The White Serpent

by Tanith Lee

  “This time,” he said, “it is Cah, coming through the shadow to me.”

  Somnambulist, she kneeled down by him. It was dreamlike. As he reached out to her, her narrow hands slid about his neck.

  Their mouths and bodies met recognizing some unnamed landfall, aphrodisiac as Zastis.

  It was not only that he was Rehger—Saardsinmey— but that he was for her all regretted things. He had become not merely a young man, but her own youth, the male alter-demon of her flesh.

  His hands found out her skin, her breasts, her thighs, as if, sightless, he must learn her by touch alone. When he possessed her, the strength of him was like the heart of fire. Always quiet in love or lust, she knew she must cry out. It would not matter, the house expected him to be with some girl. . . .

  As the rhythm of the life-dance bore her up, she did not remember who he was. She did not know his name. She forgot she was Panduv.

  Like a coiled flower of the chaplet of the goddess (black Cah the Anackire-eyed), the pulse of her womb, the bud spreading its chalice, stretching to be filled.

  She clung to him and he to her. The crying sang from her and she must smother her delight with her fist for fear it be heard—

  The spring of liquid light pierced through her.

  The flower-womb cupped and clasped and closed upon it.

  Night and silence resettled like a fall of dust. In the silence, they were stilled together, saturated in the warmth of each other, and the starlight ticked across the floor.

  “That was a welcome gift you gave me,” he said.

  “It’s a time of giving.”

  When she moved to the mattress’ edge, pulling her mantle once more around her, he said sternly, “Will you be quite safe here? I don’t know what’s in store for me, but if—”

  He stopped, and in the space she did not say anything more.

  She saw the shine of the stars on his eyes as he watched her go, on his gentle, madman’s eyes. And out in the court, the wick was guttering before the goddess.

  Panduv did not look back. She went up the stairs, along the passage, to her couch, and lay down there and slept at once.

  About an hour and a half before dawn, fragmentedly, she discerned the noise of the yard gate, and knew that he had been let through, on to his unsure road, into his different future.

  • • •

  She woke again late in the morning, languid, not remembering. Then she thought it a dream, until the evidence of her own body put her wise. The craziness of what she had done thrust her mind forward in a senseless progression. Arud must suspect. He would cast her out into the streets and they would stone her there—such things went on, even in the sophisticated capital. Perhaps she should at once remove herself from the house. Why had she ever remained? How many occasions she had been on the point of an exit from this life. Something had stayed her. The child, maybe, or sentimental fondness for the paunchy priest who, by her wiles, she had so much changed, setting him at liberty also from the mores of masculine Iscah, to her benefit.

  And she had grown comfortable. Her roots had gone down into this unsuitable soil. She bloomed here. She would not run away.

  How should he know anything? Who had spied? The holy stillness of the night had been nearly uncanny, and in the hour of her excursion to the courtyard, the villa had seemed deserted, or its inhabitants under a spell—

  She fell asleep again, and opened her eyes at last to a sound of brazen cymbals. It was the festival procession clashing over the afternoon.

  A deep lassitude was on her, but she rose and went through certain bodily contortions now habitual with her after sexual union. For spring, the day had turned hot and heavy. She found her muscles intensely reluctant. She was debilitated, and left off.

  There was the other way, to be sure. The herbs she had had the merchants fetch for her, the leaves of the plants she nurtured in her apartment. Their scent was pleasant, all but one. She gave for its excuse the pretty speckling of its leaves.

  She brewed the drink in some distaste. The remedy was decided but unkind. There might be sickness, then she would bleed, which would not be to Arud’s liking, for, after the orgies of the temple, oddly, he was often hungry for her.

  Well, it served her right. Since she had been so lavish with her greed and was now too lazy, and besides so very nervous. . . . For the Lan was not as young as her priest, therefore probably not as virile. Yet the single embrace—a burning— Best drink the herb. A day or two of malaise and Arud peeved would be a suitable penance and punishment for silliness.

