Tanith Lee - The White Serpent

Tibo opened the door of the hovel-house.

The room was drenched warm with firelight, Orhn asleep one side of the hearth, the other, Orbin, in the chair that had been his mother’s. Warm, but not secure. Things altered. And there, and there, and there—where Raier would be after the coming of night, a vacant space.

“Hoh, Tibo,” said Orbin, softly. “While you were out yammering with those women, I got to worrying about this farm. There’s no money in it, I thought. But then a man came riding by. Oh, you’d have liked him. A foreigner. You’d have wanted to invite him in. But he wasn’t looking for a whore. He was looking for something else to buy. With Alisaarian silver. Look. Shall I tell you, Tibo, what he wanted in exchange?”

The cold months were very hard that year. A period of deadly freezing nothingness. Beasts had died even in their byres. Men had died merely from falling a few yards outside their doors. When the breaking rains began, the snow fell on, mingling in the water, as if they should never be rid of it. But many sought the way into Ly, to sacrifice to Cah for a better year, a chance to abide. Orbin, seeing Orhn had lost two of his cows to the winter, set out on the course as usual, a silver coin in his pocket, leaving the idiot and the slut behind.

The route was doubly unpleasant now, sludge and ice combining, and the snowy downpour pelting over all. Here, with careering descents at regular intervals on either hand, Orbin went slowly, but undeterred. There was the solace of religion, the quick flicker of lust, and some prolonged drinking before him. He might even, rich as he temporarily was, remain the night on a wine-shop pallet. He might even make a special offering to Cah, to appease her, in case appeasement was necessary. He did not think so, really. He had been within his entitlement to sell off an illegal child, as Orhn would have been able to sell his own offspring, or Orbin’s, come to that. The slut stayed quiet enough about it. Not a word all winter. Not that one had been anticipated. She knew she had no redress and no say, and that anyway it was her fault. If she had been any use about the place, or any use to Orbin—she did not even know how to enjoy a man—he might have acted differently. Serve her right. Still, he was glad she had spread her legs for the easterner. He liked the silver, and liked telling her what he had done about the brat. Although he had been slightly uncomfortable before and after, wondering how she would take the news. As if she could object, or mattered.

On the viscous track behind him, Orbin detected a noise, and turned to see what it was. Something quivered grayly in the milky rain—and he thought of demons, banaliks—When he did see, his heart steadying, he was not well-pleased. “You stupid sow—what’re you doing here?” Tibo did not answer, she only came nearer, her hands extended before her, so he assumed she meant to show him something, and looked at them. But that was not actually her purpose.

He was still berating her and looking to see what she held out to him, when Tibo pushed him with all her force. Orbin was not a small man, but the blow caught him unprepared by the habits of a lifetime, and besides, there was ice underfoot. For a second or so he slithered and scrabbled, yelling, flailing with his arms. Then, as elsewhere and four months earlier his mother’s corpse had done, he pitched sidelong off the track and down a rocky little precipice below. Unlike his mother, Orbin screamed as he fell. But not for a great while.

The only problem with a child so handsome was to keep him out of the clutches of brothels. Katemval was well-practiced at eluding them, both the wealthy importunate and the kidnapping scavenger. Nevertheless, it cost him a few pains extra this time, not least in the rat-runs of Ly Dis, and all the other towns, through and including the Iscaian capital, to the port. Altogether, his hunch to delve the uplands, paying off one way in that one child, proved a stumbling block another. Delays and vile weather led to further delays and further, viler weather, culminating at the capital in the words of Katemval’s agent: “They say they never had such a sea for tempests. There’s not a captain on this coast will put out till the spring.”

“Oh, won’t they. We’ll see what a bribe will do,” announced Katemval staunchly, and off they went, to the most southerly port. Where it was discovered that bribes would do nothing. Viewing the enormous raging waters for himself, Katemval was not, at length, disposed to argue.

So there they wintered, he, his men, and two wagon-loads of bought children. Half an inn was required, as well as the services of women to tend the flock. At least, it was warmer.

There was an Alisaarian tower in dock, a ship on which Katemval’s agent negotiated first passage out. She would be making for Jow with a cargo of copper and common slaves. Katemval found this traffic disgusting; he himself traded in finer stuff, and for a nicer market.

The children fared very adequately, if the fretful slave-taker did not, kicking heels in Iscah. Blossoming on sufficient decent food, sleep, and care, many had already forgotten or dismissed their origins.

Not the Lydian, though, Katemval surmised. He was after all one of the youngest, and might miss his mother, too. Though death had got her before the Alisaarians took him, maybe the child equated that loss with the other.

The slave-taker was strict with himself, not to make a pet of this single boy. It would be all too easy, and then another parting, distressing for both, perhaps. But on the first sunny morning, when the bloody ocean conceded it might lie down again, Katemval, finding the boy in an upper window of the children’s room, pointed out the tower ship to him, lying at anchor, lovely as a toy after her winter cosset.

“That is how we’ll go to Alisaar. On that one, there.”

“Yes,” said the child.

“Tell me, Rehger,” said Katemval—for he knew what the boy’s name was intended to be, and pronounced it accordingly in spick and span Alisaarian—“What are you going to be, in Alisaar?”

“A man of glory,” said Rehger, the words Katemval had taught him to say, and hopefully to credit.

“Always hold to that, my dear,” said Katemval. “You are going to be a lion and a lord and a man of fame. Your life will be like a sunburst and your death a thing of drama and beauty. What are you making now?” he added, for he saw the boy’s fist curled about something. Whether this inclination for artistry—which sought expression in packed snow, mud, and bits of wood with a kitchen knife he should never have been given—would grow up with him or be at all serviceable, Katemval did not know. But he was intrigued nevertheless. Not hanging back, not hurrying, the boy opened his hand.

It was the left hand, with that wire of silvery scar around the wrist. More surprising still, perhaps, what lay in the palm of it: A triangular blazing coin. Almost all gold, only enough bronze there to harden the metal.

“Where did you get it, Rehger? Did you steal it?”

“No. My mother gave it me. My father gave it my mother.”

Katemval doubted this. Yet, intuitively, he doubted also that any theft had been committed by the boy himself.

“Where do you hide it, then?”

“Here.” The boy revealed a tiny leather fragment around his neck, the sort of thing in which valueless talismans were retained. All gods, it was worth ten times over what had been paid for the child.

“Put it back then, Rehger, and don’t let anyone else see. Someone might want it.”

“Do you?” said the boy, fist closed again on the coin, looking at him with utter directness.

Katemval laughed, a little hurt, the kindhearted taker of slaves.

“Of course not, boy. That’s yours, now. Remember your mother by it.”