The White Serpent

by Tanith Lee

  Panduv’s black tomb, abandoned, had nevertheless withstood both shocks. The quake, spreading from the hell-mouth in the ocean, was lessened here. It had been their fate to survive.

  “There’re snakes in the sky,” said one of the soldiers, softly.

  Then they could no longer see them. Something had risen, between the dust-pall of the land and the spasms of the volcano.

  They could not make out what it was, this interruption. A couple asked each other. One man said, “I’ve heard of that—it’s water—it’s the sea—” And then he screamed and turned and ran away up the street of the dead, stumbling on the upraised paving, clawing through the shattered trees.

  The rest stood quietly, looking out toward the curious, shimmering entity that was a wall of water taller than the tallest spire of Saardsinmey.

  Chacor said, softly as the other man, “What does it do?”

  “Nothing can stop it,” said the captain. “Look, it’s coming inland.”

  “But the city—” said another of the soldiers. He added, very low, as if ashamed to tell the secret, “My son’s there. And my mother. If she got down into the cellar in time, do you think— No. It’ll flood the cellars. It’ll break everything above and fill up everything below. No. That can’t be. Rorn’s stinking guts, it can’t be.”

  Some of the men began to murmur, solemnly, couthly. They stood on, looking out toward death, straight-shouldered, praying. The priests of Ashara were voiceless beside them. They waited also, trying, it would seem, to be faithful to the precepts of Shansar and Lowlander alike: Die well, live forever.

  The sound of the water began to come, now. It was like a deep hoarse sigh. All other noise was lost in it, as everything would be lost.

  The Lydian spoke behind them.

  “There’s the tomb. It’s solid, and the water has to push uphill, here. A chance.”

  They turned, not all of them, and gazed at him, surprised he thought to refuse the gods. Chacor said, “He’s right. Move, you—” He shoved at the two men next to him. Suddenly the whole group was struggling back to the tomb, the priests coming after.

  They got through the tangled aloes. No one properly paused on the threshold. A man hesitated to call after the fellow who had run away, but he was out of sight and did not answer, and the sound of the sea now was very raw and strong.

  The last man in, they put muscle to the stone door and thrust it along the runner, closing it fast. Though mysteriously equipped for it, it would be more difficult to open from within. But maybe they would never need to try.

  The mausoleum was an oval, divided into an outer and inner place. The priests’ torches flowed through ornate carvings, leaves and leopards and laughing moons, which sprawled all about the walls, seeming a sheer insanity at this minute.

  Beyond a doorway, the inner tomb held shadows. They did not need to enter it. It was this, the antechamber, farthest from the wave, and doubly fenced by walls of stone, which would be the most secure. Nevertheless, the nervous torches spilled into the shadow. There were glimpses of something pale lying on its dais, another madness which they saw and did not see, comprehended and had no time for—

  The ground was shaking once again, and fine dark powders sifted down. The noise of the enormous wave had altered to a steady howl—

  They heard, through the surge, Rorn’s feet upon the hill—

  If they noticed each other, or remembered their families or their gods, not one now who displayed it. Each man stood before death, as before death men, though mown down in millions, have always stood, companionless and lonely.

  The torches dipped. Night gaped. Thunder. The wheels of giants bore up on them.

  Then, shrieking, the water came.

  • • •

  Rehger thought, I forgot her warning. She was speaking, then, of this. If she knew what she spoke of that night she cried. And her death brought me here. Not to die. This isn’t the unstoppable sword, the broken spine of the chariot’s flight. No glory in this, Katemval. And Amrek, where is he? Under what slide of rock and turf on the plain of Koramvis, listening in your envy to the footfall of men above—

  He half reckoned she whispered to him, the dead girl with the gauze veil across her face, but he could not hear her.

  His mother put into his hand a fruit. “Eat, before he sees.”

  He was riding the dog Blackness, and the crowd cheered. The cheering clove through the stones. The fruit tasted of salt water.

