The White Serpent

by Tanith Lee

  • • •

  Ottamet, the capital, was a thatched wooden town, painted scarlet, rose and cream, with brilliant blue jetties of obscure religious meaning, that prodded half a mile into the paler blue of the waves. The sea was tidal but calm, and there had been a strong breeze on the body of the water. The crossing had taken little more than a day. From Ottamet, the galley turned north, flattering the coast. Miniature Ott also had been flinging territorial nets, and advanced in patches up along the Sea-Lake until a wide rivermouth checked her. Here was Put, wooden and thatched, rouged and jettied. Wild parrots nested in the roofs, screeching and squawking. The echoing omnipotence of the black jungle-forest loomed and towered behind. The river estuary, a swamp pillared by colossal reeds, choked up with sand banks, islets and hot springs, sent a quavering fume into the sky. It was possible to get through, carrying a light vessel upended overland, until the main channel of the river won free. No man of Ott wished to go that way, but several were willing to sell all manner of boats.

  Lizards the size of two-year-old children sat on stones to watch the bargaining, often conducted in sign language, the tall Shansars and Zakors, the shorter, chunky Otts, with playful wicked eyes. The parrots screeched and scratched.

  Before sunset all but one of the Zakors had deserted. One of the Shansarians had gone down once more with fever and been taken in at a hospice by a holy jetty. The Karmian, who was related to this man, became woebegone and was therefore released by Kuzarl to cook for the sick one and save his stomach from Putish “muck.” Next morning, when the parrots were barely stirring, the four remaining men of the expedition went out of Put with a slender rowboat slung on their backs.

  The river won fifteen miles upstream in a skein of purple lilies that gave suddenly on muscular brown water.

  Like a dream the mountain banks of western Thaddra came floating toward them as they rowed.

  • • •

  The mountains stepped down and walled them in. On the sloping plain between the mountains and the river-course, the forests pushed and crowded nearer to the water, and in parts invaded it. Massive trees had rooted in the river, which clashed and hurled itself about them, foaming with rage. But the peaks of the mountains stood in the forest like giants in a meadow, staring away into the past and future indifferently.

  • • •

  Clogged by the jungle, the river had split in strands and narrowed. Conversely it was very deep. They made their journey that day by thrusting off with oars against the boles of trees and great ferns. Overhead, the boughs met to form a tunnel.

  From noon onward there began, beyond the noises of their exertion, the boat, the water, the forecast stillness of approaching storms.

  The air itself became another hindrance, another block against which to drive the unwilling vessel.

  Near sunset a royal sky was erected miles off behind their sunshade of leaves. The atmosphere boiled slowly over.

  For an hour thunder tuned itself among incredible distances, growling like cruel hunger around the valley’s hollow belly, striking the mountains and struck aside. From the forests things answered with squalls and cries, brilliant, snuffed-out flickers of wings. Then the silence returned, weighing like lead.

  The men let down their oars, laid them over the planks. The water along the channel crinkled, flattened, and grew thick as agate; only where it rocked against the boat did it move, and this seemed half illusion.

  Lightning speared across the leaf-eyelets of the sky.

  It pierced a distant crag, or seemed to, exploding. Then the thunder boomed as if the heavens fell in masonry blocks.

  Wind like a scythe tore through the valley of the river, bending the trees, making the boat jump in the solid water. The men crouched down. The Var-Zakor was unnerved, agitated, the Shansar servant looked on in a trance.

  The wind shrieked unknown words. Lightning passed once more with a tearing hiss.

  This lightning hit the top of the tree-canopy, about thirty feet away from the boat.

  The world turned inside out as a sheet of living flame threw itself upward. The agate river was changed to gold. A deluge of burning leaves and branches, a fire-howl, enveloped everything.

  As the boat ignited, Rehger pitched himself into the river.

  Beneath three or four incendiary surfaces, darkness filled the deep narrows. There was no bottom, only here and there blind shelves and obtrusions of the land.

