Mortal Suns (10 page)

No more must I use canes, which might throw my spine awry. Now I must be lifted, and elsewhere learn to lift myself, and swing by a hanging bar, and, lying on the floor, curl and roll and twist, and, lying in the pool, juggle balls with the knees and calves of my legs. This at first amused me. Then I hated it and sobbed. The servants, thickset women who acted sometimes as assistants in the practice courts of the stadium at Airis, were patient with me. In their everyday role they were nothing, and might not touch, except in dire extremity, the body of a man. Having learnt the art of things from male tutors, however, they were in demand for work upon high-class women who had suffered any injury, or who had been harmed in childbirth. For this they were well recompensed.

They seemed not to dislike a child. They lured me with sports and confectionery to my work, and when I had mastered everything, to greater performance and better tricks, with promises of stories, and sometimes demonstrations of the most amazing contortionist abilities, which they had gained years before and never lost.

In two years, I would be nearly limber as a fish. Though I could not walk, I could twist and turn upon my bar like a snake off a column, and had all the agility of an accomplished child dancer—I, who could not put one foot upon the ground.

They were very careful nevertheless, that my muscles should not bulge or be overly stretched. Tasks done, they massaged me lightly by the pool, where I would lie, dreaming upon the image of the green turtle, who in turn gazed back at me with eyes knowing all things, or nothing.

Ermias was jealous. This must be true. Once she took to mimicing my antics, the fluid bends and turns of my arms and torso, screwing up her face as she did it. The older servant woman was there, the one with the scar along her cheek where once a charioteer had caught her, not meaning to, with his whip. She looked sidelong at Ermias and said, loudly, “Once there was a firefly saw a star. I can do that, said the firefly. But when the fly had done her very best, her fire went out. The star burns yet.”

“You insolent sow,” shouted Ermias. “I’ll have you flogged.”

“Been flogged,” said
the woman. Unlike a princess, they had had no qualms at building up her frame as large as a strong man’s. “But I’d only take it now from the Sun Queen. Shall I go tell her you want that? Or will
you
try for me?”

Ermias grew red as a lamp. She went away, again.

The woman, whose name was Kelbalba, swung me round in a somersault from her big safe hands, catching my legs before any feet were needed.

“Scum rises to the top of the jar,” she said.

Then she told me a story in her rough voice, about the Daystar, and how she was the sister of the Sun, and loved him so much she would never leave him, although she always walked an hour behind him through the sky, to console men at his going down. The Daystar was not worshipped, she said, accept among the peasants. And yet, how lovely was her light, in the last of the evening.

My education was taken in hand.

The rudiments of reading, writing and simple numbers, which had been thrust at me in the House of Thon, were now expanded into long tutorials, which sometimes fascinated and sometimes irked me.

Religion, too, was taught to me. I learned that the Sun had no other name and was only one. I was lessoned in the proper observances and prayers, and on how to conduct myself in his temple. To which, at the greatest festivals, I was carried throughout the year.

I was taught the ways of lawless, obscure Phaidix, the moon, who at certain seasons might be invoked by women, under the name of Phaidix Anki, as a sorceress.

I learned that these two gods, with Thon, the Death Lord, were current in all lands of the continent, and most of its islands. But that there was also a pantheon of slighter gods in Akhemony, some immigrants from Artepta, Bulos, Ipyra, and elsewhere. All had their places.

It was Kelbalba who told me of Lut, the Arteptan dwarf god, whose part it was to watch over any who came into the world at a disadvantage, or later fell to one, the very poor, the sick, those smitten in brain or body. “Those the other gods forget,” said Kelbalba. I was nearly six then, when she spoke of Lut. She did not make anything much of the story, no more than of a hundred others. But when I said, curiously, that I supposed he would know about me, she said that she supposed he might. She had a charm of Lut, in blackened silver, and showed me it. She said, proudly, she had always been very ugly, and so adopted the god, although he lived in Artepta.

I marveled
at that. I did not think her ugly at all.

