The White Serpent

by Tanith Lee

  The night had retained its peculiar stifled stillness. Some dogs were yowling down the hill, starting off others elsewhere. But their voices were oddly muffled, and the chorus did not continue. The night choked it out.

  The Shalian priests carried brands, and rang bells softly. In their midst they bore the long-litter, curtains drawn. The torches barely smoked. There was no wind. The Guardian’s soldiers, redundant, resentful, but prepared, trudged after, for mounted men were not allowed on this thoroughfare. They had demonstrated some disapproval of followers, or mourners, especially that one should be the Lydian. But nevertheless he and the Corhl walked to the rear, side by side, unspeaking.

  The sarcophagi of the entertainers lay at the topmost stretch of the Street. They had their own quarter, as did all the senseless dwellers in the necropolis. The painted death-palaces of famous hetairas with carved roses on their doors, the pavilions of champions, chained chariot wheels and split shields. The challenging epitaphs caught torchlight under the trees: “Vow live and I am gone, but when I lived my life was better.” “I kissed the sun. It was enough.” Or, too, the dulcet, among the blossomy leaves, a dancer’s body in bronze and garlanded with gold, the tablet under her foot: “I was loved.”

  Panduv’s tomb, far up the incline, and ringed by flowering aloes, had no inscription. The stone was black. It was a domed shape reminiscent, to any who had seen it, of the beehive city in the cliff, Hanassor.

  The door of the tomb, thick stone on a grooved runner, stood open. The priests with the litter paced inside, the fires and bells.

  Over the paved boulevard of the dead, a quietness seemed to descend now like a lid.

  For miles, not a sound.

  “Trouble, sir.”

  One of the soldiers spoke abruptly.

  Another added, “Yes, someone after us, and mounted up, from the noise of it.”

  They listened. Out of the night, some distance away along Tomb Street, a suspicion of hiddraxi, even horses, galloping. And some other resonance, as if a heavy thing were being dragged between them.

  “Two or three miles, I’d say,” said the captain.

  His cohort waited, hand to sword, mollified by a chance of action. This was work they knew.

  Then, sudden as it had begun, the hoofbeats and the dragging ended. The whole band seemed to have been swallowed into nothingness.

  Presently, one of the soldiers swore. He looked at the Lydian, who had won bets for him. “Ghosts, eh?”

  They paused there, in limbo. Ten guards, a captain, a prince of Corhl, a hero of the stadium of Saardsinmey—while from the tomb a muted light stole and the notes of alien prayers.

  Then the lawless riders were on the Street of Tombs once more. Pelting headlong toward them all. In three seconds more each man there ascertained some crucial difference. If hoofs, if wagons or chariots, they had come out from the roots of the earth—

  And then the ground rolled.

  • • •

  Because he was in low spirits, Katemval had been glad to go on a drinking party with old friends. They were men who had made themselves, as he had, through luck and knack, traders and adventurers, in their youth. With the Saardsin grain merchant, he had once hunted wolves. While to the Kandian trapper, Katemval had once stood witness in two legal, savage duels, during which the man won his dead father’s goods from five brothers. Only one of the brothers had required killing. He was a plotter who would not have taken to defeat.

  Talking of which, and other former days, the outing, litters spurned, roved through a decent inn or two, ate its supper, and drank its fill. The Star, and the hot sparks of remembered youngness, sent them all at last into a house of women, and here they finished off the night.

  They had also, at an earlier juncture, gone to the harbor wall to look at the ocean. Many people were out to do the same, some picnicking even on the beach. But mostly there were long faces. Imbued with the wisdom of travelers who have gazed on many marvels, and calmed by wine, the drinking party found the sight of wet fire interesting but no cause for alarm. They reassured the timorous on the streets. Some freak current or outpost of the storm had sent in the fire unusually close. Oh, yes. As for the flame-balls, that was something one beheld at sea. Though there were sailors who swore such things were demons, many tabbed these random emissions of lightning. With similar facts, they regaled the uneasy at the emporium of joy.

  A while before morning, youth having evaporated, and the threat of un-well-being upon him, Katemval hired a boy with a torch, and started for home.

