Hunting the White Witch

by Tanith Lee

  All this was simple. I had my goal, I had my healing and self-protective flesh. I had my indifference to doubt.

  I had no food.

  Throughout my life, I had been able to make do with little. Here and there, due to circumstances, I had made do with very little indeed, going days without nourishment. This was now the case. It did not impair my strength to begin with; actually, I took small note of it. I was convinced I should shortly come on some sign of habitation, or, failing that, game of a wintry sort I could bring down, if I must, with a bolt of energy. I had also snow everywhere to melt in my mouth for drink.

  Six days passed, then twelve. My last meal had been a bit of biscuit I had consumed on the ship. Oddly, I had felt no hunger since, appetite gradually stifled by the low rations before. Suddenly, on that twelfth day in the cold lands, hunger returned to me like a howling ravenous dog. The pack on my shoulders changed to lead. My guts knotted with vipers, a black light freckled my eyes; like a savage out of some prehistoric nightmare, I tumbled on all fours and crammed the fiery clots of snow between my lips, swallowing and gulping and scratching at the frozen ground with my knife for more. This makeshift dinner did me no good. I presently vomited, and lay afterward facedown in the broken snow, till the dim flaring of a magenta cloud told me the sun was going undercover for the night, and I had best stir myself to do likewise.

  The land had been rising some while, and it was hard to make out toward what, for most days there was ice mist or thin snowfall to obscure the view. Once or twice I had seen loomings that might be mountains, or only further banks of fog. Once I had traversed a dismal wood, most of its branches lopped by the weight of the snow, and reduced to a forest of gray pylons with the sun running above and speared systematically on each. When it grew dark, I took shelter in a diversity of rocky outcroppings, in caves or on platforms, mainly to avoid the wild beasts I had hoped to encounter by day. I had even made a fire (for show I believe, as I did not absolutely need it then), using my Sri tinderbox rather than Power, and scraps of dry growths found fossilizing within the rock crevices.

  On the evening of my hunger, I pulled myself up and staggered over a rise and into a narrow valley. It was exceptionally clear weather, and I could make out the darkening terrain. It seemed I had been already ascending the flanks of a mountain for a time, and had not been cognizant of the fact.

  The valley was high, surrounded by uplands and peaks. A group of these seemed ominously to smoke, as if some dank furnace were going in their chimneys. The sun went, and the valley and the mountains were suspended in a silver twilight.

  I found a cave. By the opening, a slender pillar of fluted glass stretched from the overhang above to a basin of greenish mirror below: a frozen waterfall. Sometimes, on its east side, it would warm at sunrise, the ice there would crack, and for a couple of hours smashed shards and water would splash down onto the unreceptive pool.

  The cave was shallow and dark. In one angle lay a white bone. This bone became important to me, since it signified earlier occupancy, a link with the races of men and beasts.

  I had seldom been alone for very long. Alone in my brain and my soul, yes, but who is not? But physically unaccompanied. Crowds, bystanders, women to lie on, men to fight, enemies to be outwitted. Here there was only silence. The sounds and shapes I heard and saw were products of the landscape. No bird flew, no wolf cried; when a shadow flicked like a wing on the mountainside, it was a cloud passing.

  The first night, I scraped up dirt and woody growths to make a fire in the cave. I chipped off a piece of the static waterfall and sucked this tasteless burning confectionery. I had begun to feel the cold in a strange, dislocated way, and my hands trembled from hunger. I fell asleep, and dreamed, as in stories they say the hungry man does, of roasts and mounds of bread and the fancy concoctions of cities. In the dreams I gorged and stuffed myself, and was never filled. Near dawn I woke with a groan, shivering, and with the snakes redoubled in my vitals. It reminded me of the plague, and presently I lapsed off once more, and dreamed of that.

  I came to about noon, too weak to move, except that shortly I had to crawl into a corner to relieve myself, and thereafter often. My bowels were loose as if I had been eating rotten fruit and my bladder scalded, and several times I threw up, though I was hollow as a scraped gourd.

  The day smoked out into night.

