The White Serpent

by Tanith Lee

  Rehger turned at that moment, and saw them.

  Yes, he could himself have been a king. They had said that in Alisaar, with the love-words. Now he seemed no different, the body kept at its vivid pitch by daily exercise, the commanding height, the curious completeness, nothing redundant. He no longer dressed like a lord, that was all. The clothes were those of a well-bred artisan on holiday, no adornment. A king in disguise.

  He came over to Chacor.

  “The best of congratulations.”

  “I receive them with pleasure. Fill your cup. I want you to meet another of my wedding guests.”

  The women on the terrace called plaintively as Chacor took him back into the house.

  • • •

  They had provided the tall handsome Lan with some refreshments, then locked him into an upstairs anteroom. If Arn knew about it was not certain. Jerish and Annah had now and then been seen lingering nearby, or Jerish’s fair-skinned, yellow-haired brother and his coppery Ommish wife. Once there had been some knocking on the inside of the door. Through the sounds of the feast it was not much audible. The Ommos lady went to the door, however, and said sternly, “Come, sir, would Yannul the Hero of Lan have behaved so timorously? Shush!”

  “He’s in there,” said Chacor, bringing Rehger to the door.

  Conceivably he expected Rehger to know already who this was, since they were operating within the design of the goddess. But Rehger only said, “Who is that?”

  “My last wedding guest.”

  “You’ve locked the door,” said Rehger. “Is he vicious?”

  “By now that’s a possibility. So I’ve brought you, Swordsman, to quell him.”

  Chacor unlocked the door, opened it, and guided Rehger to the doorway. Rehger paused, then moved forward, into the room. Chacor smartly shut the door and relocked it. Having listened a moment for the phonetics of assault and battery—there was only silence—he led his accomplices away.

  • • •

  Yennef was drinking the wine and eating the savory breads.

  He looked at the man who had entered, and remarked, “I judge it would be unreasonable to ask for an explanation. After all, this is a marriage feast.”

  The arrival was dark Vis . . . maybe he was an inch or so taller even than Yennef. Powerful, couth—almost a Dortharian demeanor. But when he spoke, it was the accent of Free Alisaar.

  “Perhaps you will,” he said, “accept both as an explanation and an apology, the fact that you are, sir, my father.”

  Yennef became fly. He narrowed his eyes and took in more thoroughly what he was seeing. Then he drank from the wine-cup.

  “Well, here and there, I’ve had that accusation made. Usually it’s by the woman involved.”

  “My mother is in Iscah. Or, she may be dead. It isn’t an accusation. As I said, a fact.”

  The Lan glanced him up and down, cool, and guarded.

  “But perhaps I was never in Iscah.”

  “Yes. It was winter. She said robbers had set on you.”

  “No, no, my gallant,” said Yennef, “that was last summer, here. Bandits by the Dragon Gate.”

  “You seem to have then, sir, a penchant for being robbed. She discovered you near the farm, disabled with a knife-cut in one arm. She persuaded the men to give you shelter, in the dog-house.” (Yennef ejected a virulent oath.) “Once you were fit, you went on your way, but before that you had my mother. Her name was Thioo.”

  “I had her? You mean I forced her?”

  “She went to you. She gave herself and you took.”

  “Did I? It seems a man can get desperate, in the Iscah mountains. If I was there.”

  “You left her a token.”

  “Well, one finds one must. Doubtless you’ve found that, too.”

  “An Alisaarian drak of bronze-mixed gold.”

  “Oh. She must have been a spicy lay, then. I was poor in those days.”

  “You remember those days.”

  “No,” said Yennef, “but from your looks, it has to have been some twenty-five years ago.”

  “A little more.”

  “Ah, a little more.” Yennef had another drink. “You’re from Alisaar yourself.”

  “The men on the farm sold me for a slave. I was shipped to Alisaar.”

  “You don’t look like a slave.”

  “I was a Saardsin Sword.”

  A glint of fascination went under and over Yennef s deliberate facade.

  “That I do credit. I’ve seen them fight, and race. Saardsinmey had the best—and lost the best. Anack had you in her hand, if you survived the city.”

