Arrows of the Sun Read Free

the trees, looking down at the pale naked thing running from it
knew not what, leaving its panic-trail of flesh and blood and acrid human
scent.
    The law said, Run .
The drums said, Run . Therefore he
ran.
    The mind paused. Saw wood, twilight dimness, sweat-streaming
bloody self running from nothing at all, and said, Why?
    It mastered the feet, slowed them, willed them to a
standstill. The heart was harder, and the breath in starved lungs; those, it
left to heal themselves. It brought its scattered selves together and bound
them with its name.
    “Korusan!”
    No.
    “Koru-Asan!”
    Better.
    He opened his eyes. The wood was gone, had never been, except
in his mind, and in the rattle of the drums. They were silent now. He stood on
stone, in walls of stone. Rough tunic rasped on skin as whole as skin could be,
no mark that was not long since won, no scar that had not healed.
    Cold metal touched his nape. He did not flinch, even
inwardly.
    “Strong,” said the voice behind him, that had known his
name. “And self-willed.”
    “Blood of the Lion,” said the man who stood in front of him.
The man had no face. None of them did, of all who stood about him: clad in
black from crown to toe, not even a glitter of eyes through the swathing of
veils. Korusan, whose face was bare for any to see, made of it a mask and
schooled his eyes to stillness.
    They would always betray him, those eyes, unless he mastered
them. He was named for them: Koru-Asan, Goldeneyes. Yellow eyes. Eyes of the
Lion.
    “Proud,” said the one behind, the one who held the knife.
“Haughty, if truth be told. And why? His blood is none of ours.”
    “It has its own distinction.” Dry, that, from one who stood
in the circle.
    “And its own destruction.” Cold and soft. Korusan stiffened
at it. Infinitesimally; but here of all places, now of all times, there could
be no concealment. “He will be dead before he is a man; and if he lives to get
a son, what will that son be, as weakened as the blood has grown? Dead in
infancy, or witless, or mad—if any are born at all of seed so sore enfeebled.
Such is the Brood of the Lion.”
    “He will live long enough,” said the dry voice. “He will do
what he is born to do.”
    “Will he live so long?” the cold one inquired.
    Run , said the law.
And Korusan had run. Keep silent , it
said. And he had kept silent. Running had won him nothing but pain. He said, “I
will live as long as I must.”
    “You will be dead at twenty,” said the cold one, the cruel
one. “You fancy yourself strong enough now; and with magic and physic and
training, so you are. But those have their limits. I see the darkness in you.
Already it sinks claws in your bones.”
    “All men die,” said Korusan steadily. “It is a gift, maybe,
that I know what I shall die of, and when.”
    “Is it a gift, too, to hate those who willed this doom on
you?”
    He laughed. They started, those grim men in their circle,
and that lightened his mood immeasurably. No one ever laughed in this rite,
under this questioning. “They are dead who condemned my house to its death—man
without woman and woman without man, lifelong, and never a child of any union
but one; and that was their weakness, that they permitted her to live. Or maybe
their cruelty. They would know that the sickness was in her, the blood-beast,
the thing that goes down from father to son, from mother to daughter, and
weakens and twists and kills. But—hate them? No,” he said. “No. It was never
their choice that she wed daughter to son and son to daughter, and they
likewise, to preserve the line pure. If I hate anyone, it is that one. She was
a fool, my ancestor. Far better had she done as her brother did, and wedded
with barbarians.”
    “Then the Blood of the Lion would truly be lost,” the dry
voice said. Not so dry now; there was a whisper of passion in it.
    “It is lost in any event,” said Korusan. “My sisters are
dead or idiots. I may die before I can sire sons. But