The White Serpent Read online

  Book Two

  Alisaar

  Part Two

  8. Sold and Bought

  NOT THE TEMPLES. It was the brothels the Corhlan had gone to.

  There had been a nightmare, of death. Somewhere. But you need not think of it, here.

  He had fought, lost, walked away from the under-rooms of the stadium. To submerge his grievance, he came to this place, near the waterfront. He had had some cash saved, which had not yet run out. When it did, they would throw him on the fish-reeking cobbles, the madam glaring and vituperative, the girls regretfully sad. Then—then he would devise some other means to get by.

  “I’m a prince, in Corhl,” he told the girls. They did not care, or believe him. But his healthy limber frame, his handsome face, they liked those. “Come to my palace. Be my queen in Corhl.”

  “Oh, get on with you,” they said.

  The bed was scattered with the somber marigolds of Alisaar, the pomegranate-color wind-flowers, the speckled topaz lilies that grew wild on the hills. The establishment servants fed him, and brought wine, and white Karmian spirit that made you think you could fly. (“Fly to Corhl with me.” “Oh, get on.”)

  During the first night, near sunrise, an enormous herd of cattle had woken him, mooing and rumbling under the sea. But cattle did not go about there.

  The girl screamed as she lay on his belly, gripping his shoulders. He was finished just before her, and, his eyes clearing, saw through her contorted face into another face, white as a skull. There was a pain in his chest, running down from the neck to the breastbone. The Lydian had given him a whack with his shield. It had stunned him. Well.

  “Now, for me,” the other girl said, sliding on to Chacor.

  “Corrah, no. I’m dead.”

  They had heard those rumors too, and did not believe them, either, though they did believe otherwise in every manner of miracle, jinx, glamour, ghost and demon.

  “Ah, Chacor. The sun’s going, the Star’s coming up. And look, what’s this?”

  Erect in her canny winsome hands, he surrendered himself. And she buried him in her loins, most marvelously alive.

  • • •

  Wrapped in her cloak of black silk and a great poured collar sewn with jets, Panduv stood and stared.

  The man, a mix, poorly dressed in contrast to her opulent slavery, clanked the throats of the bags again.

  “Five hundred bars, standard rate. Take and have them weighed, if you wish.”

  “You’re her menial,” said Panduv. She snapped her fingers for her girl to go on ahead, through the covered court into the building.

  “No. But she can command me, of course. Her kind can always do that.”

  “So I see. Well. Go back and tell her to—save her money.”

  The man looked down at the bags.

  “They’re heavy.”

  “I cry tears of blood for you.”

  The man cursed her for a black Zakorian trull, and Panduv stalked by him. She could have killed him with her bare hands or feet, for she was stadium-trained also to fight, like every professional dancer-acrobat of the city. But that was out of bounds. He was, Yasmat snap off his organ, a mix. And an errand-boy for an Amanackire.

  Panduv was tiring of that Amanackire. Once had been enough. What next?

  Entering the purlieus of the theatre, Panduv discovered.

  “She’s here.”

  “Who is here?”

  “Your snake woman.”

  The manager, between contempt and nervousness, peered about the ante-stage, a space just now banked up with properties, and persons who were listening.

  “Not mine,” said Panduv resolutely.

  “I put her in the painters’ room. Go and see to her, for the love of the gods.”

  Panduv left him and went to the painters’ room.

  “You must be amorous of me,” she said to the Amanackire. “May I decline? Those stadium-trained avoid drinking milk.”

  “I only want what I have told you I want.”

  “Which you knew I’d refuse, or else why are you here before me, when your groveling money-bags met me outside?”

  “Name your own price, Zakorian.”

  Panduv detained a flock of replies. Curiosity was claiming her, despite everything. The Amanackire had come out tonight mantled in clear colors, a chameleon for once. Her tell-tale hair, and even her face, were veiled in gauze.

  “Why do you want to purchase such a thing?” said Panduv.

