Mortal Suns

by Tanith Lee

  A boat rowed us over, and went back.

  By now the Sun was much higher, ambered, a huge smothered spark. The Daystar could just be seen, mauve and opaque.

  There were no clouds. A kind of shivering luminescence hung on everything, and seemed to slide through the stony beach, and drip down off the clustered forest.

  A few moments after we had got from the boat, a bird began to sing.

  Nimi exclaimed, and two of the men made warding signs.

  At first the song seemed exquisite, resembling the notes of the kitri. But then it sharpened, splintered. As with the odors of the Island, it was firstly pleasing and next disgusting. It scratched the nerves with needles. Then the song ended and did not resume.

  Klyton walked at once away and up the path, which had originally been paved, and was now quilled by slivers of rock that must have shot up, perhaps, in a tremor. The ground was woven with brambles and creepers.

  Five pillars were at the entrance of the shrine, and were black from age, with horrible shafts in them that showed out yellowish white —protuberant bones. The creepers had gone round and round like serpents. The roof was gone, smashed in on the floor below. This floor had had mosaic, a picture of a Sun with cat-animals running about it, but no colors remained in it, and something, maybe only the years, had pulled fragments out and thrown them everywhere.

  Klyton told his men to clear an area in the shrine and put down for me some rugs, and the chair which had been brought.

  I had after all managed the beach, and was now on the path, but going very slow, Nimi and one guard assisting me.

  As I ascended, I studied the trees of the forest. They were twisted in extraordinary shapes, some like open hands stretching out cupped, clawing fingers, and some lying sidelong against each other, then bending back to run another way. There was one like a great ball, the branches thrust out as spines do from a hedgehog. All the bark greasily shone, and unlike the mosaic had deep, throbbing colors, a syrupy green, orichalc, and magenta. While out of some of the trees strange slender trickles of moisture flowed, red like magma, or greenish like sap.

  The canopy of the forest had dark leaves at least larger than a man’s hand, and in places as big as a shield. These flags hung motionless, but as we climbed, we saw, threading through and through, a type of snake thing, pallid and scaled, long, rope-like, yet seeming to have a head also at the tail’s end. But it was blind, it had no eyes. It paid no attention to us or the men heaving out the rubbish from the shrine. When it vanished, we climbed on.

  The creepers and brambles were also curious. They had the highlight of silk, black wizened berries.

  In the shrine’s back, the altar had been split by the roof coming down.

  Nevertheless, Klyton there offered wine, and some meal from the store on the ship. Only when the incense was lighted, it stank.

  There had been a tale King Okos had had grapes brought from the Isle, to make a wine. He gifted it to an enemy, who died.

  The bird began to sing again. With strands of burning liquid glass it webbed together the tree tops, then tore its web in splinters.

  Klyton drew me aside. He kissed my mouth. He tasted of the char of the offering, but I did not recoil. Had I started to be afraid? Had I? Oh, yes, surely. But then, I loved him.

  There was a film on his clear irises like the film on the sea. Behind the film, his eyes glittered.

  “We’ll be back by nightfall.” And then, very low, “Pray for me, Calistra. The temple is ruined but stays holy. You can feel—the air’s like granite, weighing. The most holy ground in the world.”

  The soldiers watched respectfully as we parted, and followed him out.

  My guard sat dicing heartily, with frozen faces, on the path, three standing watch. The rest constantly looked up and around.

  Out on the level, greyish sea, the Bulote galleys shimmered as if haloed or on fire. We knew, though standing in so near, they were miles off from us.

  He told me, in the ship by night, on our last journey. And in Artepta told me again and again, along with his repeated speech of the favorable giving of the gods, this other tale. His dreams I listened to also, unless I could wake him. Until our situation was altered. Then she will have heard them. Or woken him. And later she used her soothing drugs.

  Sometimes for battle, the prince puts on a badge or a particular high crest, to show his men at all stages where he is. Then it is the keynote, that sigil, of his fight. And for this final fight, this last march, Sun’s Isle is the blazon, how to find him and know him, the keynote to the ending.

