Bring Down the Sun Read online

  There was no use in either guilt or shame. Myrtale had done what she had done. Her child was still safe. Pella was as well protected as she or her aunt could manage.

  They had passed beyond the palace and the city into featureless darkness. No stars or moon guided them; no road stretched before them. They floated in a sea of nothingness.

  The dark was full of visions, surging and seething on the edge of sight. Flocks of shadows crowded in close; they chattered as the shades of the dead were said to do. Living women flew like birds above them, circling in the fitful light, singing an eerie song.

  There was madness in that song. It stripped Myrtale of wits and sense, and bade fair to leave her as empty as the world into which she had fallen.

  Timarete’s hand gripped hers with bruising force. But stronger than that was the child within her, battering against the walls of the womb as if he would leap forth in full armor with spear in hand.

  Pain was real. Pain was the world. It brought back the stars and set her feet on a hard and stony road.

  Jagged peaks loomed above her. They had no names that she knew. The stars were all strange. The air was brutally cold, with a tang of iron.

  Water roared below. A river ran through the gorge, cutting deep into the sheer walls. For a dizzy moment she thought it was a river of blood, so strong was the strangeness in the air, but such sanity as she had trickled back; she smelled the cold clarity of water.

  The river’s voice was manifold. Amid the roaring she heard shrieks and growls and what sounded like snatches of words, as if bodies tumbled in the torrent.

  She could see nothing but mountains and stars, but her aunt’s grip was strong still, her hand warm and blessedly alive. That warmth brought a memory of sunlight into this black and deadly place.

  Myrtale realized she was crouching as if against a rain of blows. She straightened slowly. Her body ached; the child had quieted, although he was restless still.

  He was not afraid, but his unease thrummed in her. She pressed her hands to the curve of her belly, willing reassurance into him. Those who had laid this trap wanted him alive; they would not harm him while he lay in the womb.

  That was true, but she walled off the rest of the thought: that Myrtale needed only to be warm and breathing in order to bring him to birthing. What the witches had done to Arrhidaios, they could do to her. Witless, senseless, and pliable, she would be no more than a vessel for their puppet king.

  The horror of that all but overwhelmed her. Almost too late, she recoiled from this latest of many subtle spells.

  Dear Mother, they knew her too well; she was too weak, too young, too ill-schooled. She should never have come here, never have challenged them. She should have stayed in Pella.

  “Stop.” Timarete’s voice cracked like a whip. Slow light dawned in the chasm, laying bare the stark cliffs and the turbulence of the river.

  They stood on a shelf of rock midway down the crag. Behind them was darkness absolute—but it breathed. Myrtale shuddered with sudden cold.

  Wherever they had been, Timarete’s lone word had brought them to living earth and familiar sky. A cavern opened in the crag. With no evidence of either fear or hesitation, Timarete stepped into the darkness.

  Myrtale dug in her heels, but her aunt’s grip was relentless. Stone remained solid underfoot; in the dark she heard the river’s roar fading with unnatural rapidity, until she stumbled forward in whispering quiet.

  The walls closed in: the air grew thicker and the floor rougher. Timarete’s pace slowed, which was merciful: more than once, Myrtale lost her footing and nearly fell.

  The way, which had been level, began gradually to ascend. Her breath came harder; her sight, if she had had any, would have begun to dim.

  This was eerily like the ascent of the Mysteries on Samothrace, but there was a profound difference in it. That had been blessed in all its parts. This was anything but blessed, and deadly dangerous.

  When Myrtale could not have borne the burden of her body for another step, sudden light dazzled her. It was the barest glimmer ahead, but as her aunt drew her onward, it brightened to the pallor of moonlight, although there was no moon tonight.

  The sound of water rose again, but softer, less a roar now than a whisper. With it came the scent of greenery, the sharpness of bay and thyme. Cool night air wafted over her.

