked at the two upper rooms. In one, the sick man dozed, in the second were only the wide mattress, and a loom, hung with cobwebs—but she would not have much time, and Daibi might practice her weaving at a kinswoman’s house.
The two barns were empty, only the tethered cow by one, seeming not quite comfortable, as if she did not like the barn door. But the cow had a calf. Perhaps she was wary of strangers.
Of the little earthen cellar Daibi did not inform them, nor the trapdoor into it, over which stood the largest of the grindstones.
She and the others had sworn an oath to Elakti in the pavilion. Her spirits had told her she must stay hidden. And most of the girls had seen these spirits, telling her.
And so the guard rode away, not knowing that down there, in the cellar, all that while, Elakti had sat, her Sun-baked face flat as a slate. Holding in her lap the thing which sometimes did cry, but which the soldiers had not heard. The thing which, to Daibi’s mind, was not, anyway, a crying baby at all.
As she was scraping off the last of the flour into the jar, Daibi felt a shadow fall between her and the Sunlit door. She looked, and Phelia was there, the court Maiden, who normally seemed by turns nervous or haughty. Now she was both at once.
“My lady says you’re to come to the barn.”
Daibi stoppered the jar and stood up, brushing off her big hands on her coarse skirt. During the more-than-a-year Phelia had been here, her garments, too, had gone for rags. The Maiden now wore homespun with badly cobbled darns.
They crossed the yard through the scurry of the chickens. Against the Sun, the leaves of the marroi looked russet as plums, and the stem like blood-filled bronze. The barn was very ordinary, beyond it. Daibi’s mother had said the sacred tree brought the farm luck, but rather than any luck at all, it appeared to have brought Elakti here, magical and possibly accursed, for how else had she borne—
Daibi saw the women were coming out of the barn, as if to meet her. As last year wore, the band of girls had dwindled; Daibi had wondered if any had blabbed. Both slaves had run away, too, and probably been taken by wolves. And one attendant had gone to Oceaxis before the birth, and not returned in time to join their flight. All in all, Elakti was now served by twenty-one women.
Elakti moved out first. She wore a cheese-colored linen dress that Daibi’s mother had had for holidays. On her bare arms shone still the bracelets of a royal wife, colcai, silver. She had lost only one of her coral earrings.
The crone, bent over from two winters lived casually, came out pressed close to her queen. The crone’s mouth was turned down. She smacked her lips in unvoiced irritation over almost toothless gums. But she still found the herbs for Elakti’s court. The herbs that helped to bring the magic.
Daibi had stopped, and Phelia beside her. Elakti had her awful face, the face she wore when something was coming. And Daibi’s hair shifted at the roots.
Where was the child? It was often drugged with a posset, left in a hollow of straw in the barn. When they danced, up the hill under the moon, the child lay beer-stunned on a wolf pelt, fighting slowly with the fur.
Daibi even now, even so near, did not want to think about the child.
Elakti raised her arm. She had been thin before, now she had got plumper on the heavy food, the breads and porridges of an upland farm.
She pointed, away beyond the barn, towards the pasture where the few sheep grazed.
“See—see—fallen from sky!”
And the crone jabbered, dancing like a rheumaticky doll.
Into those fattening porridges went the herbs. But Daibi forgot this. A veil seemed lifted from her eyes.
There, on the rim of the shorn grass, something writhed and tumbled—claws and wings—
“The eagle,” Elakti cried. “Fighting with a leopard.”
“Eagle,” shrilled the crone. “Eagle with leopard.”
Daibi saw, as did nineteen others. They saw, in various forms, the same picture. A great bird with feathers of yellow flame and soot, that had snatched at a meal too big for it, a mountain leopard like turned cream, spotted, and scored with rents. The hooked black beak opening like two knives against each other, and the crimson oven of the leopard’s mouth. Then as they rolled, one huge paw wrapping speckled velvet round the neck of the thrashing raptor. The snarls and screams in a crescendo, a whirlwind of wings—the crack like a breaking sword—
Phelia with her hands pushed to her lips, shuddered and averted her eyes. Avoiding the herbal porridge, she had grown thinner for Elakti’s bloom. Devoid of the crone’s simples, Phelia saw merely this, one of the farm cats with a dead pigeon in its jaws.
“I’ve waited on this sign,” said Elakti, moving like a shade among them, touching them, a wrist, a shoulder. “The eagle must give up its prey. The victim rises in triumph. The Sun comes from under the world, reborn.”
Phelia perceived, beside herself, only one who was mostly sane: the crone. She squinted sidelong, muttering carefully, “Triumph, triumph, born again.”
