Hunting the White Witch

by Tanith Lee

  At length the well ran dry. Her own tears she had put aside. She said she was going to the goddess on the hill, that this was a mighty deity, dispenser of calm and consolation, and that I must go also, to be calmed and consoled. Because of the curious thing between us, I went.

  * * *

  The turf was extensively disfigured beyond the old palisade by the marks of the plague fires. This different aspect, the daylight and my own brain, kept it from me some while that I had journeyed this way once before, and that my friend was conducting me to the shrine that stood above the Lion’s Field, that dueling ground of princes. I had fought Sorem there, and after him certain others, beneath the eye of the shrine’s goddess. Later, I had disrespectfully burned the black poppies on her altar to give me light, when I watched the Hesseks climbing from the northern wall and the sea.

  There were no poppies there now but a green-gold ear of grain and some honey in a crock. The stones were briar-grown as ever; I wondered, if they reverenced her, that the slaves never cleared these away. But my friend explained to me, seeing my look, that the goddess preferred the living thing to twine about her. In fact, no offering was set there, even a flower, unless it came of stock already plucked for use.

  “She left you strict orders, then,” I said.

  “Ah, no, she asked for nothing. The offerings do us good, for the act of giving, however small, is beneficial.” She herself had brought a flagon of cinnamon oil. Her tears returned and she poured them, with the perfume, on the stone; the smell of the oil was pleasant in the clean salt-freshened air. Then she kneeled and whispered on the west side of the altar. I turned away to let her pray in peace, as Chem had done. Shortly, she called to me, and her face was different, not happier, but with a kind of quietness.

  She deceived herself into this serenity, thinking the deity had blessed her with peace, but what matter, if she could bear her sorrow more easily? But the girl was there before me again, and she said, “It’s not the goddess who takes the burden from me; I find the strength within myself, through her memory that lingers here.”

  This seemed an advanced, unusual teaching.

  “Is your lady old or young?” I asked.

  “Young,” the girl said. “Something less than twenty years ago these stones were raised to her. And she’s real, too; my mother spoke with her. You won’t credit me, but thus it is. Shall I tell you?”

  I said, glad to humor her, that I should like to hear.

  “The city was not so great then. My mother dwelt in the southeast country, among the valleys there and the hills, where the southern lakes begin. She was in the fields, near sundown, when she saw a woman walking between the sheaves. Now you must remember this, the light was fading, Masrimas’ sun going out, but still the woman shone and gleamed. It was from her skin and her hair, which was as white as alabaster, and her face—my mother said—was too beautiful to bear.”

  I had caught my breath.

  She did not notice; she said, laughing, “You’ll disbelieve it, but listen. The track between the sheaves led by the spot where my mother stood. Soon the white woman had drawn close enough to touch, and my mother, who was afraid, sank on her knees. She was carrying then, with me, and maybe more fanciful because of it. The woman turned, and she said to my mother, ‘Will you tell me if there is a town across the hill?’ My mother managed to say that there was. She was sure the woman was a sprite, for she could speak hill-Masrian quite perfectly, though clearly she was a stranger. But then the woman, who was looking at her without menace or contempt, said, ‘You have a child with you.’

  “My mother started, expecting her womb to be cursed, but the woman stretched out her hand and laid it on my mother’s cheek, and at once, my mother would tell me, all her fear left her. The woman said, ‘When your labor begins, think of me and you will have no pain. The birth will be swift and uncomplicated, and the child strong. Though I fear,’ and here she smiled, ‘you have a girl inside you, not a man, for which perhaps you are sorry.’ My mother was dumbfounded, and begged to serve the stranger, to bring her food or drink, but the stranger said she lacked for nothing, and went on into the dark.

  “And now, here is the magic part. When her time came, my mother recalled vividly what the stranger had said. She invoked her name—did I say the woman gave her a name to speak?—and suddenly her birth pangs left her, and I was born inside the hour, the girl she had been promised, healthy as an apple. Doubtless you consider this a foolish romance, but the pain of birthing is not pleasurable, and a woman surely knows when it is gone from her by a spell.”

