The White Serpent

23 Cah the Giver

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.

Already, Panduv paid heed to the diet of Teis. (The nurse was a problem, endlessly slipping her sweetmeats.) Panduv lessoned the little girl in embryonic moves of an acrobat and dancer. Teis had natural ability, but her attention was inconstant. It would be an extravagance besides, to bank upon any future for a girl. Had it not been hard enough, letting go all plans for herself?

Only torches twined now in the dance of fire.

Panduv turned. Like two spiders, the nurse-woman, and her daughter, were weaving a web of beads.

“Be wary, nurse.” Panduv was harsh. “I’ll leave her with you until sunset. Remember your duty to the Master’s child.”

Infallible words.

The child laughed again, seeing her mother desert her.

In point of fact, Panduv got no farther than the market place.

Tomorrow was a holy day, the festival of Cah the Giver. (Arud had set off for the temple at sunrise and would not leave its precincts until tomorrow’s midnight. Another motive for Panduv’s restlessness; when he was in the house, at least he was a cause of occupation.)

By temple law, all buying and selling must cease before this evening’s sun went down, and the market was a madhouse.

After a negligent try or two, Arud’s chariot driver stalled the vehicle at a herd of orynx. The hiddrax stood trembling.

Panduv would have wished to call the man a fool and cuff him.

Instead, “Master,” she remarked, in tones of burnt honey, “Arud’s animals are distressed. Please do turn into that side street there,”

“Impossible, woman,” said the driver. In her instance, “woman” was title rather than dismissal, uttered quite deferentially. Panduv gritted her teeth, waited. “See, the pigs’re almost past.”

And past the orynx continued, thumping with their bristly sides the wheels and left flanks of the unhappy team, while men leered and grinned at the Black One, and mere women scurried by like ticks across a dog.

Superfluous to protest. Emblem of everything now. She had accepted. Like the ageless fire-sorceress in the mountains, Thioo . . . Nothing matters. Here we are. Here, it’s the custom. A Lowlander philosophy: We have all time and in time anything can be accomplished. The waste of one small life is nothing.

Why think of such things? Life was radiant and absolute.

But maybe it would be more comfortable to accede. Not only in her outward values, but through and through. What then? Eat confectionery, render to Arud a tribe of male brats, grow lush and portly—

Panduv surfaced as if from under a river, returning gasping into the scalding heat and the market noise.

Across the humps of jostling pigs, a rabble of drovers, the sweetmakers’ booths and the towering jars of the sugar-sellers, Panduv saw into the enclosure of the slave-market. The fence was scanty, a rope run round between posts. On to the auction block had been pushed a gang of five men, wrist-chained together. They were all but naked in five skins of metallic darkness foreign to Iscah. On this dark, appalling scars and lacerations indicated their former employment. They were off a slave-galley, men of abnormal strengths, but actually useless in terms of service. It was well-known, they could be bent to nothing else having outlasted the oar and the whip of an oars master. The fifth man was the Lydian. Rehger.

The floor of the chariot seemed to evaporate and leave her adrift in the air. Even as this happened to her, reason grasped her firmly and set her down again on a solid surface. No, it was not Rehger, not Saardsinmey and living life. No.

Yet, if not Rehger, a man so like him—

Though lean and muscular—how else would he have survived?—he did not have the distinctive build of the professional Swordsman, a Son of Daigoth. This man, too, was older than Rehger would have been, had he lived. But handsome, and in manner off-hand, princely almost, divorced from the chain and the company. He stood and looked about, while the other four crouched snarling.

“There,” said Panduv to her driver. “Lord Arud lacks a bodyguard.”

“No, woman,” said the driver, slightly offended and reproachful—she had forgotten in her desire to joy her lord her proper address of master. “No good. Those are off some Zakr pirate the Vardians trounced. Such muck can only be put in the mines.”

Panduv braced herself.

“Master, your leave to tell you. Lord Arud has said to look out for such a slave.”

Dismissing female stupidity, the driver did not respond. While, from the auction, Panduv could hear the other men saying much the same as he had. Certain of the capital’s priestly factions held a stake in mining concerns of Shansarian Alisaar. Presently there would come a bid of this sort.

