Authors: Alice Borchardt
Uther, Alex, and Alexia followed Aife silently along an avenue lined with the tall Italian poplars. Uther was trying to pretend awe. He was not having to work hard at it. The setting impressed him in spite of himself.
They reached a set of broad, shallow steps that led to double bronze doors. Aife pushed open one door and entered.
The hall was arranged for dinner, with a table set on a dais at the end of the room and other tables on each side stretching as far as the door. Once it must have been the administrative center of the province and had a roof. It did now, but not the one the Romans gave it. At some time or another in the past hundred years, the basilica must have burned and the upper stories reduced to ruins. It had been reroofed with wood beams and lead plates after the manner of his people, but the symbols were not like any heretofore seen.
Dragons, cats, bull, and boar were present, and serpents. Yea, Gods, the things were everywhere, coiling among the other beasts. And there were representations of human beings, all dying impaled by the bulls’ horns, torn by the boars’ tusks, bitten by serpents, and struggling as the cats inflicted the death bite.
Uther shivered. There was nothing lifelike about these carvings, only a sense of the inescapable tenacity of death; and everywhere, gazing at him from around the ferocious beasts and tormented humans, the serpents’ fixed smiles. He fancied he could smell the reptile reek and then realized he could.
Aife led them the length of the hall, toward a golden camp chair, the kind Roman leaders carried with them in the field. It was held together by a pivot at the center, so that it could be packed flat for transport.
“It is said to have belonged to the great first Caesar himself,” Aife boasted, pointing to the chair.
It was wood, but lavishly trimmed with purple velvet and gold inlay. The chair was raised on a dais at the end of the room under the remains of a dome set with clerestory windows that let in light to brighten the dais where the chair rested, and a pit lay directly in front of it. Uther knew now where the reptile reek was coming from.
They were white, pale, coiling, slowly moving shapes in the gloom of the pit. The dark stone set off the ivory glow of the writhing bodies at the bottom.
A snake pit.
He’d heard of them, of kings who kept them, but never seen one. There was a body in the pit. It looked male, but young. The light from the high windows in the dome illuminated that end of the pit. Uther could see only the head and face. He was seated in the corner, his cheek resting against one of the walls.
But for the corpse pallor, his face was in repose, and he would have seemed to a casual observer to be asleep. Until the observer noticed the gross swelling of arms and legs caused by the bites of venomous serpents. He was bound, hand and foot.
“Yes,” Aife said. “My brother wouldn’t want any of them to hurt his pets.”
Uther drew back.
“Ah, he is dead,” she said, studying the corpse. “Last night he still breathed, so I left him.”
“What did he do?” Uther asked.
Aife laughed, a dry laugh. “He married without my brother’s permission.”
Yes, and Uther knew why he had been made an example of. These lords collected fees whenever their tenants—colony slaves, really—married. He had seen these southern lords sometimes, in order to squeeze every last iota of labor out of their people, make men and women contribute free labor for years, simply to enjoy the privilege of being wed to the one they loved.
“The punishment seems excessive, considering the crime,” Uther said mildly.
“The punishment for crossing my brother is always death,” Aife answered.
“Ah, I see,” Uther said.
“Do you? I think not. To see, you must live with it day by day for seven years, as I have. He made the boy’s wife watch. They say she is mad.”
Yes,
Uther thought.
They would say so, if only to protect the girl.
Aife shouted loudly. Three men ran up and joined them at the edge of the pit.
“Get it out. The hall has to be ready for dinner tonight.”
The white snakes moved in the gloom, a fearful rustling. The men looked frightened.
“Can’t we just leave him there? After a while, the rats come and they . . .”
“No! My lord’s friends will begin to arrive soon. They might be disgusted by the sight. Certainly, their women will be!”
Alexia laughed. “Have you a rope and a hook?” She gestured toward the man in the pit. “He’s wearing a belt.”
Yes,
Uther thought. The pit was shallow, no more than five feet. A tumbler could do it easily. The air and stone around were cold, the serpents torpid.
“How does he find so many white ones?” Alex asked.
