The White Serpent

by Tanith Lee

  He should not die. She would not allow it. She knew the properties of herbs. And she had learned in childhood, for self-preservation, how to deceive.

  So she went on with the pots, all stupid and careless, until Orbin, having questioned her sharply about the man’s story, his garments, his foreignness, pushed her out again shedward, between the curtains of the snow.

  • • •

  By the time the next thaw came, twenty-five days later, the stranger was whole and on his feet, and assisting Orbin about the farm.

  Orhn had been very gracious. That was, Orbin had permitted the stranger certain rights and Orhn, standing by smiling, had made appropriate sounds at proper intervals. Having interrogated the stranger, Orbin had asked for his money. If Orhn was to provide the man a roof and nursing, and a share of the food until he recovered, that was only just. Orbin suspected the stranger did not give all his cash, and was correct in this. He instructed Tibo to search the stranger when next she tended him during his fever, and she brought back a handful of small coins. In return, the man lay in the dog-shed, with a brazier for warmth for which Tibo firstly, and he himself when fit, must obtain the kindling. He was also given a piece of bread or slab of black porridge to eat, and a bowl of the evening soup or stew, generally with no meat in it. Tibo’s herbal medicines she had prepared in secret.

  “He’s tough, some mercenary off the roads,” said Orbin with lazy contempt, unease and faint envy mixed in his tone. “He’ll mend. If we keep him here until Big Thaw he can help with the spring ploughing. Orhn can save on hired men, in that case.” (The farm was not rich enough to keep workers over during winter.)

  The entire project entailed, of course, trapping the man for as long as possible, and making him pay in any way that was feasible for the privilege. He was an easterner, a Lan, he had said, with a name the Iscaian-Lydian drawl had instantly turned to “Yems.” He said, too, he was a soldier, which might be the truth, for he had a fighter’s body, trained and tall, and sword calluses on both hands, though he had arrived with only a knife. Even this Orbin confiscated. “You won’t be needing that, on Orhn’s farm.”

  Meanwhile, there was no real means for the man to escape their hospitality. Ly village was nearly a day’s journey away over the snow, and that was only if you knew the route, Ly Dis, which Yems had stubbornly mentioned more than once in his fever, was seven days distant, unreachable till spring. As for saddle-thoroughbreds, the big animals that, unlike the Dortharian chariot teams, could carry a full-grown man on their backs, they were as mythical here in Ly as were the fabled horses from the southern lands.

  It was a wonder, in fact, how the fellow had got here himself. He had told Orbin a tale of going to join the Vardish troops over the border, of being diverted west on some other mysterious errand, next falling in with the mountain bandits—who let him go to bleed or freeze to death, having taken his mount, a hardy zeeba, and all baggage and accoutrements.

  “Some yarn,” said Orbin. “Who cares? We’ll work him.”

  And soon he was up and about and busy, making the repairs Orbin wanted to the ramshackle hovel-buildings of the farm, cleaning out the few thin cattle in their byre, getting and chopping wood—which he even professed himself willing to do, to prevent his arm from stiffening. He made, certainly, no demur about any of it. Probably he had expected no other treatment.

  “I’ll have to watch you,” said lounging Orbin to Tibo, as she bodily lifted the old woman, twittering and feebly fighting, from her chair, “all this help, you’ll have nothing to do. Cah knows, I don’t want an idle sloven in Orhn’s household. Like that old bitch,” he added. His senile mother, that Tibo was now spreading gently on her tidied pallet, where she fell again asleep, had not really earned her rest by the laws of the land. She had borne five sons, but only two survived. Her husband was dead, and in the ancient days, she would have been cast out and exposed long ago. But there, she was his mother, rot her. Only look, though, she had wet the chair again. He shouted angrily at Tibo to take the chair outside in the yard and scrub it well with snow.

  • • •

  When Tibo had finished shaking the mattresses and cleaning the chair, she went to see after the three cows in the byre. The afternoon sky was shrilly blue, the pale blue of the cold time, but water dripped from the icicles along the roofs. This thaw might last all of two days.

