Mortal Suns (46 page)

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.

The Lakesea changed herself as if to abet him. By the third day, birds flew over, sunny white. A score of small islets passed, with willows that the god is fond of.

Meanwhile I endured the laval ache in my womb. My courses had always been irregular. No doubt the journey, the Island, had brought it on after delay. But the cramps grew worse. I, too, burned with fever. I lay down and the motion of the galley made me sick. Then I was being carried through the shallows of the sea, to one of the little isles. I was in a tent beneath a pine, and Nimi bathed my forehead, and blood was all over my skirt.

Near evening, I saw another attendant had arrived. Bachis had sent me her Maiden, fifteen years old, a stout, strong girl from the country round Airis. I did not know, but the Maiden was a skilled midwife and had assisted Bachis in the act of birth. Now, she bent over me. An hour later, in a torrent of pain and awful blood, something was drawn out of me.

Though professional at her work, the Maiden was not canny with her tongue.

“Oh, lady, see. Is perfect. And would have been a boy.”

I had not, in my absorption, having no proper symptoms, and misled by the irregularity of my menses, known I carried Klyton’s child. He was the length of my last finger, under the filth, like a totem of white-fat jade, perfect, as she said. One might see the shape of all of him that was to come. He had hands, unopened eyes, lips, a phallus like a paring of the moon. And he was the bud of a flower. I stared at him, half delirious, and cared nothing at all, wanting this done with. It was in later years he haunted me, the only child I ever bore.

“They keep such aborts, in Sirma,” said the Maiden knowingly, “in a box of spice, with the lid sealed tight.”

Like my turtle, I thought. And slept.

I think Klyton
did come in. Recollection seems to glimpse him, distracted, a man of affairs, who must pause at women’s business, from politeness.

To this day I am not sure if they told him, or if they did, whether he understood. Having become true strangers, we never spoke of it.

By the time I was well enough to notice, the Lakesea had narrowed to a long river, which the Bulotes call Her Plait. They worshipped still a mother goddess, and her river tresses were strewn through Bulos, but this waterway was three rivers on one, therefore
plaited
. Their goddess has pearls, too, in her hair, of course, and on the river, as always in that country, you found pearl fishers, boys and men, diving from the decks of thin brown boats, one coming up once, that I saw, with weed on his shoulders, a pearl like an egg clenched in his grinning mouth.

We had traveled through Bulos before, when we were a King and Queen, but not along this river. Anyway, none knew us now, though I heard Bulotes in the river villages speak on two occasions, in my presence, of that summer when the Great Sun went by on the road, his Chief Queen with him. And they spoke as of something momentous, and lucky. But we were only foreigners.

One sultry night on Her Plait, waking, I thought I heard something go overboard, very heavy, cumbersome. Maybe I dreamed this. But never again did I see Klyton bring from the baggage Amdysos’s shrine.

There was a minor summer festival about this time, seldom much observed in the royal house. I recalled Kelbalba had, a couple of times, laid flowers for Gemli, and Ermias sneered at them, before we were friends.

Klyton decided we should put ashore, and honor the festival and the summer goddess. We were near the end of the river. They would have to march afterwards, mostly. Klyton wanted the horses off the bigger galley to be exer cised, and the men. We landed near some villages and made a camp, and when the people saw the two ships, they came to sell or barter food, and milk their cows into our buckets.

For his soldiers, he organized games, horse riding, and throwing and shooting at a mark. He gave extravagant prizes from his own goods, astonishing some of the men, cups of silver, boots of bullshide, belts fringed with bullion, scabbards staring with gems, and often with a steel sword in them.

He spoke to
them at their games, praising their faithfulness and endurance. He said he would not forget. They had started the wine ration by then, which was lavish, and they cheered and banged on their shields.

As he sat overseeing the contests, he was impeccable, and magnificent. No one could quibble at such a leader. But there was a flaw now,
behind
his face, under his eyes. Could I alone see it? I think not.