Even though a mirage, it was imperative to save him.

Panduv left the chariot. Her driver gawped at her.

Women did not behave in this way. Only the lowest went about here on foot and unescorted. Leopard-black, veil-less, slender and upright, Panduv stalked upon the enclosure, stepped over the rope and trod forbidden ground.

Outrage was immediate, but tended more to ridicule than brutality. In the silence which succeeded the oaths and sneers, Panduv approached the auction block. The men made way, affronted beyond words. The auctioneer was stone.

“Your pardon, master,” said Panduv, head lifted and eyes cast down. “It is the business of my Lord Arud the Priest, the Adorer of Cah.”

Someone yelled, “Yes, we know who keeps this black bitch.”

But the auctioneer, a traveled fellow, aware that times and etiquette might change, prudently murmured, “What then?”

Panduv whispered in turn, “He would buy that fifth man. Keep him for Lord Arud. Money shall be sent inside the hour. Don’t fail. You’ll make a profit.”

The auctioneer drew a long breath. “All right. Now for the sake of Cah, get out, out!”

Panduv, on the first occasion in her years at Iscah, drew up a corner of her gauzy sleeve, and masked her face. She crept away through the crowd of masculine essence, making tiny moans and sighs, to appease it. As she went, she felt the astonished stare of the fifth slave going after her, molten or icy on her spine. She was not sure which.

When they had fed him, they de-loused, scraped and bathed him, washed and trimmed his hair, shaved his face, salved and bound an open wound or two, dressed him in the linen garment of a house-servant, and sent him up the stairs.

In a blue chamber that gave on a terrace, the gorgeous black girl from the market sat in a chair and looked at him.

He presented her with a bow straight from some court of the Middle Lands. He sensed she might care for it and be amused.

“Your kindness, lady,” he said, “is beyond thanks. But you took a risk. Didn’t they warn you, my type absconds, or murders his owners inside two days.”

“The ship was a pirate,” she said. “They caught you somewhere.”

“No, I was legitimately sold to them, bartered, more correctly. By a friend of mine.”

“And before you were a galley slave, what were you then?”

“A free man. And sometime agent of Dorthar. By birth? A Lan, with connections to the royal line there. My name’s Yennef.”

“Yennez,” she said. Then, crisply, throwing off the slur, “Yennef.”

He smiled. His teeth were white. All of him seemed sound and vital. But his eyes were luminous and curiously dreamy, rather as Rehger’s eyes had been. Groomed, he looked more like Rehger than ever. It was bizarre.

“We’re strangers then, lady, in an alien land. Is that why you had compassion for me?”

She did not intend to tell him why. To him it would mean nothing, and for herself, she did not want to chatter of it.

“My lordly master,” she said, “has need of a bodyguard.”

Yennef grinned. “You find me suitable.”

“On reflection, not. It would be better, I think, to manumit you and let you go.”

The grin fell from his face They gazed each other out. It was fine to have before her a man prepared to do this, eye for eye.

“Why?” he said. Then, remembering Iscah, “You paid your lord’s cash for me. What will he say?”

Recklessly she answered, “It’s a feast of Cah. Gifts are exchanged, sometimes they free slaves and prisoners. I’ll tell him this was an offering on his behalf. He’s a priest. It will look pious, and also display that he’s rich.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “He’ll have your silky hide.”

“Oh, no,” she repeated. She said, without pride, “I can usually make him do what I want.”

Yennef considered. He said, “But you still look made of silk.”

She stared back.

“If you need a woman,” she said, “I’ve no objections to your having one of the kitchen girls, before you leave.”

“Those little rounded wobbly stuffed cushions? That will be nice.”

Panduv said, briskly, “I’ve already sent for the clerk. The deed of manumission will need to be written and sealed quickly. At sunset all business stops, for the festival.”

“And you have use of his seal, as of his coffers, this malleable master of yours.”

“The Lord Arud is sometimes away at the temple two or three days together. I regulate his house.”

“And after the clerk, what?”

“You’ll be given provisions and set on your road.”

He said, “I’ve forgotten which road that was.”

