The White Serpent Page 10

  As the Alisaarian’s sword came plunging down, Chacor brought up his shield with all his strength behind it. Death-desire met life-wish. The shield’s metal buckled and the wooden frame under the owar-hide gave way. As the point of the sword tore through, Chacor rolled aside from it. The Alisaarian, cheated of murder, only the wrecked shield on his sword, unbalanced, hung forward in the air. The Corhl came to his feet, slipping, grasping, deadly silent now, and slammed into the leaning man. As the Alisaarian went down, Chacor, who in all his itinerant brawls had never killed, fell again, astride him, and forced his sword half its length through flesh, muscle and pounding heart.

  The Saardsin died with one orgasmic shudder, giving no audible sound.

  Not so, the terraces. Curses and women’s scarves descended on Chacor as he rose up wildly, driven mad, shieldless—grabbing the Alisaarian’s shield—looking east.

  Then, past the couples of fighting men, the length of the stadium north to east, the Corhlan ran, brandishing the red sword, yelling the name of the one he wanted.

  • • •

  The Lydian had not killed. The two challengers he had disposed of he had removed by temporarily crippling them. They lay bleeding and semi-conscious against the terrace barrier, awaiting perforce the bout’s end to be carried to a surgeon. Killing was another matter. He did not want it. This might disappoint the crowd, but the fireworks of his swordsmanship so far held them cheering him. Though, too, they urged him to use his genius more cruelly. There had been times in the stadium, not always at Zastis, when Rehger also had come to want a man’s death. Such occasions were not predictable. When the prompting took him, he obeyed. He killed. That was all. He never made a record of numbers, nor kept count, even, as some did, of names, countries, dating his life: That morning I did for the Istrian; that race when I broke the mix’s neck.

  On his left, the Ylan had wounded once, and killed twice. Rehger had not witnessed it, but heard, on the edges of awareness, the sea-sound of the crowd shot up in great waves.

  The Iron Ox, to the right, had himself been hurt. He fought on, dispatched adversaries, but inexorably slowing. If he had his wits, he would presently sham a swoon. The crowd liked him; he could afford to skive, and win them back another day.

  As the Lydian shed the third man—unseaming the skin from knee to pectoral, a gaudy wound that, ending just under the nipple, induced fainting swiftly in a tired and unprofessional duelist—someone shouted his name. Not from the stands, which was perpetual, from the arena.

  Rehger turned, and found the boy from Corhl before him, sword anointed tip to grip, face insane with the fighter’s lust.

  From the look he had taken a life, for the first time. Like loss of any virginity, it was significant, that first. He was bleeding himself, a scratch on the right shoulder, not yet impeding him. The Corhlan was untrained, and craving, as they said, to touch the sun.

  Fortune had spoiled him, in the race.

  Fortune was trustless.

  The boy was maybe three or four years Rehger’s junior, in other ways younger still. Not done growing yet, he lacked the Lydian’s height, but then few men were as tall, and since his twentieth year, he had met none taller.

  The Corhlan was smiling, his eyes burning on Rehger. So the hunter might dwell on his prey, so a woman might ponder a man she hoped would possess her.

  The tiers had laughed at the boy’s headlong stampede, his need to meet the Lydian, and now they were saluting him, his valor and his idiocy. At least, probably, if he fought well, they would not regret watching him spared.

  Rehger moved, slowly enough that the boy could see he was accepted and that it had begun.

  The Corhlan made one beautiful answer, skimming with the sword—but, instantly checked by Rehger’s nearly gentle counterstroke, reacted with a clottish swing. From that, Rehger merely stepped away, as if ignoring a piece of pointless bad manners.

  This was how the Corhlan would fight, then. Artist and dolt by turns. Katemval would have said, if he had been child-sold to a stadium something might have been made of him. But he was free, and it was too late now.

  And then—chaos claimed the world.

  It was so ridiculous, so incompatible, that for a moment Rehger paid no heed to it, only readjusting his reflexes and his touch as if in response to some natural happenstance.

  It took him a few seconds more to realize that, although this had taken place, and continued to do so, it was impossible, and therefore he had no jurisdiction over it.