  • • •

  The cup was ready. She held her breath against its smell, the actual look of it. And as she raised the goblet there in the afternoon storm-light—a terrible wailing cut through the sky.

  It was a sound dehumanized, supernatural. It seemed to overpour the basin of the atmosphere and bring down the house.

  She was in Saardsinmey, inside the pillar-drum, flung every way as heaven fell. The roar of crashing stone and of huge waters, the screaming of a single gargantuan throat.

  Panduv spun about and the cup of abortion whirled from her fingers and the exquisite glass shattered on the tiles with the drink like lizard’s blood.

  Panduv raced upward through the villa.

  Stairs passed under her and walls tumbled down.

  On the roof terrace, the sky had indeed unreefed itself, a rent blue-black sail. Peaks of the city were stabbed out in a weird yellowish glare against its dark.

  Two female servants collapsed on their noses before her.

  The awning flapped with a horrible loudness. The nurse woman began to wail again.

  Panduv reached the fish pond and looked into its cloudy eye. There in the pupil lay her child, face down under a spurling ink of hair.

  A prophecy fulfilled. A circlet joined. Be rid of the unborn, and the born also you were rid of.

  Panduv did not think. She reached into the pool and gripped the form of Teis, which no longer had the texture of anything fleshly, or familiar. Panduv pulled forth this object, and turning it over her knee, squeezed the water out. Then she tossed the child, like the unreal thing it had become, on its back. In the avenue of the child’s throat a fish had lodged. Panduv, like a magician, brought it forth and threw it into the pond. Miraculously, the fish began at once to live and swam swiftly under a pebble.

  She was a Daughter of Daigoth’s Courts. She knew many clever tricks. She slammed her child across the breast an appalling blow, hateful, that set the staring women off into hysteria once more. Then Panduv, leaning to her child’s face, kissed her mouth, a hoarsely sighing kiss of love after the blow of hate. (So it appeared to the women, who described it afterward in superstitious awe.) A kiss. And the beaten chest of the little girl lifted.

  The child’s lids parted and Teis was there, in the eyes. She crowed and choked and howled, clutching her mother. Panduv held her fast, and the storm cracked like a goblet and water swept over them all.

  The harvested plant would not provide sufficient maleficence again for some days. She could then remake the brew, but perhaps too late. She would not bother. Holding her child, Panduv was conscious that she had accepted also the second child, the spark of fire lodged gemlike in the girdle of her belly. The sly goddess of Iscah had outwitted her, and what Cah willed you could not go against. The pregnant mother was sacred to Cah. Then, let it be.

  • • •

  “All this to come home to! You’re nothing but trouble to me, you Zakr wench.”

  Arud ranted, quartering the chamber with a prowling plod. After the storm the night was massive and fragrant, limitless and cooled with stars. His litter had arrived two hours after midnight. He was not so sodden as the general rule, but discontented over some minor slight, for the more weighty his spiritual dominance the more he valued himself, and the more he knew himself envied.

  His
holy robes swung around his thick body, their richness dazzling. On his breast the insignia of the Adorer, a pectoral in which two golden figures revered a disc of jet and topaz, clicked and wriggled with its own irritation. He had about him, all over his smooth surfaces, even in his splendid hair, the tang of incense.

  It would have been the clerk who sent a cautious message to Arud, arranged for it to be waiting at the temple porch. The message reviewed the buying and manumission of a galley-slave, in honor of the festival.

  Ready for sleep, Arud had awakened. He had come directly to her, this fly-brained Zakr wretch, the curse of his house. He discovered her seated in her chair, polished ebony in a silk mantle, her black mane mantling over it. Her glamour only set him off worse.

  She bore the tantrum. She was used to them and had learned the best mode for their duration. Allure, a modest downcasting of eyes and head, hands meek, palms opened and upturned, as if to slake a rain of slaps, In fact he rarely struck her, and then never murderously. Only once, in the mountains, had he been prepared to do that, and not to her.

