The White Serpent

by Tanith Lee

  When Selleb was gone, the first milky hollowness had started in the sky. Don’t wait all day upon a call which may not come.

  But there was nothing else to do with the Iscaian day but wait.

  In any case, the call came at midafternoon.

  The mistress waddled into the yard, and beckoned Panduv from the shade of her doorway.

  “Wash and prepare yourself.”

  The blood glittered in the black girl’s veins.

  “Why?”

  “You’re to go to the couch of the Watcher.”

  “I?” said Panduv, “skinny and unlovely and Zakr that I am?”

  “No insolence. I’ll have you beaten. It should have been done long ago. Make the most of Cah’s service. The High One means to sell you as a menial at the new moon.”

  Panduv did not answer, but went to prepare herself for Cah’s service.

  • • •

  One of the little girls guided the Zakorian to that three-sided chamber where the guest was housed. The daylight, though mostly obscured in the furtive temple by ways, was broadening. It was the time sometimes called by poets in Alisaar, the Hour of Gold.

  The little girl indicated the door, then ran away. Her mother, a whore, had told her the Zakorian was a demon—like all her race—and would, if the child were unwary, bite off her half-grown breasts.

  Panduv rapped on a door panel.

  “In.” The cry was peremptory, but mostly eager.

  Panduv grimaced, composed herself, and opened the door. She stepped into golden space—a wealth of full light through a large latticed window. The patterns of the iron lattice fell upon everything, and now upon herself, and she was struck again by this image of broken lights—as in the lamplit corridor—half wondering what it might portend. Then she looked at Arud, lying on the couch. He wore a long loose shirt of linen, nothing more, but for a wristlet of silver, some prize of his that probably he never took off. Panduv, upon whom jewels and precious metal had showered, noted the vanity. But more than this, the flat belly and well-formed legs. It was a meaty body and would run to flesh, but had not yet done so. She felt again the hunger of desire, and gave him, across the gilded air, one intent gaze. Then, like a proper temple harlot, lowered her eyes. At the same moment she dropped from her shoulders Selleb’s borrowed mantle. Under it Panduv was naked, but for that emphasis of the red cord girdle, tied now upon ebony skin.

  She heard him breathing. He was some while, eyeing her. Then he said, the slur of Iscah pronounced, “Come here.”

  Panduv went to him, stepping meekly, not lifting her lids.

  When she was close enough, he reached out both hands and took hold of her, pulled her down beside him.

  “They’ve instructed you how to look at a man now, have they?”

  He combed her hair with his fingers, his mouth on her breasts planting starving kisses, then one hand was under her buttocks and the other between her thighs. He rolled on top of her and entered her at once. He did not force, but neither did he attend. After a few thrusts he growled and collapsed on her, shuddering and done.

  Panduv lay on her back. She waited. Presently he said to her, “I heard there were tricks you know. But you don’t know enough to give thanks to Cah.”

  “You mean, to offer her my pleasure?”

  He grunted.

  “I had none,” said Panduv. “Or very little. Do you think it happens by magic? Is that the mystery?”

  “You look too boldly and talk too much.”

  “How can I teach you my tricks if I have to remain dumb?”

  “You can show me. In a minute or so.”

  “Then you must obey me.”

  “Obey—” he raised his head, ridiculous and very handsome in astonishment.

  “I must instruct you,” said Panduv. “You also cheat Cah of your pleasure. Do you think that thing you do, over in less than a minute, is worth anything to her?”

  “Blasphemy now,” said the Watcher priest. But he observed her, and when she looked into his face, he grinned. “You’re so black I can hardly see any features. Only your eyes, and your lips, polished with gold.”

  She drew his head down and kissed him, stroking his body now, taking time over it, so that he began to like the procedure. Even very ordinary love-modes of the ruby city would be new to him.