  The light revealed itself to be a lamp encased in pale stone. A handful of tall pale men rose from where they had been sitting. Myrtale remembered none of their names but one, but their family she did indeed remember: the Hymenides, those last remnants of the old people from the vale of Acheron.

  Young Attalos would not look directly at her, though she caught the flash of his glance. His brothers were equally shy, or maybe that was veiled contempt. They bowed low to Timarete.

  “Enough of that,” the priestess said. “Time’s wasting. Is it all done as I bade?”

  “All of it, lady,” said the eldest.

  “Good, then,” she said. “Let’s begin.”

  The Hymenides fell in like an honor guard, surrounding the two women. Their lamp lit the way along the narrow bank of the river, beneath cliffs fully as steep as those on the other side of the cavern. This river was gentler by a little, and narrower and shallower, but it was still a great power in this world or any other.

  Myrtale was beyond exhaustion. She walked because if she did not, they would carry her; and that would be more humiliation than she could bear. She had stopped wondering how, in this state, she could do battle with anything but her own body.

  One thing alone she was sure of. The witches were waiting. The river’s flood led to them; so did the wheeling of the stars, and the voices of the dead chittering about her. This was the living world, but the dark land was as close as her chiton to her skin. To touch it, she had only to reach out her hand.

  The dead needed blood, Erynna had told her—as had her teachers before that, and old Homer himself in his tales of her ancestors. Maybe that was true, but living blood in living body was at least as strong a lure as blood of sacrifice poured out upon the earth.

  Myrtale’s strength was coming back. The earth fed it; the stars called it forth. Even her guards offered what they had, whether they knew it or no.

  Her steps steadied. When the track ascended, she barely quailed. The stars were fading; she could see the shadow of a wall above her.

  They were in Acheron indeed, and the place to which they had come was the great shrine, the Nekromanteion, high above the river. Mountains marched away below it, sheer slopes and sudden crags as far as she could see.

  There should have been priests here, attendants, pilgrims dreaming in the hidden rooms and descending into the caverns where the visions were. But there was no living soul in all that place but Myrtale and her companions. Tonight it was theirs, their battlefield, poised between the mortal world and the world of magic.

  The dead were there in plenty. They flocked like sparrows, crowding thick over the altar and trailing like mist above the walls. The murmur of their voices drowned out the river; the wind they raised overcame the wind of earth.

  Were they the witches’ weapon, then? Would they drain the life out of her, leaving only enough to bring the child forth alive?

  “They’re not the trap,” Timarete said, standing side by side with her in mind as in body. “They’re simply a diversion.”

  Myrtale shuddered. However diligently the priestesses in Dodona had labored to teach her not to fear the shades of the dead, the thought of them was a cold chill down her spine.

  She stiffened her back and restrained herself from creeping under Timarete’s mantle. For this night above all, she needed courage.

  The altar lay before her. In place of the blood sacrifices of these late days, it was heaped with offerings of an older time: flowers of the early spring, fruits far out of season, garlands of myrtle and bay. Without stopping to think, she lifted one of myrtle and crowned herself with it.

  Its pungent scent sur
rounded her. The hordes of the dead swirled like smoke. They brought a memory: Philip’s strong warm hands cupping her face, and the taste of his lips on hers.

  That brought her to herself. The earth was deep and strong beneath her. She knelt, the better to feel that strength, and laid her hands on the stony ground. Soft new grass sprang through her fingers.

  It was growing as she knelt there, both blessing and promise. The child stirred in response. His heart was the core of the sun. Darkness had no power against him.

  It was all around them, more powerful than the dead. The enemy had come behind the wall of it, driving it before them.

  Twenty-six

  Myrtale saw through the darkness with ease that should not have been possible. The light inside her cast itself through the walls of the world, and the earth’s power rose up through her. She saw the forces that had hunted her all her life, and committed their faces to memory.

  Erynna was one of them, not quite the least but far from the greatest. Those rode a black wind, flying as Myrtale had seen in her dream or vision: a phalanx of witches clothed in naught but the ointment that bore the magic.