  The Amanackire sighed—for the gauze fluttered. She did nothing else.

  Panduv said: “You think you’ll need it? And before I shall?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I mustn’t rejoice. You may strike me down—I’ve heard your race can kill by lightning from the brain. And then where would you be? But the stone is black, lady.”

  “The Lowlands use black stone.”

  “And burn their dead.”

  “I’m not among my own kind here. I respect the customs of the lands I visit. I have been influenced.”

  “Something more,” said Panduv. She narrowed her lustrous eyes, toyed with her jet-stone collar nearly as dark.

  “What would you have?”

  “Say,” said Panduv: “Why from me?”

  “It has the nature of a balance, Zakorian, which you might not understand. Besides, yours is of the best, the masons boast of it. The most sturdy.”

  “You fear Saardsins would break in and desecrate?” By a movement of the face-veil, Panduv saw the Amanackire smiled.

  “Before Zastis, you came to me,” said Panduv, “asking me about the Lydian.”

  “It was, if you wish, a prelude to this.”

  “But you’ve met him by now. It’s all over the stadium, and the Women’s House. That you and he fire the Star together. That you hexed him and nearly crippled him in the practice court so you could have him all Zastis to yourself. So why not ask his help with this other problem?”

  “He has never bothered with provision. They say it’s notable, Panduv. The women, though mostly less exposed to obvious danger, always see to it first.” The Amanackire paused. Then she came toward the Zakorian girl, and as she did so lowered the veil from her face. She stood looking up at Panduv. The Lowlanders generally lacked the height of the Vis. But all at once, her slender smallness, the always-unrecollected youth of the white girl, stirred the dancer, sexually and emotively, and, therefore, to an awareness of the human.

  “Panduv,” she said, “forgive me. My race are arrogant and cruel. I know no better than to demand. Let me crave your pardon, and ask, then. Please, Panduv Am Hanassor, I beg you. Permit me to buy from you your built black tomb on the hill. With the riches I can give you, you can build at once one even finer. Although, I promise you, you won’t need it. Your days will be long.” Panduv shivered.

  “Not yours? Yes, I see. Why else this hurry.”

  “You will hear quite soon that I have died. Then rejoice, if you want. Sell the tomb to me: Take my blessing for your curses.”

  • • •

  Velva had entered the Salt Quarter, the warren of narrow streets and ruinous lots that lay between the warehouse district and the eastern slums of the city. She had told the inn-lord the Lydian wanted her. Her employer had not argued, or looked for further payment. He had not guessed it was a lie. Would it were not.

  There was a thin twisting sooty street that coiled and wriggled through the warren. Though leading nowhere of import, and of revolting appearance, it was well-known in its way, or ill-known, certainly.

  Sometimes, from some black crack, a hand reached out and plucked at the girl’s cloak, or a face squinted. But they were feeble, indeterminate attentions. Prosaic lust was not what prompted this defile of night.

  She passed all the doorways, not looking, and the alley-mouths. She passed the cavelike op
en entries, shelved with mortal flesh. In this worm-wend, all manner of drugs and essences were sold. Incenses and elixirs, inducements to dream or drown, the recipes of many lands. Here even they sold Aarl’s Kiss, that had its fame, now, Vis over. It was the juice of a yellow fruit, plucked from a mysterious island that lay at sea beyond the shores of Alisaar, and off the proper routes of the traders. They said the blond Storm Lord, Raldnor, had found the island on his journey of discovery that ended at the Second Continent. The fruit, when eaten, made one drunk. More. In sufficient quantity, the rind and pith mixed in, it made all things beautiful; it opened the portals into the kingdom of the gods. But it also killed, in great pain, and swiftly. Crush the whole fruit, however, distill and dilute the juice, one might imbibe the pleasant drink moderately for some years, knowing something of the ecstasy often. Or, if in haste, much ecstasy and death in a few months. Those that took the juice a decade denied it was an assassin. They loved it as their friend. They tried to hold it off, as a loved friend is held off, and gave in finally, and in the last seasons of addiction, married it. Those that went more quickly acknowledged it was death. What had life, anyway, to offer them, that was delicious as this?