Suddenly the attractive nonchalance and swagger went from him. His broad shoulders bowed and he hung his head. For an instant a look of bitterness and frustrated gnawing grief got hold of his face. Then these, too, seemed to drain out of him, as if he no longer had the stamina to effect them. She recalled, he was older than Rehger, almost twice his years, maybe, and had been cooped for six months or more on a Zakorian pirate galley.

“Sit there,” she said, and when he had done so, she brought him wine and served him, as if he were a master of Iscah and she a dutiful woman.

A minute later (they had not spoken any more, except that, un-Iscaian, he thanked her again), the clerk was sent in with his papers and case of ink and wax.

Panduv was sorry. She was more sorry than was comfortable at the swift curtailment of this interlude.

He had lost all track of time, nearly of all things, on the galley. That was normal. To survive, less so. It was Galutiyh the Dortharian who had rendered him to the pirates. Yennef had not been thrown from the trail of Galut and his dross, and of Yennef s son riding with them. Yennef had sensed the false leads in Xarabiss, but not been able to get over the water in proper order to keep up. That was luck proving flighty, as it always had. Then a series of mishaps occurred on the way to Zaddath—which was where he knew, by then, they must be heading. Some of the delays might have been fashioned by Galutiyh—lame mounts, felled trees, obliterated paths. Or not, depending on the dedication of ill-fortune. Then again, maybe it was only bloody Anackire, working out her scheme-dream of the world.

Galutiyh’s men ambushed Yennef in the rough country around Ilva. Galutiyh had his score to settle. There were beatings and other games. In the end, dizzy and carefree from swamp fever, Yennef beheld himself, from some distance up in the air, being traded to black men with smashed faces, whose long low ship flew a tattered doubled-moon and dragon. They were not far from old Hanassor, one gathered from the talk. Free Zakorian reavers. He gave himself over as done for.

He had already, somewhere or other, apologized to Rehger for non-utility. Well, his son would expect nothing of him. His son. In the gut of the stinking black galley, Yennef had visions of Rehger—torn apart on a machine of torture, poling upriver between mountains, in a jungle, a king in a chariot riding to war, standing among white towers of marble.

Finally, Yennef believed that Rehger was dead, and believing it, most of the anguish dimmed. How could you mourn and rage over something to which you had no rights? Besides, it might all have turned out otherwise. Yennef, condemned to die in the pit of the galley, need not trouble.

But nourished on the gangrenous meat and vermin-nous bread-slabs and diseased water, rowing in the boiling ship belly, men perishing around him, endlessly cut by fire—the tongues of whips—expecting always no tomorrow, his fever abated or was amalgamated into him, and Yennef lived. And then came a night of furious rowing, the Zakor seeking to evade a Vardian patrol with a Shansarian captain out of Sh’alis, sea-wise and angry. Chased up the lawless coast almost into Hanassor’s rocky cliffs, the Zakorians discovered themselves trapped between their pursuer and another waiting Vardian. The pirate was rammed.

As she was sinking, blond men came down into the howling hell of the rowers’ deck and broke the shackles.

It transpired Yennef was now the property of Vardians. They knew him for a Lan, but were not overwhelmed by former ties of friendship. They shipped him across to Iscah in the intestines of a merchant vessel, not rowing, simply bolted fast to the planks. From the port, his gang and a couple of others were marched to the capital. They were not worth much, and the mix now in charge of them had no patience. When men died they were tossed off the road into ditches. This was Iscah. And there were plenty of crows.

Gaining the market, Yennef was cheerful. He had gone by most other emotions, save contempt—of self and every other.

He knew of Cah—of course, his past had taught him, a million years before, in a mountain hovel in the snow. And all at once there Cah was, gliding through the slave-auction. Crow-black herself, wand-slim in her gauzes, with a silver wristlet and necklaces of ivory.

And Cah spoke to the auctioneer and Cah brought Yennef to this house on the hill. Cah, quite properly, was the lover of a high priest and would make the man do what she choose. Cah had let Yennef free. In her presence then, the backbone of indifference crumbled.

The Lan was not wholly sane, she saw that now. It was not a rowdy or pernicious madness, gentle, rather. Perhaps it would subside. But the cause seemed deeper, older than the reavers’ ship.

