Танит Ли - Anackire

The brass of the fountain was ruddy, the water playing like strings of glass beads, and everything else dark. Almost everything else. For the white Lowland child was standing by the basin, and something was with her—

Safca’s heart turned over. At first she did not believe. Wrapped about and about the child’s slight body was a huge snake, the very kind with which the Zorish girl had danced in the marketplace. Which was well for a girl of the Zor, birth-trained to mastery of such a reptile. Though not venomous, the great snakes could crush small animals, even the chest of a man should they desire it enough to obtain sufficient grip on him. A slender child would be nothing.

How the creature had got in, slinking through some kitchen hole and pouring over the wall, was now unimportant. Safca’s hand was already at her throat where a tiny dagger hung sheathed in Elyrian enamelwork. Such a minor blade—she must aim for one of the eyes, hoping the reflexive mindless tightening of the coils would not persist too long, after death.

If only the Lowlander had not been dumb, she might have shrieked for aid.

Why then did Safca not cry out herself?

At the instant this thought occurred to her, Safca became conscious of a sound, a low, musical murmur, which was emanating from the dumb child. In that instant, too, the child lifted her head and looked into Safca’s eyes.

They gazed at each other, and the guardian’s daughter slowly raised her dagger and dropped it back in its sheath.

Safca’s waiting women had mentioned to her how the child seemed able to call birds from the air, and how the two shy pet monkeys from Corhl would play with her. But this—

The power the Zorish girl exercised over her snake was nothing to this. The child had no need to fear. She was in command, or rather in communication with the great serpent. Its coils were loose, separating the starlight like the fountain. Its flat head moved in her hair.

Nor was the child dumb. The sound she made over the snake, a hypnotic speechlessness of vibration, was yet articulate. Equipped with vocal apparatus and a thorough knowledge of the Vis tongue, the child did not employ them only because, in some uncontemptuous way, she found language superfluous. All this Safca grasped at once, and accepted at once. She made no objection, only stood blinking before the eyes of her Lowland servant. They had never named the child. They had called her for her supposed birthplace, and that charily. She was not displayed. The guardian had never glimpsed her.

And now the Lowlander moved a fraction, the snake slipping forward, resting its head across her palms. Both their eyes, the eyes of the child and of the serpent, were a pale clear gold, and both sets of eyes seemed glowing.

Safca realized the Lowlander was offering her the snake, offering it like a garland, all the winding terrible power of it. There was a certain lightness in that, maybe. Safca touched her lucky bracelet, and stepped back, and the spray of the fountain kissed her shoulder.

“There is no harm,” said the child.

Safca opened her mouth to scream and did not scream. Her pulses thundering, she reached out and let the snake spill from the child’s arms to her own.

It was heavy, both liquid and dry, an extraordinary sensation. Every hair of her body seemed upraised, no longer with fear, with some more primeval reaction. She shivered continuously, yet a strange elation possessed her. The snake entwined her bones. For she felt the glory of its strength, that did not hurt her, clear through to her skeleton, in the protective ambiance of the child.

How can I fear this thing? she thought. Something so beautiful .

It lasted only moments. Then the snake flowed away, rope on rope of sensation gliding off, leaving Safca trembling and then stilled. It vanished before she looked to see it go.

She wanted to speak to the child, to ask her many things, but the child would be silent now, silent in all ways. How old was she? Older than the eleven years she looked. Younger, also.

Where do you come from? Safca asked the child, over and over, in her brain, aware the child could hear if she wished, aware the child would know she did not mean a land or a people, but some other thing, less actual, more decided.

But the child, as Safca had guessed, did not answer.

The ambush on the Amlan Road was not altogether a surprise. There had been a purchased warning at the inn the night before, somewhat unspecific, but enough. The spot itself, though he had never had trouble there before, was also a likely one, the hills leaning to the road and thick with coarse high grass. Men burst out like demons, whooping to inspire alarm and to get rid of their own tension, as they plummeted down on the riders and the five rumbling wagons.

But the wagons were full of eager unsheathed swords. Blood sprang and anointed the wine casks and the bales of silk he had had the forethought to roll in protective owar-hide.

Rem extricated his sword from a tangle of guts and kicked the corpse away in time to throw another bandit forward, off his back and over his head, and under the prancing hoofs of the zeeba in front, which finished him.

The rest of the fight was already over. Dead brigands lay strewn along the road, and a couple hung undecoratively from the wagons. Three or four more had made off alive, scrambling through the thick fur of the summer hills, the last of them dragging some of the worthy merchant’s goods along with him.

“That one,” Rem called. “Bring him down.”

The man with the best eye for it flung a spear, and the bandit fell dead in the grass. His associates did not bother to look back, and were soon from sight.

In the old days, even two years ago, this road was clear enough of such adventures. But since piratical Free Zakoris had come to crowd the sea-lanes between Dorthar, Ommos and Lan, few ships risked the harbor of Amlan, preferring land-trips to and from the ports of Elyr in the south. Thus, the trade road to the capital had ceased to be the well-patrolled and lawful stretch it had been. Every rare cargo that ran the Zakorian gauntlet, stood a fair risk from the hungry robbers of Lan.

Having himself been a bandit, once, Rem was not ill-educated in their ways and means. Hiring out as an escort for such dainties as now remained safe and unspoiled in the wagons, he had built some sort of financial security for himself. Twenty men were in his pay, courageous and intelligent. He could have taken on more if he had needed them. Not so many, maybe, as the fifty who would have followed him in Karmiss, under the Lord Kesarh’s banner of the Salamander. But, as things had stood, it would have been stupid to go back. Kesarh had had no need of him, in any case. Six years ago there had been a breath of plague in Istris, and the Prince-King Emel, though mightily protected, had evinced plague symptoms and shortly died. Less than three months later Kesarh Am Xai was crowned as King. He took two queens with him to the throne, one a Shansarian princess of Suthamun’s house, and one a Vis woman.

But all that was another world. The news came late here, and the emotions the news engendered were low-voiced as distant harps.

Eight years in all had gone by, eight years, and these months of the heat and of Zastis. The child, if she lived, would be less than nine years old. But he had no reason to suppose she lived. Although he had hunted her, and the girl, Berinda, intermittently up and down this land, for all the eight years and the months after, from the north to Lanelyr and back, he had found no trace.

And even though he continued at the savage trade he had chosen in the beginning just because it would take him all over Lan and so enable him to hunt for them, now he no longer understood why he did so. Habit only, probably. For she was dead, of course. Somewhere the winds swilled through her little baby’s bones, and her supernatural adult soul was exiled, riding them.