Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  David did not know what this English word “ghoulish” meant, but knew better than to ask at such a moment. Obviously it was bad, obviously he was guilty of it. He walked quickly off to escape culpability and his mother as one, and sat down under a tamarisk. He watched Evelyn emit an exasperated sigh, and scurry in the other direction to find a servant. David was close to tears. The little animal was so beautifully made, so complex, the tiny pointed face, and the wonderful squirrelish tail, and all these marvels wasted now in death. It was of a category he had been inclined to call, in the plural, mongeese, since it was mongoose in the singular, and a plural goose became geese not gooses. The error had last summer earned him a light stinging cuff from his father’s riding glove.

  Soon, sitting under the tamarisk, he was able to watch one of the men come and sweep up and take away the mongoose who did not become geese in the plural, and would now become nothing at all except compost. David, unseen, gave in and wept. He wept with a breaking heart for all the sadness and cruelty of a world he scarcely knew, this land of giants.

  Then, relaxed, lying face down on the grass, he fell asleep. He woke once to hear the muttering of servants close by in a tongue he could now follow by means that were so simple they were inexplicable. What did these people say? Talk of the mongoose. Young and glossy, it had had no mark upon it. Of what had it died? No, not a touch, or an ill-wish, even, but the mere concentration of inimical presence. A presence not to be fought with, only to be bowed down to, and so, nature in revolt, an ultimate bowing down in death. After all, even the cobras kept out of the garden now, overawed, though of course they would come, if desired. But there was no need. One was careful. One did what was wanted. Even the Goan cook, a Catholic to the tips of his moustache, was courteous. And in turn, courtesy was given. Her purposes were otherwise: the male child. It seemed the lawless magic of the very young, or the bewildered anguish of the very young, this had drawn her here.

  Me? Are they talking about me? But about who else then? Is it—?

  The noon sun beat on the drumskin of the garden, dark-red behind his eyelids, and the voices melted away and he curled on his side and slept again, dreamless, which might mean only that he did not recall his dreams.

  When he woke the sun had moved a little, burning on the linked arms of the peepul trees. A yard off Agnini sat, braiding her hair. David rolled over and lay watching her, smiling sleepily, for she had come to find him and she was beautiful and he loved her much.

  “Beloved,” said Agnini, “tonight I must leave thee.”

  David’s entire body altered with distress.

  “When wilt thou return?” he asked her, using the fluent fast speech, the inner tongue that was the core of her teaching.

  “Return I do not,” said Agnini.

  “Not come back? Not ever?” he whispered, in English now.

  “No, Beloved. Never to thee.”

  “Why must you go?” he cried, his pain too large yet for further crying, the adult pain of loss. “Did I do something to make you angry with—”

  “The doing is not thine, Beloved. Nor yet. This night, another than thee will anger me. Then shall I go away.”

  In English still, though she had kept to the other tongue, he cried out: “Can’t I—couldn’t I—please don’t—” and fell silent. For neither did English have, it seemed, the sentences he needed. To tell her the nameless hell that was his existence, and which she had filled in moments with motes of light and notes of joy. That if the motes and notes of light were to be taken from him, now he had touched them, he could not bear it. That, though he knew none of those mighty, emotive phrases by which poets describe the deepest human despair, and the self-annihilation the deepest human despair invites humanity to embrace, yet that was all which remained of him if she were gone. He gazed at her, and though he did not realize it, his eyes told her everything that he or words could not. If perhaps even she had needed to be told such things.

  In the garden there was now no noise at all. Beasts and birds slept in the last of the great heat of midday, and men slept or lay vanquished. The grass itself, the leaves on the trees, did not move. Even the wind slept somewhere, high in the hills, under the river, under a stone. There came then the great coolness of that great heat, which is not coolness but only the accepting of the heat, and therefore comfort in it. This David felt, and he sighed. There had come to him also the acceptance of pain, the finish of that business the doctrine of Jesus Christ conceives of as a kicking against tearing barbs, and the doctrine of the Bhagavad-Gita as the blown and scattered ships of broken thought.