Best, would be to send him out in the early morning, before the sun rose on Cah’s festival. He could bribe the city gate, and Arud’s seal would settle any argument. She could not give Yennef a mount, but with the provided coins doubtless he could come on one. She believed what he had said, about the Lannic royal line. Rehger had had this princely look about him, too. She could have supposed them related, the Lan, the Lydian, but Rehger had been birthed from a witch girl and an itinerant in the jumble of the Iscaian mountains.

The business with the clerk was slowly got through, in Arud’s name. In law no woman could do anything, and the clerk, seen to with a double fee, conducted the affair as if an invisible Arud were at his elbow. When everything was accomplished, Panduv sent the Lan to one of the guest cells that opened on the altar-court. It was a ridiculous excess of hospitality, as buying and freeing him had been. This did not seem important, nor Arud’s reaction to the news, which she could hardly deny him, seeing the legalities were for public record, and meanwhile the entire house was primed.

Arud’s return (tomorrow’s midnight, drunken and slack from the temple mysteries which involved both blood sacrifice and carnal orgy), felt far off, as if to be located in another decade.

She had given instructions to the villa servants concerning the man Yennef’s comfort. At the correct hour, one of the boys should go to rouse him for departure.

Panduv crossed to her apartment, to see Teis put to bed. The sun was a red ball rolled almost all the way down the hill, and by its flushed glow the child lay on her mat giggling, as the nurse told her stories and tickled her. Panduv’s presence was noted by both and dismissed. Panduv stayed only a minute in the room.

She paced the roof terrace until the sun set. A religious stillness had descended on the city so that she heard a night bird begin to sing in a garden at the foot of the hill. The stars were sown. The evening was beautiful. The black woman stood high up in the sky on the priest’s roof, yearning for things forgotten or never known, until the breeze blew cold. She chided herself then, and went in again to the house.

There was a spring star which, a while before midnight, shone in through an upper window.

It woke Panduv, pointing down between her eyes. Or she thought it did.

She was aware immediately of a presence in the chamber, and stiffened, imagining snakes. But then it came to her the intrusion was not physical. Nothing was to be seen, or heard, yet, as if a voice had spoken in her head, she received the phrase: Go offer to Cah.

She was rebellious. Who tells me so?

In that moment she woke in earnest.

The apartment was undisturbed and silent and void, but for the dry chirrup of the cricket which dwelled behind the hearth stone.

Presently Panduv got up and drew on her mantle. She covered herself only with that. Leaving the bedchamber, she walked out into the passage, barefoot—

Starlit air hung from the window-places. At the corridor’s end, a flight of steps led into the altar-court.

On the house altar of Cah, freshly scrubbed and spilled with an aromatic, a dish of oil had been left burning for the festival. The drowsy flickering light showed only the lumpen stone of the goddess, faceless, and breastless, even. Yet it had been awarded a crown of flowers.

In her mind’s eye, Panduv saw herself, a dancer in a garland. She saw the Lydian wreathed after combat’s victory.

Although she was now awake, at least in part, another question welled through her, words she did not even understand. You want your hero’s glory back again? And, like the question not understood, a reply. Only to live.

The court, open to heaven, let starlight, too, in at the doorway of the guest’s cell.

He lay alone, motionless, but awake, she knew. He also had had his training. He could kill empty-handed if he judged her some thief or mischief-meddler.

“Hush,” she whispered, to let him recall her voice.

Then she heard him laugh, very low.

“This time,” he said, “it is Cah, coming through the shadow to me.”

Somnambulist, she kneeled down by him. It was dreamlike. As he reached out to her, her narrow hands slid about his neck.

Their mouths and bodies met recognizing some unnamed landfall, aphrodisiac as Zastis.

It was not only that he was Rehger—Saardsinmey—but that he was for her all regretted things. He had become not merely a young man, but her own youth, the male alter-demon of her flesh.

His hands found out her skin, her breasts, her thighs, as if, sightless, he must learn her by touch alone. When he possessed her, the strength of him was like the heart of fire. Always quiet in love or lust, she knew she must cry out. It would not matter, the house expected him to be with some girl. . . .

As the rhythm of the life-dance bore her up, she did not remember who he was. She did not know his name. She forgot she was Panduv.

