The White Serpent

by Tanith Lee

  But Tibo was looking away and away into and beyond the ashes on the hearth. In the new silence, Panduv felt her own exhaustion. She was wrung out. She had made confession and she was purged, she was empty. She could have wept at last, but she scorned tears, the Zakorian. Fire not water.

  When Tibo rose, Panduv looked up at her in a vague surprise.

  “Consent to come with me. There’s something I’ll show you,” said Tibo.

  Not a whisper about her son, not a glimmer of that hurt and cruel fury that had been in her face before. Nothing. Had she even heard, this Iscaian drab, even noticed the jewelry carpet of a city laid before her?

  Panduv got to her feet.

  “What is it?”

  “Outside, a little way.”

  Panduv’s instinct verged on distrust, but she said, “If you like.”

  They stole out of the house, and by the door Tibo took a lantern, and with the flint she lighted it. Panduv said scathingly, “The god will be glad you don’t waste his fire.” But Tibo, of course, did not reply.

  They walked through the summer night, across the pasture where the cows lay like boulders under a slender tree. A stone wall had mostly come down, and over it they went into the citrus trees and the standing rocks.

  The beacon of the lantern disorganized rather than assisted vision. When it smote on the dome, this seemed an error of the eyes. Then the light steadied. It hardened into being.

  “What is that?” Panduv recollected now having sighted the shining top of this object as Arud approached the farm.

  Tibo said quietly, “It was always there, underneath. But the trees grew bigger, the roots pushed off the soil. Last summer, the earth shook and lifted it up.” At her words, Panduv envisaged the pale smooth thing, rising like a fish, through the tide of the earth-tremor. It did not seem to be all above ground even now, but wedged into a socket of stone. The form of it was nonetheless like the shape of the fish of her imagery. The material of which it was made appeared metallic, but there was not a scratch or pock upon it. No mark at all.

  “When you go near enough,” said Tibo, “an opening comes.”

  They went forward, very slowly, the lantern engorging everything before them, putting out the rest of the valley.

  And, as predicted, a door-opening evolved in the side of the fish-shape mound. Such mechanisms were not unknown. The modern temples of the snake goddess, Panduv had heard, were frequently so equipped. Yet the manner in which the door made itself bewildered her, happening not with an upward, downward or sideways motion, but in a kind of swirling. . . .

  Within the door, was only darkness.

  “Have you gone inside, Tibo?”

  “Never.”

  “Afraid to.”

  “Yes. Here always, I never like to be here.”

  “You’re a sensitive. It must be a bad place, then.”

  Panduv took the lantern from her, and, going closer to the opening, let the light press on the darkness.

  It was an oval chamber without corners, and again she thought of the white races, tales of the round halls in their ruined city in the southern Plains. Instantly the lantern found a confirmation. There on a featureless wall, what she took for a carving. A coiled, unmistakable snake, white on white.

  The Zakorian moved back, so the darkness possessed the hole again.

  “It’s a temple. The Plains People had them everywhere, scattered, even in the land of Dorthar. This must be old as the mountains.”

  She felt that she was shaking. It was not fear. There was a current of energy in the vicinity of the snake temple, a supernatural force to be avoided, as Tibo said she inclined to. Panduv backed farther and the electric awareness was less. She said, “Why bring me here?”

  Tibo said, “Cah is here.”

  The Zakorian swore. “No. Cah is a goddess for the Vis. Yours. Mine, maybe. That thing, there, that’s the yellowhairs’ magic. Their goddess, the Lady of Snakes, Anack.”

  Tibo said, “Cah forgave my sins. Each month, her hand was on me. When this thing came out of the earth, it was full of Cah. I’m afraid here. Fear doesn’t matter. This place is why I heal and how I bring the fire. I’ve told no one else. It’s Cah’s place.”

  “It’s theirs,” said Panduv. She was angry. Stupidly she thought of athletic contests between the dancers of the city and blonde girls of Sh’alis. Inappropriate, yet total—the racial unmeeting, the fight, the war going on in small ways or large. Would Sh’alis not have sung over the battering of Free Alisaar by a white, screaming wave?

