The White Serpent
The afternoon tilted away toward sunset. A bloom dropped from the trees upon his hand. (Summer was going, too, toward its set.) He put the bloom in her hair. He had now been silent a long while, she with him. Looking at them, the passersby would think, perhaps, Chacor had some Lowland blood, and that they spoke within.
“The sintal grew in the old city of the south,” she said. “There was an elder language, then. Sintal. It means goddess-hair.”
“Like yours,” he said, and wondered if he should bite out his tongue.
But Elissi only told him, “We say, we, too, are Anackire, for Anackire is all things, and all things one thing. Each of us has God within him, is God, Chacor.”
“You credit that souls come back to be born again; death doesn’t count.”
“Even if,” she said, “that weren’t so, the terror and anguish of Saardsinmey is over. The pain is done, for them. And if the pain goes on for you, then let it be a part of you, Chacor. But not, Chacor Am Corhl, you a part of it.”
They walked back in the youthful evening, one pair among scores of couples, drinking chilled fruit juice, praising the monkey as she walked daintily by their side on her long leash. The maid had found her own young man, a carter from Marble Street, and been allowed to run away until the dinner hour.
He permitted himself no familiarity. He did not even take her hand.
At dinner, he spoke to Jerish, accepting the company of the soldiers going toward Xarabiss, and asking after a zeeba he could now afford to hire. On Arn Yr he next attempted to leave ten silver parings, and was refused.
Later, looking for Elissi in the garden, Chacor did not find her. He was sorry and relieved.
• • •
Somewhere on the two-and-a-half-day ride up to the fort, Jerish and his sergeant sold Chacor the soldier’s life. Partly it was done, he thought in confusion soon after, by inquiring what he meant to aim for in Xarabiss, or Dorthar? Then he as well would have to inquire into his prospects. He had always been a drifter, taking up brawling as a trade, but, in Alisaar, he had learnt something of chariots, of hiddraxi and zeebas, and of the methods of the sword. Now soldiering seemed to present itself as this same trade and learning, in better harness. He had begun to get on with Jerish and his officers, and the mixed “pack,” which called itself the Plains Wolves, were a lively bunch, three-quarters yellow Moiyan and a quarter everything else under the sun. Black-bronze skin did not debar from command, either, Jerish was proof. While the Dortharian captain who was to govern the Dortharian peacetime battalion in the fort, was a white blond.
Besides, after this paid brawl got stale, Chacor could opt out of it. As Jerish assured him, provided he gave due warning of intended departure, and providing New Alisaar or Ommos were not actually training ballistae on the city, there would be no checks.
Once he was in, and the cut and dried rigmarole of military training started, Chacor wished himself off and away. But it was too late then. Moih’s new recruits received two months’ pay in advance. Thereafter, they kept an eye on you.
Then, he began not to mind it so much.
He began to discover brothers, against whom he could try his strength and his fighting wiles as much as he wanted, and still go drinking with them in the village under the walls at night.
The city he returned to for his leaves, or more usually went up across the border into windy Xarabian Sar, from which Raldnor the hero had claimed false derivation. Rehger Chacor had lost touch with. Jerish said the Lydian was still employed by Vanek. Arn Yr, intent once more on profitable voyaging, beyond one visit Chacor avoided. (He did not see her, either.)
Just before the winter closed down, in the interim of thaw, there was a tirr hunt. The filthy beasts had been massing in the area, their castings and stench marking the tracks and trails, and there were stories of gypsies and village children poisoned by their claws. Tirr were hated worse than any wolves. Chacor, who had hunted them in Corhl, had some tips to offer which proved effective. They wiped out three nests, and brought home one whole flat-skulled jutting earless head and flange of talons, carefully unvenomed, to set by stealth on the officers’ supper dish.
Winter was bleak, and they damned it extravagantly, always ritualistically complaining about the weather, the difficulty of getting to Moiyah and Xarabiss. The fires blazed high in the mess. On sentry-go you might watch the stars Elyrian fashion, in the winter clarity of sky above the turrets by night. Beneath, the bay had frozen and the sea was plates of ice. The white fields stretched off from the fort the other side. Chacor favored a mix-Sarish girl, but she was like all the other free girls he had gone with. By the time of the thaw rains, they had even-temperedly done with each other.