  The legend of the island I had heard. Kelbalba had recounted it, and more than once, for as a young girl I liked it.

  Before history had begun, the center of the Sun Lands had not been a hollow lake of sea, but filled in by land. Here lived a despotic race, advanced in sorcery, who warred on the people of Akhemony, then only a tribe which lived about the hills and plains, in villages of dirt-brick. However, their priests were wise, and had found out that the Sun god was supreme, and worshipped him. So then Akhemony’s priesthood invoked the Sun.

  The god had invented the act of breathing, to cleanse and fuel the bodies of humankind. Now he embued the breath of the Sun priests with sacred fire. Lying down on the earth, their feet pointing outward to all stations of the world, and in a circle that mimicked the Sun itself, they produced in unison one mighty outward breath. This, magically altered by the god, rose upward as a wind, and the form of it was mirrored ever after in the chimney of Akhemony’s temple. Spearing on, it entered the uplands of the sky, and here provoked a solar gale. Which in turn, by the god’s will, broke off a part of the greater Sun, and hurled it down upon Akhemony’s foe. So colossal was the detonation, the land sank there and filled instead with sea, as a hoofprint fills with rain. Only one small island stayed afloat, and on it an enormous fragment of the larger Sunstone. As Akhemony grew in might, this Isle became sacrosanct. A temple was erected there to contain the Stone and dedicate the victory. But the priests who served it were withered by the power of the Stone, and died, and the Isle itself was transformed into a place of marvels and monstrosities.

  Sarnom walked behind Klyton, as they went up through the colored forest. An old man, he had stayed healthy and alert. He did not seem fearful.

  The soldiers and their captain came after Sarnom, their eyes everywhere. They had drawn their swords, specifically to cut away the foliage and creepers, as Klyton did with his knife.

  The forest was thick. It made them dizzy with its perfumes and effluvias. They passed through only one glade, and here there was no grass but a floor like obsidian, fused and sheer. On it, they saw a black shelled creature, like a sort of crab, and great as a mule, but it did not move, it might only have been another rock.

  Some while after they found frog-like things, which appeared constructed from bright silver, and jumped away. They had each two pale eyes, and a third eye at the middle of the back, lidded and blinking.

  When the forest ended, which it did without any scrub, the boundary drawn straight as a rule, there were hill slopes of tawny grass, brittle as baked sugar, that snapped, and smelled of new bread. Once or twice they heard the bird sing again in the trees, or another like it. On the first slope, there were scarlet ants the size of mice, or a little bigger. The soldiers tried to stamp on them to kill them, but, having done it, as they raised their boots, the ants, too, rose unharmed, and scurried off again through the grass.

  Above this slope were others, but they were empty. Then the slopes became burnt, like meat, and scattered with boulders all eaten out, and cold, they said, to touch.

  Something made a sound here, reminiscent of grasshoppers, but they did not see any. Aside perhaps from the crab, and the hideous ants, so far they had seen no creature that lived.

  They continued. There were plants, bulbous things, which spurted juice when sliced at. They had colors, Klyton told me, which have no names. He said, colors like the eye of a storm, like the pain of thirst. They could
hardly stand to look at them.

  Where the crown of the highest hill was, they beheld a skeleton, old as for ever, brown and terrible, a beast that had, as in the tales, two heads, one much smaller than the other. Through the huge blackened skull, and the tinier skull like soiled bronze, an antique sword and knife poked up, rusted and brittle as the grass below: the remembrance of some hero’s battle, which he had won.

  They had climbed up the hills of the Isle, and now went down into its valleys. But it took them less than half a day, because the blunted ember of Sun was not at the apex when they reached their goal. When they had cloven through a wall of dead and murky trees that once might have been oaks, they saw the temple of elder time lying over the lower hillside, before them.

  It was black as a carious tooth, the temple, but steps went up to it, and columns held up a roof. There were said to be five hundred columns, a number of the Sun, but by now many had toppled. Even so the roof was whole, noduled by statues which seemed to have blistered, melted, becoming shapeless. Over this place, immanence had formed like a slab.

