The White Serpent

by Tanith Lee

  The women welcomed them courteously, like old friends of the family. They were very modest, nearly bashful. The dialect prevented much verbal commerce.

  The younger girl Kuzarl took down the stair. Rehger lay on the roof with the elder, in a nest of straw, under the stars which seemed to expand and spill across the eventual roof of night.

  • • •

  “These people never go north or west, they insist. They don’t pry into the limits of the jungle. Somewhere is the sea. But who can reach it? The forest closes on the traveler and eats him up. Only phantoms come back. Mine whimpered me a story of that, and frightened herself so I had to comfort her.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Rehger, “this town uses coins.”

  “There are other settlements in the mountains, north, and east,” said Kuzarl. “So they say. Traders go about from petty kingdoms of Thaddra, lost Zakor and Dortharian outposts.”

  “And the fabulous city. Have they heard of that?”

  “If they hear, they never listen.”

  They stood at the town’s border, where the graveyard was. The tombs were of raised impacted mud. Creepers and flowers grew over them. The stacks looked cheerful and careless, and where they had given way, the flowers only bloomed more exuberantly.

  “The city,” said Kuzarl, “is lapped in jungle, between this country and the coast. I begin to dream of Ashnesee. Did I mention, that is the name of it?”

  Rehger said, “Describe the dream.”

  “White light ringed by midnight and the fire of eyes.”

  “You also begin to talk like a priest.”

  “All Shansars are priests. Priest-warriors. Today, we fight again, you and I.”

  “And if I kill you,” said Rehger, “how will I find the way to Ashnesee?”

  “Do you suppose I can lead you there?”

  “She gave you directions,” said Rehger. “In Saardsinmey, or Sh’alis.”

  “She? The Amanackire. Ah. You think that.”

  Past the graveyard, the forest. The sun gilded its facade, then there was blackness.

  At length the Shansarian said, “You acknowledge, you are in a sort of dream, a sorcery. You say to yourself, nothing is as it appears to be.”

  “I understand you’d prefer I thought in this way.”

  “How are we to duel?” said Kuzarl. “Where shall we get swords? Shall I seek them? I might go into the woods, and take up two serpents. Each would become a blade of steel.”

  Rehger said, softly, “That was a trick she played on me.”

  “Who are you?” said the Shansarian. “Do you know yourself? Perhaps you died in Saardsinmey. Perhaps I died in the river.”

  Rehger turned. “Now,” he said.

  He jumped one of the tottered grave-stacks and came at Kuzarl. Rehger had drawn the knife the council at Zaddath had given him, to replace that which Galutiyh had had. It was proved. It could hack reeds and vines, and the flesh of lizards. The customs of the stadium were nullified, even the abstaining from sex before a combat. He brought the knife lengthways across Kuzarl’s ribs, and blood welled, red as only blood could ever be.

  Out sparkled Kuzarl’s dagger, Shalian in design, incised with a snake-fish, gems in the hilt. Kuzarl ignored the slit in his side.

  Rehger stood back, waiting. When the Shansarian lashed in at him, he blocked the blows, once, twice, and dashed the man from him, disdaining to slice him again.

  The sunshine rang on the land. But the fight was heavy and purposeless. Used to the fined reactions of a merciless training, Rehger found his body had become that of a stranger. It did not move as he remembered, and was itself resentful that it could not. There was, above the arena of the graveyard, no murmurous and excited crowd. There was no reason and no prize.

  The Shansar rolled and plunged at him again, and again, and Rehger met the advents and the blows, beating him aside, down, and to nothing. Rehger returned the onslaught without emphasis, allowing Kuzarl to shield himself.

  From the first and only wound the Shansar bled. This did not seem to disable him, and yet even he did not attack with spirit. He did not strive as he had in the river.

  Rehger cast the Zaddath knife from the right to the left hand. He went forward and brought his right fist cracking against Kuzarl’s jaw. As the Shansar staggered, Rehger kicked his feet from under him. Kuzarl crashed among the flowers, and the Shalian dagger flew away in a bush.

  “You died in a river,” Rehger said, “as you told me.”