“By offering a five-gold-piece bounty for each one delivered to him alive and unharmed,” Aife said. “Not all of them are vipers, but there are more than enough that are. There are snake tubes in the walls. They shelter in them when it gets really cold. No one knows how the rats get in. And the flies—maggots—play some role in the disposal process. Well, they fly.”
Yes,
Uther thought. Not all the white things were snakes. Some were bones, and a pair of reflective beady eyes peered out of the gloom.
What an end,
he thought.
Bitten by vipers, gnawed by rats, food for maggots.
Someone had returned with the rope and hook. They were no longer dependent on the feeble light of the windows. Another servant carried a lamp.
The lamp was let carefully down into the pit. The rats vanished, and the pale snakes moved to the edges of the pit.
Alexia, laughing, hurried away toward the door. She came running, reached the edge of the pit, dropped and back-flipped into it, landing at the feet of the corpse, facing the body. In a second she had tucked the hook under his leather belt.
Almost too late, Uther saw the slim, white shape of the serpent where it had been shadowed by the corpse’s leg. Uther’s mind caught the fleeting image of its swift, smooth strike at Alexia’s ankle. Alex was faster than the reptile. He landed on top of it, foot pinning its head. He cupped his hand for Alexia. She leaped into it and, from there, to his shoulder and out. As she turned, Uther threw his arm around her body, steadying her while Alex caught her outstretched hand and pulled himself out of the pit.
The snake, unharmed, writhed, then struck at nothing.
By now they had acquired a gallery of interested spectators, and the three of them, Uther, Alex, and Alexia, were showered by a tumult of applause.
“I can see I missed something. What?” The voice belonged to Severius. He entered by way of a small door near the raised dais. He had a woman on his arm and a torchbearer beside him. But Uther knew no one was looking at him or attending to him at all. Every eye was fixed on the woman beside him.
She was simply the most beautiful woman they, any of them, had ever seen. She was wearing a many-layered dress of white, sheer Coan silk over a heavy, silk shift. The dress and shift were lavishly decorated with gold embroidery. Her jewels were purple amethysts set in a gold collar at her neck, a half dozen strands of pearls below the collar. Armlets, bracelets, and a diadem on hair the color of a midnight sky, and set off skin that glowed with the rich tints of cream and rose.
The face was that of a dreaming angel. The face, though. That face was very familiar.
Who?
Uther thought.
Who?
Then recognition followed, brutal and shocking as a kick in the stomach.
Igrane!
When she rose from the pool and found him, Black Leg seemed to be sleeping. He was, she thought, as beautiful as a young god, lying on his side among the grass and flowers.
But she became alarmed when he wouldn’t readily awaken. She tried one or two things she knew that worked, worked even with the dead. But her fear grew when she found nothing would penetrate the shields around his dreaming mind.
She lifted her head and studied the garden, and knew that somehow he had penetrated the knowledge she and so many of her kind had tried to learn for so many long years in the past. She felt a stab of envy, followed quickly by an even greater anxiety than she had ever felt before.
She lifted his upper body and cradled his head against her breast. He was animal and man combined, a touch of ancient beauty left to a world that had lost most of it. And from an incredibly long ago time, they were reaching out for him.
We learn more than one way. The flower of the intellect is overvalued by mankind and even by demon-kind, because that was what she was. But there are other ways to learn, and they are mysterious, frightening at times, but perhaps far, far more important than what we do with our intellect.
He and his father learned to do some things quickly and fearsomely well. As a warrior, even she was aware of Maeniel’s reputation for agility and skill. Humans and even such as she sacrifice speed and more than a little skill to get the formidable self-conscious intelligence that characterizes humanity. But chance and perhaps divine intervention had combined both in him. And the lost genus of the first of earth’s great civilizations had required just that doubling of mind power. In him, the instructions that formed the garden on his lost world had found their chosen prey. And she surmised that even now he was reading his primer, an introduction to knowledge so vast that down through endless ages, it still dominated the earth.