  The sea was still giving up to heaven an eerie blur of light, plainly visible between the tall southern roofs and garden walls.

  Perhaps the gods had been roistering, too. They lived forever, and must get bored with it. For men, boredom was normally offset by notions of brevity. Katemval was not yet to his seventy-sixth year, an upper path for a Vis. His father had gone to one hundred and fifteen, but not pleasantly, riddled with ailments. Well, my dear, thought Katemval, following the bright blot of the torch, a few more such nights, and seventy-six should see you out.

  But he did not credit that. Sleep and a posset would put him right. And there was this breach with Rehger somehow to be sorted. The witch was dead—so that at least was seen to.

  They had reached Jewel Steps, and were climbing them, the torch-boy springing ahead, when there came a sudden tremendous bang, from the waterfront behind.

  It rocked the night, a horrible echoing thud, that drove the air deep into the ears.

  “Was that the harbor?” exclaimed Katemval. “Some ship’s oil-casks have gone up—”

  The boy looked frightened, staring back toward the sea that house sides hid from them, the torch dropped to the stair. Katemval had turned also. Below, light was being kindled in a score of windows.

  Katemval thought, No, I won’t go to gawp. It’s my bed I need—

  Then he was falling.

  He could not tell why. He struck the steps, and hit his head, and thought stupidly, It was aching anyway, where’s justice— But then some rhythm in the stone jounced him on, and he fell farther, and the next blow stunned him, so everything was mazed, a mad misty universe where walls were jumping into the sky, and there was a ghastly mad noise going on, grinding and cracking and splintering, with the strains of bells and screams mixed in.

  • • •

  Since the crane had stayed unrepaired, the column-tree had remained upon the top-walk of the stage. It had been the axis of this evening’s discord at the theater, along with the leopards for Yasmat’s dance, which were fractious and unbiddable. Panduv herself had unfalteringly performed her routines, her body obedient to her as a black rope. . . . When the rehearsal perished, the night had run nearly into a day. But Panduv’s lover among the actors persuaded her to combine with him, again, inside the column-drum. “You never make a sound above a sigh,” he complained when they were done. “Don’t you like what I do?” Well-mannered to intimates, she was casting about for a reply that would suit his peacock soul, when such things ceased to matter.

  “Tits of Death!” the peacock cried, between anger and fear. “Some pig’s winching us on that cracked-up crane—trying to kill me—that Epos, he thinks he’ll take my place—Epos! Damn you into Aarl, you bloody dog!”

  The drum flung to and fro. The lovers were tossed into each other’s arms, and away against the cushioning. All at once, the column reeled. Sickeningly, beyond any command of theirs, they felt it toppling. As in the other thing, he made more noise than she. The crash was bruising but not fatal—now they rolled. They were deafened and buffeted by the tumbling drum. The actor roared and flailed. “Keep still, brainless,” Panduv spat at him. “Hit me again, I’ll tear out your eyes.” “You Zakor sow, don’t mark my face with your talons—” Just then, with a shudder, the column jarred to a halt.

  All of this had lasted less than a minute. Breathless, a
nd in abject wrath, the actor now scrabbled over Panduv to release the hinges of the drum. After some difficulty, he succeeded, and crawled out into the darkened theater. Something crunched under his knee. With undeductive surprise, he realized it was the piece of a lamp which seemed to have come down from the ceiling. Perhaps the column had struck it in the air.

  Then, and only then, it came to him the atmosphere was full of a thick abrasive dust. He began to cough, cursing the damage to his voice. As he did so, the second revelation occurred, and on its heels, another. There was a most bizarre music playing in the city beyond the theater courts. It had elements of pipes possibly, a wild wailing song. More than ten thousand throats seemed to make it up. Instinct caused him to glance overhead. He saw, through the cloud of ocher, something flash and flicker in the roof. It was lightning. The roof had become sky—

  “Oh, Panduv—” he said, his tone inadvertently laced with high tragedy, for once genuine.