  “Amrek,” said Kuzarl. “Kill me or let me up to fight you.”

  Rehger stood over him. “Brothers in Alisaar duel for their birthright. And what’s ours?”

  “The world. Raldnor’s quarrel. Who will possess.” He reached to grip Rehger’s ankle and pull him down. Rehger snapped Kuzarl’s hand away with his foot.

  “You’re bleeding, Kuzarl. Go back to the women in the town and ask them to see to it.”

  “Who will possess,” Kuzarl repeated. “Your race. Mine.”

  “Or the Amanackire. If I travel west, I’ll find the city.”

  Kuzarl lapsed against the ground. He seemed suddenly to suffer from the gash in his side.

  “I was her servant, in northern Alisaar—Sh’alis. I saw her unveiled. She was Aztira. She’d died and lived again. I lied to you.” He closed his eyes against the sun, his face secretive and cunning.

  “Did she say her sorcery would act on me to bring me after her?”

  “She said nothing of you. She forgot you, Lydian.”

  “Then she only spoke of the city.”

  “Something of the city.”

  “Enough that you could find your way to it.”

  “Yes, yes. . . .”

  “Why did you delay to do so?”

  Kuzarl opened his eyes again. His face became proud, arrogant, unknowing. “This thing, and that thing. Or fate elected me your guide.”

  “But no longer.”

  Tardily, cautiously, Kuzarl sat up. He leaned on a piece of grave, and helped himself to his feet.

  “Ashara-Anack,” he said.

  He went without haste, quite steadily (as after the river), back toward the town. He made no attempt to reclaim the costly dagger from the bushes. To Rehger, he said nothing more.

  The Lydian walked through the graveyard and in under the arches of the jungle trees. The morning light was behind him, the west was represented now by the density of the forest. Soon, as Kuzarl had said that they said, the forest folded in upon him.

  It was night. Night in day. There was no day. There was no direction, north or south, east or west. And in the coolness of his anger, the drunkenness of disillusion, and the clarity of the dark, he gave himself then to fate, or to Anackire, or to the will and the afterimage of the woman, Aztira.

  Nothing seemed alive in the forests now but for himself and the enormous growing trees. Although there was great heat and moisture. When he was thirsty, which was not often, he drank from the sweating leaves.

  He went on until an incredible tiredness dragged him to the earth. Then he slept, and when he woke, went on again.

  Childishness entered into him. He had towered among men, but here in the endless night of the trees, his identity was valueless.

  If he had measured time, it might have been five days later that he came on the pillar.

  Its paleness, or some other thing, caused it to glow in the ebony forest. It matched the tallest trunks to their topmost heights, eighty feet, or a hundred. Coming near, you saw the figures of birds and cats, dragons and serpents, carved into the pure white stone.

  Beyond the pillar, straight as a knife-cut through the forest, ran an unpaved track, two chariot-lengths across. Nothing blurred the track, or had rooted in it. It went into distance, until the darkness smoothed it away. Without a doubt, it led somewhere. It led to the ultimate hallu
cination, the Amanackire city. Ashnesee.

  Book Six

  Ashnesee

  20. Death and Life

  IT WAS A PLACE OF BLACKNESS, of untextured night sleeker than water. But out of the black sprang a flame.

  And the flame gathered itself, and grew.

  The flame became flesh.

  Became a woman of unnatural height, white as the snow upon a mountain.

  A white body, and eight white arms stretched in rays . . . beneath, the torso ended in the tail of a great snake; the coils like alabaster, scalloped by scales that gleamed faintly, as they ceaselessly stirred.

  Far above, framed by a snow-cloud of hair which was also a whirlpool of serpents (twisting, spitting to her shoulders), a pale face, set with a devouring stare of colorless ice. Or colorless fire.

  Aztira’s face.

  Then the sheen of her became unbearably effulgent— and went out.

  Only the untextured blackness remained, sleeker than water.

  • • •

  The moon was rising as she left the temple. The Star was already aloft, and west and east the sky was a clear magenta, deepening into night only at the zenith.