  “Yes,” said Agnini, as though she had read such sensations from him, “thou art brave, and thou shalt be wise, strong and blessed. Come, I will show thee truths.”

  When she rose, David got up. She held out to him her beautiful hand that was like a somber, articulated flower. She led him away.

  It seemed they went out of the garden, and on to the road, white and iron-hard now, and then they walked toward the open uplands, where David was forbidden ever to go alone. But David made no protest, did not even worry over this departure. The comforting envelopment of the heat was so intense, time itself seemed to have stopped. They might travel as they pleased, he and this woman that he loved as a mother and as an abstract dream of future love, and as a spirit. No one would come after them, or could find them. No one would ever know.

  And a considerable distance seemed to hurry by them, under his enclosed shoes that he must wear against snakes, and under her bare feet, their darkness powdered with white dust.

  So they were up in the hills where all was unfamiliar, being rocks and pitiless brown slopes, and an endless blue horizon beyond.

  “Dost thou recall,” Agnini said, “the story I told thee first, of the young student, and the serpent that stole from him, vanishing into the earth, and of how the man pursued the serpent, when Indra had opened for him the way?”

  David nodded. Glancing down, he saw a slender rupture in the ground.

  “See,” she said, “the serpent’s way to the city of his kind.”

  “But snakes don’t have cities!”

  “Thou hast forgotten the story, O Beloved.”

  He looked up at her, and watched her, the gentle movements of her hands, her body swaying like a stem in water. He remembered then the story, which was of the Nagas, that fabulous race of Serpent-People, demons, nearly gods, and of their tricks upon men, and their several cities underground.

  David kneeled down by the hole. “Does it really go all the way into a city, Agnini?”

  She smiled, and touched his blond skull.

  “I have said, I will show thee truths. Thou art not afraid?”

  “Not—if you’ll be there too.”

  “I am here and shall be there. And now,” she said, “I open the way.”

  And she spat. Her spit, like a bright star, went shooting straight as an arrow into the hole. At which, the rockside crumbled and fell inward to a yawning nothingness, and he was drawn softly down with it.

  IV

  He had not slept, or lost consciousness, yet he seemed to be waking up. There was a darkness, but not as one thinks of blindness; he was not afraid. He was standing, too, so he had not actually fallen, though he had thought he fell, slowly and easily, down into this place. And he was alone. Nevertheless, he believed he knew exactly what he must do next, and this, in a life of uncertainties, was such a reassuring conviction he obeyed it.

  As he walked forward, another conviction began to come. If I go on, he thought, thinking in English still, something will happen. But he was not alarmed. It was only right and proper to go on. To go on was essential, like breathing. He went on, and the thing duly happened. At first he did not know what it was. It was as if he began to stretch, very pleasant and natural, and then as he stretched he threw off and cast something away from him, like the sheet on the bed. And then it was more as if he broke through water. Ah, he thought. That’s better. Much. But then the feeling started once mo
re, more imperative and more pleasant and more urgent, and he began to run through the serene darkness, his arms spread out, with no notion of obstacles, and met the feeling head-on and ran through it, and this time it was like jumping through a hoop of crackling paper.

  Now I shall be free of bonds, he thought. They will drop behind me.

  And once again he passed through the invisible barriers, and then once again, and again, and there was almost a pain each time now, but a pain that was good and clean.

  “Thus,” he thought, “thou art no more, and yet thou art.” He thought in Hindi now, or in the older language that was Hindi and was not, which Agnini had taught him. He raised his arms over his head and felt strength and fiery courage, and laughed aloud. And it was no longer the laughter of a child. He looked about him then, and by the light of a vague warm glow that was coming in ahead of him, he glimpsed the pale sloughed garments that he had shed, five or six or seven times, on the rocky floor. They were the skins he had cast, the empty bodies of boyhood, adolescence and youth. All these deaths that are the sum of life, the endless reincarnation of self.

