The White Serpent

by Tanith Lee

  “Yours,” called Galutiyh Am Dorthar. “I’ve got business with the Warden and Council.”

  “What authority?”

  “Come and see.”

  After a wait, three bad-natured soldiers and an officer who had been at dinner, clattered down the stair. Galutiyh displayed some seals. They were impressive. The goddess of Dorthar’s High Council, the authentic golden Snake and Rod of Shansarian Alisaar, the Lion-Astride-the-Dragon symbol of Zaddath herself.

  The tone of the sentries changed. They cracked a postern, and presently Galutiyh and his riders trotted into the city.

  • • •

  Galutiyh swaggered through the Council Hall at Zaddath, having left his escort of ruffians on the street. The place was mostly empty but for secretaries scribbling in cubbies. For such a career Galutiyh’s family had intended him, but he had been more venturesome. He worked and wormed and vaulted his way up. Gray-eyed Galutiyh was not all Lowland-Dortharian. He had a lot of Thaddrian blood on his mother’s side. For the Lowland—or other continent—connection, it was somewhere, but no one knew where. He claimed a Lowland grandfather, and had now said it so often he partly believed it himself.

  When Counselor Sorbel entered the allotted chamber, Galutiyh was quite gratified. Sorbel, called after the Vardish king, was also the right hand of Zaddath’s Warden. Nevertheless, he seemed brisk.

  “What do you want, Galut?” (Galutiyh winced at this Thaddrian abbreviation of his name.) “Really a drama, at the gate. No one here would like you to abuse your privileges.”

  “My lord, I earned my privileges by devotion. It seemed to me speed wasn’t inappropriate.”

  “And why?”

  Galutiyh recounted his reason.

  Sorbel altered. He looked keener, less at ease.

  “This story of an Amanackire woman,” Sorbel eventually said, “is a—” he used the Vardian expression, and in Vardian: “Flimsy mast on which to fix a sail.”

  Galutiyh allowed himself to demonstrate he understood the phrase. “Even so, when the Council of Dorthar sent me to investigate the Plains, I was instructed in this—story. And then it occurred to me the Council here was more in need of my findings . . . they seemed to think it was important. Wasn’t it?”

  “Don’t be insolent.”

  “Excuse me, Lord Sorbel. Blame the rigors of the journey. Fifty-three days by land and sea.”

  “Where is the man?”

  “Safely shut in a hostelry five miles back down the Zaddath South Road.”

  “All right. Wait here.”

  Sorbel went out and Galutiyh sat down. A minute later, a servant brought a tray of cakes and Vardish wine, which boded well.

  • • •

  A great beetle, glistening like a drop of ichor, clung by its pincers to the window-post. One of the three men in the room lurched toward it, raising the pommel of his knife to crush the insect.

  “Why not let it live,” said the third man quietly. It was the first thing he had said for a long while, and the significance of this, apparently, stayed the man with the knife.

  “What do you care?”

  “Can’t stop him, can you?” said the second man.

  The third man was shackled to the table by an iron cuff on his right wrist.

  The blond mix, who had been disturbed by an increasing abundance of insect life on their journey west and north, lifted the pommel higher. Beyond the window, the black night tinked and purred.

  “In Alisaar,” Rehger said, as quietly as before—and as before the other hesitated—“it was thought unlucky to kill anything before a duel or combat. Since the gods strike in the same way, suddenly, perhaps without cause or care. Like the beetle, you might not see the blow coming.”

  Galutiyh’s blond ruffian stared at the beetle. Grudgingly he lowered his knife.

  “Anackire protects,” he said, ritually. He worshiped all gods, and none.

  He went back to the far end of the table where Rehger’s second guard, a swarthy Ommos-mix, giggled. “Scared of the gladiator? Wait till he breaks the chain. No? Isn’t he mighty enough?”