I, too, must sit to applaud the games. The Sun tired me out and I knew I could not lapse, not drop asleep. It was an agony.

Quite near me, Bachis sat too, with her stout Maiden fanning her, and her child in the slave’s lap. Klyton’s Daystar queen had plumpened rather after the birth, now she was short but round. Having come to him with not much, she was almost always in silk, and in winter in the palace, she had been hung with furs and pelts, summer foxes and leopards, with strings of whole tails trailing after her. She had jewels, too. Knowing she liked it, he had loaded her, for she was an ideal secondary wife, prepared to learn and never to demand. At these games in pastoral Bulos, she wore glinting, silver-sewn white, and on her head, I see it as clearly as if she posed now before me, a circlet of electrum with flowers of every colored metal —electrum, gold, silver, colcai—tumbling down through her darkish hair, to her fat, satiny shoulders.

She must have been about my age, I suppose, sixteen or seventeen, and the boy almost a year. He had pale gold hair that caught the sun. I glanced at him now and then idly. For I too had almost done what Bachis had, produced another living creature.

After all the feats and prizes, Klyton gave the soldiers a feast from the bounty of the villages.

The men roamed about, or sat around the cook-fires, where whole cows, one of whom had given us milk, were now roasting. Klyton’s household was in the greater tent, his two captains, and the two royal women, she and I.

The day cooled to twilight, and stars Bachis might have liked to have, spotted the enormous sky. On the river, swans had gone by, and the soldiers had shot one, being frisky. But here the swan was thought sacred to the summer goddess, so they did not dare eat it, and the river pulled it away.

I see the swan, too, in my memory. Its waste. For it had lived.

He was drunk.
I believe so. His beauty was alight and his movements slow, or rushed. Then the drunkenness went down to melancholy, as it can. He had been acting out for them, on and on and over and over, his victory and hope. And somewhere in the Bulos starshine, he could not play any more the King and the Sun.

He seemed to sit in thought. He missed what was said to him. His eyes grew heavy. They turned black. I had seen this happen sometimes in desire, but never like this. There was no light in them, only a gloss slicked over.

Klyton began to gaze about at us all. He smiled once at me. It was a smile of forgetting. He had not meant to hurt me. On the captains who had stayed with him, he turned his black eyes, considering. Who were they? One jested, and others laughed; Klyton nodded. He could manage nothing else, for they spoke another tongue.

It was then Bachis’s son shook his rattle—naturally silver, with silver bells—the Maiden had given it him to keep him jolly and awake.

The black eyes sunk on to the face of the laughing, primrose-headed child. The eyes lightened. All the darkness left them, and they were colorless.

He said to Bachis, “Let me have my son.”

She fluffed up like a proud hen, and snapped her fingers at the slave.

They did not tell him, or they did. He and I did not speak of it, not then, nor ever. That bud of white jade buried in the powder box under a pine. Perhaps this had nothing to do with that.

Klyton took the child from Bachis. He gazed at it. The boy was solemn now, only waving his arms, slowly, and, as if to flatter, drunkenly.

Without another word, Klyton rose and carried the child outside the open tent.

Bachis’s mouth came open. What was Klyton doing—taking the child to the other tent, maybe, to wreathe him in jewels?

None of the men paid much attention. They, too, had drunk well. A father with his son. He might be showing him the stars.

About half an hour after this, Klyton returned, and told us the feast was done. He was unaltered, but his arms held nothing.

Bachis, who never demanded, went up to him in a slinking, fawning way. She put one finger on his sleeve and whispered something.

Klyton frowned at her.

“Don’t let it concern you.”

I saw her
face fall in like an old woman’s, and it was the sensible Maiden who conducted her away.

The soldiers went, mumbling, uncertain, somewhat confused. In the camp, not many had noted that Klyton had not brought the child back again to the open tent. Could not a father lay his child elsewhere to sleep?

So he had. They discovered it before Sunrise. The scintillant hair was put out, dark and wet, and just so was the stone on which Klyton had broken in the child’s skull.