Elakti now stood before Phelia like a clammy hot nightmare given flesh. To Phelia, Elakti said, boldly, gladly, “We will wash ourselves and our hair. We’ll make garlands. We’ll go down. Now is the time. My lord and husband Amdysos has returned.”
3
It seemed unlikely they could mount him on a horse, so no one tried. Instead the captain walked at his side, guiding him a little.
The captain felt embarrassed at his self-appointed task. This was a prince. More, since the thought could not be put aside, this was a high King, the Great Sun.
Over two hours it took them, to ga
in the shrine. By then it was evening. A bow of new moon was strung far up on a peach sky. The pines and marroi of the groves were darkening. When they reached the willows by the healing stream, their charge walked immediately away from them—until then he had been docile as a sleepy child. Amdysos, Sun King of Akhemony, bent over the horse trough, and using mouth and hands, gulped up great draughts of water.
One of the soldiers let out a sort of praying oath.
“Shut your noise,” said the captain.
He waited until Amdysos had finished his drink before leading him on, about the shrine, to the buildings down the slope.
Someone had been sent ahead. The patriach of the shrine was waiting. He was dressed in white, as all the priests here were, palms hennaed, the gold Sun symbol on his head. But he was a big, grey, oldish man. The insignia of his rank weighed on him, easily to be seen. The captain had noted him about, two or three times, at priestly works.
He sat frowning as the captain stood, and Amdysos stood, the ruined blackened face tilted a fraction, to clear the one eye of the lighted lamps.
“This—you say—”
“Sir. I know him. I served under Amdysos, a year or so back.”
“But I knew him too,” said the Chief Priest, without emphasis. And then, “My lord—will you come closer, and sit here with me?” Amdysos did not take a step. “Does he not recall his name and titles—”
“Sir,” the captain said, “we have to remember what came to him.”
They stayed quiet, remembering.
“This seems—incredible. Almost two years.”
The captain said, flatly, thinking of war reports made to civilians, “It carried him high up. It would have a nest—a stinking nest of twigs and boughs, full of old bones and rotted pieces of meat. And it would have attacked him. Somehow he killed it—he had a knife from the chariot. The God knows how long that went on, how long he had to wait for the chance. Then he must get down from the height—some sulphur mountain perhaps. He was torn and bludgeoned, and after, maybe he fell. No one to help. He’ll have wandered. Memory at last brought him this way. But his brain still rings to the ordeal. He’ll be better presently, among his own kind.”
“Presently—his own kind—”
“I mean the court, sir. He’s King. After Akreon and Glardor, before any other,”
Then wine was offered, a dish of mixed fruits, grapes, apples; pomegranates, and a section of honeycomb. There had been bees in the shrine some months, apparently, then they went away, leaving the comb behind them like a gift of thanks. But when the captain took a little, and tasted it, the honey was stiff, and sour in flavor.
They brought in other priests, who had formerly spoken with Amdysos son of Akreon. A couple said that the Arteptan, Torca, should have been there, he had sometimes spent time with Amdysos, as with the King—with Klyton, that was.
Some turned pale and said they saw it was Amdysos. Others peered, and one even lifted up the lamp, and held it to the arrival’s flinching, skewing face, as if looking at a painted wall.
“I protest, sir,” said the captain.
The Chief Priest told the other one to desist. It was this other priest who said, “It might well be the prince, captain. What’s left of him. If such a thing were possible.
“It was a bird of giant size,” said the patriach. “There are feathers here, which it sloughed. Enormous.”
“If the god willed he survive,” said the captain, “it would happen. And it has.”
A silence dropped.
Amdysos spoke. “I am near the Sun.”
The Chief Priest rose, and his chair screeked on the floor, going backwards.
“My lord,” said the captain, gently, urgently, to the wreck that stood, foul and unreasonable, beside him, “my lord, speak to us. Tell us what we must know.”
But Amdysos lowered his head. His one eye went horribly opaque. It occurred to the captain he must have to sleep with it open, like a snake.
That night, Amdysos was taken by the priests, bathed and salved. They were used to the disturbed and unwell, and he gave them, anyway, no trouble. They investigated his wounds, both old and new. Hie had been hurt much as the captain had deduced—breakages, punctures—possibly exactly as had been described. There was another thing. Under the crippled man’s arms, and in the hair of his loins, was found a rash, which the priests treated, and claimed they could cure. It had been found before, they said, mostly among traders who sold, or kept as pets, such large birds as owls, or eagles.
“But there is another thing,” the Chief Priest said to the captain. “I can hardly keep it secret. Anyone can see how he is—whoever—whatever—he is.”
“What thing?”
