The White Serpent

by Tanith Lee

When the slave came out, followed by the sun-blazoned figure of Rehger, a note of keen gratification went through the older man. It was rarely now that the hero sought his inventor . . . if the attentions had ever been frequent, or more than the easy friendly courtesy the Lydian extended to most of humanity, his fellow Swords, the city nobles, the drudges of taverns, the gambling mob. (Yet I’m soothing to him. He knows that. Here he is now, some enquiry on his lips. He used to ask me many things, long ago, when I told him the stories of my travels, other lands, legends. Alisaar’s his earth, he can never go anywhere else, or want to. But my mind-box is his library. We’re to fight Thaddrians, have you seen Thaddra? I was offered a team of animals from Dorthar, would they be worth going for?)

  “Sit, eat, drink. And ask me,” said Katemval.

  Rehger smiled. “Is it so obvious?”

  Seating himself, then, a dash of sea-sand fell from his mantle. He was dressed for evening fare, but he had been on the beach.

  “Not the princess, surely,” said Katemval.

  Rehger glanced at the sand, which some of the waterbirds had come to try. He took one of the little breakfast cakes and broke it for them, stroking their necks of iridescent indigo as they ate. “No, not a princess. There was something curious with the sea. At dawn, when she and I were walking back toward the harbor wall, the tide had gone farther out than I ever saw. A couple of ships outside the basin were in difficulties, they were pulling cargoes off in a hurry. She was afraid of the sea, she said it meant something bad would happen. You know what those girls are like sometimes.”

  “I remember.”

  “But the fishermen were down the beach, waving their arms and running about. There were scores of fish left behind all over the mud. The men said to me Rorn was thirsty, he was drinking the sea.”

  “The waters beyond Alisaar were always strange. Myth used to have it they rolled on into the ocean of Hell, Aarl, All-Death. Then the traders began going back and forth to the white men’s lands, and Hell had to move its traps. But you can see sailors, the ones who stick to the south routes and the west, hair gone gray, and some of the fishermen and shore-liners get it, as far up the coast as Hanassor. Bleached by Aarl-salt—and it turns the brain, too, probably. It’ll have been the tremor on the night of the Fire Ride. The land shudders, then the sea does flighty things. But that isn’t what you came to ask.”

  “No, Katemval.”

  The slave hurried out again with a fresh griddle of hot cakes, and honey-curd and raisins—and to remove the milk, regardless of Katemval, which the Children of Daigoth never drank. Rehger thanked the slave, waiting till he was gone to say, “Who was Amrek? I mean the Storm Lord. Do I have the name right?”

  “You do. Amrek son of Rehdon, the last Vis High King. He was the one who said he’d wipe all smudge of the Lowlanders off life’s face. But Rehdon’s bastard, Raldnor—half Vis, half Lowlander, and Anackire Incarnate for a mother, if you swallow all the tale—Raldnor made a treaty with the other continent, the blond men of Vathcri, Vardath and Shansar, and picked up the Lowlanders and told them they were magicians. And armed with that, he whipped Amrek into an early grave. Koramvis city was smashed to bits in the earthquake. Anackire sat on the mountains and applauded like a lady at the stadium. Around a hundred years back, it happened again, another way round. Free Zakoris wanted war, but the war was stopped. The gods stopped it. If you believe all that.”

  “Do you?”

  “Well, if I spill the salt I ask the god’s pardon like some up-country wench. And I sacrifice regularly in the temples. I even make an offering now and again in the Shalian temple near Tomb Street. To the snake woman. Just to be on the safe side. But the gods walking the water—I can never quite credit that. I don’t even know if I credit the gods. May they excuse me.”

  Rehger laughed softly. But his eyes were distant. His unleveled beauty, as he sat there at the ordinary sunny table, filled Katemval with an instantaneous anxiety. It seemed to provoke fate. The years of fighting and winning, the crown of the great race—and no mark on him, no disfigurement to appease the envy of perhaps nonexistent gods.

  “But Amrek,” said Katemval, “why Amrek?”