  Panduv shut her eyes and saw a star dashing, flaming, from the sky. It crashed against the bosom of the earth, seared and split the land, driving a channel, burying itself deep. As the patchy clouds and cinders settled, the star lay smoldering in its ditch, in a valley between mountains.

  “There,” said Tibo, as she put her hand on Panduv’s shoulder. “You saw the star? I’ve seen it, too. Cah’s sky-chariot falling. It remembers.”

  “Lowland magic, the power of flight,” muttered Panduv. Tibo had taken her hand, and was leading her away from the shining domed mound, temple, fallen star, time-fish, between the citrus trees, into the commonplace pasture where the cows still lay peaceably chewing.

  Panduv’s limbs were water. She sat herself on the rough grass before she should stagger. “I don’t like that, it isn’t for me,” she said. She shivered. “But for certain, it had some meaning.”

  Tibo loitered patiently until the Zakorian got up again. They returned into the hovel. They did not speak to each other any more.

  • • •

  Lying by Arud on Tibo’s mattress, Panduv dreamed of Saardsinmey after the wave.

  She saw initially from high up, as if she flew winged above the wreck. Far below, the landscape was a desert, with jagged monoliths and fanged ravines of masonry. She would not have known it for a city, except she had come there in the dream armed with its former name.

  Circling, as once the hunting hawks had done, she descended through the bruised air.

  She was impartial, the winged Panduv, in the dream. It did not tear her heart or consciousness, how it was, the sights of it.

  On the roof of the Zarduk temple, whose entrails had been wrenched out, a ship rested. She flew by the ship, circling the pillars, and away. Above, there lay the stadium, which, with almost everything, had been obliterated. There was only an abysm—the arena, piled by tumbled things.

  North and west, a metropolis of ruins, clung with seaweed, with bits of shells on their stairs and roofs and floors, and dotted with all the feasible remnants of a human society suddenly vanquished.

  A wind was blowing. It was clearing off the blots and stains of the atmosphere, and Panduv was blown to earth by it, and alighted, still high over the city, where she might have expected to, on the Street of Tombs.

  Everything was mud. The marble seemed mostly to have been turned to mud. And here, too, as she had dimly noted in the shattered ruins beneath, tiny groups of men and women were picking about, like beggars in a gutter after a coin.

  Panduv, invisible, poised among the mud hills, and looked at them with mild pity, but no sense of kinship. They were distant in all ways. There, where a white stone had protruded from the clotted slime, someone was grubbing, trying to pull out a corpse by its legs. But there another only sat, and did nothing.

  The soul of Panduv—so she supposed it was—began to drift again. It came along a rise, to the sarcophagi of kings and queens, the entertainers. On the incline above rose the black beehive of her own tomb, washed up amid the aloes.

  The door stood open on its runner. She recalled . . . Rehger, maybe others, had found shelter there. One of these persons, seemingly left behind, now stepped from the doorway, white out of black.

  Panduv was not alone in seeing the phenomenon. Two women a short way down the slope had stopped in their grim potterin
g. They appeared terrified, as if by an apparition, not realizing that this was only some survivor of the wave like themselves.

  The figure was not intrinsically alarming. It was that of a girl, wearing a white dress, her head also veiled by white. She did not stay to gaze about her, but went on, up the incline, away from the black tomb. On the crest of the slope, however, she did hesitate, and next looked back, as if she had become aware of another watcher—Panduv.

  The white of her clothing blended subtly with that of her skin and hair. The survivor out of the tomb was the Amanackire.

  In the dream Panduv experienced no shred of wrongness. On the eve of nemesis, avoiding the gossip of the theater, she had never heard of the Lowlander’s poisoning, while her actor-lover had been too busy with other commerce to tempt her ears with it. Panduv had not known of the murder, the burial, until that other dream in Ly’s temple. I gave myself to death— The former dreaming, recaptured in this, conveyed only utter correctness.

  The Amanackire had died, and by her death, ensured that Rehger might find shelter from destruction. Some days had passed, and Rehger, too, was gone. And rising up in the shadow, healed and whole, the white girl moved out into the world.