Never, any more, was I allowed to walk, that is to use canes and swing about on them. At five or six, I often got in a temper at this. I had waited so long, perhaps expecting to get them back as another of my rewards for diligence at all my lessons.

It was explained to me all over again, that constant recourse to the sticks would deform my body utterly, because I had not finished growing, had scarcely begun.

So I had to be content, since they were adamant, with my chair with the golden clasps, which, as I grew, grew also, or rather was replaced always with a larger one.

The female slaves bore me to the cell of easement, even sitting me on the pot. I did not any more find this humiliating. They were, after all, slaves only, and lessons in my rights and worth as a princess of the Sun, had already taken hold. To move about, however, requiring always one other, and presently two, to bear me in the chair, was a cause of annoyance and frustration.

I would sit looking at the far end of the room, or the door to the room with the pool and my turtle—now she was
mine
—and chafe because I could not merely
go
there.

Dependency of any sort will rankle. A child any way is so dependent. It remembers worse. To be born helpless without language or any ability, surely we are all, at the commencement, the creatures of Lut, and at the end, with age, may go back towards him again.

Sometimes I was carried to a garden that ran under my apartment, reached by a small door. It was completely wild now, having been left untended since the time of Okos, for the moon goddess, who loves things untamed. Her shrine was there, black stone, and her statue, quite coarsely cut, but showing a lynx crouched at her side.

Once when they had put me there, near the outer wall under the vine, I saw a fox come through and a cub after her. They were in their summer colors, with a sheen like that on the Lakesea below.

I watched them gambol, and fight mock combats, springing at each other, hoping no one would come to frighten them. Then they were gone, away into some secret place of the garden, where the wild fruit trees had netted together and the grass stood high as I would have done, had I been able to stand.

Overhead, the
Daystar was clearly visible, though it was almost noon, the hour when she is often shy of her appearance, so close to the Sun.

Looking up, I noticed, too, an old woman. She was dressed very darkly, but had heavy, dull-gleaming ornaments, a necklace of big somber stones, and a dozen bracelets. Although it was morning, she seemed to have offered something on the altar of the shrine. I could not see what.

Then she turned. I recalled her at once, she was the old woman who had soothed me that second night at Oceaxis, a century ago, when I was four.

She said, “Udrombis goes up to Airis for the hot months. But not you.” I shook my head. I did not query why she put my deeds together with the Great Queen’s. “They run the Sun Race soon. Have you heard?”

“To honor the god,” I said obediently, “through the caves under the mountain.”

“Yes, just so. Where have you been but Oceaxis?”

I shook my head again. Though a King might make military diplomatic progresses, and other portions of the court break off to travel, most of the household remained constant, in time of peace, by the Lakesea.

“You were once in the Temple of Death,” said the old woman.

When she said it, I did not feel afraid or threatened, as when, say, Ermias spitefully mentioned my awful beginning.

The old woman pointed away, over the wall.

“Down there is the sea. Go far enough, you will come to the Sun’s Isle. Have they told you?”

“Yes. Where the piece from the Sun broke off and crashed down. When the First King conquered.”

“Who,” she said, “do you think is the more powerful? Not a King? The Sun then, or the moon? Or Death?”

I puzzled. Such questions—not quite such questions—were put to me in the hours of schooling. But I did not know. The Sun gave life. The moon and Death took it away. A King could do both, but was also subject to both. She seemed not to want an answer any way.

She said, “Glardor
is off again,” like an elderly market-wife speaking of some nephew.

Even I had heard how Akreon’s heir, the new Great Sun, was still, very often, on his estates. He liked the things of the earth. He planted, and tied vines. He would even take a turn with the plow. Glardor the Farmer they called him, out as far as Uaria and Charchis. For this reason perhaps, now and then, little eddies of trouble would stir, in Uaria and Charchis, in Ipyra, in Sirma. … What could a farmer know of ruling or war?

There was a silence then, but for the crickets in the grass. The Sun was lifting up high, and soon they would come to take me into the shade, for royal women had complexions like milk, unless they were ebony, as in Artepta.

