The White Serpent

by Tanith Lee

  “Oh, won’t they. We’ll see what a bribe will do,” announced Katemval staunchly, and off they went, to the most southerly port. Where it was discovered that bribes would do nothing. Viewing the enormous raging waters for himself, Katemval was not, at length, disposed to argue.

  So there they wintered, he, his men, and two wagon-loads of bought children. Half an inn was required, as well as the services of women to tend the flock. At least, it was warmer.

  There was an Alisaarian tower in dock, a ship on which Katemval’s agent negotiated first passage out. She would be making for Jow with a cargo of copper and common slaves. Katemval found this traffic disgusting; he himself traded in finer stuff, and for a nicer market.

  The children fared very adequately, if the fretful slave-taker did not, kicking heels in Iscah. Blossoming on sufficient decent food, sleep, and care, many had already forgotten or dismissed their origins.

  Not the Lydian, though, Katemval surmised. He was after all one of the youngest, and might miss his mother, too. Though death had got her before the Alisaarians took him, maybe the child equated that loss with the other.

  The slave-taker was strict with himself, not to make a pet of this single boy. It would be all too easy, and then another parting, distressing for both, perhaps. But on the first sunny morning, when the bloody ocean conceded it might lie down again, Katemval, finding the boy in an upper window of the children’s room, pointed out the tower ship to him, lying at anchor, lovely as a toy after her winter cosset.

  “That is how we’ll go to Alisaar. On that one, there.”

  “Yes,” said the child.

  “Tell me, Rehger,” said Katemval—for he knew what the boy’s name was intended to be, and pronounced it accordingly in spick and span Alisaarian—“What are you going to be, in Alisaar?”

  “A man of glory,” said Rehger, the words Katemval had taught him to say, and hopefully to credit.

  “Always hold to that, my dear,” said Katemval. “You are going to be a lion and a lord and a man of fame. Your life will be like a sunburst and your death a thing of drama and beauty. What are you making now?” he added, for he saw the boy’s fist curled about something. Whether this inclination for artistry—which sought expression in packed snow, mud, and bits of wood with a kitchen knife he should never have been given—would grow up with him or be at all serviceable, Katemval did not know. But he was intrigued nevertheless. Not hanging back, not hurrying, the boy opened his hand.

  It was the left hand, with that wire of silvery scar around the wrist. More surprising still, perhaps, what lay in the palm of it: A triangular blazing coin. Almost all gold, only enough bronze there to harden the metal.

  “Where did you get it, Rehger? Did you steal it?”

  “No. My mother gave it me. My father gave it my mother.”

  Katemval doubted this. Yet, intuitively, he doubted also that any theft had been committed by the boy himself.

  “Where do you hide it, then?”

  “Here.” The boy revealed a tiny leather fragment around his neck, the sort of thing in which valueless talismans were retained. All gods, it was worth ten times over what had been paid for the child.

  “Put it back then, Rehger, and don’t let anyone else see. Someone might want it.”

  “Do you?” said the boy, fist closed again on the coin, looking at him with utter directness.

  Katemval laughed, a little hurt, the kindhearted taker of slaves.

  “Of course not, boy. That’s yours, now. Remember your mother by it.”

  “Yes,” said Rehger.

  He had never spoken of his mother, and obviously would say no more of her now.

  But that was as well, under the circumstances.

  In five days they might be on the sea. Another month, and the real life he had been born for, there in that sty, would begin for Rehger Am Ly Dis.

  • • •

  When the rains paused, three priests of Cah came to call on Orhn and Tibo.

  The priests seldom walked. In the snow they would have journeyed by dogsled; now the temple’s servants carried them in three litters, up the fearful track, over the valley, into the farmyard.

  Tibo came to the door, kneeled down in the mud and bowed her head.

  One by one the three priests were lowered to the ground and emerged, to stand there burning in their red and yellow, brass and beads.

  “Get up, woman. Where are your men?”

