Authors: Tanith Lee
There came the crash of a fist upon the outer doors.
Klyton turned with a curse and left the shrine standing open, the sweet smoke going up. A slave met him at a doorway.
To the news, Klyton listened. Reaching up, he took off the garland, and let it go. To the slave he said only, “Get out.”
From beyond
the closed doors they heard his roar. They had never known at any other time, in triumph, in anger, in war even, Klyton to give out such a sound.
Presently, he came like a flung stone through all the doors. He shouted for an escort of fifty men. Some of the younger slaves were crying in terror, at Klyton’s rage, at Udrombis’s death—not from any love, but as if the world had given way. An old slave man came and spoke quietly to them. At any other time, Klyton would have turned to him—“Thank you, Sarnom.”
Klyton whirled them all off with violent gestures. He grasped a mantle round himself and buckled on his sword. As his hand met the pommel, a carnelian incised with an eagle, he gave a laugh. But his face was as they had never been shown it. It had no mind behind it, only this fury, and the green eyes were stretched wide, with a kind of blood-lust one sees in animals, as they take their prey.
It was Adargon who came, armed and running, the fifty men gathered ready below.
“My lord—God’s Heart—the Queen-Widow—”
“Yes, I know,” said Klyton, so light it only floated on the boiling surface of him. “They told me.”
“You’re going to the temple.”
“It seems the priests have barred the inner door, the way into the Precinct. And Lektos has let them.
“Lektos,” said Adargon.
They ran down through the palace, which was making now its noises of shock and sorrow and panic.
As they emerged into the court, thunder split the night above.
Klyton tilted back his head. He shouted in a harsh male scream, up into the sky. “Yes! You’ve spoken.
Yes.
”
Adargon put his hand on Klyton’s arm and Klyton turned, a snarling lunatic. Adargon who also had never beheld Klyton in this shape, faced him solidly. “My lord, don’t let them see. They’ll think hell gapes enough already.”
Klyton’s eyes seemed to give off a shot of fire. Adargon, even Adargon, started. But then they heard the tearing shriek.
They turned and stared, and in the courtyard, men called aloud, while the horses swerved and squealed.
The thing came blazing down, sizzling, and shattered on the paving. Red fire ran like dye and glittered out.
“A
thunder-stone—a bolt from heaven—” Adargon blurted.
Klyton’s eyes had cleared somewhat. He was back inside them. “Look. More of them.”
The soldiers and the slaves, the Sun Prince and the King, stood with their heads tipped back, as if at some scenic instruction.
From the thunder-riven dark, the stars had sped away, or else they were dashing down to the earth. A rain of shrieking fires was falling like hail. As they hit the ground they smashed, each a vessel of seething matter that burst. On the palace roof, rattling, glittering. Through the garden trees they rushed. A blow of fire ignited, and there were black silhouettes before a curtain of red. Everywhere, the thunderbolts were cascading. The sky was birthing them. And on and on they came.
Klyton ran to his horse, mounted it, and held it wheeling, neighing, as the groom tumbled away. Seeing this, those who had held back, also mounted up, while their servants ran for cover.
The band of men raced from the palace, a stream of bronze and steel, along the shore road towards the town of Oceaxis, while the rain of fire-coals plunged all about them, lighting their path with kicks of fire, and from the sea crashed waterspouts of the form and heat of smelted swords.
The wild gardens, and the groves that led towards the. sea, were burning. I stood transfixed on my terrace, watching the deluge of the thunderbolts, and seeing the trees flare up to cups of gold. Birds swarmed from the conflagration, black, like bees, on the red cloud of the smoke. They blew between the shards of fire. Their cries and wings sounded like the cries in the palace, and my women’s commotion and rushing. Slaves rushed too, below, with vessels of water, which they spilled in their terror.
The sound—the sound—beyond the screaming and the outcry of the birds—notes like the missiles of a million miniature catapults, the air unseamed—
But down there, twelve years old, I had sat while the women danced. The sky so tranquil that evening, and the lucid sea silken on the shore. And Klyton came to me the first.
The tamarinds cooked with an appetizing smell. The air smelled, too, of metals, and a yeasty fermentation. And of lightning.
