The White Serpent

by Tanith Lee

  Against this, Ashnesee had been raised.

  A fortress. A graven image of another thing, which only was. A sword of snow. The exacting completing second half of the endless Balance. A serpent all whiteness poised upon its tail.

  Into herself Aztira accepted Ashnesee, the voluntary conception of a child.

  The idea had a symmetry not one of her race could deny.

  The very name itself, worked a magic within her, like the melody of that sleeping sea she had also only heard of. It was the true name of the oldest city of her kind—Ashnesea—the rusted blade left lying south of south on the Plains.

  Slaves of the Vis race had been herded to the building of this reincarnation of Ashnesee. It lay innermost in the thick fur of the dark beast’s back, the jungles of the northern west. And close to malignant hating Zakoris. Yet further particles of Balance.

  To Ashnesee then, would Aztira go? It was offered to her as a quest at the moment her youth itself might have been craving one.

  For Ashnesee was to be sought. As, long ago, some had sought Ashnesea.

  A month later, Aztira left by the north gate of her city, alone and on foot, which was how the Amanackire mostly traveled.

  • • •

  In Xarabiss, she was stared at. It was summer, and there were crimson flowers on the land like a daylong sunset. The peasants came to offer her fruit or bread, little basins of broth or wine, with a garland arranged at the brim. (What she required, she accepted.) In the cities they made way for her, soldiers pushing the crowds aside. At hostelries and inns, the best chamber was at once allocated, but as a rule she chose the open, where they would place an awning on a roof or in a garden. She was never disturbed. The busy, loud-clashing crystal cities of Xarabiss passed as if on wheels. They were none of them her city of the Plains.

  In the narrow land of Ommos, in theory a Lowland possession, if not much cherished and barely kept, the journeying girl elicited terror and aversion. In the towns, no one would look at her, they skulked or ran away. Ommos itself was considered ugly Vis-over. Coming on a party of mixes on a shore, she took passage in their ship to Dorthar.

  Dorthar she did not amaze.

  At the first town she was greeted with ceremony and gifts, and refused them. Unshaken, they offered her the use of a traveling chariot, chariot-animals, and a driver bowing to the street. She had come all that distance a pedestrian, preferring it, undaunted, having no need for the security of wagon or servant, her physical vivacity, that looked so fragile, stronger than the strength of a healthy man. But she did assume the chariot for a little of the journey. She was curious to see the city of Anackyra.

  Again, on the open road (now a paved highway), a delegation accosted the Amanackire. Men in gold trim and heavy ornaments who asked, under their goddess-banners, if she desired escort, who inquired if she wished to meet with the Storm Lord—he would, they promised, receive her with pomp. She put them right, there. She had no interest in their High King, the mixed-blood bastard descendant of Raldnor, and though she did not speak of it in that way, that was the way they took it from her, without a flicker or a risen brow.

  Under a dragon comb of mountains, Anackyra demonstrated streets of hammered marble, many Anackire temples of bare-breasted golden harlots, bleached-hair Dortharians, prosperous Vathcrians, and tall, brazen Vis.

  Having to address her, from the princes in their chariots to scrabbling rabble by the gutters, it was with the title Priestess, but now and then, Goddess.

  She lived a year in Dorthar, up in the hills between Anackyra and the ruins of ancient Koramvis. A lord had made over a villa to her, the nobility had been jostling to do it. Mix slaves waited on her. Tame pigeons nested in the feather trees, but the kennel of hunting kalinx the lord had removed—the Amanackire Goddess had no inclination to venery.

  If any white Amanackire were her neighbors in these regions, they did not reveal themselves, and were not spoken of.

  There was an importance to Dorthar, and to the dissimilar twin cities—the ruin above, the rebirth below. One adjourned here, to absorb the psychic smolder, or to pay some obscure respect to it.

  This spot was a well of Power, deep and unstable as the earthquake-faulted strata of the land.

