Mortal Suns Read Free Page B

chosen them anyway, by allowing them to survive the initial test, in the sanctum. They could expect no other life.
    Of thevery few who dared to run away, generally the harsh mountains killed them. If not, caught by the grown servants of Thon, their own future incarnation—now lost—they were taken at once to a lower room, a sort of natural cave existing under the temple, and locked in there in blackness, with nothing but an injunction to speak a prayer of apology. Unlike the sanctum, with its corpses and skeletons, there was no chance to outlive this punishment. The cave door was not opened again until half a year had passed. The remains were removed, and flung down the side of Koi, into a ditch that ran below.
    Sometimes there had been more than two hundred children together in the House of Death. From all Akhemony they might come, or farther. Now there were only eleven.
    None of the five in the courtyard had grown accustomed to snow, though they had seen it each winter of their not-yet four years of life.
    The boy, bemused, for a moment was made stupid.
    “It’s cold to touch.”
    “
Is
it? Is
snow
cold? Go out then, ninny, and lie down on it, and enjoy it.”
    The boy began to cry. Then stopped. He gave no other protest. None of them did so.
    He walked out into the court, and lay on the white covering, face down. He did not wriggle very much.
    After the priestess had counted slowly aloud to the number four hundred, also sacred to Thon, she told the child he might get up.
    He came back staggering, biting his lip at the scald of the snow, which had burned his cheeks.
    Then all five were sent about their business.
    “And you, child, you, the useless one. Go back in there. You should be peeling vegetables since you can’t stand up. A curse, these misfits, these freaks. Thon should have taken you, but even he didn’t want you. Perhaps he’ll never let you die, you displease him so.”
    The freak, Cemira, went with downcast eyes. Most days she peeled vegetables and scoured pots, hour upon hour. Her hands were raw from the cold of the mountain temple, and the heat of the too-hot, greasy water, and cut by kitchen knives too large for her. And somehow these hands would twitch about as if looking for her feet. Of course, her feet would have saved her. She would not have been in the House of Thon, if she had been born with feet. She would have been a king’s daughter. But she did not know that.
    She movedslowly, and the watcher, the thin priestess, had an urge, not for the only time, to kick away the crutches and see this one fall. But she contented herself with another order.
    “
Hurry
! Be quick, you lazy idiot-child.”
    The outer room of the kitchen, where routine tasks were seen to, was dark and not warm. Beyond the window, as Cemira resumed her work, the snow dizzied down. Sometimes the flakes spun in through the unshuttered opening, and sizzled out in the flame of the meager brazier below.
    The, children rose at dawn, and retired at dusk. Summer meant a longer sweating day, winter a longer, icy night.
    Perhaps the seasons, the nights and days—that is, heat and cold, blackness and light—were the only proper markers of Cemira’s time. Was night, huddled on the narrow pallet, covered by one thin blanket, better than the monotonous and uncertain day? Yes, night was better, for with night, burning or freezing, eventually came sleep. But was summer better than winter?
    During the cold months, the children might have to lean into one of the wells to crack the ice with a stone. Once one had plummeted, and so died.
    The snow, miraculous and soft, was cruel. Yet silver shone in down-hanging icicles, and once, a living mountain lynx, the shade of milk, stood by the statue of Phaidix and her lion, also her beast, licking at her obdurate foot. Someone had said blood or malt must have been smeared there, but why? In the House of Thon they did not offer to any other god—not even the Sun. And Phaidix any way did not like