Hunting the White Witch

by Tanith Lee

  She kept her head, as I had trusted she would, and clasped her arms about me.

  To ride the terraces below the walls of the Heavenly City is frequently done, but sedately and with care, for as each ledge gives way to another, step-fashion, there will come here and there a drop into space, with the Palm Quarter some hundred feet below. Directly at the lip of the temple terrace, where one of these same drops occurred, I now drove the horse. It plunged and tried to veer, but I cut it around the neck, and with a scream of terror and a pottery clatter of sparks and stones kicked off beneath its hooves, it sprang out from the hill into the enormous void of air.

  For a woman who could sound like a man, she now gave a little squeak, like a mouse.

  “Hold me, and keep faith,” I cried back to her. Her arms never loosened.

  The horse pranced screaming beneath us, striking the sky with its feet while the stars wheeled. I seized with my will on its brain, open on the nude chaos of its fear, and welded it to obedience and silence, while I held us, all three, aloft, effortless, as I had held the wine-jar in the court to make the kitchen girls stare. Shivering to the roots of its extended limbs, as I gripped its flanks with my thighs and its brain with mine, the horse rested motionless, on nothing.

  There had been some roaring on the terrace behind us, but now a huge gag had stopped their mouths.

  The jewel windows lay below, tiny as beads. The horse’s mane stirred in the breeze of night, still tractable to every law of the weather and the world but one.

  I was young, and I was a god. The Power in me was like a golden shaft.

  “Do you yet live?” I said to her.

  I felt the movement of her head against my shoulder blade as she nodded, unable to say a word.

  I tapped the horse lightly, sorry I had had to beat it. With a vast flying bound it stretched itself, and again, and rode over the indigo air as if it were a summer pasture.

  * * *

  That ride, brief as it was, shot straight from a myth. There were stories after, in the city, of the sighting of a falling star, a comet. In the folklore of Bar-Ibithni I think there may have grown the legend of a prince and a princess, borne over heaven on a winged horse. I cannot tell if any truly watched that flight beyond the crowd below the Emperor’s walls, who had their motives to forget.

  Quickly and coolly I began to reason. I shunned the idea of such an arrival in the Citadel, I am not sure why. Too much furor perhaps, on top of the other; or possibly I considered how she might feel, dropped from the clouds into the lap of her son. She clung to me tight, with some cause. She did not cry out again, or entreat me. She felt what I could do, and had surrendered herself to me, this much I knew. Her surrender was very sweet in the moment of my triumph, the renewal of my godship.

  I brought the horse down, drifting soft as a lady’s scarf, in the open country just outside the Palm Quarter, near where the vineyards start.

  There was an aroma of magic everywhere, or so it seemed. The night, the velvet groves, the outline of the old palisade and the glimmering of lights beyond. I let the horse stand for a minute in the long, dark-scented grass, and it put down its head and cropped there, as if we had come from market.

  I said to her, mundane as the horse, “Someone betrayed you to them, Malmiranet. Someone who had observed I was with you, and who knew your mind well enough to guess your action at the temple.”

  She said, in a husky fierce voice, blaming me, “Sky-flights, and he speaks of betrayal. I shall lose my wits. Oh, you are right, I shall die of it.”

  She let go of me, and slipped down from the horse and walked away a step. I supposed her crying for a second, before I heard it was laughter. I dismounted and dropped the reins over the horse’s head; it was in no mood for running off. I went to Malmiranet and drew her to me and kissed her.

  I had been crazy indeed to mistake another for her on the stair, however momentarily. She did not taste of wine or scent, but of the smoky pulsing of the night itself. There was no mouth like hers, and no perfume, and her body shaped itself to mine.

  She waited only a heartbeat before she put her arms about me, and held me strongly as she had held me in the sky. Then at length she pushed me gently back, and looked at me, and smiled.

  “They told you the koois gets better with aging, did they?”

  “Sorem is to be king in the Crimson Palace,” I said to her. “I will make him Emperor. How will you reward me?”