  Aztira compared it to the being of the other spot, the gamepiece of the Amanackire, which by then, like a tiny muffled light, was a beacon in her brain. Ashnesee had been erected solely upon ground. There was no reservoir of mystic and violent energy beneath. In itself, that was significant enough.

  All this time, the time of traveling and resting, no part of Aztira had faltered. None of her beliefs was shaken or changed. These mortal Vis were alien, and interested her less than their monuments. Fearing nothing, knowing herself mightier, and awarded everywhere homage, she did not query her supremacy. And when she glanced inwardly toward the beacon of the City of the West, it did not trouble her any more than the sea and the forests which coiled it round.

  After that year of pause breathing in the airs of Dorthar, Aztira traveled again. She went down the coast in the other direction, south by ship from Thos, and crossed to Shansarian Alisaar. (She found Shansarian reverence like that of other countries, and their unease also quite comparable.)

  She was approaching the age of nineteen, in Sh’alis, when the slow mental breakers from the west altered their tempo.

  Her leisurely meandering was leading her always to Ashnesee, and thus in a manner Ashnesee had already claimed her. She was only a filament straying from and to the kernel of its thought and plan. Otherwise, having no necessity to reach outward, she had fed her eyes and ears, her moods, but never explored analytically anything of the real and ordinary life of mankind which everywhere fermented. Yet suddenly, for no apparent reason, as if she had put her hand upon a pulse in the body of some statue—she felt the genuine aliveness of the world and of its mass of peoples, surging and whirling on every side. And only then she learned how Ashnesee had also felt this surge and whirl.

  Like a beast rousing from fathomless sleep, Ashnesee had lifted its lids and distended its nostrils—

  The white serpent, waking. . . . As Aztira sensed the terrible invading threat of living mass pulsing, boiling against her, Ashnesee long ago had sensed it. And Ashnesee the serpent was gathering itself.

  For the first hour in all her days, Aztira was over-come by a featureless, awful doubt. She did not see what it was, for it was so unusual.

  In the burning starlit nights of northern Alisaar, the goddess-girl, unable to compose herself for sleep, paced up and down the courts and passages of a house some Shansarian aristocrat had given her. Her own instinct, feeling the ambivalent clutch of external life, was to thrust it off, trample it. The woken instinct of Ashnesee was like her own.

  The sword-snake yearned to strike a warning, warding blow.

  As she comprehended her own skin on her bones, the flowing hair that clothed her head, so with Ashnesee, now.

  What Ashnesee willed, she must will, for the will was corporate, indivisible.

  Linked with this power, some sensation never before experienced entered her marrow. It was both physical and spiritual. It had no name, but it shamed her, and this led her at length to suppose it was, itself, shame.

  A Shansar prince with Karmian graces, who had religiously sent her wines and flowers and jewels, was going down to the south, to vaunting “Free” Alisaar. A chariot race, famous and notorious, drew him there. Most of his Shalian household would go with him, and quantities of horses.

  Aztira informed the man, Kuzarl, she would travel with him but without display. Falling on his knees, he told her such a commission was an honor.

  She did not know why impulse drove her south, to Saardsinmey, a city by the ocean. Infallibly, her psychic’s prescience thrust her forward. She obeyed herself, for in the past she had always been able to rely on what she was.

  • • •

/>   New Alisaar loathed white Lowlanders and demanded money (Kuzarl’s), and sneered behind its fingers, but was also afraid.

  Aztira subtracted funds but only one servant from Kuzarl, a mix girl with tawny eyes. Aside from this, Aztira, in the coastal city, broke free of Kuzarl entirely. He was cleaving to her, although she had not lain with him, as if he were her lover—protective, possessive. He brought pearls to lave her feet and she directed him at once away.

  During the last piece of journey out of Sh’alis, riding in a curtained litter, Aztira had given herself, doubtfully, to inner conflict.