  10. Dispossessed

  TERROR, FIRE, WATER, and darkness, had bestridden the world. After a short century of obscurity, of thunders and churnings, and a great sweeping away, a slow, uncanny light began to come. And a silence thick as deafness, with, inside itself, the same inexplicable sounds that deafness knows—sudden long whistling notes, sudden inner boomings, a sharp snap like parting bone, a leaden pulse, a rushing sigh—

  Miles out, the Aarl-mouth, the volcano, glowed a dark deep red. The huge column of its smoke seemed to stand quite still, though far overhead the cloud had opened into a parasol, magenta in color, and now and then chalked with dim reflected fire. Somewhere, in some other country, the sun had risen; it was noon. The sky here was that of an eternal sunset, all the somber crimsons, thin russets, heavy purples of decay. The sea looked nearly black, but for the streaks on it of the mountain’s sinking lamp.

  Black rain had trickled over the city, ashes and tears. Dead birds also came down. It was a season of fallings, birds and rain and tiles, and strength. The wave, too, had slipped away. It took with it, back to the ocean, many of the treasures of the city. In return, the wave had sprinkled the land with marine keepsakes. Fish were in the trees. Weeds wrapped the uprights of doors and embraced the legs of arches. But Saardsinmey was no longer a city, a built place. It had become a geography, a place of escarpments and jagged standing stones.

  Very occasionally there was the oddest, least conscionable, event. Something living might be seen moving through the city, or heard calling out there. These happenings were infrequent.

  • • •

  Beautiful and pristine, her masts precise, long flanks tidy with oar-ports shut, her prow pointed by a gilded Vardish lion that blazed in the strange light, the ship lay at anchor on the roof of the Zarduk temple, almost forty-five feet in the air.

  Below, aside from the massive outer walls, and their girdling pillars the width of ten men around, little of the temple remained. But it was, nevertheless, a marker in a desert, for beneath its stair, strewn with freakish debris, nothing else had stood in a radius of thirty streets.

  “The hand of Corrah,” said Chacor. “Or some god they offended.”

  He stared in disbelief and dismay at a dead sea-thing, a dark blue bladder with its eyes sunken in, and half the size of a man’s body. It was automatic to measure that, for a man lay beside it, a Zakorian priest of the temple. The wave had broken his arms and squashed out his face with his soul, even, as it battered the sea-beast against the pillar.

  Chacor was full of horror, and abject depression.

  A man darted from the temple. He was wet and filthy and carried a sack. He came at the dead priest like a rat and tried to pull a golden wristlet from him. Chacor struck the looter flat, drawing his dagger as he did so. The Alisaarian looked at Chacor, at the dagger, clearly muddled. “Something to you, was he? That won’t help him now. Go on then. You have it.” Chacor sprang toward the looter, ready to knife him. The looter, sack held tight, sprinted away, between the hills of patchwork dripping masonry, from which bodies hung, and skeins of hair like weed and weed like hair. . . . How had he survived, that Alisaarian? Corrah knew. Some quirk of destiny, like Chacor’s own.

  • • •

  The sea had smitten the tomb of Panduv like a colossal hand, not a fist, a woman’s blow, open-palmed.

  All light died. That was the augury. One expected to be next.

  Flung
face down, bruised by those damnable carvings of a dancer’s vanity, Chacor heard rather than saw the walls giving way. The water poured through and filled his mouth. He thought, formlessly, that this was a disgusting way to die.

  He came to himself, soaked and cold, puking up the sea, and then to realize someone was helping him, one of the soldiers. Happiness that another man was alive with him made Chacor cry. The soldier had the kindness to pretend that this was only the sickness affecting his eyes. In Alisaar it was beneath a man to weep. In Corhl, as in Zakoris, it earned a boy over six years a flogging.

  The soldiers, they had all survived, had got out of the tomb by use of the door mechanism. Three of the Shalians had been killed. The rest had taken their bodies away, down to the temple, if anything was left of it. Everyone else stood on the slope of an alien land, mud and muck, minced bushes, branches piled as if for a bonfire, and various rubble. In parts, a tomb jutted from the unrecognizable vista. Houses of death, they had weathered death better than fifty thousand houses of the living.