  Presently Rehger rose for air. The boat lay some way off, alight and flaring in a cage of flaming elements, wood, reflections. The fire was all around, and above him. Of the other men there was no sign. He dived again.

  Red light filtered down to him now, and the river gods sank their fangs into his heels.

  He rose a second time, much later. The fire was in turmoil, upstream, but flashing out, catching, hurrying after him.

  One of the gods under the river took hold of Rehger by the waist and pulled him, with iron human hands, down again deep under the water.

  There, in the opaque reddish dark, he saw the pallor of the Shansar’s clothes, flesh and clouding hair. Kuzarl’s pale eyes were wide, his paler teeth clenched, grinning, while the scintillant breath escaped grudgingly between them. Letting Rehger go, he hovered before him, like a sky creature resting at midflight, in the levity of the water. Kuzarl had no weapons in his grasp, was revealing the emptiness of his hands. He would use only himself, like one stadium-trained.

  To Kuzarl’s mind, apparently, the goddess had devised and provided. There was to be combat—

  As the Shansar curled over to grapple him, Rehger swung beneath him, lunging up under Kuzarl’s body, flinging him off and off and away, a knot of torso and limbs twisting capriciously in the medium of liquid.

  Each man shattered the surface once more, perhaps twelve feet from each other, here the limits of the channel. The fire lashed at them, and smoke drifted from their hair as from the water. The atmosphere was spoiled, but they gulped it in. The Shansar laughed, without noise or breath, his eyes blazing like the forest. Tradition: A berserker. He plunged in a vast diving spring, like a leaping fish, straight up and across the channel, falling on Rehger, bearing him down, one of the ringed hands clamped on the Lydian’s throat.

  As they sank again, Kuzarl’s fingers pressed for the life in the neck veins, to bring on sightless confusion, or unconsciousness, but the neck of the Swordsman was armored in muscle, a statue’s neck, like the rest of his physique. As Rehger began remorselessly to detach Kuzarl’s clasp, the Shansar broke of his own accord and tried to turn to kick his adversary away. But Rehger it now was who secured Kuzarl, forcing back his grinning face, using legs and arms to detain him, and at the same moment angle his body into an agonizing spinal arch.

  But the medium of liquid, yet again, advantaged and misled.

  The Shansarian abruptly tossed himself backward, a voluntary description of the arch, and hurled both men over in a series of spinning wheels, from which in turn they loosed, and so from each other, to hang suspended there, unappeased.

  Certain burning stuff from the forest above, not immediately extinguished, was now arrowing down past them through the river, like flaming comets. Between their lips the silver flames of their breath escaped.

  They were not merely flame-breathing sky creatures. Dehumanized, the Shansar was now equally submerged in the fighting-madness of homeland ritual. Nothing was in his eyes but starvation, greed. Buoyed in fluid, his eloquent hands were taut and ready. To Rehger, the blood-lust of Saardsinmey had come back. It was not genuine, or even entire, for through it he thought quite cleanly: This was a substitution, a surrogate, scapegoat for the unbearable itch of hatred.

  The crimson comets seared by, going out like old wine in the abyss beneath. How far might they fall?

  The two men, strong lungs still lined by a little air, forgetful, eager to renew their contact now as two lovers separate
d, drove forward, slammed into each other, grasped, would not let go.

  Kuzarl, his mouth stretched in a grimace like joy, started to rip, to gouge, to dismantle his enemy. But Rehger, speedlessly, with a terrible expressionless power, had commenced to wring, with one arm alone, the last of the air from the Shansar’s lungs. The left arm of the Shansar was pinned. He had discovered it to be so, and redoubled the efforts of the right arm— but Rehger now had the right arm also, and propelled it, slowly, graciously, aside and backward—

  The awful complaint of this right arm, rotated from its orbit, almost from the socket, penetrated Kuzarl’s madness only in order to heighten his murderous frenzy—but a kind of screaming, part berserk fury, and part sheer pain, shot his lungs of the last air. His ribs caving under Rehger’s crushing vice, a helpless spasm, like a ghastly hiccupping, sucked the water in instead.

  All at once the Shansar was suffocating. Drowning.