  Galutiyh first produced a shackle when they came off the Xarab ship at the border port. He had requested Rehger to allow this necessity. Rehger did not argue. Once he was cuffed, the other end of the chain was fastened to the wrist of one of Galutiyh’s biggest fellows, a dumb, brown-haired man, with crazy eyes. “After all,” said Galutiyh to Rehger, when it was done, “you won’t mind that. You’re a slave, aren’t you?” They had ridden the roads up into Xarabiss and there had been some dithering about before they took ship. Galutiyh obviously suspected he was being followed, but had then eluded his pursuer, leaving evidence of a trail continuing on to Dorthar, or at least a more northerly town. Instead, they crossed the Inner Sea at its narrowest point and put in at the edge of Shansarian Alisaar. In a cove on the border a half-rotten fishing skimmer or two lay rubbing her sores on the rocks. One of these hags consented to bear the party up the coast. It was windless weather, and the crew rowed, and Galutiyh’s men lounged among the reeking kreels, sometimes casting line themselves for fish or water-snakes off the bows. The Zakor sailors paid them scant attention.

  Zakoris ranged herself on the left hand, to all intents impassable country, jungle-forest rising back in stairs that choked the sun, or wading out even into the sea. During the day, Rehger was again unshackled; after dark the chain was fastened to an iron ring in the mast. When this second voyage of twenty airless, mindless days and anchored nights ended at the Var-Zakor port of Ilva, Galutiyh commandeered some scrubby horses. Then the chain was lengthened and the dumb man and Rehger rode side by side. At night, when the travelers halted, Galutiyh would undo the dumb man and chain himself to Rehger. “May I lie with you, dearest?” asked Galutiyh. But even then, as always until then, Galutiyh did not trespass beyond a few words. He would only chide Rehger in the morning, “How beautifully you sleep! Not a snore or a nightmare. Teach these others, will you? Their moans and snuffles drive me insomniac.”

  Getting on the Zaddath Road, riding through the villages and into the suburbs, they were looked at, and Rehger—or it might be the dumb man who shared the daytime chain—was marked as a culprit. Once some black-skinned priests emerged from a wayside temple. They purified the road, when the company had gone by, both of horse-dung and criminal aura. Generally the native Zakorians were less interested than the conqueror Vardians. There was little sign of mixture, but neither any of oppression. Close to the conqueror capital, the Zakorians adhered with seeming equanimity to Vardish ways, mostly dressed and carried on as Vardians, and were bilingual. Here and there you might see the emblem of a black Ashkar-Anackire, but never a white-skinned Zarduk or Rorn.

  There were laws in Zaddath, too, concerning human noise after midnight. The hostelry was therefore very still, and the sound of hoofs approached distinctly along the road.

  “There’re our mates, coming back,” said the blond mix. Relieved, he threw his knife quivering into the wooden wall.

  Torchlight began to hit the lintel of the window where the beetle clung.

  When the door was opened, neither Galutiyh, nor any of the mates, presented themselves. It was a natty Vardian officer and five Zakorian guard.

  The Vardian demanded that Rehger be delivered to him.

  Galutiyh’s men obeyed.

  In the courtyard, “I see you’re a gentleman. If you’ll swear by the goddess not to lark around, you can ride free into the city.”

  “I don’t worship the goddess,” said Rehger, with the frankness of a good child, the Vardian thought, rather taken with him.

  “Well, that’s straightforward. By any god you respect, then, or just your word, I think, would do.”

  “Of course,” said Rehger. “You have it.”

  • • •

  The chamber was lamplit and windowless. A vane stood wide in
the ceiling behind a sieve of linen. Moths still drizzled down. Aside from Galutiyh, and Rehger, there was no man in the room who was not of the peoples of the goddess. Blond hair, the pale summer tan of Lowlander, Shansar, Vardian. Amber eyes. If there was any trace of interbreeding, it was invisible.

  The Warden of Zaddath sat in his carved chair, with Sorbel standing next to him.

  Directly by Sorbel was another man, tall and strongly-proportioned, garbed like a Shansar prince.

  The Warden had turned to him immediately.

  “What do you say?”

  The Shansarian fixed Rehger with an eagle’s look. The yellow eyes scorched and the mouth curled, and his ringed hands moved at his sides in a gesture of some recaptured motion and guidance—Rehger recognized it. He recognized the Shansar. Not his face or name certainly, but his person and the hour of meeting it.

  It was Sorbel who spoke.

  “He is claimed to be a slave of Alisaar, called the Lydian.”

