The White Serpent

by Tanith Lee

  The bedchamber being large and uncluttered, he took exercise there, as if he were a prisoner and had no rights to the rest of the mansion or the garden below, which they had shown him were accessible. The streets of the city were another issue. He was not forbidden them—simply, they were not alluded to in the mannerisms of the slaves.

  The second night was sleepless, the gate of the vast cavern fast shut against him. Wine-red Zastis tinctured the grills. He did not ask the house of the sorceress for a girl. He did not want one of their bed-menials, however pleasing or acquiescent. He recalled the blonde Ommos-Thaddric woman, in the roof-thatch of the last village. He considered her, and when desire became unbearable, he turned his memory to the image of death in the square below, the white she-man, joking and applauding a corpse to its grave.

  When the sun rose he went after all down from the upper floor of the mansion, into the outer court, and into her garden, where the city was to be seen. The inanimate bleached buildings rocked at anchor in a soft morning mist, through which beast-headed towers seemed to lift their snouts to snuff the air.

  All the flowers in the garden were white, or of a diluted pastel. White pigeons were cooing in a tree, and he was able to hear the rush of the fountain that concealed the garden’s lower entrance. No other sounds came up the hill. However, a quarter mile off, erected on a level with the tree of pigeons, one of the pillared buildings had put out a branch of smoke. A temple to the Lady of Snakes, maybe, where the altar fires were still kept alight, from politeness, by gods no longer needing to worship.

  A voice blew quietly against his ears. Rehger did not react to it. This was how she had communicated first with him, Aztira, calling his name in his mind. Now he only felt the pressure of her attention, like a slight pressure of fingers, yet for several moments. After which, she withdrew from him like a sigh.

  He continued down to an edge of the garden, where there was the girdling of a low, steep wall. Far beneath, on the misty boulevard, between the monuments, and great houses, he beheld some men and women walking, without haste, two by two, or alone. Like the city, they were all one in whiteness. Zircons flowed over a woman’s wrists, a silver clasp was struck on the shoulder of a man’s tunic. None of them looked up to see if any watched them from the garden’s vantage. Had they done so, they might have taken him for a slave, a brawny servant of Aztira’s mansion who, for some reason, was not moving in the rat-tunnels under the lawn. But doubtless they would not probe his brain to learn why this was, for he was subhuman and did not count.

  (He had garnered a notion of the undercity from the invisible coming and going of the slaves, and from once or twice seeing their emergence or retreat through apertures in the plaster, pillars and stairs.)

  But for the Amanackire citizens, they progressed unhurriedly over the surface, along the boulevard, and two by two or alone, vanished in adjacent thoroughfares.

  Further on in the morning, on the lush hill of a park, he saw another group of them. They seemed at a kind of slow and measured play, a ritual, or a dance even. There was no music and no song.

  He could recount these scenes in Zaddath, if ever he returned there.

  Rehger thought of Amrek, who had meant to wipe this people off the earth’s face. He stared across the city.

  He had admitted, as far away as that last village in the forest, that he had no purpose remaining to him. Purposeless, he had known therefore he would reach this place.

  The feeling was similar to something he had experienced in his childhood, brought out of Iscah by the man Katemval. It came back to Rehger sharp as a knife. How the child he was had wept suddenly—losing something. It was the black bitch-dog—it was the black hair of his mother—all he could properly remember, save her name, pronounced differently.

  The hurt, so small and incoherent, swelled and battered under his breastbone now, trapped and bemused in his man’s body.

  Not Yennef, not Katemval, nor Tibo. The stadium had been parent to him, creatrix, and Daigoth, deity of fighters, acrobats and charioteers, Daigoth was his god.

  But his mother had reverenced Cah, squat, bloody, and blacker than all other things. . . .

  What had driven him was not pride or hate, or rage, or love. If he examined himself, it transpired that he had never validly undergone any of these states, these justifiable emotions of humankind. What motive then, for any of it?

