Hunting the White Witch

by Tanith Lee

  I worked right through the morning and the noon, not pausing to meditate. I understood very well that this was not the end, but had no notion what the end might be. A strained normalcy was struggling to repossess the city. The rain of flies had fallen everywhere, from here south and east, and to the western dock, not a street or a house had been missed, but only here, about the Temple, was there such a harvest of death.

  A few had noted the potency of incense, and by early afternoon there was hardly a byway that did not have a brazier set out, smoking up heady blueness from its grille. The faces in the windows were wooden with fear, and on some was a rigor of grief held in.

  It was Shaythun who had sent the flies, this they all believed, even those who could not give the name of the ungod of Old Hessek Bit-Hessee. Shaythun, Lord of Flies, Shepherd of Swarms.

  Long before sunset the sky was darkening, the sun a smear of bloody heat through the incense smoke. Men climbed about their sloping roofs, sealing cracks and chimney outlets. Often they gazed westward for another swarm.

  Bailgar had taken charge of the Citadel, mounting a watch on the high places, the towers and parapets of the city.

  I had got down as far as Winged Horse Gate. There were fewer casualties that side of the wall, though a deal of panic and ghastliness. I went through and washed myself at the public basins in the Market of the World. One of the unicorn beasts of the black men, attacked by the flies, had run bellowing, smashing the booths and pavilions, till some artery burst and it slumped against the wall of the basins. Two black men stood beside its body, periodically ululating and trying to force the beast, which was quite dead, to rise.

  A sense of purposelessness had come on me again, my services dispersed to their limit among the people, and forgotten. Priests were moving about, as I had seen them do in the aftermath of the fire that day after Hessek’s rising. Lamps were already burning, for it had become so dark from the smoke and the abnormal overcast. The sky had become a thick lens interposed between Bar-Ibithni and the light. With an awareness of irony, I turned my steps toward the Grove of the Hundred Magnolias.

  On the street, three jerdiers in the livery of the Citadel rode up to me.

  “Vazkor—is it the Lord Vazkor?”

  It appeared they were not familiar with Sorem’s accusation of treason against me and my subsequent confinement, from which I had so incidental and peculiar an escape; they wanted only to escort me to the Palace. I related some yarn of having a woman whose safety I must make sure of on this side of Hragon’s Wall, and asked them how Sorem did. The young captain slapped his thigh—that suspect gesture of Orek’s, which I recalled as if in a dream where past and present mingled like sands.

  “Sorem Hragon-Dat is well. The horse merely stunned him, but the priests carried him to the Temple. The Empress Mother is also secure. We shall have to make the coronation another day.” He smiled at me, charming as a girl, and said, “I remember how you slew the Hesseks, that wild night, like the god himself.”

  I thanked him. Soon, getting no more from me, they cantered away into the misty, blood-orange dusk.

  * * *

  I had no wish to return to Temple or Palace, to watch Sorem struggle with new gratitude, his raw emotion, yet another pardon. Nor to my woman, though in truth, a portion of me would have been glad enough to seek her arms, what comfort her love and her body could give us both, before the final stroke of the sword.

  But there was no logic to it. It would be fruitlessly dreadful to see these grapplings after hope, after life itself, and I partaking of them, when life and hope were done.

  I lay down beneath a flowerless tree in the Grove. No stars shone between its branches in that occult sky.

  A little after the midnight bell—I had been surprised to hear it ring, this formality and order between the double brinks of chaos—a voice started up not far from me, and went on and did not cease.

  I went to look. It was like my omen, and I must seek it.

  A man lay in the bushes. He was a thief, out slitting purses even on such a night, and had been counting his gains there. Now he lay on his side, hugging himself in his soiled coat and staring up at me. He shook all over, and he whined, “I’m cold, Fenshen. Fenshen, run to the widow and get some coals. See, I’m cold and I’m sick, Fenshen. I’ve a pain in my belly like a worm ate me.”

  As if a bright lamp shone on a word in a book, I grasped the fact.