“The ribs were crushed, and ripped inward. The left lung is healed, but severely damaged. It won’t ask very much to kill him. In any event, his life can hardly be long.”
The captain said, “All the more reason then, for going quickly to Oceaxis.”
The escort the captain organized was made up of thirty men. No longer did he think much of a plot in Ipyra. He did not even—curiously, he was not a fool—think how this must seem, what he did, in the reign of another King.
Amdysos rode in another litter, he was royal but wounded. Sometimes he soiled it; not always. Sometimes he would get out while it still moved, squat, for both functions, at the roadside.
How long had he lain in the hell of the nest? The captain did ponder this, as he rode along the sunny, pleasant route to the Lakesea. Some while, maybe, for the eagle might have wished to store this succulent, muscular young meat. Months, off and on? Perhaps he had fought it off a hundred times, and still been himself. But in the end, winning his race, himself no more.
He stank of it still, of the nest of the monster bird. How much would it require, of water, perfume, time, to wash him clean of the taint?
But also, it was his proof.
Perhaps then, he would reek until men acclaimed him.
And in Akhemony, among his own, his mind could be made whole.
The captain recollected, Amdysos, seventeen or so, Sun-born, flawless, a man, the sound material of Kingship.
At noon they halted. Among the roadside woods they ate some food. Amdysos did not stir from the litter. It was as well—he ate like—like an eagle—tearing, stuffing his mouth of snapped fangs—the men were not talkative. The horses were restive. Birds—small ones—had flown from the trees in sprays, and not come back. The woods were now empty, here, of birdsong.
During the afternoon of this concluding cumbersome lengthy journey, the green woods broke above, and sunlight ran down towards them, laughing and calling—local girls crowned with ivy and flowers, Sun white and brazen on their arms and molten on their ale-brown hair. One darker one ran first. She was not so toothsome. She had, you saw too, a long, plate-like face, and two wide, wet-black eyes.
But it was she, this one, who stood in the road, holding up her arms in the gesture of a primitive priestess, to halt them. Authority incarnate.
The captain had never seen Elakti, or certainly never seen her near enough to identify. But he knew the name, and that she had been missing.
He could see too that there were now others up the incline, men and women of the farms and villages, watching, waiting on her word. Not everyone had disapproved of her mad career. Foremost stood a slender and aristocratic woman, and an old hag. The woman carried some object, closely wrapped, and he thought it must be a baby, yet surely it was too bundled up for that—and the woman seemed not to like holding it much … an animal?
“He is with you!” the woman on the road sang out. “I am Elakti, his wife. And he, the Dead Sun.”
Then the captain understood her rights, even accepted who she must be. And something in him cringed; not only a crippled and stinking lunatic to escort, but now this insane hussy, and all to be kept with honor. For that very reason, disciplined, he got off his horse and went directly to her.
“Not dead, madam. Alive.”
�
��Risen,” she said.
He put her up on his horse. Followed now by the other women, some barefoot, all garlanded, conceivably drunk, and in tatters, and by the staring folk from the hills, the captain and his soldiers went on towards pristine Oceaxis, capital of Kings.
4
I see her distinctly, Queen Calistra. Only for a moment. She has risen from the bed where the pink cat’s tongue dawn has flicked her awake. White limbs, slender firmness, waist circled with light, her high white breasts with their two sweets, like peony buds. The shower of golden hair, down, down to her thighs, sun-silvered on one side—the silver feet into which she has eased—with all the forgetful nonchalance of repeated things. And now she bends to lace them on. Beautiful young girl that I was. Beautiful young crippled girl who has unremembered.
Only a moment. Then I become this being once again. I am Calistra. Great Queen of Akhemony and the Sun Lands, Sun-Consort, Mirror of the Sun, Jewel of the Heavens, wife to Klyton the Great Sun.
The silver feet are laced on. I pace to the side table, and pick up the cup of juice they have put ready. The dog comes, and rubs his white silk on my side.
“Do you miss him too? You should only love me.”
Klyton has been gone a whole night. The training of troops out beyond the town, discussions with his leaders, dreams of foreign conquest … He will be in the King’s Apartment by now. Soon I will see him.
The dog raises himself, putting gentle paws against my thigh. I kiss his head. He licks fruit juice from my fingers.
The shutters were thrown back and between the pillars I could look to the shimmering Lakesea. The water dazzled my eyes. Three gulls circled languidly, then another joined them. I glanced away, and saw their afterimages imprinted on the scroll of poems I was reading.
It was almost noon, and Klyton had not come to me yet. Business of the court and the world detained him. My impatience was heady, hungry for the reparation I would be given.