  He had lost control of the sword in his hand. Lost it completely. The sword was alive. It tugged and pulled against him, it twisted against his palm. As he raised it, it resisted, and the length of it thrummed. Cold as ice, charged with an energy, a strength that wrestled with his own—

  Before his mind had even laid hold of the facts, his entire body broke into a freezing scalding sweat—not of fear—of pure horror.

  Witchcraft. A spell. Yes, Rehger could credit these. But whose work? The Corhlan’s? The power did not seem to come from him—

  Struggling, a live enemy for a weapon, his actions suddenly labored and arbitrary, the Lydian strove to contain the boy’s gadfly attack.

  (The tiers, supposing their champion taunted the swinging young Corhl by mimicry, lovingly chided and clapped him.)

  But the Corhlan was falling back, retreating. Under the dark Vis tan, his face had paled below the pallor of excitement. His eyes were on the bewitched sword.

  So Rehger had an inch to spare, to glance, to see for himself.

  They called it Shansarian magic. A trick of the Ashara temples. Katemval, who had beheld it done often in Sh’alis, had ascribed it to drugged incense and hallucination, or some odder ability to flex metal. Snakes became swords, swords were changed to snakes.

  In his hand, the grip to the hilt remained, though it rippled with convulsive life. The hilt had shrunk to a kind of spine, quivering with the movement of the rest.

  Under what was left of the hilt, the full length the sword had been, a serpent. Stiffly stretched, it was writhing to rid itself, even as he grasped it, of the final vestiges of the steel. It was the color of milk, the hard clinkered scales gleaming like platinum. The eyes stared from its flat head, soulless white— He knew then whose power had formed the spell.

  The impulse was to fling it from him. There was an inherent loathing in the Vis, of snakes, which the people of the snake goddess had fed on and fostered. Real or illusion, to clutch this thing now, as it strove to full animation, turned the stomach, destroyed the will.

  It must be she meant him to die. To die in shame, before his hour. He felt her cold eyes on him now.

  And then, as if by that recognition of her, as of his fear and anger, he had satisfied the Amanackire sorceress, the sword returned to him. The snake disappeared. There was the flash of metal. Slim and balanced, it filled his hand, his servant, his. For how long? Now he could not rely upon the blade. The steel was a white snake, inside. He had seen it loosed. It might, having learned the truth of its nature, at any moment aspire to it again—

  All this had taken only seconds. The crowd had noted nothing, only the Lydian’s joke of hamfistedness, the retreat of the Corhlan, the tiny pause that sometimes came in combat before some decisive blow.

  Rehger’s skull sang. His vision was blurred, and his body too light. Such sensations followed great exertion and bloodloss. They were the prelude to death-danger. You could not stay long on the sand then, you must complete the task.

  His hand on the sword felt numb now. The leaden beats of his heart tolled through him. He was past fear and shame, numbed like the sword hand. So it would be, on his death day.

  The Corhlan was fighting him, his face full of the terror and fury Rehger had lost. The Corhlan did not understand, but the sorcery had him yet, its teeth in his throat.

  Somewhere, the abacus in the Lydian’s brain had kept
score, by the noises of the crowd, how many Saardsins had fallen or triumphed, and their popular status, how many men had been discommoded and hacked. Three or four fights still went on and were the last, this being one of them. Then it would be done.

  Rehger moved suddenly. As the weakness dragged from him like a cloak, every failure and shadow of his life swept up on him. They were strangers, these emotions, yet they knew him.

  He clipped leftward with the serpent sword, and doubled the blow, and the Corhlan’s shield clanged down at their feet.

  It was not a matter of art any more. A howling mob ran on Rehger’s heels.

  He saw the young man’s eyes, beautiful as a girl’s, widen with shock and dismay. Then Rehger brought the sword downward, gods’ fire from the sky, and cleaved through him, from the left side of the neck to the breastbone.

  The stroke required colossal strength (the clavicle had been shattered), perfect judgment. It was, nonetheless, a butcher’s.