I wished the
women would die to stop their noise. Where was Hylis? Even the white dog had run away, and in their cage the doves huddled all together, trembling like the firelit leaves.
By the time Klyton and his men reached the town, several houses were on fire there. The streets were full of scurrying slaves, the town guard called out, drays with water-barrels pulled by half-petrified donkeys, men and women who cried and milled about, their heads muffled from the fiery storm. The thunder-stones seemed less, but as Klyton climbed above the town to the Sun Temple, whose building had been begun, it was said, by eagles, Oceaxis spread away like a map, and was a scene of punishment, and nightmare. The ruddy pall of the fires, the smolders, the constant abstracted human movement, one great house that had gone to a pillar of flame, and sent up a tower of pitchy smoke. And through it all, the livid bolts which still intermittantly fell. On the temple hill, the crying sank back to a rumble, but now and then the gongs were beaten in the town, to warn, perhaps of a new conflagration. Beyond the harbor, the sea looked bubbling, and not like water. Klyton turned his face to the temple and rode on. And the pines and cedars, the huge oaks and marroi, draped the town from view.
Lektos had come out and positioned himself at the stairs’ top, on the uppermost terrace. Behind him, the temple burned yellow from the torches and the lamps, and two hundred of his five hundred men, stood in ordered ranks, their shields in front of them. In Lektos’s hand was yet that naked sword.
Klyton dismounted. Adargon and ten others walked behind him up the steps. It was enough. Klyton was the Great Sun.
Lektos, though, did not give way. He waited, the shields at his back.
The smell of smoke was acrid in the groves and on the stair. But the thunderbolts seemed not to have fallen here at all, or if they had, they had done no damage.
Klyton reached the terrace, and Lektos. They faced each other, and Lektos said, “My lord, the Queen-Widow—”
“Yes.” said Klyton. “Why do you think I’m here?”
Lektos faltered, but did not falter sufficiently. He did not shift. And at his back his men were like icons of soldiers, unseeing, shields locked.
Adargon said, “Stand aside, Lektos. The King is here. Can’t you see?”
Lektos
said, “My lord the King—the King is behind me. The priests say so. In the temple. The King—is Amdysos.”
Klyton bellowed. His voice smote the trees and rang like a hammer on an anvil. “Your
King
came up from a pit—your
King
has killed my
mother
—your
King—Get from the way!
”
“Not—not Amdysos,” Lektos warbled, backing a step, firming himself and standing still again, “the child—it rent her and ran off into the passages—they closed the doors to keep it in and hunt it—but it was the instrument of the God—”
“Udrombis!”
Klyton bellowed. In a movement like that of some machine, his hand loosed the sword with the eagle in its pommel. In one smooth stroke, he cut the weapon from Lektos’s hand. Lektos was open-mouthed, foolish now. And in the silence they heard again the outcry of the town, and the whistling of another of the bolts falling somewhere near, but below the trees. Klyton said gently, “Move yourself.”
Lektos planted himself more steadfastly.
“Someone shall fetch a pr—”
Klyton’s sword stripped through the light: a flare, a dart of color. It had taken Lektos, who was generally armored, between throat and collarbone, where the throat-piece and helm had been dispensed with. Lektos hiccuped, face splashed with his own blood, and turned slowly around, crashing face-down before his men.
The shield wall disbanded. The soldiers leaned at angles, staring. A young handsome man, with a scarred chin, made one stride forward. He was a son of Lektos’s earliest youth, by a woman of the palace. Neither Klyton nor Adargon knew his name, but Lektos had been reasonably good to him.
He said, blatantly and loudly, “You killed him, but you’re not the King anymore. Amdysos is. Can’t you see all the gods are raging at you, throwing fire down from heaven? They chastised the old witch—” incredibly he meant Udrombis—“for her poisonings and plots. It’s you, Klyton, who must step down.”
And Klyton looked at him, at the sword the boy had drawn and the baleful libertine eyes. Klyton cut sideways now, and took off the hand with the sword, and as this adversary also slumped away, sightless with surprise, the other soldiers on the terrace came trampling forward, swearing and yelling, their eyes not blind at all but bulging with horror and anger.
The world truly gave way. They fought Klyton, there on the terrace. The army of a King, clashing against a King’s sword their own. And others now were pounding through the trees, not knowing who it was they must war with, but knowing it was war.
