The White Serpent

by Tanith Lee

  The man who had come oversea from Vardian Zakoris that morning, was a four-generation mix. His skin was black, his hair light brown, and his eyes, too, had been washed down from the blacks or yellows of his ancestors’, to one of the strange occasional grays you saw now in such breeding. He was otherwise unremarkable, a merchant-trader off one of the score of foreign ships in the harbor.

  New Alisaar perhaps interested Vardish Zakorians, still themselves under the full sway of blond rule. For New Alisaar, while she paid dues to her Shansar king in the north, was elsewhere solely independent Vis. And of her ruby cities, the port of Saardsinmey was queen. Ninety years had gone into her building, her long boulevards, her teem of alleys, the red tiling that dragonplated her. She flew into the bargain the three-tailed dragon-banner of the former kingdom. As for the northern half of Alisaar, the Shansarian province, they termed it here, with a scathing lightness, Sh’alis.

  It was also a propitious time to be in town. This evening would bring Saardsinmey’s great summer race, the one they called the Fire Ride. The city was a hotbed of wild and spirited gambling, aglow with all the blood-lust and factious rivalry of secondhand danger.

  Thinking of this and working at his accounts under the awning on the inn’s roof, the mix trader had not neglected his cup, but others had, and now there was a dearth in it. The inn was of the best, far up along Five Mile Street. You expected decent service.

  “Hey!” the Var-Zakor shouted, banging his cup on the table.

  The noon hour was a busy one, but the three girls catering to roof top custom were not hurrying, rather pausing here and there to chat and flirt. They were thorough Visians, too, oil-black hair and eyes, and firm brazen skins that seemed to invite a caress, a pinch, or a slap. The Var-Zakor took pride in his own elements of pallor, such as they were. As the nearest girl came leisurely toward him, he gave her a glare which, in certain quarters of the homeland, would have made any Vis step lively. But she only stood by, wine-pitcher on hip, and, what was more, raised her smooth-strung brows at him like two black bows.

  He thrust his cup forward.

  “The jug’s empty,” she said.

  “Then get on and fill it, you lazy cat.”

  She was well-dressed, with gold on her arms, no less, and a flower in her hair. She looked back at him and she said, “Keep a civil tongue, if you please.” Making no move to obey.

  “Don’t try any of your lip with me,” said the mix. “Get about your business, or do you want something to speed you up, sow-face?”

  “You’ve got a foul mouth,” said she. “I doubt if our wine will wash it out.”

  At that the mix rose. He brought down his left hand on her shoulder, liking the feel of it even as he drew back his right hand to strike her. To his astonishment—and pain—her knee came up and struck him first in the belly. The trader doubled over, aware even as he coughed for breath that all along the benches customers laughed, thinking it funny. Saardsinmey was a Vis stronghold, and needed teaching manners. Better start with her.

  She was hastening back toward the stair when the Var-Zakor caught her. Someone shouted her an amused warning across the tables, but that was all. The mix snared her by her Vis hair and pulled her around. She tried to hit him with the pitcher now, but he pushed off her arm. This time he landed out with his fists. The pitcher went flying and was smashed. She gave a faint scream as she dropped. He had struck her just under the left eye, she would have a fancy bruise to remind her of him, but he was not done yet. As he drew back his foot to gift her a good sound memento of a kick, someone said to him politely, “Wait a moment.” This checked the mix. He glanced up and noticed a stillness had come over the inn roof. Suddenly it was so quiet the rumbling noises of the street below intruded, one might hear crickets in the creepers and the bells on the awning in a passing breeze.

  A figure was standing a few feet away, having just come up the stair.

  The Var-Zakor beheld the arrival was above average height, and of more than average physique, and Vis naturally, like nine tenths of the city.

  Then there was a blur, a surge of motion and heat—in a terrifying rush the mix found himself high in the air—he punched feebly, with all his strength, against the fearsome stamina that held him there so indifferently.

  “Listen to Mud-Hair bleat!”

  “Throw him off the roof, Lydian.”

  “Do it, Lydian. We’ll say he tripped on his little dangler.”

  Roars of mirth and applause were followed by some hoots of disappointment. For, returning to the stair, the tall man they had named a Lydian flung his howling burden straight down into the middle courtyard, a mere dozen steps below. Here the Var-Zakor crashed among some pots and lay groaning.