  Rehger looked down at the ornamental birds. Katemval looked at them, too, remembering that casket with the hawk and pigeon in it. Sometimes slum archers bagged such suppers—the shard of flint in the raptor’s breast seemed to indicate this was their origin. But then some other one had bought or taken the trophy. They were not embalmed, as it turned out. The corpses were kept pristine by some other perturbing method. Flung on the compost behind the house, even now, the slave said, they had not decayed. Nor had anything utilized the carrion.

  “Yesterday, it was suggested to me,” Rehger said, “that I come direct from Amrek’s line.”

  “You’re Iscaian. There was no look of it, there,” Katemval said promptly. He was unnerved. He thought, And every look of it in you. By a pantheon of gods—yes—

  “Well, Katemval. My father was just a man who had my mother, not an Iscaian. He left her that golden drak, remember. She told me something of how he looked, tall and strong, and dark. He might have been rich, once. And he said he was a Lan. Is that possible? Is there some remnant of Amrek’s house in Lan?”

  “Now wait—wait—” Katemval tapped the table, so the raisins jumped in their dish. “Lanelyr— About the time of that non-war. A priestess who claimed descent from Amrek Am Dorthar. She married into the royal house at Amlan. Not to the Lannic throne, you understand, which only goes to brothers and sisters or sons with mothers, incestuous pairings.” Abruptly Katemval ceased. He sat and looked at Rehger, realizing that the boy—the man—had never bothered to mention this vital circumstance of his begetting, all through their years of friendship—which plainly was not any kind of friendship at all. Katemval said, in a foolish, stricken voice, before he could control himself, “Didn’t you trust me, to tell me that? Your mother’s honor, was it?”

  Rehger glanced up. His eyes lost for a second the sheen of distance, they gentled, as Katemval had seen them do with a woman or a beast. Insulted, Katemval drew away as Rehger reached out to clasp his arm. And the gentleness went. Rehger shook his head impatiently.

  “I thought it was unimportant, who he was. I never told you because it meant nothing to me.”

  “What can it mean now?” Katemval said. “You’re a Saardsin Sword.”

  “A slave, yes,” Rehger said, offhandedly. “But I should like to know. If I have a king’s blood. If my mother took me from a king’s descendant.”

  “All right,” said Katemval. He was brusque. “Stroll along Three Penny Alley and find a soothsayer, or some witch, and ask her to cast it out for you.”

  “It was a sorceress who told me first,” Rehger said.

  Katemval thought of a white image by a wall, a message of downfall, of weird rumors concerning a raising of the dead—

  “Don’t go to her,” Katemval said. “If it’s the Amanackire woman, No.”

  “It seems I may have to.”

  “No, I said. Certainly, she is a witch. Without pleasantries, the deadly sort. Like all her race, the white ones. There’s a tale they have some colony, in the northwest jungles—oh, beyond Zakoris. They plot there and ferment their cold sickly magics. The written warning I told you of, it has that tone. It must have come from her—”

  Rehger’s face had acquired a shadow. The prefiguration of the bones within. After all, he had been marked—“You watched the last combat, Katemval?”

  “I can always watch now, when you fight.”

  “Did I kill the Corhlan?”

  “You killed him. And half the city says she brought him back. But who’s seen the boy? It’s an ugly nonsense, but it’s compatible with what she is. Oh, they can work magic. Sham or genuine, it’s nothing to want to be near.”

  Rehger came to his feet. He gazed at Katemval, a long, open look, and t
he shadow was in his eyes now.

  “Katemval, I have to be going. I must be in the practice court by midmorning, or put out the fighting-squares.”

  “Yes,” said Katemval. “Go carefully.”

  He felt old, and sat down as Rehger turned to leave. But then, getting up again, Katemval walked upstairs to the roof and watched the Lydian riding away along the avenue on the coal-black thoroughbred. Katemval watched as far as the fountain, where the road angled. For the snake witch lived on this very street. In the dilapidated tiled mansion. Rehger had gone by it without a glance. But neither had he looked back once, toward Katemval’s house.

  • • •

  He might have excluded himself from the practice court, this one day; the squares would not have been out, despite what he had said to Katemval, who knew as much. Champions made their own laws for such things.

