Mortal Suns Read Free Page A

was insane.”
    “Not surprising. You see?”
    “It’s deformed. It hasn’t any feet.”
    “Nor it has. It’s accursed. Surely, we ought to leave it here, despite the law.”
    “I didn’t hear you, sister.”
    One of the priestesses of Thon bent and picked up the baby, which had come into the world so fast it had left its feet behind in the stuff of chaos. “Come along now, I’ll take it.”
    “No, I have it. I remember the name. Cemira.”
    Feeling the heat of a living body, after the frozen and ungiving stone of the sanctum, the child began finally, faintly to whimper.
    “Hush,” said the priestess. The child stared up into the black eggshell of face, the slits of pitiless eyes. Were they pitiless? Instinctively, the woman rocked the child, and carried it off, to where they would warm for it a little milk, which anyway might kill it, now, after this interval of famine.
    “The child is dead. She is dead, and your servant, Lord Thon. Accept her. Her name, Cemira, has been entered upon your list. She rests helpless on your knees. She is dead, and she is yours.
Alcos emai
.”
    After six days, once the fever had departed, and the baby was found able to see, hear, move and make noises, the priests pronounced her dead. That is, alive, and a slave of the Temple of Thon, in Akhemony.
    Whether cripple or whole, witless or wise, from now until her physical ending, she would serve here the blood-haired god.
    Alcos emai
, used at the finish of countless prayers, means in that tongue,
So it is
.

2
    I can see herquite distinctly, the child. This must be the first memory of self. She is leaning on her two little canes, with their rests propped under her arms. She wears the long, black child’s tunic that reaches to the floor, where her feet would be, if she had any. Under the tunic is the black, sleeved shift. Like all the children, all the priests and priestesses when unmasked in the House of Thon, she is waxy pale. She has a small pointed face like that of a small cat, cut from lunar opal, with big ringed eyes. Her mouth turns down, not from temper or displeasure, but like a dry flower that is dying. Her hair, between straight and coiled, is golden as the metal fringes on the robe of her father, the Great Sun, King Akreon, in the palace at Oceaxis—Lakesea—to the east. The father she has never, and never will ever see. Except—across the river of time.
    Someone called to the children, the five of them who were in the porch, watching the snow settle on the kitchen court.
    “You and you. You, you. You.”
    Although they were permitted to keep their given names, their only possession, the names were never spoken. Death was an eater of titles, as of flesh.
    The children approached the black-faced, unfeatured priestess. She was the tall, thin one they were particularly frightened of.
    “Why are you idling here? Haven’t you anything to do?”
    “The snow,” said the littlest child, a boy of about two and a half. Until the age of four—the sacred number—male and female went unsegregated. It had been noticed long before that sometimes the tiny girls could comfort the tiny boys, and the tiny boys lend the tiny girls a sense of duty. These were the male and female role—virtues, here, servitors, succorers, which were offered to them as ideals.
    Along with that, they had, from the third to the seventh year, a rudimentary schooling. To read the texts of the temple, copy letters, such things made them more useful. But, too, their work was in the laundry, in the kitchen, sweeping the long stone floors, clearing up old blood spilled by the outer altars.
    At twelve, they would learn more specific arts. The boys butchering and woodwork, and other skills to maintain the temple. The girls might make candles, sew, or rear the animals of the precincts, preparing them for their ultimate destiny of sacrifice or table.
    Any who were apt could rise, if there were a vacant place, to the ranks of the lowest priesthood. The god had