Mortal Suns (21 page)

She watches,
and sees the long slope to the stone mouth, and the chariots going up. She watches them halt, and hears, as does all the attentive crowd, the prayer and its responses. While some of the audience, soft as docile praying infants, speak them too.

Across the face of the mountain’s lowest bulkhead, where for centuries they have cleared all but scrub away, she can see too, the figures of the waiting priests, and finally very clearly another great cave-mouth. From this the victor of the Race will, at last, emerge, his passage through secret night and death completed. And after him, the others, though not all still in their chariots, and seldom all the horses. Over the mouth of this blind-dark, wild and uncanny cave, goes a curious twinkling of the sunlight, caught there as if on strands of impossible dew.

No one talks of what lies between the two mouths in the rock. Or, if ever they have, never to a woman.

Calistra watches as Klyton goes into the maw of the mountain.

Ermias is breathing like a small scented hog at her ear. The little slave, Nimi, is still, as if changed to salt.

The dark has swallowed him, Calistra’s beloved.

She believes it conceivable, she will never see him again, but over there too she hears the steady respiration of Stabia, her friend. He will return.
But if he does not
win—

Men of an era before time had come into this place. For these evidently, it had symbolized the same, the fall and return of the Sun. For in that way they had painted on the rock. Probably not sophisticated enough for chariots, if they had even had the wheel, they had run the whole route. It would be safer running, then.

At first, a channel went through, with the five priests, two on one side, three the other, standing by the bowls of fire, upright, masked in gold, like icons. The chariots folded into a huddle here, you could not ride more than three abreast.

Then the light flared up again, in a darkness ahead, and they came out into the first great cave.

On the high ledges, more than thirty priests were poised. The bowls they had lit had started up the bats which lived there, and which wheeled and flapped, dipping down low above the heads of men and the ears of the horses. But you trained your team to such things, with flags on cords, or tame birds. Not a secret betrayed; most caves had bats. The horses stood it, with lashing tails and jinking. Then the men were spreading them out neck and neck across the platform.

The floor
was level, and a hundred yards ahead, a new mouth of blackness waited. Its lighting was the signal to start off.

There was no further ritual, and no jockeying for position. You waited where you were able, here. No advantage in it. And for many, no knowledge of what lay ahead.

The horses stamped, the bats swirled up towards their nooks above.

A trumpet sounded, deep in the mountain.

The entrance ahead burst to golden light.

New tumults of bats rushed instantly out of it, and to meet this streaming mouth of light and dark, between the shadows’ leaping, every chariot tried to fling itself.

Klyton saw the Charchite slip back at once. A prince of Ipyra on his left went next. Lords of Akhemony, several known to him for years, were all around him then suddenly gone.

No one warned you. None must say. There was an old story of a prince who won by wringing knowledge of the Race from a Sun priest. But after his success a disease fastened on and killed him, and the priest was slain by a bolt from heaven. You did not ask. You did not tell. Perhaps, there might be a hint … but there had been none.

And so, whether to run fast or slow was a matter of choice, knowing nothing of what lay ahead. Except, there was this, you might study those who had raced here before. There were five. Only one had done it twice and been once the winner: Amdysos.

Klyton came in behind Amdysos’s chariot. It was dark cypress and inlaid with cinnabar. He wore white and gold, himself like one of the priests.

They had been friends. Amdysos was his guide, going quite fast. After this, all would be well. After this, brothers again.

Beyond the first cavern, the way was narrow once more. Presently, two chariots struck together, collided, and Klyton heard the cacophony, rage, frustration, and the shrill of horses. But that was behind, and he, Amdysos, and five more, kept on. Those other six, left behind, must do the best they could.

Down the
narrow way they galloped, the second Ipyran princeling now in the lead, after him, two together, Akreon’s byblow, Uros, and stocky Melendor, and then Ogon, who was a boaster, and who had raced here last year. Then Amdysos, and a man whose name Klyton could not summon. Last, Klyton himself. As they went, one more chariot came rumbling up. It was the Charchite, broken through the muddle of the collision. He gave a scream as he passed Klyton, careering next between Amdysos and the nameless one. The four forward chariots parted for him, crushed to the walls, and then the Charchite and the Ipyran were gone into the fading of the light ahead.