  But he had required the fight, the hard exercise. Sex had not purged him. The sea and the night, disturbed by red glimmerings, the water plucked away. It was Zastis. He was of the bloodline of a dead king. And in his mind, he could recall a white girl lying on a palace floor, a white girl with her hands locked upon a grill of iron.

  Eight squares, each composed of four men, spaced two by two, back to back.

  The sun streamed down and broiled them, and the blades, sword and dagger, made lightnings, slammed together, slithered, grated, shot away.

  And the Corhlan. He lived. Did he? Where? Where would a man go to, who had been slain and restored inside a day? To the brothels? The temples?

  “You’re slow, Lydian,” the Ylan, facing him from the next square, rhythmically lunged. “Too many times, Rehger, with the one you had, Rehger. Last night. Was it six times? Or seven? Did she go pale, then?”

  You did not converse while fighting. Except now and then in the practice court.

  “Last night I was praying,” said Rehger, feinted almost idly, and thumped the Ylan across his helm with the sword-flat. The Ylan went down, and the man back-to-back with him stumbled and cursed.

  Rehger thought: That was word-play, too. Pale. He meant the Amanackire.

  The trainer ambled up the block of squares. Now he frowned, now called on Daigoth.

  Rehger waited for the Ylan.

  “Take off your pathetic rags,” he said to the frightened girl, in snow-lapped Xarabiss.

  The Ylan was on his feet, shaking his head like a bemused lion.

  Amrek. Rehger. A dream, memories carried in his blood—

  The Swordsman beside him, a young sturdy Ommos who would be worth watching in a year, if he lived so long, landed a blow upon the Ylan’s side-mate. The man swerved, missing the worst of it, and came back to ram the Ommos under the ribs with a dagger hilt. “That’s what you like, boy-stitcher.” The Ommos sprawled toward Rehger’s piece of ground. Rehger sprang away. The Ylan, favoring his dagger now, tried to score under the Lydian’s sword. Rehger moved effortlessly beyond the stroke. Bringing up his left hand he took the sword neatly from his right, snatched the dagger right-handed. The showy gambit now brought the sword left-handedly down on the Ylan’s blade, and scythed it to the court. The Ylan snarled, his anger was real. Generally they fought in the practice court with blunted iron. Not today. It was Zastis. Tempers and blades were sharp—

  The Lydian’s sword and dagger re-passed each other, the showy gambit performed twice without a flaw. “Only able three times, then,” growled the Ylan. “You saved it for me?”

  The Ommos, still rolling on the ground, sank his teeth suddenly in the foot of the man who had felled him.

  A howl of laughter and abuse went up.

  The trainer groused stamping forward. Dirty fights earned docked privileges. No boys for the Ommos tonight—

  What did it matter if you were a king’s making? That blood must run thin by now. And he was a slave in Saardsinmey— Careful with the sword. Swords might be snakes in disguise.

  “I fear you. Oh, Rehger—warn this city—”

  Something was screaming, miles below, loud and sonorous, a mighty creature in the gut of the planet—

  Rehger lifted his head—the sun canceled vision. His left arm flew outward for no reason, and he looked and saw the Ylan standing in astonishment there. “You let me cut you.”

  The blood of a king, it was leaving him now.

  The trainer was at the Lydian’s elbow, holding the left arm, examining it. The Lydian allowed this. The arm, opened lengthways a hand’s breath below the elbow to the wrist, did not belong to him. It belonged to the city.

  The other squares fought raggedly on.

  “That’s deep enough. This old wrist scar here blocked off the stroke. Lucky. Off, out of it. Gods blind me, Lydian, I never saw you take a dolt’s bite like that since you were eleven years of age.”

  He walked away from the court. He held the blood of Amrek inside his arm as best he could, but it spilled between his fingers, to the ground.

  • • •

  The surgeon pointed to the cup of wine.

  “Drink that. Keep still.”

  Unkinder echo of Katemval, this morning.

  Rehger did as he was instructed. The surgeon drove his silver needle six times through the skin, tied off the gut-thread and severed it. The wound was bound by an apprentice.

  “You won’t compete for our city for ten days. You were due two events, they’ll pine. I will inform you presently which exercises you may or may not indulge.”

  When the lecture was done, Rehger said, “Do you know anything about the Corhlan who fought here?”