  “So little,” she said, “for so much. I am too old for you, my magician.” But she went on smiling, not melting but dangerous as high-banked flame. Now she kissed me, holding me by the hair, and the fastening of her boy’s shirt came undone so willingly that I think she had been there before me to help me on my road.

  It was the horse which roused us, snorting and pawing at the ground.

  I turned, and saw how the western sky was red at its bottom as if the sunset had begun again. I smelled burning, and a low far thunder came abruptly on the wind.

  “Fire!” she exclaimed. “It looks to be the docks. What can have caused it?”

  A cold snake, running on my skull, made me answer, “Bit-Hessee.”

  3

  The horse galloped, not through air, but on the hard flagged paving of the Palm Quarter. Crowds scattered before our headlong progress. The bright streets were more full than usual, rippling with an insidious alarm, and the balconied towers bristled with leaning figures, peering northwest toward the scarlet bonfire of the burning docks.

  They did not know what had broken loose; they thought it only conflagration, accident. Those with money in ships grew pale and wrung their hands, and ordered their slaves to run that way and get news. There was, too, an uneasy, superstitious, ridiculous thing, the Masrian embarrassment at these blasphemous uncovered flames.

  The horse hurtled down the thoroughfares. Bells were mourning on the west wind now, and a taste of ashes. In my mouth also. I was afraid, as if Old Hessek sucked my soul from me. This, coming when I had not been ready, after all my readiness when I waited and they did nothing.

  We clattered up the track of Pillar Hill, and the Fox Gate was drawn back for us without a challenge. The vast inner yard of the Citadel was massed with jerdiers and horses, and the red-hot iron flare of caged torches. The men made little sound, but the clamor of bells was louder here, and a distant roar, of fire or voices.

  One of Bailgar’s Shield captains came running over and led us through and up into the Ax Court.

  Sorem was in the pillared walk, flanked by his fellow jerdats, Dushum, Denades, and the rock-faced Ustorth, and an ever-moving crowd of rank and file was coming and going about them.

  Yashlom appeared, and politely aided Malmiranet to dismount, while I heard her demanding if her girls were safe. He said they were. Then Sorem came up and took her by the arms and thanked his god that she was unharmed.

  “We met Basnurmon on the way,” she said.

  “By Masrimas, I thought it was more than horses delayed you.”

  “The sorcerer took care of it,” she said. “Shall I tell you the wonder now, or save it? You seem busy, my handsome beloved. What goes on here?”

  “Sit in on the council and learn, Mother. Vazkor”—he gripped my hand—“you have all my gratitude, but it must wait. You saw the fire?”

  “The whole city sees it,” I answered. I felt leaden, devoid of energy, which the activity about made worse. With an effort, I drew myself together and added, “I conclude that Bit-Hessee counts me an enemy, despite my playacting. They moved without sending word.”

  “Oh, they sent you word,” he said grimly, “had you been here to receive it.”

  “A Hessek messenger, and your men let him go before I returned?”

  “Not quite.”

  He called a young jerdier over, who had been loitering by the target-fence. The boy looked nervous and gnawed his mouth; when Sorem tol
d him to speak to me he blurted out, “I was on lookout, sir, on the left tower of the Gate. It was just getting dusk, but I saw them come up. They looked like lardy beggars, sir, but after the orders about Hesseks—I calls down, in a friendly way, do they want anything? But they runs off. Still, they’ve left a basket under the wall. I sends one of my mates for it; he brings it in and we open it. Oh, God, sir, I’ve seen some things in my time, but that—”

  The sentry was a Shield, and Bailgar had come up behind him and taken him by the arm.

  “Don’t make a drama of it. It was a head, Vazkor. A child’s head, and the teeth had been torn out.”

  “Torn out,” the sentry repeated, as if appealing to me against the injustice of his having had to discover such an item.

  My gorge came up in my throat. I swallowed and said, “Yes, I think I can imagine which child it would be.”

  “Once the rest is settled,” Bailgar said quietly, “someone should avail himself of the opportunity and burn that stinkhole out.”