  I got my voice, and asked, “Did your mother reckon her goddess, then, or witch?”

  “Something of both, maybe. But it was in Bar-Ibithni that I heard the name of the stranger again. Generally it is the poor who cleave to her. They say she came this way, traveling to the northwest—to Seema, maybe, along the ancient route of the wagons.”

  “To Seema,” I repeated, and turned my head westward involuntarily.

  “Yes,” my friend said. “That is why they have carved her image on the west side of the altar here.” She led me aside to show me.

  I had not seen before. I had not thought of such a thing; that what I sensed of the presence of Uastis here in Bar-Ibithni was only the memory of her traveling, this ancient remembrance, that while I scoured the city and its environs for news of her, her token had been here upon the hill, where I leaned that night and watched the Hesseks come from the groves and the sea. I wondered if those paid searchers I had set to find her had simply missed this obscure sect of a white goddess, or if they merely did not associate such a mild pastoral deity with the picture I had specified—a white hag out of some hell.

  The image was tiny, a hand-span high, a rough-made thing, yet somehow pleasing to the eye, constructed out of white stone. A slender woman in a loose robe, long furl of hair, hands crossed on her breast. I imagined the face had weathered away until I realized how smooth it was.

  “They don’t show her face,” I said. “Was it that terrible?”

  “Oh, no,” the girl said, “that beautiful. Perhaps some city craftsman could have duplicated her countenance, but a farmer made this. They tell how she descended from the sky in a silver boat, but that story you will never have patience with.”

  I put my head in my hands. My friend came and stroked my hair. She said she must be going, that she wished she might help me in my trouble, and that she was sorry she had mistaken me for Vazkor.

  Her eyes were sad again when we parted, but the healing had begun for her, while for me the wound was torn open on its scars. I never asked her name, but I asked what she named her goddess, and if it were Uastis.

  No, that was not the name, she said. They titled her Karraket. Though her mother, she added, had used a different ending for the name; she could not call to mind exactly what.

  I watched her go away, Chem, the belligerent slave, trudging behind with the parasol and the club.

  I had learned my own road, too, but did not take it till the sun was sinking and the sea had turned the color of koois beyond the wall.

  * * *

  I searched for Gyest in the field by the Horse Market, a hood pulled far down over my forehead. The Sri wagons had gone, all but two, and two white oxen were lifting their pink noses to the cool air of dusk. I had no logical reason to suppose I should discover Gyest had waited on me, or even to assume he had not died of the plague, yet I foresaw he would be there, and there he stood, the dark red magician’s veil about his face. He had foreseen also that I would seek him, and when. As I walked to him across the field, he raised his arm to greet me, as if this were the arrangement we had settled on that day we had met. It had been a false image he had shown me in the psychic copper, but not through his doing. He, too, had been deceived, but he had warned me of the cloud of death, the doom, the dark. He had offered me his help.

  “Will you eat with us?” he asked me
now. He looked at my face, inside the shade of the hood. He said, “You are a boy yet, though you have aged ten years behind the skin. I have heard the tales.”

  “Did you hear I had died?”

  “That, too. I have heard stranger things. And less strange.”

  “In Seema,” I said, “do you have a goddess, Karraket?”

  A cook-fire burned in the dusk and pots seethed there, and three red-turbaned women chattered to each other on the grass.

  “The people of Sri have only one god, who is neither female nor male, not really a god at all, rather a principle. Karraket is a name I am unfamiliar with.”

  “Too many names,” I said. “I don’t know even that I hate her still. I am weary of hating her. What I thought led me here was only the memory of her passing. What I fought, thinking it her witchcraft, was the malice of a human woman infected with my sorcery. Gyest,” I said, “I may never play the sorcerer again.”

