Hunting the White Witch

by Tanith Lee

  * * *

  It would take three Masrian months to achieve the western shores, four or five months of the Hessek calendar, some seventy-six days in all, discounting the time we had already used up getting through the southern islands.

  Open sea. Featureless some days, on others alive with the life beneath, with leaping fish, striped as tigers or spotted like cats, with birds above going landward to the north. In the sky vast cloud lines, armies of cumulus on the march, at sunset scarlet galleys rowing there with green and silver sails, or the storm warning, that dark chimney with the head of an ax, a screaming vent of wind. We had three or four storms but weathered them. None was as bad as that hurricane I myself had mastered.

  Events marked each day from another.

  Some with rain, some with wind, some with the fall sun and the calm of the turquoise water-meadows beneath us.

  Some with fights and brawls. One noon two men were hung to whine on the foremast, a punishment; brought to me to be healed with black lips and crying eyes after, so they would be fit for evening duties. Nights were marked with random sodomy, heard and glimpsed in the dark, not always willing.

  Sometimes there was a sight of a distant fleck of land spotted at sunup; later, one or two minuscule islands where fresh water was gathered, and a big crab, the size of a small dog, might provide dinner for Lanko and his favorites, which had not been its intention. Incidents. A rower, tough as bullhide, starting to weep because he had dreamed of a boy lover of his youth, a mixie boy sent to be a whore in Bar-Ibithni; a man drowned in a sudden storm, which had caught him obeying nature at the bow; another vanishing, having spit in the eye of Lanko’s second. After forty days at sea, some of the biscuit went to mildew, and they shouted at me to say a spell and make it good. It was not my plan anymore to revive the dead; even this food-death, absurd though maybe the comparison was, sent me weak in the legs, images of Lellih swimming up in my brain, and that other necromancy. When I refused, there was bad feeling. I told them I would miss my own rations two days out of every four; I ate little in any event, but the spectacular gesture drew off their wrath. The magician was contrary. They let him alone.

  Each day differing. Yet each day the same.

  I came to know the oar, to understand its physical person as one would come physically to understand a woman one lies with forty, fifty nights. My iron-wood wife, with her blue blade combing the water and her slim hard body in my arms, across my breast and thighs. Six hours of copulation, then another six. A demanding lady. Yet she left my mind free. How many hours of how many days of how many months the shadows and the fires crossed my brain as I sat in that black ill-smelling hole, while the oar opened my palms on their own blood, no protective scars to armor me, and the faint pink light of dawn at the hatches faded into gray and into pink once more at the day’s decline. The climate had cooled, the skies, when not obscured by cloud, had a purer, thinner look to them; by night the stars shone large and brilliant. On the winds that blew down from the west came an aroma of winter, like the old winter of the northlands, biting bitch gale, lash of sleet, marble weather with a thick snow down.

  On the fifty-first day there was a fog. The ship sailed into it, and a chill silence settled on everything. The sea below was gray with a staring blue beneath; the masts scaled over with rime. Lanko’s men cursed and put on their jackets and cloaks. The sun showed as a lemon-metal ring. Nobody looked for naked witch-girls riding on pillars of ice.

  Through this soundless blanket we rode, the oars making a sucking, muffled noise. The southerners did not care for the fog, neither this particular penetrating clarity of cold. The winters of Seema, Tinsen, and Bar-Ibithni are not positively cold, cold simply by contrast with the blaze of summer; dust winds blow and rains descend; hail and thunder and black clouds. But snow never falls on the golden lands of the south and east, and only on two or three high mountains of the archipelago do they find it, and then they bring it down in clever sealed flasks to cool the drinks of lords, that, obviously, being its only purpose.

  I at my oar, deep in waking, blind-eyed dreams (of Tathra, of Demizdor, of Eshkorek and the black krarl, of the Crimson Palace, of Malmiranet, of a silver mask), suddenly heard the cry around me, men with labor-sweating faces leaning from their stations.

  “The magician brought us here, promised us gold. Let him lift the freezing fog.”

