The White Serpent

by Tanith Lee

  A twilight had come into her eyes, seeming to tint them, but not with colors—or with those indescribable colors of which she could not tell him.

  “We are to be envied and despised,” she said. “You know it.”

  He inclined his head.

  “Vis will tremble,” she said. “But it will be worse, at last, for us. In the end, we shall be lost.” She held out her hands to him over the bier of her risen kindred. “So, we are alike, you and I, after all.”

  When he went to her, she laid her head against his breast, as if she were tired and yearned to sleep.

  “Before sunrise, you must be got out of this sorcerous unclean city. Rehger, I will send you by a safe road. To the sea. Nor far, my love. Will you trust me to do it?”

  “Yes. But that’s for the morning.”

  She said, in a whisper, “You have read my thoughts.”

  • • •

  The dry pond of the plain had gathered to itself a fragrance on that evening. It was the perfume, lacking all the myriad smudgings and stenches of humanity, of the distances of a starry sky and the ground swell of the metamorphosed foliage of Ashnesee.

  They walked the ridges and defiles of the city.

  She discovered for him, as they went by, the massive monuments, and gilded shrines, the fair diadem of the temple, with its bloom of inner fire. Where the palaces were aglow, sometimes the silhouettes of beings moved on the lights. (Often, the noble buildings stood void.) In a garden, now and then, like statuary alive, the pale Amanackire went up and down. They were in constant union and almost always separate.

  Twice, Aztira came upon her fellows on the roadway. Some greeting was exchanged, naturally in total silence.

  The allergy of all that place, directed toward him like an instinctive music—this he could not fail to sense. She had said he must be gone before the new day. He had beheld them in their sanctum, and he had been allowed to judge the rite of reincarnation. And he was Amrek, and All-Vis.

  But their antipathy was nothing in the peace of that evening. Beside her lawless and boundless beauty, nothing. The Star exalted in their celibate heaven.

  As they walked, they spoke occasionally of Alisaar, of Saardsinmey, as if still it throve, sparkling with torches, and the races in the stadium due to begin. They laughed together once, thrice. The old stigmas had been sloughed, with the meanings of time and sentience.

  • • •

  In the oval hall of Aztira’s mansion, slaves had laid out a princely supper. The plates were silver chased in gold, with a design of sea-monsters—assuredly a gift from Sh’alis.

  The wine was red: From Vardath.

  Their conversation, which had become untrammeled, melted into the pauses of reflection, and of desire.

  Her bedchamber, reached by a little low stair, warmed by a dozen tapers, had no windows, was enclosed as the womb of a shell.

  Her nakedness, when he encountered it, the whiteness of her, like ice or marble, had, too, its inner fires, which he had forgotten. They took each other like leopards, famished, the commerce of a minute. And then again, the earth revolving and flung away.

  It was the house behind the lacemakers. He heard the far shamble of the traffic on Five Mile Street.

  Or it was Moih, and at his prayer the statue had become flesh.

  • • •

  “Rehger, forgive my use of you.”

  “We seemed evenly matched.”

  “That was not the use I meant.”

  “I will forgive you anything, Aztira Am Ashnesee. You will outlive me, anyway. What does it matter?”

  “Once you leave me here,” she said, “I shall become again a ghost, to you.”

  As they lay on the pillows, through the final hour of darkness, she had begun to plait her hair. When he moved from her arms, he found it all in fetters round him. He lifted three or four of the plaits, shook them, and let loose the showering hair.

  “You smell always of blossom and clear water.”

  “But you will forget me, nevertheless.”

  He made to begin loosening another of the plaits. She stopped this.

  “In Iscah,” she said.

  “In Iscah, what?”

  “The sign of a married wife.”

  He stared then deeply into her eyes, frowning, curious.

  “What mystery is this?”

  “Never mind it,” she said.

  He put his mouth to her breasts, their pale and velvety buds, but lust was done with, hers and his. She had called him by his Alisaarian name, but he might forget that also, when he left her. He knew as much, indifferently.

