The White Serpent

by Tanith Lee

  In the midst of this, they saw the smoke off to larboard, and concluded somebody’s fleet had burned. The cloud lay nearly firm as sculptured rock along the water, a large mass slowly gliding west.

  Every star in the sky was like a blood drop. Zastis itself was not to be seen. They had now had three hours of sunset.

  They rowed on for the Alisaarians’ city because it was human, something they understood.

  Or so they thought, until they saw it.

  The Moiyan ship paused, a mile from land, as they looked on Saardsinmey.

  “No Shansarian,” murmured Arn Yr’s deck master, “no men, no weapon on earth, did that.”

  “The gods,” said Arn Yr, “did that.”

  And reasoning out at last what might have been the gods’ instrument, that tumble of hard black now resting behind them on the sea, still they went in to shore, drawn by horror and compassion, and in case, against all chance, they might render help.

  Book Three

  Iscah

  11. True Slavery

  SHE WAS IN THE womb of Yasmat, in the hand of fate.

  She was in darkness, which rocked her to and fro.

  But she discovered a discrepancy in the substance of the darkness, for half was water, half was not. Then the dark opened. There was a long horizontal shaft of burning red. It had the smell of salt and slime and pitch, yet also a freshness that dizzied her. She gulped at it thirstily, drinking the air, stretching out her hands to it—

  Perhaps it was this movement, or some upsurge from beneath, but the great womb which had carried her turned suddenly over. In that instant of birth, as she fell into the sea, Panduv’s instinctive body flung itself away, leaping like a black dolphin in a wave of fire. She did not know why.

  Immediately she struck the water she went down. An entirety of liquid closed over her head and pushed her under like a hard hand. Beneath her she glimpsed eternity. But above, the column-tree of the goddess from which she had been sprung, floating in two hollow halves still joined by hinges.

  Raising her arms, Panduv dived toward the surface, broke the barrier of the sea into the red light, and pulled herself on to the floating column.

  Her body was pulped and battered, as if she had been beaten by masters of torture. Every part of her ached and shrilled, even to her teeth and her loins. She rested face upward on the drum, her arms outspread, one hand dangling in the water. Within this cask of wood and paint and bronze, she had been catapulted through time and space, and fetched up here on an empty sea of blood.

  In a blood-red dream, she lay there.

  And, in the dream, she later beheld a purple moon come up, and against its flickering, the image of a ship.

  When the hook of the grapple thudded home in the column-drum, Panduv did not raise herself. She did not care.

  The ship hauled her in slowly.

  Panduv saw, beside her and beneath, in the water, the reflection of the ship, and then, above, the one tall sail. She was a vessel of Sh’alis, mostly Shansarian in design. Over the rail, the faces of men, smudged and staring, and pale of skin, looked down on their catch.

  “A black fish of Vis!”

  “Or maybe the fires burnt her that color, eh?”

  As two of them began to climb down the swaying rope to her, Panduv considered slipping off the column, allowing herself to sink into the eternity under the sea. . . . The life-wish of the stadium-trained kept her where she was.

  The men lifted her roughly and handed her up. She was wracked by pain and a sound escaped her.

  “You’re alive then?”

  “Oh, it’s alive.”

  They dropped her on the deck.

  The ship lord, the captain, was bending over her. A blond man with black eyes. Not good. Mixes were often the least tolerant.

  “You escaped,” said the mix captain. “Ashara spared you, Inky. Are you off some other ship?”

  She parted her lips to revile him. Perhaps then he would kill her at once. But no, the words would not come. Life-wish, or only that she had forgotten the means of speech.

  The captain was indicating his cabin, an uncouth housing amid ships, and they took her there and cast her down by the man’s pallet.

  Presently he entered, tying the leather door-flaps together, so they were alone.

