Serpent's Blood

by Brian Stableford

  When they stopped again to eat and rest, in the early afternoon, some of the drago mites actually brought food to the women- which they accepted gladly-and then they discreetly withdrew, until they were hardly visible, between the trees, which were more densely packed hereabouts than on the north side of the river.

  Lucrezia was hungry and thirsty, and her wrists had been badly chafed by the cords which bound them, so the luxury of having her hands free to convey food and water to her mouth absorbed all her attention for several minutes.

  Although Jume Metra was with her she made no attempt to resume her insistent questioning, and thus did not immediately notice the change in her captors'

  attitude which signified that something new was about to happen.

  When she finally did look up, Lucrezia was facing the wrong direction

  --northwards- and had to turn around. More drago- mites were approaching, coming towards the place where they sat as if to meet them. Two were warriors, and this unusually close approach gave her a better chance to appreciate their menacing qualities- but for some reason she could not quite fathom, it was the third which instantly claimed her full attention.

  This one was much more slightly built than the workers, with a smaller head.

  Its mouth-parts were gathered together into a 342

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  bundle which tapered

  almost to a point. It walked on its four hind legs, with its forelegs lifted and folded, the 'hands' pressed together like those of some unctuous human orator. Its black eyes, peeping out from beneath half-closed lids, looked directly at her.

  Dragomite faces, carved as they were in rigid unearthly chitin, were not capable of expression, but Lucrezia felt as she met the stare of those infinitely deep black eyes that this one was curious, and contemplative, and dangerous, in a way that none of the others were.

  Could this, she wondered, be the commander-in-chief of the drago mite expedition?

  Jume Metra stood up to welcome the newcomers. The two giants halted ten mets away, but continued to watch; the one that was small by the standards of its kind came to stand before the armoured warrior, eventually turning its head away from Lucrezia to look at her. While standing on its hind legs it seemed very tall in spite of its relative slightness of build taller even than Dhalla. It peered down at Metra from a height of three mets, and parted its hands to offer a cursory half-salute with the left. Its antennae were already moving rapidly, and the pal ps around its mouth now began to unfurl.

  Every movement seined pregnant with meaning.

  It's mostly illusion, Lucrezia told herself. It's first that the antennae are reminiscent of waving arms. There's no true intelligence in this pantomime not much, at any rate. This may be the director of operations, hut it's not a monstrous master mind. She did not know, however, whether she ought to accept her own advice on this matter.

  Jume Metra reached up as if to touch the slender drago mite face, but could not quite reach it. Lucrezia could not judge from such a simple gesture whether she approached the creature as a man might approach a faithful pet or as a slave might approach his master and the fact that she could not tell for sure disturbed her almost as much as the eerie appearance of the monster itself.

  The drago mite ducked its head, and lowered its antennae, almost as though it were a king reaching down from his throne to a kneeling supplicant. Neither antenna actually touched Metra's outstretched fingers, any more than a king would actually condescend to touch the hand of an imploring subject but they 343

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  did briefly curl under to touch the pal ps about the monster's own mouth. There was nothing in this that Lucrezia could conclusively identify as language, but she didn't doubt that there was some kind of understanding between the warrior woman and the slender drago mite Unthinkingly, Lucrezia took half a step backwards. It was a mechanical move, certainly not part of any planned retreat, but Metra instantly turned to grab her left arm, and one of the other women hovering nearby was quick to seize her right. Lucrezia had no idea what they intended to do, but she struggled reflexively. It was useless- they were strong and they twisted her arms back to minimise the force of her resistance. They actually lifted her feet from the ground as they thrust her forward again.

  She knew that they were not merely bringing her into confrontation with the slender drago mite but making an offering of her.

  "What are you?" she said, more fearfully than she would have liked, as she met that horrid stare, looking into the infinite depths of its black pupils.

  "What do you want with me?"

  For the briefest of moments, as its peculiar mouth-parts moved, she thought that it was actually going to reply in human language - but then something lashed' out from the tangle of pal ps like a striking snake, and struck heron the neck, just beneath her left ear.

  It was as if she had been st jabbed she felt something penetrate her flesh like a stiletto. Was f brought here just to be killed? she thought, near to weeping because of the absurdity of it, because she had expected so much more, of the situation and of life.

  Several seconds went by when she was simply numb with shock, unable to feel anything. If there was blood- coursing from her wounded neck she could not sense its wetness. Then her head began to spin, so dizzily that she tried with all her might to close her eyes.

  She failed. She could not avoid that terrible stare, which filled the field of her vision with hypnotic intensity.

  She wanted desperately for consciousness to fail and darkness to fall, but the world would not let her go, even though she knew that she had lost all power of command over her limbs and her inner being.