Like a coiled flower of the chaplet of the goddess, (black Cah the Anackire-eyed), the pulse of her womb, the bud spreading its chalice, stretching to be filled.

She clung to him and he to her. The crying sang from her and she must smother her delight with her fist for fear it be heard—

The spring of liquid light pierced through her.

The flower-womb cupped and clasped and closed upon it.

Night and silence resettled like a fall of dust. In the silence, they were stilled together, saturated in the warmth of each other, and the starlight ticked across the floor.

“That was a welcome gift you gave me,” he said. “It’s a time of giving.”

When she moved to the mattress’ edge, pulling her mantle once more around her, he said sternly, “Will you be quite safe here? I don’t know what’s in store for me, but if—”

He stopped, and in the space she did not say anything more.

She saw the shine of the stars on his eyes as he watched her go, on his gentle, madman’s eyes. And out in the court, the wick was guttering before the goddess.

Panduv did not look back. She went up the stairs, along the passage, to her couch, and lay down there and slept at once.

About an hour and a half before dawn, fragmentedly, she discerned the noise of the yard gate, and knew that he had been let through, on to his unsure road, into his different future.

She woke again late in the morning, languid, not remembering. Then she thought it a dream, until the evidence of her own body put her wise. The craziness of what she had done thrust her mind forward in a senseless progression. Arud must suspect. He would cast her out into the streets and they would stone her there—such things went on, even in the sophisticated capital. Perhaps she should at once remove herself from the house. Why had she ever remained? How many occasions she had been on the point of an exit from this life. Something had stayed her. The child, maybe, or sentimental fondness for the paunchy priest who, by her wiles, she had so much changed, setting him at liberty also from the mores of masculine Iscah, to her benefit.

And she had grown comfortable. Her roots had gone down into this unsuitable soil. She bloomed here. She would not run away.

How should he know anything? Who had spied? The holy stillness of the night had been nearly uncanny, and in the hour of her excursion to the courtyard, the villa had seemed deserted, or its inhabitants under a spell—

She fell asleep again, and opened her eyes at last to a sound of brazen cymbals. It was the festival procession clashing over the afternoon.

A deep lassitude was on her, but she rose and went through certain bodily contortions now habitual with her after sexual union. For spring, the day had turned hot and heavy. She found her muscles intensely reluctant. She was debilitated, and left off.

There was the other way, to be sure. The herbs she had had the merchants fetch for her, the leaves of the plants she nurtured in her apartment. Their scent was pleasant, all but one. She gave for its excuse the pretty speckling of its leaves.

She brewed the drink in some distaste. The remedy was decided but unkind. There might be sickness, then she would bleed, which would not be to Arud’s liking, for, after the orgies of the temple, oddly, he was often hungry for her.

Well, it served her right. Since she had been so lavish with her greed and was now too lazy, and besides so very nervous. . . . For the Lan was not as young as her priest, therefore probably not as virile. Yet the single embrace—a burning—Best drink the herb. A day or two of malaise and Arud peeved would be a suitable penance and punishment for silliness.

The cup was ready. She held her breath against its smell, the actual look of it. And as she raised the goblet there in the afternoon storm-light—a terrible wailing cut through the sky.

It was a sound dehumanized, supernatural. It seemed to overpour the basin of the atmosphere and bring down the house.

She was in Saardsinmey, inside the pillar-drum, flung every way as heaven fell. The roar of crashing stone and of huge waters, the screaming of a single gargantuan throat.

Panduv spun about and the cup of abortion whirled from her fingers and the exquisite glass shattered on the tiles with the drink like lizard’s blood.

Panduv raced upward through the villa.

Stairs passed under her and walls tumbled down.

On the roof terrace, the sky had indeed unreefed itself, a rent blue-black sail. Peaks of the city were stabbed out in a weird yellowish glare against its dark.

Two female servants collapsed on their noses before her.

The awning flapped with a horrible loudness. The nurse woman began to wail again.

Panduv reached the fish pond and looked into its cloudy eye. There in the pupil lay her child, face down under a spurling ink of hair.

A prophecy fulfilled. A circlet joined. Be rid of the unborn, and the born also you were rid of.

