Chapter Three

Pushing the Wall

At sunset on the eve of her fourteenth birthday, Diana became an acolyte at the Sun Temple of the Solari.

Skalos Joras gave her the surplice himself, and her father stood as her patron and mentor, his big hand on her shoulder as she settled her golden collar over her head, the many-rayed sun surrounding her face like a halo. The vivid colors of the crimson surplice and flame-colored tunic made her hair and eyes look paler than ever, but the Elders were willing to overlook that for Domitian's daughter.

For a little while, it was the busiest, but happiest, time of her life. She was up before dawn with the other acolytes, preparing the temple for the Salutation ceremony, and she learned that most of the work in the temple revolved around the mirrors: moving them, replacing broken mirrors, and polishing them, endlessly polishing them. Diana was convinced that every Rakkor warrior would be the strongest spearman in the world if he only spent a summer polishing mirrors.

Her work in the temple meant less time for her friends, but more time for study. Like her father, Diana devoured every book she was given. She had an uncanny knack for memorization, and had only to read a thing once to make it hers forever. She easily placed into the advanced mathematics and was soon studying trigonometry with acolytes two or three years older, but to her consternation, she lagged in Rhetoric and Logic. She could write an argument beautifully, but for some reason they always tangled on her tongue.

When she wasn't working or studying, she went to the agoge with Lelia, Kallista, and Helion, training beside them with the bow, spear, and shield. At fourteen they were considered adult Solari, and were expected to act as such. If there was another war, they would go to fight; if the Noxians climbed Mount Targon again—unlikely, but it had happened only a little more than a hundred years ago—they would be expected to defend the city.

Skalos Grakos had the charge of preparing his wolf-cubs for actual combat; a daunting task, to corral nearly thirty excitable fourteen year-olds into organized battle lines. But the shield wall and the phalanx were the foundations of formation warfare, and he drilled them mercilessly, from the charge in the ephodos phase to the othismos, the push, where each side tried to force the other line to break. It ended with the pararrhexis. The breach. One of the best days was when Diana was the one to breach the shield wall, smashing her shield into the opposite line and powering through, thigh muscles burning as she shoved her iron-shod heels into the ground and dug in. For a moment, when the shields gave way and she shattered the line, she felt invincible.

They aimed practice spears dipped in dye to tag their opponents on the other side of the shield war, and Diana had already been grazed over one shoulder. If it had been an actual wound, she would be bleeding; not badly, but enough to weaken her over a day's battle. Behind her, the spearmen stabbed over and around her, the spears clattering off armor. The spearmen on both sides tried to kill the warriors on the shield wall and disrupt their lines, and Diana, on the shield wall today, could only duck her helmeted head and depend on her armor to protect her, her teeth gritted as she shoved. Skalos Grakos periodically declared someone wounded or dead, forcing them to fall or be carried away, weakening the shield wall for that side.

Around the two sparring lines, there were the smaller tachoi forces, speeding to the flanks to disrupt the formations. It would have been exciting, she was sure, if they had been allowed to skirmish, but Skalos Grakos kept calling a halt.

"No! No!" He shouted again and again, smacking their practice spears aside with the flat of his hand. "You are the wall! Walls do not have heads! They do not turn their heads!" He took Ereon's shield from him and thumped the boy in his helmeted head with it. "Here! There is your enemy! If you do not trust your tachoi, they should not trust you to be a wall!"

Diana had found the hardest part of these exercises was not laughing when the Skalos was yelling at someone. As Skalos Grakos seemed to speak only in exclamations, he was always yelling at someone.

The Skalos threw up his hands and walked back out of the practice ring again, his broad, scarred shoulders banging into shields on both sides of the line.

"Again!" He shouted, dropped his arms, and the shield walls surged into each other once more.

At the end of the practice, they walked away exhausted, water-legged and aching, their shoulders and arms bruised from slamming into the shields. Diana peeled her helmet off and shook her head. Her hair was drenched with sweat, and she had only an hour until she had to be back at the Temple.