  Then there came a groaning boom. It passed through the ground beneath and the open sky above. The world started again to vibrate. The actor sprawled on his face.

  Panduv, in her turn, had been listening to the music in Saardsinmey. It had held her spellbound on her belly, shrinking, immobile. And now, while she lay there still and the earth quaked and thundered a second time, her companion’s desperate feet spasmodically kicked shut the partitions of the column. As all the tiers of the theater lifted slowly from their beds, and glided down on the stage.

  • • •

  In Velva’s tiny cubicle at the inn on Five Mile Street, there was space only for a bed, a slender cabinet, a mirror of bronze upon the wall. No space at all for the earthquake.

  Most of the inn had collapsed into the street and surrounding yards. The wing which housed the tavern slaves and girls, only one story high and tucked into rising ground, had largely survived both shocks. But internally it was a shambles, and full of the electrifying sawing wailing sound that now seemed to hang densely on the city as the dust.

  Velva had not been sleeping. The deed of the previous morning, the gossip-borne news of its accomplishment, had held her ever since in a kind of paralysis. She performed her tasks in an orderly way, but when the night’s service was over, coming into the cubicle, she lay down fully-clothed, straight as a rod, her hands clasped across her waist—the position of one buried.

  Neither dread of accusation, nor remorse, had affected her. She had felt herself to be merely an instrument of some great will. Maybe it was in itself this epic picture of the murder that now wrung her out. For sure, she had no thought of elemental punishment. When the earth tilted, throwing her from the bed, and from her apathy, she was only terrified, nothing more.

  The first shock tore through the world. And passed. Perhaps thirty seconds elapsed, filled by crashings and subsidences, the human hymn of pain and fear. The aftershock, in itself far less, but needing solely to strum the weakened structures of the city to bring them down, seemed if anything stronger than the first. That too passed.

  A beam had dropped from the ceiling and smashed the bed. Had Velva not been ejected, it would have crushed her. But she had no fancy either she had been spared.

  • • •

  The boy had run away. That was not amazing. But he would not have expected it of Rehger. Was the boy Rehger? Rehger was a man, now—Katemval lay on rubble of the Jewel Steps and brooded on these things. Then, his eyes wandering, he saw after all the boy who was not Rehger had also not deserted him. A cascade of stones from a nearby house, covering the steps, had killed him outright. This brought Katemval an instant of extreme grief. Then, his consciousness moving inevitably outward, he realized such motives for sorrow were everywhere around.

  Katemval crawled to his knees, and wrapped the edge of his mantle over his lower face, against the smother of stone dust and plaster. He stared in a sort of emotionless acceptance, finding that he could now look out to sea from Jewel Steps, for every wall and building in between seemed to have collapsed.

  The dawn was coming, too, carelessly out of the east. It burnished the whirling pillars of the dust, revealing or suggesting distances. Here and there, like lamps underwater, fires had broken out and were burning, attractive sweet colors through the murk, rosy, and soft white— The whole city, on one breath, seemed to scream.

  Katemval felt anger then. He looked at the sky, the ghostly sketch of sea. He might have spoken against the gods. But the ground began to shake again. The thundering rumble came from far away, pouring toward him. And like a beaten dog he cowered before the stick.

  Then a god rose in front of him, a scarlet blazing tower. Or it was the misplaced sun exploding as it was hurled up from the southern sea, eight miles away, had he known it, turning the sky to blood.

  • • •

  The sea in its sequins had gone this time two miles out. It had run from Saardsinmey as if itself afraid of the quaking of the earth. The water left the ribbed mud behind it, shining still, littered with thrashing sea-life and the slovenly nets of weeds.

  The ships in the harbor basin, dashed and buffeted by the rocking of the world, several alight, were now grounded, ineffectual as huge toys.

  Of those people still alive in the vicinity, few paid heed to the sea’s escape.

  It had waited out its while, a thousand years perhaps, the thing under the ocean. Once or twice, playfully, it had turned in its sleep, and the coasts of Alisaar trembled. Nothing sleeps forever. Feeling its quickening upon it, it woke, and lifted itself into the darkness of the day.