  They drifted like leaves above the shrine. The flocks of the dead had fled in terror. Myrtale knew no fear of them, even as she recognized the power that beat down upon her.

  The Hymenides buckled under it. Their weapons were useless, their magic too frail to withstand the onslaught. Their bodies were a shield still, to death if need be; in that, even now, they never wavered.

  Only Timarete stood upright. If she felt herself outnumbered, she did not show it. Light kindled in the staff she had brought from Pella.

  Pride might have brought Myrtale to her feet, but she needed the earth’s strength more than she needed such bravado. She sat on her heels, hands still flat in the thickening grass.

  She braced for thunderbolts and the casting of mighty spells. What came was much more dangerous.

  The woman who alighted amid the offerings on the altar was neither young nor old, neither beautiful nor ugly. Her hair was no particular color in the dimming starlight; her skin was pale, her body more thin than plump. She was as ordinary as a person could be, and that in itself was powerful magic.

  She had a rod in her hand, a peeled wand. She carried it casually, held lightly in her fingers, as if it had no significance. And yet at the sight of it, Myrtale doubled up with sudden, piercing pain.

  Her mind babbled to itself. They wanted her child. They needed him—alive and enslaved to their will. They would not harm him now, nor force him into the world before he could survive there.

  This was a feint. It had to be. It could not—

  Myrtale thrust panic aside. It was part of the spell, meant to weaken her until all thought of attack or defense was driven from her mind. Then they would have her, and the child, beyond hope of escape.

  One of the Hymenides rose up with startling speed and hurled his spear direct to the witch’s heart.

  It passed through her as if through a swirl of mist. Even as she laughed at him, her rod flicked out to brush his cheek.

  He withered like a leaf in a flame. Before his brothers could utter a word, he had crumbled to dust. A gust of wind scattered it, dissolving it into nothingness.

  Attalos howled and lunged. Timarete’s outthrust arm flung him back before he could go the way of his elder brother. The rest, having more sense or less crazy courage, hung well back but kept their spears balanced in their hands.

  In a movement so smooth it seemed slow, but in truth it was preternaturally fast, Timarete flung her own spear, a spear of magic. That, unlike the mortal weapon, struck its target; but the witch twisted, eluding the worst of it. It rocked but did not destroy her.

  While she swayed, Timarete struck again and yet again. On the fourth stroke, the witches who had hovered, watching, gathered in a flock high above her.

  They looked like hawks poised for the kill. Myrtale, for the moment forgotten, gathered as much strength as she could. Knowledge, she had too little of, but she had never needed it to bring down the sun.

  This was her own earth, her country, her Epiros, that embraced this vale of Acheron. Had they forgotten that, and remembered only that here in the black vale, where death and darkness ruled, their magic was all the stronger?

  They were not such fools as that. They had come in force, they had chosen the place of battle, and now they surrounded her, barring every path of escape.

  The child had gone still inside her. She might have thought little of that, had she not come to see how subtle the witches truly were. Serpent subtlety: creeping in shadows, striking the heel.

  Nearly invisible tendrils of magic had unfolded from the witch’s rod. Even as the witch defended herself against Timarete’s relentless attack, the rod went on weaving its spell.

  It was almost beautiful, that work of the darkest art. It bound a soul as tightly as a spider bound its prey, numbed his spirit and suborned his will but left him free to walk and talk and live as a mortal man. He would be king in Macedon, and he would fulfill the destiny that had been woven for him—but how and when and for whom he did it would be entirely in their hands.

  They would make him great, for their own purposes. He would rule as they bade him, nor would he know to care.

  Deep in Myrtale’s heart, she tasted bitter laughter. Her aunt had done nearly the same to her, albeit with the best of intentions. Now they both paid, Timarete no less than Myrtale.

  Myrtale’s son would not pay. As foolish as it might be, she raised her head and looked Erynna in the face.