"Ready to try the Spear again?" Helion asked beside her, and she smiled up at him. Helion had finally overreached her, and it was strange to have to look up to meet his eyes.

"Better on a day where Skalos Grakos hasn't ground us into sawdust," she said, walking with him to put away their armor and weapons. The practice armory was on the far end of the field, and the cool wind felt good on her hot face. "Anyway, I have to go to the temple."

"No time for your old friends anymore," he remarked to the sky. "The world is a cruel place."

"I am an acolyte," she reminded him.

"And so one day you'll be a priestess and leave us?" He thumped his spear against his chest. "Cruel. Cruel."

"Maybe," she said, and shoved him. "I don't know. Stop teasing me."

"Why did you go to the Temple?" he asked, spinning his spear overhead between his fingers, a trick he was particularly proud of. By now she had become accustomed to walking with the sharp blade of a spear going whp whp whp over her head. "You never told us."

"Father thought it would be best." She colored at the look he gave her. "Well, he did."

"To be sure. But your father would never make you go if you didn't want to. Truth between us."

It was a thing they said often to each other; Diana wasn't sure how it had begun. Sometimes it seemed like a different promise, and the presumption made her nervous and shy of him. But Helion had always been sure of her. Ever since the day they had raced each other to the apple orchard and come in the gates together, there had been some shared sense that no one else could match them so well.

"I thought…I thought I needed to learn more about being Solari," she said, fumbling her way to something that was both honest and inoffensive. "Sometimes I feel that I mightn't be Solari at all."

"You're Rakkor, at least," Helion replied, and knocked his shield into her spear in a reassuring sort of way. "There can be no doubt of that."

"I don't look like one."

"No," He agreed softly, and something in his eyes made her walk faster.

"It comes harder for me, that's all," she said. "The things we believe. I need to understand it better."

"What's to understand? It is there," he said, pointing the sky, where the sun was a little past the noon peak. "You can see it, you can feel it."

"Yes, but what does it mean, Helion?" She asked, more sharply than she meant to. She waved the question away before he could reply. "You see."

"I see you have questions that need answering," he said, and tucked his spear into the crook of his shield arm. "It is another thing we share."

"Is it," she said warily as he caught her elbow.

"Yes. I would like to call on you at your father's house." He had practiced this, she thought; the formally worded question wasn't at all like Helion. His ears reddened. He wasn't asking to come to her house for a friendly visit. He was asking permission to formally court her. Heat rose to her cheeks and she looked away from his earnest blue eyes.

"Yes," she said. She was astonished when he bent and kissed her, quick and a little awkward, his dusty hand tangling in her hair.

"Then I'll see you later," he said, with his easy grin, and darted away, calling for Ereon and Parthas in a shameless bellow that made Diana turn crimson. "She said yes! Parthas! I told you she would!"

"Helion!"

He was already gone. Near the armorer's stall, Lelia and Kallista were laughing uproariously, Kallista sagging against the counter with her hand at her middle. For a moment Diana stood there, flushed with mingled outrage and amusement, and then she laughed and trotted over to them.

She thought of Helion when she was locked in the cellar.

Like Domitian, Helion was a part of the sun she could recognize and love. Sometimes she thought it was the key to the lock that barred her from the rest of the Solari: that their love for her, and her love for them, would show her the way. They were children of the sun, it was bred in them, built into their bones.

Diana knelt before the tiny altar she had built with her father a few months before, wearing the white toga of an acolyte at her devotions, and prayed. She sang her sleep-songs, the Salutation song, her voice rising high and sweet, clear as ringing wind chimes in the darkness of her prison.

For sweetly sings the setting sun

A farewell in fire, the twilight burns

One simple truth she always speaks

The night will end; the light, return.