  About the temple, grazed a flock of things. So you might see sheep, clustered around some little Sunlit fane of the hills of Akhemony. These were not sheep, though about their size.

  The men stared, and Klyton stared, down at them. The flock was composed of rats. But they were bald rats, pinkish, with dim dark eyes as though their heads were full of rivers. There reached, even here, the rodent smell of them. And what they grazed on had had bones.

  Klyton said to me, he meant then to go down alone, killing where he had to, to gain the temple.

  But abruptly the Sunlight congealed, as if before a storm. And then a wind thrust up the hills, throwing the grasses and the plants together, snapping them, so the air was suddenly full of the odors of bread and mutton. The wind bent even the men over. It roared as it passed, and going down around the black temple, it danced, spinning. The rat flock fled from the wind.

  But in three or four minutes, the wind died. And now the light itself was of a shade no man there could describe. In this they picked their way down, and over the carcasses of indecipherable dead items, and pellets of rat dung like loaves, and walked up the temple steps.

  There were snakes on the steps, sinuous and whip-thin, and they sank into holes.

  One of the men began to howl there. The captain hit him in the face. “Steady. You’ve seen worse.” This was a lie.

  A friend helped him up and they went on.

  The temple was a casket, and the door was down. Inside, light entered at a hundred cracks. Most of the pillars stood, and an aisle led to the great altar. This was of a washed-looking white marble that had scarcely darkened. And on it, above the place for offering, the Sunstone rose the thunderbolt, in a cage of black metal.

  The soldiers stopped. They went to their knees. Perhaps they forgot the giant rats. Only Sarnom stayed at Klyton’s back.

  Klyton strode forward through the temple and came to the altar, and faced the mythical Stone that was real.

  He put back his head, to look.

  The Stone from the Sun was black and rough, and veined with ores. It was my height, he said, no more, the height of a girl. It had an unlikely image, for it was also shaped like a woman. So he saw it. A head and breasts, tapering to a pair of little feet which were, he said, because of the ores, silvery.

  From his clothes, Klyton took the jewel he had brought. It was a ring of golden leaves, finely crafted, set with a flawless topaz. He laid it on the offering place, before the Stone.

  He spoke to the Stone, but without words.

  The temple sang, he said, like a huge harp, a sithrom. And it glowed like a cave of the sea, all phosphorescent. He felt some substance of the temple spread over his skin, on the orbs of his sight, and in his mouth he knew its flavor. A spirit of the wind still twirled in the aisle, in and out of the pillars. One might see dancers in the wind, or the priests who were dead, advancing with a sacrifice, a pale stallion that had five eyes …

  Deep within his brain Klyton now experienced the rippling glimmer of the Stone, reaching in and tasting him, like a snake sipping a cup of milk.

  The god spoke then, muffled and soft, inside his brain, his mind. A tiny voice. Almost nothing.

  No.

  The god said only this. It was impersonal.

  The god had forgotten him, for Klyton, a Sun, of a line of chosen Kings, was only mortal. No more. Nothing else.

  No.

  The impact wrenched through Klyton. He steadied himself, as the man had been told to do outside. He whispered, too low for the waiting soldiers and slave to hear, “Very well. Take my life. But give me just one year more of glory. Give me what you vowed to me. Since you said it should be mine.”

  The god did not speak again. And the Sunstone was grey-black and cindery and ugly, and had silver feet.

  Sarnom, seeing Klyton turn with tears lying out under his closed lids, reached up quickly and flicked the drops away, as if attending to flies.

  “Thank you,” Klyton said. “We’ll go back now.” He added, “They must eat and drink nothing here. Do they know? Did I tell them?”

  * * *

  My guard had stopped dicing. They stood together drinking from a wine sack, at the bottom of the path.

  Nimi and I sat watching the forest.

  I wondered what Bachis was doing, aboard the smaller galley, and whether she felt favored or demeaned by being left there. Though the vessel was not big, she had kept elsewhere on it and did not share my awning. She knew her place, a lesser Daystar. She fed her baby herself, cloaked by the sturdy Maiden. This led me to remember my own childhood, Phaidix’s garden, Ermias, the turtle.