  I took a short walk along the colonnade, beyond the torches. My head was ringing as it had in the fetid tomb that night in Bit-Hessee. The child who chewed me with his yellow teeth. His toothless head, their gift. Yet if they had accepted me as theirs again, why not wait till I acknowledged their sacrifice? Unless—unless I had acknowledged it.

  The Power, again. The Power. I had used it, great power, enough to ignite my darkness, and theirs. For the white witch had trained them in her ways; now they could read me, feed from me, as she had. That psychic firework of the flying horse had been my beacon to them; sensing it, they took it for my intentional command, and they had risen, making me their Shaythun-Kem, eating my strength, their hunger tapping my brain and my life.

  It must stop. Now, before they destroyed me, for I was not theirs to devour alive. Neither hers, Uastis’, however much she might wish it. I, who walked on water, who stilled the hurricane, who rode the sky, surely I was master of myself, and of these shlevakin.

  I must have cried out, for, when I turned, they were staring at me—disconcerted, anxious, and bemused. The man I believed a friend, his eyes blanked over by his shocked unknowing of me, and this woman I had come to want beyond all other women, averting her head with angry pride, not to let me see she was afraid of me.

  But I was done with bellowing like an ox above the slaughter-pit, and done with leaning on a pillar.

  I went back to them.

  “What is it?” Sorem asked.

  “It’s done,” I said.

  A man burst into the court, shouting for Sorem.

  “Jerdat, the port’s alight, and the grainhouses along the commercial side. Twenty ships are burned, and a mob is on the Amber Road; Hesseks, my lord, for sure, upward of three thousand, and others farther west, so the watch says.”

  They erupted from the marsh like a festering wound, a pack of wild dogs rather than rats. The port guards who saw them coming took to their heels. It was like a tide of mud running into Bar-Ibithni, the overbrimming of the swamp, and the surface alive with poison. A band of twenty men—police from the dock who tried to hold Fish Street, an alley that led east toward the Bay—were slain in moments by a black spray of darts and stone slivers. The tide had its unlawful knives, too, homemade, primitive instruments of sharpened flint, not even bound. At each thrust they cut their own hands to the bone, but did not hesitate. Anything that came in their way they slew, man or woman, child or beast, and what they slew they trampled over. They were of one mind, one heart. They made no sound as yet; it was their victims and those who fled them who filled the air with their hubbub.

  Inside a quarter of an hour sheer terror was communicating itself along the arteries of the New City. Amid the tolling of warning bells, lighted by the red horizon, the rich merchant section rushed from its fastnesses. Winged Horse Gate became a point of exodus, through the inner wall of Hragon to the supposed greater safety of the Palm Quarter. The scanty guard there, some thirty or forty jerdiers, thrown into confusion and without orders, tried to bottle up the stream of shrieking citizens in the Commercial City, holding the gate against them as if they, rather than Bit-Hessee, were in revolt. Though not till a great bolt of flaring thunder shot up the sky—the storehouse of whale-oil in the Fish Market set ablaze and its vats exploding—did the jerdiers jam home the alcum doors of the gate and shoot the valves. This act of idiot and compassionless bureaucracy led, inevitably, to a worse panic.

  The merchants and their households, whores in their tinsel, mixes and Masrians alike, fell on each other in an effort to get free, not only now of the Market of the World and Amber Road, in which the closing of the gates had shut them, but of the crushing press that had accumulated against Hragon’s Wall. Men attempted to scale the wall itself, toppling back on those below.

  All this while, sparks spread the conflagration behind the crowd to the gaudy brothels and inns that scattered the fringes of the Market, and all this while, too, the Hesseks poured nearer.

  There were almost four thousand on the Amber Road, three thousand more had split away to enter Bar-Ibithni to the south. Some went in their papyrus boats to beach among the gardens at the foot of the Palm Quarter, as yet undetected. Despite these apparent maneuvers, they had no actual plan of advance; the distribution of their forces was so far random, and the more appalling for its randomness. They struck where and how the urge moved them, men and women, young and old alike, flooding the Masrian streets, firing them as they fancied.