Panduv did not think. She reached into the pool and gripped the form of Teis, which no longer had the texture of anything fleshly, or familiar. Panduv pulled forth this object, and turning it over her knee, squeezed the water out. Then she tossed the child, like the unreal thing it had become, on its back. In the avenue of the child’s throat a fish had lodged. Panduv, like a magician, brought it forth and threw it into the pond. Miraculously, the fish began at once to live and swam swiftly under a pebble.

She was a Daughter of Daigoth’s Courts. She knew many clever tricks. She slammed her child across the breast an appalling blow, hateful, that set the staring women off into hysteria once more. Then Panduv, leaning to her child’s face, kissed her mouth, a hoarsely sighing kiss of love after the blow of hate. (So it appeared to the women, who described it afterward in superstitious awe.) A kiss. And the beaten chest of the little girl lifted.

The child’s lids parted and Teis was there, in the eyes. She crowed and choked and howled, clutching her mother. Panduv held her fast, and the storm cracked like a goblet and water swept over them all.

The harvested plant would not provide sufficient maleficence again for some days. She could then remake the brew, but perhaps too late. She would not bother. Holding her child, Panduv was conscious that she had accepted also the second child, the spark of fire lodged gemlike in the girdle of her belly. The sly goddess of Iscah had outwitted her, and what Cah willed you could not go against. The pregnant mother was sacred to Cah. Then, let it be.

“All this to come home to! You’re nothing but trouble to me, you Zakr wench.”

Arud ranted, quartering the chamber with a prowling plod. After the storm the night was massive and fragrant, limitless and cooled with stars. His litter had arrived two hours after midnight. He was not so sodden as the general rule, but discontented over some minor slight, for the more weighty his spiritual dominance the more he valued himself, and the more he knew himself envied.

His holy robes swung around his thick body, their richness dazzling. On his breast the insignia of the Adorer, a pectoral in which two golden figures revered a disc of jet and topaz, clicked and wriggled with its own irritation. He had about him, all over his smooth surfaces, even in his splendid hair, the tang of incense.

It would have been the clerk who sent a cautious message to Arud, arranged for it to be waiting at the temple porch. The message reviewed the buying and manumission of a galley-slave, in honor of the festival.

Ready for sleep, Arud had awakened. He had come directly to her, this fly-brained Zakr wretch, the curse of his house. He discovered her seated in her chair, polished ebony in a silk mantle, her black mane mantling over it. Her glamour only set him off worse.

She bore the tantrum. She was used to them and had learned the best mode for their duration. Allure, a modest downcasting of eyes and head, hands meek, palms opened and upturned, as if to slake a rain of slaps. In fact he rarely struck her, and then never murderously. Only once, in the mountains, had he been prepared to do that, and not to her.

He would not hit out at her now. He would never guess the truth. She was in the arm of Cah, though he, the priest of Cah, had not yet realized.

He exhausted his invective. Then he bellowed for wine, and she brought it to him, softly as a dove.

“And what do you say, woman? Is it a lie?”

“No, my lord.” (She only called him Arud when he was reasonable, sober, and blithe. She foresaw it would be less and less that she might call him Arud.)

“Not a lie? Then explain yourself.”

Panduv kneeled. She put her hand lightly as a leaf on to his instep. The touch stirred him; his feet, she had long ago found, were sensitive.

“A woman in Iscah may own nothing, my lord. But I have put all my jewelry there, on the table by the lamp. The jewels were your bounty to me, but if you take them back, they’ll repay you the cost of the Lannic slave.”

He gave a growl of scorn.

“You don’t say why, still.”

“An offering to Cah.”

“Freeing a slave is man’s business.”

“It was done in your name, my lord. The city will be jealous of your wealth and impressed by the pious gesture. It’s something you would have done yourself, had you been here—”

“Would I—you Zakr—”

She chanced an interruption. “Because I was desperate, and you’ve always been charitable to me.”

His face thundered down at her. Yet, she had caught his interest. She always could, and perhaps for a handful more years. His desire, his curiosity.

She said, “When you took me in, I vowed I would give you a son. I disappointed in that.”

Abruptly his features relaxed. Teis was a talisman.