  As he advanced toward the light, the one who had been David Finlay, eight years of age, was a man. And the man was tall and strong as though from two decades of faultless excercise, repose and nourishment, beneath the mighty sun which had deeply tanned him and bleached his fair hair to a golden banner. While under the crown of the golden hair the man’s brain, innocent and educated, understood everything, and was made by it amused, and reverent. So he walked out of the tunnel into the light.

  The opening was the shore of a lake, or an enormous cistern, under arching rock like a dove-gray sky. Light came from the rock, and from the water, which was crystalline, and out of which grew huge crimson lotuses, standing on their stalks well clear of the surface, like inverted parasols. Across the water, through the lotus forest, he saw the flash and glitter of the towers and walls of the underground city.

  Though he had no intermediary memories of his own life after the age of eight, for he had had no life, yet his adult brain was equipped with adult knowledge. He was able to gauge the distance from shore to city as a little less than half a mile, and to predict he could swim it, too. He knew his stamina and abilities, none of which he had himself built up or learned, but which had evolved for him in the casting of the skins—making him what he could be, would be. With a joyous, reckless control, qualities never his till now, he dived in a graceful powerful swoop into the water, cleaving it, passing through its silken undertones, and coming up again with the crimson lotuses brushing his forehead and eyelids.

  He swam, without effort, along the natural lanes among the flowers. The water gleamed, and seemed to do him good, like that of a mineral spring. The shining city of the Nagas came nearer and nearer through sparkling showers of waterdrops. Presently, his fingers brushed a flight of great steps, brilliant with colored painting, which went up to a platform. Here there was a wall, crowded with exquisite and complex carvings. In the wall there was an opening crowned by a horseshoe shape, and without doors. The way was barred only by pillars of red sandstone.

  He drew himself from the lake, shook away the water and was instantly dry. As he climbed the marble toward the walls and their opening, he heard the sound of the city for the first time. It was a wonderful sound, of music mingled with action, and seemed imbued by energy and interest. Cities of men did not have this sound.

  When he reached the platform, he saw that the seven sandstone pillars rose far up over his head, and each was roped by a serpent, living and golden, every one of which stared at him from its topaz eyes.

  He made an obeisance to each of the seven. He had no right here, save the right of invitation, the rights of love and magic. The serpents were each large enough to crush him, but none had made a hostile move, only watched him as he approached.

  He was perhaps nine strides from the opening they guarded, able to glimpse through it the extraordinary masonry of the city, when the serpents altered their positions on the pillars. Then each came sliding down. As they touched the marble of the platform they were changed. So he saw the Nagas as the carvings often show them. Upright on their tails of golden plates, sinuous as rope, they were from the waist upward almost men. The man-part was dark-complexioned, the musculature formidable, and hung at breast and arms with gold and huge polished gems. The dark faces smiled, as in the carvings they do, but cruelly, stilly, the long mouths closed. And the large eyes, black and bright as certain of the jewels they wore, were without any white. Each head was cased in a diadem or helmet of gold, and behind head and shoulders there rose, like phantom wings or the plumed lily of the fleur-de-lis, a triplex black and gold formation of serpents, hoods spread wide in the rage display of a striking cobra.

  It was the snake-man of the central seventh pillar who spoke, and as he did so his double tongue, slick black as a sloe, flickered in his mouth.

  “Thou standst by a city of the Serpent-People, of the limitless realm of the Great King Takshak. Thy kind is unwelcome here. What seekest thou?”

  “A woman of thy people, known to me.”

  The snake-men glared from their wicked eyes.

  “Art a fool, thou. What is thy name, Fool, and who thy fool’s protector, that thou darest so seek one of our race, naked and unarmed, among the thrice-weaponed, the crushers, the venom-toothed, the shape-changers, we?”

  He now knew that the name “Agnini” would be of no use here—it was a game she had played, an English anagram of her merely racial name, Nagini. He knew also that his own English name was useless, as the English concept of God was useless. But whom in the Indian pantheon could he claim?