“Did you come before?” I asked the old woman. I had forgotten the substance of our previous chat.

“Did I? When was that?”

“Years ago. I was a child.”

She did not laugh. She said, “We are all children. Oh look, now. That butterfly.”

I looked of course. And saw the butterfly, mint-green, with black eyes on its wings. And when I looked again for her, the woman, she was gone.

When the slave came, I said to her, “Who is that who comes in our garden and the rooms?” She stared blankly. “An old woman—like a queen.”

The slave did not know. But slaves, I then thought, knew very little, not understanding they are like the mice in the walls of an ancient house, going everywhere, privy to all things.

In the afternoon though, Kelbalba entered, and when I had finished my exercises, and we were sitting with the turtle, I told her of the woman I had seen.

Kelbalba said, gravely, without any attempt to alarm or deny, “That would be the old witch, Crow Claw. She died in the snow months.”

“Which snow months?” I gabbled.

“The last ones. They found her inside the door of the High Queen’s chambers, lying on the floor, as if asleep.”

“Then—it was a ghost.” Stunned, I did not argue.

“She was happy here,” said Kelbalba. “She doesn’t want to go away.”

“But Death
takes—makes … Is there a choice?”

“Yes, if you’re strong enough.”

I dreamed that night I saw Crow Claw sacrificing a white hare to Phaidix, to whom no blood sacrifice was ever made. It was Phaidix who stole in by night and drank the life from the bodies of men and women, babies and beasts, but they died in a joy greater than any to be found on earth.

When Crow Claw had killed the hare, its soul jumped out of it, white as the moonlight, and she and it went away together, directly through the wall of the garden.

What was I, then, as a child? In wartime once, the pherom-steel, when hammered in the fire, was cooled by plunging into the blood of a living enemy. How had
I
been tempered? First miseries, then terrors, and so to a life which, if not in any way wholly carefree, was yet full of pleasures, and of boredoms, too. From
that
lesson, what was I learning?

At my seventh year, they began to teach me to sing, as Udrombis had promised, and to play the sithra, the little female harp which, being so light, was easily rested on my knees. I was not inept, but preferred to improvise, myself creating songs and melodies, not doing as they said I must. I made my songs from the history of the Sun Lands now being taught me, the stories of heroism and romance that caught my fancy. And I composed odes to geographical regions I had never seen, trying I think to bring them to me, since I could not go to them. When Mt. Airis was spoken of I longed to see it. I longed to sail across the Lakesea in a galley. I longed to sail the narrow winding straits at Artepta, and behold the monuments of smooth and shining stone rising out of the water, and the statues of strange beings, which spoke—a thing I did not know, even having lived there, sometimes happened at the Temple of Thon. In my head I went traveling, making up for myself these places and lands, reinventing them from what I knew, as they had told me the gods had done, at the very first.

For my arrogance I was reprimanded. Which helped me, for it made me worse.

Probably I should have been, after my start, a timid child. In some ways, I was. But I was forever darting out of cover. I was forever angry, sitting in my golden chair, beating my legs that had no feet against the lion-claws, until my calves were bruised and I cried.

It was I
who wanted ghost stories, and then lay rigid through half the night. Oddly, I was never afraid of Crow Claw. If she had come then, I think I would have debated with her quite boldly on her state.

Then again, with certain adults I was stricken almost silent. A crushing rebuke made me shake, made me sick to my stomach, as did the dread of things not reckoned by others onerous—for example, the excitement of going to the temple, where I should see my beauteous male kin—before all those excursions, I vomited, until I was given a little wine, which would steady me. Even so, I would have died rather than miss the trip.

I had, too, unreasonable fears, or so they were called. Of a spot behind a particular pillar, where they must always leave a light. Of the sound cats made outside, fighting at midnight to honor Phaidix. Or a certain innocent food or drink. Yet—thunderstorms I loved.

Snow, however, made me melancholy, which was not so surprising. The bedcovers, shutters, and drapes of the palace had not yet blotted up the icy times at Koi.

What can I say of her then, this child?