Hunting the White Witch

by Tanith Lee

  “It doesn’t move me,” I said to Gyest, as if this were some show he had ordered them to put on in order that I be impressed.

  “But, Vazkor,” Gyest said, “when has human suffering ever moved you?” I had not expected that. It went through me like the distant cast of a spear, like hurt in a scar long sealed. “You have no compassion,” he said quietly, without anger, merely telling me a fact. “You survive all human ills. How can you expect to feel compassion? You must see that the sympathy any man feels for the plight of another is, at its core, simply a realization and fear that he, too, might suffer the same plight. We grow cold in the loins and about the heart when we confront disease, wounds, death, because we know they are also our heritage. But you, Vazkor, who have overcome any and all these devils of the flesh, how shall you tremble and ache for us?”

  My mind slid back, as if he had directed it, to the shot deer at the pool, my fourteen-year-old pity sprung from my own terror at the aspect of death. I thought, too, of how I had worked among the victims of the yellow plague, trying to ease their wretchedness, as if thereby I would ease my own that I knew would come to me. It was exact, every word he spoke. Yet I should never have fathomed it without Gyest.

  “Don’t chide yourself,” he said now. “Expect only what you can give. Which is pity, rarely, accidentally, some trigger sprung by nostalgia or regret. True sympathy you will never give. Yet how much more you are able to give. Ask the dying man if he would rather you wept for him or healed him.”

  Darg’s hand fell on my arm.

  “What’s this? Masrian you speak and my soldier howling like the she-wolf. Come, Gyest. Heal! Heal!”

  My voice sounded rough as a boy’s when I said, “Gyest, get all of them out. If I must do it, I want no witnesses, no shouts of sorcery.”

  The place was cleared; he spun them some yarn of me, that I had been tutored by a doctor-sage in Bar-Ibithni the Golden, and so on. Even the youth was taken away, sobbing, which left me the writhing, moaning man.

  I healed him. No wonder now, no hubris, no surge of pleasure or contempt, not even my own questioning that I felt nothing. Just healing. The absolute, as I had finally been shown, does not need the accompaniment of pipes and drums.

  He came to himself shortly. By then I had bound his arm with a strip of rag lying on the ground, to conceal its wholeness.

  He fixed me with blazing eyes, and told me the pain was gone and he could flex the fingers and wrist. I told him he could expect total recovery, providing he did not remove the bandage for seven days nor look at the wound. He gawked, and began to argue that he could feel no wound, that I was a magician. I leaned very near, and promised him if ever he called me that again, to my face or at my back, I would send a ghoul to gnaw on his liver.

  We parted in unfriendly silence, my patient and I.

  * * *

  I sat on a rock, some way above the camp. Smoke, firelight, and a yapping of hounds and men filled up the space below. The space above had changed from carmine to indigo, and the brass dust-moon of the Wilderness had just risen. Somewhere the dog-rats of the waste were twittering, barely audible, out of a vast hollow quiet. It is a phenomenon of such spots that any noise is encapsulated in this ringing stillness, and made strangely tiny, however loud. The shouts of bandits and the squeaks of fauna sound as if confined in bubbles, a symbol of their impermanence. Only the desert endures.

  I sat a long while there. Now and then I noticed the glare of the smithy fire burst up, and thought, Well, I have won Gyest his forge. But mainly my mind went wandering. I was digesting my life. To say I was at peace would not be honest, but to say peace showed itself to me, brushed me with its cool breath, yes. There is, too, a sort of relief in admitting defeat. Struggling to drag a mountain from my path, acknowledging at last the mountain would remain, lying down beneath the mountain, thankful for the shade of it.

  About five hours must have folded themselves away into the night. The moon had touched the roof of the sky and turned her sail to the west.

  I was gazing down into the fire-blur of the camp, gathering myself to return there. All at once I glimpsed a man dismounting from a black horse. It caught my eye, for the horse was finer than anything I had seen of the bandit mounts this far. Then the man turned. His hair was curling, cropped rather shorter than mine, and he was gaudily dressed, yet he had a look of me. A second after, I saw a woman on a mule; he had moved to converse with her. They were speaking trivial words, yet I could sense something between them, like a current of heat or energy. The woman was dressed in black and the black shireen of the tribes. Her hair poured around her like unseasonable snow.