  There was a general move, beneath and round about, to observe his condition. But the Lydian had already set his back to the scene. He was kneeling by the girl, who, her palm over her injured cheek, had sat up to lean on his shoulder.

  “Let me see, Velva,” He turned her face with care, examining the bruise attentively.

  “Has the bastard disfigured me for my life?” she said fiercely.

  “Not at all. Take it from one who knows. Here.” He put money in her hand. “Go to the physician on Sword Street.”

  The girl abruptly threw her arms round his neck, kissing him and shawling him with her beautiful hair.

  “Let him alone, Velva,” voices cried. “Do you want his mind on that before the race?”

  The Lydian now laughed, and gently disengaging himself from the girl, rose to his feet.

  “I love you,” she whispered. “It was well worth it, that pig’s fist, to be held in your arms.”

  “Ah,” he said, and shook his head at her, before walking away across the roof. There was scarcely a woman in Saardsinmey who had not murmured similar words to the Lydian, if only in her waking dreams.

  • • •

  From midafternoon, the shops along Five Mile Street had firmly closed their doors, while quantities of others in adjacent thoroughfares did likewise. Not only were the usual locks and grills employed: In some cases boards were being nailed to the facades. After the Fire Ride there was often fighting in the streets, and no doubt there would be this year, since three of the competitors were blond free men from Sh’alis.

  By late afternoon, a thick honey light spooned down on the districts of the city. A peculiar lull had come with it, the hush before the storm.

  From several hundred cornices, balustrades and porticos along the celebrated route, flowers roped and banners stood flat on the serene hot air. The three-tailed dragon was out in force, and the blazons of such innkeepers and merchants whose cash helped mount the seasonal sports. Mostly the colors of the contestants were on display, in swags and swathes, spilled from windows, twined in trees and the hair of girls, the reds of Saardsinmey eclipsing the rest. Luck banners had been tied to the poles of streetlights or hung across the way from building to building. They depicted the god Daigoth, patron of fighters, acrobats and racers, and, closer to the waterfront and all along the harbor wall, from God’s High Gate to the Coast Road, images of the sea deity Rorn.

  The spectators had been assembling since midday. As the afternoon wore and flushed, they came in droves, piling up the stairways to their bought benches on rooftops and balconies, and all the upper terraces for the length of fifteen miles.

  At the head of Five Mile Street, the vast stadium of Saardsinmey was already packed beyond its limits. There were multitudes who preferred to oversee and make judgments—or merely to emote and scream—along the course. But the rest who could afford the price, high tonight as never elsewhere in the whole year, preferred to witness the birth of glory and its killing finish on the stadium straight, despite the long interim of waiting when all there was to guide them were the flare of distant lights across the city, and far-off shrieking, and occasional panting runners with unreliable bulletins.
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  By the time the first stars raised their silver torches over New Alisaar, in a clear rouged sky, there was barely a quiet pulse beating in Saardsinmey.

  • • •

  The great mirror of glass, which had once poised in a palace of the old capital, now rested in its clawed frame of gilded ebony in the hall beneath Saardsinmey’s stadium. Here men, burnished to the sheen of its gilding, sometimes scarred as its tarnished face, dressed in magnificence to kill or die, would stand a moment, and stare in. It might be the last sight they would ever have of their looks, their wholeness, or their life. It was thought fortunate to touch the mirror as it held you, and to instruct the reflection: Stay, till I return.

  Usually the mirror was taller than any who gazed into it. One man matched it, height for height. The Lydian.

  He wore the charioteer’s short open-sided tunic, a garment of linen, ruby-red for Alisaar, strapped with red-dyed leather cuirass, belted by golden scale-work. His calves and forearms were also braced by leather, ringed by gold; his black hair drawn back, for the chariots, into a tube of hollow gold. He was altogether a creature of gold as he stood there, of gold and blood.

  The faultless proportions of his body, developed through practice, since earliest boyhood, of every physical skill of the stadium (in each of which he excelled), had formed him, built him, like the endeavors of some genius artisan. As indeed they were: He was his own architect. But the head and face of this man had also their perfect proportion. Though the immaculate features were sculpted to strength, it was strength, too, of mind, and spirit. While the eyes, large and vividly black, dreamer’s eyes, misled opponents long, long ago, until the pride of jaw and mouth, or of a simple deadly sword, put them right. There had already been a saying in Saardsinmey, for five or six years: As bright as the sun and as handsome as the Lydian.