The bats, which had withdrawn, dived again. They ripped through Klyton’s aura, the nerves of his body now stretched beyond the flesh, through the physical strands of hair that had come loose from their clubbing. One bat brushed his temple, another settled a moment on the left-side horse, fluttering like a black ribbon in its mane. Klyton saw the wink of red eyes in its rat mask. He sprung the whip and cracked it just clear of the bat. You were not permitted to kill them, they were the creatures of Thon, allowed here by the Sun god as a reminder. But the bat dashed up and was gone.

Amdysos, though far enough back, was checking his team.

Guided, Klyton checked too.

Away behind there was a crash. A man’s voice raised in grief, perhaps in pain.

Behind, too, the lights were dimming down.

Ahead, new light—a new entry—the channel opened abruptly wide.

Klyton heard the leading Charchite scream again, not from triumph now. And hauled harder on the reins.

Even so, erupting out into the second cavern, he was not prepared.

In front and above, caught in the fresh flush of light, a lowering wall seemed to bar the way. On it was the huge picture of a thing painted apparently in blood and night, which uncoiled its curling tongue to clasp the disk of a crimson Sun. Enormous, it seemed you must run into it all, and be lapped up too.

The Charchite had clapped his hands across his face. His team bolted to the wall, and stopped there, the chariot swerving round and going over. He had been lucky. Two yards more, there was a drop of twenty feet.

The Ipyran
screeching prayers, rushed at the wall, and went in through a tiny hole below, which had also now come to light.

The terror of the wall painting poured over.

Klyton saw the priests who stood like stones along the walls. Here their faces were masked in black. How could you be sure they were only human?

Amdysos was going faster, and Klyton too urged on his team. Coming to the opening, instinctively he ducked his head, and drove under the thing on the wall.

Before him—far before—the Ipyran, sole leader now, ran howling still, his yellow horses snorting and prancing.

Ogon, Uros, Melendor, Amdysos—the nameless one dropped back—Klyton passing him. Bizarre, the man’s name surfaced as he did so, but was left behind.

The need to gain ground, as in any race, felt paramount, yet must be subdued by will. The Ipyran was maybe not clever, snatching first place so soon—this much already one saw.

But others too were closing from behind, a roar of hoofs and wheels. No time to look. The bats had flown up again—you did glance there, and saw them clustered like black bunches of grapes with scarlet beads that were bunches of eyes. Venom dripped from their mouths. Echoes now went through the skull. The head spun.
Clear
it. Again, the way narrowed.

More painted images—what now? On either side was the Sun’s disk, colored a dreadful dying red. It fell in stages, depicted always lower, behind the bars of the stalactites, seeming—as they ran—itself to fall. And then came a steeper slope ascending, and on the walls were the awful bulbous shapes of men who had lived once in the world, men with the heads of stags and foxes and lions, and over all the black clutching form of Night, whose mouth, like the bats’ mouths, slopped poison down. It stank here, of death, and the light faltered, and the echoes drowned—

Klyton was cold inside his heat. The sweat felt thick on him, and the fine hairs stood along his spine, the strong hairs crawled on his scalp. Just so worms would feel, that went through and through if you were left, when dead. For this they burnt you, to save you such dishonor.

But all men die. All men, high or low. Happy or accursed. Even the King, in his sleep, like a woman or a child—

But not
the eagle.

Ogon had got a bat in his hair. It had flashed down on him as if called. He was shouting, cutting chunks from his locks with his knife, to get it out. His horses floundered; he went to the side, and trundled out of control down a mysterious side passage, some old working of the mine.