  The light was appropriately hell-light, now scarlet, now sporadically phased by black clouds and dirty syrupy rain that had a foul odor. It occluded most things, and wholly masked the view of the city, a blessing, perhaps.

  The soldiers meant to go down into Saardsinmey— they still named it that, the havoc below: Report to barracks. They did not seem to question it would be there. On the other hand, the Guardian’s palace and adjacent buildings had been erected with much care and cash. It was impossible to detect anything from up here. Except look. That was the Zarduk temple, by Rorn’s teeth, drifting in and out of the murk, and something glinting on the roof—a beacon maybe—

  “Where’s the Lydian?” said Chacor abruptly.

  Some of the men had already gone off to the Shalian fane, to see if they could find any of their mounts alive. They were coming back now, mountless, with grim faces. Chacor had thought the Swordsman might be with them.

  “One court and one wall standing,” said the first soldier to reach the captain. “Our Rorn trod on their goddess good and proper. They’re making a pyre for their mates, trying to find something dry enough to burn. I said, row out to the fire-mountain. I shouldn’t have said it. But Rorn’s bleeding guts, there must be thousands dead down there—”

  “You can see a bit, from their wall,” said another. “It’s a shambles.”

  “The Lydian,” said Chacor.

  “What? Oh, to the stadium, could be. He’s long gone.”

  Presently the soldiers got themselves into pedantic military order, and marched off, sliding and out of step in the slime. They would be wanted in the city. They had welded themselves to this idea.

  But Chacor had no inspiration at all. He decided eventually to start after the Swordsman, or at least in that direction. He did not know why, or ponder why, any more then he knew or pondered why he kept glancing back, through the red-black rain, at the hill and the tomb where the white woman still lay, her bed awash with trapped salt water.

  • • •

  He could not find the stadium. He could not find anything. Enormous stacks of stone and plaster went up, some with caves in them. In the caves were chairs and colonnades, barbers’ shops, bread-ovens, gleaming mirrors, dead bodies. Sometimes a tree or pillar had been carried up and pushed through a wall. Sometimes the trees and pillars had stayed put. He saw dogs and hiddrax, and once a horse, hanging by their necks from boughs or high cornices, as if in a knacker’s yard. He saw too many such things.

  Once he heard, or thought he did, a woman shouting and calling. He tried to reach her but could not shift the mounds of marble, the great fallen arch with its headless statues. And finally anyway, he could not hear her any more.

  When he gave up on the stadium, and so on the Lydian, he got to the Zarduk temple and observed religiously the grace of the stranded, crewless ship. For the first time it had occurred to Chacor some god had done all this, and that it would be clever to be gone. The looter, once he had vanished, became unreal. No one else seemed living. A couple of times Chacor was misled—a woman, her hair fluttering in a gust of cindery breeze, the glimpse of light on an ornament . . .

  Then suddenly, he found Five Mile Street.

  It was easy, in a way, for the sea had cut through it as through a canyon, mostly unimpeded, and so left its wide long shape, the margins only spoiled by debris, pools of water, and fantastic flotsam.

  Chacor walked then, looking exactly before him, and climbed up and over where he had to. When he heard things he took no notice. Twice, there were hoofs. They echoed, striking every new hollow, whipping back from a hundred sounding boards, until a phalanx of riders raced through the sky. But there was no point in attending to it. Something seemed to be burning down ahead, near where the docks had been. Probably it was some fire that the wave had not quenched, or a weird reflection of the volcano, which was now itself barely visible through smoke and umbra. Even so, a few ships might have remained, coasting the wave, as had the vessel on the temple, these with their crews living.

  A man moved out from the wreckage on to Five Mile Street, about a hundred yards away. Chacor, fooled too often, would not look. When the man waited, Chacor kept on, although, recollecting the other meeting with the looter, he drew his knife.

  In an altered landscape, height was an irrelevance. He did not perceive the other man was the Lydian until he was nearly up to him.

  “Where are you going?” the Lydian said. His voice was quiet, lacking the authority with which it had offered twenty men the chance of safety in a tomb.