  “They think here Anackire has all things in her hands.”

  “She has enough hands,” said Yennef flippantly.

  His mind, in spite of him, was burrowing. Each time he drank the yellow wine, he seemed to sink back another year, to some other place. Of course, he had been in Iscah, in Corhl and Var-Zakoris, too. There had been a mad expedition, anger and youth and some simpleton’s story, hopes of treasure—he could hardly recollect, only the fruitless venture and the traveling. There were plenty of escapades, and just as many girls. Dark women, smoky women, smooth skin and a smooring of night hair.

  “So you had your friends abduct me on the street because you claim I’m your father.”

  The younger man said, “No, I’m as startled as you, to find you here. But they recognized you, no doubt.”

  “I see. It’s that we have a resemblance to each other. It does make some sense.”

  “Don’t you,” said the younger man quietly—he had stayed even and polite throughout, under Yennef’s attempts to heat him up—“have a knife scar on your left arm?”

  “Two or three as it happens. Shall I strip my sleeve? You can choose which one’s Iscaian.”

  Yennef finished the wine.

  The other man said, “You see, we’d have no business with each other, except that there are questions I should like to ask you.”

  “I’m not rich,” said Yennef. “And anyway, I have a legal wife, in Dorthar, and three legal sons.”

  “The questions have nothing to do with your estate, sir.”

  “Yennef. Call me Yennef. I’m not some antique graybeard. I used to be your age, not a hundred years ago. My sons have less respect, I can assure you. And my wife’s a ravening shrew.” The wine was going to his head.

  “Then I won’t ask you,” said the other, calm, inexorable, “to strip your sleeve. I’ll strip mine.” And putting his hand to a plaited leather wristlet—a badge of the Artisan’s Guild in Moih, now Yennef considered it—he loosed and pulled it off. He came forward then, and showed to Yennef in the lamplight the lean articulate hand and muscled forearm of a professional fighter, itself with one streamlined scar which ended at the wrist. Here, where the wristlet had been and the scar ended, the skin was clasped in a circlet of dull silver scales.

  “Aside from the scars of knives,” he said, “will you tell me, Yennef, do you have a mark on you like this?”

  Yennef felt giddy. It was the final years peeling away. He had suddenly recalled the barren mountain valleys, the blue-white snow piled up like death, and warm beauty slender as a bone that found him there, wedged with the dog among the rocks.

  “I don’t,” he said. “Not I. But my father had a callus like that. As you have it, on the left wrist. It was broader in him, it ran as far as the lower joint of the thumb. He never hid it. He was proud of it. He used to have his sleeve cut slightly short, on the left arm. You know what it is?”

  “The snake mark, the sigil of the line of Amrek, the Storm Lord.”

  Yennef shook himself, trying to shift from one dimension to another, out of the past.

  “Who told you? Your mother?”

  “Not my mother. A sorceress of the Lowlanders.”

  “Ah.” Yennef s
tared at his son, and saw himself at long last, in the golden mirror. None of his Dortharian getting—known scarcely better than this one—had returned such a likeness. They took after their dam, and had her stupidity to add burnish. “It’s come to me,” said Yennef. “I mean, going with your mother. Tibo— that was it, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, Tibo. Thioo, in Iscah.”

  “You say—you don’t know if she’s dead?”

  Still quiet, reasonable: “It was an ungenerous life. She wasn’t well-treated. Women in those parts seldom were.”

  “I didn’t think of it—getting her with child. And then those cretinous blockheads sold you. How old were you? For the stadium, it can’t have been much more than five or six.”

  Abruptly Yennef turned away. He walked off and sat down in a hard stiff chair, and put his head in his hands.

  He said after a moment, “You embarrass me. I don’t know you, or what to say.”

  “My name is Rehger. They used to call me the Lydian, in Alisaar.”

  “That’s kudos, isn’t it—fame by name of the birthplace—Attack’s breasts, I’ve heard of you. I laid a bet on you—three years—four years back—I was at Jow. I only saw you at a distance, an inexpensive seat. But you won. Blade and spear. A hundred silver draks. I should have risked more—”

  “At least,” Rehger said, “that repaid your outlay on Tibo.”

