The White Serpent

by Tanith Lee

  The road was paved with large dressed blocks. In a city of Dorthar, Karmiss, Xarabiss, Alisaar, the road would not have been a phenomenon.

  Marching beside the road at intervals were obelisks of white marble, with crests of gold-leaf, catching sun.

  There was not a mark on the road. It was new-made, an hour before, it seemed. Nothing had ever gone over it. Not a wheel or a hoof, not a footstep, a lizard, a bird, a leaf, a wind.

  Narrowing in perspective, it pointed to a low mountain rising from the plain perhaps seven or eight miles away. In the manner of mountains, the top of the crag was lit by snow: The city.

  • • •

  The city.

  It had been raised on a platform of rock, and the lit snows of its crags were towers and the heads of walls. The sun struck down on it, and crystals flashed from the mirrors of huge windows. In size, it was itself not vast.

  The road roused up into a high causeway, but where the causeway came against the platform of the city, there appeared, from the plain below, to be no gate or entry. The face of the platform was sheer.

  A wood of trees, also like the arboreal stations of the Plains, had collected at the roadside, before it gained the incline to the causeway. Here Rehger left the paving, and from this area he watched as the westering sun got over the platform, and a brass sunset turned the whiteness of the city black.

  The city did not seem real. It had about it, or appeared to have, some of the imagery of legendary Dortharian Koramvis, which Raldnor had broken in bits.

  A wind blew east over the plain, once all the day was out. It was warm and silken-heavy, smelling of farther jungles where the sun had fled and fallen. The wind brought no perfume and not a note or murmur. Zastis was rising.

  The Star had also sprinkled red lights along the surface of the plain. They blinked and flickered, like luminous nocturnal roses. But it was a black wave of red eyes which was blowing now, as the wind had blown along the earth.

  It would be possible for a man to climb a tree of the wood, but they, too, could— Besides, their dreamlike slowness checked him. Their odor was not as he remembered it from the menageries of Alisaar. In Moih, Chacor, but not Rehger, had hunted them. And once, as a child in Iscah, he had been snatched up by Tibo, as Orbin sprinted before them, and his mother’s braids stung against his neck as she ran with him for the farm.

  Tonight, on this surreal plain, it was a pack some fifty or sixty strong, gliding as if wafted above the ground, without stench or cry.

  They washed against the wood, entered it, and turned tens of heads to look up at him with the fire-drippings of their eyes.

  One put its forelimbs on a trunk, the slaughterous claws retracted.

  The evil shape of the head of this single beast caused Rehger a curious puzzlement, that it should in its form prefigure so exactly what it was—

  He was not especially alert, had gained none of the ebullition of danger. He had not drawn the knife, it was sheathed still, like the talons of the tirr.

  Aztira. Her name had a likeness to theirs.

  The Tirr that had put its forefeet on the tree dropped down again.

  The wind’s breaths rustled the leaves of the wood, but there was no other noise. Then there came a noise without any sound, a sort of whistling purr, in the ears, or in the skull.

  The tirr pack responded. They gathered themselves away, pressed back into the trunks of trees, where their eyes did not cease glittering and winking.

  Two men walked out between the tirr and the trees, shining like nacre. By mind-speech, evidently, they controlled the pack.

  Rehger did not speak, or think. If the Amanackire attempted to scour his brain, he would not make it easy.

  One of the two men parted his lips.

  “You are approaching the city.”

  The other said, in the same pithless, unused voice:

  “Your kind do not enter Ashnesee, except they enter as slaves.”

  “Ashnesee,” said Rehger. Sensitized to it now, it seemed to him he felt his thoughts shoot out a bolt of anger, or great heat. “I’d heard that was one of the words for your city.”

  Their snake stares turned on him like sightless stones.

  Outside the wood, the moon now was rising, white kindred of theirs at any time but Zastis.

  They must scent his ancestry, rage—his, theirs, weaving its lines of force between them.

  The first man said, “Follow.”

