Tanith Lee - The White Serpent

For love must have something.

She pressed her hands against her side, seeing what was yet invisible, unknowable, and known.

Westward she did not gaze. She did not think of it, or stretch out the psychic tendrils of her will. Nor did she entreat. She had no superior left to hear her prayers.

But she felt the drum of her heart like that of a stranger, as in the tomb she had feh it, when terribly as death, it called her to return.

That was all.

When the drumming smoothed and quietened, and coursed back into her own breast, she knew the circle was complete.

At dusk, when the Star rose, an enormous Boundlessness claimed the sea, under the mutter of its waves and the vagrant shiver of the wind.

The boat drifted between land and liquid and atmosphere. Tidily, the sail had been secured, and the uneaten stores of food set out to tempt the birds. The wine, poured in the sea, had long ago been drunk away.

No other thing was in the boat.

Where the Star pierced through the water, it revealed, as if fathoms below, disorientated meanderings, the wreckage possibly of a sunken ship, or merely shoals of fish foraging.

Later the moon was birthed out from the amphitheater of the forest.

Maybe the moon did finger a sudden glitter on the sea. But it was the dance of water-things, which flirted in a diamond rush of spray and dived again to the depths.

The reflection of the boat stayed black on the lunar ocean but faded when the moon swung over. By morning, when the gulls came to feed on the viands of Ashnesee, the vessel was already listing.

The birds fought and screamed over the feast, to have it all, before the boat should go down.

A child about two years old was sitting by the fish pond, carefully undressing a wooden doll. With the dull start of surprise that sometimes assailed her, Panduv recognized this apparition as her own daughter, Teis.

She was a pretty thing, her skin deep-toned but Iscaian still, yet with Panduv’s jet-black horse’s mane, hair that hung almost to her ankles when she stood up, and now spread all round her on blue tiles of the pool’s rim. Spring sunshine struck fiercely along the roof terrace. The pool crackled light like jagged glass and the fish hid under their stones. In the shade of the awning, the nurse-woman was stringing beads and crooning to herself.

Teis had finished undressing the doll. She lowered it into the pond. The doll floated a moment, then turned over and sank straight down.

The child gave a sudden wail.

Panduv sprang forward and seized her up.

“No. Bad kitten. You must never lean into the pool.”

The water was only two feet deep, which would have been enough. Panduv found herself, as so often, occupying simultaneous roles. In a swift succession of voices and actions she hugged and scolded her child, berated the nurse, and rescued from the pond the doll.

“Next time it will be three taps of the rod. (Here is your doll.) Don’t tell me your eyes were fixed on the child, plainly they weren’t. (Am I to wait to have her drowned?) Why did you throw it into the pond in the first place?”

The nurse mumbled and groveled. Teis regarded her mother with an intent all-knowing gaze, and inserted the doll’s left foot between her lips.

“Now, Kitty, don’t bite the wood. The splinters will get in your mouth.”

The child, all-knowledgeable, eyed Panduv who, an adult, had unlearnt the original wisdoms.

Panduv shook Teis. Teis laughed. The black woman liked her child and was inclined to believe she would become interesting as she grew. As yet Teis had few words. The passion of the baby—most babies—for self-injury and, thereby, potential suicide, Panduv had long since accepted. There was an antique saying of the Iscaian hills, (the nurse had repeated it frequently). Fresh from the womb of Cah and wants to get back there.

The nurse was a capable creature, only sluggish sometimes. But then again, the young leopard mother, who spent three quarters of every day willfully absent from her daughter, might have reacted too wildly.

Panduv saw the fat old witch was looking at her under crinkled lids, divining her thoughts and sensing forgiveness.

“Teis, go to nurse,” said Panduv, setting her fruit once more on the blue tiles.

“Nurse,” said the child. “Teis,” announced the child. She waddled toward the beads the nurse was now waving to entice her.

Panduv stretched herself, and strolling to the balustrade, looked down from the hilltop toward Iscah’s afternoon capital.

She had the view by heart now, as she had the rooms of Arud’s villa, the blue walls and tiles, the average number of fish in the pond—which varied as they bred or ate each other—the routines of the domestic season. She was Panduv, the Priest’s woman. That was her official title. It was not without kudos. The acolytes of Cah, even here in the more sophisticated capital, did not marry, but their doxies were kept openly, and, where cared for, with some show. The men of the city did not treat Panduv impolitely. And though she must address even the oil-seller as “master,” he in turn nodded to her, and provided of the best.

As to walking a certain number of paces behind her lord, Panduv had a litter to bear her about the streets. Veiled she would not go, however, and not a single soul did not know the Black One.

For Arud, though he now and then lay with other girls, Panduv had remained his fancy, and the overseer of his home. He allowed her, by Iscaian standards, incredible liberties, and left her much to herself.

But Teis he loved. Aside from bringing her expensive toys, he would even, in the privacy of the house, play with her, chasing the child so she pretended fear, or crawling about the chambers carrying her on his shoulders.

For status, he would have wanted a son, which was what Panduv had promised him. She had been very sure, and after a night of grueling work, to see a sister of the female sex had emerged from her loins, provided her the first startlement of motherhood. Following the birth, care with herbs and specific exercises of the stadium, precautions taught every girl of Daigoth’s courts, ensured Panduv kept barren.

The early heat had distilled hallucinatory glimmers from the roofs. Along the hillside, feather trees lifted their slim plumes. In the courtyard below, a slave was scrubbing the household ahar.

Panduv offered now to Cah the goddess, since women were granted this boon, here. Alternative ethics of worship, like those Arud had exposed in the mountains, were unmentioned.

Yet she was aware that Arud was a powerful member of his temple, part of an inner elect, and had risen effortlessly in the past three years to the high office of Adorer. His priestly robes were heavily fringed with silver, and vessels of gold, and thin glass, had appeared as if by magic almost overnight in the house. Content and sanguine and no longer sent about on the tasks of a Watcher, Arud also gained in weight.

Panduv supposed she, too, had thickened. Child bearing, and the somnolence of her days, would have padded her satin flesh. Despite that, she was to all the women of the capital, where plumpness if not obesity stayed the vogue, a bone. She ate sparingly, even in boredom, and had continued her dancer’s athletics in the concealment of the villa.

Arud, partly anxious for his exotic pet Zakr, half eager to display flashy lack of convention, gave her the handling of a light chariot. She was not, by Iscaian law, able to drive on the streets, but once up among the hills, she discarded the driver. The sight of his merry back, bounding for the nearest tavern, had come to symbolize to her a holiday. The hiddraxi were imported, another evidence of Arud’s wealth. She trained them to flight on the sidelong paths, hurtling into the upland valleys, where she would herself break loose to swim the streams and sleep in the grass. When the child was older, she should be taken, too. Arud would not object. Approached deviously, he was nearly always compliant. He had come to see his generosity to a woman as an aspect of free thinking, and sometimes referred to it impressively before colleagues.