Nothing is without cost, and she knew he could and must pay some dreadful price for his achievement; and the first installments would be in innocence lost and in sorrow for the world of peace and beauty he left behind him. So she cradled him in her arms as he, like a child hidden in the womb, absorbed the garden’s manifold beauties, and his ears and deepest mind listened to the songs of life, a beauty ever ancient, ever new.
She felt the turning of the planet through the stone where she sat, the wheeling stars that pass down the constricted tunnel of time. Suns exploded, galaxies coalesced like sea foam, spinning in tide pools. The detritus of the dying stars spoke in the blackness between worlds of life’s complex logic, expressed in the long chains of molecules that energize the shapes of living things.
The garden around them took up the theme, and in light, color, form, and a veritable symphony of sound, poured the beauties of this complex matrix into her ears and his mind. Night and day, sunrise and sunset, a roving rainbow of burning beauty, forever dying, forever renewed, for when the last sunset of the last day on the last planet of the last star is done, the vast energies of eternity would draw all that is or was possible back to begin again.
The sun passed its zenith and began to light only the high ledges of the canyon wall. The birds came flowing down the river in the twilight, a ribbon of shadow. She clutched him more tightly and prepared to slide into the river and call the Weyvern for both of them, because within the reach of the deep pool, she had fed on the spiral waterweed, on fish roe offered by her hosts, the jeweled fish hiding among the reeds. She was very strong, thanks to his contribution to her skills.
But the birds were no match for the burgeoning garden. She could feel their fear as the paean of song rose from the glowing flowers, catching the last shadowed dusk. And the flock floated by into the shadowed canyons beyond.
At length, the moon rose, a huge, glowing sentinel that drove away starlight and silvered water, trees, grass, and leaves, enhancing texture but drowning all but the most vivid violets, pinks, and purples with its light. She was still cradling him, drowsing in the moon glow, when he opened his eyes.
Her arms tightened. “My love,” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve been somewhere. It’s not enough. I’m not enough. I love you, I do. Time curves away from us, but in the end, I think you are the one.”
“Yes,” she answered, and kissed him. They dissolved into each other. Both were water. And they fell into the river like dense fog or rain, troubling the surface not at all.
He drifted down and the glowing jewel-like fish studied him with quiet eyes set high in their skull plates. He understood how old those fish were, and his mind turned from a yawning gulf, a chasm of such vast proportions that his mind couldn’t grasp it except as those first seas of earth. His brain sought sleep, antidote to madness. His mind slept as his body made the transition and he woke.
He lay beside her on a beach. The sand was snow-white, a white so pure it picked up the color of the sun rising out of a calm sea into a clear sky. The water was still; the waves eddied up the beach, not foaming, only spreading, glowing with the molten colors of the new sun. And when they reached their fullest spread, they sank, their glow vanishing into the sand.
“No. I don’t want this,” he said. “I never wanted this. I never imagined anything like this.”
“Love me,” she told him, resting one finger on his lips. “Love me and forget all the rest.”
And her flesh was hot at the breast tips and groin, cool at the neck and belly, smooth as velvet, silk velvet. His body joined hers, hot at the groin, and she cradled him between her thighs, legs gripping his hips. Drawing him up, gliding like a sea foam that tops a breaking wave, and then plunging him down, down, down, into darkness where even in sleep knowledge—too much knowledge—was torment.
He woke in her bed, himself again, but knowing that from now on he would be intolerably burdened. The walls of the room were bare white and still, somehow calming. The only thing between him and the sky was a grating. Or was it a grating? Perhaps it was a plant, a very slow-growing plant with very hard, fernlike leaves and shining brown, braided stems.
He thought on her flowers and surmised she probably had tamed some exotic thing and used it to roof her bedroom, because the domed, marble ceiling was broken, the edges of the break smoothed by whole centuries of rain.
The bed had sheets over the tick and was flush with the floor. A rose vine clinging to the edges of the broken roof by long, pale roots with green tips dropped its petals on the bed and white marble floor, and the sheets. . . . Or were they sheets, because they moved out of the way of their own volition when he rose and walked toward the doorway.