  As they walked along the road, the tirr were melting into the night, as if night had constructed them and lent them movement, and kindled their eyes like stars, and now put them out again.

  21. The Hearth

  THE GATE INTO ASHNESEE WAS, for Rehger, a shrine or sarcophagus located at the base of the rock platform, below the causeway. The white men breathed on it and it opened—you heard of such devices in their temples. The aperture closed behind them.

  A stair went underground, and led into a warren of man-hewn passages, dully and oddly lit both by distant torches and some faltering luminescence that seemed to have no source.

  The route, at first level, then lifted itself in ramps. They emerged into a shut courtyard like a well, where the hot moon streamed in at one corner of the shaft.

  The city stayed mute.

  Another covered passage ran from the court, finishing at a slender door of cibba wood. The plashing of water had suddenly become audible. When the door—managed this time by touch—slid wide, rosy moonlight burst out again, crushed into the juice of a vast fountain. Its curtain, in cascading down, seemed to bar the way. But there was an interval of dry space, and through this one passed into a garden.

  The white men moved ahead, ascending, not glancing back, as if mislaying the barbaric animal they had brought in with them.

  Rehger, however, hesitated, to view the city of the Amanackire. It lay on three sides, rinsed by the moon and made of the moon. . . . Tiers of pillared buildings, ruled by roads like frozen rivers—and, among clusters of trees, slim groves of towers whose heads were shaped like the masks of beasts—things not quite viable. And though small cells of illumination rested there in pools, humanly lifeless, too, a necropolis, so exquisitely formed it was, and devoid of motion as of sound.

  The white men had halted at the top of the garden, under the vertical of a mansion there. A tower rose here, also. It had a serpent’s head burning coldly with the eye of an enormous moonstruck window.

  Rehger followed the terraces up to the men under the wall.

  “This is her house?”

  They looked at him.

  He said, “You’ve brought me to her. Aztira.”

  It was not that he had begun to read their minds. There could be nowhere else they would bring him.

  One of the men pointed. (Rehger saw another gate, this of decorative iron, ajar in the white wall.) They disliked to speak aloud, when it could be avoided.

  And they would let him go on alone. They did not, then, mistrust him. Or she did not. Or, whatever his scheme or temper, they had valued themselves at more.

  When he made no instant move to enter through the gate, they left him, and descended the lawns.

  Then, standing on the grass of her garden, in the Zastis night, he remembered the house behind the lacemakers, and how he had gone to her, there.

  But Ashnesee had even a different smell, an arid and vacant air, like that above a desert ruin, tinged merely now and then with a ravenous cloy of orchids.

  He put his hand on the iron gate.

  • • •

  He would come into the mansion by way of the door beneath the tower, where the vine clung to the stones. From this entrance, the corridor would lead him into her hall, the great blanched oval with a floor of mosaic tiles, on whose walls were paintings of low hills, and pale-robed maidens who danced, immobile, in a field of grain, all lit now by the glow of the
lotus lamps above. On the hearth, which in the evenings of the cold months would sometimes blossom fire, flowers lay sprinkled, giving off a dusty sweetness. A huge coiled snake of silverwork guarded the hearth, with eyes of creamy amber. There were few other furnishings.

  Aztira waited, by the hearth snake. She wore a dress the color of the girls’ robes in the mural. She had no jewels.

  In the quiet Rehger’s progress through the house, light-footed as the padding of a lion, was audible. And that, not once did he pause.

  The girl’s eyes flame-flickered, but only like the eyes of the inanimate snake. If she breathed, it had remained invisible.

  The heavy drape at the doorway was swung aside with a jangle of rings.

  He did not stop even then, but crossed into the room, over the patterned floor. His eyes were on Aztira, and on nothing else. Even the snake did not seem to divert his attention. He strode under the lamps, and they turned him, one after another, to gold, until, perhaps ten feet from her, the advance ended.

  He had arrived in the city of gods a vagabond. The glamour and the shackles of Saardsinmey were done with, two years had run away, forests had resisted and torn at him. More than ever, in the torrent of this, he had stayed, become, a king. And his black eyes fixed on her with all she remembered of their beauty, and their strength and cleanness. Such clarity was itself a power.