  Yennef looked up. He rose to his feet, straightening himself.

  “I don’t expect or want your filial regard, Swordsman.”

  “We’re strangers to each other,” Rehger said. “But I’d value my history, if you can give it me.”

  “You want to boast your descent from Amrek Accursed-of-Anackire on the streets of Anackire’s Moih?”

  Rehger smiled, as Yennef had seen princes do, when they wished to put you at ease. The eyes were like her eyes, if Yennef could only remember what she had looked like. For he could not, of course.

  Only that she had been beautiful, and a lucky find. Though there was one single image, almost supernatural, flickering between the shadow and the red whisper of a fire—when she had come to him—and he had thought, or only said he thought—the goddess, Cah—

  “There’s no more wine in this jug,” said Yennef. “And that damned Zakorian or whatever he is, the prankish bridegroom, has locked the door again.”

  But trying the door, they learned another had come at some time to turn the key. They were at liberty.

  16. The Charioteer

  REHGER RODE OUT OF the city in the black chariot of war, among the soldiery and the banners, under the burnt-blue lid of the sky. And the crowds of the city cried and shouted, and the women threw withered garlands and silks like blood. And the rumble of the marching feet, the wheels, the drums and rattles, were the voice of the storm, going down to battle and to death.

  But as he stood there, shackled and scaled by armor, his thoughts had stayed behind in the temple of his gods beside the river.

  Drought had shrunk the river up. On the temple steps dead lilies stank and a spiny water-thing had died. A haze lay on the river, a haze of incense in the temple aisle. The gods towered from the mist, their bodies that were nearly human, their dragon heads, glimmering in the light of propitiating flame.

  “Have no fear, great ones,” he said. “I’ll ask you for nothing, as I know quite well you will give me nothing.” Yet they did have something to give.

  For, out of the shadow stole his mother, Tibo. She was garbed, and even her hair was dressed, in the manner of the queens of Dorthar and the jewelry fashions of Koramvis. But her skin was painted white, as the face of his enemies.

  She said, “The Lowlander will kill you, Amrek.”

  Then she called him names and railed against him. She was terrified. They balanced, as did all things that morning, on the edge of the world. The fall was not to be avoided. But when he turned from her, she stayed him. She was not Tibo, surely, but Val Mala, that woman whose soul was so young it was purblind, half mad. Her existence had been that of a sensual, spiteful and selfish child. Now she was a savage child, frightened even from its child’s cunning, abetted by a poisoned knife. “Hear the truth from me,” she said.

  And she told him then how he had been got on her by her lover, conniving in her bed. He was not the son of the king, no Storm Lord, not Rehdon’s sowing—as was Raldnor, who would kill him. He had no identity. An imposter, the gods of Dorthar denied and would cast him down.

  When she stopped, he had nothing to say to her.

  He did not interrogate her, or reject her words. Nothing in his life, and nothing in that crucial instant, gave him the impetus to do so.

  And very soon, borne forward by the chariot of fate, war and death, he rode from the city, off the world’s edge, into a country without wars or cities, or rivers, without titles, gods, or names.

  • • •

  The pre-dawn stirring about the cattle-market wakened him, as normally it always did, two hours before the sky lost its Visian darkness. His routines were recurrent but flexible. Breakfast was to be had among the stalls and charcoal braziers by the market gate, with drovers and watchmen. If it was a day for early exercise, he would cross the three streets to the Academy of Arms. For his monthly fee, morning or evening, he could engage Moiyah’s best sword-masters, Dortharian-trained (who in turn vied to duel with a professional, sometimes set him to school others and saw him paid for it.) The standard of the gymnasium courts was not far below those of a stadium. Otherwise one had access to the Academy baths, their staff of barbers, and masseurs, and, if one wished it, the periphery talent of fortune-tellers, betting cliques, commercial telepaths and joy-girls.

