Mortal Suns Read Online Free

blood. When the lynx melted away down the mountain, its flowery paw-marks stayed six days, in the closing ice.
    In summer, different flowers grew about the statue, and inappropriately about the porticoes of Thon. White and honey, the priests came with brands and scorched them away. But it must be done over and over, for the flowers came back, blooming on and on.
    From the courts, in summer, you might look up and see the kites and eagles, motionless, a mile high in violet air. When storms came down over the Heart Mountain, the sky hung alternately low, with enormous clouds, damson and smouldering black, and in them were the shapes of the mountains themselves upside down, or the shape of the temple, sculpted heavily in smoke.
    But in summer,too, on every forty-fourth day, each child, however young, must go, to sprinkle fresh blood at the pillar-base of the god in the inner sanctum. And then it stank, that place of bones. Worse than the butchers’ yard, worse than the latrines, worse than all worsenesses, that hole of death to which they had almost been added. After twelve years of age, there would be further duties in the sanctum. They had to do with the stacking up and tidying of the skeletons, and the washing of the face of Thon.
    Cemira was almost four. She had asked one of the kinder priestesses, the one who had taught her, prematurely, to sew, and sometimes rubbed scented fat into her hands, when their chapped soreness cracked and bled on the linen.
    “You’re in your fourth year. Almost four.”
    How did she know? She must have consulted the record of Cemira’s entry to the temple … Or she was that other one, who had rocked the baby in her arms.
    Two years earlier, sometimes, this priestess had taken Cemira on her knees, and brushed her hair for a long time. The priestess had murmured, above the shining, rippling fleece of the child’s hair, “You’re my baby. You’re my baby I should have had.” And, once, “They told me, it had golden hair, even in the hour of its birth.”
    Cemira, however, did not remember this. Only at her tenth decade will Sirai recall that Cemira heard it.
    Poor woman. Presumably she had lost her own child, either in reality or unstable fancy. Poor woman. She was kind, in her fashion.
    By the table where Cemira sat, peeling, cutting—already she was exhausted with sitting—leaned the sticks, the canes. They hurt her, but they were all she had. They meant mobility.
    She wanted to sleep. No one was there, though through the door, the kitchen moved to black forms, gushing with steam and thick with the odor of meats, for the higher priests dined well one day in four. Cemira let her head droop.
    She was immediately elsewhere. Where was it? In the sky. A bird carried her, the cloth of her tunic caught in its claws. Irrationally she was not alarmed. Below she saw the temple, the smallest thing in the world. Enormous clouds, quite solid, and touched rosily with a sinking Sun, formed buildings that were all like the temple, the only edifice she had consciously seen, but far more huge, more charming in design. Most wonderful of all, she moved without needing feet, and had no pain.
    A pot metthe floor with a nearby crash. A lower priestess cursed the pot, and then must speak the prayer to Thon asking his forgiveness for her curse.
    Cemira woke. Exquisite escape quite over, she resumed peeling the roots. Returned to earth, and her crutches.
    Annotation by the Hand of Dobzah
    I can confirm that my mistress, Sirai, has to this day, under her arms, the faint small marks of her first wooden walking canes. These are two silver scars formed each like a sickle moon.

3
    Countless legends, dramas and songs, in a variety of lands, are concerned with the notion of justice, of the severe payment for vicious deeds, and the rewards of honor and tenderness.
    Hetsa, the Daystar Queen, sixteenth wife of Akreon, had heard such stories often: they had run off her marble skin like rain.
    It was a spring afternoon.