  Book Two

  Part I: In the Wilderness

  1

  A ROAD LED SOUTH toward the outskirts of the city. Shrines and small temples littered the lower hills. Flocks of gray pigeons circled in the air and prayers rose through the dawn stillness; but beyond the walls, the mark of the plague fires was visible between the gardens of villas and groves of palm and cypress, and like a hollow blackness at the center of the sloping meadows. How many refugees died in their hill retreats I never estimated, though no doubt some zealous, sneaking little clerk did so, to leave a record of the Yellow Plague for future generations.

  About five miles from the core of Bar-Ibithni, the south road rays into a series of subsidiary tracks. By following the western way we came gradually on the old land route to Seema, which skirts behind the back of the ancient swamp of Bit-Hessee, though in the days of Hessek empire it ran straight to the marsh-city gate. The land route is a hazardous thing. For several centuries the caravans had toiled up and down it, till the advent of the mighty Masrian ships developed the seaways in its stead. For those too poor or too penny-pinching to take to the ocean, the land route remained, however, a negotiable track without alternative. To the Sri wagoners, it was Ost (the Unavoidable). Though groups of them had journeyed to the city by sea, in order to be in time to capitalize on the anointing of a new Emperor, not one went back that way, which would take all their profit in return for a rat’s portion of steerage, and the probable death of half their livestock during the voyage.

  Ost the Unavoidable goes initially through the dense forestland west of the hill lakes. Here there is game in plenty, fruit and edible roots, and the shelter of the tall trees. But after three days, the forest begins to draw back. A plain opens, well watered at its edges, growing bone-dry on the fifth day. Toward the seacoast there are yet salt marshes, and even the black trickles of the streams that run up into the plain country are saline and undrinkable. By the ninth day one comes to the Wilderness, for this is what all men call the area separating the archipelagoes of Seema and Tinsen from the fertile regions of the central south.

  The Wilderness. It is a place of rock, whose mesas and stacks take on a misleading configuration in the distance. By day, under the shifty skies of the summer’s turning, now smalt blue, now leaden white, now a hot colliding of blocks of thunder, the Wilderness is bleached as ivory. Yet in the sunset or the dawn, the dust that continually drifts and smokes from the ground makes the sky, and reflectively the landscape, into a giant tapestry of blood and saffron, purple and mahogany. The hugeness and the color seem to suck the mind from the body, and send it whirling through space like a nugget. It is the spot for visions and trances.

  And for bandits. However, the Sri are past masters of the grim facts of existence, and pay a tax to any who require it of them on the road, reckoning it less than ship’s fees. The robbers, of an appearance that would not disgrace a wild beast, are tickled by the polite and affable handing over of goods and the lack of nervousness that the Sri display, and take from them little, and do no harm. Only the wealthy caravans of merchants, too mean to expend money on a sea voyage or a suitable guard on the land journey, are set on and pillaged to the last wheel and rivet, and the dead left for the orange dog-rats that emerge from their burrows at sunfall. Besides, it is surprising how many of such caravans persist in their attempts to cross the waste, providing thereby a living for its human refuse. Additionally, the Sri are to some extent feared for their magic.

  Men and fauna alike give evidence of some water in the desert. It is also true to say, as the Sri say, that any water hole one finds, one shares with the rat, the jackal, the serpent, and the murderer, therefore all must sit down in peace. Even the bone-brown tiger—which occasionally passes over the dust dunes, leaving behind it tracks like menacing flowerheads in the twilight—does not kill its prey at drink.

  It takes thirty or forty days to cross the Wilderness, longer if you turn south before the Seema-Saminnyo (the large causeway that leads to Seema, an isthmus with its farther body of land broken in islands). To go south before this causeway means one seeks the southwestern ocean, which only madmen do, for the lands that lie beyond it are months away, the weather unsure, and the trade bizarre.

