‘Ephraim says answering a question with a question is a sign of either arrogance or ignorance.’
‘Which in my case?’
Jaer flushed. ‘You could be either, I guess. An ignorant person, or an arrogant one. Unless you’re mythical. In that case, you’re not a person at all.’
The Serpent’s head swayed, joyfully. ‘Could I not be an arrogant mythical person?’
‘I don’t know. Could you?’
‘Let us believe so. A male, arrogant, mythical person. Now, what are you?’
Jaer sat down and crossed his legs to consider the matter. ‘I’m not mythical – I don’t think. Really, I’m not one thing or the other.’
‘On the contrary. You are one thing or the other, but never both at once.’
‘How did you know?’ asked Jaer suspiciously. ‘I’ve never seen you before.’
‘No, but I’ve been here and there, near where you have been. I’ve looked and listened. I’ve smelled your trail. I’ve lain along the tower wall in the sun and listened to the old men jabbering away about you. I know you.’
‘Then why haven’t you let me see you before this? You scared me half to death.’
The Serpent coiled and recoiled. ‘Ephraim and Nathan wouldn’t have been eager to meet me. If you’d been younger, you might have felt you had to tell them about me. The age you are now is an age which can keep secrets.’
‘I’ve never had a secret.’
‘Oh, Jaer. Why, you are a secret. Wouldn’t the village Speaker go into a fit if he knew you were here? What about your mother’s mother? Wouldn’t she like to know? What about your father?’
‘I didn’t have a father.’
‘Oh, come now. You had a father.’
‘I know. I mean, I don’t know who it was, and Ephraim says it doesn’t matter who it was….’
‘Why would the old man say a thing like that?’ The Serpent sounded both amused and curious, so Jaer attempted reprise of an argument he had understood very little of.
‘Well, you see, Ephraim says if you go back a hundred years, I had sixteen ancestors, and half of them were fathers. And if you go back five hundred years, I had two million ancestors, and half of them were fathers. And you go back far enough, and we are all related to everyone, with little pieces of the whole world inside us, so it doesn’t matter exactly which human being begot us or which human being carried us, because we are all out of the womb of earth, fathered by time. Ephraim says.’
Something flickered in the Serpent’s eye, almost like anger, but it went on in a silky voice. ‘Well, that may be true, but it’s still important who your father was. If you don’t know who your father was, how do you know who you are?’ The Serpent caught Jaer’s eyes with his own, and Jaer felt himself floating down into the soft, black wells of those eyes. ‘It matters,’ whispered the Serpent. ‘Who you are …who are you?’
Jaer was dreaming, the place of stone and the tall, black man, a woman dancing to the sound of sticks tapping stone, a mighty, terrible figure carved of wood. The dancing woman had hair like smoke which swirled around her in the firelight. There was an old woman, many old women, smiling and kindly, fading away into a vacant coldness of stone. A woman flying, great wings, not a woman at all, and a dark city horrid with the sound of bells. Then another city. Tharliezalor, he said to himself. At last. How weary the way from Tchent to Tharliezalor.
Then he was flying, and the city below him was not High Silver House, not Tharliezalor, but Orena, glowing rose and amber in the rising sun, with the sound of trumpets rising up into a new day and people crying his name … only it was not his name at all. Jaer floated to the surface of the Serpent’s eyes, hearing the Serpent asking still, ‘Who are you?’
‘Millions of people,’ said Jaer sleepily. ‘Millions and millions of them …’
The Serpent did not seem satisfied with this, but he went on talking as Jaer wakened, talking about the habits of birds and the names of creatures and the uses of certain plants. Much of what the Serpent said seemed to make little sense, but it had a curious fascination to it.
Jaer did not intend to tell the old men about the Serpent. In fact, when he returned to the tower, he felt it would be more fun not to tell anyone. That night as he sat by Ephraim’s bed, however, listening to the old man’s wandering talk, he found himself telling all about it. Ephraim at first looked amused, then puzzled, then slightly fearful. He asked many questions: what the Serpent looked like, how it had sounded. Jaer said nothing about the strange dream he had found in the Serpent’s eyes because he did not remember it.
‘A male, mythical, arrogant person,’ mused Ephraim. ‘Jaer, while it is true, as I have often said, that anything is possible, alive, and enduring in Earthsoul, still if this creature were real – let us accept for the moment that it could be real – then it would also be likely that the Serpent is not your friend.’
‘I guess I knew that,’ confessed Jaer, a little surprised to find that he had, indeed, known that. ‘But it would still be interesting to know who my father was.’
Ephraim puckered his mouth and said nothing. After that, Nathan went with Jaer whenever Jaer went hunting.
CHAPTER NINE
MEDLO
Year 1165
Medlo and Alan had been working for a season with a wagon train which wound its way back and forth from the misty valleys of Jowr and Sorgen through the long pass beside the Palonhodh and thence up or down the Rivers, Nils or Rochagor, with whatever had needed hauling from one place to another. Most recently they had loaded grain in Tachob, in the Rochagam D’Zunabat, and had then come a slow way down the river to wind around the watery