  It came to her she traveled beneath a shimmering blade. It came to her that, like a cipher of vengeance, she herself would be the precursor of the storm.

  Saardsinmey was the target of the Amanackire sword. An upsurge of Vis arrogance was typified in it. What could be more suitable than to destroy such a thriving boast. Nothing need be threatened or claimed. The message of the act, even if received without knowledge would, on other levels, be understood exactly by every consciousness of Vis. And the Sea of Aarl swept the beaches of Saardsinmey, an oceanic earthquake zone with cellars of somnolent fire. . . . Walking about the streets of the ruby-tiled metropolis, the urge was on her repeatedly to smite them with hand or mind—For this she had come, to revel in aversion and foresight.

  She dressed in white and veiled her white hair in whiteness. And surrendered herself to the flaming sweet tumult of pride, going up and down a city of the living dead.

  • • •

  The racial hysteria grew in her like a poison until it almost seared her out. She had not thought to resist or to question. She went on watching and waiting on the first intimations of destruction. Only then could she take her own departure. She must see it begin.

  And in this heightened state, this sort of ecstasy, she started to hear a name, over and over. Even Kuzarl had uttered it. It was the name of a god—that was, one of the mortal gods of the mortal Vis.

  The Lydian, they said. The Lydian, Lydian, Lydian.

  Everything had been elevated or compressed to symbols by now, in her delirium of Power. So she regarded the virtue of this name, and said to it: The city makes you its soul. Then, the Lydian is Saardsinmey. And she thought, He will die in the doom of the city, this man.

  And she started to seek him out, but in a dream. She did not, in fact, set eyes on him. Nevertheless, suddenly, in some supernatural manner, she found him. In the slang of Vis she was a sorceress. She “looked” at Saardsinmey’s Lydian, and “saw.”

  Scattered across the world, probably, there might be others, the brood of palace women and freed slaves. Yet here, at this node of history, an ultimate of symbols had occurred. The death of the boastful city could encompass a death of the bloodline of the Genocide.

  Saardsinmey, the Lydian: Amrek, the Shadow.

  She witnessed only a moment of the famous race, from a balcony near the end of Five Mile Street—the chariots tore down the night in a molten river, torchfire and screaming, and were gone.

  He would be the victor. She had already judged that.

  Purchased outside an inn, by an alley, two birds slain for a supper. Galvanized from corruption by her white hands, she sent them where she had learned they would be noted, for the Lydian.

  Victory is transient. Since he is, tonight, your city, tell him this.

  Earthquake had spoken before she did, out at sea, a promise. The sword in the starry sky and she its messenger—

  That had been the apex of her flight.

  Immediately after, she plunged to the nadir below.

  • • •

  She, too, was to die in Saardsinmey.

  Not in the cataclysm. For her, it would be sooner.

  She woke in a lucid dawn, aware. (The pink petals of sunrise glimmered on her couch, as she lay in the old house behind the lacemakers, by the street they called Gem-Jewel. . . . )

  The unheard bellow of the city’s gathering death had obscured the lower crying that was her own.

  She was not yet nineteen. She struggled and beat death away, there in her mind, in dawn and silence, alone. But the huge black hawk came down again upon her heart, and settled there, folding its wings. And she accepted.

  She beheld then in a bright fragment, how it was to be, and that it came through him, her ending—the Lydian, the Shadow. He was her death, and, strangely she was his—but his life, also.

  In a trance she rose and went about her day as ever, and when the evening stooped on the streets she walked out unguarded, on foot, and chanced on the means. As she had known she should.

  The means was the carriage of a stadium dancer, a coal-black Zakorian. (The Balance, always that, dark with pallor.)

  “The Lydian . . . tell me how he’s to be come at.”

  The Zakor girl fenced a while. Her brain snarled and veered, and with no effort Aztira read it.

  “Thank you,” said Aztira, like a killing snow.