I know they said of Klyton that, having become insane, he killed the child, timid it would rob him of status, as his brother, Amdysos, had. And also there was a story he sacrificed it to the god, for better fortune.

He said to me, “I had nothing to give him but suffering. I myself can’t bear it. How could I make him heir to that?”

And I held the murderer in my arms, this evil and unspeakable thing he had become. Do not judge Calistra. She will judge herself more coldly. But she would hold him yet, I will not lie.

In the morning, most of the men had made off. Such country swallows those who wish it to.

But Bachis stood with her slave and her Maiden among the sparse heap of her baggage, those items she had accrued and been able to keep. She stood as if grown into the ground, her fallen face as white as naked bone, and her eyes staring at him. She said only she would not move, no, never. She had a look of Udrombis, indomitable, and perhaps for that he left her there, where she had rooted herself. The Maiden bulked behind her, crying. I think the villagers buried the child. I do not know what became of Bachis.

South, the summer seemed it could never end, yet trees had autumn in them, when we got down to Artepta.

They said in Thon’s hells, where men were made to suffer for the worst earthly crimes, there were no seasons, yet there could be extreme heat or cold. A wind blew in the south that might have come from there. They call it in Artepta,
Fire-Breath.

Adargon was
waiting in a fortress house in the marshes, where all but one of the rivers end. It was a building Arteptan kings had had made long ago, partly ruinous now. The huge window spaces looked out at the miles of reeds, taller here than men, that rattled in the firewind like spears. Between were pockets of ale-dark water. Violet irises grew about them, these the height of a girl, on stems like brass. Great lizards couched in the mud, and vented a pig-like barking.

I had been able to exercise my body very little on the journey, confined to a ship, a tent, traveling overland in a litter between two mules. Then another man ran away, and he took a mule with him, and I rode the remaining animal awkwardly. I was stiff and in pain, and in the chamber I had in the fortress, at last tried to undo the knots of my body. Nimi rubbed me with scented oil. And the crocodiles barked from the rushes.

Artepta had sent Adargon emissaries with amiable words for Klyton, saying we would be welcome in her city. They had offered Adargon a ship, which had arrived, and lay now at the edge of the marsh, on the last narrow river that went to the sea. But, Adargon said, Artepta spoke of Klyton only as of a prince. Kindred, not lord. And there was another thing. Of the men left to Adargon after the desertions of his own march, scouts had tested Artepta. There were bizarre reports of a massive fleet, anchored out beyond the islands. True, the scouts had not seen it, but had met with those who had. The fleet came, perhaps, from the Benighted Isles. But that place was primitive, and the fleet, purportedly, like artisans’ work for sophistication.

It might be only a tale. Artepta spoke a language unknown elsewhere in the Sun Lands. Though the scouts had mastered it somewhat, possibly they were not as lingual as they thought.

Was the fleet Artepta’s own? If so, why anchored far off? And why clandestinely?

Adargon looked worn. Not like Klyton, for Klyton burned on. After what had happened, after what had been done, he was yet brilliant as the Sun. Until the shadow came, which was often. Adargon was raddled, unhappy and at a loss, but his mind was perfectly transparent. He must have heard soon enough about the murdered child. But Adargon did not deviate. He would do his best. The gods would expect that, but no more.

All told,
Klyton had reached the marshes with fourteen men, the old slave and the boy, and three women: myself, and my two little girls. Adargon’s contingent now numbered seventy-six men.

In this panoply we would sail to Artepta, who might prove strange or false. But, beings of action must go somewhere on a road, and there was no turning back.

Artepta knew our numbers were low, too, for the ship they had sent was single and not significantly large.

Nevertheless it was not like anything I had seen. It had two decks. All the wood was gilded, even the oars, and the mast was twined by gold with a crimson and black sail crossed by a rayed Sun that became the crescent moon of Phaidix’s bow. There was a sort of pillared house amidships, and here Klyton and I were to sit, as one had seen gods did in Arteptan carving. So we dressed in our best and sat down, under the awning, with the sail unfurled above.