  “Don’t fear I’ll touch you,” said the mix ship-lord. “I wouldn’t dirty myself. But some of them might. They catch Star-itch and go with anything, with each other or the livestock. They’re muck. Ashara hear me, this trade is my curse. But you are my slave now. Do you understand?” He peered at her with his Vis eyes set in the filthy, unshaven white face. “Rest up,” he said. “Tonight you can eat, and then tell me who you are. You see,” he said, bending to her, “if you have a rich family, they’ll have to recompense me, to get you back.”

  Panduv’s voice came.

  “No family,” she said. She smiled a little, which it hurt her to do. “I am a slave of the city of Saardsinmey.”

  “Not any more,” he said. “We went and took a look, after the storm passed. Nothing left of it, your bloody city.”

  “An earthquake,” she said.

  “And a great wave from the ocean. Your Rom spat on your Saard rubbish-tip. So much for you.”

  “And no ransom for you,” she said softly.

  “So, I’ll sell you when we reach Iscah.”

  When he left her again, she saw that the sky and the sea were still bright red. Although she had not fathomed what he said about Saardsinmey, an education seemed to be taking place in her mind. On some level, she knew perfectly everything that had happened as, unconscious and absent in the column, it had been rolled and tossed and borne her out to sea in the jaws of the returning ocean. A miraculous deliverance. Yet something also within herself told her that truly, the city was gone, and that therefore she, too, had died, everything of what she had been dashed from her. She had died once before, in Zakoris, on the day she was taken from her village. That first life lost she had never regretted. The life of an empress-slave—already she had passed far beyond it.

  She wondered in that case what was left of herself, and who she now was. And searching through herself in the torpor of her physical shock and pain, she found at length the inner place, beyond sight and feeling and thought, and here she enclosed herself, with the peaceful sense that nothing actually mattered, what she had lost, or what had been destroyed, not even her nature and her name. Panduv slept.

  • • •

  The Owar was a ship from the harbors of northern Sh’alis, crewed by the lowest stuff of the northern quays. Sometime trader, and opportune pirate, she mooched about the seaways between the lesser ports of the Shansarian province and Vardish Zakoris, only sometimes venturing south to take in New Alisaar. On a rare commission to carry Alisaarian iron and breeding pigs to Iscah, the storm had caught Owar not far from shore. Blown about, she had seen fit, in the unholy sunset which followed, to detour farther southerly, on the lookout for others who had not managed the tempest. Easy booty was often come by after bad weather.

  Nevertheless, a glance at the sea and land around the great southern city had turned Owar in her tracks. Later that day, sighting intact shipping, they had heard some of the news of a colossal earth tremor, a firemouth gaping in the sea off Saardsinmey, and a wave that had clipped the sky.

  “The goddess lost her temper with them at last,” said Owar’s captain, an irreligious fellow.

  That day’s sunset was as dire a proposition as the sunset that had attended the storm, and indeed the dawn between. One hour into it, the coast of New Alisaar fading on their right hand, they saw an object in the sea, and hauled it in. It was not much of a treasure, only some upset hollow thing with a black Vis woman on it. She might fetch a coin at Iscah, but frankly speaking, they had gone out of their way for nothing.

  • • •

 
She was the captain’s handmaiden. He told her, if he had had a choice, she would not have been the fruit of it. Inky, he called her. He had an aversion to the touch of her skin, not realizing she was as allergic to his whiteness. To her arrogance and grace he was impervious, did not notice.

  The aberration of the sunsets and the dawns grew less. As such evidence dispelled, the events of the quake and the wave became unreal for the men of Owar, and might not have happened. Only the Zakorian girl, who had witnessed less than they, remembered.

  Her pride was integral, even though she was no longer Panduv. (Asked her true name by certain of the sailors, she replied, deliberately: Palmv. They found this as difficult on the tongue as once the name Panduv had been on her own, and clove to Inky.) With the pride, her well-tuned body had also kept its cravings, for good food and for exercise. That first was not available to her—or in fact to anyone on Owar. The second, being a possible enticement to the Star-peppery crew, she kept to a minimum, stretching and limbering in the bow, before the pen of pigs, when the last light and most of the ship’s activity subsided. Her hurts healed swiftly. Her body ached now only for use. She did not sleep well, and insomnia was so new to her, it did not much distress. In the corner of the cabin, she listened to the captain, snoring and grunting, and amused herself by facile plans for his murder. But he was her protector, she could not afford to get rid of him.