  Erynna smiled. The air around her filled with certainties. Yes, let Myrtale win this battle. Let her son be born and live uncorrupted. Then let her know the true depth of her folly, when he abandoned her to conquer the world. He would look on her with love and loathing; he would go the way he chose, without regard to any other, least of all the woman who had borne him.

  “There is no gratitude in that heart,” Erynna said. Her voice spoke in Myrtale’s ear, as if she stood close by and not far above her. “He will defy you in every way, thwart you, oppose you, mock you and all your purposes. Then he will die long before his time, leaving you amid the ruins of his empire.”

  “Maybe,” said Myrtale, “but he’ll do it of his own will. He’ll be no crushed and trammeled thing.”

  “That’s a pretty dream,” said Erynna, “until you wake and see how grim a life you’ve bound yourself to. We’ve seen all the twists that fate can weave into the tapestry. You will curse the day you refused us, and mourn the death of all your dreams.”

  A gust of fetid wind buffeted Myrtale. This was more than a curse; it was truth, spoken with the voice of power. For all her resolve, Myrtale wavered.

  Would it be so terrible after all if her child were guided rather than left free to choose his own destiny?

  “Yes,” Erynna breathed in her ear. “Come with us; help us shape the world. With such magic as you have, the world can be yours, and everything in it. Your son can be anything you wish him to be.”

  Around them, the battle had subsided into stillness. The witch on the altar was battered and bleeding but still upright. Timarete balanced a spear of lightning in her hand with improbable ease, but did not cast it.

  They were all, witches and priestess alike, watching Myrtale. It was all in her hands.

  Hers, not Erynna’s. The child rode within her body. The divinity that had made him, the magic that filled him, came through her. Until he was born, no one but Myrtale could make his choices for him.

  A great anger swelled up in her, an eruption of rage that either of them should be forced to this. Did they think her so weak that she was fair prey for every snake that lurked in the grass, and every hawk that flew overhead?

  And yet as she reached for the sun that lived in the heart of her, her eye caught Erynna’s. The witch was smiling. Even this was a trap. It was all a trap, every moment of it.

  Or was that the trap—to freeze her into immobility, incapable of
choosing a course, until they overwhelmed her mind and cast her down?

  She thrust the thought aside. Whether she acted well or ill, she must act. She must choose.

  There was no sun to draw down. It was still below the horizon. She drew it up out of the earth into the waiting sky.

  It strained in her grasp, struggling to escape. The stab of fear came near to destroying her. But she was not the child who had toppled a mountain. She had a little sense now, and a scrap or two of discipline.

  It could not be enough. No mortal should meddle with such powers as these. Flesh and bone were not strong enough to hold them.

  She must not give way to doubt. The sun grew within her, even as it swelled through earth into sky. The witches shrieked and thrashed. Bolts of magic blistered the air around her.

  None of them touched her. The sun seared them to nothing, blazing as bright as a summer noon. It swept them out of the sky.

  That great winnowing left Myrtale at the eye of creation, laid bare to every eye that could see magic.

  Some of the witches had fallen, but too many rose again, swirling together, linked hand in hand. As they spun above her, her eye caught on the wheel and fixed. Both thought and sense fled away.

  Pain shot through her, flinging her backward. The child dealt one last, agonizing blow, then subsided into deceptive quiet.

  For a precious moment, her mind was her own again. The sun had all but escaped her grasp. She lunged, her whole spirit a prayer, and caught it. With more hope than art or skill, she smote the wheel of witches even as their cloud of hopelessness enveloped her.

  The sun died. She gave herself up to the final blow—knowing that while her body might live, her mind would be gone. She would be as witless as her son’s elder brother, his only living rival for the throne on which the witches would set him.

  The ember of anger within her flared—feeble after the soaring fire of the sun, but it warmed her just enough. By its light she saw the stony hillside in the grey light of dawn, and the shrine of the dead standing stark on its summit, and of the witches nothing, not even a rag or a bone.