  He floundered, began to struggle, the gargantuan vitality of the berserker state beating like gavels—on the obduracy of bronze.

  Rehger, his own vision blackened, his own lungs seeming to have collapsed flat as the rent skins of drums, held Kuzarl like a huge, fighting, insane child. Which grew sleepy, which ceased, inch by inch, second by second, to fight. . . .

  Locked together, idly revolvingly, they were gliding now down and downward.

  Rehger felt the heavy head loll against him, the legs, the jeweled hands flexible as weeds—felt but could no longer see. And now could no longer feel.

  He thrust against the water, to regain the in-jutting of the channel, the rocks and roots which all this while had grazed against him, falling. Rehger, holding Kuzarl now solely by the princely buckle of his belt, hauled them both, lightly cumbersome, unseeing, unreal, in a miasma or shadow, against the channel side. Using its leverage, Rehger launched himself, and the deadweight weightlessness of Kuzarl, upward—

  Darkness. Of water, sight, mind. There was no end to the dark, or the shadow. To the water, no end. Subsurface, the channel must have spread. They were in under the rock, buried, in a stone river.

  Whiteness blasted across his face. The air shrilled into his lungs like knives: He could not make them take it, and then—could not get enough.

  Vision was senseless— They were still inside the water. Vertically now, it lanced upon him. Rain. And the fire was out.

  Under the rain, and the sullen sky snagged on remnants of the forest roof, Rehger rolled the Shansar on his face and worked the river out of his chest and guts.

  The blood-desire had faded as his own life ebbed. It would have been easy to continue dropping down into oblivion and night. But only now, surely, did he think it easy, now when he had brought both of them back from it alive.

  Kuzarl, lying breathing on his side, looked at Rehger with inflamed, gentle eyes.

  “That’s not the last of it,” said Kuzarl Am Shansar.

  The boat was gone. The Shansarian servant, the Var-Zakor—neither had reappeared. The rain fell. The sky guttered out.

  Rehger did not answer Kuzarl.

  Kuzarl said, hoarsely, “The Three Ordeals, to find out guilt or innocence, or the victory, or the essence of what must be. Fire, water, steel. Not always in that order. The hero Raldnor passed through them. The steel of the assassin. Tempest. Volcano.”

  “Save yourself,” said Rehger. “We’ve some way to go yet, I imagine.”

  “I don’t speak of facts, but of truths.”

  “Shansar truths.”

  “The Fire Ride— That was the fire, repeated here, you and I. And for you the fire in the sea, like Raldnor, and the wave that had your slave-city—an ordeal of water. And steel, every one of your duels before the mob. But one more time, the steel, with me.” Kuzarl was not yet properly returned to his body to be quelled by its discomfort.

  Rehger said: “On your terms, I killed you in the river. You’re bested. Your reptile goddess gave you to me.”

  Rehger’s eyes, and face, were composed. He spoke without malice or gluttony.

  But Kuzarl said, “You killed me and restored me. You kept me for the steel, as she kept you.”

  “Anackire.”

  “Anackire.”

  “If she exists, your goddess, if she is what your people and her own people say, if she is Everything, if she is all places and times, this land, this weather, all men, you, and I, then we’re much to be blamed, Shansarian. We botched the world. We made it ill and wrongly, and deserve the disaster and the misery of it. Get up. Let’s get on wherever you reckon we’re going. If your philosophy’s accurate, what does it matter?”

  But Kuzarl only nodded and rose to his feet quite steadily. His jewelry had ceased to shine, but his eyes had become once again polished, luminous amber.

  “Why do the children play games?” said Kuzarl. “Isn’t it unkind and unbecoming to prevent them, even when they bruise their limbs or sometimes hurt their companions. Children must play. And why should we think so?”

  Rehger only waited. Kuzarl gestured indolently upriver, westward.

  Through the rain, the burnt charcoal fringes of the forest, along the riverbank, westward, they went.

  • • •

  The tangle of trees, miles and days beyond the fire, shut the river. Only the pinnacles of the mountains sometimes showed. They seemed intrinsic not to the earth, but to the sky.