  “Yes,” said the Shansar. “Your hunting hound was clever.” He did not take his gaze from Rehger. “Neck and neck, Lydian. But I didn’t tell in Shansar, Rorn was angry. Since it was the anger of Anackire.”

  The Warden cleared his throat. The Shansarian prince, who owned estates in Sh’alis and Karmiss and, once, had gone to Alisaar to race in the Fire Ride, turned and said, “Lord Warden, we were side by side, he and I, on the cliff above the sea. He remembers, too. That was what he mocked me with, Rom, their nonexistent sea god, when his chariot broke from mine after the earth and the water shook. I would have won the race, but for this slave.”

  “What do you say?” inquired the Warden of Rehger.

  “He also raced in the Fire Ride, as he says. We were nearer to one another than we are now.”

  “And you survived the destruction of the Saardsin city?” The Warden, the chamber, both were full of some hesitation, some unwillingness. “How?”

  “In a shelter,” Rehger said, “on the Street of Tombs.”

  “You refer to a grave.”

  “He was at the funeral rites of his beloved,” cheeped Galutiyh from his corner. “Her rites.” At Rehger’s shoulder the Vardian officer shifted, but Sorbel remarked, “Be silent, Galutiyh. You think yourself too wise.” To Rehger, Sorbel said, in an abrupt harsh creak, “You’ll be asked to describe this escape.”

  Rehger said, “I have to reassure you, my lords. If you’re wondering whether I, too, rose from the dead, I did not.” It was a perfect hit. Every man in the chamber reacted to it.

  “There was a rumor,” said Sorbel, “some man of the arena, who was healed.”

  Rehger said, “The woman you’re discussing was Amanackire. In Alisaar, all your blond race are reckoned sorcerers.”

  “Galutiyh promises us,” snapped Sorbel, “that he captured you and forced you here as his prisoner. Please realize, your words and deeds will be scrutinized in the light of that.”

  “I came with Galutiyh of my own accord.”

  “Yet you were chained.”

  Rehger said, “The Vardian officer there still has the chain. Perhaps he would return it to me.”

  The Vardian, without waiting on response, smartly handed Rehger cuff and chain.

  Rehger clasped the shackle on his wrist and taking hold of the other end of the chain, slowly pulled it outward from the cuff. In a few moments the links of the chain had altered shape, as if softening in a furnace. The men in the room regarded this spectacle silently, until the chain crunched from the cuff and Rehger dropped it on the floor. He broke the fastening of the cuff itself more quickly, threw that down also.

  It was the Shansarian charioteer who then began uncouthly to applaud.

  “This Vis dog brings the stadium to Zaddath. Cheer him. Let us make him a garland.”

  “Let’s first of all discover,” said Sorbel, “what this garland is, that he desires. We have questions to put to him. But he has his own questions. Look at him. This man isn’t a slave. We think he knows some secret. He disdains our suspicions. Do we stretch him over coals, or whip him, maim him, and expect compliance?” Sorbel glared at Rehger. “Do you have the blood of the Plains People?”

  “To my knowledge, no.”

  Sorbel put his knotted fist to his throat.

  “Do you, to your knowledge, have the blood of Raldnor Am Anackire?”

  The chamber surged. The lamps flickered and flashed at the uneven breathing of men.

  “Do I take you to mean am I descended from the bloodline of Raldnor? My mother was an Iscaian farmwoman wedded to a peasant in the mountain valleys.”

  “What do you want?” Sorbel cried out shockingly, a sensitive who had lost control of diplomacy in the swirl of empathic vibrations.

  “Is it so difficult to guess?” Rehger said. “The woman Aztira was known to me. Like yourselves, I wonder if she could live after death, in the flesh. And if so, where she’s gone to.”

  • • •

  In the way of the ancient palaces of Vis, the Council Hall at Zaddath burrowed into the ground. Beneath the upper rooms, with their ledgers, clerks, formalities, and clandestine late sessions, corridors descended into the pit of a dry river-course. Down there, even the insect chorus did not sound. There were other noises, sometimes.