  The girl before the hearth of flowers held out her hand to him, palm uppermost. There on its whiteness lay a triangle of tarnished metal.

  “The coin your father left your mother,” she said to him, “the drak which you gave me to divine. My proof, in case it is wanted.”

  “Proof of what?” he said.

  “That I live.”

  “Oh, lady,” he said, standing in the golden shadow, “I know that you live.”

  “But that I died, also?”

  “Yes. That you died and woke up, and here you are. The Goddess Aztira.”

  She continued to extend to him Yennef’s drak. He did not come to her to accept it.

  She said. “I took it with me to my grave, to comfort me.” But her hand sank down, closed now on the coin.

  “Your kind,” he said, “live forever. Why did you need comforting?”

  “Since I was without you,” she said.

  He said nothing. He was completely still, as she was, now, and as the city itself.

  Aztira said, “Hear and believe this. I foresaw my death, but that was all. I predicted murder and terminus. I entreated you to my funeral rites because I reasoned the tomb of black stone would withstand the shock and the water. There was some measure of choice for me. But I was glad, in dying, trusting you would survive.”

  “Thank you then for that, madam. You get no thanks from Saardsinmey.”

  “No,” she said, “I won’t bow my head and cringe before you. If I am ashamed, it is my affair. If it was evil and my sin, that, too, is mine, not a matter between us. I thought I would die—oh, the soul, yes, the soul is eternal. But body and soul are strangers to each other. I—there would be nothing more of me. You think that to return out of bodily corruption is a simple thing? You said—that I woke. No, Rehger. This isn’t how it was. I hope you will let me tell you of it, but not yet.”

  “Perhaps never. Did you call me here by some witchcraft?”

  “Not by any sorcery. Not by the energy of the will or mind. Only my memory of you. That perhaps did cry after you. But I see, you would not have listened.”

  “I was instructed to remember you. I’ve done so. No day or night, since Alisaar, that I failed to think of you. You stayed alive for me, Aztira, like the stink of mutilated flesh and sea filth, and a hundred sights of rabble.”

  “Enough,” she said. “You can’t kill me to blot out the crime of my race.”

  “It seems not.”

  “Would you have done so?”

  He said, “In my thoughts, lady, I’ve slaughtered you many times. The way a Vis would crush a snake. That picture would come to me. To break your neck.”

  “And in these thoughts did I never in return blast you with lightning?”

  Her voice had risen. She looked indeed as if she burned coldly, her whiteness livid. And suddenly, she glanced toward the wide hearth, partly lifted up one hand. And there were flames on the stones, not flowers, shooting upward to send a crash of light into the chimney, and limn her pallor (and that of the silver serpent), as if with blood.

  He felt the scorch of the fire on his body, then—it cooled. Flowers scattered the hearth; the only light came down from the hanging lamps.

  “And since you can never kill me, Rehger, and since apparently I’ll spare you, what next?”

  “In Var-Zakoris and Dorthar,” he said, “the chance of this city is a cause for debate. They would like someone to go back, and tell them.”

  “A paid agent. As your father was.”

  “Did you divine that also from his coin?”

  “In other ways. I had no time to tell you all I learned. But you have met with your father.”

  “It was the meeting with him which put me on the road to Ashnesee.”

  “My regrets you could,” she said, “get nothing more from it.”

  Aztira turned. She went to the wall, to where a tree of pale ruddy leaves was painted on the plaster. She touched one of its branches, and a faint murmur passed through the wall, along the floor. In seconds, a figure came in at the hall’s other doorway. Rehger had seen a goddess of the city, now he saw one of its slaves.

  She was a dark woman, umber-skinned and small, clothed in a linen smock, her hair bound closely to her head. She bowed from the hips, drooping down like a thirsty plant.

  Aztira said, “Here is the lord I told you of. Take him to the prepared chamber, and serve him as you were instructed.”