  From the height of the temple terrace, the young woman had an encompassing vantage of the city, spread around and about her down to its ring of walls. Outside these walls the flattened landscape had swum into nothingness. The city itself had the look of an artifact, a small assembly of carven buildings on the board of some Vis war game. The Star and the stained moon dyed it like a fiery bone.

  The girl abandoned her height, descending a broad paved stairway between garden slopes of sculpted trees, basins and arcs of water.

  Her whiteness glimmered in the hot dusk, if not so emphatically as in the temple. That which she had created there, on the altar, the image of Inner Self symbolized as the goddess, had probably been witnessed, though not a sigh penetrated the sanctum. It was to her a spiritual exercise, a condition of life, similar to the walk she took, morning or evening, through the wide avenues of Ashnesee, or across the plain beyond, where the wind blew sometimes warm and saline from the jungle-forests, or a slinking tirr might come to mouth her footsteps or rub its nightmare head, in abasement, on the dust. She need have no fear of tirr, and in the city of her kind, she was foremost among equals.

  At the bottom of the temple terraces, two men of the Amanackire stood beneath a cibba tree, maybe by design, to look at her. Their whiteness, like hers, shone in the umbra of tree and night.

  Greetings, Aztira.

  They did not speak aloud, but within. And in words only approximately.

  In the same fashion, she replied, and walked on, along one of the marble roads without a name, between the pale palaces.

  Silence lay on the city. Like the most primal of creatures, these people had no vocal conversation, sounds rarely escaped them. They moved with a deftness nearly noiseless. They seldom inclined to music, and perhaps never sang. Their children, few, for birth was controlled and selective among them, were as quiet as they.

  The road was lined solely by palaces, with here and there an obelisk or shrine. These places, some now blooming into lamplight, were interspersed with parks and groves. There was very little else in Ashnesee. Beneath the mansions and the lawns, under the streets, the city was cut by tunnels and chambers, generally manmade, where the maintenance of everyday living went on. Ashnesee was served by slaves, and had been built by slaves. Once dark Thaddrians, Otts and Corhls, and darker Zakors, they were by now a mingled, molded race, some generations bred to their duties and their station.

  After walking for the half of one hour, meeting no other, Aztira reached her house. It rose on an eminence, unwalled but moated by a mosaic courtyard. Near the stair was a tall pillared edifice, the Raldnor Shrine. From this proximity the mansion of Aztira was to be identified.

  She went up the stair, over the mosaic, and through opened doors. Beyond the unlit vestibule, whose plaster was marked with dimmed pictures, lay the round painted hall of an Amanackire palace.

  Ghostly lotus lamps floated on slender chains in the high ceiling. No slave had yet come to kindle them.

  Aztira crossed through the hall, climbed more steps, proceeded into the braincase of a tower, a large bare room, with one large window of smoldering glass.

  Before this window, which faced east, Aztira stopped. Her stillness was like that of an icon, she did not seem to breathe.

  Her entire consciousness was centered at the core of her mind. She was listening, but not for any kind of sound.

  • • •

  In the Lowlands, a village of five huts—this was her birthplace. She was born pale-eyed, and perhaps her mother had misliked her gaze. When the child’s hair began to come like silver flax, they knew, and took her to a temple.

  Her parents, unremembered, and vanished in her first year, were pure yellow-fair Lowlander, accustomed to mind-speech as to need. Otherwise ignorant, solitary, fixed. From such stock the albino strain normally emerged.

  Before she could walk, or talk in the verbal sense (Lowland children from the initial months were capable of a sure if eccentric telepathy), Aztira was in Hamos, that xenophobic city of the south Plains. Here she grew up among her own, those with whom she had no ties of blood, and here she was schooled, as all such children were, a process which incidentally discovered among them the most adept, the most flawlessly Of Anackire.

  There was no love, and there was no kindness, not in that inner reach. But Aztira did not miss love or kindness, for neither was there any injustice or cruelty shown her. There could be no lies. Though educated to use the spoken language forms of Vis—and, too, of the blond Sister Continent beyond the seas—communication rested on the hundred thousand nuances of mental dialogue. It was learnt early, how to parry and to protect the insights and signals of the mind. For, unlike the merchanting telepaths of Vardath or Moih, these did not give to tactful atrophy any of their supernatural gift. The Amanackire were also children of Truth.