  The cell was not cramped, lit by a pair of clay lamps, and with a brazier even, against damp or cold. A clean pallet lay along one wall. The jailer, having detailed the room’s appointments, vowed to bring kindling, oil and food, at logical hours. Wine could also be purchased, even women. “Don’t get low, sir,” said the jailer. “I’ve never known any man to be left here more than six months.” Rehger seated himself, on the pallet, to wait.

  • • •

  He thought, in flowing, sequential degrees, of the passages of experience which had brought him here. The weave of the cloth, a tapestry of chariots and swords, or shouting crowds, of fire bursting from water and metal from its sheath—and the powder of marble. At the hem, in Iscaian dusk, his faceless mother. Through it all a fragile thread recurring, white as the center of the lamp-flames.

  Remember me sometimes. This the Amanackire had written to him, before the city perished.

  Alive or dead, she drew him on. He remembered. He remembered her.

  And, as he was doing this, another man came to the cell’s door and stared in by the grating.

  An amber-colored Shansarian eye saw, in the filmy light, the seated statue of a king musing, done in gold-washed bronze.

  The Shansarian snapped his fingers, and the jailer made him free of Rehger’s cell.

  Rehger did not get to his feet, and thus became a king giving audience from a couch. Plainly, he was not fraught. Not doubting or anxious at himself. Nothing could be done to him, got from him. Besides, he was honest. He had said it all.

  The Shansarian prince looked down on the seated king.

  “So the Fire Ride stays fresh for you, too? I should have come back, the next year, and beaten you, if your city had stood.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Above, in that chamber,” said the Shansarian, “you saw a conclave of allies, who distrust each other and all things. They summoned me from the province of Alisaar. I told them what I’d learned, the famous tale. Will you be told it, too?”

  “I came here for that purpose.”

  “Expect no embellishment. I’m not a paid spy of Vardath, like their Dortharian kiss-foot, Galutiyh. I worship the goddess. My land over the oceans was the first to swear allegiance to brotherhood with Raldnor, and the Lowlands. (Vathcri claims that. They cheat. It was Shansar.) Now, the Lowlands have become two races, and one of these an enemy. The tale is this. Near the end of the months of the scarlet star, a girl of the Amanackire traveled up through the Alisaarian north. She had two or three servants, who served her as the white ones are always served. A lordling of the Shansarian province who saw her on t
he street, recalled her beauty from Saardsinmey, where he had gone to attend to some affairs. He sent politely to her house to ask if she was the same lady, and if so, to congratulate her on leaving the city before the disaster, as he had done. The message was returned that she had witnessed the disaster, or its effect. The prince then sought her doors. They shut. Who aggravate the Amanackire? He came away.”

  “You were this prince?” said Rehger.

  The Shansarian made a flaunting gesture. “I. Kuzarl Am Shansar.”

  “You’d met her in Saardsinmey.”

  “Beheld her, after the chariots. She was by then yours. Or so it was said.”

  “But you saw her, nevertheless, frequently and closely enough, to pick her out this second time, in the north.”

  “Do I swear to that? The woman on the street went veiled. Yet, you’ll know, with a woman one fancies . . . the carriage of her head, the movement of her frame as she walks, linger in the mind.”

  Rehger waited. Kuzarl Am Shansar, studied him, and said at length, “Have you missed that she boasted to me? When she sent me a written message to declare she had survived.”

  “Not missed.”

  “She boasted also before you of the prowess of her people? And that they would bring down a proud city of the black races, to make an example of it?”

  Rehger did not reply. In his mind, a hawk fell, and Aztira kneeled and wept in hubris and horror. Not only her people, herself: She also had been divided. From that impetus, it had seemed to him, she had—this cunning sorceress—given herself to a murderer.

  “The wild tales now spread like weeds all over Alisaar and the province,” said Kuzarl. “Perhaps at her instigation. A woman of Saardsinmey had plotted to slay her, done it, seen her in her tomb. After the quake and the wave the Amanackire was reborn, in her own body, which healed of death by her magic.”

  “The Lowlanders believe life is inextinguishable.”

  “Yet not the flesh, which corrupts. There are legends in Shansar, of heroes who re-entered their own corpses in time of need. Raldnor is supposed to have done this during the un-war with the Zakors.”