Seeing it, Uros, his friend, set off after. Do friends do this? In battle I would, Amdysos. But not—here. This is nothing to do with life. It is the fight with Thon, knee to knee, for the Sun must rise, and to lose my brother and my friend is nothing to the safety of the world—

Now, all at once, a swerve in the track—and chaos. Walls rushing in, or chopped away—

The track was thin, in parts less than the width of two chariots. He saw the priests stand aloft, far spaced in groups of three, two on one side, one man another. They lit their fires as the riders approached, as before, but now the light was murky and greenish, and their faces were masked in silver, and their robes were grey, the color of mourning …

Either side hung the ancient workings, crumbles of stone ballasted by poles and shafts of oak, with great pherom stays. Drops of a hundred, two hundred sword lengths. Veins of metal left alone, gleamed transparently, like tears or saliva.

The paintings on the walls had in some areas disintegrated, flaked off. But one saw enough. Things with huge white eyes, the beasts of Night Below. They leaned to dead men, eating of them, pulling out the ropes of their viscera, and like flowers, their hearts.

The Ipyran was slowing, he was weeping. There was madness in Ipyra. Their vaporous caves, where skeletal women sang of horrors—he should not have come here—all at once he stopped his chariot, drew rein, and got down as if on an avenue. He walked to the rockface, under the picture of a snake that had men in its teeth. Here he kneeled and wove to and fro, crying. While his horses stood champing, and shaking their feet and heads, spraying foam like cream.

Someone would have to come back for the Ipyran. The priests would see to it.

The remaining chariots curved round them.

Now Melendor was whipping up his team. He had raced the Race before—it must be safe to do so. Yet Amdysos kept firm, his horses going only at a pouncing trot.

As Klyton went by the Ipyran in his ecstasy of madness, he saw the man had clawed his face, the way women did there for a loss.

And from
behind now too, the nameless man, his name truly left behind, for Klyton could not again recapture it, was all at once thundering up again, with others at his back.

The echoes rolled about in Klyton’s skull. It would be easy to fall down, to lie there, in the green dark-light.

Although Amdysos, the guide, trailed a little, Klyton cracked the whip again, lightly, over the backs of his team.

The chaotic route was leveling, and ahead another cavern loomed, its lights rising from night.

But the bats as always were coming out again, as if signalled.

One huge red bat, with eyes as white as those of the hellish things on the walls, hurtled straight at him. Klyton swung himself aside, and the horses bundled together, unwieldy as a pair of carter’s ponies. And then the red bat was by, and Klyton heard behind him an exclamation, not even loud, after which there was the unmistakable crunch of a chariot wheel going over a dip.

The unnamed lord fell with a cold call that was not even properly that, and quickly over. The chariot, wheel-lodged and tilted, stayed sideways on the track, the horses still as statues, washed by torch-green sweat. Vague as ghosts, other chariots rammed together, trying to steer aside. A shambles. The cursing and grinding faded like a dream.

For here again came breaking light, and the next cavern—Melendor and Amdysos spilled over in to it, and now Klyton, who flung up his head, while the horses reared in terror, nearly jerking from his control.

From the ceiling of the rock hung down the robes of Night, the long, black, rusty chains of Night, and caught in them, the masks of a thousand grimacing skulls. Jangling and clattering, and the bats swooping, and the sound of laughter—but whose?—and along the walls the unhuman priests, garbed at last as they said that Thon was garbed in his crypt, white faces and red manes and purple lips and disks of metal on the eyes—

Melendor, who had done this before, had even so lost the mastery of his team. They circled, jounced, bucked around the space, setting the chains ringing worse, and Amdysos pulled hard back, and Klyton saw the chance before him, the long, up-swollen sweep that sprinted for a hole of jet black ahead. The priests ahead would light the darkness as he came up. They had done so every time, hearing the riders come on. And the other two could be got by here.

Anything might
be beyond,
this
had been here, something worse than this—but Klyton did not pause. He had been patient. Now in the lines of Amdysos’s body he had seen a sort of answer. The Race of the Sun was won not necessarily by speed, but by endurance. But one must have more than that.

Here,
here
, the
chance
; Klyton knew himself in the hand of the gods, who, however many they might be, had one hand only, and that larger than worlds.

And so he raked with the whip across the air, and his horses bounded forward. There must always come at last a time to take the risk, and to jump the chasm of fate. After all, they had shown him. He was the eagle, and had wings.