  At Iscah she would be sold as a slave.

  She neither doubted nor credited this.

  She wore a ragged shirt the captain had given her. It had smelled unclean before she washed it in the sea. Beneath the shirt, about her neck, the economical knife stayed undetected in its closet of nacre. Would there come a time when after all she must use it, on another, or herself?

  The non-physical core, wherein she habited to guide her body in the dance, to that place she went most often, out of the world. But otherwise she wondered sometimes if the battering in the drum had deprived her of sanity, she was so bland, she cared so little.

  • • •

  The ship came in at last to a shabby port of Iscah. News of Saardsinmey’s fall, garbled and spectacular, had already got up the coasts, filtered through Sh’alis on the way. Gossip was off-loaded with the pork and iron. The yellow mix sailors strutted through the town, cloaked in the power of Ashara-Anack, glaring down the dark Iscaians.

  “Strip,” said the ship lord to Panduv. “You’re no eye-sore here. They’ll like you best that way. You can do your dancing for them. I’ve seen you at that. Not bad.”

  Panduv stirred.

  “I will not strip. I will not dance for you or for them.”

  The man came and threatened her with his fist. He did not use it, not wanting to devalue her for the market.

  Through the inner vision of Panduv there chased a line of scenes. That she might now kill this lout, that she might flee through the port. That she might find refuge or a living somewhere. But something restrained her. Iscah had no love, either, for Zakorians, who had plundered her when they were able, and were now accursed of Anack, a goddess recognized as dangerous.

  Panduv said to the captain, “You’ll manage to sell me without putting me up naked or performing for them. They only want a slave to work, in a place like this.”

  “Or for bed,” he added.

  “Or that. So, let them pay you to see and get.”

  He shrugged. “Undo your hair,” he said.

  She had worn it plaited and bound on her head by a thong from the shirt. Now she thought he wanted her long-haired as an inducement. But when she obliged him, taking a blade, he cut off her hair just below her ears. “For the wigmakers,” he said, deigning to give her explanation.

  The urge to kill him fell on her again like the wave upon the city, or, as she had imagined it. The one she had been was coming back to her.

  The slave-market opened in the cool of the evening, when the more prosperous of the port idled down to the quay. To Panduv’s eyes these had themselves slight means enough, and would have passed for street-cleaners in the south. For the slaves, they were a dismal lot, and the captain turned cheerful, seeing his wares were so superior.

  As they waited their turn for a rostrum, a brief procession parted the crowd. The captain and his second officer each spat on the dusty ground.

  “Infidel priests!”

  They were the votaries of Cah, identifiable by their robes of dark red and ocher. Foremost walked the Chief Priest, shaven hairless, even in the twilight with a boy to hold aloft a parasol of feathers over the bald head. A few paces behind this apparition came another, a fat woman swaddled in gauzes, but her lolloping breasts bare, her arms clattering with bangles. Unmistakably, the mistress of the temple brothel.

  The captain discussed her demerits with his second. They laughed, but not too loudly now, for these idolatrous priests would be venerated here, and even the fat holy-girls thought worthy.

  Torches were being lit. Presently it was Panduv’s turn to mount the rostrum.

  She stood there, looking only into the sky beyond the muddle of lights and roofs. As the stars hardened, she heard her supposed virtues described. Her strength, the elasticity of her body, her sterling health.

  A flash of brass attracted Panduv’s attention, and her eyes were drawn after all into the crowd. She saw the blubberous woman, her bracelets colliding, pointing at her. Panduv, too, had made out what the woman was. There had been, in the courts of Daigoth, a dancer or two from Iscah.