  It was gone as suddenly as it came. It did not dismay me; it was like a dream.

  Gyest was standing beside me. He said softly, “What were you seeing?”

  “My mother,” I said. “My mother, and some man not my father.”

  “So,” he said, “and there is no anger now.”

  “No anger. Yet I swore a vow to some dark thing once, some remnant of my father’s despair, that I would kill her.”

  He seated himself, asking me if he might, on the rock nearby.

  “You know you can never rest until you find her,” he said.

  “Oh, I can rest. As much as I shall ever rest, perhaps.”

  “Once,” he said, “you sought within my brain. One adept, read by another, also reads. You learned something of me, and I something of you. Did you appreciate this?”

  “Lellih scoured my brain as she would scour a cookpot with a knife,” I said. “Yes, gift for gift. What do you know of me?”

  “Enough to show you the way,” he said.

  A snake moved inside my belly. I was waking up. Visions, truths, reverie, leading me back to consciousness and feeling, to involvement, to life, where, perhaps, I was reluctant to go.

  “Gyest,” I said, “we had this through before. If I seek her, I shall kill her. This I believe. I have no hate left, but he has cause to hate her, and it is his genius, his will, that created me. Ah, Gyest, if only I had known my father!”

  “The shining dark,” Gyest said, “the reflection of the flame upon the wall: Shadowfire. Vazkor, you are too much of his, too much of hers. You can’t escape this road. You must confront them both in order to resume yourself. Now. Suppose that you seek her, how shall you do it?”

  “The Power of my will, the very thing I don’t mean to use again. Very well, I will heal, but not this other. Not again.”

  “A focus, then,” he said. “As the Sri use it. Small power, much concentration. To trace a man, you take something that has belonged to him, a garment or an ornament, preferably something worn often. If he has not left you such a thing, then you fashion one in the semblance, as near as may be. There is an image in your brain when you think of her. You’re accustomed to the form and have mislaid it. Uast the cat, the white lynx. Look.”

  He opened his cloak, and put before me on the rock the silver mask I had dug for in Ettook’s treasure chest, the mask Demizdor had worn about the krarl, the mask Tathra had shunned, the mask the Eshkiri slave had brought. The mask of my mother, Uastis, Karraket, the witch. The face of a silver lynx with open black eye-holes, the yellow strings pendant from its back like sunrays on the rock, each ending in a flower of amber.

  I cursed aloud. The blood shot to my heart in a pang I had forgotten could take me.

  Gyest went on calmly, extending this calm to me.

  “The silver is debased, and the flowers are only yellow glass, but the illusion is as perfect as I could get it. The mold Omrah made at my direction, the rest is the skill of Darg Sih’s clever smith who at one time, before he slew a man and fled here, constructed jewelry in Bar-Ibithni.”

  “Why have you done this?”

  “To aid you.”

  “Why aid me?”

  “God has moved me to help you. Or, if you prefer, it was my reasonl
ess inclination to do so.”

  I reached out, and took up the mask. I half anticipated the shock to go through my palm when I touched it, as it had when I first drew it from the treasure chest. But this was not the same. It weighed heavier in the hand, and the gems more lightly. It was a focus, as he had said. If I stared down into the blank eye-holes of it, what witch-eyes should I behold staring back at me across lands and seas and time itself?

  “No,” I said, “I am done with this.”

  “It’s not done with you,” he answered.

  No, truly it was not. She had sat her mule in the camp below, her white hair around her shoulders. No, it was not done.

  I got to my feet, the mask in my hand. I walked into the Wilderness just far enough to put the small lights and sounds of men behind me.

  About a quarter of a mile from the camp I halted by a narrow towering fretwork stack, like a pillared temple carved by the wind. It was the very wind I could hear blowing now, through the empty bell of the desert. The dust stirred like smoke underfoot. The brown moon lay on the horizon’s edge.