It was a prison, for all that she went in willingly and she knew her father would be waiting for her in the morning to unlock the door. If she didn't pray, if she didn't kneel at her altar, she kept finding herself at the door, testing the lock again and again without any clear idea of how she'd gotten there. She made her own rituals, facing the east with her arms outstretched. She looked at the dark. She contemplated it. She could see the value of light; it was self-evident, it required no imagination of her.

She looked squarely at the deadness of the dark and imagined the world beyond, equally lifeless. The cold without the sun. The barren earth.

Then she imagined the sun rising, the sudden flare as it broke the horizon, and it was too bright even in her mind, sharp and sudden and dazzling. She recoiled and blinked it away, imaginary sunspots dancing in her eyes.

She willed herself to feel the warmth her father described, the connection to the sun, the day, the light of the world. She could see his faith when he tried to explain it to her; there was no doubt it was real, as full and many-faceted as a gem, so much more complex than the simple, straightforward belief of Helion. Domitian had assembled his faith as painstakingly as he built his models of the heavens. They were wondrous things, the marvel of the Archives, accurate in their angles and motions to the hundred thousandth decimal place. That was his faith, she thought, and sometimes she despaired.

She didn't think she would have decades to assemble her faith as he had, somehow.

The Skaloi of the temple did not like her questions.

She had sworn to her father never to lie in her heart, and she would not break that promise. But it was hard, hard when the other acolytes began to look at her sidelong, and Skalos Abeon—he was the worst, a lean, ascetic man whose faith burned hot and dangerous—picked at her, circled her, like a wolf deciding which morsel would be best to devour.

"The East-facing sun," he said today, as they walked through the temple gardens. He taught in the manner of the old rhetoricians, preferring to walk and talk with the acolytes, questioning them to force them to find the knowledge within themselves. It was an affectation, as far as Diana was concerned. She lagged behind the rest, hoping to go unnoticed. "Thalian, what can you tell me of it?"

"It is the dawn victorious," Thalian said promptly. "From its hue we can foretell the manner of the day."

"Yes. And?" The Skalos looked back, searching for volunteers, and Diana avoided his eyes. Ariadne answered, talking about the measure of the hours, the waxing and waning of the sunlight over the course of the year.

"It is the constancy of the sun," The Skalos said. "What might I mean when I speak of constancy? Diana?"

She knew the answer he wanted; she had made the mistake of referring to phases of the sun a few weeks before. It seemed to her the sun did have phases, just like the moon; the longer phase of the year, from solstice to equinox, the watery winter sun cycling back to its summer potency. But that was not a truth Skalos Abeon admired.

"The sun is unwavering," she said. "It rises every morning without fail."

It was sufficient; she bit her tongue to keep the rest back. The Skalos was trying to bait her into losing her temper, and the more he provoked her, the shorter her temper grew. He went on to another acolyte with his next question, and she thought she was safe. But like that wolf, Abeon soon circled back around to attack from another direction.

Later she couldn't even remember exactly how he said it; something about the patterns observed by learned men who had been trained to think, and the speculations of fools, who find omens in the flight of pigeons. There was nothing on the surface that showed he intended the hit for her, and he couldn't know about the mistaken omen on Titan's Spear, but Diana flushed with fury all the same.

"Did we not once tell the future with the entrails of pigeons?" she asked with poisonous sweetness, to the amusement of some of the other acolytes. Skalos Abeon's thin lips curved, his eyes lighting with satisfaction.

"Two hours on the mirrors for your insolence, phila Diana," he said softly, and she knew she had done exactly what he wanted her to do.

Two hours polishing mirrors made her miss her supper, and she came home in a foul mood, her arms aching miserably. Father was in his study, and she knew when he closed the door it meant her interruption would be unwelcome, unless it was the direst emergency. He was an Elder of the Fifth Degree now, and she supposed he was reading some Solari Mystery that she couldn't be allowed to know, some deep knowledge that would burn out her eyes, like the heretic of Skarphogi at the Summer Solstice.