  Before he could speak and maybe blunder, a woman’s voice came from within the gateway.

  “Canst thou not see, Cunning Ones, which Guardian he has? He is the Lord Darvinda, of the Kashatriya. His Patron is therefore Indra Vajri, whose wrath we have felt before. Let him by, my gentle brothers. He is here at my request.”

  Then the man-snakes turned away and flung themselves in corkscrews round the pillars, and became all snake again. There, between the seventh and sixth of them, stood the Nagini who had been hired for annas to teach a white child dialects.

  She wore a crimson drapery sewn with gold discs. Her arms and throat and ankles were ringed with silver and soft gold, and clasps of gold and red coral and redder rubies were woven like fires in her hair. On her forehead was a star that seemed to have fallen out of heaven, and in her ears two more. Her breasts were bare, but for two white flowers. The palms of her hands were hennaed, and her fingernails paler than pearls.

  She was so beautiful he could not immediately speak to her, but he greeted her with respect. He was not ashamed to stand before her naked. He had never learned that shame, though in his other life his mother had tried hard to teach it to him.

  Inside the gate were two litters draped with gorgeous fabrics. It seemed men, her servants, bore them. But these too would be capable of the forms of snakes, or half-snakes, just as they were capable of putting on the form of mortals. His Nagini, also, was a serpent.

  They rode side by side through the strange, busy, musical streets of the snake city.

  “Why didst thou place me among the Kashatriya?” he asked. “I have no caste.”

  “All men have caste,” she said, “of the soul, which never changes. And thou art Kashatriya. A Warrior.”

  “But I was a coward,” he said.

  “Who knows better than the warrior,” she said, smiling, “the terror of battle, the loss of comrades, pain of wounds and death? This may make afraid, after many lives; thou hast lived often. Yet also thou art and shall be brave.”

  On every side there went up narrow painted towers and wide painted porticos, and pillars, and ascending, diminishing pyramidal slopes of stone, all blossomed with sculptures and burning with precious metal and enamel. Although there was a natural light throughout the city, every palace and temple seemed lit by lamps, and the colors of the windows an
d the colossal porches fell over them in slow and glorious lightings. Now and then a chariot would fly by, drawn by white horses, or red or black, with jewelry hoofs, and the charioteer braced forward, some lord standing and proud behind him. Palanquils also passed, hung with bells, and elegant pedestrians walked in a dance of gesture and conversation. In one place there was a smooth turf where riders played a fierce match with curved sticks and a golden ball. All these had taken human shape to suit their activities. But elsewhere snakes lay coiled along the ledges like heavy syrup, communing with each other mysteriously.

  A river cut through the city. On its banks the steep ghats, lit by torches that shone in the water, climbed to the doors of magnificent houses. To one of these the litters were taken.

  At the threshold, the Nagini kneeled, bidding her visitor be welcome, her hair sweeping the petals strewn on the floor.

  He became in her house a prince. Bathed and anointed, he was dressed in the finest muslin and silk, garments such as the masters of the serpent race put on when they had taken the shape of men. There were ornaments, too, like the jewels he had once seen in a museum, behind thick glass. These things felt curious to him, yet not unfitting. All the rooms through which he was conducted were sumptuous, but it was in a chamber of golden walls and screens of pierced marble that he sat down on cushions and ate wild and delicious foods, lightly spiced and pretty as mosaic.

  Behind a curtain clear as thin smoke, musicians coaxed the strings of the sarod, and the bilancojel fluted like a bird. Then his hostess returned and seemed to light the room more brightly. They sat and drank wine, and played chess, which in his former life he had never learned, but which his adult brain knew well. When each had beaten the other once, the board was removed and they played a lighter contest, which was appropriately the business of snakes and ladders.

  But though he had gained a name, that her servants used and that she used as if it had always been his, her name he did not hear. And so perforce fell back on calling her Agnini.