  The tiers, amazed by rapidity, one falling figure, the abrupt climax, its glamorous awfulness, erupted. Women shrieked. Well, one had known they liked the Corhl.

  Rehger did not acknowledge them. He stood, the sword ripped from his hand, looking at the unconscious youth dying in front of him.

  When the paean of the trumpets rang out, with those who had survived and could, Rehger raised his arm to acknowledge a teem of praise and veils.

  He neither searched for the Amanackire among the boxes, nor gazed after the surgeons’ carts which were coming up to tidy the corpses and the maimed.

  He walked from the stadium, and passing into the rooms below, allowed himself to be stripped of armor and leather. Then, going to the bath, was cleansed in turn of dust and sweat and the blood of others.

  A group of noblemen who had come down to laud him, found him stretched along a pallet of the empty upper dormitory, his head on his arms, as if for sleep. “Forgive me,” he said. Swordsmen might wax moody after their prettiest battles, it was well-known, nor was the lion-orchid of Ly Dis any exception. They spoke awhile of poets and women, to him, and awarded him their presents, and tossed a garland of golden poppies over his head, before leaving him. Then, only then, he wept.

  • • •

  The man stood immovably in the entrance of hell.

  “I beg your pardon, lady,” he said. “You can’t come in here.”

  The torchlit corridor beneath the stadium was very dark, the cavern which opened beyond the man, evilly-lit by braziers, had its own darkness. The woman gleamed between, too white, too ghostly, omen of all things bad.

  And now she said, looking in his eyes with her own that were like sightless mirrors, “You see who I am. Stand aside.”

  “Yes, I see. I’m very respectful, I’m sure. But no woman gets in here. Not even the whores, to say good-bye.”

  Behind him, emphasizing everything, a man shrieked out in agony. That would be the one the Iron Ox had taken last. It was, altogether, the surgeons’ room, no place for the curious, whatever bribe or threat they offered.

  “The Corhl,” the woman said.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “He’s alive,” said the woman.

  “Somehow. His own gods know how. When they haul the steel out of him he’ll hemorrhage and die, anyway.”

  “Let me by,” she said.

  The man, like all Vis, knew of the Amanackire, what they were said to be, and to be able to do. But that Yllumite the Iron Ox had filleted, he was screaming now on and on, halting only to get breath. The man in the entrance said to the Amanackire, “Why don’t you, lady, go and find your goddess, and when you do, crawl up her hole.”

  Then something hit him in the chest. Like some beefy fist, it knocked him back, into the upright of the doorway, winded. As he lay on the wall gasping, the Amanackire woman went by him, into the place beyond.

  The murky room, stinking of hot metal, blood, offal and medicine, was very busy. The doctors bent to their work beneath the low-slung lamps. A gaggle of boys ran about with boiled water for the implements, the hooks and knives and bone-saws. Another made rounds with a pitcher of wine. He stared at the white being as he went by, and signed himself for divine protection.

  The Yllumite had died abruptly and his cries were ended.

  The surgeon straightened, washed his hands in the bowl one of the boys had brought. He turned, desultory, to the couch where another casualty lay, a sword wedged among splinters of shattered collarbone, in the meat of shoulder and breast.

  The surgeon was anatomically impressed by the force of the blow; perhaps there had already been a weakness in the clavicle. . . .

  “That must come out,” the surgeon said. “We don’t let him die by the long road. There’s not much left, but hold him,” he added. No one moved. The surgeon looked up and saw the woman who had come to the head of the couch. “Lady, you shouldn’t be here. Get out.” And heard how the boys muttered with fright that he had so addressed a white Lowlander.

  For the woman, she took no notice.

  “Lady,” he said, “I’m sorry if he was something to you, but he’s lost his race. You don’t want him to suffer? Go out, or move back. The blood’ll splash you.”

  And he set his grip on the sword.

  Before he could do more, one of the woman’s slender hands came down on his.

  The hand was the color of snow. It repulsed him, its whiteness on his own black-copper—he expected her skin to be cold, but she was warm, as he was.

  “I will do it,” she said.

  “Daigoth’s eyes. Don’t be a fool, woman.”

  “Stand away,” she said.