  I looked about at them and they fell quiet. Their faces were hostile. I was no longer lucky.

  “Well,” the man on the other side of me demanded. He was a felon from some southern town, a mix with no ears. “Well, can’t you do it, mighty sorcerer?”

  “The fog is a natural thing and will pass. You need not fear it.”

  The mix laughed, showing me off to the others about him, as we all, without a break, bent and straightened with the pull of the oars.

  “I am thinking the Sri magician is also a natural thing, and will pass.”

  I thought, I could lift the fog, shut up their din. Easy. Why not? But that was how it had begun; why not walk on water, why not fly through the air, why not raise the dead: I thought, I can suffer this. God knows it’s little enough.

  They chaffered and bawled at me a while.

  I paid no heed. How I had altered.

  A couple of hours later we rowed out of the fog, straight on our western course.

  * * *

  By the seventieth day they had begun to fret for land. Rations were low, mainly due to the greed of Lanko and his second officer—I honor him with the title—and the lack of organization aboard. Thieves by trade, they stole also from each other. Hardly a night now without someone caught in the hold with his fingers in the stores. Lanko devised an extravagant execution; a man apprehended drinking koois was held head down in the koois jar and drowned. Lanko then offered the jar to any who wished to drink. Lanko’s own private stores, kept separate from the crew, were never raided.

  They had had one old brown map, pinned by a lady’s brooch to the table in Lanko’s cabin. This scrap indicated the West land, a vague melted shape with no bays or harborage marked in, more guesswork than charting. According to this map, however, the land should by now have revealed itself. Yet the sea, blue-green and cold, was featureless.

  They were like men waking from opium. Their adventurous spirit had guttered out; they seemed to come to and discover themselves, like sleepwalkers, miles from home. What were they doing here in this chilly water-desert, with its scents of snow and emptiness?

  Some ice went floating by, miles off to the south, like sails of rusty glass. Muffled in oddments of clothing, skins and pelts and furs subtracted from the cargoes of merchant ships, the sailors pointed to the ice with fear. They had told stories about it, but somehow they had not expected to see it. At least, in the stories, it had been warmer.

  Suddenly an image of the sea demon of Old Hessek, Hessu, was set up in the prow. Apparently Seema acknowledged him, too. There he sat, astride his lion-fish, lightnings in hand. His copper was all green, and the enamel wings of the fish had lost their luster. They rubbed him over and began to offer to him libations of wine, the odd inedible sea-thing dragged up on the lines at the bulwarks. Gods indigenous to Seema were mentioned, too; even an occasional grudging scared dawn prayer was offered Masrimas.

  On the seventy-fourth day, when I was due my abbreviated rations, none were forthcoming. I did not need to ask why. Their mutterings, the shifting near me in the night, once waking to behold a man at my pack, who scuttled away when he noted me stirring—these had tutored me. I went to where Lanko’s second was engaged in doling out pieces of gray biscuit and strips of salted gristle. He winked at me, and smiled about.

  “None for you.”

  I reached across and picked up the ewer of wine and water and drank from it, then selected a segment of the brick-dust biscuit, which I ate. He did not try to stop me, but when I was finished—it did not take long—he produced his kn
ife and showed it to me.

  “See this, lovely boy? Lanko says you are to starve, and so that’s what I say, too. If you come up here again I’ll make a pattern on you so nice you’ll never tire of looking at it.”

  Conversation being pointless, I turned my back on him and started to walk away. He did not like that, and threw his knife at me. It would have hit me under the left shoulder and gone through into the heart; he meant business. Every defense of mine leaped. In the splinter of a second I was aware of the knife, next moment I experienced a surge of energy rising and thrusting from me, at my direction, yet so fast it seemed almost to move of its own instinctive volition. The knife sizzled and spun away as if it had hit an electric shield, and the clustered watching men groaned and backed off. They had anticipated magic and were not amazed, only disheartened. They had wanted to see their bad luck killed.

