Tanith Lee - The White Serpent

The white men had halted at the top of the garden, under the vertical of a mansion there. A tower rose here, also. It had a serpent’s head burning coldly with the eye of an enormous moonstruck window.

Rehger followed the terraces up to the men under the wall.

“This is her house?”

They looked at him.

He said, “You’ve brought me to her. Aztira.”

It was not that he had begun to read their minds. There could be nowhere else they would bring him.

One of the men pointed. (Rehger saw another gate, this of decorative iron, ajar in the white wall.) They disliked to speak aloud, when it could be avoided.

And they would let him go on alone. They did not, then, mistrust him. Or she did not. Or, whatever his scheme or temper, they had valued themselves at more.

When he made no instant move to enter through the gate, they left him, and descended the lawns.

Then, standing on the grass of her garden, in the Zastis night, he remembered the house behind the lacemakers, and how he had gone to her, there.

But Ashnesee had even a different smell, an arid and vacant air, like that above a desert ruin, tinged merely now and then with a ravenous cloy of orchids.

He put his hand on the iron gate.

He would come into the mansion by way of the door beneath the tower, where the vine clung to the stones. From this entrance, the corridor would lead him into her hall, the great blanched oval with a floor of mosaic tiles, on whose walls were paintings of low hills, and pale-robed maidens who danced, immobile, in a field of grain, all lit now by the glow of the lotus lamps above. On the hearth, which in the evenings of the cold months would sometimes blossom fire, flowers lay sprinkled, giving off a dusty sweetness. A huge coiled snake of silverwork guarded the hearth, with eyes of creamy amber. There were few other furnishings.

Aztira waited, by the hearth snake. She wore a dress the color of the girls’ robes in the mural. She had no jewels.

In the quiet Rehger’s progress through the house, light-footed as the padding of a lion, was audible. And that, not once did he pause.

The girl’s eyes flame-flickered, but only like the eyes of the inanimate snake. If she breathed, it had remained invisible.

The heavy drape at the doorway was swung aside with a jangle of rings.

He did not stop even then, but crossed into the room, over the patterned floor. His eyes were on Aztira, and on nothing else. Even the snake did not seem to divert his attention. He strode under the lamps, and they turned him, one after another, to gold, until, perhaps ten feet from her, the advance ended.

He had arrived in the city of gods a vagabond. The glamour and the shackles of Saardsinmey were done with, two years had run away, forests had resisted and torn at him. More than ever, in the torrent of this, he had stayed, become, a king. And his black eyes fixed on her with all she remembered of their beauty, and their strength and cleanness. Such clarity was itself a power.

The girl before the hearth of flowers held out her hand to him, palm uppermost. There on its whiteness lay a triangle of tarnished metal.

“The coin your father left your mother,” she said to him, “the drak which you gave me to divine. My proof, in case it is wanted.”

“Proof of what?” he said.

“That I live.”

“Oh, lady,” he said, standing in the golden shadow, “I know that you live.”

“But that I died, also?”

“Yes. That you died and woke up, and here you are. The Goddess Aztira.”

She continued to extend to him Yennef s drak. He did not come to her to accept it.

She said, “I took it with me to my grave, to comfort me.” But her hand sank down, closed now on the coin.

“Your kind,” he said, “live forever. Why did you need comforting?”

“Since I was without you,” she said.

He said nothing. He was completely still, as she was, now, and as the city itself.

Aztira said, “Hear and believe this. I foresaw my death, but that was all. I predicted murder and terminus. I entreated you to my funeral rites because I reasoned the tomb of black stone would withstand the shock and the water. There was some measure of choice for me. But I was glad, in dying, trusting you would survive.”

“Thank you then for that, madam. You get no thanks from Saardsinmey.”

“No,” she said, “I won’t bow my head and cringe before you. If I am ashamed, it is my affair. If it was evil and my sin, that, too, is mine, not a matter between us. I thought I would die—oh, the soul, yes, the soul is eternal. But body and soul are strangers to each other. I—there would be nothing more of me. You think that to return out of bodily corruption is a simple thing? You said—that I woke. No, Rehger. This isn’t how it was. I hope you will let me tell you of it, but not yet.”

“Perhaps never. Did you call me here by some witchcraft?”

“Not by any sorcery. Not by the energy of the will or mind. Only my memory of you. That perhaps did cry after you. But I see, you would not have listened.”

“I was instructed to remember you. I’ve done so. No day or night, since Alisaar, that I failed to think of you. You stayed alive for me, Aztira, like the stink of mutilated flesh and sea filth, and a hundred sights of rubble.”

“Enough,” she said. “You can’t kill me to blot out the crime of my race.”

“It seems not.”

“Would you have done so?”

He said, “In my thoughts, lady, I’ve slaughtered you many times. The way a Vis would crush a snake. That picture would come to me. To break your neck.”

“And in these thoughts did I never in return blast you with lightning?”

Her voice had risen. She looked indeed as if she burned coldly, her whiteness livid. And suddenly, she glanced toward the wide hearth, partly lifted up one hand. And there were flames on the stones, not flowers, shooting upward to send a crash of light into the chimney, and limn her pallor (and that of the silver serpent), as if with blood.

He felt the scorch of the fire on his body, then—it cooled. Flowers scattered the hearth; the only light came down from the hanging lamps.

“And since you can never kill me, Rehger, and since apparently I’ll spare you, what next?”

“In Var-Zakoris and Dorthar,” he said, “the chance of this city is a cause for debate. They would like someone to go back, and tell them.”

“A paid agent. As your father was.”

“Did you divine that also from his coin?”

“In other ways. I had no time to tell you all I learned. But you have met with your father.”

“It was the meeting with him which put me on the road to Ashnesee.”

“My regrets you could,” she said, “get nothing more from it.”

Aztira turned. She went to the wall, to where a tree of pale ruddy leaves was painted on the plaster. She touched one of its branches, and a faint murmur passed through the wall, along the floor. In seconds, a figure came in at the hall’s other doorway. Rehger had seen a goddess of the city, now he saw one of its slaves.

She was a dark woman, umber-skinned and small, clothed in a linen smock, her hair bound closely to her head. She bowed from the hips, drooping down like a thirsty plant.

Aztira said, “Here is the lord I told you of. Take him to the prepared chamber, and serve him as you were instructed.”

Her tones were distant. It was not the address of mistress to slave, but of a sleepwalker to a phantom. Though chattels, the servers of Ashnesee were not, then, considered to be actual. They were only specks of a commanding brain.

The Amanackire said to Rehger, as if in another language, “Go with her. You will not be uncomfortable. Tomorrow you may depart by the same hidden route. The two men who brought you, one or other of them will come here at first light. Be ready. You have seen the City of the West has substance. Perhaps they will reward you for the discovery, in Var-Zakoris. Or say you lie. Or in returning you may be forfeited to the jungles. Understand, it was your bond with me, Rehger, that drew you here, against all odds. Not my outcry, or any magic. Your fantasy was of finding me alive and of killing me, knowing that if I had lived, to kill me would be impossible. You undertook this sullen quest because there was nothing else for you to do.”