Mortal Suns by Tanith Lee Read Free Book Online Page A

sacrilege. Since boyhood, one of four, he had been trained to sound such a horn, against this hour. He lifted the horn to his mouth, drew breath into his mighty lungs, that a diver for pearls in the Bulote rivers might have envied. He kissed the horn lip. Tang of age and bitterness—
    Even over the rampage of the Drum, that thundered and blasted down at them, turning the mountain in a cauldron of sound, the horn was audible. A lost and appalling lowing had come from it, and went on, like the cry of the world herself.
    Then the priest, breath exhausted, let go the note, which hung a moment more above the thunder of the Drum, swilled between cliffs of stone and air, paled like dye in water, vanished.
    Shivering, the priest got up again. His life had been, partly, for this. It was unthinkable he would ever have to do it again.
    He, and the soldiers of the King, stood, agonized and one-dimensional, between land and heaven.
    Then—
    Then.
    The Drum, the Heart—
    Stopped
.
    One of thesoldiers screamed. He clapped his hands to his head. A fellow caught him and threw him down before he plunged to his death over the ledge of the mountain.
    And now, only this …
    The wind whined, curled over, and came back, whining. They heard the tinselly crinkle of the waterfall.
    The horses shook their heads, the bridles jingling.
    The priest spoke softly, not to bruise the Heart-stopped air: “The Great Sun is dead.”
    In his youth he had known this, once, at the death of Akreon’s father. He had not been on the mountain then, he had been younger, then. He buried his face in his hands, and stood motionless, as the soldiers swayed or reeled, or crawled around him.
    The temple was built of shrieking. In the midst of it, as they ran against her, as they fell and tumbled on the floor, Cemira hung on her canes, and saw the throat of the cow slashed by a howling priest, her outcry tangled in all the rest.
    After that the world spun over and Cemira sprawled, just as the thin priestess had wished to see.
    Cemira lay on the floor, kicked and stumbled on by others with feet.
    Her head tolled an abysm of emptiness. It was as if she had gone deaf. Or, had died.
    The blackness covered her, and yet, still conscious, she bobbed on the sea of it. This
must
be death. And death was as horrible as living.
    But someone now snatched her up. She was borne, whirling, through the whirling world, away and away. She clung with all her might. Did she wish after all to survive, then? This curtailed body, did it have the temerity to long for life?
    “Ssh. It’s the worst moment. In a second—it will be over. Hush. My baby. I know, I know. Hold me. Yes. Oh, let the gods make it end!”
    Unknown to Cemira, known to the priestess who held her, the kind priestess who had sought her in the maelstrom, up in the peak of Heart Mountain the drummer was already taking up again his Drumsticks. To him, maybe worse than to any other, this abysmal hesitation in the rhythm of his days. He craned into the gloom of the sanctified cave, his flaming madman’s eyes straining upon the reefs of time, seeking the new moment in which—to
resume
.
    It came.
    The sticksflared high, struck down.
    From his body of bronze, the Drum of brass and bullshide, the savage crescendo bellowed, and the earth tilted and crashed back upon its axis.
    Cemira raised her head. Her hair was soaked with her tears and those of the priestess, whose mask was also wet, and askew. For the flick of an eye, Cemira saw the old white face, a stranger’s, gathered in seams, the sad visible eye, quite human. But the priestess adjusted her mask.
    “There now. All over.”
    “What was—what was—” Cemira had been deprived temporarily of the power of language.
    “The Great King has died. Probably at Oceaxis. The Heart must stop, to show the heart of the King has stopped. Do you see?” Cemira shook her head, and was giddy. “Well, it’s over now. And there’s a new King. So the Drum beats on.”
    In fact, in