  He shivered, and doubled up his body, and called me Fenshen once more.

  “The flies didn’t hurt me, Fenshen,” he said. “I hid in the cellar of the widow’s house, and I brushed them off when they fastened on my arms. But she screamed, the silly bitch, and they went in her throat.” Then he laughed and cried and clutched his abdomen, smiling horribly with the pain.

  He was the first victim I saw of the plague that the flies had brought to Bar-Ibithni.

  3

  The plague came to be called Yellow Mantle. Men must name everything, as if, by giving a name, they will decrease the nameless horror they experience. Though it was an accurate title enough. Those who contracted the plague passed swiftly through a stage of lassitude and weakness into delirious fever, accompanied by a purging of blood from the bowels. This was the turning point, for here the purging would either unaccountably stop, the fever cool and the patient gradually recover, or else the hemorrhage would worsen, the entire structure of the inner organs apparently poisoned and breaking down, until death ensued. By this time the body was so drained of blood that the skin of the corpse—in most cases a brown-fleshed Masrian—had altered to a pallid, overtly disgusting yellow. There was no doubt on seeing those corpses piled up on the sweepers’ carts that they had perished of some vile pestilence for which no cure was known.

  Yellow Mantle came in the night, sudden as only a supernatural curse could be. There was hardly any period while the plague hatched in the bodies of the most susceptible victims. Those who fell sick after, their constitutions being more vital, had simply held illness at bay a fraction longer.

  I speak from an intimate knowledge of the disease. I saw all its stages and almost all its variations. I watched the thief die in the Magnolia Grove. He went quickly, before sunrise. I could do nothing to ease him, and indeed had not tried. I knew this for the last stroke of the sword. I think it gave me a strange fortitude to understand that.

  By morning, three hundred lay sick of the plague. By noon, three thousand, and there were hundreds already cold.

  At first, not properly realizing what had come among them, relatives were attempting to bury their dead in stone grave-chambers, furnished with priestly rites. Soon, vast pits were being dug in the commercial parks, and presently in the open lands eastward of the Palm Quarter. Being a Masrian city, it was two days before an edict was condoned to burn the corpses on open bonfires. By then, the pestilence had spread across every quarter and district of Bar-Ibithni. It was indiscriminate in its choice, sparing sometimes the old, the crippled, killing the young men, brides newly wed, women big with child. While of the children themselves, scarcely one in five hundred escaped.

  For myself, I knew I should end with the rest. Each process of suffering I observed in another, I accepted would shortly come to me. I, too, was young and strong, I had survived the venom of a snake, my wounds had healed without a scar, but this I should not survive. The white woman, she I had sought, she I had vowed to slay, had sent to slay me instead. Of all this doomed metropolis I, more than any other, could expect no redemption.

  After the thief had died, going down into the smoky, predawn twilight, which had about it already the miasmic half-dark of a plague pit, I encountered a small procession from the poorer area: a group of families who had ventured out, carrying their sick ones on makeshift biers. Their faces were all equally haunted by rabid fright, but they jabbered to each other softly, trying to deny their own prescience. As I was coming up with them, a girl of about twenty,
who was walking at the back with a boy child holding to her skirt, abruptly fell down on the ground. The nearer members of the procession sprang about, the women making religious gestures. None went to the girl, and the little boy, tugging at her, erupted into tears.

  I went and kneeled down by her, putting my hand on the child’s head in an attempt to reassure him. Obviously the girl was in the primary grip of the plague.

  One of the women said, “It’s a fever, sir. Several have got it. We are going to the Water Temple on Amber Road. The priests are clever healers.” The girl muttered and stirred and opened her eyes. There was a glaze over them and she was bathed in sweat, but she seemed to glimpse the child, her brother or her son, and stretched out her hand unsteadily.

  “Don’t cry,” she said. Then she saw me, the blurred face of a stranger bending near, and she said, “I’m well enough, sir. I will get up now.” Plainly she could not, so I raised her in my arms and began to carry her after the others. The child had forgotten to weep; he was only about three or four years of age. The older woman took his hand uneasily, and hurried back into the shelter of the group.