It was Jerish and Annan’s wedding that spring. The Plains Wolves were heading back to the city garrison. Chacor had for three months been moving upward, and was now offered the rank of division sergeant under a Moiyan captain. It meant another stint at the fort. But with hunting weather returning and the leave-route open again to Xarabiss, he was not unwilling to stay. Best of all, there were tales not merely of tirr but of bandits in force on the border. It was in Chacor yet, the viral restlessness that sought release in combat.
He did go to the wedding. He was chosen by Jerish in fact to be one of the Raiding Party—a custom of the wedding—along with Vathcrian cousins and boyhood friends from the army. He could not have said no.
In the uproar and festivity he did not properly see Elissi until the dancing began. Moih had a form of dance not yet popular in Vis lands. Here the sexes mingled, hand-locked, man with girl, in long lines. Elissi came by with a soldier of the Wild Cats. She looked still and smiling, but her face was not vivacious, as Chacor remembered. Mostly he saw how the winter had paled her skin. What had been Iscaian honey was now Amanackire snow.
They spoke some words to each other during the evening, wishing the bridal couple well.
He had long since made his own offering to Corrah, precious oil and wine. Blood sacrifice was not the vogue in Moih for any of the gods, except at certain seasons when the carcasses were immediately portioned and distributed to the needy. They never sacrificed to Anackire. So far as he knew they never gave her anything.
In the morning, he rode out again for the fort, soldierly and somewhat admired on the streets.
Then, in Sheep Lane, at a silversmith’s, he saw Elissi, perhaps a foot high and made of silver, standing in the shop-front.
He stopped his mount and stared. In the end he walked into the shop. A curlicued Xarab came out at him, and Chacor, aggrieved, pointed at the statuette.
“You wish to buy?” The Xarab seemed dubious “This isn’t cheap.”
“Who made it?”
“I see you are a connoisseur. I will be honest with you.” (Dishonesty shone radiant from his brow). “Not a master. An apprentice, but of a reputable studio, the worthy Vanek’s. Obviously a pupil of mighty promise, you will agree? Would I, indeed, accept an inferior cast?”
A strange suspicion made Chacor say slowly, “An Alisaarian.”
“So I am led to believe. From that tragic city torn by the hell mountain last year.”
Looking more closely, Chacor saw the resemblance to Elissi was fleeting. Some memory had lodged, or else the model was a girl rather like her, but only in build and style of hair.
“Very fine,” said Chacor, dazed.
He went out of the shop, nothing bought, and the Xarab bowed to him in such a way that adjacent booths began to chortle, but Chacor did not hear.
• • •
The bandit, whose other choice was an escort to Sar, elected to betray his leader’s hideout. Moiyah was reckoned lenient to criminals; she fined or imprisoned them. Xarabian-Dortharian Sar, on the other hand, tended to maim or crucify them on the terrace under the altar of the wind gods.
Of Chacor’s detachment, twenty-five men, he sent five back to the fort with the
ir debilitated captives. The engagement, an ambush in a stony defile, Chacor had foreseen. It was not too difficult, for the terrain begged for something of the sort. The dead robbers they buried; Moih, who burned her own dead Lowlander-wise, gave specific instructions.
So far the fort had not lost a man on this expedition. The local bandit population had been decimated. Chacor was justly not displeased, and his men were positively jolly, although the Moiyans tended to crow less over killing.
The fort meanwhile was now some days behind them. The mission had sent them northeastward. Technically they were out of Moih, on the map of the Plains, and that evening they made camp on a low eminence with a view of the Xarabian border. The hideaway should be a task for the morning, but Chacor fancied a night attack, which he was keeping from any of the bandit king’s spies who might be about.
As the cook-fires sent up lazy smoke, Chacor’s scout noticed a movement three miles off, over the barren folds of landscape. The sun-blushed dust was skirling there, intermittently, but only in one generalized spot.
“Dust devils?” said Chacor, who was not yet properly used to the Plains.