  “The dawn has begun,” she said softly, in a while. “A man will be standing in the garden, under the tree where the doves gather—do you recall? He led you into the city, and will lead you out of it. A hidden river runs away through caverns toward the coast. Where it breaks from the ground, there will be a boat, provisioned and ready. But then there is the wide western sea. Oh, Rehger,” she said.

  “Zastis is good sailing weather,” he said.

  She did not weep. Her eyes, as the Lowlanders said, were formed of tears.

  They made love an ultimate time, swimming and slow, drowning, and cast ashore apart.

  Transparent sunrise flooded the bedchamber when its door was opened.

  He went between the bars of light, each falling behind him like a dreamer’s sword.

  Not till he had traveled the corridor’s length, did he hear her say, “Don’t turn. There’s an ancient rhyme which warns against it. Forget me and prosper. I think you will know me still, when next we meet.”

  He raised the curtain at the corridor’s end, and going on, let it fall again, between them.

  • • •

  The white man met Rehger Am Ly Dis under the tree of doves. They went together, not a phrase exchanged, to the lower tract of the garden, by the fountain there, and into the tunnels beneath Ashnesee.

  So then the Vis wanderer saw Aarl-Hell, out of the legends of his own people. It was glimpsed, inadvertently almost, at a turning here, in a passage there—Laval fires burned in it and toiling figures lurched hither and thither spawning nightmare shadows. The slaves of the Chosen Race were busy. They oiled the clockwork of paradise above and could not afford to idle.

  The undercity was an ant hill.

  Rehger passed through it unchallenged on the heels of his guide, and came at long last into a luminous cave. Flat and thin, the river wormed along its rocky channel.

  The Amanackire observed Rehger’s progress down the bank for less than a minute before retracing his steps into the warren of hell.

  Alone, about an hour after, Rehger encountered a group of slaves on the river rocks. But they did not appear to see him, though he went by within three feet of them. They were fishing in the steely water.

  And later again, when daylight had started to be ahead of him, he saw another detachment of slaves, squatting on the bank. They were actually laboring at nothing, perhaps resting. (Their faces were mindless yet controlled.) They might have been the very ones who had put ready the boat—and stacked in it the store of food and barrels of water and wine—that presently he came on.

  It perched in the shallows, and beyond, the river yawned wide and the cave frayed into air and sky and leaning granite. And on the clifftop, the black thatch of the jungle-forest flourished like giant weeds.

  Rehger pushed the boat into the main course of the river, brown and lazy water veiled by insects and heat. He rowed, and in the forests the sun beat and birds squalled.

  The city had disappeared, and soon an angle of the river-wall closed away the exit from the caverns.

  The day and the river, the boat and the man, went on toward an assumption of the sea.

  But as he rowed, the man sensed upon him the eyes of a goddess in the sky. Eyes of tears, witho
ut pity, sorrowing.

  He would reach the ocean. Sailing in to shore, he could then proceed gradually south. It was a prolonged voyage, but finite. Winds would rouse and belly the slanting sail, fish leap in an offering of sustenance. Huge plated beasts would wallow from the beaches of the jungle, but not dare attack the oar-finned wooden animal with its one snapping wing.

  Even the pirates of Free Zakoris did not often try the water here. There was nothing for them to steal, and they had besides religious qualms concerning these coasts.

  South, should one reach it, the very land itself pointed toward Alisaar. The world commenced again, and the circle of the ring was sealed.

  In the serpent-headed tower, Aztira gazed within herself, seeing a life adrift in waters. But it was not Rehger’s life.

  Perhaps I did not even need to ask your forgiveness.

  His generosity would have allowed her what she asked, and had done so.

  A covenant, between your race and mine. Between reality and hubris.

  Among the Shadowless, on the pure white banner of their pride and her own, she had branded darkness irrevocably. Created now, and fixed, the genes of her descendants would carry it to eternity. A rogue flowering, it would fruit when seldom looked for. From the albino tree, a black viper. A constant, and recurring, theme. With every generation, bronze skin, black hair, black eyes, would spring from the core of the snow.