  It was not a great while before he was aroused and wanted her again. But he was already more malleable, curious and lazy together. He let her lie down on him, and when she took him in, steadying his tempo with her dancer’s pelvis, she worked for him, bringing him by stages to the pitch of uncontrollable excitement at which she lost him. On this occasion, he shouted aloud.

  The light was reddening and Zastis no doubt on the rim of the east when they joined for the third time. He was much slower now. He lay back under her ministrations, gasping, and sometimes laughing in a way that pleased her: Beneath his hide he had some sense of the absurd. By now her own lust was at its wits’ ends. No sooner had they amalgamated than she found release. Remembering the dictates of Cah, she expressed herself in groans and sighs. Left to himself he followed her swiftly, and more noisily, and falling back, put an arm over her waist.

  Later, food was brought to the door. Arud shared the supper with his bedmate, baked fish and cheese, figs and wine. She might have fought him for it otherwise, and perhaps he saw that, too, in her eyes.

  When calm, his accent was nearly shot of the Iscaian blur. So there was no doubt when he told her she must stay with him for the night.

  She had expected that. To make him want her for longer would be more chancy.

  Even so, she had begun to have faith in him. She lavished on him a tenderness she had never felt for any man but sometimes pretended to out of affection. She played his body like an instrument—it was greedy but not insensitive. She offered him the bed-games of dancers and warriors and the slight but inventive perversions of the Saardsin court. He gulped all down. He was a pleasure-lover, and, too, teachable. He did not, of course, want to know anything about her.

  At last he slept heavily. She lay beside him, pondering the temple, how it left him alone and shut in with a vicious Zakr slave. But she was only a woman. She would not, for all her foul blood, be able to overcome the power of Cah, the omnipotence of men. Possibly, that would prove true.

  When she was dozing, near morning, she felt him wake. He went to the vessel to urinate. Returned to the bed, she knew he lay a while in turn, looking at her. She could tell it was not only desire, now, but what else it was, she was unable to guess.

  She acted an awakening. He put his hand on her, and caressed her lightly. And then he spoke the perfect words.

  “Cah’s womb, but I’d like to take this with me.”

  “Do it,” said Panduv. “They daren’t refuse you, here.” He was paying little attention. She continued carefully, “They said you have a long tour before you, through the mountains. The women there will be nothing. Thin as sticks—worse than I am. And not half so wise. No other holy-girl would have the stamina to make the journey with you. But I’m strong. My body is used to grueling exercise.” Then, Panduv made her voice velvet, she called him love-names, and kneeling, pressed herself to him, and murmured into his ear, “I love you. Cah’s stricken me. Let me be your property. Don’t leave me here to joy common louts. My flesh has known your flesh. After all, if you turn sick of me, if I offend you—you can sell me on the road.”

  She could not see his face but she was able to picture it when suddenly he said, “You’re a liar, black girl, and a rotten one. Sell you on the road—if you don’t make off first. Do you know the reward given runaway slaves? For runaways from a temple? For those who annoy a priest of the goddess?”

  Panduv drew back from him. She sat on her heels and gave him stare for stare.

  “So you value yourself so slightly you reckon no woman could love you?
”

  “Women’s love—what’s that matter? Rubbish, nothing.”

  Panduv said cunningly, “You offend Cah, to whom a mother is sacred. Didn’t even your mother love you?”

  He opened his mouth—then laughed again. Lifting his hand he struck her glancingly across the cheek. Panduv leapt to the floor, her hand after the nacre sheath—her knife—which she had luckily removed before coming to him. Her eyes were for sure a leopard’s. She could kill him with her body alone. And then the temple guards would intercept her and do to her whatever they did do to slaves who annoyed the priests of Cah.

  As for Watcher Arud, he was all agog. She should have been prone, entreating forgiveness. But this creature would not do that. She was a compendium—a swamp-cat, a devil, and a lean beautiful boy with breasts. His muscles still sang from what she had done to them. He already wanted her again.

  “You lawless thing,” he said. “Cah didn’t create you. Were you even born?” He waved her to him. It was evident why.