  They were a cold people, so the Vis had always named them, even at the gold-haired periphery of their tribe. What need had they for warmth? Passion and effusion were the sugar and salt with which the mind-blinded spiced the turning meat of their relationships. What the Amanackire desired they asked, and what they would not render they refused. Now, because they had grown powerful and self-sufficient, because their legend had imbued all Vis, because they were coming to believe that they were gods, they did not hanker after human things.

  What was ambition? If wanted, advantage might be taken. And what was love . . . a carnal urge that in the Lowlander was subject to command—or only the product of fear—terror of loneliness or death—which states the pure Lowlander had almost eradicated, and which the Amanackire had almost ceased to know.

  For the soul continued forever. And (like a mild breeze the other intuition moved upon them), the flesh itself might be sustained.

  When she was twelve, a year after she became a woman in the physical sense, Aztira had found herself capable of healing.

  One of her fellows had fallen, the skin undone. Aztira knit up the skin again, and drew off the scar like smoke into the air. The motive had been the empathy of startled pain. The fount, herself. To heal was native to her. In fact, she had effected some slight cures before, not understanding what she did.

  There were other abilities. In Hamos, especially the inner enclave of Hamos, they were a normalcy.

  In the Women’s House, which Aztira had now entered, leaving the fostering of her guardians—never anything resembling kin—Aztira practiced the psychic lore of the antique temples. She unbound in herself those arts that—outside, Vis-over—were the tricks of magician-priesthoods, and the substance of myth.

  She was aware of the other universe beyond the stones and seals of her Lowland city. Sometimes she saw actual Vis, the beings of this outcast world. They were as alien to he
r as she to them, in appearance and attitude. She was used to her own kind. The darkness of the Vis perturbed her, even. She had been taught these dark races were the lords of the planet once, in a time which had itself succeeded an earlier unlike era. She recognized the Vis as mortal.

  A priestess of a clandestine sanctuary, a scholarly, wise child, she reached her seventeenth year in Hamos, having experienced nothing else. She had had three lovers, perused a multitude of books, unleashed in her body powers that neither alarmed nor distorted her notions of self. She had grasped the fundamental meaning of that which was called Amanackire.

  • • •

  Although there was positive sexual differentiation among the Amanackire, there was no submission to gender. In prior history, the Lowlands had upheld a matriarchy. While such as Moih now aped the Vis way, ruled by councils of males, the center of Hamos was a council comprising male and female proportionally.

  Before this council, Aztira was summoned. She was just seventeen, having no fears or doubts on the matter of anything.

  She was among the most adept of the Amanackire at Hamos, and the moment had arrived when the existence should be made known to her of Ashnesee.

  In an amorphous, telepath’s way, she had already intercepted atmospheric currents to do with the City of the West.

  Now they told her, in solid terms of geography and building and hidden routes. The abstraction was given dimensional reality. Ashnesee was a city and a kingdom. It was, moreover, an intention. Once before, the temporal power of the Lowlanders had been thrown down. Presently Amrek the Genocide would have crushed all trace of them from the earth. Amrek’s memory, shunned where possible among the Vis, had survived in black freshness with Aztira’s people: He was enthroned in their mythos beside the messiah, Raldnor. For where Raldnor had been the life-granting spring of Anackire, Amrek was the anti-life. They were, in the being of the Balance, one thing. As the people of the Plains now resumed a former name on the tongue of Vis—the Shadowless—so Amrek was the Shadow. And, if he had gone, body and ego, into the past, yet his elemental presence was retained in the old hatred, the antipathy between races. In New Alisaar, broken in all but material dues from the conqueror Shansars, and in Free Zakorian Ylmeshd to the northwest, and in Dorthar itself, the shining hub of Vis, which in embracing the godhead of Anackire had degraded and corrupted her to an idol—there and other-where, the Shadow sifted and slunk, and stretched itself. In every honey skin and skin of bronze and jet, in every skein of sable hair and every darkened eye—there, the Shadow was, and waited.