There were humans who deigned to set foot on our island. They were paid handsomely for their masonry skills, their talent, and their labor—we have much gold in our caverns. And there were no unfortunate incidents of the sort that can spoil a relationship…that is, until the tower was complete and it was time to place Missansha in it.
Some of us there were who speculated that Missansha’s powers might only hold sway over her own kind. The long, ascending rampway that spiraled around the outside of the tower, though it was built for snakes, still posed a burden to us. We asked that these foreigners would escort her to her chambers. None of us wished to be close enough, and we could not have her slither off the edge of the narrow ramp.
We made another generous offer, and two of them volunteered. The rest waited alongside us.
Only one of the volunteers returned. The other died as he reached the top. His body became as glass, transparent and stiff. The survivor managed to lock her in before he stumbled back down the spiral to safety. We offered to nurse him back to health—we had much experience by now with the effect of her—but, no, the foreigners did not trust us after that, these alien creatures. They departed our shore and never returned. The tower they’d built was solid, well constructed for the ages, and we left her there, banished with us but never among us.
Once a week someone carried food to her, leaving it where she could reach it. At least for a long time this was so. Over time, the act of delivering food became a ritual. To be chosen was an honor. Because it was codified as ritual, no one asked if the food was taken, if there was a sign she still survived. She surely had long since died. The ritual continued nonetheless.
And so it was for centuries, the lonely one isolated safely above us. We congratulated ourselves that we had found a benign solution to her existence.
What happened then was that Death paid us a personal visit.
Death as you know looks like anyone. When he is among you humans, he looks like one of you. Among the Ondionts he was a serpent, and yet dissimilar. Obsidian of eyes and sheathed in bone. Unlike us, he had arms, thin as reeds and supple, down the sides of his body. We knew him the instant he arrived, and he did not dissemble, but came right to the point.
“I want to know,” he said, “how it is that you have all stopped coming to me.”
The elders, who had been unborn when Missansha was sent away, shuffled meekly up to him. They replied as one, “We don’t know what you mean.”
“There are rules,” he explained. “I for my part must adhere to them, as must you. Else what sort of a world would we have? You, for your part, seem to have ceased to die, and I wish to know how you have done this—what magic or art now protects you. I’ve traveled a long way for the answer and I will not leave without it.”
Now, none of them understood Death’s accusation. Ondionts had been born and had died as always. Our insignificant island would have become surfeited otherwise, and our caverns jammed with wriggling tenants. Death saw this for himself even as they protested their innocence. He noted the tower rising in their midst—something no snakes had built—and his sinister arms pointed at it.
“Why is that erected?” he asked.
Before they had even finished reciting the now mythic story of Missansha, Death gestured them to silence.
“You think then that by placing a problem out of sight, you resolve it? That is your notion?”
“But how could we punish her?”
“Forgive me, did I suggest you should have punished her?” answered Death. “And yet you are of the opinion that she relishes her imprisonment. That placing her in a tiny room in the sky is not a punishment to her?”
“But…but she wasn’t put to death!” exclaimed one of the elders, who immediately regretted his outburst and shrank away. For a moment he had forgotten to whom he spoke.
“No,” agreed Death, showing his teeth. “She was not. Not to death, but surely to madness have you condemned her. You are not people who fare well when isolated, and she began life more isolated than the rest of you.” With that Death passed through the crowd. One by one they lay down before him. At the tower’s base he stared up into the sky, to the very tip of it. He imagined himself there and a moment later he stood at the top, for that was how Death traveled.
His hands pressed that barred door, and it opened to him. Inside, it was dark and cobwebbed. Spiders had busily taken over the space. They dropped from their webs as he passed beneath them.
Deeper into the chamber, Death saw tiny lights burning—an entire wall of them. This struck him as unlikely. The lights sparkled. They were round like the eggs laid by Ondionts. They were eggs, in fact, and the fire in each was a spark of life. He reached the wall and pried one loose from the mucilage that held it. He held it in his hands, and with his needle-like fingers, he cracked it open and let the light escape. Like a flame it leapt up at him, and then through him. He heard it, saw it, experienced its life in a burst, because that is what the soul is—every moment of the life that was known, compressed into a flame of existence. It sang to him as it passed from this plane of being. And from the darkness behind him, a voice unused to speaking croaked, “What was that? How did my little song escape?”
Death turned and there she was. Impossibly alive, thin and ancient, and yet to him unutterably beautiful.
“I let it go,” he said.
Missansha gasped. She uncurled and rose to his height, the height of his voice. She’d learned to do that as a child, as a way of protecting herself. “How did I not hear you enter?”
“No one hears me enter, just as no one can surprise me. And yet you have just done that impossible thing.”
She didn’t need eyes to identify him. The sense of him burned her like heat.
“These,” he said, and turned back to the wall.
“My songs,” she replied. “Long ago they began to come to me here in this chamber, I don’t know from where. They entered me, pierced me, and then I birthed each one. So long ago that began, I can hardly remember the time before it.”