  Their bad luck did not bother to glance around. I went below to take up my oar again, noticing the sinking tingle of the shield as it retreated into me. It seemed this Power, which mostly I would not use, was stronger now than it had ever been.

  Word got about.

  A man crawled up to me in the rowers’ station, begging me to say if we should ever reach a shore.

  I knew we were near to land, sensed it with certainty. In two days or less we would make it out from the opaline greenness of the ocean.

  The next day a flock of gulls went over, white gulls with black-barred breasts and red eyes; some perched on the masts of the ship, screaming and beating with their wings, as the gulls in my fever had beat in the vitals of Lyo’s corpse. The sailors grew more cheerful, drank wine. One brought me his frostbitten fingers to heal, like a gift.

  Then on the seventy-sixth day out from the islands, the ninety-sixth day out from Semsam, they saw what they believed I had sent them to.

  5

  The land rose from a flat platinum sea. A broken paving of thin ice glittered on the ocean’s surface, under a gray sun; it was bitter cold. The land itself was an irregular pinnacled whiteness. Nothing moved there. No inlet gave access to the interior. The cliffs were sheer.

  It was plain to me we had come, after all, too far southward. Lanko’s instruments were doubtless faulty, and the clever navigator, though he would boast he could thread a ship through the eye of a bone needle, had no genius for direction.

  Winter arrives swift and absolute at the southwestern tip of this continent, and we had sailed to meet it.

  Men gathered at the rail, their breath blue, and acid with fear. Lanko strode from his cabin wrapped in red Tinsenese bear furs, the second at his heels. They made straight for me.

  “Where’s the gold, Sri-boy? Eh?”

  The second observed me narrowly. He said, “He doesn’t feel the chill like a normal man. His dirty magic keeps him warm.”

  It was a fact that I had come above in just my tunic and breeches, having no other clothing to get into against the weather. Though, in truth, it seemed I could now control my body heat—involuntarily, almost without thinking, as I had deflected the murderous knife. I did not notice the cold more than as a mild discomfort, and now the second put his hand on my arm.

  “He boils like the copper!” he shouted, and snatched his hand away again.

  “Come,” said Lanko, “he won’t hurt you. Will you, eh, my darling? He’s good for all sorts of tricks, but he’s no stomach for a fight. Ah, I know, his sprite-familiar pushed off your knife. I say it was your pox-mucky bad aim.”

  The second remonstrated. Lanko shut him up with a look.

  Lanko put his arm over my shoulders.

  “Well, now, I was asking, where’s the gold? Not up those snow cliffs.”

  “You’ve brought your ship too far south,” I said to him. Not that I imagined he could really be reasoned with. “Set Gull for the north, keeping this coast on the left hand. Seven or eight days of oars, even without a following wind, should see a milder climate.”

  “You swear this for a certainty?”

  “I reckon it to be so, yes.”

  “And how would you know, my fine boy? The same way you knew I should get rich here?”

  The second broke in, in a flinty scared voice trying to be menacing, “I’d say, Lanko, that he’s a devil who led us here to get vengeance. Maybe some Masrian wizard set a curse on us and this is his instrument, eh, Lanko?” He laughed, attempting now to make a joke in case he became the joke instead. “A nasty devil-sending to lure us to our deaths.”

  Lanko said to me, “Our stores are nearly gone, magician. Care to magic some up for us, see us over these eight or nine or ten or a hundred days of sailing up the coast?”

  “Lanko,” I said gently, “need only open his private store to feed the whole ship.”

  He smiled. Even the sharp little eyes smiled. He liked me for enabling him to despise me.

  “And you,” he said, “won’t ask for further rations till we reach landfall. Will you?”

  “Since there is so little, I will agree to that.”

  “Ah,” he said. He bowed, took my hand and kissed it. “Now get below, you bloody Sri bastard. Get to your oar.”

  There was no guilt in me at their fate. They were at best robbers, and most a deal worse than robbers, and besides, I never imagined they would perish here. I was not the angel of their deaths, contrary to popular opinion aboard, nor their bad luck. What I said to them I knew was exact—the winter was less severe northward. Somewhere a river opened into the land, part frozen at its mouth. The cliffs were the fortress walls; we had only to search out a door.