  And as he balanced on that height of the unreal yet extant city, he knew that he had lost himself forever. Rehger, like Amrek, was gone into the past.

  • • •

  She sat, almost all that long second day, her hands folded, overhearing the ebb of the struggle within him. It was her Power which made her able to do so, and made her able to endure it.

  Then, when shadows had covered all her floor, she put that from her, and rising, sought him.

  She loved him, but beside her love for him there was her own destiny, and that of her race. Anackire. She must be two women, the lover, and—his conjuration—the sorceress.

  She reached the threshold of the chamber in the scattering sunset.

  He stood, arrested, in the center of the room, as if he had been pacing about. He wore the clothes the slaves had brought to him, on her orders. The garments were white, as every piece of good raiment was, here. And in his thoughts a picture lay discarded, of another man in Moih, a dark Vis clad in white for his wedding. (Who this man was she could not tell.)

  “Zaddath, or Dorthar,” she said, “will want to hear all you can tell them of my city.”

  Were his eyes empty, now? Their blackness seemed to have no depth—like two shutters of burnished iron.

  “Come with me,” she said mildly. “Tonight something may happen in Ashnesee that will be of interest to the councils of Zakoris and the Middle Lands.”

  “You know so much of me,” he said. His voice was empty, surely. “Everything.”

  “Nothing, my dear. Nothing at all. I don’t know if you revile me still.”

  All she could decipher now, there in this room of her palace, was the sea-change in his perception. Rollers poured and thundered on the beach. Below, his meditation had become unformed but constant, and like that of a child grown very old.

  “You’re inviting me to go with you into the streets of your city,” he said presently, gravely. “If that’s your wish. Yes, goddess.”

  “Goddess. You haven’t been tainted by the superstitions of fools.”

  “Now I have.”

  “Rehger,” she said.

  “But I don’t recognize that name you give me,” he said, “that man, that Lydian. He was done for in Saardsinmey. Your lesson, which I have learnt.”

  “You misunderstood—” she cried, blindly and suddenly, the liar and lover, now. And at that he moved to her and gently put his hand, curving, quiet, against her face. She remembered so well the warmth, the strength and self-restraint of his formal caresses, the peerless grace of the lion taking her up like a leaf, not to damage her—

  She thought, woman’s thought: What have I done? She said, “You suspect you will not return to Zaddath with your news.”

  “It seems unlikely. But I’ll go with you now, Aztira.”

  She put her own hand against his, and drew away. She closed her heart, and said, “You must walk a step or two behind me. Pardon me, that I ask you to do it.”

  “Of course.” He smiled at her. She saw that he was serene. He had surrendered. This was the dignity of the king borne to the public scaffold—again it was she who must rein in wildness and lament.

  “No one,” she said, “will think you a slave. We seldom keep secrets in Ashnesee. Some are already aware of the guest of my house. Even to his bloodline. Seeing you, the knowledge will run like fire among them. This isn’t dangerous in itself.”

  “No.”

  “But you may feel the lash of it. You’re able to shield yourself.”r />
  “I know that, too.”

  “An unusual ability in a Vis. The line of the first Storm Lord, Rarnammon, boasts a Lowland strain. Now entirely debased among the Dortharians.”

  She walked before him down through the mansion.

  At the higher grills and windows, the sunset massed hard, glistening scarlet. Yet, emerging from the vestibule, the west lay over behind the city, more suavely dyed, a flush of amber soaked on silk. The shrine exactly below the house snared the sun on its lid of gold. The rest was darkened like a cloud.

  The woman descended the terraces and turned east. Her whiteness blazing on the dusk, she preceded him along the nameless roads of Ashnesee.

  • • •

  A stairway of stone led into the shallow valley. Night had already gone down into it, and filled the bowl of grass and trees as if with smoke. The towers rose out of the dimness, gleaming, their peculiar cupolas, which were the heads of kalinx and tirr, the slender muzzles of dogs or the hooked visages of birds, blushed like copper. These staring masks had pairs of eyes, crystal windows, each balefully holding the dying sun.