Adargon
dragged Klyton back down the stair, both men hacking away the attack as they went. All but two of their ten were gone. Adargon howled for the rest of the escort, forty men, and as these cleared the area below, forced Klyton towards his horse. “Leave it, my lord—Klyton,
leave
it—they’re too many and they’re out of their minds—”
Klyton remounted. His face was bloodless and empty. He allowed Adargon to push him from the riot. Those of the escort that could, extricated themselves from Lektos’s battalion in the sacred groves, and galloped after, killing, as they went, men in armor and on foot—who were only shouting to know what had gone on.
All the women had vanished, as if they had felt and taken exception to my fear of their fright. As the gardens by the shore faded to a blackened wasteland, little birds that had flown into the trees beneath my terrace, fluttered anxiously, piping, unable to settle. Slaves called to each other in the gloom. They had not, before, needed lamps, and now everything was dark, even though the cruel moon had risen on the Lakesea. The smoke had veiled her and colored her like a hyacinth. I thought I saw the drawing of the face of Phaidix there, a profile with one indifferent and unlooking eye.
In the room with the pool, the turtle would not come out of her shell. She had ceased to be an animal and become instead a cold slab of onyx. The doves continued to huddle together. I spoke softly to them, but they paid no heed. Did they blame me? To the beast, men seem like gods, able to do and cause so much. Therefore, are not all things in their power? And when the lamp goes out or the plate is bare, or the snow comes, that too must be their fault. I pondered, wandering my hollow rooms, if we then misjudged the gods, who were able to do and cause so much that we could not, and yet perhaps, like us, must sometimes wait helpless on the whim of other, mightier beings.
I had seen a red glow pulse above the hidden town, but that too had died away. The levinbolts had ended. At the edge of my terrace one lay that had burned only for an instant. It was merely a gritty ash now, that would be easy to sweep aside.
A hand scratched on a door. I gave admittance, and one of my women entered. I asked her where Hylis was, and the woman lowered her eyes. “I don’t know, madam, but I was sent to you. They say, keep to your rooms.” This was like before. Perhaps I knew, for what else had I done? “Bring me some juice, and water, please,” I said, for I had drunk dry the pitcher. She bowed and went, and when she had gone, I asked myself who “they” had been, that “sent” her. In any case, she did not come back.
The palace,
after the commotion, was now deathly still. I had heard horses once, and men’s voices lifted, but that, too, ceased without explanation.
At last I walked to the outer doors and opened them. The guard there did not turn to look, and he was no man I knew, but then, when did I notice them?
“I wish to send word to the King,” I said.
“Pardon me, madam. I can’t leave my post here. One of your women …”
“My women have disappeared.”
His eyes then slid to me. I was young and a fool, the eyes seemed to say, no other Queen would let herself be abandoned so. And he, for his bad luck, must linger here to guard this imbecile.
“Some have gone away,” he remarked, enigmatic.
The lamps were failing, but another light crept in the corridor. It was the dawn beginning.
I left the guard and moved again into my chambers, to watch the harsh Sun appear, as the cruel moon had done, over the sea which was a lake.
Now I seem to picture those eyes, that face, repeated, the shuffling of their booted feet, between the torchlight and the rising of the Sun. Men urged and tugged away, uneasy at the gods, thinking of the riddle and the death in the temple, and hearing of Klyton’s deeds there. The soldiers of Akhemony, ordered that night to ring the palace round, slipping off in twos or threes, then by two hundreds and three thousands. Glancing back perhaps, to note that high golden roof, the landmark of Oceaxis—
See that? The palace.
As the Daystar followed the Sun, both of them wan and soiled from the smokes, the King’s House, perched above the land, hollowed out as I had felt it to be.
An hour after
Sunrise, someone came in not knocking, or else knocking so lightly I never heard.
I went into the outer room.
There stood my slave, pretty Nimi, and with her the child from the Temple of Thon, and on a leash they had the white dog, who seeing me, wagged his tail and smiled.
“Lady Calistra.” said Nimi. By this title she nearly always called me, though I had risen to be High Queen. I had never chided her. Had I never felt myself quite Queen enough? “Here we are. We found your dog. Choras caught him, he was afraid. But there was some food in the kitchens.”