  There were only the cows and dogs to feed in winter, as the fowls and pigs were sold or slaughtered at the summer’s end. She did not like the slaughtering, which was brutal and haphazard, but she dealt with the carcasses, hung winter-long in the hut-larder beside the cow-byre, as she dealt with any food. Now going into the dark enclosure, she sorted among the hanged birds, and tore off a meaty plucked wing. This she thrust in the pocket of her apron.

  When she entered the byre, the Lan was raking the muck from the mud floor, piling it against one wall. Dried, it would be used for the hearth fire, and to fuel the stranger’s brazier in the shed, though Orbin did not know this.

  Tibo went straight up to the Lan, and drew out the bird wing, which she handed to him. He took it without a word and stored it under his tunic, wedged inside against the belt.

  She had been bringing him illicit food since the onset, also, on occasion, black beer. She had taught him how to get milk from the cow that still had it, jetting the fluid directly down his throat from the yellow teat. She was not amazed he had not known the trick. He was from another world.

  She began now to heft the fodder into the trough, and Yems went on raking and piling up the dung. In the beginning, when he had tried to help her move the heavy feed, she had pushed him softly off, liking to touch him. He had had a light fever all one day and night, when he first lay in the dog-shed. He had cried like a child for water, which she had swiftly given him, and she had held his head on her breast, caressing his hair. She had touched most of his body when he slept, later. Though she could not have found words for it, her sexuality and her maternal instinct, both ripe and both equally denied, sought a focus in this male icon.

  But now he was recovered, a man, independently apart from her.

  She bent to her task, because he had come close.

  “Tibo,” he said, quietly. He voiced her name a new way, just as she could not pronounce his name in the way he wished. But she liked his altered pronunciation.

  “Yes, master?”

  “Don’t call me that. I’m not some Iscaian clod who’ll beat you.”

  “Yn—” she tried, “Ye—”

  “Yennef,” he said patiently.

  “Yemhz.”

  He sighed, but it amused him. He always seemed to do this. She liked the manner in which he noticed and laughed at her.

  “Tibo, my dear girl, tomorrow’s dawn, I’m off. Do you understand?”

  “Ah,” she said. She shut her eyes. Suddenly a great well of emptiness opened within her. She had known he would be going, of course. Not so soon.

  “Tibo? Those louts can’t blame you for that, can they?”

  Yes, she thought. But she said, “No.”

  “Anack,” he said. He swore. “I’d take you with me, out of this muddy little hell—but it would be impossible in the snow. Besides, maybe you don’t want to leave, I don’t know you, do I, only your kindness. And you’re clever, aren’t you? Telling me how to get to Ly, and about the big dogs the priests use for sleds. And taking my part with that grunting offal when I was sick. Stealing from me with your soft hands—saving me enough cash to live like a king all year in Ly Dis. Clever, wise, sweet Tibo.”

  She turned her head and stole a look at him, then.

  He was a man. Handsome as she had never known a man could be, fined and rare, like the light of a young sun, the carven towers of the mountains—but a man still. Beyond her. Different. Her thoughts or words or wants, to him, like rain falling on air.

  So she lowered her eyes again, and put more
food in the trough for the cows. Pointing out to him, as she did so, where she had laid his knife in the hay.

  • • •

  There was a winter star which at midnight, on a clear night, shone in through a tiny hole under the roof.

  It woke Tibo, pointing down at her with its thin finger of crystal.

  In that moment she knew, or recognized her knowledge.

  Without hesitation or doubt, she slipped between the covers of the great grass-stuffed mattress where she lay, dark by dark, year by year, with her idiot husband. Orhn did not stir. He would not. Nor Orbin either. As she hurried to make the evening stew, plummy that night with dumplings and livers, she had left out by the hearth two pitchers of beer. She had been taking stock of her jars, and perhaps to leave out the beer in her search was a mistake, for when Orbin saw it he wanted it, and her protest that she had just now meant to set it back had earned her a smack across the head. He uncorked the pitcher and began to drink. Orhn had shared in the drinking, because it was his beer. Both enjoyed the bout. They would sleep deep and late.