  Saardsin professional fighters, whatever their original race or merit, however rich they might become, however much courted, however many contests won, or lost, entered these halls as children and remained as slaves. Barring death, there was no manumission from the courts of Daigoth. But then, to be slave here, in this way, was not like the slavery of others.

  As for Rehger Am Ly Dis, standing his moment before the surface that once had mirrored Alisaarian nobility, he did not seem like any kind of slave. He looked a king.

  Reaching out, the Lydian briefly touched the glass.

  “Stay, till I return.”

  • • •

  It was a fact, the man who owned one of the finest seats at the stadium had almost stayed away.

  Katemval had had a premonition. If such it could be called.

  Leaving the charming house on Gem-Jewel Street, he had parted the curtains of his litter, looking along the avenue in the sunset. Every shop was bolted and boarded-up as far down as the public fountain, where a phalanx of the Guardian’s soldiery was even now marching smartly across the intersection. Then something else caught Katemval’s eye.

  In the warm light and shadow, a cold blank omission.

  Katemval turned his head sharply—a woman in a white mantle gleamed against some garden wail. White was not the fashion in New Alisaar, its racial connotations were unpleasing. But then Katemval realized that beneath her white veil, her hair shone paler.

  They were past.

  Katemval almost shouted for the litter to halt. But ordinary sense prevented him, and he let the curtain fall.

  Her face had been young—her hair bright with youngness, and she was white-skinned he was sure. Neither age, nor bleach and cosmetics had made that pallor. An unmixed Lowlander, then, the plains race of southernmost Vis, they who had tumbled a world. One heard tell of such albinos, Amanackire they were named, Anackire’s Own, the Children of the Serpent Goddess.

  Suddenly he plucked the curtain back again and craned out. But they had turned the angle of the avenue by the fountain, and that part of the street was lost to view.

  There was something in this incident, small though it was, that unsettled Katemval. There were certain legendary traditions in the west that showed death as a thin colorless ice woman with claws—

  Death was always vigilant. She—it—being ultimately inescapable. So what? How one lived, the gifts of life, these were the valid matters. Death was the end. No less, but decidedly nothing more.

  He had watched Rehger in combat and competition at the stadium whenever trade permitted. In recent years, seldom the traveler now, Katemval had been there to watch at every event. He saw Rehger fight, and ride, and strive and win, and fame on him like pure gold. But death was always there, too, and only a fool did not know that. Why be troubled now?

  At eighteen, Rehger had lost footing in sand slick with various life-fluids. The sword of the Kandian youth they had paired with him had cleaved the air in a terrible blaze—cutting home into Rehger’s breast, high, against the shoulder. That had nearly been the finish, then. The crowd, Katemval recalled, which had already begun to adore him, becoming one with him as he fought, groaned the sound they termed the deathmoan—But Rehger, sashed in his own blood, had steadied himself, and when his adversary came in at him again, returned the blow, this one straight to the Kand’s heart. A year later, on the proceeds of a bet laid, in Saardsinmey’s most honored manner, upon that fighter one most truly loved, Katemval had bought his house on Gem-Jewel Street.

  The pale races existed, and maybe might come to see the boxing and sword-play, and the chariots, in Alisaar. To glut their eyes on the Lydian, too, that Katemval had rescued from the mire of backland Iscah. Had he not said to him even, at the first, trying to seal the boy’s destiny to it—Grow for glory, glory days, and a death clean and fair.

  Stop thinking of it. Katemval chided himself, superstitious, for the litter was by now forcing through the press of people, toward the stadium gate. It was a lamplit, febrile dusk. And here and there the retired taker of slaves heard the friendly cry, “There goes the Lydian’s father!” An old jest, not inapplicable. The father gave life.

  “Twenty white pigeons,” Katemval muttered under his breath, in his heart, to Daigoth, as the litter went through the gate. “And a two-year bull. And my most cherished wine to quench the burnt offering. If he lives.” And added, being now thoroughly a resident of the metropolis, “And wins.”