“No sir. Not really late enough in the year. Not enough dust.”
“You joke with me,” said Chacor. Like the scout, he was powdered head to foot.
The scout grinned. “Unless I have it wrong, sir, that’s the Dragon Gate smack against the border, where that dust dance is.”
Chacor had seen the Gate several times by now, going up and down to and from Sar. It gave him an eerie sensation that caused him to invoke Corrah, but that was all. He said, they had better go and see, put the camp on dignified alert not to excite possible watchers, and with three men galloped off northward, with the sun in a sinking rage on the left hand.
As he rode along then, Chacor came to feel that there was something uncanny about the evening. It was nothing he could put a hand on—maybe only the red sideways light, the success of the jaunt, the little command he now had going to his head, in the warrior fellowship of fighting shoulder to shoulder. Or maybe it was something in the weather. They had been hearing of summer hail and flash-floods farther north, and that a series of earth tremors in Dorthar, where they had become a triviality and were mostly ignored, had nonetheless created enough damage to send the population to its temples. Yet, he was not uneasy, merely sensitized. Even if the moving dust were a ploy of the bandit lord’s—which he doubted—four armed men, mailed, on cavalry zeebas, would be a match for it.
As they crossed the last mile, and the dim shape of the pillars of the Gate came visible like ghosts through the dust, Chacor’s skin prickled. It was the sensation a Lowlander would have called flatly Anackire—their label it seemed to him for any random otherness.
Then he heard the shouting. It was human, both irate and desperate. And then, the long-drawn, gut-twisting screech of tirr.
Two of the three men he had brought along were expert javelineers. As he gave them the word, they were already reaching, ready.
They sprinted through the dust.
It was almost a tableau. A slope with boulders and a stand of sunburnt trees. A wagon with empty shafts, now and then slipping and bucking on the slope, hitting the dust up in spouts. Two men were on the wagon, trying to hold it, and at the same moment whirling a staff apiece—torches, smoking and invisibly flaring in the sunset. Six tirr crouching, mauling the wagon sides. Abruptly one beast, two, springing, meeting fire and slewing aside.
“Anack!” swore the mix javelineer.
No one waited. Next instant two of the tirr were pinned by iron. A third spun and came at them. Chacor kicked his zeeba, leaned forward and rode straight at the tirr, seeing only the death-ripe claws, the red coins of the eyes, swerving, and his sword coming edgeways down across the mangy neck. The beast collapsed and he jerked his mount away from the death throe and the talons— Looked up and saw a third javelin had done its work, and the third man had another tirr on its back, not yet risking pulling out his sword. That one was a female with sallow furrowed nipples—she had been suckling young not long before.
The last of the creatures crouched hesitating, vicious, unnerved. Once you had hunted them, you knew they were inclined more to kill than to preserve themselves. Gaining some fluke of escape, often they would not take it if they might inflict another wound. Full grown men seldom survived a single scratch, unless cauterized within five minutes. A slender woman or a child—it was hopeless.
Chacor sat there staring into the red eyes. The hiatus was unnatural. Were they considering, he and his men, they would spare the brute?
Suddenly Chacor was thinking of a name. It was the name by which Rehger had called his lover, the Amanackire—Aztira. This had a likeness to the other name—tirr. The notion was irrelevant, disquieting.
“Finish!” Chacor shouted.
A fourth javelin went over. The tirr seemed to leap snapping toward it, to embrace it, and fell back heavily, stone dead. One of the other tirr was still spasming. You could not dare go and put it out of its misery even, that was too chancy.
The two men from the wagon had stopped making a noise and lowered their torches. One, a Xarabian, jumping down, with help from the mix soldier shoved stones under the wheels.
The other man, not Xarabian, but Vis-dark (and Plains dusty), had also swung down.
“Soldiers from the Moih fort, aren’t you?”
“Our respects,” said Chacor.
“Well, sergeant, you’ve saved our chops this evening. But we deserved it. What a day we’ve had. First we were robbed—hence our lack of zeebas or any knives, not to mention my employer’s irreplaceable samples—then attacked by tirr. Your sublime goddess must have sent you to our aid.”