  Tibo got up. Head still bowed, she replied, “My husband Orhn is inside. Shall I fetch him?”

  “Where is your husband’s brother?” said the priest who had spoken before.

  “I don’t know, priest-master. Leave to speak?”

  “I grant you.”

  “Days ago, Orbin-master went to Ly, to offer to Cah. He didn’t return here. He took money, and maybe is delayed. He spoke of bartering or buying. Orhn lost cows this cold.”

  “Did no one go to look for Orbin?”

  “My husband—he never told me to go. Without his leave, I mustn’t. I did go a little way to look, but Orbin wasn’t there.”

  “Enough,” said the priest. “I will tell you where Orbin is.”

  He told her. Tibo listened, head bowed. When he ended, she lifted her bowed head and gave a huge appalling cry, but that was tradition. The priests waited until she stopped ululating, by which juncture Orhn, aroused from sleep and scared, had come to the door also, plucking at her sleeve.

  A man of another valley, going over to Ly, had chanced to see Orbin prone at the bottom of a steep rocky ravine. There was no means to get to him, and anyway, the carrion crows of the uplands had already done so, and were feasting—their bustling presence it was which had caused the traveler to look down. The body, what with the depth of the ravine, and the crows, was barely recognizable. But the man, reporting the event in Ly, had thought he knew it by its boots. Then other farmers came to make sacrifice or to drink in the village, and only the regular Orbin did not. So the priests went to visit Orhn’s wife. It was true, without her husband’s direction, she could not leave the farm’s environs to search. Conversely, Orhn might not have been able to muster such an order. Orhn, though opinion differed on the extent, was not quite as he should be. And this in its turn clouded the death of his brother. That a child had been born here all Ly knew. That the child had been sold to slave-takers at the start of the snow, that was general knowledge, too. The Alisaarians had had their camp at Ly, and come back there with the child, though no one had seen much of it, wrapped in fur, up on the leader’s big black riding-beast. Had Orhn been capable of the wit to sell his son for cash? Or had Orbin sold the boy? And did that mean in turn that Orbin, not Orhn, had unlawfully sired it? And did it mean that Tibo had run mad and attacked Orbin?

  Men did slip and die on the passes, but rarely. They grew up slogging back and forth along such tracks. Women, however, now and then lost their minds, a fault of the inferior stuff from which the goddess had created them.

  “You must come with us,” the priest said to Tibo now, “you must come and be questioned before Cah, in the temple. But first, bring us beer to drink, and some sweet cakes.”

  • • •

  It was a sin, and she understood it was a sin. As with the man who had fathered her son, Tibo was aware of the lawless thing she did. Her thoughts were transparently ordinary on the day she killed Orbin. She had meant to see to it all winter, as soon as an opportunity arrived. An execution. The moment he had told her what he had done, that instant, she had known she would have his life. But rationally, she stipulated that it must be a murder the worldly blame for which she might escape. There was Orhn to tend. There was the mere fact of living.

  But too much had gone on, and they suspected her, as she had always foreseen was possible. That had made no change in her resolution when she considered it beforehand, and she did not alter her vision of the k
illing, now. She had needed to kill Orbin.

  Yet curiously somehow Tibo had not despaired of Cah. Even though she had transgressed Cah’s supremest edicts—or had she? It was Orbin who had flouted Cah, ungenerative Orbin, who had given away the born gift of a boy to aliens.

  As she walked after the litters, two of the temple servants behind her, Tibo did not tremble or loiter. She did not peer after the spot where Orbin had gone down, nor hang back as they approached it. And when, at long last they came in sight of Ly, Tibo quickened her step.

  • • •

  “Speak freely. Remember you are heard, and seen. Cah hears. Cah sees.”

  “You birthed a child.”

  “After many years’ barrenness.”

  The temple was very dark, almost lampless. Perhaps for holiness’ sake at this testing, or perhaps because of the lean season and a lack of oil. Out of the dark, velvet-black, the part-seen shape of the goddess, concave face, bulging mammalia. Catching light, the eyes, like lights themselves.