  And under the columned midnight arches near Sword Street, she lingered, and saw him stride out into the eye of the lamp. Rehger, the Lydian.

  In him there was a completeness, to her gaze obvious at once. The savagery of leopard and lion, the gentleness of doves, the calm of deep water, the edge and might of fire. Yet, something unfinished too, something awry. The life had begun—but not moved in its allotted course. Like a star wrenched from its sky. Oh, the star blazed— She was pierced by the brilliancy of him, burnt.

  Amrek—Vis—mortal—bronze almost to black—out of the Shadow, the light.

  For myself, I loved you, from the moment I saw you I believe.

  Though he denied her, he would come to her.

  And though she conceded it was now inevitable, she had forgotten death.

  (Aztira stood like an icon before the glass window in the tower at Ashnesee. The moon had ascended to the roof. Beyond the city and the walls, the plain was a sea of night.)

  They were lovers then, life with death mingling. She has won him to her by priestly trickery, in the childish wickedness of her delirious desire, herself half-hypnotized by the acceptance of fear. She had won him by death-dealing. (She saved Chacor, their victim, that she should owe the Corhl nothing. She had brought the boy back from the blow of Rehger’s sword as she would have led an animal from some crumbling pit into which it had strayed, frightened by her voice.) She was in three conditions—shame, hubris, love. She was flung from each height into another or into an abyss, and all this she showed Rehger plainly, not in the telepath’s way, but in the woman’s.

  Finally, she was able to become with him only that, a woman. A blissful peace enveloped her. The battle was done. Fatalistically, she dismissed the destiny of the city, and did not listen to the footfall of her own particular death.

  Even so, she detected it.

  Then—she saw how the pattern might be resolved, and how—in the jaws of a whirlwind—her dying should stay Rehger for life.

  She bought Panduv’s tomb. (Black for whiteness.)

  Panduv would survive; Aztira knew it, just as she knew the milk that day had venom in it. She had paid well for her own murder, coins for lilies and bane. She had consented.

  And even as she penned her letter to him, to her lover and her love, she had gloried in her Amanackire Power, which held pain far off. She had exalted that she no longer dreaded to die. And, lying down softly on the couch, she had cast herself adrift, as it seemed into a tremendous nothingness, like slumber, sensuous and enfolding.

  He would live through her, he could not forget her, now. She had left behind a shrine of gold and silver and could go to sleep.

  But, ah—what came after—

  “No,” she said aloud, the woman at the window.

  The horror which had been, there in the black tomb, empty and swilled by water, this she resisted, would not recollect. Her exclamation, charged with her will,
started a soundless vibration in the tower room.

  Now across the night, beyond the window, the terraces of the city, the walls, the slopes of earth and darkness, her lover hunted her. It was not that she had called to him, or even that he could have heard her, the beating of her heart, the susurrus of her mind, here in the forests at the land’s western brim.

  They were perhaps condemned to meet again because of what they were, because each furnished for the other a spectral landmark in the chaos.

  • • •

  To the traveler, the track, beaten so flat and lacking obstacles, was the business of a couple of days. During the midafternoon of the second day, he came to a clearing, unlike any other clearing previously encountered. The forest, primeval, architectural, seething with profound animation, was curtailed as a shore would end against water. To the limits of keen vision, this curtailment stretched. While beyond the brink there was a plain.

  To any who had seen them, the plain resembled, here in the womb of the jungle-forest, the bare rolling flanks of southernmost Vis: The Lowlands, south of Moih. They had weathered, it was true, rather differently in an altered climate, these alter-Plains. Their tones were more sonorous, richer, and here and there an island of ripe vegetation rode on them, or postings of the forest itself.

  Where the surge of the forest and the line of the track stopped, and the lake of the plain commenced, was an arch on pillars, seventy feet in height, carved as a game-figure, white as the straight blade of the road, five chariot-lengths in width, that ran away beneath.