  Still, I had grown aware of what was due.

  I was sleeping in the below-deck at the end of my second shift, though at my bench, while some were yet rowing in response to Lanko’s hurry to leave the cold behind.

  I woke without alarm to find men binding me with thick cords. I lay quiet, and let them do what it reassured them to do. My use for the ship was ended. I sensed something before me, some test, some knowledge I must achieve, that waited for my solitude. I was not afraid, nor angry.

  They finished with the rope, whispering. I opened my eyes and let them discover I was alert. They stumbled back, cursing with fright. When I did not struggle, thinking me restrained, they became more courageous, and one kicked me in the side, another wrenched my head up by the beard and dropped it back so I should see diamonds flash in my brain. I did not defend myself with Power. I said, “Be careful,” and they trampled over each other getting away from me.

  Then someone shouted from the hatch, Lanko’s second. The braver men hoisted me, and presently I was out on the deck under the dome of polished jet that passed for a winter sky.

  The sea roared softly around us. The wind was getting up, and the great sails spread to it lovingly, and aft the windcatcher creaked as it was drawn over.

  They were burning incense before the Hessu god; I could smell the cloy of it. I could not see Lanko about; maybe he was sleeping off his fat ration of wine, missing the resurrection of these ancient customs. For I was to be the scapegoat, the sacrifice. The sea did not care for me, was peeved at my presence; as a mark of her displeasure she had misled the ship, rotted the rations, hidden the green and gold of the land behind hard white armor. So they would give me to the sea to eat, drown their bad luck, and fortune would beam on them once more. They did not even keep my pack, nor anything in it, but threw the bundle with me; bad luck was bad luck.

  I did not confuse the transparency of their belief with protestations, threats, or unnecessary miracles.

  Not till they flung me, with a hilarious shout, over the rail did I cause my bonds to part like frayed wool. Not till my feet touched the water did I stay my fall, and catch my bundle neatly as I stood on the sea.

  I had come to Charpon’s vessel walking on the ocean. I went from Lanko’s galley in the same way. It had a certain ludicrous aptness. After all, I could not swim. It
was wiser to walk than submerge myself in icy fluid in order to reassure a band of brigands, and keep my inflamed conscience peaceful.

  Again, no wonder. No pride, no disdain. It was useful; I was glad I had the art of it. They screamed behind me. How often, in my wake, those cries as the magician passed.

  It is, after all, a very small thing to be a lord of men, men and their lords being what they are.

  * * *

  I came ashore.

  That place. It might have been waiting for me. In moments of foolishness and delirium that followed, sometimes I supposed it had been. Philosophy had replaced human terror for me, for I must employ my brain in some fashion while I endured. Occasionally, I reckoned the winter ice-fields of the southwest lands were figments of my mind. Or of some vaster and more astonishing mind, that thought in continents, dreamed in worlds.

  Certainly, I was better equipped than most to face the rigors of the glacial open, which would have killed the strongest man in a few days, or less. My body continued to meet the cold unflinchingly. My skin dried, but did not corrode or flake itself raw; my eyes stayed clear though the lids swelled; and after sunshine, for about an hour once the light went, a temporary snow-blindness would haunt my sight with white gauzes. Even ice burns vanished from my hands in moments. I was not comfortable, but I was not in pain or distress. It was an extraordinary magnitude of self-preservation, never before at my disposal. As a child learns intuitively to make sounds, to organize its limbs, to recognize symbols, so I had learned, just as intuitively and with no conscious effort, these abilities, and activated them spontaneously.

  I had determined to walk northward, sunrise and set being my guides. I say “walk” and walk I mean. I did not spring into the air. To levitate—or fly, as Tuvek might have termed it in his tribal days—is as wearying at last as to rely on the natural means known as legs. I had even been able to scale the cliffs above the shore without recourse to sorcery.