Simon Levack - Shadow of the Lords

An unpleasant smell filled this part of the room. It wasvaguely familiar, but for the moment I could not recall where I had come across it before. It was not difficult to guess where it emanated from, however: somewhere in the mass of garbage behind me. I sighed, realizing that I had no choice but to rake over the heap. I had already decided why it had been left there. It was the obvious place in which to have concealed the costume.

I clambered back over it, meaning to search it from the other side where there was more room to work.

I was stooping over the pile with my back to the doorway when I heard something behind me. It sounded like a light, stealthy footstep.

I tried to stand up but I was an instant too late.

Something crashed into the back of my head, and before I even hit the floor I was plunged into a darkness even murkier than the room around me.

Asnake danced in front of me. It was not the venomous kind. When it raised its broad, flat head and opened its mouth to send its tongue darting silently towards my face, I saw no fangs. It was the sort that killed its victim slowly, squeezing until he could not draw breath, until ribs cracked and organs split and burst. With every movement I made, I knew its grip would tighten further. I kept as still as I could, taking short, shallow breaths until the strain on my lungs and the sensation in my head, a feeling that it was whirling and rocking even while the rest of me was pinned to the ground, became too much and I gasped and coughed.

The snake did not react. Its eyes watched mine. As I gazed into them I realized that they looked wrong: their pupils were not thin elliptical slits but perfectly round black beads and their irises were a warm brown that I knew from somewhere.

I kept my eyes on the snake’s because I could not look at the flickering light that illuminated them. It seemed to swing back and forth like a censer in the hands of a priest, looming towards me until it threatened to fill my head up and then shrinking to a shimmering point the size of a star.

I could hear a voice. It seemed to come from far away and I was not sure whether it was uttering words or inarticulate cries. The sound was so faint that when it stopped I could notdecide whether I had really heard it, but when it resumed, the snake seemed to respond to it.

‘Can you hear us?’

I blinked. My eyes were shimmering, misty. It was becoming harder to focus on the creature’s face, on those unsettling eyes, the scales that glistened where they caught the light, the lipless smirk on its mouth. I shut my eyes but somehow the snake was still there, its head now moving from side to side in a slow, sinuous dance. I felt its coils moving over my body, and terror convulsed me, making my hands clench and snatching my head up off the floor, but the choking, suffocating pressure did not come. I lay still again, wondering at the sensuous caress of the snake’s skin against mine, its tongue flickering over my throat and chest.

It reared up then, as if to strike.

‘Can you hear this?’ it asked, more loudly than before.

It had a woman’s voice, throaty, compelling, thrilling. It was a voice to fill a man with yearning even when on the point of death, or perhaps particularly then, when all he has left is the desire for life and what creates life.

I groaned.

It seemed to me that the voice was not speaking to me. The distant voice answered it with a sound like sobbing.

‘Oh, we can do better than this. We can make much sweeter music than this, can’t we?’ purred the snake.

Then it seemed to shed its skin, letting it fall away the way a snake will, leaving last year’s scales draped over a rock or a cactus to dry and shred and blow away in the wind. In the moment before it moved towards me, blotting out the light, I caught a last glimpse of the creature’s body, of the play of shadows over its pure, smooth new flesh, and I thought it was most beautiful thing I had ever seen. The yearning stirred in me again, stronger than before when I had merely heard thecreature’s voice, and when it slithered over me again, curling itself slickly around my manhood, for all my fear I could not find it in me to struggle. Instead I found myself trying to writhe in time with the snake, to match its own undulations with my own, and when I found myself still pinioned too tightly to move it was frustration, not pain or terror, which made me groan again.

‘Oh, this is good!’ The voice had changed, becoming wilder, higher in pitch. ‘Can you hear how good this is?’ Again its words seemed directed somewhere else, despite the intimacy with which its flesh was engaging mine.

A pain, tiny at first but growing and getting more insistent, started to gnaw at the back of my head, even as I heard my own moans of pleasure beginning.

‘You’re loving this, aren’t you?’ The words were definitely meant for me now, whispered from lips that brushed my ear in time to them.

I groaned again. I had to get out but there was nothing I could do, and the urge to let this continue was too strong.

‘Why don’t you tell me who you really are?’ The lovely caresses slowed almost to a stop. ‘If you don’t, I might stop. Do you want me to stop?’

I could manage only a gurgling noise.

‘I didn’t think so. I gave you some of those little black seeds of Idle’s. Now you can’t let me stop, can you? We use them ourselves, so I know.’ An unpleasant, snickering little laugh stirred the hair around my ear. ‘Even if this didn’t tell me!’ She squeezed me once, making me gasp. ‘What are you doing here?’

Something other than fear or sexual desire jerked the reply from my throat, something that seemed to have overridden my will and produced answers to her questions without my thinking of them. ‘My name’s Cemiquiztli Yaotl,’ I gasped, ‘a slave of Lord Feathered in Black. I was looking for my son.’

She was still for a moment. Then she rose, still gripping me, to look down at my supine figure. She leaned slightly sideways so that the light, the flickering yellow glow that I could now see came from a pine torch, fell over her face, and, reflected in the light, I caught the glint of a bead of sweat on her cheek.

‘Why did you think he’d come here?’ She was still whispering.

‘I thought he and Kindly’s featherwork might be in the same place.’ Her movements had ceased. Part of me willed them to resume. Part of me wanted to scream at her to stop. The pain in my head was intensifying.

She bent towards me again and I felt her hair and her breath on my face. ‘I don’t have to lie to you about this,’ she murmured. ‘There’s no featherwork here and I don’t know anything about your son. If we ever let you go, you can tell Kindly that. But now …’

She moved again suddenly, her hips grinding against mine with a new urgency, her hands kneading the bare skin of my chest and little cries bursting from her lips.

The pain in my head seemed to expand with her excitement, making me feel that my skull was about to explode. Nausea seized my stomach and the breath stopped in my throat as if I were being choked. I groaned aloud, making a sound like ecstasy even at the moment when my manhood began to shrivel.

The world spun around me, sucking me back down into the darkness. The last thing I heard was her scream.

It was more than a sound of pleasure. It was a war-cry, the vaunting boast of the victor, a triumphant shout.

I drifted in and out of my dreams and from one dream to another.

Fantastic creatures danced in front of me. I thought I sawnests full of snakes, their glittering skins patterned with stripes and whorls and painted in glorious colours, scarlet and yellow and blue and green and colours I had never seen before and never would again, colours that I could taste on the tip of my tongue and whose sounds were like flutes or falling rain or laughter. Sometimes I could not see the snakes but only the patterns on their skins, growing and merging and dividing and wavering before my eyes.