  It was possible to snare lizards in the muddy, silty places which the river had left behind. The water which was available was full of salts. In preference, they sliced the stems of ferns and drank their sour vegetable milk.

  The now-and-then visibility of the mountains, the passaging of daylight, guided them west.

  Aside from necessities, they did not speak.

  Their individual endurance and rate of progress was not competitive. They had been welded into a bizarre union. As if by prearrangement, if not the plan of Anackire, all else was removed from them, and there was at last no doubt that a goal existed and would be achieved. Despite the brawl under the river, neither man was impaired, or had given up his wits. The hard common sense of savagery was on them now.

  In the middle of a day, conceivably the fifteenth or sixteenth after the fire (or it might have been longer), the Lydian, who was ahead of the Shansar, cut his way through the continuous forest fence into a clearing so wide its farther extremes were out of sight. It was not the conclusion of the jungles for, far off, they lifted up again into the sunlight, like mounds of a blue haze, and ghosts of the mountaintops were anchored over them, southerly, though no longer to the north.

  In the clearing was a town.

  Having subsisted some time on tasteless and infrequent meat and the resin of ferns, maybe the oddity of the town was simply perspective, transposed.

  It had a strain of Ott, of Thaddra, too. The buildings were of mud and had grown together in the manner of a hive. Carving stuck out of the thatches. Wooden birds roosted there, perhaps for good fortune. Then one of these carvings shook its feathers. A flightless fowl was tending its nest. The town seemed to have no proper relation to the jungle-forest. Its people did not stare at the two travelers, only gave them occasional glances.

  In a square was a market, where they were able, surprisingly with coins, to get food.

  At one side of the square, regardless of other business, a custom of Ott went on, a Death Feast, at a long table. In the seat of honor, embalmed and dressed in its best, the cadaver sat overlooking the feasters with indigo eyelids. The Otts toasted the deathshead and invited passersby to quench their thirst; Rehger and Kuzarl were among these. The beer was potent. Nothing, in any case, seemed truly curious to them, or real.

  As dusk came on in a preface of light, a red star appeared in the wide dome over the clearing. It was the first night of Zastis.

  “Still the fire,” said Kuzarl.

  They were seated on a tavern r
oof, under the awning woven of leaves. An outrider of a night breeze tried the awning, feathering the leaves, the movement of a wing. They might have lived in the town many years.

  Down in the square, the funeral had just disbanded. The figure of Death, a man dressed as a woman, and all in white, had appeared to lead the dead away for burial, with happy songs and jests.

  Kuzarl’s blond head was back, to gaze at the Star. “Your Zastis doesn’t trouble my kind. They have no special hunger. All Shansars will tell you so, as they rush for the brothel door. No, no. Transparent lust is the mark of the Vis.”

  Rehger watched the last of the funeral party. The stirring in his blood was remote, but he had been aware of it for days, realizing the season. He was accustomed to containment, or to the alternatives of action. The combat in the river, even so long ago, had been tinged by some premonition of the Star.

  “Zastis is a love-house of the Vis gods,” said Kuzarl, “set on fire and burning forever in the skies.” Kuzarl might have been drunk. Both men might have been so. “Or,” said Kuzarl, “Zastis is one of the mysterious flying chariots of the Lowlanders, or of the Dragon-Kings of the Vis. Combusted, flaming magic, unable to go out, its erotic radiation sprinkling the earth like scarlet snow—”

  “If you want a woman,” said Rehger, “go and find one.”

  “See there,” said Kuzarl.

  Across the rosy twilight roofs, another roof, not far away. There were two women on it, one dressing the other’s hair. This apparition gleamed in the gathering dusk, for though the women were smoky-skinned, their long tresses had been bleached. The seated one had noticed Kuzarl’s scrutiny. She smiled to herself and looked away. The other continued the hairdressing, but also she began to sing in a low cindery voice.

  To get to the women’s thatch was no difficulty, since almost all the roofs ran into each other at one point or another.