  Before we had got very far, the girl had begun the bone-rattling shivering that the fever brought, but she was still lucid, and entreated me to put her down. Because of her distress, I laid her on the paving. There in the street she lay for two hours in a pool of matter and blood. She grasped my hand in her agony, and coming to herself again, asked me what hour it was, and died before I could tell her. She had gone more quietly even than the thief in the Grove.

  It was very hot, the smoke-laden sky the scorched color of blue cinders, without bird or cloud; a smoldering glare of sun. I did not know what possessed me, unless it was some spirit of guilty contrition. I felt no terror or rage at that point; these had been set by for me. I went on the way the procession had taken with its biers, and arrived presently at the Water Temple.

  It was a small building of stucco and red-painted plaster, a Masrimas of green bronze inside, and a magic well, reckoned to be healing. Within the courtyard and the precinct the sick were already packed in rows. They were burning fresh incense here to alleviate the stench—in vain—but one grew accustomed to the nauseous odor after a while, and scarcely noticed it.

  I offered my service to the priests, who plainly considered me mad but were yet thankful to find one madman at least who would help. At my stained and draggled finery, they glanced in curiosity, but had no leisure for questions. We fell to our grisly, hopeless tasks. There was no shortage of labor.

  I had concluded it was expiation I tried to work out there, and maybe something less grandiose, as if by confronting disaster, I could inure myself to what would come. Truly, I was not inured. My numb state was torn bit by bit into compassion and horror. What I beheld made what I did there the antithesis of my spirit and my humanity. Once I had to go off to vomit, and imagined the plague already in me, foreseeing each paroxysm and calamity I would undergo in the vivid details of which I had by this time watched a hundred enactments. But it was not the plague, not then. Then even my revulsion passed, even my cringing apprehension, so I grew numbed again, as at the beginning.

  * * *

  A day melted into a night, a night into a day. Somewhere I slept, somewhere drank water, somewhere refused the platter of food a priest brought me. These were interludes. The rest was death, and the ever-changing face of death, now a child’s, now a woman’s. A goldsmith, a rich man brought in from the street, who had a fine house in the upper commercial district and mixie servants, took almost the two days to die. In the middle of his seizures, he recognized me, or what I had been, and clawing at my shoulders, babbled to me to save him. Till then none had identified me as the sorcerer. Goaded by his cries, I set my hands on him, aware it was useless. Finding this, too, his eyes lighted up with hate and he spit in my face.

  “May you suffer this tomorrow, you jackal! May you lie in your own filth and blood with these rats in your vitals!”

  I told him I expected that I should, but he was raving again and paid no heed.

  The sky, like an oven roof of blued heat, baked disease into the city. Everywhere the incense rose in columns; I smelled it in my sleep, over the fetor of the plague. Nearly all the brotherhood of the Water Temple were sick now. Three died by the magic well, pleading for its water, which did not heal them, which they could not even keep down. At length only I and one old priest remained. He drew me aside, and ordered me to leave the shrine and the city, and seek the hills. Many had done this, though, as it turned out, to small avail.

  I said I would not go. The priest remonstrated; I had stayed healthy this far and might well be spared, if I would listen to reason. I said I had been forewarned that I would die of the plague, and eventually he left me in peace. That is, in what fragments of peace I had.

  Toward the end of that second day we saw the red signature of the plague bonfires to the east and south. I was bemused by then, walking about like a part-resuscitated corpse myself. The pyres put me in mind of some ancient burning, not of Bar-Ibithni, not even from my past among the tribes. It was another thing. I leaned on a pillar of the temple and shut my eyes, and had the vision of a mountain pouring out magenta flames onto a black sky, and a white figure running down a slope with the lava-serpents of this fire going after it.