  Tidings reached the Crimson Palace late. Invulnerable behind those high black and purple walls, brooding on smaller plots, its jerds indifferent to action, sluggish, unprepared. The Emperor, too, was slow to rouse. I would never have dared to hope he would show himself to his people in so poor a shape. He did not accept the tale of a Bit-Hessian uprising. When they showed him the glowing sky, drew his attention to the pealing of bells, the Heavenly City on its eminence seemed removed from these matters. He stirred himself at last, and sent out one of his jerds, a mere thousand men. He also sent for his scribe and penned a brief letter to Sorem. It read, succinctly, as follows: Jerdat, we have been woken by a riot in our city, and is the Citadel yet asleep?

  Sorem was already like a madman in his rage to muster the garrison jerds, and ride down to the aid of the commercial area. We had held our last brief council, one extra there, Malmiranet, who listened to it all and judged it as a man would have done. Currently, she—along with Ustorth, Bailgar, and the rest—exhorted him to wait. Seeing the Emperor’s letter, she tore the parchment across and said, “Now he remembers he has a son here who is a commander of men. It has taken this for him to remember.” When Sorem cried that while he held his hand, the shipping in the port was burning, after our cold counseling, it took her passion to say, “Let it burn. They’ve let you burn these twenty years.”

  We had posted scouts along the various thoroughfares; these rode in at intervals to bring information. Not till we knew for sure the strength of Hessek, nor where it ultimately proposed to throw that strength, could we confidently move. To dash out like heroes and lose everything was not in my plan. Bit-Hessee would die tonight, with no errors made. If Sorem wanted kingship from it, he must rein his soul and wait.

  Observing him, anguished and white-lipped there, I thought, honor and friendship aside, though I might near enough call him my brother, yet he was a fool. She had the right of it, she had the ambition for him that he had not, and was more the prince than he. Malmiranet had kept on her man’s gear, her black mane loose on her shoulders, and stood on the north wall of the garrison, red-lit by the angry sky, one arm about the bronze girl Isep, who seemed moved as she was, leaning forward with bright cruel eyes and lips parted into the smoky wind. Nasmet, the pleasure-lover, scared and exhilarated at once, drank from a wine cup, pouring libations to obscure sprites, and weeping.

  We got word shortly that the fire, at least, had been constrained in the dock. The Hesseks h
eld to nothing they took, but came on and left the way open behind them. Fugitives had formed a water-gang along the bay, bucket-passing from the ocean to quench the flames, and had done some good. During this time, I had waited moment by moment for a cry that the Hessek slaves of the Palm Quarter had risen. That cry was late in coming, but very loud.

  The Emperor’s stingy battle offering, the one jerd he had dispatched, was clattering down toward Hragon’s Wall and the Commercial City, and making slow progress, for the crowds in the Palm Quarter, thoroughly alarmed by now, impeded it. This jerd of the Crimson was arrogant, reckoning itself sufficient to quell the riot, and not fully aware of the numbers with which it must deal. Its way led across the Fountain Garden, one of the large parks that greened the Masrian sector of the city. The jerd was about a third the distance across the tree-lined avenue that bisected the garden when the lanterned groves on either side burst alive with figures.

  A huge party of Hessek slaves, got free of their masters in the confusion or else sent out voluntarily for news, had congregated here to intercept the passage of the Imperial Guard. Probably they had expected more soldiers. No one had numbered the slaves. They were in rags or the futile pretty clothes their owners hung on them, but they had snatched up kitchen knives, stones, or concealed barbaric weapons they themselves had constructed, knowing this night was imminent.

  A thousand men in full armor, equipped with swords and bows and mounted on pure-bred Masrian horses, caught lazy, dreaming, and stupid by wild animals who fought with teeth and claws when other tools were gone and seemed possessed by devils. Those soldiers who escaped told stories of the bellies of screaming horses ripped open by bare hands, of girls of twelve years or less with blood-red hair pulling down shrieking jerdiers, and covering them as bees cover spilled syrup. Those who witnessed the evidence later, what remained there in Fountain Garden, coined a fresh name for the avenue: the Beasts’ Run.