  Moih being Moih, it was nothing at the Academy to see a rich man’s soft sons working out, or gambling, with the garrison soldiers or sturdy porters from the docks. Rehger’s personal myth had become known among them and he was greeted there as “Lydian,” even by the elite of the Racers’ Guild, who spoke of their horses as if they were mistresses, and of not much else.

  Usually, by the time the sky had melted to Lowlander pallor, the Lydian was on Marble Street.

  But between Marble Street and the Academy, in a small wine-shop known as the Dusty Flower, Rehger and Yennef had spent Chacor’s wedding night. Until the third. Vis-black hour of morning, they sat either side the table. To the house’s sorrow, they drank no vast amount, neither did they talk to any lavish extent. A stilted frankness stumbled between them. There was a kind of distaste, a reluctance to remain and, curiously, eventually, a hesitation at parting.

  They had no physical contact. They broke from each other, the two men, like thieves who have planned a crime, or perhaps met to review one long committed.

  Rehger did not think he would see the Lan (his father) again.

  After all this, there was less than an hour for sleep, but Rehger took it, and dreamed the dream, which the words of Yennef had probably imposed on him.

  “The line of descent is easy enough. I have it by heart, for what it’s worth. The woman was a prophetess, a priestess. Safca. Amrek’s daughter, by some courtesan, who escaped into Lan when the Lowland War reached Dorthar. This Safca might not have been reckoned, except that she had the snake mark on her wrist.”

  She became holy, Safca, in the upheavals of her time. In the peace which followed, she married into the royal house of Lan, a subsidiary branch. She bore one son late in life, Yalen, a prince, marked as she was, in the same way. Yalen who had his left sleeves cut short to show the brand of Anack. . . . When he was in his forty-sixth year, he fathered a bastard on a serving-girl in a village hostelry. It was on a hunting trip. He used to sport and say, “That spring I acquired the seven wolfskins and Yennef, in the backhills.”

  The Lan did not relate this with any bite. There had been anger, once, but it altered to irony. The hill girl had walked every step of the road to the capital, and sought out Prince
Yalen on Audience Day, with the yowling baby wrapped in her apron. “He was decent to her. He set her up with a tavern in the city, and took me into his household. He had his lawful heirs. Besides, in Lan, the closer the blood-tie the more the offspring are worth. The old man had married his half-sister for that. The slough of the pot-wench wasn’t worth anything. But he was fair to me. I was allotted the title it’s customary to award, in such a case. They call you the god-gift. That was Yennef, the god-gift. The trophy Yalen never wanted that the gods forced him to have.”

  He grew up chafing, could not recall when it started. At thirteen he stowed away on a Xarabian ship. That was the beginning of his travels.

  “The year he got the wolfskins and Yennef. I never even had the goddess mark. But the bloodline’s simple. Have you memorized it? Amrek to Safca, Safca to Yalen, Yalen to Yennef. Yennef—to Rehger Am Ly Dis.” And Yennef had added, “Get a son. Pass the commodity on. Life, I mean. The trade of living.”

  In the subfusc of the Flower, his face blurred and often averted, Yennef seemed, by his coordinated movements, his light voice, the ironic remnant of his youthful anger, a very young man still.

  “There is a tale, mind you, Amrek was never sired by Rehdon the Storm Lord. Mala the bitch-queen had him off the king’s counselor, in order to hold on to her status—Rehdon couldn’t plough her, they said. She scared him so his seed went to water. It might be, or it might not. She was a wicked slut, brainless. She might have miscalculated, or spread lies. She hated her only son.”

  Surely she had, had hated Amrek. Rehger had felt her hate strike like venomed steel on his bones.

  And Amrek had believed her. Or he was beyond caring. In the arena it might happen sometimes, there would be a man like that. Come for an appointment with death.

  But Amrek was gone, into the past. Rehger—hearing the sounds of the market, an exuberant, self-important present below his window—felt the huge empty rush of time that spilled all things away. Aztira had promised that in Moih he would meet his father. This had taken place, but there was no meaning to it. Rehger had been a peasant’s get in Iscah, he had been a Swordsman in Alisaar. Those lives were gone, as was the life of Amrek.