  Now, drawing her veil over her face, she walked on across the rim of the hill and disappeared from view.

  Winged, incorporeal, still Panduv did not follow her.

  Instead she woke with a dreadful violence, jammed back into her body, not knowing where she was or what had happened to her. And in the intuitive battle to reclaim her memory and herself, for her heart to beat and her lungs to breathe, this dream, like the other, came undone and flowed away, down again into the sea-depths within her, out of sight and out of mind.

  • • •

  “What am I to tell them, that they could accept, at the Mother Temple?”

  Arud voiced his distress twelve days later, when they had got beyond the crow’s nest of Ly Dis, among the enduring sameness of the mountains.

  Now, he is actually asking me.

  “There is a course.”

  “Yes? Well? Well?”

  “Inform them the rumors were grossly overblown. She’s a healer who sees to women’s complaints. She has the antique art of making fire with two pieces of wood. She does nothing, meanwhile, without invoking Cah, and her temple finds her virtuous. Besides, she’s married, and her husband wouldn’t permit her to do anything unlawful.”

  “Falsehoods, woman. I’m to condemn myself before the goddess by lying?”

  “Cah is only an idea . . . the embodiment and symbol of life.” (The two outriders were some way behind them, out of earshot. The other absconding pair had vanished even from the town.)

  Arud did not chide Panduv. Conceivably he recalled how she had defended his feverish avowals to the world at large. How she had mentioned, too, the outrider’s extreme unreliable drunkenness on the night in question. Should it ever be of use.

  At last Arud said, humble before the infinite, “There are some who think in that way. Not gods, but their essence. In the capital, provided a man’s discreet . . . Even the Highest One—Cah is All. Everything. The fount of existence. Not simply a stone with breasts.”

  “The Lowlanders, I hear, speak that way about snaky Anack.”

  Arud frowned. “Cah is the one true goddess.”

  “Then credit that the little Iscaian wife acts only in her name. Tibo’s a devout believer. Let her alone. What does your temple care? And you. You only want to be home.”

  “Yes,” he said. He heaved a sigh. “I’ve a house, on a hill. Breeze-fanned in summer. Flowering vines. A fish pond. Blue walls. You’ll like my house.”

  So, I am to be in his house.

  She thought of his love-making of recent nights, changed and passionate, and very deft. The dance of fire was over. She had become after all an instructress and courtesan.

  Besides, she had not been able to safeguard herself. Or perhaps she should not have asked her own gods to fill the void in her days. Jokingly, Yasmat had intervened.

  “Arud,” she said, for he was learning, too, that in private he would be addressed by his name.

  “What is it now?”

  “I’m carrying your son.”

  He seemed to consider this. Some minutes passed.

  “Well, how do you know it’ll be a boy?”

  “I know.”

  That would have been her role in Zakoris, in the sea village. To take men in, to thrust men forth. But she was fit and vital. A pregnancy would not quell her. It would be a child of late spring or early summer.

  Yes, she was strong. The strength of any partner would be superfluous to her. Her lovers, whatever their reverence for a dancer’s genius, or their titles or intellectual knowledge of songs or stars, they had, none of them, been her spirit’s match.

  And a warrior needed wars. Iscah would be one long campaign. She laughed aloud, and Arud said, “You’re glad then, you Zakr girl, to be filled with my son?”

  “Only delighted to delight you, master.”

  “You’ll be mistress of my house. Have no worries on that front.”

  One must not employ irony. Be generous and lesson in generosity. At least, keep quiet.

  He glanced down and saw her, striding by him, straight and royal, black as night, her long hair like a banner—having no past, for he had given her reality. He stopped his zeeba. He took her up before him. It was not Iscaian, and the outriders stared.

  Book Four

  Moih

  14. A Moiyan Wedding

  UNLIKE THE NUPTIALS OF most of Vis, the marriages of Lowlanders were not concerned with the Red Star. It was well-known, Vis over, the Plains Race was immune to Zastis. For the mixed blood, and the Dortharians, Xarabs, and others who interwed on the Plains, they did not seem to mind too much not waiting on into the hot months. The first of summer, after the rains, before the deluge of the heat, that was the favored time, in the southern south.