  He would not hit out at her now. He would never guess the truth. She was in the arm of Cah, though he, the priest of Cah, had not yet realized.

  He exhausted his invective. Then he bellowed for wine, and she brought it to him, softly as a dove.

  “And what do you say, woman? Is it a lie?”

  “No, my lord.” (She only called him Arud when he was reasonable, sober, and blithe. She foresaw it would be less and less that she might call him Arud.)

  “Not a lie? Then explain yourself.”

  Panduv kneeled. She put her hand lightly as a leaf on to his instep. The touch stirred him; his feet, she had long ago found, were sensitive.

  “A woman in Iscah may own nothing, my lord. But I have put all my jewelry there, on the table by the lamp. The jewels were your bounty to me, but if you take them back, they’ll repay you the cost of the Lannic slave.”

  He gave a growl of scorn.

  “You don’t say why, still.”

  “An offering to Cah.”

  “Freeing a slave is man’s business.”

  “It was done in your name, my lord. The city will be jealous of your wealth and impressed by the pious gesture. It’s something you would have done yourself, had you been here—”

  “Would I—you Zakr—”

  She chanced an interruption. “Because I was desperate, and you’ve always been charitable to me.”

  His face thundered down at her. Yet, she had caught his interest. She always could, and perhaps for a handful more years. His desire, his curiosity.

  She said, “When you took me in, I vowed I would give you a son. I disappointed in that.”

  Abruptly his features relaxed. Teis was a talisman.

  “Cah gives as she gives. Teis is female, but I love the child. She brings light into my house.”

  “I’ve prayed to the goddess to allow me a son. You know, I’ve been barren.”

  Annoying her, as he sometimes did, with inconvenient sharpness, he said, “I thought that was how you preferred it.”

  Panduv raised her eyes now.

  “I want only your gladness. I want to keep my vow to you.”

  Then, gracefully, dancer in all her movements though dancer no longer in the Dance, she rose and leaned on him, gazing into his face. “The man was my offering to Cah, in exchange for fertility.”

  Arud peered at her. Fatigue and excitement mingled in him. The drugs of the mysteries, the cavorting pale brown wodges of the temple girls, the memories of the day itself, would always bring him to this leopard-being, this night-woman. He put his hands on her waist, thin, supple as oiled rope, slipped to her flanks, the fierce sheer buttocks, under the wave of hair, silk over silk over silk.

  “And do you think she heard you, Panduv?”

  She let her own hands rise along his chest. With a sudden bewildered pang she acknowledged the Lan had been nothing to her, that all the past was gone. And that this man who still, with one able smiting of her own she could have killed, this limited and angering man, inflated with self, running to fat, this priest, had grown into her as the seed of the child would grow. “It’s with you,” she said, “if she has.”

  As he began to work upon her, with the finesse of the arts she herself had taught him, she thought, Suppose—another girl. But she knew this would not be.

  Later, tomorrow, when he was well-rested, she must speak to him about the nurse. The house buzzed with events and it would be difficult to persuade him from slaughter, there. But the old ninny, asleep under the awning as Teis drowned, was too old to turn out and too useful to be beaten to death. They wanted to go back, the newborn and the very young, and plotted and cheated to do it. For they soon detected the world was a harsh country. Until the recollection faded of some better land from which they had come, they must be guarded. Panduv would assume the post. Cah had ensured she must.

  Arud was struggling upon her, reining himself that she, too, should be satisfied. Having learnt the manner of it, she arched herself against him and cried out, the two long disembodied cries with which she had answered the Lan before. It was only fair that she should act them out for Arud. He was to father this child, this gift of Cah.

  Groaning, he spent the unnecessary worth of his loins, and Panduv held him in her arms.

  • • •

  In the third month, as was customary, Panduv was borne in her litter to the Women’s Court of the fane, to give thanks.

  The Mother Temple of the capital was raised on a tall whitewashed platform with a stair of red obsidian. The pillars of the temple were painted carmine and black,-and the cornice was gilded. This house of Cah did not reek of offal, only of the sweet gums and alcoholic oblations of the faithful.