“Cah gives as she gives. Teis is female, but I love the child. She brings light into my house.”

“I’ve prayed to the goddess to allow me a son. You know, I’ve been barren.”

Annoying her, as he sometimes did, with inconvenient sharpness, he said, “I thought that was how you preferred it.”

Panduv raised her eyes now.

“I want only your gladness. I want to keep my vow to you.”

Then, gracefully, dancer in all her movements though dancer no longer in the Dance, she rose and leaned on him, gazing into his face. “The man was my offering to Cah, in exchange for fertility.”

Arud peered at her. Fatigue and excitement mingled in him. The drugs of the mysteries, the cavorting pale brown wodges of the temple girls, the memories of the day itself, would always bring him to this leopard-being, this night-woman. He put his hands on her waist, thin, supple as oiled rope, slipped to her flanks, the fierce sheer buttocks, under the wave of hair, silk over silk over silk.

“And do you think she heard you, Panduv?”

She let her own hands rise along his chest. With a sudden bewildered pang she acknowledged the Lan had been nothing to her, that all the past was gone. And that this man who still, with one able smiting of her own she could have killed, this limited and angering man, inflated with self, running to fat, this priest, had grown into her as the seed of the child would grow, “It’s with you,” she said, “if she has.”

As he began to work upon her, with the finesse of the arts she herself had taught him, she thought. Suppose—another girl. But she knew this would not be.

Later, tomorrow, when he was well-rested, she must speak to him about the nurse. The house buzzed with events and it would be difficult to persuade him from slaughter, there. But the old ninny, asleep under the awning as Teis drowned, was too old to turn out and too useful to be beaten to death. They wanted to go back, the newborn and the very young, and plotted and cheated to do it. For they soon detected the world was a harsh country. Until the recollection faded of some better land from which they had come, they must be guarded. Panduv would assume the post. Cah had ensured she must.

Arud was struggling upon her, reining himself that she, too, should be satisfied. Having learnt the manner of it, she arched herself against him and cried out, the two long disembodied cries with which she had answered the Lan before. It was only fair that she should act them out for Arud. He was to father this child, this gift of Cah.

Groaning, he spent the unnecessary worth of his loins, and Panduv held him in her arms.

In the third month, as was customary, Panduv was borne in her litter to the Women’s Court of the fane, to give thanks.

The Mother Temple of the capital was raised on a tall whitewashed platform with a stair of red obsidian. The pillars of the temple were painted carmine and black, and the cornice was gilded. This house of Cah did not reek of offal, only of the sweet gums and alcoholic oblations of the faithful.

The door into the Women’s Court was small and the Court itself not large. Only females of the moneyed class could afford to approach the goddess, the spot was infrequently packed. Panduv gave the prescribed coins to the portress and passed inside.

The Zakorian had come to the Court twice before, treats Arud had donated. The area comprised a bare lidless box of walls and flagged floor, with, at the farther end, a group of citrus trees, the altar standing among them.

Panduv was alone with Cah.

The statue was modern, of a woman, voluptuous but not gross, veiled as fashion preferred by a smoldering gauze. Through the film, her eyes of tawny topaz would sometimes flash like flame. She was black, so black it was not possible to trace her countenance or read her expression.

The black woman confronted the black Cah, and laid on the altar some cakes, baked, in accordance with tradition, by her own hands. Panduv’s baking was indifferent. She had no talent for such chores. But, though she had come to credit Cah, Panduv was not uneasy. Cah had got from Panduv what she wanted. A cake was only a cake.

When she left the Court, bees were gathering in the citrus trees and among the flowers on the wall. Summer was advancing. Pleasingly, the Red Moon of Zastis fell early this year, she could enjoy Arud before she grew too big.

The temple was also busy with its bees. About the offices and sanctuaries the lesser priests were hurrying. Across the platform there came the chant of boys’ voices, gaining mathematics, and beyond, the drubbing of mallets from the mason’s yard. A respect for learning and the arts had begun to invest the capital. A sculptor of the temple school had created the Cah of the Women’s Court. A theater was being built. Only men temple-trained would be licensed to act, as to carve, study the stars, or take positions of temporal authority. But a son of Arud could expect such schooling. For Teis, there were other means, a subterfuge Arud had condoned: His daughter would be granted her letters. But for his son, what might he wish he would not have?