  Inside her body, implanted, the seed of her lover, his child. Rehger’s son. But grown in the ocean of her adept’s Power, like herself, he would be, this boy, this man, a magician and a god. A god of the blood line of Amrek, with the mark of the snake on his wrist.

  It was the Balance. It was Anackire.

  But, also, it was only love.

  For love must have something.

  She pressed her hands against her side, seeing what was yet invisible, unknowable, and known.

  Westward she did not gaze. She did not think of it, or stretch out the psychic tendrils of her will. Nor did she entreat. She had no superior left to hear her prayers.

  But she felt the drum of her heart like that of a stranger, as in the tomb she had felt it, when terribly as death, it called her to return.

  That was all.

  When the drumming smoothed and quietened, and coursed back into her own breast, she knew the circle was complete.

  • • •

  At dusk, when the Star rose, an enormous soundlessness claimed the sea, under the mutter of its waves and the vagrant shiver of the wind.

  The boat drifted between land and liquid and atmosphere. Tidily, the sail had been secured, and the uneaten stores of food set out to tempt the birds. The wine, poured in the sea, had long ago been drunk away.

  No other thing was in the boat.

  Where the Star pierced through the water, it revealed, as if fathoms below, disorientated meanderings, the wreckage possibly of a sunken ship, or merely shoals of fish foraging.

  Later the moon was birthed out from the amphitheater of the forest.

  Maybe the moon did finger a sudden glitter on the sea. But it was the dance of water-things, which flirted in a diamond rush of spray and dived again to the depths.

  The reflection of the boat stayed black on the lunar ocean but faded when the moon swung over. By morning, when the gulls came to feed on the viands of Ashnesee, the vessel was already listing.

  The birds fought and screamed over the feast, to have it all, before the boat should go down.

  Book Seven

  Iscah

  23. Cah the Giver

  A CHILD ABOUT TWO YEARS old was sitting by the fish pond, carefully undressing a wooden doll. With the dull start of surprise that sometimes assailed her, Panduv recognized this apparition as her own daughter, Teis.

  She was a pretty thing, her skin deep-toned but Iscaian still, yet with Panduv’s jet-black horse’s mane, hair that hung almost to her ankles when she stood up, and now spread all round her on blue tiles of the pool’s rim. Spring sunshine struck fiercely along the roof terrace. The pool crackled light like jagged glass and the fish hid under their stones. In the shade of the awning, the nurse-woman was stringing beads and crooning to herself.

  Teis had finished undressing the doll. She lowered it into the pond. The doll floated a moment, then turned over and sank straight down.

  The child gave a sudden wail.

  Panduv sprang forward and seized her up.

  “No. Bad kitten. You must never lean into the pool.”

  The water was only two feet deep, which would have been enough. Panduv found herself, as so often, occupying simultaneous roles. In a swift succession of voices and actions she hugged and scolded her child, berated the nurse, and rescued from the pond the doll.

  “Next time it will be three taps of the rod. (Here is your doll.) Don’t tell me your eyes were fixed on the child, plainly they weren’t. (Am I to wait to have her drowned?) Why did you throw it into the pond in the first place?”

  The nurse mumbled and groveled. Teis regarded her mother with an intent all-knowing gaze, and inserted the doll’s left foot between her lips.

  “Now, Kitty, don’t bite the wood. The splinters will get in your mouth.”

  The child, all-knowledgeable, eyed Panduv who, an adult, had unlearnt the original wisdoms.

  Panduv shook Teis. Teis laughed. The black woman liked her child and was inclined to believe she would become interesting as she grew. As yet Teis had few words. The passion of the baby—most babies—for self-injury and, thereby, potential suicide, Panduv had long since accepted. There was an antique saying of the Iscaian hills (the nurse had repeated it frequently), Fresh from the womb of Cah and wants to get back there.