  I held the mask between my hands, and let my Power drip slowly down on it, like my soul’s blood.

  * * *

  I woke in the dawn. The plains of the Wilderness were exploding into light. It was the first hour of day, one of the two most beautiful hours of the desert, where sunrise and sunset are the queen and king. I kept where I was and watched till the mystery ended. Then I got up and went back into the camp of Darg Sih.

  It seemed to me I had slept. I recalled no dream, no revelation, nothing. Yet I knew the way. I knew the way to find her. I must do what only madmen do, turn aside before the Seema-Saminnyo, travel to the brink of the southwestern ocean, bribe some ship’s captain to take me south and west again to that unknown featureless land—I had not seen it, knew it only as one knows some object one has touched in the dark, through gloves—and there she would be. Sea-girt, summer gone with the birds from that anchorage, maybe even snow there now, and near to a place of snow. It was apt for her, my snow-haired dam.

  It recurred, the image Hessek had shown to me: The sorceress was sinewy and raddled, with her claws of fire and her cat’s head. My fear was dead, yet still she seemed an inspiration for fear, of all the world’s fear if not of mine. An elemental? A witch? What would she do indeed, when I walked up to her on some western street, or in some icy garden there, under the pale winter sun? I am your son, Uastis of Ezlann, whom you abandoned to the stinking krarl of savages, and trusted never to meet again. I am the son of Vazkor, your husband, by whose shadow I have sworn to slay you, Uastis, and let dogs destroy your healing bones and fire your healing flesh so never from that wreck can you remake yourself. There shall be no part or portion left, Uastis, that can heal itself; not a grain, not a hair. True death for a daughter of the Old Race, and I bring it.

  Of course, my preparations for her death had undergone a change. There had been before no precautions of fire, a total destruction that nothing might return. Remembering the Eshkorek legend of her, that she had risen from a grave once or maybe twice, and having the proof of this oddity in myself, aware it might happen, my plans were half unconsciously altering and reshaping themselves. From that conclusion rose an unassailable revelation.

  Since the beginning of it, rejecting or reveling in my Powers, I had claimed them from my father, who had been a sorcerer before me. But my father had died. Though his body had never been found in the ruined tower, yet it lay there, or somewhere. If he had lived, there would have been news of him in twenty years, some tale, some battle, some fresh striving would have revealed his life. No, he was dead; my whole argument sprang from his death. She it was who could not die. She, and I. It was her blood that made me more than human.

  The bandits, their dogs and women, snored in the camp. The corpse of the tiger lay where they had left it, already vile smelling, with ten black desert birds circling above, afraid to come down to feast with so many live things about.

  Then, under the stunted palm that grew above the spring, I observed Darg Sih sitting with Gyest, playing one of the southern checker games in the dust, with elegant, certainly stolen, counters of red soapstone and green jade.

  Caught by the incongruity of this, I paused to let the bandit chief make his move. He pulled his moustaches and grunted, and rapped with the green counter on his teeth, as if they might supply the answer.

  Shortly, the counter slapped down. Darg Sih had won the game. He roared for koois, and from a tent nearby a boy ran and gave him the flask Gyest had brought. Darg gestured me over with flailing motions of his arms, embraced me, and offered me the rum. We drank, and Gyest, lifting the red veil, also drank. Darg watched this with childish fascination, digging me in the ribs. No iota of countenance came visible as Gyest drank. Presently he handed back the flask.

  “You go south, then, bandit brother, take ship? Bad, bad,” Darg said to me.

  “Does Darg also read minds?”

  “Gyest tells me,” he mumbled. “Why go to the poxy stinking port? Stay and hunt tigers with Darg, eh, brother?”

  “He must seek his kindred,” Gyest said.

  “Ah,” Darg said. “Kin. Not scutty Sri ways, no man knowing his father, eh?”

  “How did you decide my road?” I asked Gyest.

  “Not I. Long ago you foresaw a ship would take you there.”

  “That time I was in error.”

  “Not this time.”

  “No,” I said, “not this.”