  It was as if the moment of the unexpected assault had somehow become infinite, imprisoning her thought and her desire more securely than the tomb.

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  4 hyry keshvara was accustomed to dream while she slept, but she somehow knew as she struggled back to wakefulness that she hadn't dreamed for a long time. She resented the fact, for she felt entitled to her dreams. It wasn't that they were invariably pleasant, nor even that they made such a deep impression on her mind as to remain unforgotten, but simply that she thought of herself as the kind of person who wouldn't easily settle for cold oblivion even on a temporary basis. Her mother, whom she resembled closely in many ways, had once comforted her after a childhood nightmare, saying: "It's far better to dream than not to dream, little one, for we are what we are by virtue of the continuity of our thoughts. If we were truly to sleep, to become nothing inside ourselves, how could we ever know when we awoke that we had not become someone else while we slept?

  Don't be afraid of nightmares, Hyry. Never be afraid to be afraid, because fear is one of the things which makes us what we are. "

  It was with this fond memory in her mind which she had reconstructed only slightly with the passing of the years, for the sake of tidiness that she opened her gluey eyes and looked into the face of the Serpent.

  She knew immediately what the Serpent was, although she had never seen one before. It was far too sleek and slender to be a Salamander, and there was nothing else it could possibly be. Its lustrous patterned skin was not as scaly as she had imagined, and its' dark uniformly coloured eyes were not as gem like The hood which connected its temples to its shoulders was relaxed at present, so she couldn't tell whether it would be as broad and smoothly curved as it was in pictures drawn by Xandrian artists. But its tongue was forked; she could see that when it opened its thin-lipped mouth in what might have been a smile.

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  "Hello," it said s^tly. Its throat pulsed as it formed the word.

  Hyry knew that Serpents could make almost all the sounds which human language contained, but they had to master awkward tricks of pronunciation which their own tongue never demanded of them. Some Serpents, it was said, refused to learn the human language because it made demands upon them which they deemed to be contrary to their essential nature. With the aid of similar trickery, according to common belief, humans were able to make all but a few of the sounds commonly employed in Serpent language, but few ever took the trouble to learn not because it would have been unnatural, but because Serpents were rare, shy and possessed of very little which humans might want to beg, buy or steal.

  Hyry tried to say

  "Hello' as she sat up, but her dry throat couldn't cope with the soft syllables, and the word came out as a meaningless grunt.

  The Serpent handed her a cup. She used the tip of her tongue to taste the liquid within it before drinking. It was a syrupy kind of sap which could be squeezed from certain kinds of forest fruit if one knew how. The Serpents evidently knew how.

  Hyry looked around as she sipped the liquor. She was still in the dense heart of the Forest of Absolute Night, which was presently illumined by the purple half-gloom of daylight. There was no sign of the river, nor of her horses and donkeys, nor of Princess Lucrezia and Elema. There were two other Serpents reclining on the ground some ten or twelve mets away, but they were ostentatiously not looking in her direction.

  Her thirst slaked, Hyry flexed her limbs' experimentally, and tried to clear the fog from her brain. She looked down at her left hand, which was swollen, discoloured and slightly numb. The Serpent waited patiently while she composed herself.

  She decided, after methodical investigation, that she was not in bad shape, physically. She was not as weak as she might have been or, indeed, ought to have been if her system were still full of flower worm venom. She raised her left hand to look more carefully at the place where the flower worm had stung her. The scars were impressive in their complexity no less than six sting-cells had discharged their burden of poison into her but she could see that the yellowing puncture-marks were almost completely healed. She wondered how bad the swelling had been at its worst.

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  "Five days," she guessed thoughtfully.

  "Maybe six."

  "Ssix," said the Serpent, extending the s in a most peculiar fashion.

  Did that imply that there was no s-sound in the Serpent's language, she wondered, or that there was an s-sound, and this was it?

  "Did the tree really fall?" she asked, trying to remember.

  "Or was that just dizziness? Did I actually tumble into the river, or do I only think I did?"

  "Were in river," the Serpent told her.

  "Lucky not to drown. Head jusst out of water when tree floated. Lucky we found you. Could have sstarved. Bad ssting."

  "You pulled me out? Fed me, even while I was unconscious?"

  "Yess. Ssifuss wanted throw you back. I ssaid no. SSumssarum said OK.

  Not hard to do. My name Mossassor. You? "

  "Hyry Keshvara," Hyry replied, resisting the temptation to extend the s in Keshvara into a hiss.

  "Why did your friend want to thow me back?" She suspected that many humans who found an injured Serpent floating in the river might throw it back, but she wasn't one of them.

  "Ssinkss you disseasse."

  "He thinks I have a disease? What disease?"