  There came then the bellowing crack of doom. Those who could, craning in horror toward it, saw this:

  A funnel of brilliant white, a hammerhead of blackness. Then red, red for New Alisaar, the red of roses and fire and blood, bursting, hitting heaven, streaming down.

  The landmass seemed lit by it, end to end. The sky recoiled. All hint of sunrise was put out.

  Black and red the turmoil now, and through the upsurge, silver snakes that twisted, wreathing the stormclouds, clutching, strangling them, never letting them go.

  The submarine volcano, brother or child of countless others located far from shore, south and west, the mountains of fire which had given those oceans their legends of Hell: Its frenzy was flame against flame, so the water, running into it, was gulped and burned away. Steam and magma, liquid rock, salt and boiling smoke, gushed a quarter of a mile into the atmosphere. The volcano raped the sky. The sea churned, caught between waves of moving earth and fire. The sea fell in upon itself, and, repulsed by the phallus of Aarl, turned back for land.

  • • •

  Sixteen years of age, Tarla, her clothes torn, her face freshly painted with dirt, sobbing, framed in the upper window of a room that had no longer any actual walls; Tarla with dead women heaped around her on the cushions and the wreckage, saw—across the flattened chaos of ten thoroughfares, a market, a descending terrace that finished in midair—saw Rorn come out of the sea. Or thought she did.

  The towering fire-cloud with its lightning coils of white serpents coming and going, that made no sense to her. Nor had the earthquake done so. It was a nightmare, although she could not surface from it. Only an hour ago, she had been arguing for the hopes of a hypothetical embryo, lodged in her womb by some Corhlan wanderer— Now, those ideas had vanished. She clung to the window-shape. She sobbed, and the red sky heaved and fissured.

  Then, Rorn came up from the depths.

  He had no form, as in the myths he did. No, he was only water. It piled up on itself, scaling into the sky until the sky was gone. It hid the mountain even, and the mountain’s fiery light. The world turned black. Yet the water glowed. It gleamed like bales of silk, up there, stretching to the roof of eternity.

  In wonder, the girl had stopped crying. To cry had no meaning.

  One moment the ocean was a glittering sheet on its side, distant, unbelievable, and real, and then you saw, too, t
he curling creamy head of it, pleating over, the breaker, two hundred feet high—

  It looked utterly gentle, so smooth now was its passage. And gently, tenderly, it smoothed down the granite palisade of the harbor, the last fifty-foot standing stones. As it came, it drew up the galleys and the merchantmen, the turrets, the basalt slipway itself, in one cupped hand skillful and sure as a mother’s—

  Tarla saw all things, whole or in portions, gathered to the sky. The needles of a fine spray pierced her face. The breath of Rorn rushed in her mouth, her lungs, as she opened them to call aloud. Then countless tons of water, the tidal wave, combed in across the shore, the street, the city, and her little protest, and silenced every one.

  • • •

  When the ground moved, men fell down as at a magician’s mantra in some theatrical comedy. When the ground moved a second time, they fell a second time. Here and there a tree uprooted, leaving behind a perfect impression in the soil. Stones shook out of tombsides, and fifty feet away a lamped statue was smashed in bits, and set the shrubbery in flames.

  Farther off, the city had fared much worse. A smother of particles and smokes hazed up from it directly, obscuring and heightening the chaos. Otherwise only noise came out. It rumbled and moaned, and bells jangled—there was a long bass roaring that did not properly end, but seemed to go round and round in circles in the hollow shell of the earth.

  Then the gout of bloody matter exploded like a lanced abscess on the horizon of the sea.

  As the world flashed red, then darkened to a reborn night, having the clue, even those who had begun to flounder down toward the mass of the ravaged city—checked.

  Not one of them had said a coherent sentence all this while. With blasphemies and oaths, pleas and wordless expletives, or total silence, so they had greeted the advent. The Shalian priests, who had scrambled out of the tomb for fear it would come down on them, had done no better than the unenlightened soldiery, the cursing stone-worshiper from Corhl, the Lydian Swordsman fighting, as he usually fought for life, without comment.