Tanith Lee - The White Serpent

He stood and gazed on at her, unspeaking, a statue with somber, considering eyes. Behind him, shadow on shadow, the black slave-girl waited, head still bowed.

“You mourn Saardsinmey not only for its destruction, but for its false purpose, which you borrowed. Gladiator and king, your freedom would have come with death. You would have perished inside five years.”

He answered then.

“So I believed.”

“You had made a pact with it. But your true life, which you had chosen and begun in Iscah, was interrupted by the man who bore you away. He declared he gave you a gift of brightness, days of glory, Katemval the slave-taker. But he cut the thread of the life you planned, that which your soul had wanted—”

“I don’t credit the soul’s life, Aztira. You know as much.”

“It was too late to recapture in Moih the ghost of that beginning,” she said, paying no heed, it seemed, to his denial. “Or else the making of things was not the only task you had set yourself. How willingly, therefore, you abandoned that last great victory you won over the stones, in the Lowlands, your apprenticeship. To hunt instead the ghost of me.” She moved back, slowly, drifting as if weightless, to her hearth. She said, “Go with the slave.”

“Aztira,” he said.

“What now?”

“If your race believes in many physical lives, do they ever fear rebirth as some man of Alisaar or woman of the black Zakorians?”

Startling him, she laughed, lightly; all her youngness was in it.

“Yes,” she said, “they do fear that. They say it would be self-punishment. Why else must we maintain one body against death, but to elude this truly awful fate?” Laughter and irony faded from her. “Leave me now,” she said. “You have had enough of me.”

When he turned, the crumpled slave straightened somewhat and went ahead of him, into the mansion.

Across the ceiling of the room, clouds had been painted on a ground of milky azure. They had no look of fundamental sky, yet, in the dusk of dawn and evening, seemed to float, while the blueness swam upward and changed, if not into ether, at least out of the condition of paint. The walls were incised with a coiling design which resolved into a serpent’s head beside the door. A tap on one of its eyes caused the door to open. On the other, and there would come at once one of the slaves with expressionless faces like dark brown wood. There were high-up grills which let in air and some quantity of light, but nothing more, and there were no furnishings beyond a bed, assembled for the guest, and wound with curtains. But the insects of the jungles of Vis seldom found their way into Ashnesee. Adjoining the chamber was a room for bathing and a closeted latrine, both of which outdid the best of the rich houses in Alisaar, At night an alabaster lamp was lit on a stand of marble.

He did not make ready to leave, the morning after his arrival.

He lay in a vast cavern of sleep, such as had sometimes come on him after a race or a fight. They had known this, the creatures of the house, and let him alone. Waking at noon—the sun was up above the grills—he saw they had removed the choice, uneaten meal offered the previous night. Later, when he had brushed the serpent’s eye-socket, a breakfast was brought in.

Rehger did not interrogate the slaves of the city. Like their overlords, they seemed to have no inclination to verbal speech. When one had made to taste his food, he shook his head at her and she went away. He had not supposed the sorceress would resort to drugs or toxic substances. Conceivably it was her pain or anger, or her scorn, to imply, through the slave’s action, that he would think so.

The bedchamber being large and uncluttered, he took exercise there, as if he were a prisoner and had no rights to the rest of the mansion or the garden below, which they had shown him were accessible. The streets of the city were another issue. He was not forbidden them—simply, they were not alluded to in the mannerisms of the slaves.

The second night was sleepless, the gate of the vast cavern fast shut against him. Wine-red Zastis tinctured the grills. He did not ask the house of the sorceress for a girl. He did not want one of their bed-menials, however pleasing or acquiescent. He recalled the blonde Ommos-Thaddric woman, in the roof-thatch of the last village. He considered her, and when desire became unbearable, he turned his memory to the image of death in the square below, the white she-man, joking and applauding a corpse to its grave.

When the sun rose he went after all down from the upper floor of the mansion, into the outer court, and into her garden, where the city was to be seen. The inanimate bleached buildings rocked at anchor in a soft morning mist, through which beast-headed towers seemed to lift their snouts to snuff the air.

All the flowers in the garden were white, or of a diluted pastel. White pigeons were cooing in a tree, and he was able to hear the rush of the fountain that concealed the garden’s lower entrance. No other sounds came up the hill. However, a quarter mile off, erected on a level with the tree of pigeons, one of the pillared buildings had put out a branch of smoke. A temple to the Lady of Snakes, maybe, where the altar fires were still kept alight, from politeness, by gods no longer needing to worship.

A voice blew quietly against his ears. Rehger did not react to it. This was how she had communicated first with him, Aztira, calling his name in his mind. Now he only felt the pressure of her attention, like a slight pressure of fingers, yet for several moments. After which, she withdrew from him like a sigh.

He continued down to an edge of the garden, where there was the girdling of a low, steep wall. Far beneath, on the misty boulevard, between the monuments, and great houses, he beheld some men and women walking, without haste, two by two, or alone. Like the city, they were all one in whiteness. Zircons flowed over a woman’s wrists, a silver clasp was struck on the shoulder of a man’s tunic. None of them looked up to see if any watched them from the garden’s vantage. Had they done so, they might have taken him for a slave, a brawny servant of Aztira’s mansion who, for some reason, was not moving in the rat-tunnels under the lawn. But doubtless they would not probe his brain to learn why this was, for he was subhuman and did not count.

(He had garnered a notion of the undercity from the invisible coming and going of the slaves, and from once or twice seeing their emergence or retreat through apertures in the plaster, pillars and stairs.)

But for the Amanackire citizens, they progressed unhurriedly over the surface, along the boulevard, and two by two or alone, vanished in adjacent thoroughfares.

Further on in the morning, on the lush hill of a park, he saw another group of them. They seemed at a kind of slow and measured play, a ritual, or a dance even. There was no music and no song.

He could recount these scenes in Zaddath, if ever he returned there.

Rehger thought of Amrek, who had meant to wipe this people off the earth’s face. He stared across the city.

He had admitted, as far away as that last village in the forest, that he had no purpose remaining to him. Purposeless, he had known therefore he would reach this place.

The feeling was similar to something he had experienced in his childhood, brought out of Iscah by the man Katemval, It came back to Rehger sharp as a knife. How the child he was had wept suddenly—losing something. It was the black bitch-dog—it was the black hair of his mother—all he could properly remember, save her name, pronounced differently.

The hurt, so small and incoherent, swelled and battered under his breastbone now, trapped and bemused in his man’s body.