  In the middle of that came a crashing on the courtyard gate. I drew myself together and went to open it, picking my way between the sick. Even outside, the paving was thick with them. Three jerdiers on white geldings stood like tall trees among a world of people on their backs.

  “By order of the Emperor’s council,” their captain said, “all dead are to be burned.” Anticipating the pious outrage that must generally have been forthcoming, he added, “The fire of Masrimas cleanses the contagion of the fever, for Yellow Mantle has spread from the ruins of Bit-Hessee.” Then he checked and stared at me. He was one of Bailgar’s officers, a Shield. “By Masrimas, Vazkor! What are you at here, sir?”

  Plainly it was ridiculous to dissemble, for we had spoken before.

  “I am some use here.”

  “But have you had no news?” he asked me.

  “What news? Only news of the plague.”

  “There have been men looking for you since morning.” He beckoned to me. “Will you step nearer? I’ve no mind to shout.”

  “I may be infected,” I said, “and probably am.”

  “Probably we all are for that matter.” He swung down from his saddle and came up to the gate. “Sorem’s dying.”

  It shocked me. To see one’s death in a mirror. This was what I had run from. Like a fool, I asked if it was plague.

  “Yes, plague. What else?”

  “When did he fall sick?”

  “Sunrise. He asks for you.”

  “I can’t heal him.”

  “It’s not for healing, sir.” The jerdier’s face was set. He looked away from me and said, “It’s little enough. It’s a hard death he’s having; worse with the strong ones, for it takes them longer. All the same, you had better hurry if you intend to go. The priests have spoken the last prayer for him.”

  I wanted to ask him if Malmiranet lived, but the words blocked my throat like the black flies. My fate had hunted me down. I should have to watch Sorem’s death. Maybe hers. I would have given everything to avoid it.

  “I’ve no means to get a mount.” Most of the horses had contracted the plague, the cattle, too; hour upon hour I would hear the mallets of the slaughterers over the temple wall, like a dull thunder.

  “Take my horse,” the jerdier said. His eyes were bleak with the estimation he had made of me. “You remember the road to the Crimson Palace?”

  * * *

  They let me in at the gate with no delay.

  There was not a breath of wind in the garden city. Black spears of shadow lengthened beneath the trees. The pink flamingos picked their way among the shal
lows of the lake indifferently. No bird had the sickness, neither the smaller domestic animals.

  Between the pillars of the incense and the plague fires, the city stretched like one great public tomb. Bodies were tumbled in the streets, since there were few still healthy who would risk carrying them away, though occasionally the death carts trundled by. Here and there a priest or beggar hurried between the shuttered, silent houses and the barricaded shops. In an alley a blind man was tapping with his staff and calling for alms, nervously darting his head to catch the stillness. Perhaps no one had told him that Bar-Ibithni was dying, invisibly, about him. On the steps of a porphyry fountain a little starving dog, some woman’s pet, had chewed greedily at a thing from which I turned my eyes.

  Sorem’s bed faced west across the large frescoed chamber, to where the windows stared into the overcast sky. It had a copper skin, that sky, and a yellow sheen revealed where the sun was lowering itself; no air came through the open casements, only the reflection of the sinking day spilled on the floor. The beautiful room stank, but it was a stink so familiar to me now that I hardly noted it. I could see the bruise still on his cheek where the horse had kicked at him, no other color there but one. He lay on the crimson pillows, which seemed to have drained the blood from him into themselves. Yellow Mantle, yes, it was cleverly named.

  I went up to him. He was very near to death; I had barely been in time.

  As sometimes happened at the end, the fever and the delirium had abated, leaving him clear. Though he spoke with almost no voice, scarcely audible, yet his words were formed and precise.

  “I’m sorry to greet you in this disgusting state. It was good of you to come.”

  His gray bitch hound was stretched near the bed. Hearing him speak, it raised its head eagerly and beat with its tail an instant, then sank down again like a stone. Sorem was so weak, he could not order his expressions to show me pain, sadness, pleasure—anything. I sat where the physician had put his wooden stool before he went away.