  The priests spoke to Tibo in dismembered voices, as she stood by the alter.

  They believed she was guilty. They believed that, when this ritual was done, they must throw open the doors and give her to the people of Ly, to be stoned to death.

  Even the High Priest had entered the body of the temple, to witness the proceedings, and his head had altered to the mask and beak of a huge predatory bird. A woman became important when she broke the law.

  But Cah also was there. Cah’s shadow and her eyes, listening, watching.

  Cah—

  “Woman-Tibo, tell us now, who fathered your child?”

  Tibo drew in the solid air of the temple, blood, unguents, smoke—the smell of Cah. Words came: She spoke them.

  “The father of my child was the man given to me by Cah.”

  Tibo waited, an electric tingle on her skin, inside her bones. Was it a lie? By law, Cah had given Tibo Orhn. By magic and desire, Cah had given Tibo Yems, the stranger. It was what Tibo had always believed. Was a sin still a sin when the goddess offered it? If she was wrong, now Cah would strike Tibo down.

  But Cah did not strike Tibo.

  There was only the loud silence of the dark and the oil sputter and the breathing of the priests.

  “You say you took and bore the child lawfully?”

  “I bore him according to Cah’s will,” Tibo said. Now she knew it was so. She said the phrase with triumph and conviction.

  “Woman-Tibo,” said a priest (they questioned her or commented, she thought, in turn), “Orbin fell from the mountain and died. What do you know about that?”

  “I didn’t see it,” she said. This was true. She had drawn away and turned her back on him, as he slid and floundered and toppled into space. It was not squeamishness or even superstitious fear that made her do so, but an unwillingness he should behold her face, as if that might somehow help him. But had Cah prompted her, also, then? So that she might declare now I didn’t see?

  “You say you’re guiltless of Orbin’s death?”

  Tibo said, “Masters, I’m only a woman. Orhn had to sell our son, we had no money. Orbin went to get new stock, to sacrifice to Cah so she’d be lenient to us. Now Orbin is dead. All this sorrow.”

  “But are you guilty, woman?”

  “Isn’t a woman always some way guilty, if trouble comes on her men?”

  The words—from Cah. Cah instructed, Cah taught her. There was no need for any confusion. The laws were wrong. Or Cah had made a new law for Tibo, and Tibo performed her will.

  The priests murmured and hissed to one another in the dark, and their adornments clicked and rustled. Then the High Priest spoke through the curved beak of the bird.

  “Woman, you’re obtuse. But you will have to satisfy custom. If you’re innocent, put your right hand on the foot of Cah. Otherwise, confess now.”

  Tibo hesitated. She did not know it, but she had been in a sort of trance more than three months long. It had come on her at the moment Orbin, seated there in the firelight, revealed that he had sold Raier. In this trance, Tibo had gone about her household duties as ever, worked and slaved, eaten her meager share, slept her curtailed sleep. In the trance she had not wept or complained, had not torn out her hair or rent her cheeks with her nails, had not fallen down screaming. No. She had only waited, with the promise of Orbin’s slaughter in front of her. And when it was accomplished, still the trance supported her, and did so yet.

  However, the clarity of the trance enabled her, additionally, at the High Priest’s pronouncement, to recollect a scene of her infancy. She had been taken to Ly and when there, her mother and sisters had mixed themselves amid a crowd under the temple hill. It was a day in the hot months, the sky and the earth blistering. From the temple came a sudden muffled shrieking, and next the doors opened and a woman was dragged out and down the hill by some of the temple’s servants. She was an adulteress, Tibo discovered later—for her sisters whispered of the circumstance for years, even dating things by the day of the stoning. As the rocks began to fly, Tibo’s mother and sisters slinging their portion determinedly (though Tibo was too young to join in), Tibo had noticed, without comprehension, that the woman’s right hand had been hurt. Even before the stones flailed against her, she kneeled and wailed in agony, though when the onslaught began she had tried to shield herself. Tibo recalled one missile hitting the forehead of the adulteress. Then she fell back and was quiet. The stoning nevertheless did not end until the priests up on the temple terrace, sure the death sentence was complete, gave a signal.