  In the deep porch, Velva touched the cord of a bell.

  She did not hear it ringing, but the door, after a moment, was opened, two inches.

  “What?” said a voice.

  “Awl’s Kiss.”

  “Cash? Or do you barter other things?”

  “Coins.”

  “Let’s see ’em.”

  Reared among the tenements of Saardsinmey, she knew to show just one flash of one bright drak. She had saved the Lydian’s money, which he had pressed on her, meaning to give it back to him. But he had not sought her again. The witch had ensorcelled him instead.

  “Come in,” said the unseen one. He held her arm through the door, and she pushed him off.

  The darkness stank of sea-damp and filth. A light burned, very low. Neither purveyor nor client wished to be illumined. Velva had slight fear she would be plundered and slain. She would be more profitable alive. For this medicine, she would come back. Taste, and you must return to it.

  “How?” said the man she could not see.

  “Not the usual mixture. Undistilled. From the pulpings.”

  Now she was in some unsafety. She had implied she meant this venture to be unique.

  “That’s not so simple,” he said. “Why d’you want it that way?”

  Velva turned a fraction, for he was shifting the lamp, trying to spy her better.

  “My lover. He’s old. Sick. The juice does nothing for him, watered.”

  “You want him packed off, eh?”

  She hid her face in her cloak, and threw weighted dice.

  “I need his money. Fill another vial for me—that one distilled.”

  And the vendor cackled, pleased to be of service. Since, hooked by her elderly paramour, she also was his, and—youthful and hale—might stay so an entire ten years.

  • • •

  It was a winter morning when slave-takers came to the fishing village a mile below Hanassor. Above, the dark conical cliff that held the city, blocked the sun, but the sea was sheened. It was never really cold in Zakoris.

  Panduv’s aunt-mother—her birth-mother was long dead—was gutting fish and pegging them to dry out on the posts. She was bare-breasted, and big-bellied, always with child, as was the old way, by any one of the village men, who held all their women in common. Other women worked farther along the stony shore, seeing to the nets or the fish the men had brought in just before sunup. Smoke swarmed from the hut-holes.

  Panduv, who in those days had been called something in the way of Palmv, had also been caught turning cartwheels when supposed at toil with the pots in the water tub. Her aunt-mother had damned her, naming her not only Palmv but the Hated-of-Zarduk. Nearly three years old, eyes wet (for the blows had been harsh), Palmv scoured the clay. She did not know the bruises of those blows would fade in another world.

  Zakoris was Vardish, since the Lowland War, over a century: Var-Zakoris. The might of Hanassor was done, and there was a new capital inland with another title. Sometimes pale-skinned men with yellow hair were seen in the village’s vicinity. They were not liked, or annoyed. The gods had had their say. Zarduk was chastising his old kingdom. In Free Zakoris, over the mountains, that was where the soul of the land had gone.

  Seeing riders coming down on them, Palmv’s auntmother had called the other women. They spoke of Vardians or Tarabines—but the riders were not white men. Dortharians, then, the lovers of Vardians and Tarabines.

  Nor were they Dortharians.

  They came along the stones, the zeebas picking a way. The women stood ready to fight if needful. Their men, resting after a night’s fishing, were not to be disturbed.

  Then a couple of the riders explained what they wanted. Children. Very young. Girls—for boys were not sold at Hanassor. Boys were still considered warriors here, and powerhouses of seed. But girls were expendable. Particularly a girl like Palmv, whose mother had died of childbearing and might have passed this stigma on.

  Palmv heard the exchanges. She heard herself offered, for the slavers’ price. When they came and looked her over, she barely struggled. No man was consulted. No one knew who her father was, she had never been an asset to the village.

  Presently she was carried away to Alisaar.

