Tanith Lee: The White Serpent

“Some yarn,” said Orbin. “Who cares? We’ll work him.”

And soon he was up and about and busy, making the repairs Orbin wanted to the ramshackle hovel-buildings of the farm, cleaning out the few thin cattle in their byre, getting and chopping wood—which he even professed himself willing to do, to prevent his arm from stiffening. He made, certainly, no demur about any of it. Probably he had expected no other treatment.

“I’ll have to watch you,” said lounging Orbin to Tibo, as she bodily lifted the old woman, twittering and feebly fighting, from her chair, “all this help, you’ll have nothing to do. Cah knows, I don’t want an idle sloven in Orhn’s household. Like that old bitch,” he added. His senile mother, that Tibo was now spreading gently on her tidied pallet, where she fell again asleep, had not really earned her rest by the laws of the land. She had borne five sons, but only two survived. Her husband was dead, and in the ancient days, she would have been cast out and exposed long ago. But there, she was his mother, rot her. Only look, though, she had wet the chair again. He shouted angrily at Tibo to take the chair outside in the yard and scrub it well with snow.

When Tibo had finished shaking the mattresses and cleaning the chair, she went to see after the three cows in the byre. The afternoon sky was shrilly blue, the pale blue of the cold time, but water dripped from the icicles along the roofs. This thaw might last all of two days.

There were only the cows and dogs to feed in winter, as the fowls and pigs were sold or slaughtered at the summer’s end. She did not like the slaughtering, which was brutal and haphazard, but she dealt with the carcasses, hung winter-long in the hut-larder beside the cow-byre, as she dealt with any food. Now going into the dark enclosure, she sorted among the hanged birds, and tore off a meaty plucked wing. This she thrust in the pocket of her apron.

When she entered the byre, the Lan was raking the muck from the mud floor, piling it against one wall. Dried, it would be used for the hearth fire, and to fuel the stranger’s brazier in the shed, though Orbin did not know this.

Tibo went straight up to the Lan, and drew out the bird wing, which she handed to him. He took it without a word and stored it under his tunic, wedged inside against the belt.

She had been bringing him illicit food since the onset, also, on occasion, black beer. She had taught him how to get milk from the cow that still had it, jetting the fluid directly down his throat from the yellow teat. She was not amazed he had not known the trick. He was from another world.

She began now to heft the fodder into the trough, and Yems went on raking and piling up the dung. In the beginning, when he had tried to help her move the heavy feed, she had pushed him softly off, liking to touch him. He had had a light fever all one day and night, when he first lay in the dog-shed. He had cried like a child for water, which she had swiftly given him, and she had held his head on her breast, caressing his hair. She had touched most of his body when he slept, later. Though she could not have found words for it, her sexuality and her maternal instinct, both ripe and both equally denied, sought a focus in this male icon.

But now he was recovered, a man, independently apart from her.

She bent to her task, because he had come close.

“Tibo,” he said, quietly. He voiced her name a new way, just as she could not pronounce his name in the way he wished. But she liked his altered pronunciation.

“Yes, master?”

“Don’t call me that. I’m not some Iscaian clod who’ll beat you.”

“Yn—” she tried, “Ye—”

“Yennef,” he said patiently.

“Yemhz.”

He sighed, but it amused him. He always seemed to do this. She liked the manner in which he noticed and laughed at her.

“Tibo, my dear girl, tomorrow’s dawn, I’m off. Do you understand?”

“Ah,” she said. She shut her eyes. Suddenly a great well of emptiness opened within her. She had known he would be going, of course. Not so soon.

“Tibo? Those louts can’t blame you for that, can they?”

Yes, she thought. But she said, “No.”

“Anack,” he said. He swore. “I’d take you with me, out of this muddy little hell—but it would be impossible in the snow. Besides, maybe you don’t want to leave, I don’t know you, do I, only your kindness. And you’re clever, aren’t you? Telling me how to get to Ly, and about the big dogs the priests use for sleds. And taking my part with that grunting offal when I was sick. Stealing from me with your soft hands—saving me enough cash to live like a king all year in Ly Dis. Clever, wise, sweet Tibo.”

She turned her head and stole a look at him, then.

He was a man. Handsome as she had never known a man could be, fined and rare, like the light of a young sun, the carven towers of the mountains—but a man still. Beyond her. Different. Her thoughts or words or wants, to him, like rain falling on air.

So she lowered her eyes again, and put more food in the trough for the cows. Pointing out to him, as she did so, where she had laid his knife in the hay.

There was a winter star which at midnight, on a clear night, shone in through a tiny hole under the roof.

It woke Tibo, pointing down at her with its thin finger of crystal.

In that moment she knew, or recognized her knowledge.

Without hesitation or doubt, she slipped between the covers of the great grass-stuffed mattress where she lay, dark by dark, year by year, with her idiot husband. Orhn did not stir. He would not. Nor Orbin either. As she hurried to make the evening stew, plummy that night with dumplings and livers, she had left out by the hearth two pitchers of beer. She had been taking stock of her jars, and perhaps to leave out the beer in her search was a mistake, for when Orbin saw it he wanted it, and her protest that she had just now meant to set it back had earned her a smack across the head. He uncorked the pitcher and began to drink. Orhn had shared in the drinking, because it was his beer. Both enjoyed the bout. They would sleep deep and late.

Perhaps she had been scheming even then, leaving out the beer.

There was a dull red glow remaining on the hearth. The old woman slept on her pallet, sometimes dreaming and gibbering. Tibo had left the water cauldron over the fire, and the water was still hot. Taking her precious crock of soap from the cubby, Tibo washed herself from head to foot. The temple sold this soap, which Orbin loudly despised, though he preferred it when shaving to bird grease, and so never threw it away. The temple whores washed themselves no doubt with such an unguent. At the passage of the soap, the radiant water, her own hands upon her body, Tibo trembled. The dying red of the fire glowed like smooth mirror on her skin.

When she had dried herself, she drew the marriage rings from her hair and shook it out, waved and springing from its braids, black as night seas she had never looked on.

Presently Tibo lifted her cloak from the nail, and covered herself only with that against the winter night. She closed the door behind her soundlessly, and walked barefoot over the thin gray ice.

A quarter moon stood in the sky, and the stars, to light her path.

Yennef, who had strayed in to Iscah on the wildest quest, Yennef, in whose veins the blood of a king, but a fallen discredited king for all that, wound its way, Yennef had roasted and eaten the piece of fowl, and supped also on the rich stew, and soon stretched out for sleep, since he must be awake very early tomorrow.

He woke silently and totally, tutored to it, long before the dawn began.

The brazier smoldered on with its prohibited kindling. It lit the shed only smudgily, and the mounded backs of the slumbering dogs. But an upright figure slid through the dark, toward him. The slobbering fool, or the ham-brained Orbin, intent on further robbery?