  "No. Ssinkss humanss are disseasse . . . exssept oness wiss Sserpent'ss blood. Ssifuss not he not sshe eisser. Nor me."

  Hyry frowned. Three more or less distinct trains of thought had been stirred into motion by this answer, and needed disentangling. In other circumstances she might have followed up the first line of enquiry, but having just spent a troubled ten day in the company of Princess Lucrezia she concentrated instead on the second.

  "You believe that there are humans with Serpent's blood?" she said uncertainly.

  "Not you," Mossassor replied. It was not the most helpful answer imaginable.

  Hyry blinked as her efforts to concentrate filled her head with jagged pain.

  It was a strong disincentive to further pursuit of that particular argument, so she decided to shelve it in favour of something less problematic.

  "Where are we?" she asked, although she quickly realised that even something as simple as that couldn't qualify as a question which readily lent itself to a satisfactory answer. She amended it to: "Are we still near the river?"

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  "Long way ssous^Jthe Serpent said, with what might have been a hint of apology in its tone.

  "Pale men chassed uss. No choisse."

  "I was with a friend," Hyry said uneasily. She would have said 'friends' but thought it might be undiplomatic to mention Elema if the Serpents had been forced to run from a dark lander war band "We were camped near a river-crossing. Armed men were coming dark men, not pale ones. They . .

  ." She broke off because Mossassor had come suddenly to its feet. The other two Serpents were already standing.

  "Musst go," Mossassor said.

  "Can walk?"

  Hyry realised that for six days, at least some of which had been spent running away from other humans, the Serpent with or without help from its companions must have carried her. Mossassor was no taller than she was, and no more heavily built. Save for a belt with pouches much like her own it seemed to have no luggage of its own, but even so she could not imagine how or why the creature had done such a thing. Even if she were not to be reckoned a disease, would it not have been far simpler to abandon her for the dark landers to find, leaving them to decide whether or not to care for her?

  "I can walk," she said, although she wasn't certain that she could walk far or fast enough. ; "Good," the Serpent said.

  "Need help, lean on me."

  The other two Serpents did have packs of a sort half-full sacks without drawstrings or shoulder-straps and these two brought up the rear while Mossassor led the way. At first, Hyry found it difficult to move at all, and her head began to ache continuously as soon as she was on her feet, but the first few steps were the worst. After that, she simply gritted her teeth, stubbornly determined to resist the pain at all costs.

  She tried to reduce herself to the status of an automaton, which could move with mechanical regularity no matter what internal storms might beset its fugitive consciousness. It was a trick she had tried before, and she knew that she was capable of it. She soon slipped into a kind of limbo which was not quite sleep and contained no dreams. How long she walked like that she could not tell.

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  herself to independence.

  She was, after all, a human being, and human beings were supposed to be the true lords of the world.

  It was not until nightfall that they stopped again, at which point Hyry was quick to lapse into authentic unconsciousness. She slept fitfully because of all her aches and pains, but she did dream, of runaway princesses and battle-hungry dark landers of poisonous flower worms and merciful Serpents.

  When she awoke again Mossassor brought her food, and more liquor.

  When she had eaten, the Serpent became enthusiastic to talk to her again.

  She realised then that its efforts on her behalf might not be entirely altruistic. The Serpents hadn't come into the forest on a whim; something had stirred up a special kind of curiosity, and whatever its companions thought Mossassor was evidently of the opinion that Hyry mi
ght be able to tell it things it wanted to know.

  As soon as she understood this, Hyry became wary, and she began to think like a trader again. When Mossassor began to quiz her on her reasons for being in the forest, and the destination she had been trying to attain, she was careful not to give away too much and to match question for question whenever she could.

  "I was supposed to join a party of Xandrian merchants," she said.

  "We hoped to cross the Dragomite Hills to the lands beyond, having heard that a way across had been opened by a blight that had depopulated many of the mounds. What brought you here?"

  "Alsso heard of dissasster in the drago mite landss," Mossassor admitted.

  "Became anxssiouss, in casse it iss warning. Sserpentss have sstoriess, ass humanss do."

  "Stories?"

  "Yess. Humanss have sstoriess about coming ofchaoss. Sso have we.

  Ssome of uss ssink ssey are ssings for sshildren, but ssome not sso ssure. I curiouss, like you. You ssearssh for garden? "

  "We do have stories about the lands to the south," Hyry agreed, trying to conceal her surprise at the turn which the conversation had taken.

  "Many men think of them as mere inventions, but we're careful to preserve them nevertheless. We have a saying which tells us that the only sin is forgetfulness. Maybe you have something similar

  "Not uss," Mossassor said. It was difficult to judge whether it was being deliberately enigmatic.

  "We good for getters Have to be.

  Ssometimess too good. You ssearssh for garden? Garden of 349