  White among the groves, the Amanackire had gathered. There were perhaps two hundred of them, which might be the sum of their numbers in the city. A minority were children, or adolescent. Mostly they looked to be between twenty and thirty years, at the commencement of long adult life for a Vis, the peak maturity of the Lowlander. There were no old ones. Men and women mingled, as the children mingled with the rest, no person or group adhering to another. And their faces, which were, every one, flawless and, if analyzed, beautiful, were as blank as the cut marble faces of the beast-towers, or even of the bred slaves with skins of wood and eyes of mud.

  Lamps shone from some of the trees, and stars were coming out, and the big Star itself had got over the rim of the valley sky, red in redness, like a ruby in wine.

  Aztira reached the top of the stairway, and Rehger, behind her.

  And all the Amanackire, Children of the Goddess, lifted their heads to see, reminding him of the tirr that guarded the plain outside the city.

  He did not need mentally to hear the inquisition that washed murmuring through the groves, like urgent ripplings over a pool. Nor how it brimmed against the girl who had brought him here. What answer she gave he did not know. He let the fluttering, saturating needles furl in about him, bore with them, a rock in a tide. Amrek. Perhaps this was the demon they summoned, or it was more subtle, more dreadful. If they were conscious of him as a man he did not guess. He was All-Vis, to them. But to himself, only granite, and their sea of intellect and magic, sweeping over and about, was unable to do more.

  After a while the sea furled away again and left him alone.

  Then Aztira started to go down the stair, and he followed her.

  He had begun, since he had let go, to be aware of her love. And, as long before, her impossible might. (It was these elements, twinned, that had caused him to smile.) Somehow the desperateness of such power awoke compassion.

  When she came to the foot of the steps, the people had parted to let her by. There was an aisle of flesh and robes and trees. They walked along it, he and she. It ended against the column of a tower. Thirty feet above, the dog’s head was growing paler on the deepening dark, the eyes had relinquished their rabid glare and turned chill.

  The way into the tower was an oval door of white lacquer. Aztira leaned her hand against it, and it opened inward.

  The room had been made round, and on its walls were the expected frescoes, pastoral visions, dancers, a beaming solar disc of gold. As in the palaces, lamps had been lit, all up the vault of an inner stair.

  By its positioning, the groves and fanciful decorations, he had by now deduced what the area was. A graveyard, and this, one of the tombs. The assembly was not, however, a burial party.

  Aztira glanced at him. She moved on into the round hall, and up into the stairwell. He, and he alone, went after her.

  • • •

  At the topmost level of the tower, the marble ended in a coal-black chamber. Here, on a pedestal, flames burned in a black bowl, in the manner of their temples. By the flame-light, nothing was revealed but for a silver bed, and lying on the bed, a man.

  He could have been anyone of the Amanackire who waited below. Their unflawed faces had by now become all one face, males and females, duplicated over and over, saving only hers.

  The man on the couch was breathing. Once, in every minute, his shoulders, the sharp line of the ribcage, were disturbed with motion.

  Again, Aztira glanced at her companion. She put up her hand, as she had done in returning his caress. Now the hand was to stay him.

  She approached the bier, and stood over it. To all appearances, she was a sister to the breathing corpse, so physically alike they were.

  “Urhvan,” she said, aloud.

  Her lids dropped over her eyes.

  She was speaking within. Yet the chamber rang with the litany of her inner voice—entreaty, reassurance, insistence.

  The man’s eyes opened without warning. They bulged. He let out a braying scream.

  It was a noise of the arena. A sword had gone between the bladed armour of the bones, into the belly. A death cry, panic and disbelief, fury and denial.

  “Urhvan.” Aztira said, again out loud, while the whirlpool of thought and energy soared and smote against the black room, and the glare of the flamebowl flattened, flared.