  Perhaps she had been scheming even then, leaving out the beer.

  There was a dull red glow remaining on the hearth. The old woman slept on her pallet, sometimes dreaming and gibbering. Tibo had left the water cauldron over the fire, and the water was still hot. Taking her precious crock of soap from the cubby, Tibo washed herself from head to foot. The temple sold this soap, which Orbin loudly despised, though he preferred it when shaving to bird grease, and so never threw it away. The temple whores washed themselves no doubt with such an unguent. At the passage of the soap, the radiant water, her own hands upon her body, Tibo trembled. The dying red of the fire glowed like smooth mirror on her skin.

  When she had dried herself, she drew the marriage rings from her hair and shook it out, waved and springing from its braids, black as night seas she had never looked on.

  Presently Tibo lifted her cloak from the nail, and covered herself only with that against the winter night. She closed the door behind her soundlessly, and walked barefoot over the thin gray ice.

  A quarter moon stood in the sky, and the stars, to light her path.

  • • •

  Yennef, who had strayed in to Iscah on the wildest quest, Yennef, in whose veins the blood of a king, but a fallen discredited king for all that, wound its way, Yennef had roasted and eaten the piece of fowl, and supped also on the rich stew, and soon stretched out for sleep, since he must be awake very early tomorrow.

  He woke silently and totally, tutored to it, long before the dawn began.

  The brazier smoldered on with its prohibited kindling. It lit the shed only smudgily, and the mounded backs of the slumbering dogs. But an upright figure slid through the dark, toward him. The slobbering fool, or the ham-brained Orbin, intent on further robbery?

  Yennef lay motionless, and waited. He could kill empty-handed, if he had to.

  Then the darkness was shuffled off in a single movement, like a breath of wind through a tree. For several seconds he did not know her as Tibo. There was only a naked woman, slender as some Elyrian vase, her body painted by the ruby highlights of low fire, black flames of hair about her, uncanny and beautiful, like the visitation of a Zastis dream, here in the ice-heart of winter—

  “Tibo—?”

  “Hush,” she whispered. Then she kneeled down by him, and he caught from her the savage mingled fragrances, incense-soap, skin and hair, night and desire.

  It was so dreamlike even then, there was no need to speculate on what was prudent in this backland midden, what was sensible or kind. And before even he reached out to her, her narrow hands, scarred all over from the misuses of her life, yet tender as the fur of kittens, crept about his neck, and her warm lips sought his own.

  He had not had a girl since Xarabiss. He was eager, and she seemed as famished as he was. All the while he stroked her, molded her, she twined him, muttering love-words he could not comprehend. When he met the barrier of her virginity, he was not entirely startled. Iscaian law, the backlands—with a generous impulse to counter his impatience, he took his time to open her, fill her; he owed her boundless thanks, and even his life. To return her a taste of pleasure, obviously what she had trusted him to give, was slight enough. And she responded to his tuition, singing her ecstasy under her breath, gasping, outflung, melting, laving him with brighter darker fires—

  “I thought you were your goddess, Cah, there in the shadow,” he said to her, a little later. It was a courtesy, an accolade. Perhaps, for a moment, in some way, it had been true. But she made a tiny averting gesture. Blasphemy, to be taken for Cah. And yet, it seemed to Tibo then, lying against him, burned by his heat, her seals broken, her flesh for the first time vital and alive, it seemed to her that maybe Cah had sent him to her, that Cah, in order to enjoy his beauty, had possessed her. Why else the disregard of law and sin, why else the pulsing avalanche of joy?

  • • •

  The sunrise started with a rent of rosy orange, that slowly bled across the straw through all the shed’s cracks and crevices.

  Accustomed by now to Yennef, as well as to Tibo, the canine pack had paid them small heed, but with the dawn the dogs became restless, aware the thaw held, and anxious for the valley.