  She thought all this while that it had happened to her because she was inferior. Because she had turned cartwheels. Useless, this was her punishment. It was in the stadium, in the girls’ hall, that she learned, gradually, painfully, disbelievingly, that she had been taken for her beauty and her strength, and that her name was Panduv, and she would be a dancer and a princess in glory. When she might otherwise have scratched at pots, dried and pickled fish, and lain with her legs open, either taking men in or pushing them, newborn, out, all her days.

  • • •

  Now Panduv stood on the top-walk of the triple stage, thinking warily of these things. Was it an omen, to consider her start? Had the white woman lied, saying Panduv would not need the tomb and that her life would be long? Was it only that some fate hung over Panduv, a death that was not expected, and would leave nothing to be buried? Obliteration by flames, or water—Panduv felt an instant’s awful fear. To the Lowlanders, with their religion of eternal renewings (alien to Panduv as anything of theirs), physical death was nothing. (Why else, that one, so calm in the face of it?) But to a Zakorian, only a holy burning or drowning in sacrifice was valid. The gods provided for all such victims, as for men who fell in war. For the rest of the dead, without the model of their corpse to remember by, the shade would be formless and amnesiac. And if the cadaver was shelterless, how could the shade achieve a refuge? Death was a dim, bleak country anyway. Every aid was needful, there.

  The theater was nearly empty, rehearsals concluded. Up in the crimson roof the lamps had been doused by those monkey-boys who could scale the pillars. The poled sections of scenery had been run off along their grooves into the wings—the wheels below, into which the poles were locked, had screeched throughout the rehearsal so the actors laughed and complained and the manager despaired. Behind Panduv, there remained only the great bole, part primeval tree, part column, abandoned on stage until tomorrow. It was a tall drum of solidly carpentered wood, braced with gilded bronze, and painted. Jointed and hinged lengthways, it stood currently wide. The play had a diversion: A manifestation of the love-goddess Yasmat. A magical tree carved into a column was to be split by divine lightning. The goddess would step forth, to be fawned on by leopards and birds. In a dance, she then demonstrated the omnipotence of sexual love. The goddess must at no time speak, that would be blasphemous. She might only be portrayed by perfect beauty and exceptional talent. Panduv had been engaged for the role at a staggering fee. Her worth was further attested by the shockproofed structure
of the column, and the cushioning of its interior. However, the cranky crane, having deposited the column-drum, promptly broke down. It had been altogether a disquieting night.

  Nor yet over.

  The leading actor of the Alisaarian troop appeared on the apron, and came stealthily and quickly up the stages to Panduv, taking her into his arms when he reached her.

  “Yasmat,” he groaned in her ear.

  “Delay a while,” she said. “We can go to the clothes room.”

  “No. Let’s go in there. Yes, into the column. It’s comfortable enough. Black on black, my Yasmat. Oh, don’t make me wait any longer—”

  It was Zastis, the nerves of both alight. She allowed him to prop her in the dark column and himself against her, pulling shut the hinged sections . . .

  Yet even as they clung and plunged, upright and frenzied, in the close-bound, hidden dark, she had an idea they made love in a grave. And that, once all the business of the night was over, she must propitiate Yasmat for being given, especially flippantly, the goddess’ name.

  • • •

  The night ran its course. With accidents and pleasures. With lovemaking and merrymaking. With clandestine messengers bearing deeds, packed harlotries and taverns, street fights near the docks. With a sumptuous dinner in the Guardian’s palace, whose guests ranged from indigenous merchant-princes through a pack of nobles from Sh’alis, to charioteers and philosophers.

  Toward sunrise, tiring, the night left everything lying, flotsam on a beach, and seeped with Star-set into the west.

  • • •

  The flowerseller moved with earliest morning along Gem-Jewel Street. Few were about but slaves. Women drew water from the fountain. A wine-shop or two had organized its brooms. Hawks sailed high and pigeons fanned their wings on the rooftops.

  A snatch of talk came from an upper window.

  “The sea’s gone out again, the fishmonger said, further than before.”