  We drank more koois, and the boy brought a plate of cold meat and figs. He had gold earrings. I could not work it out if he were Darg’s son or his leman.

  “If you need a ship, then you must reach Semsam port. Ships there.” Darg skewered his meat with the knife that a few days back, probably, had been slitting some merchant’s throat. “If you go to Semsam, I will give you a pony and send three—no—four men with you. No trouble in the Ost, then”—he beamed at us, using the Sri word to better our understanding—“and no trouble in Semsam either, where they are dogs who cut up their babes for supper.”

  I thanked him for his generosity.

  When we rode out an hour later, the Sri wagons and my guard of four bandits, Darg Sih wept copiously, and swore he would offer prayers to his gods on my behalf. I think I never inspired such instantaneous and fulsome approval in my whole life, before or since.

  * * *

  My parting from Gyest six mornings after was more constrained. I assumed I should not see him again. Each farewell in my life had been final, and men’s days were short. It is extraordinary. I had not known him long, nor intimately beyond those psychic interchanges on which ground we met as fellow magicians, and I the greater of the two. Neither did I ever see his face, or learn anything of note concerning his history or his aims (if aims he had; I think he was content to be). I never had the father with whom most men expect nature to equip them. I had instead the hatred of a red pig, and a shadowy myth given me by enemies and strangers. Even if my father had been Gyest, among the Sri I could not have been sure of it. Still, he was the closest I got, maybe. Or maybe I let sentiment influence me. Say then only this: I shall regret always the loss of his good friendship, his unpretentious wisdom, and his half-amused quietness under the hand of his god.

  Every one of the four Sri women kissed me good-bye, and the white dog licked my hand. They gave me food for the journey, and Ossif handed me a copper charm from his wagon. These charms they acknowledge as toys, their god cares for them anyway, but man in his weakness likes visible proof of caring. It is a joke between them and the Infinite.

  The four hairy bandits seemed pleased rather than otherwise at being my escort. I wondered if they meant to try to kill me, or sell me on the way or in the port itself. What would I do then? Power, or the knife I had bartered for in Darg’s stronghold? As it turned out, they had no tricks in mind, and were simply enjoying scenery differ
ent from that of the camp.

  The track to the southwest shows clearly an old road of Hessek make with a decrepit shrine to some Hessek spirit at its beginning. The deity is not Shaythun for sure; he has chipped wings and a tiger’s head. An iron bell without a clapper rusts in the dirt nearby. There must have been a priest to tend him once, but he was gone, and the hermitage returned to the dust of the plain.

  It would need sixteen days, a little less with hard riding, to get to the coast.

  Gyest and I had not spoken again of where I was headed, my destination nor my goal. I had ceased quarreling with it, and he had ceased showing me my way. Destiny or gods or fortune—whatever one is pleased or innocent enough to call them—they seal men to their decree. There comes an hour when battle ends and one puts one’s neck beneath the yoke.

  I forget most of what was said. A platitude or two, probably, wishes for safe journeying, kind weather. The best men fall back on them when wit no longer answers.

  When I was mounted, I thanked him without specifying my thanks.

  “You have time. Go slowly,” he said.

  I knew what he meant, and I said, “Still, I swore it to him. I mean to do it. I can kill as well without anger as in a rage. Better.”

  He said quietly, “I see a jackal running. His name is I Remember.”

  A slow shiver went down my spine. I had thought myself past such things. But I raised my arm to him and bade him good-bye, then rode off along the Hessek road to Semsam, the four bandits whooping after me.

  3

  Semsam glowed muddily in the rain. It was a place of ramshackle itinerant bivouacs and worming alleys crowded by makeshift hovels, which had somehow, against all odds, endured. Near the shore, decayed mansions of Ancient Hessek balanced on marble stilts, like terrible old dying birds. The rain, which had started three days back on the shore road, looked fair set to wash this slimy disaster of a port away. There were no walls, no watch. It was a center of robbers and reavers, and of certain illicit trades of Tinsen from the west, and various outer islands to the south. In dock, the canoes of the black jungle men lay alongside the tall slavers and the single-deck galleys of Seemase pirates.