  “I’ll come back for you,” he said again. He had said this previously after their third joining, when she had cried out in his arms, trying simultaneously to smother her own delight with her fist—for fear it be heard in the hovel-house. “I can’t leave you here. I’ll come back, Tibo.” But she knew he would not and said nothing in response. She said nothing now. She knows all men, even if not cretins, are bloody liars, he thought, and was glad she knew and that she did not even for a minute believe him. For he would not come here again, of course. A wayside flower, as they said. Not even that. She was braiding her hair, ready for the copper rings. She did not tell him to go or say she loved him, or weep or smile. She simply was as she had been all along. Thank both their gods. It was as if nothing had happened at all.

  Despite that, he kissed her at the door, and gave her an Alisaarian drak of gold-bronze—high currency in the towns of Iscah. “I’m not trying to pay you,” he said. “Take care. May your goddess stay awake for you.”

  She lowered her eyes, in the familiar way. As he went, the dogs also crowded out and rushed off over the pasture. Blackness, who, when he lay sick he had deliriously watched licking his own blood from her coat with a gourmet’s quantifying attention, now nuzzled his hand as she plunged by.

  He looked back only once. The girl was not to be seen.

  She had known what she wanted, and asked for and received it. Rather in the way of the white Lowland races, she appeared to look for nothing beyond the measure of each day.

  • • •

  Tibo, the rings on her hair, dressed, aproned and booted, was at the hearth preparing the old woman’s gruel, when Orbin entered the room.

  His head and belly troubled him after the previous evening’s drinking, and he did not notice the easterner had absconded until it was almost noon. Then, too, when the absence was sure, he could not get up much enthusiasm to beat his brother’s witless dolt of a wife. He contented himself with hitting her across the head until she fell to the floor—which, at such times, she always did rapidly. Then she would lie for a while, until he cursed her, at which she dragged herself up and went on, unspeaking, with her duties.

  Orhn always cried when Orbin repeatedly struck Tibo, and the old woman wailed and rocked herself.

  As soon as Orbin had gone off—to search the dog-shed in case any Lannic valuable might have been left behind—Tibo comforted the mother and her son.

  Though her head still rang, she knew by now how to angle herself to miss most of the violence, and always fell over before much harm had come to her. Orbin had not thought her guilty of any plot, merely negligent; she was a scapegoat for every ill. When the cabbag
es blighted, he struck her, too.

  • • •

  She did not think particularly of Yennef as she moved about the room and yard. Only in the evening, when the light began to die and the snow-cold breathed down again upon the farm, did she imagine him, in Ly by now, bargaining for temple dogs and sled.

  All day, every so often, still hot from the fire of her womb, the wine of his orgasms ran out between her thighs. It was the only thing he had left her of himself; the rich man’s coin did not count. When all his semen had passed from her body, there would be nothing at all.

  2. The Will of Cah

  THE TEMPLE OF CAH, standing on high ground, dominated Ly, which was not difficult. The Big Thaw, snow’s end, and the tepid rains which teemed after it, turned the village every year to sludge. Dwellings, shored by earth, came undone and collapsed. The thoroughfares were brown swirling swamps in which feet and wheels stuck. Everywhere lay drowned rats and the stones of rebuilding. On its central hill, however, the temple squatted above a dressed stone terrace, a pillared box which, even in the rainy cool, smelled of thick perfume and blood.

  Cah had created the world. Those who said otherwise were naturally in error. Theology was not worth discussing, it simply was. Being female, though, she had made a great many mistakes, and eventually called on the male gods, her lovers, to rule in her stead. She it was who taught women their proper function, which was to grow new men in their bellies. It was well known that Cah also relished the act of conception, and therefore was fond of the male species in general. Worshiped Iscah over, and next door in the land of Corhl, as Corrah, Cah upheld masculine dominion. She had never instituted a matriarchy, as was once the state of affairs with the snake goddess of the pale races.