Arud would be High Priest in ten years, or twelve. It was almost sure. Unadmitted to the secret connivance of the temple’s inner clique, yet she had glimpsed its dexterity. The new thinking of Iscah, the very statue in the Women’s Court, these in themselves evinced the nature of change, and of the men behind it.

At home Teis was sitting placidly with the current careful girl. But seeing her mother, the child came gamboling forward.

She put her hand on Panduv’s belly, where she had been told the other child was sleeping.

“How he?”

“He’s well.”

Teis pressed her ear to her mother, to hear if he was yet saying anything. Her own ability with words increased daily. She did not want to be usurped.

The summer climbed its golden stair into a palace of drenching heat and powdered dust. Its descent was jarred by rains. The winter swooped across the sea, white-winged, and snow came down again as the year before on the Iscaian south, a happening scarcely known in previous history.

There were reports of earth tremors north and east. In Dorthar a lightning bolt was said to have sliced the cupola from a temple of Anack—in Anackyra, or perhaps only at Kuma. Farther east yet, a fleet of fifty ships of Shansarian Karmiss had gone down in a tempest, not a man saved. There were scares of plague in Corhl, but the entry of the snow ended such tidings.

Wildest of all, maybe, a tale stole out of Thaddra of a white dragon lurking in the jungle wastes of the west.

It was a bad winter for many, rife with portents and false alarms, cruel with freezing.

But in the villa of Arud, the fires were lit, they dressed in furs, and roasted nuts, and the cricket still chirped in the hearth.

Her pains began in the middle of a winter night. Teis had been dilatory. This one was early.

Panduv had been dreaming. Her children were grown. The girl, in a bright gown, was up on the roof. A parasol of tree stood in a tub beside the pond now, and hanging there in a cage was a chattering bird, which Teis was feeding. She seemed aged about eighteen. Her hair, though woven back in a ceramic band, reached almost to the ground. At its very tips, the shining mass was divided into brief little plaits, twelve of them, each ending in a gleaming golden ring. Panduv deduced that her daughter had married.

Her son was unmistakable.

He was black, as she was, but although he had the beauty of a god to her eyes, it was not like her beauty. Not even, as she considered it in the dream, Rehger’s beauty, quite. But he had the eyes of Rehger the Lydian, and coming up to her smiling and calm, he put into her hands a gift. It was a living leaping breathing burning dancer—of somber wood.

“Tor the Giving Feast,” he said, “Cah’s festival.” Then, without demand or unease, “Do you like it, mother?”

He was happy. It was not in the smile. But in the substance of the inner depth behind his visionary seer’s eyes. He was entire.

She turned the dancer in her hands, amazed, and Teis leaning on her shoulder said, “Mother, that’s you.”

And suddenly her whole body sloughed from her and her soul, yes the soul of her, was dancing the fire dance, with all the nonsense of the body scorched away—But in that second a shriek of pain ran through her core.

He began early and he hurried to the world. In the agony she remembered to call out the appropriate sentence: “Cah aid me!” Cah aided. The head of her son, black as charcoal, pushed into life. Once the torso and the limbs came out, Panduv saw she had birthed a perfect living creature.

Arud when—against the tenets—he entered the room and took the boy, lifted him up and swore.

“Your color, you Zakr woman. But he has my eyes. Look, do you see? My eyes and my race—male, by the goddess.”

Exhausted, Panduv drifted on her pillows. Arud put earrings of gold into her hand, just as, in a dream, some other present had been placed there—but the idea of it had gone from her in the toil of labor.

Then they gave her the baby and she suckled him.

He had the Lydian—the Lan’s—eyes, but it was benign that Arud should mistake them for his own. He would be a generous father. In all but flesh and blood, this would be his son.

She would convince Arud that the child must have an Iscaian name, an old name of the uplands, which in Iscah was mostly given as Raier.

Against her breast, the child slumbered. His face was composed and couth. Within its pliable contours she beheld, clear as moon in cirrus cloud, the serene and sleeping face of a man of sixteen or twenty-five years. But that was still to come.