Stuffing half a loaf of bread into her mouth, she carried a tray of cheese, olives, and grapes from the lower slopes of Mount Targon up to her room, sitting down at the little table they'd managed to squeeze beside the window, a place for her to study. Like her father, she liked having the window before her when she studied: looking down at the lights of the town helped her think. She read a chapter of Arivan's Historia while she ate, watching the thin sliver of the moon rising. Then it was Logos and Geologia, and she practiced her arguments for Rhetoric aloud. She had structured the argument well on paper, but when she tried to say it out loud, she kept forgetting key points, circling back to them later, disrupting the flow of the logic.

And her opponent tomorrow was Clytemne, she thought, furious with herself as she stumbled into silence for the fourth time. Clytemne was a year older and had never liked her, though Diana had no idea why. The bullying of Skalos Abeon was the breach in Diana's shield wall; until now, she had been too bright, too excellent to attack. Not so long ago she would have had many defenders, but she had left her pack behind, and Helion, Kallista, and Lelia couldn't help her in the Temple.

That was the worst of what the Skalos had done. He had made Diana look weak, and then given weapons to people like Clytemne to use against her.

She heard her father's walking staff thumping downstairs and shielded her candle with her hand, so he wouldn't know she was still awake. If he didn't ask her what had happened today, she wouldn't have to tell him, and that wasn't a lie by any definition.

The sound of his staff faded, and she heard his bedroom door shut. The village was dark, the faint light of the moon and stars glowing silver on the slate roofs, a quiet light, a kind light. It hid the darkened windows and doors, it washed out the colors. The world was simpler under the moon.

"And then Skala Legeia told us to sit down, and she would speak to us after class," Diana concluded gloomily.

"Why don't you just come back to train here?" Kallista asked, leaning on her spear. They were sitting under a stand of black pines on the side of the practice field, and for once, Diana was in no hurry to go the Temple for the afternoon.

Diana shook her head wordlessly, balancing her own spear on the toe of her boot.

She felt rather than saw her friends exchanging a glance over her head, and part of her wanted to tell them everything. If she hadn't spent the night before in the cellar, she might have, but the simple fact that her father had to lock her up for the night, like King Lykaos in the stories, drove home the seriousness of the danger. Tonight was the last night of the full moon, and she wanted nothing so much now as to sleep.

"Where does she live?" Lelia asked, tilting her red-gold head to one side.

"You are not going to go beat her up."

"No, all of us are," Lelia said cheerfully, and made Diana laugh.

"That would make it worse," she said regretfully, but knocked her shoulder into Lelia's to thank her.

"They're strangers up at the temple," Kallista observed. She was as tall and lean as her spear and had a habit of balancing it over her shoulders, her long arms wound around the stout ash shaft. "They know each other like we do. You're amyita to them."

Diana shrugged. That wasn't the whole of it, though it was true; the children of the Temple had already formed their friendships, and she was an outsider. Father had wanted her to have the Rakkor childhood he'd had when he sent her to the agoge. And she wouldn't have given it up for the world. They called the children of the agoge wolf-cubs, and Lelia, Kallista, Helion, and the rest were as good as her brothers and sisters, as good as her own blood.

It was a good thought, but she was done feeling sorry for herself, at least in front of Lelia and Kallista.

She swiped the butt of her spear at Kallista, the hard pole smashing into the taller girl's shin in a sudden attack that made Kallista's wide mouth curve in a fierce grin.

"We can't go fight Clytemne, so you want to dance with me?" She asked, and stabbed outward, her long body propelling the spear like a bow from the string. Lelia rolled out of the way swiftly, clearing the way for the duel.

"I won't get in any more trouble for thrashing you." Diana blocked the next thrust of the spear, turning it aside and sweeping her spear in a whistling arc that would have cut Kallista's throat, had it landed. They had graduated to true iron, sharp and lethal, and it was true that Borean had almost lost his arm when he was too slow with his shield, but Skalos Grakos said bloody training made for bloodless combat.