  In the province of Moih, the dual city-state of coastal Moiyah and the inland metropolis of Hibrel, a thriving culture had for some sixty years been growing up. Giving fealty direct to the Storm Lords of Dorthar, the cities and towns of Moih were democratically governed by their elected councils, enriched by their merchant fleets and traders’ guilds, tolerant in the extreme of all gods, while cleaving themselves proudly always to Anackire, Lady of Snakes. There was neither racial, religious nor class stricture in the mores and legalities of Moih. Theoretically, there, you might befriend and worship whom you chose, and rise to whatever position you were capable of. Out of the melting pot of persecution, off the anvil of two famous wars, Moih had emerged, splitting herself free of the Lowland Way. Not for her the passive and unorganized fatalism still current in the southernmost Plains. Nor the xenophobia of the purist Amanackire, one of whose strongholds, the city of Hamos, lay four days’ ride from Hibrel’s outskirt, behind a barricade of ethnic ice. Correspondingly, as the frigid zealots had gathered to their own, into bustling Moih flocked the makers and doers of the Lowland people, along with representatives of almost every Vis-Plains mixture possible.

  The wedding customs of Moih, therefore, tended somewhat to variety.

  Upon this, one particular bridegroom was not pondering, late in the day in Moiyah.

  Attired like a peacock for the event, it was nevertheless obvious that the good-looking young man was himself no son of the Plains. His hair and eyes were blackest black, his skin boldly metallic. Indeed, against the darkness of him, his Moiyan marriage clothes of white and gilt looked especially well.

  She had seen him in something less elegant, the first time.

  The bridegroom smiled. He was-exhilarated, and a very little nervous, for this sunset’s rituals were alien, and he meant to present them faultlessly. For her sake, of course.

  If it came to that, what had he thought of her, at the first sighting? He had
been half-blinded still by what had led up to it, and coming into the bay of Moiyah, among all the creamy shipping, the painted walls above with the golden Anackire perched there, and then beholding the flaxen throng in the port—he felt a sort of fear or disgust. Xenophobia was his portion, too. The ship had been difficult enough. Something in him was starving for the multitudes of his own kind— And in and out of the jostling crowd along the quayside, had come the two daughters of Arn Yr, with their maid.

  Annah, the elder, was also the taller of the two, with a dainty porcelain head bound and wound with hair like ripened wheat. News had already run east, of the Aarl-mouth, the great wave, and their outflanking tempests. There had been unearthly dawns and sunfalls, too, at Moiyah. Arn’s ship, Pretty Girl, was anxiously looked for. Getting word from the agent that she was approaching the bay, his daughters hurried down to make sure of their father. But Elissi had seen the ship-lord first. Arn himself, enthusiastically waving in return, pointed out both girls to his passengers.

  Elissi was slight and small, fair-skinned but summer tanned. Her hair was so light that the sunshine sent it up like a scarf of white fire. But she had remembered her Ommish granddam. Elissi’s eyes, like the eyes of Ommos, and of Alisaar, and of Corhl, were jets.

  Maybe Chacor had been consoled by her black eyes. When, later, he came to look into them.

  He had meant to go away quickly. Up into Xarabiss, to Dorthar, or to the homeland, like a frightened dog. The kindness and the openheartedness of Moih he accepted, and was prepared to repay if he could, like provisions bought on credit. He knew these people were alive, had characters and minds, even souls perhaps, as he did. But they were nevertheless dream-people.

  Of the daunting telepathy of the Plains there was not much overt evidence. The Amanackire prided themselves on their secret inner speaking, but in the mercantile peoples of Moih the art had been restricted, from craft, or common politeness, more to the family circle. On Pretty Girl they had seemed to take care not to bother their Vis passengers with displays of minds in dialogue. In Arn Yr’s house, though it was sometimes apparent a thought had passed between the kindred, they saved their wordless discussions for the private rooms.