  A priest at the back of the cluster was now approaching the rostrum. He was pointing, in turn, and offering money. The captain of Owar swore. There could be no haggling with a priest. He snatched the slave-seller’s arm and began to remonstrate, to no avail. The money had been accepted, the priest already turned away. Panduv realized she was bought by the local temple. And since no woman was permitted to serve Cah save as a prostitute, she had been purchased as a whore.

  • • •

  The temple crouched on a platform of stone. Black trees grew all about it, full of carrion birds by day that had smelled the offal from the altars. In a precinct behind, the whorehouse of Cah was situated.

  The first night they drugged her with a beverage she was too thirsty not to drink. In the morning two young girls, already slopping with loose fat, brought dishes of food.

  Panduv ate a little. She did not like the meal. Sweet sticky solid porridges and sweeter leaden breads.

  Her abode was a cell, no larger than a latrine. It gave on a yard, or did so when the door was unlocked. She had already noticed temple guards oversaw the outside of the wall, and all the exits from the fane.

  At noon, the fat girls came to remove the dishes, bringing more. Panduv asked, seeking to be plain in an approximation of the slur of Iscah, if she might answer the needs of nature. One of the girls, not speaking, indicated a lidded clay vessel in the corner. Not only, it seemed, was the cell the size of a latrine, it was to become one in fact.

  Panduv ate no more of the food. She performed certain exercises, raising her feet to the wall, looping her body over—but the space was so confined it frustrated her, as the public jouncing restriction of Owar’s deck had done.

  In the evening, another meal was served.

  As dusk, Star-flushed, began to fill the meshed grating in the door, the holy-mistress came to visit, audible before entry from her bracelets and her heavy, labored breath.

  She stood in the doorway, perhaps fearful she would be wedged forever should she enter the narrow cell. She smelled of sweat and perfume and displeasure.

  “You must eat,” the mistress said to Panduv.

  Panduv smiled.

  “To increase my weight?”

  “Yes, that’s so. To make you appealing.”

  “The men of your town like slugs for women.”

  The mistress, understanding her, pursed her lips. She was coppery, dark for Iscah, t
hough nothing to Panduv, with tough black hair much-braided and strung with beads. Under the slabs of her porridge-built flesh, an old beauty peered out bewildered. But her eyes were flint.

  “Who is it you worship?” she inquired.

  “Zarduk of fire. Daigoth of the warriors.”

  “You are Zakr. Free, or under the whites?”

  “Neither. I am a slave of Alisaar.”

  “You know the name of Cah?”

  “I have,” said Panduv, “no quarrel with Cah.”

  “Cah has bought you. Cah requires you to serve. To serve, you must plumpen.”

  “Your food nauseates me. I can’t eat it even if I would. Look at me. This body is used to exercise. I was a fire dancer.” (The mistress made a little hissing noise.) “Cage me this way,” said Panduv, reasonably, while her blood roared in her ears, “and I’ll become sick. You’ll waste your goddess’ money.”

  “You will grow accustomed to the food. If you’d gone hungry since your birth, you would be glad of it, as the other girls. It is an untroubled life.”

  Panduv could no longer restrain herself—the one she had been.

  “Damn your untrouble, you wallowing sow! Am I to become a thing like you? I’ll starve. I’ll die rather. Take me out and kill me.”

  She thought then of her beehive tomb she had given to the white Amanackire bitch. The tomb was swept to pieces by the wave, no doubt. And the witch-bitch had promised her long life, that would not need it—

  But the fat woman had gone away, her attendant was closing the door.

  Panduv upset the plates of sticky food. (And considered an instant the temple guards, but they were too many.) She stood on her hands against the wall. She blazed with futile anger and did everything so poorly she might as well not have attempted it, finally striking her head against an uneven place in the plaster. Then she beat her fists there, and cursed all things.

  Later, she flung herself on the pallet. The truth, reality, had come to her now with a vengeance. She felt at last the end of Saardsinmey, the loss of what she had been, at first with raging agony, though this settled gradually through the void of night into a disbelieving despair.