Mortal Suns by Tanith Lee Page A

watering his horse at the brook, downstream with the cavalry. At fifteen, he looked almost fully a man, magnificent enough, and he took his own advice, was modest and quiet-spoken where possible. His men liked him, and were not put out by his age.
    Klyton looked less a man, more a wayward god in youth and armor. Something eccentric in the lines of him, something fantastic and magical, pleased. He was thought too young to be given a command, although Okos had apparently had one at thirteen, in the battles with Uaria. Some perverse idiocy had put Klyton too among the ranks of Pherox’s detachment. Amdysos had tried to change that. As Klyton said, it was like the school, where they split you from your friends to make you conscious of new ones, which had not worked.
    Pherox, attwenty, rode up and down the lines of men, mature man and warrior. He had fought before, small uprisings here and there, all called wars. Sufficient. His sword, as they said, had drunk.
    Handsome, like them all, he had the darkness of his mother, black hair, black eyes, and an arrogance and coldness that made one bite the tongue.
    It was a fact. If Glardor—not euphemistically “stepped aside,” but
died
—Pherox would be the Great Sun. Udrombis had borne him on a night of tempest. It had been a difficult birth. You could believe it of him.
    Klyton let his gelding have the water. He watched it. He said, “Do you remember when Pherox took the apple—”
    Amdysos roared with laughter.
    Klyton did not turn. He felt the eyes of Pherox on them both. Pherox did not like their friendship. He had said openly that they were not only brothers but lovers, which had never been true, at least not true in the carnal sense. To Pherox, male love—of any sort—was shoddy. He should have read the legends. The Sun god’s many loves of every gender. But the strain that was, in Udrombis, burnished stone, and in Amdysos, pragmatism, was in Pherox—poison.
    The incident of the apples had occurred when Klyton and Amdysos were boys, six and eight years old. Pherox was thirteen, Klyton’s age today.
    Stabia had been given a gift of apples, some country present, nice enough, but too many. Klyton and Amdysos ate their fill, and then had a slave cast the apples in the air so they could try to split them flying, with arrows.
    Pherox appeared. He lectured them on this waste of fruit. They were children. What did they know.
    Then he picked an apple off the garden bench. It happened to be the showpiece of the gift, a fruit of green and red stained marble. They watched him, and at his unawareness, neither spoke out. When he took it directly to his mouth and champed on it in righteous fury, it broke a side tooth, which, to this hour, might be seen flashing its repaired cap of silver.
    They had beenfriends from the beginning, from when Stabia and Udrombis had leaned together in the cool, scented rooms, and Klyton and Amdysos had fought and played like foxes on the floor.
    Pherox did not think quickly enough, or look properly at things. About the look and feel of an apple, whether it were flesh or stone, at friendship that had nothing to do with ambition. At his own stance on the black Arteptan horse.
    He had two wives, and both had given him, already, sons. He called them, Pherox, his flocks and herds.
    “The Sun’s going,” said Amdysos.
    Far up the hill, thinly, the priest might be heard singing out the incantation. Arndysos tipped a few drops from his wineskin into the stream … “
Do not forget us.
”
    Pherox was gone. He had not bothered, as several had not, to salute the dying Sun. Campaign was different. The gods were not unreasonable. Still, if one could.
    “It should be the first Sirmian town tomorrow,” said Klyton.
    “Yes. How do you feel?”
    “I don’t know,” Klyton said. “Keen, I suppose. Very, very brave.”
    Brief but opaque, doubt drifted through both their eyes. Tomorrow they must, for the first time, kill a man. Or, they