  Her tones were distant. It was not the address of mistress to slave, but of a sleepwalker to a phantom. Though chattels, the servers of Ashnesee were not, then, considered to be actual. They were only specks of a commanding brain.

  The Amanackire said to Rehger, as if in another language, “Go with her. You will not be uncomfortable. Tomorrow you may depart by the same hidden route. The two men who brought you, one or other of them will come here at first light. Be ready. You have seen the City of the West has substance. Perhaps they will reward you for the discovery, in Var-Zakoris. Or say you lie. Or in returning you may be forfeited to the jungles. Understand, it was your bond with me, Rehger, that drew you here, against all odds. Not my outcry, or any magic. Your fantasy was of finding me alive and of killing me, knowing that if I had lived, to kill me would be impossible. You undertook this sullen quest because there was nothing else for you to do.”

  He stood and gazed on at her, unspeaking, a statue with somber, considering eyes. Behind him, shadow on shadow, the black slave-girl waited, head still bowed.

  “You mourn Saardsinmey not only for its destruction, but for its false purpose, which you borrowed. Gladiator and king, your freedom would have come with death. You would have perished inside five years.”

  He answered then.

  “So I believed.”

  “You had made a pact with it. But your true life, which you had chosen and begun in Iscah, was interrupted by the man who bore you away. He declared he gave you a gift of brightness, days of glory, Katemval the slave-taker. But he cut the thread of the life you planned, that which your soul had wanted—”

  “I don’t credit the soul’s life, Aztira. You know as much.”

  “It was too late to recapture in Moih the ghost of that beginning,” she said, paying no heed, it seemed, to his denial. “Or else the making of things was not the only task you had set yourself. How willingly, therefore, you abandoned that last great victory you won over the stones, in the Lowlands, your apprenticeship. To hunt instead the ghost of me.” She moved back, slowly, drifting as if weightless, to
her hearth. She said. “Go with the slave.”

  “Aztira,” he said.

  “What now?”

  “If your race believes in many physical lives, do they ever fear rebirth as some man of Alisaar or woman of the black Zakorians?”

  Startling him, she laughed, lightly; all her youngness was in it.

  “Yes,” she said, “they do fear that. They say it would be self-punishment. Why else must we maintain one body against death, but to elude this truly awful fate?” Laughter and irony faded from her. “Leave me now,” she said. “You have had enough of me.”

  When he turned, the crumpled slave straightened somewhat and went ahead of him, into the mansion.

  22. The City of the Snake

  ACROSS THE CEILING OF THE ROOM, clouds had been painted on a ground of milky azure. They had no look of fundamental sky, yet, in the dusk of dawn and evening, seemed to float, while the blueness swam upward and changed, if not into ether, at least out of the condition of paint. The walls were incised with a coiling design which resolved into a serpent’s head beside the door. A tap on one of its eyes caused the door to open. On the other, and there would come at once one of the slaves with expressionless faces like dark brown wood. There were high-up grills which let in air and some quantity of light, but nothing more, and there were no furnishings beyond a bed, assembled for the guest, and wound with curtains. But the insects of the jungles of Vis seldom found their way into Ashnesee. Adjoining the chamber was a room for bathing and a closeted latrine, both of which outdid the best of the rich houses in Alisaar. At night an alabaster lamp was lit on a stand of marble.

  He did not make ready to leave, the morning after his arrival.

  He lay in a vast cavern of sleep, such as had sometimes come on him after a race or a fight. They had known this, the creatures of the house, and let him alone. Waking at noon—the sun was up above the grills—he saw they had removed the choice, uneaten meal offered the previous night. Later, when he had brushed the serpent’s eye-socket, a breakfast was brought in.

  Rehger did not interrogate the slaves of the city. Like their overlords, they seemed to have no inclination to verbal speech. When one had made to taste his food, he shook his head at her and she went away. He had not supposed the sorceress would resort to drugs or toxic substances. Conceivably it was her pain or anger, or her scorn, to imply, through the slave’s action, that he would think so.