Authors: Tanith Lee

Mortal Suns (49 page)

Before these rites, Shajhima had pared off a nail from Klyton’s middle finger, cut a lock of his hair, and dipped a square of linen in his blood, for a Muhzum. Though demented and unholy, Klyton had been a High King and died in fight.

Calistra walked at her lord’s funeral, the last time she was allowed to walk on the soil of her own continent.

I see Netaru sprinkling red flowers, like the flowers that grow after the fire is out.

In mid spring, Shajhima and his troops began their march across the Sun Lands. I was taken too, among the baggage train, which included already many captive women. I saw the armies of Pesh, sparking and gleaming in the Sunlight, covering the earth like great waters. But they meant nothing. I cannot speak either of the battles, how hard they were, or simple, what strategies were employed, how many gave their lives on either side. I have to this night no notion of the manner in which the princes of Akhemony joined to fight the Pesh. I can neither conjure or draw the picture of the twisted and wrecked un-King on his golden Sun Throne, cast down, and trampled.

Torca died, but I cannot say how.

I was a shadow.

There is only one half-colored scene, that room in the palace at Oceaxis, the King’s Apartment. I had been housed there, and some other women with me. I do not know why. Shajhima scorned for himself these royal rooms.

I looked without any feeling beyond the eternal pain that encompassed me like air, or blood. The white rearing horses, the mural of the god, the painted ceiling, the bed-frame, stripped. Men came by, carrying out the scrolls and books from another room.

As I stood
in this bedchamber, the men who had been sent to the Heart Mountain, reached their goal. They had put wax in their ears to protect them from the Drum, and climbing up to the sacred cave, they saw the Drummer at his task, which few Akhemonians had ever done, bringing down the drumsticks on the enormous Drum that never ceased, save to pause at the death of a Sun King.

On the route to Akhemony, I had heard the Heart come back. The troops of Battle-Prince Shajhima had not liked the sound. It made them dizzy and they prayed to their god, who then was not mine, and who I should never have thought would ever come to be. As indeed I would never have thought the man who killed my love and took away my feet, would ever become my champion and the friend of my soul.

But what had
I
felt in my agony hearing the Heart? Let me be truthful. I felt no more than for another thing—nothing. I think I did not, even, strictly hear.

Yet I heard the Heart stop, and stop for ever.

Having got up close to the cave, they found a horn to blow, and did not bother with it. The Pesh warriors climbed on, up platforms of rock, through the glacial rush of a stream. Green blossoms, they said, were growing in it.

The Drummer did not see them, they said. He sat amid his own excrement, around him the pieces of food he had not yet eaten, which deaf women brought him, and which he gathered with his teeth. Above him hung the filled gourd of wine and honey he had only to tilt with his cheek to drink. His eyes were like two voids of light.

Unhindered, the Pesh moved around and behind him. Two held him and another sliced his throat. He drummed on, even as his thick gore spurted from the wound. They said he drummed a minute more than any man could, for he was immediately quite dead. Then he sank forward on the brass Drum, and it was stilled.

The precious green flowers that grew there were consumed and blackened by the blood. Or so I think someone has told me. But who, who could it have been?

In Akhemony, when the Heart stopped, a terrible mad shrieking rose. And since the Drum did not resume, the shrieking did not finish.

As birds are dashed from the sky, so men were dashed to the ground. Within the palace alone, ten or twenty persons died. Perhaps disturbed by this vibration, after about an hour, the huge gold King’s lamp came crashing down from its chain, in the bedchamber. The other captive women here, Islers, Bulotes, were merely frightened by the noise and screaming, and the lamp, which had missed us.

And Calistra
lay in her chair, and she only thought,
Is that all?

However, sometimes I hear it still, the Drum of the Heart of Akhemony. In the voiceless core of night. Or after the desert wind has risen and gone away.

We were at Oceaxis a year. I forget what I did. Then Shajhima marched some thousands of men back across the world to the sea, and I was carried south again, to a ship, and brought towards this land of Pesh Sandu a captive cripple and a slave, and a shadow.

QUTM

The verse spoken after all the dances, which

often includes an invitation to the audience

to indicate if they wish to see more.

D
OBZAH HAD BEGUN TO FOLD
away her writing materials. I asked her if she wanted to add any words herself. But she shook her head, and her eyes are heavy. I must recollect she is no longer young. I wonder if she will write
that
down?

Annotation by
the Hand of Dobzah

See, I have written it!

Outside in a darkness like blue velvet, the nightingale sings on, as if all the hurt and happiness of the earth mean nothing, unless her song can render them as they are. Well, she is quite right. What poet can compare with a nightingale?

And I have said enough presently to exhaust myself and my scribe, let alone any who may read it.

My days in Pesh, how I ascended from the status of a slave, and gained the power of a visionary and poetess, and was made great in this, my adopted land, and how my life stole back to me, up out of the darkness, in a chariot brighter than the moon—these things I will not otherwise speak of here, in this, which became at last a book of shade and sorrows. That is another story.

But I will
recount a tale I heard in Pesh, long ago, one final anecdote of Oceaxis.

Before the One God of Pesh, the Sun Temple was disgraced. The Pesh entered it and it was changed. Also they went down into Night’s Precinct.

Five men—the Sun’s number, by strange coincidence—glimpsed there a monstrous creature, part bird and part dwarf which, when they went after it, scuttled away.

The men pursued. Then, in the black, with most of the torches out, they began to see that, before the bird-dwarf there danced along two small pale things—which they took at first for littler birds. Abruptly though there was a torch alight, and then they saw what ran there were two small white child’s feet—having no body attached to them. These seemed to lead the dwarf on.

The Peshans had gone down under this temple of idolators prepared for sorcery, and they did not shun it when it came.

But presently the passage they were in revealed its ending, where was a wall of stone. Here a young woman stood, beautiful, they said, with long dark hair and sable garments, and midnight jewels around her throat. And she, opening her cloak, beckoned both the little feet and the hideous dwarf into its refuge.

Accordingly the feet skipped in under the robe, at once, and the creature was folded to her side, as if by a black crow’s wing.

Then the woman opened the cloak again, and nothing was there.

Daunted now, the men of Pesh had come to a halt. They said the woman smiled. Such boldness, in women, they did not care for, but she was like a queen. Then she spoke. This is what she said: “Tomorrow I shall be younger than I am tonight.” And she vanished like a star at Sunrise.