  The nurse was a capable creature, only sluggish sometimes. But then again, the young leopard mother, who spent three quarters of every day willfully absent from her daughter, might have reacted too wildly.

  Panduv saw the fat old witch was looking at her under crinkled lids, divining her thoughts and sensing forgiveness.

  “Teis, go to nurse,” said Panduv, setting her fruit once more on the blue tiles.

  “Nurse,” said the child. “Teis,” announced the child. She waddled toward the beads the nurse was now waving to entice her.

  Panduv stretched herself, and strolling to the balustrade, looked down from the hilltop toward Iscah’s afternoon capital.

  She had the view by heart now, as she had the rooms of Arud’s villa, the blue walls and tiles, the average number of fish in the pond—which varied as they bred or ate each other—the routines of the domestic season. She was Panduv, the Priest’s woman. That was her official title. It was not without kudos. The acolytes of Cah, even here in the more sophisticated capital, did not marry, but their doxies were kept openly, and, where cared for, with some show. The men of the city did not treat Panduv impolitely. And though she must address even the oil-seller as “master,” he in turn nodded to her, and provided of the best.

  As to walking a certain number of paces behind her lord, Panduv had a litter to bear her about the streets. Veiled she would not go, however, and not a single soul did not know the Black One.

  For Arud, though he now and then lay with other girls, Panduv had remained his fancy, and the overseer of his home. He allowed her, by Iscaian standards, incredible liberties, and left her much to herself.

  But Teis he loved. Aside from bringing her expensive toys, he would even, in the privacy of the house, play with her, chasing the child so she pretended fear, or crawling about the chambers carrying her on his shoulders.

  For status, he would have wanted a son, which was what Panduv had promised him. She had been very sure, and after a night of grueling work, to see a sister of the female sex had emerged from her loins, provided her the first startlement of motherhood. Following the birth, care with herbs and specific exercises of the stadium, precautions taught every gi
rl of Daigoth’s courts, ensured Panduv kept barren.

  The early heat had distilled hallucinatory glimmers from the roofs. Along the hillside, feather trees lifted their slim plumes. In the courtyard below, a slave was scrubbing the household altar.

  Panduv offered now to Cah the goddess, since women were granted this boon, here. Alternative ethics of worship, like those Arud had exposed in the mountains, were unmentioned.

  Yet she was aware that Arud was a powerful member of his temple, part of an inner elect, and had risen effortlessly in the past three years to the high office of Adorer. His priestly robes were heavily fringed with silver, and vessels of gold, and thin glass, had appeared as if by magic almost overnight in the house. Content and sanguine and no longer sent about on the tasks of a Watcher, Arud also gained in weight.

  Panduv supposed she, too, had thickened. Child bearing, and the somnolence of her days, would have padded her satin flesh. Despite that, she was to all the women of the capital, where plumpness if not obesity stayed the vogue, a bone. She ate sparingly, even in boredom, and had continued her dancer’s athletics in the concealment of the villa.

  Arud, partly anxious for his exotic pet Zakr, half eager to display flashy lack of convention, gave her the handling of a light chariot. She was not, by Iscaian law, able to drive on the streets, but once up among the hills, she discarded the driver. The sight of his merry back, bounding for the nearest tavern, had come to symbolize to her a holiday. The hiddraxi were imported, another evidence of Arud’s wealth. She trained them to flight on the sidelong paths, hurtling into the upland valleys, where she would herself break loose to swim the streams and sleep in the grass. When the child was older, she should be taken, too. Arud would not object. Approached deviously, he was nearly always compliant. He had come to see his generosity to a woman as an aspect of free thinking, and sometimes referred to it impressively before colleagues.

  Already, Panduv paid heed to the diet of Teis. (The nurse was a problem, endlessly slipping her sweetmeats.) Panduv lessoned the little girl in embryonic moves of an acrobat and dancer. Teis had natural ability, but her attention was inconstant. It would be an extravagance besides, to bank upon any future for a girl. Had it not been hard enough, letting go all plans for herself?