  A silence had fallen over the whole wide room.

  To his annoyance, the surgeon discovered he had stepped off as instructed.

  Then, while the room watched, the Amanackire drew the sword backward out of the Corhlan’s body, as smoothly as from a sheath of silk.

  A dew of blood scattered the wounded man’s flesh, the cover on the couch. Where the steel had divided him, a ragged purple stripe now crossed the top of his breast, from the base of the neck to just above the center of the rib cage. The woman, letting go of the sword she had extracted, leant forward, and her silver hair rained over him, hiding what she did. When she lifted her hands and her head, there was nothing on the surface of the Corhlan’s body at all, save a single bead of blood, which slowly trickled away.

  Without another word, the Amanackire returned across the speechless frozen room, passed through its doorway, and was gone.

  7. The King’s Mark

  THE SUNSET HUNG LIKE a scarlet awning over the city. The day’s stadium events, which had ended with Zakorian wrestling and three nine-lap races, each with a favorite charioteer, had left the gamblers to rejoice or lick their aches.

  A bizarre story was going round by lamplighting. The berserk young Corhl, given so obviously to death before the multitude, had been improbably saved by the surgeons.

  Of the Lydian, immediately forgiven the Zastis-excess of killing him, there was no special news.

  As the sun declined, leaving pools of red along the ground, Rehger was among the stalls of the hiddrax, up behind the stadium on the northwest side. Each racer of worth reckoned to have his own particular team by his twenty-second year, as he would expect his chariots built for him by the best carriage-makers of Alisaar.

  Rehger’s hiddraxi, who had taken him to the summit of the Fire Ride, now stood kissing his shoulders and receiving fruit from his hands.

  But for the humming of the sea-hemmed city, the evening was quiet here. A few grooms went about on their agenda, the hiddrax stirred the straw and ate. North, from the horse stables, there came a vague hubbub. There had been a horse-race, too, this afternoon, and the precious beasts were not yet settled.

  “Listen, my soul,” said Rehger to the hiddraxi. “Listen to the uproar they’re making. And not o
ne to race as you race, like wind and fire. Best on the earth, my loved ones.”

  A groom came across the court, leading a black saddle thoroughbred, and stopped by the arch, where the team-hiddrax could not see too much of it.

  Presently Rehger went out. He was to dine with a merchant-lord, the very one who had gifted him this mount two seasons ago.

  As he stood in the rich light, checking the animal’s recently shod hoofs, the groom said, “Lydian, you’ll want to know. That Corhlan boy, he’s alive.”

  Rehger did not hesitate, picked up another hoof.

  “Yes. Not for much longer.”

  “Something happened. There was a woman, one of the white Lowlanders. But she knew some trick, and they healed him.”

  “No,” said Rehger. He let go the last hoof, straightened, rubbed his fingers along the thoroughbred’s neck.

  “Yes, Lydian. I swear it. The whole stadium knows. Ask anyone.”

  “Yes,” said Rehger.

  “There’s not even a scar on him.”

  Rehger mounted, and turned the thoroughbred out through the arch, into the mouth of the sunset, then south down the curve of the high, tree-lined avenue, with its view of the distant ocean, into the city.

  • • •

  It was Zastis after all, Saardsinmey more than usually frenetic. In less than a mile he had been approached more than ten times, always decorously, always part-sensually, to be told the Corhlan lived.

  By the hour he rode into New Dagger Lane, he had come to credit it. He had destroyed the Corhlan. There was no chance any man might recover from such a stroke. Rehger had felt an extra guilt that he had not himself withdrawn the sword there and then and, if needful, ended the boy’s pain. But Rehger had not been able to take up that sword, that sword which had become a serpent.

  A white Lowlander—the groom’s words. The sorcery that could accomplish one such trick—why not another? Blade to life, dead to life—

  Sinking into the oblivion of fatigue, the victory diadem of poppies yet on his head, Rehger had dreamed the earth shook, columns toppled, and mountains. White seared on redness and rushed into a void of black. The Lowlanders had cast down the ancient capital of Dorthar by an earthquake. They had called gods from the sea.