  “The harbor. I thought I saw a beacon.” Chacor hesitated. As if the world were after all sane enough for conversation, he added, “You?”

  “I went to try to find someone in a street there.”

  “No luck.”

  “Well. The house was down. He was always very proud of the house. He got it betting on me.”

  As rarely in the stadium, the Lydian was dyed by blood. His hands and arms looked as if they had been toiling in the brickwork, veins enameled darkly on the dark gold of the skin. He said nothing more. He seemed sorry rather than anguished, composed, not stunned.

  Chacor turned, and the Lydian accompanied him. They went together toward the harbor.

  Well, they lived with death. Of course, any day, the end. One forgot, but they were slaves, too, the Sword-Kings of Alisaar’s ruby cities. “What will you do?” Chacor said. “Does this make you free?”

  “I suppose not,” said the Lydian.

  They did not run off to liberty. No need. Saardsinmey, perished, offered this one manumission, or disinheritance.

  “Go to Kandis. They said you’ve fought there. And Jow,” said Chacor. “Will you? You couldn’t go up north and hire to Shansars in Sh’alis.”

  At the end of the five miles, Gods’ High Gate had come down and blocked the road. By the time they had got over it, and all the mess beyond, and were in reach of the harbor, its ruin and smashed ships, Chacor’s rogue fire had disappeared. Even the volcano seemed vanquished or asleep. Only the sky of ichor and amber burned on and on and on.

  • • •

  Arn Yr, a ship lord from the Lowland port-city of Moiyah, had taken out his vessel, Pretty Girl, a dozen times that summer, with no trouble. This had made him a trifle uneasy, so, a mix, he had offered to Zarok and prayed to Anackire, before again setting sail. Both, it transpired, had been busy with other matters.

  No sooner had they begun the crossing through open sea toward northern Alisaar, than the mother of storms hit them.

  Pretty Girl was not just a pretty face. Plucky and tough, she took all the weather could give. When the sea calmed, ladled out in an opaque sunrise, they discovered her intact. But they were miles down south, with half the stores gone, and some of the cargo with them. Arn Yr offered his men the vote, whether to turn back to Moiyah, or try for the nearer ports of New Alisaar, where t
heir predominantly yellow hair might not get them the love they had at home.

  The vote went for Alisaar. They said they would dye their manes black like the hero-god Raldnor, if necessary, and laughed. Arn Yr, three quarters Lowland, but with an Ommos grandmother, was not too pleased. But the ships of Moih went by the same democratic values as her cities. They turned for New Alisaar.

  The overcast and tingling air they took for some after-aspect of the storm. Then the ship’s instruments began to play up on them, and then the skies grew odd. In a while, no shore in sight, bereft of moon and stars and sun, they were lost, and saw themselves in the hand of the goddess.

  Near morning, they made out terrific explosions south and west.

  “Someone’s having a fight with someone,” said Arn Yr. He thought he recognized the noise of ballistae and exploding ships. Nowadays Free Zakorian pirates kept to the north and east. This could only be some fracas between Shansar and Alisaar, which boded ill for everyone, let alone poor Pretty Girl. Blond or not, they had begun to trust by now to Saardsinmey’s dockyard and markets.

  It was a spectacular dawn, the sky composed of metals and bloomed with stratos. Birds flew over and got some applause, for they meant the coast was near. Some of the birds even settled briefly on the ship, and were fed as fine omens.

  Cautious however, and with no sailing wind, Pretty Girl went to rowers stations and nosed westward, having once more a sun to guide her.

  They sighted and identified the coast at sunset. They would make Saardsinmey inside four hours.

  There was no sign of war.

  Only, the sunset lingered, its tints growing hotter . . . After a while, they started to remark on it.

  Then the moon came up. It was Zastis, and the flushed Zastian lunar orb was familiar. But this moon was not red. On an endless vermilion east it was a disc of molten orange with a purple halo, and it seemed to shift and flicker like a sun.

  The west, too, still held the light torch-red, ringing—The ocean soaked the colors up and looked itself on fire.