"No, indeed," Kallista agreed. "Everyone would be too amazed. Stay there!" She shouted, stabbing her spear at Diana's foot, an odd but effective maneuver that would have pinned her right foot to the earth if it had landed.

"When is Ereon calling on you?" Diana asked, puffing a little as she snapped back into the third form, her spear held crossways over her body.

"Two days. Ooh, nice try." Kallista spun out of the way, the shaft of her spear snapping to block Diana's quick reverse.

"He's afraid of her mother," Lelia remarked, lifting their shields in each arm. "Shields to whoever gets it first!"

They dove at the same time, spears whirling, and Diana nearly had her that time, her spear sweeping out and up in an arc that almost cut the other girl in two. Kallista bent double to avoid it and snapped her shield out, almost knocking Diana's shield off her arm.

"Tied," Lelia commented, and retired to the base of the black pine to keep score.

"He…is…not…afraid of my mother," Kallista grunted, their shields grinding together, cords standing out in her tanned legs as she shoved with all her might…and then let her shield slip with a shout, overbalancing Diana. Kallista's spear shot forward again, the line of her body and spear so perfectly level and straight that Diana would have applauded, if the spear wasn't aimed for her heart.

She followed her shield and rolled down the shaft of the spear, smashing an elbow into Kallista's chin.

"Everyone is afraid of your mother," she panted, and glanced at Lelia.

"Tied," the girl said implacably.

"Ereon loves my mother," Kallista growled, but it was a weak retort, because what Diana said was true. The people who ran afoul of Elder Jocaste regarded it as something like a rock slide or a bolt of lightning from the blue sky: simultaneously an unavoidable catastrophe and a judgment of heaven.

They went back and forth in the dust, the pale earth of the field clinging to their sweating bodies, and while Kallista's form was perfect, Diana's instincts seldom failed her. She knew somehow when Kallista would lunge from the balance of her body, the weight on one foot or the other, or maybe just reading something flickering in the other girl's dark eyes. She countered, stabbed out, spun with her shield, good, clean sweat rolling down her face, stinging her eyes.

It might have gone on until dusk if she hadn't looked up at the sky and seen, appalled, the position of the sun.

"Oh, sweet summer sun," she gasped, and backpedaled, throwing down her shield and tossing her spear to Lelia, who caught it one handed. "I'm late."

"You lose," Kallista crowed.

"No, I am late," she enunciated. "Take over for me, Lelia!"

She sped off with Kallista's jeering ringing in her ears, her breath already drawing a stitch into her side. It was nearly two miles from the agogia to the Temple, and she ran every step of the way, ignoring the amused glances in the market place as she pelted toward the temple steps. She wasn't the first acolyte to be late to her work, but she had the distinction of being the one who was late to Skalos Abeon's class, and she honestly didn't know which was worse: her tardiness, or the fact that she was sweat and grime from head to toe.

In the garden, she found them, or they found her as she rounded a corner and stopped, gasping. Skalos Abeon was in the front of the small group of acolytes, one hand upraised and two fingers pointing in the formal rhetorical pose that meant he was not only declaiming some point of dogma, but being unusually full of himself while he did it. His hand slowly lowered as he looked at her, his lips curling, and Diana drew herself up. Behind him, she could see the other acolytes ranged, like a flock of geese in flight, or the spear-point formation of a flanking charge of tachoi, coming to break the wall.

"Phila Diana," the Skalos said slowly, to give himself time to frame the insult. A few of the students were stone-faced, but most of the rest were beginning to smile. "Were you rolling around in the dust with dogs before you got here? Shame, shame. An acolyte of the great Temple of the Sun and you still prefer the company of common curs."

Diana sucked in a breath, her pulse pounding in her forehead.

"Better a dog in the dust," she said, her voice shaking with rage, "than a pompous jackass."

She was very, very late coming home that night.

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Author's Note: The next chapter might take a few days longer than usual, as I'm moving in real life. Please review if you've enjoyed the story so far. To answer a question asked elsewhere, the non-English words are shamelessly mutilated Greek.