  The woman bowed over her struggling brother. Her hands settled to his forehead and his throat. His body shuddered and relapsed. He lay along the bed of death, as if dead once more, but now he breathed with a defeated regularity.

  After a little while, Aztira drew back. As she did so, the man sat up sluggishly on the couch. His face was stupid. Then that slipped from him. He was in possession of himself. He was Amanackire. They gazed on each other and spoke with their minds. And the room sang.

  The flame had steadied in its agate cup. In the eye-windows of the dog, the darkness was complete.

  Soon, the Amanackire male got up from his couch. He looked about him, once, his eyes passing across the image of a dark man clothed in white without any attention. Before Aztira, the Amanackire made an obeisance of the Lowlands, the flight of one hand to brow and heart. Without any other show, he then went by her and down the inner stair.

  The man and woman left behind in the tomb’s upper chamber confronted each other, also quite wordlessly. Until there thrust out of the nighttime groves of the burial garden beneath the thud of one huge atmospheric pulse—deafening as any shout.

  “But you,” he said, “were alone.”

  “I was alone, and in Alisaar.”

  “Is it always an act of such violence?”

  “Was it ever easy,” she said, “to be born? Urhvan canceled his own life twenty days ago, on the agreement of return. That has become the final ordeal. Those who dare to do it, and restore themselves, become the elect of Ashnesee. There are at present only ten of us, but eventually each will have met with and outwitted death. In nearby towers, some are lying who have couched with death a year, and longer. Their flesh stays pristine. Thus, the pledge. They will return. At the flickering of the life-spark, we go to them, to minister, those of us for whom the testing is already past.” Her eyes strayed to the blackness in the windows. “I suffered renewal alone, but I was spared the deed of suicide. A tavern-girl slew me to save you from my bane. I had only to accept her pitcher. She had even dressed it for me with lilies.”

  He said, “Didn’t you think to ask that other favor of me. To wait for you.”

  “Ah, no,” she said. “No.”

  “Since you say you reckoned only on death.”

  “Yes, maybe I am dishonest there. All my kind are warned. Any adept of my people might return out of the night. But then.” She looked down at the vacant bed of silver. “How unlikely it is, such a thing.
”

  He waited now, if not in Alisaar. At last he said to her, “Did you also want privacy for your return in anguish?”

  She said, “I shrieked and rent myself with my nails. I didn’t know my name or who—or what I was. I thought myself an animal, a fish, a serpent. I thought that life was death, I was dying, and blood ran from my mouth and in absolute horror I attempted to tear free of the snare. No, no, I did not want your witness. The body weighs like lead. The seeing eyes are like sightlessness. To call out is to be dumb and to breathe is to suffocate. Anguish, agony. To die is better. And one day, I may die completely and be gone. But now—how shall I ever be sure? To live. That is our chastisement and our blessing. For you accused me truthfully. We are gods, my kind.” She put back her head and her hair spangled about her and her eyes were bloodless fires. The Power that streamed from her was like the rays of a winter moon. It was no more than a fact, what she had said to him in the inadequate language of men. “Eventually we will be as we were, as our history has us to be. There is a memory. It’s said we were winged. I nearly think it may be so. We have also traditions among us of lands above the sky, and that we rode from such places in chariots like stars, and will go back there, to reclaim many kingdoms. We dream of it. I, too, have done this. And when I dream—there are other colors there, which I— But I can describe none of them. And all those worlds will be ruled by my race. Without mercy or pity, until we fall or are pushed down again from our heights, and our wings are broken and our season finished. We heal of death. But there will be a death born from which even the Shadowless can never heal. For we shall be feared very much, and hated equally. Until the dawn of that death, then, the path lies upward. The cups of flame will burn before our untenanted altars, and those names we worship will be our own. We are gods. But Anackire is not a god. Anackire is everything, and of this the gods are only part.”