  The door into the Women’s Court was small and the Court itself not large. Only females of the moneyed class could afford to approach the goddess, the spot was infrequently packed. Panduv gave the prescribed coins to the portress and passed inside.

  The Zakorian had come to the Court twice before, treats Arud had donated. The area comprised a bare lidless box of walls and, flagged floor, with, at the farther end, a group of citrus trees, the altar standing among them.

  Panduv was alone with Cah.

  The statue was modern, of a woman, voluptuous but not gross, veiled as fashion preferred by a smoldering gauze. Through the film, her eyes of tawny topaz would sometimes flash like flame. She was black, so black it was not possible to trace her countenance or read her expression.

  The black woman confronted the black Cah, and laid on the altar some cakes, baked, in accordance with tradition, by her own hands. Panduv’s baking was indifferent. She had no talent for such chores. But, though she had come to credit Cah, Panduv was not uneasy. Cah had got from Panduv what she wanted. A cake was only a cake.

  When she left the Court, bees were gathering in the citrus trees and among the flowers on the wall. Summer was advancing. Pleasingly, the Red Moon of Zastis fell early this year, she could enjoy Arud before she grew too big.

  The temple was also busy with its bees. About the offices and sanctuaries the lesser priests were hurrying. Across the platform there came the chant of boys’ voices, gaining mathematics, and beyond, the drubbing of mallets from the mason’s yard. A respect for learning and the arts had begun to invest the capital. A sculptor of the temple school had created the Cah of the Women’s Court. A theater was being built. Only men temple-trained would be licensed to act, as to carve, study the stars, or take positions of temporal authority. But a son of Arud could expect such schooling. For Teis, there were other means, a subterfuge Arud had condoned: His daughter would be granted her letters. But for his son, what might he wish he would not have?

  Arud would be High Priest in ten years, or twelve. It was almost sure. Unadmitted to the secret connivance of the temple’s inner clique, yet she h
ad glimpsed its dexterity. The new thinking of Iscah, the very statue in the Women’s Court, these in themselves evinced the nature of change, and of the men behind it.

  At home Teis was sitting placidly with the current careful girl. But seeing her mother, the child came gamboling forward.

  She put her hand on Panduv’s belly, where she had been told the other child was sleeping.

  “How he?”

  “He’s well.”

  Teis pressed her ear to her mother, to hear if he was yet saying anything. Her own ability with words increased daily. She did not want to be usurped.

  • • •

  The summer climbed its golden stair into a palace of drenching heat and powdered dust. Its descent was jarred by rains. The winter swooped across the sea, white-winged, and snow came down again as the year before on the Iscaian south, a happening scarcely known in previous history.

  There were reports of earth tremors north and east. In Dorthar a lightning bolt was said to have sliced the cupola from a temple of Anack—in Anackyra, or perhaps only at Kuma. Farther east yet, a fleet of fifty ships of Shansarian Karmiss had gone down in a tempest, not a man saved. There were scares of plague in Corhl, but the entry of the snow ended such tidings.

  Wildest of all, maybe, a tale stole out of Thaddra of a white dragon lurking in the jungle wastes of the west.

  It was a bad winter for many, rife with portents and false alarms, cruel with freezing.

  But in the villa of Arud, the fires were lit, they dressed in furs, and roasted nuts, and the cricket still chirped in the hearth.

  • • •

  Her pains began in the middle of a winter night. Teis had been dilatory. This one was early.

  Panduv had been dreaming. Her children were grown. The girl, in a bright gown, was up on the roof. A parasol of tree stood in a tub beside the pond now, and hanging there in a cage was a chattering bird, which Teis was feeding. She seemed aged about eighteen. Her hair, though woven back in a ceramic band, reached almost to the ground. At its very tips, the shining mass was divided into brief little plaits, twelve of them, each ending in a gleaming golden ring. Panduv deduced that her daughter had married.