  * * *

  I was twenty-one years of age. Inside my skin I felt a deal older, a few decades, perhaps, yet, at the same instant, callow, unprepared. I experienced the bewilderment of my youth, but I was purged of everything else. It would be hard to dread or to hope, to fear or to love. Inside me was a lion on a chain whose name was Power, and I should not let him free again. The god whose weakness it was to discriminate had gone. The sorcerer-prince who hungered for temporal ascendancy had followed him. Even the man no longer yearned for anything very much.

  Only one bright shadow remained, the nightmare dream that had first swung me from my course. I should have been a brave in the krarl to this day, if I had not been haunted and finally mastered by those ghosts of my beginning, one white, one black.

  I had nothing to offer Gyest and his people, but they took me in. I made myself useful where I could. Oxen are not horses but you learn their ways and how to handle them. Indeed, I was shortly an excellent groom of Seemase oxen; I have yoked them and bedded them and fed them and led them to water, which they store in belly-sacks, hence their endurance in the waste. Vazkor the groom, drover of cattle, Vazkor who had been villain and dreamer, a healer for a chain of cash, a traitorous messiah, a resurrected necromancer. Vazkor, son of Vazkor. Vazkor, born of a white witch.

  * * *

  The four days of the south road, the forest, the plain’s sweet-water edges, went by like one day checked with fragments of night. I slept seldom, my brain laboring in purposeless grindings to rid itself of what it would never lose. Once, after a moment’s slumber, I woke thinking myself in the sarcophagus. And I felt no terror.

  I would lie in the faint glow of the firelight before taking my turn as watch, seeing the man there doze sometimes, I keeping watch already, though on my back. I would examine the lack in me, the surcease of my fears and longings and angers, which seemed to have died where I had not, in the Necropolis. Presently the watchman would come and touch my shoulder to “wake” me; it would generally be Jebbo or Ossif, the half-brothers of Gyest, and masters of the sister wagon. The fourth night it was Gyest himself—I had considered the figure unusually alert, though motionless, at its post

  “I see Vazkor is also sleepless,” he said. I reckoned he had seen it often. “Come, then, let us talk.”

  He stirred the fire up in a foam of red; it was cool under a fringe of trees, damp with the promise of southern rain. His face showed only the eyes, as ever. Jebbo and Ossif went similarly muffled, even among themselves when the women, of whom there were four, were elsewhere. I, too, had taken to Sri garb. Gyest’s generosity had settled on me a suit of breeches and calf-length tunic, both, as I should note, the bleached browned-ivory shade of the Wilderness itself. This camouflage, dispelled by the red head-veil, made me adequatel
y Sri against the hour when we should meet bandits. Nevertheless, I had not aspired to shielding my face and head, the masks of Eshkorek having been enough for me.

  I asked Gyest if he would not rather sleep. I even went so far as to suggest his woman Omrah might be missing him. She was a young girl, this one, and a couple of times, mislaying my reverie, I had seen her eyes on me. This I did not care for, for his sake, not liking to think him lessened by a strumpet. He was a deal older than she; no doubt the cause of her glances. Now he surprised me by saying; “My wife is with my brother Ossif tonight, and shan’t miss me, I assure you, in the manner you imply.”

  I suspect I was glad to be surprised, even to be angered in a vague, unextensive fashion, some reactions left after all.

  “I remember you told me once that your women are free,” I said.

  “Not merely our women,” he said, “all, man or woman. Those liaisons we form spring from liking, but in matters of sex, our laws do not fetter us.”

  “When your son is born, does he have the eyes of the next wagon?”

  “Oh,” he said, “children are not mine or thine among us. They are Sri. Whichever woman has the milk and is the nearest feeds the child, whichever man goes to chop wood takes the child to learn wood-chopping.”

  “To whom are the wagons left, and the riches of the man when he dies?”

  “To whoever is needy. To the Sri. But why concern yourself with death, Vazkor? Of all your troubles, he is surely the least.”

  “So, Gyest believes Masrian stories.”

  “I look in your face and see the story there, as I saw before the brand of the witch’s curse on you.”