“Another impossible thing, I think.” He could still taste the essence of that soul he’d freed; he understood now how she had lived for so long. The lives entering her had passed to her a little of their being, each one rolling back her age. “Once upon a time, you lost your wits. You had already a power, a great and fearful power that frightened your people, and in the madness of isolation this gift transformed. It grew. You became as I am.”
He drew beside her. His hands embraced her, and for the only time in her life Missansha felt what it was like for others to stand near her. There was no pain, but she was sundering from the world. “Am I dying?” she asked.
Death answered, “No. Something else.”
She could not think what to say.
When it was done, her metempsychosis, they opened the eggs together and let Missansha’s songs fly. It was orgasmic. The songs swirled and swept through her. She leaned back her head, and her tongue flicked at the sky. She moaned and would have swooned but Death caught her. “You’re not used to it,” he told her. “So many at once is dizzying.”
She would have agreed had she been able to speak, but her voice failed her. She looked into his empty eyes and realized that she could see. He, as if apprehending her confusion, said, “Your corporeal eyes could not see; but you no longer have need of them.”
Soon the last of the souls had been released from where Missansha had collected them. She had been preserving them—though she hadn’t recognized it—as a dowry for her groom.
When, after some days of speculating, the surviving people climbed the tower, they found the room at the top abandoned. No trace remained of Missansha save for her cast-off skin. Her body was missing and the floor covered with shattered eggshells, dry and empty; covered also with the bodies of a hundred spiders, curled and desiccated.
Of Death himself there was no sign, either.
“And that,” said the snake, raising his head from her lap, “is how my people met D
eath. In return for providing him with a bride, we were given very long lives. And we’ve never been sure if that was his blessing or his punishment for how we’d treated her. What do you think?” He leaned over Leodora; the sun had all but set now, and the penultimate orange glow glittered in his eyes like hunger.
“Both,” she answered without hesitation, and the snake tilted his head thoughtfully and then gave a small nod.
“Ssseeyash,” he said and placed his head on her shoulder.
“What does that mean?”
His tongue darted. “It’s not translatable; you don’t have the concept in your language. It references the shedding of the skin, the death of the old shell and the life manumitted beneath, the balance of the two coexisting being true existence, and so it is a word that expresses ultimate truth.”
“That’s a very complicated way to say you think something is true.”
“Yes, which is why we have a simple word to hold all of it.”
She reached up and stroked his nose. He sighed and closed his eyes. After a moment he muttered, “You’re dangerously brave, Leodora.”
“Foolishly so?”
“That has yet to be determined, and won’t be by me. You imagine that stories protect you, and that makes you brave. But it doesn’t mean it’s true.”
“Is that a warning?”
“Advice. Nothing more. Death comes looking for everyone eventually.”
“I’ll try not to invite him.”
“I suppose you must take it lightly,” he replied. “To do otherwise is to admit your fear.”
“If I let it stand in my way, I’ll never get off this boat. I wouldn’t have gotten on in the first place. I wouldn’t have ridden a sea dragon. I’d have married the choice of my uncle.”
“All concrete objects of fear, real and tangible,” said the snake, and she knew by the way he said it that there was another kind of fear he didn’t speak of.
She would have asked him, but at that point one of the crew members raced past to the boat’s prow, and she turned to look where he did.
Riding the horizon, a black sail protruded against the sun’s ember. It was tiny, but clearly a ship.
Soter walked up beside her. She looked at him, and saw abject horror on his face. His gaze flicked over the water to where the crewman was looking, then down at her as he said, “You have to come inside. Now.”
“Inside?”
“In the shack, the house, here.”
“Why?”
“For safety. Please, don’t fight with me, just come inside till that boat out there has gone.”
“What about my friend the snake?” She turned, to find that the snake had retreated, his head down, eyes closed, back around the mast so that he looked like a rope again. His was the perfect disguise.
“What are you talking about, a snake?”
“Nothing,” she replied, and got to her feet. He grabbed her arm and drew her along beside him. As they hurried clumsily into the shack, one of the crew came out from it, carrying a large lit lantern. He carried it to the starboard side and hung it off a hook there. It dangled out over the water.
“Why not in the bow?” she asked.
“In case someone hostile comes, they’ll see the lamp, but from a distance they can’t tell if it’s fore or aft, or port or starboard, and so can’t gauge where to board till they’re close upon it. Every ship, every boat, puts the lamp somewhere different, and the only reasonable thing you can do is steer a wide berth around ’em.”
How, she wondered, did he know the way things worked on board ships? “Hostile?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.
By the time the new ship neared, the sun was gone, the sky black; the breeze had died away. For a while Leodora had watched the ship’s inexorable approach. One light split into two—two red glows like mismatched eyes of a behemoth slithering silently toward them. Soon the ship came close enough that she could make it out—at least the places where it glistened. It was black as the night around it. The red running lights were strung upon ropes, one off its nose and one off the stern. As it overtook the tail of their boat, Soter pulled her back into the blackness of the house. Where he sat behind them, Diverus looked up at the commotion. The nose of the black ship pushed into view.