  The day went slowly but also very swiftly. I cannot explain this. Perhaps I sometimes slept, without knowing it.

  Conceivably, too, I was terrified that Klyton would be attacked within the Island, and so shut my mind numbly away in reveries. Yet I see I did not for one moment believe in his death, as I did not in my own.

  Every so often, the bird splayed its glass web and destroyed it.

  The guards talked of finding and killing it. Its song was so interesting, it might eat well. Or it might contain venom. They loudly laughed and at their noises, the song did not cease, as if it could not until its sequence was complete.

  Then the Sun was low, and it came to me a Sunset was beginning, and the colors were at fault again.

  Like the darkest carnelian the Sun sank, and the sea was henna. But as the solar disc went under the water and the land, there was a green lightning violent enough that it caused one of the men to cry out. And then the sky seemed to glow more tremendously than the Sun, and it was purple and beryl, and two shades that I, also, cannot name, though I have seen ghosts of them sometimes, in other substances.

  Nimi murmured a soft prayer. She put her cool palm on my knee, as if to comfort me. She said, prosaic as a mother, “The dog will be missing us.”

  But the guards were pointing into the sky. “Birds! Birds, do you see?”

  I stood, and went out and positioned myself on the path. Nimi and I gazed upwards. Across the supernatural Sunset, out from the Isle and back again, the flying things streamed, but they were not birds but insects, great as dishes, and they turned the sky black.

  The soldiers were shouting and on the ships I noted some activity. But then the winged things settled down again into the forest, the way dregs do in a goblet.

  In an utter quiet, the bird sang once more. Its song was very close. After all this, Nimi gave a tiny shriek.

  There on the path, between ourselves and the soldiers, was a cricket made of green chalcedony, through which the afterglow shone, revealing its inner life, bladders and arteries pulsing with dim blood. It was, this entity, almost of Nimi’s own height. And with its forelegs it strummed at its own body, and from it shrilled the web of glass, its ghastly song.

  But it was beautiful. In memory I see its beauty as I did not then.

  And while I was transfixe
d, one of the soldiers threw his shield. The shield slammed against the cricket; it toppled through the ethereal light, and the shield covered it, all but the edge of one spun-silver chitin wing.

  Nimi and I turned away as the soldiers slew the giant cricket with rocks and bits of the Island they uprooted, yelling, cursing, retching. They would not touch it even with their swords, and the man who had thrown his shield, did not reclaim it.

  In my belly, a deep aching.

  Nimi, the mother, had buried her face in her hands. I put my own hand over her head a consoling gesture I had seen her make herself, with Choras or the dog.

  As the upheaval died down, the glowing day color ebbed, and a glowing night descended. The hundred lips of the sea were lined with gilt. Daylight left behind.

  And Klyton and his men walked from the forest, calling to us cheerfully, as if we were at home, and they had only been hunting on the hills.

  3

  Beyond this point, I find I can say little of Klyton, that is, of his thoughts, his mind.

  Although with memory it seems I knew him before ever even he spoke to me, after Sun’s Isle I do not know him. And this is not the alienation of the past. Ah, no. He is now a stranger I see at a distance, as if from a high wall. A stranger who lies beside me, sometimes, and sometimes works on me the enchantment of lust, and who sleeps where I can hear his mutterings, and who in sleep, now and then—though so distant—strikes me a slight glancing blow, as he battles with an invisible other. “Amdysos,” he said once, “I didn’t wish you dead.” And then, “Of course you didn’t. Leave it behind.”

  Klyton burned on, torchlike, often at the ship’s prow, looking forward, talking with the Bulote men, who forgave him the Isle as soon as we turned from it. Despite the prophecy, none had died. With his own soldiers he flared on, like a comet. Having seen nothing, yet they assumed his private omens on the Island had been favorable. Indeed marvelous. He played his part for them I think, from shame. Or did he yet not credit his gods had forgotten him, even while their No was branded black into his brain.