  But Tibo was not an adulteress. She had done the will of Cah.

  Rather than dismay, the memory energized her. Almost in gladness she turned, her eyes on the amber embers of the goddess’ gaze, and set her hand firmly on the base of the image.

  Never before, never in all her life normally, would she have been allowed to touch. How cold the goddess felt, like sheerest snow, yet her eyes were fire. Suddenly an outburst of sweetness rushed through Tibo. Only in the arms of her lover had she felt any comparable emotion. She could not keep back a cry of love and joy.

  Then the grip of the priests came, prizing her brutally away. They turned her again, and pulled her right arm out from her body, to look at it. In her whirling ecstasy, for a moment, Tibo was not properly aware. But the peak could not sustain her forever, or she could not suffer it. She sank back into herself, and found she stood alone, the men as before in a circle around her, muttering nervously.

  The nasal impeded voice of the High Priest cut through this hoarse soft hubbub.

  “A wonder. The goddess.”

  Some knowledge came to Tibo. She looked down at her hand, still held out before her palm upward. It stung her faintly, as if indeed she had put it on to frozen snow. Even as she saw its unmarked surface and considered the sensitivity, already fading, Tibo felt another thing—a blast of great heat emanating from the statue of Cah behind her.

  The image grew hot during a testing. A malefactor, touching Cah, was burned, and so the crime was proved. It was not spontaneous psychic combustion. An oven, set under the altar and the statue, was fired at such times, until the hollow stone of the goddess scorched. When the suspect was thought to be blameless the oven was kept low, and the stone only warmed. When reckoned culpable, they stoked the oven high. Some, usually women, nevertheless tried to keep their hands against the surface.

  Today the furnace under Cah was leaping. But Tibo, flesh plastered to the stone, was forced away unburned.

  If they were terrified, or only perplexed, still they trusted the power of Cah. The world was simple. Such things could only be accepted.

  When Tibo emerged on to the terrace before the temple, she saw people were waiting under the hill. The priest who had come out with her called to the crowd in a high voice: “Cah has judged this one innocent.”

  Tibo moved down the hill slowly. Th
e hill was muddy and the street more so. Face upon face stared at her, and one of the men snatched up her right hand, and gaped at it, and showed it to others, and let it fall with an oath.

  All that remained now was to make the four hours’ journey back to the farm.

  As she went up out of Ly, rain began to fall again, hard as stones, across Tibo’s neck and shoulders.

  • • •

  The fire had perished on their hearth, Orhn, shivering even in his sleep, having forgotten to put on the branches and logs his wife had left ready. Fifty years before, it would have been a tragedy, but in recent times, even to the uplands of Iscah, had come flint and tinder. Tibo brought the fire to being again. The universal symbol of death, a fire gone out, did disturb her. But she was very tired. Tired as never in her life.

  She sat at the hearth as the flames bloomed to vitality, and comforted the head of Blackness. She had brought both the bitch-dogs into the house with her. Neither was fecund, after the winter; the warmth of the hovel might bring it on. Orhn would not mind. In his childish way he liked the dogs.

  When he woke, her husband, Tibo rose and began to prepare food. Her mind was quite empty, darkened and contained, its vistas closed, like the valley when a deep mist clung on the mountains. If anything had happened, it was over.

  “Eat, master,” she said to Orhn, setting down the platter.

  She would care for him. He was now the only child she had.

  Book Two

  Alisaar

  Part One

  4. The Fire Ride

  THE CITY SKIES WERE filled by the morning hunt of the hawks. They stooped and fell and rose again, broken prey in their grasp, with an unalterable motion.

  Until one single hawk stooped, fell, and continued to fall—

  Through all the rings of light and color, dawn and distance, it plummeted—into the garbage of an alley.

  • • •