The ship had a high foredeck that dropped off before the mainmast. It was a deep-bottomed craft, and its ropes and tackle creaked as it drew alongside. The red lantern on the prow rocked back and forth. The ship slowed.
Soter’s grip on her shoulders squeezed tight, and she almost cried out before he released her. She could hear him slide deeper into the darkness, his fear like an oil sprayed upon the air. The forward light glided past, and the side of the ship hove into view. It seemed to be lined with odd pillars. Then all at once she realized that the pillars were people, figures standing motionless along the side—she counted five of them, their bodies dark like the ship, edged only in the rolling red lantern light; their pale heads smooth, gleaming, hairless, their eyes seeming to welter in deep sanguine sockets. Their fixed stare like a braided force sliced through the protective shadows. Red light splashed along the deck ahead of her, doubling and bending the shadows, penetrating the depths of the three-sided house, steadily, rhythmically, like a pendulum as the forward lamp swung. She watched, hypnotized, as color flowed toward her feet and away, cast back again, closer, away and closer, away and closer. Then Soter snatched her into the depths of the shack, and the light splashed across Diverus where he sat staring at it, either unafraid or too ill to move. It lit the room, hooks and gaffs, ropes and tackle, all along the wall where Diverus sat. Soter pressed Leodora against the starboard wall and out of the light completely.
Yet for all that his dread was palpable, nothing happened. The black ship glided on into the night until the light from its rear lanterns had merged into a single spot, a cinder cooling, shrinking, until it went out altogether over the horizon.
“What was that?” she asked without turning to look at him.
“Nothing. Nothing at all,” was his answer. Then he pushed past her and strode to the stern, where he appeared to strike up a conversation with the tillerman, but too quiet to be heard.
“Could they have been pirates?” asked Diverus.
“I don’t know,” she answered, but in fact she was certain that the explanation lay elsewhere.
“Would the snake know?” He glanced up from where he sat; in the lantern light, his face devoid of anything she might call wry.
“How do you know about the snake?”
“I walked around the house before, to try to feel better. He was speaking to you about a tower. You had the same look you had with the fox, and so I knew you didn’t want to be interrupted and I came back here to wait.”
She thought a moment, then said, “You know about pirates.”
“Only from things said in the paidika. There were two boys, and they’d been stolen off a boat by pirates, far from Vijnagar, and brought to market there. I know no more than what they said, and so the black boat could have been pirates, couldn’t it?”
“I think it’s something else.”
“What?”
She shook her head. “Something that scared Soter.”
“Pirates would be enough to scare me.”
She replied, “Me, too.”
Stars smeared the sky overhead. The boat sailed on and Soter stayed beside the tillerman, while Diverus and Leodora hunkered down inside the house. Tension and the motion of the boat worked upon them, and they fell asleep against each other.
In the morning the light of dawn woke them, and they walked stiffly onto the deck, to discover that they were docked below an astonishingly high wall. It must have been twice the height of Hyakiyako. Pennants flew from its top. The wall was rough, the stone uneven, and scattered across its surface were small star-shaped objects, like medallions, that glinted in the early light. Farther along, away from the jetty, the wall opened into a dark and uninviting arch that wouldn’t even have accommodated th
eir mast. Any ships wanting to pass to the far side of this spiral would have had to sail on to the next span up or down the line. The rest of the span repeated the pattern of massiveness broken up by low arches. The steps and the jetty appeared to be dead center along its length.
One of the crewmen, red-bearded, came up behind them, carrying a basket on his back. He passed them and, climbing up and over the prow via the step Leodora had used to look into the sea, he walked down the jetty to the wall. A platform attached to ropes lay there, with another of his shipmates standing by, and he set his cargo carefully in the center of it. Then the two of them gave two of the ropes a tug. The ropes snapped tight; the platform lurched slightly, then began to ascend. They steadied it until it slid from their reach. High above them but beneath the top of the wall, beams jutted out, and between the beams was an opening, another arch. The sound of a squeaking pulley echoed distantly down like a bird’s solitary cry.
As the crewman returned, Leodora asked him where Soter had gone.
“Up,” he said, and gestured his head at the wall. “First one of us out, he was.”
She turned, anger infusing her until she saw that the puppet cases were gone, too, already uplifted. Soter had accompanied them. She was chagrined then by her own overhasty judgment. Behind her, Diverus set down his bundle.
“Time to go,” she muttered, then looked around for the snake. He was nowhere to be seen. The mast he’d girdled was empty, the sail drawn down and wrapped in loops of rope.
The bearded crewman and another came lumbering around the house now, carrying one of the larger crates. The platform was still ascending, so they set the crate down and watched it from on deck.
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