  “I wasn’t in attendance yesterday. But I’ll tell you, Lydian, I don’t know of a single man among all the stadium surgeons who was.”

  In the under-passages, a pretty harlot, one of scores kept to content the younger Swords, came by the Lydian, slipping her dress from her shoulders and smiling slyly. “They say the Ylan got you—well, and so he did. Well, I know. You let him do it, so you can be with that woman, didn’t you? To have your Zastis days and nights alone with her.”

  • • •

  On foot, cloaked and hooded, he went there. He even stooped a little; some might know him by his height.

  But three torch-lighters, who always greeted him, paid him no attention as they made their way through the main boulevards of Saardsinmey, touching the stalks of light-poles to yellow flower. And the girls did not come up to him, or the shopkeepers and princes who had won.

  A couple of riotous dinners were in progress on Gem-Jewel Street, and there was also dancing in the road about the fountain, young women swirling their beads and skirts. Two officers of the Guardian’s cohorts, standing to watch, were complaining that word had it the Lydian had been sliced through the arm at practice, and would not fight or race for thirty days, or maybe never again, and how would the bets go now, Daigoth-eat-and-spit-it-forth.

  Her house was in darkness.

  Even in the garden, no lit window was visible.

  He came to the upper entrance, and the lamp there, too, was out. He left the bell and crashed his fist several times on the timbers.

  When the mix girl opened the door, he was sorry.

  “It’s all right, sweetness. I only wanted to be heard.”

  She said nothing, nor did she try to stay him. She darted away and he was left to enter as he would, closing the door himself.

  Everything was shadows, the salon empty. Yet he could smell the perfume of her, faint as fine pollen, everywhere.

  He went to the grill, where she had clung lamenting. The garden lay beneath, quite silent. The moon was rising, the Vis moon of Zastis, red as the hair of a red-haired woman—white, in the cold months, as the Amanackire. His arm gnawed and burned. His fingers had stiffened. The surgeon had not told him, since he knew, that even with the utmost care, some malady might set in. The wound could fester. The arm . . . be lost to him. Some chose to swe
ep the courts then, to clean the privies, to put oil in the bath-house jars. To run errands for the Swords. Some went back into the stadium and soon died there, jeered and pitied, and praised in death. It was the mercy of Daigoth, to kill a crippled man swiftly.

  “Aztira,” Rehger said to the shadows and the perfumed emptiness. He crossed the salon and tried the doors along the corridor beyond. Each opened. Many of the rooms lacked even furnishings. In some, dim shapes, nothing that was animate.

  From a terraced balcony, a stair led up to the roof of the mansion. He climbed it slowly.

  I healed before, there have been other wounds.

  I was younger. No wound like this.

  The roof was garlanded by the garden trees, only on the southwest side partly open to the dancing lights of the street beyond the alley, which seemed remote as fireflies. It occurred to him he glimpsingly heard the sea, as he had at the inn. And on the beach, sheathed in Velva’s golden flesh.

  Pale on darkness, the Lowland girl was seated at the parapet. Her hair, unbound, with no ornament, hung round her to the roof itself, a waterfall. She did not turn.

  “Is your name,” he said, “Aztira?”

  She did not reply.

  “Aztira, you’ll have to heal me, as you did the Corhlan. I was cut in the arm today, and it was your fault.” He moved toward her, but she did not look about. The moon was in the eastern trees. Not red, as yet, only like the rosy amber she had worn on her forehead. “And then I brought the one clue my father ever left my mother. It’s a coin. An adept can read something from a possession. In Alisaar they can, or say they can. I want to ask you about that man. If you take the coin, and tell me. He was called Yennef. My mother could never pronounce it. Nor I, till I came here.” He stood by her. All about, the darkness throbbed and whispered. “Aztira? There’s also a dream I need you to divine.”

  She turned then. As she stood, her hair drifted out like silver smoke; her eyes were stars veiled in water. She raised her arms and her fingers touched his shoulders. There was strength in him, fierce and warm as wine. No wound, no trouble. He put his hands on her waist and lifted her and drew her up his body until her silver arms encircled his neck, until her heart smote against his, until their mouths could meet.