The goddess Corrah, thought Chacor resolutely. But he inclined his head. His men were occupied with carcasses. The one kicking tirr was now lifeless. Chacor dismounted. He went over to the man, and saw he was very tall, and in earliest middle-age, which his agility and energy had perhaps belied. The flaming sky was behind him, then as he, too, came forward, holding out a commodious hand, Chacor received a shock. The man off the wagon was Rehger. Rehger in twenty years’ time.
Chacor gave his hand in return.
“Chacor Am Corhl,” he said, friendly, feeling clever, feeling slightly drunk.
“Yennef Am Lan. Am everywhere it begins to seem.”
About a hundred feet away, the two giant pillars of the Dragon Gate, white, unfeatured, went soaring upward, losing themselves in the coming of the dusk.
“An historic place for our adventure,” said Yennef, Rehger’s father, glancing toward them. “Don’t they say, the first Vis kings came to earth there, carried in the bellies of dragons?”
Chacor shrugged. “That’s the mythos of Dorthar. You’re in the Lowlands now. Come, share our camp. Maybe we can cheer you a little regarding robbers.”
• • •
Supper was, again, grilled dust rat and hard biscuit, and some agreeable wine from the fort village, unadulterated by water.
As it got dark, and the stars of the Plains, thickstrewn and effulgent, appeared overhead, they sat talking in the firelight. Yennef gave the impression of being communicative. He was much-traveled—of everywhere, as he had titled himself—Lanelyr, the Middle Lands . . . Vardish Zakoris . . . and Iscah, too, Chacor inwardly observed. The man was an accomplished wanderer, what Chacor might have been, or might still become. Yennef, too, had done “some soldiering in youth.” For the present, he earned his bread as an agent for a merchant guild in Xarar, and his masters were not going to love him since he had been robbed. Chacor described briefly the plan to raid the bandit nest. Yennef promptly offered his help. “If you can loan me a mount and a sword, I’ll eat my luck as I find it. I can still fight, and after today I’d like one.”
“And to take an order?” said Chacor. Yennef said, “I’ll admit, I never served under so young an offic
er when I was your age. But, of course.” The Xarabian, however, Yennef excused. The man was his servant and, as you saw, not tough. He had been brave with the tirr perforce.
It was not yet Zastis, and there was no moon. Chacor sent scouts along the slopes an hour later, where they unearthed some snoozing bandit lookout. He was persuaded into picturing the nest in some detail, which corresponded with prior information. Gathering his men, and leaving the Xarab and two watch in the fire-ringed camp, to make a camplike stir, they set off.
When they got there, about midnight, the raid was quickly accomplished, for the robbers had been smug enough to bed down for the night. Javelins brought the sentries crashing. Next it was hand to hand. The den was in the undershore of a raised embankment with an old ruined wall on it. Some thirty villains came flying and stumbling down from the crest or out of holes. Three or four were mixes. The king himself had light gray eyes. It was an undistinguished fight, with no openings for prowess, for the thieves were used to attacking unarmed civilians. As it turned out, Yennef s robbers were another crew, parasites without the instinct to murder—they and the Xarar goods had gone elsewhere. Nevertheless there was some quantity of loot in the dirty shambles of the warren. Yennef, having acquitted himself very well, got a promise of compensation for himself and his master.
Before sunrise everything was settled, the surrendered foe roped and haltered, having been pressed into burying their own dead. Chacor’s detail had only three serious casualties. Since Yennef s wagon was going on to the fort, it proved a convenient vehicle for their transport.
Yennef rode alongside Chacor on the route west. He continued chatty over the evening fires. He seemed perfectly sociable and outgoing. Yet when Chacor, who had a leave due him and now badly wanted to take it in Moiyah, suggested they might go that way together, Yennef put him off. “Even with the peerless zeebas hired from your fort, wagons make slow riding. We’d hold you back.” Chacor, who had the northwest Visian’s utter abhorrence of homosexuality, wondered if Yennef and his weapon-shy Xarab servant were bedfellows and did not want interruptions. He did not care to regard Rehger’s father in that manner, so concluded there was some other secret.