  Recovering herself, Panduv said, “I won’t lie with you again, unless you promise me, in Cah’s name, to take me with you.”

  “I can have you anyway.”

  “Try,” she said. She thought, in that hot second, it might even be worth a death, to get her vengeance on him, for the temple and the temple food, for the Shansarian slaver and the wave that destroyed the city.

  “Yes,” he said abruptly, lying back. “Get out then. Tell the mistress to send me in another girl.”

  Panduv shrugged. She was no longer heated. She came to the couch and slid herself upon it. She lowered her head until the silk of her hair flowed over his belly and his thighs. It was the gambit of story and legend, but by Yasmat’s lilies, in such naive circumstances, a hope.

  When he was writhing and arching beneath her, she pulled herself away from him.

  “Promise me, and by Cah.”

  “You—bitch— No.”

  “You must finish yourself then.”

  He lay helpless with fury, weak with interrupted lust, gathering himself.

  “I’ll have them flay you.”

  “You must still finish yourself.”

  It was the absurdist in him that won her day for her. She saw the amusement struggling in his inflamed face. He gave a roar and bawled at her: “You’ll come with me, to the mud-nest up the mountain. Miles without number—You’ll walk every step. You’ll have zeeba rations. If you become a burden I’ll sell you, or push you off a cliff. This I swear, by Cah. May she oversee my words. Now—”

  She returned docilely, and gave him all he wanted. The rush of his orgasm, the sea wave . . . She had bought a potential liberation. With her body. The first time she had ever had so to use herself. In a night of bargains, she had become what she was meant to be, here, in Cah’s brothel.

  12. False Magic

  ZASTIS VANISHED ON THE first lap of the journey. Arud told her in the tent that night he would slough her at the next village prosperous enough to buy. “You’ll be able to escape from such a spot with ease.”

  “Where should I go,” she said, “in this rocky dust-platter of a land?”

  “Better now than later. The villages and the rocks are worse where I’m going.”

  “Why not manumit me?” said Panduv, teasingly. “You paid the temple nothing for me.”

  “No, you haven’t walked sufficient miles over the stones. I vowed it to Cah, to punish you. And you know if you run away from me, those outriders will soon get you back. They’d enjoy it. And then—”

  “I adore you,” said Panduv. “I would never run away from you.”

  Both of them laughed. It was a malign game, perilous—to Arud much more than to his slave. For there were chances now, to cut his throat in the darkness, to sprint away before the hue and cry was up. But, as she said, the land did not invite. Its tracks were channels of powder and its rivers thin runnels of spit. Ahead, the mountains were now in view, static brown upheavals going to distant mauve. She had exchanged one prison for another, but this at least was in the open air. Walking much of the day—despite his words, he afforded her now and then use of a zeeba, to the outriders’ disapproval—was exercise she valued. At their halts, too, she exercised and sometimes she danced for him, once even with a pair of lighted torches, though naked, for her clothing was a utility, not to be burnt. Arud marveled. He would not, being a son of Iscah, praise her, but he called on Cah over and over. Despite this, Panduv found herself rusty, her genius already withering. She had expected nothing else. Even so, it made her rage. It was a stormy session that night upon his blanket.

  Before his servants, and in the villages, she adopted the decreed stance of the Iscaian female. She did not want to exacerbate him. Besides, coming to a mild fondness for him, she did not, either, wish to cause him embarrassment.

  On her freedom, she had developed some awkwardness of thinking. She never had been free, she must acknowledge that. Perhaps slavery, although she had never formerly thought herself a slave, was now ingrained. If she ran from Arud, as she had said, to what should she run? It was more simple to remain with him. Too simple, maybe. But eventually life itself would show her the way. He would sell her, or dismiss her—at liberty. Or his enthrallment would go on, she would accompany him through the mountains and back down again, to the capital. And then, surely, something must occur, to wrench her loose, to employ her.