  • • •

  There were ten for the Fire Ride this year. It could accommodate as many as thirteen; often only seven or eight dared it. The prize was weighed on the old measure, twenty bars of gold. But the renown was better.

  The slave champions of other places, three long seasons training for it, sponsored and financed by the cities and prospering towns of New Alisaar—and from everywhere else. There were free men, too, who thought it no embarrassment to compete with such slaves as these. Mixes, Vis, the yellow-headed men of the Sister Continent. Flaunting Karmians, dark or blond, and sly Xarabs, whose pretty chariots were unloaded from the ships like courtesans enameled with flowers, the surly Ommos, Dortharians in their pride, their cars with black storm emblems and gold-leaf snakes. Men came, too, from Var-Zakoris, for the Vardian conqueror had his own customs of such racing, as he had had his own rules of war. Conqueror Shansars arrived, the charioteers of ships. And Shansars from Sh’alis, riding their horses overland to be gawped at and envied, though for this evening’s work they had had to learn to manage the hiddrax, the chariot-animal of the Vis, bred to race since the times of the All-King Rarnammon.

  This night then had brought its usual assortment.

  A Thaddrian, a free man and seemingly a bandit-noble, color brown and ocher. An Ott, free man, merchant stock but game and wily, color swarthy cream. A Zakorian, from Free Zakoris, what they called a fighting-leopard, color applicably black. A man from Corhl, a petty princeling, color steel.

  For Alisaar, a slave racer from Kandis, highly esteemed, color Alisaar red with rose. And a Jowan aristocrat, one of the Jow Guardian’s nephews apparen
tly, color Alisaar red with black. Saardsinmey’s contender, a slave racer unbeaten in any contest for three years, but never before drawn in Daigoth’s lots for this one, the Lydian, color red with red.

  While from Sh’alis the trouble had come. Two mixes, both free men, since no man with a touch of fairness in his pigments might be lawfully a slave. One Shalian with the color raw yellow, the other yellow with blue. And last, a Shansarian lord who owned estates in Sh’alis and in Karmiss, color white.

  (White. There was the answer to the riddle. In his box now Katemval, having glanced along the program, neatly copied and brought him by a stadium scribe, acknowledged respite. If the Shansar devil could bring ten horses with him he would not need—he had—why not an Amanackire mistress with whom to ride after the Ride?)

  It was full night now, the sky above the stadium deep as a bowl of ink and splashed by stars. Along the terraces, the lamps were dim, the wicks trimmed purposely low, or capped by smoky vitreous. Tension close as darkness, waiting for the storm to break.

  The stadium trumpets sounded.

  A huge single cry went over the stands, and was echoed all along the wide artery of Five Mile Street.

  • • •

  In the dense torchlight under the stadium, the chariots had been drawn up waiting. The teams of hiddrax, backed into the shafts one quarter of an hour before, catching the night’s fever, pawed the ground and shook their long heads, the light flowing over their groomed and burnished skins, their adornments of metal and ribbons.

  The brass dice of Daigoth had been cast, each position allocated. Now the priests came along the line, to foreigner, free man and slave alike, the first offering him the cup of Daigoth, a solitary taste of wine, while the second priest uttered the ritual sentences before him.

  “You are the god’s. Go, be yourself a god.”

  Rehger, in eighth place, listened to the phrase repeated over and over. The Ott, the Jowan, the Thaddrian, the Kand and the Free Zakorian, each drank and accepted. Whatever their personal religion, tonight they were Daigoth’s, tonight they would be gods. But when the priests reached the color-yellow Shalian, he interrupted harshly, “No. None of that. I worship the one true goddess.” The priests came away from him at once, without response. But the Corhlan, next in the left-hand position to Rehger, laughed loudly. He said to the man from Sh’alis, “Corrah is the one true goddess. You mean Corrah?” The Corhl did not have much of an accent; his comment was quite clear. The Shalian ignored him. Their teams fidgeted and shook their tasseled bits, sidling away from each other. (On the bodywork of the yellow chariot had been represented the Sh’alis sigil, a staff roped with a golden snake.) The priests had come to the Corhlan. He drank from Daigoth’s cup and received the benison. Then he spoke to the Shalian again: “Corrah will trample your snake-dung of a whore-goddess under these hoofs and wheels.” The Shalian stood like stone, holding back his sizzling animals, a smile of fury on his mouth.