  She would never move in the verity of the fire dance again.

  She would never be “the Hanassian.”

  Meticulous in diet and exercise, in the city she had had five or six or seven flawless years before her as a dancer, even more if her well-tuned body kept faith with her training. After that, obviously, decline would have come. She would then have been a valued instructress of the stadium, a courtesan if she chose (as unlike a holy-girl as orchid to weed.) This existence might not have suited her either. She might have preferred suicide to ease and envy and regret, and not been the first. Yet that time was far off. Far, far and far.

  But her body, agile, fluid and lovely, had already succumbed, betrayed her, in the foolish dance in the grove before lascivious Arud. He had thought her talent wonderful. She could have wept.

  Late at night, Arud sleeping deep, when she might have got away, she had gone out among the trees and set up a small altar of stones, and burned some oil there. One of the outriders came to see what she was at, but finding her praying, left her alone.

  She had given back her life’s reason to Zarduk, for to attempt any more the dance would be an insult to the god. She asked for some other thing to fill the gaping crevice in her spirit.

  They climbed the paths into the mountains of Iscah. It was a thankless business. Up and down, down and up, the heights and the valleys, wading in the dust.

  He took her less often now the Star was gone. But he liked the way she tended his hair, and massaged his body after the day’s fatigue. Hardly knowing he did so, he had begun to talk to her. In an unwary moment he remarked he was glad she was with him. She hid her eyes Iscaian fashion, covering her contempt. Probably that was the origin of the ritual. For if the women here showed what they thought of their men, doubtless the men would slaughter them at once.

  • • •

  There came a morning, when she was walking behind his zeeba, that he called to her.

  “I suppose you believe in magic and miracles?” he said.

  It was the first time he had asked her opinion.

  She was not misled into thinking he wanted it.

  “In what way do you mean?”

  “This dung-heap I’m to go to, there’s been a rumor—Things that can’t happen do so, allegedly.”

  Panduv was silent, attentive, respectful, striding by the zeeba. (Involved in an art form, she was no longer appalled at the act.)

  Arud, who had never inquired even to that minute anything about her, taking it for g
ranted presumably she came from Var-Zakoris, said, “This town, it’s not so far from the border. Have you heard anything of it? A welt called Ly Dis.”

  Panduv felt a start of unnamable emotion. She went on striding, but her body seemed internally scalded.

  “I’ve heard of Ly Dis. I knew a man born there, a village there.”

  Abruptly, Arud was glaring down at her.

  “Your lover?”

  At last, a personal question. Panduv might have been tickled. He was put out at the idea of her having been selected by another man, in the days of her freedom.

  “No. Not a lover.” She visualized Rehger Am Ly Dis. As bright as the sun, handsome as the Lydian. . . . She had not known him well, not as a man. He was one of the heroes, as she was. Her brother from the courts, child of her huge family.

  “What’s the matter?” said Arud. “If he wasn’t a lover.”

  But he did not wish to hear her history. And she did not wish to offer it. Rehger must have perished. With all the rest, he had been smashed and swept away. He, like herself, had died before his time.

  • • •

  They reached Ly Dis in a summer storm, dry, blustering with thunder, dust and wind. Bone-naked lightnings tore about the mountainheads above. They were so tall, those upper pinnacles, they had seemed, since appearing, to invite an aerial attack. Ly Dis town lay in a cradle of the lower crags, on whose levels the travelers had been for forty days of their monotonous ascending and descending. (The routes were easier and quicker from the capital—Arud had never ceased telling her.) The valley-cradle was untidy, and the town, blathered by the storm, like a heap of stones.

  Only a handful of beggars were on the dirt streets, huddled in what purported to be doorways. The temple, with the house of the local tyrant, abutted on a single paved square, with a well and a scaffold in close proximity.

  The temple was a condensed replica of the fane at the port. The smell at Ly Dis, however, was larger. It stank, of blood, oil, incense, an overpowering odor that dashed at them with the wind.