  I lay on my back, with my Sri cloak rolled under my head, staring out across the blackened ash of my fire at the huge gems of the stars, of which some were bluish and some faintly green or pink. My head was quite clear. I was not even afraid. I knew I would not die, though I had begun to wonder what would become of me. Maybe, by use of my Power, I could draw sustenance to me, an animal from its winter burrow, a man who would help me. Yet when I tried to concentrate my will, I was aware only of the blank emptiness of an untenanted world. Not a whisper of life. Eastward the coast ran. In front of me, northward, another inlet of the sea, but how far away, hundreds of miles, days of traveling . . . . My mind began to cloud as I thought of it, and the weakness flooded through me. My Power was at a low ebb, after all, smothered like a flame. My hands were wooden and white, frozen now. I should lose fingers if this kept up, and would they grow again?

  I had sensed a test before me, a knowledge I must achieve. Was this, then, the test, the knowledge: starvation, the reduction of my physical self to a puking, helpless frostbitten baby on the floor of a cave with a bone in it?

  Eventually the pain went away. I had no strength, but could just pull myself to the opening and look out upon the white valley, the pale thunder colors of the mountains, smoking earnestly as caldrons, volcanoes perhaps, trapped by an age of ice. I began to examine the bone, for I had stopped wondering now about my future or the actualities of my trouble, and had commenced reflection in the form of those huge symbols of infinity, or the invisible symbols of the nadir.

  By constant touching of the bone and meditating upon it, I came to know its history, an insignificant and ghastly one, and from this reverie passed into others that dealt with earth and sky, surcease and eternity, men and gods. I grew very calm, a calm I had never known before and which left me afterward, for truly, I do not believe a man could retain this serenity, this strange content, and dwell in the places of humankind. It seemed to me I had fathomed the innermost secrets of myself and of everything, and maybe indeed I had; it was the fee I paid to life and living that when I began again to live I must forget them. In the tales of many lands, the prophet goes forth into the wilderness, the waste of sand or snow, or aloft on the barren black mountain, and when he returns to the people his eyes are great and luminous, his face is altered; he tells them he has seen God. I will suppose that God, if He is anywhere, is to be found in men, the nugget of gold buried inside the mud. I will suppose, too, that the wilderness washes off for a moment, or forever, the mud and the clay. Perhaps, then, the returning prophet should not say, “I have seen God”; but rather, “I have seen myself.”

  If I were to total up the time I spent in the cave, I think, all in all, it would be near enough fifty days, but I shall never be sure, as I will never be sure of the mysteries I learned there, and forgot.

  The end of the rite was very ordinary.

  I appeared to wake from a pleasant dreamless sleep. The sun was rising and the pillar of waterfall splintering on its east side and the bright drops spinning down to the pool. I felt neither hunger nor thirst, nor sick nor weak. In fact, I felt quite normal, strong and able, my brain lucid and my body ready for any action I might require of it. This was patently absurd, and I knew it to be absurd. The visionary mood had sloughed off. I was entirely a man again, and reasoned like a man. Still, there seemed no harm in trying. I stood up, stretched, and my arteries responded with a singing healthy flow of circulation. I was not cold, and no part of me had suffered from lying invalid here, immobile in the ice. After a minute, so taken with it as I was, I ran out of the cave and across the va
lley and back.

  I had never been more fit. I think I cavorted in the snow like a clown, till I remembered something and sobered up. I remembered the Old Race.

  The Old Race did not eat. I could recall very easily Demizdor’s mutterings, the Sarvra Lforn with its jeweled fruits, the nonexistent latrine...yes, neither eat, nor dispose of the by-products of eating—two tyrannies of nature dispensed with. Recall, too, my shame in that place of theirs because I had not been free of such essentials. And now. Now I was one with them. Blood told. My mother’s blood, for she, the white phantom, was so palpably a descendant of that Lost People of winter hair and white metal eyes.

  I returned slowly to the cave, sat down there, and opened my pack. I removed the counterfeit silver mask, which Lanko’s scum, in their terror, had left me, and I looked in its blind gaze a long while.

  Probably it had all come from her, all my Powers, from her race, their heredity in me. Perhaps there was nothing in me of my father after all, beyond a physical resemblance, a few memories of his retained in the cells of my brain, a brief flaring of his ambition, which I had at the last foregone. Apart from that, my abilities seemed of her alone. Even that time upon the fortress-rock near Eshkorek, when I had thought his shade or his will was guiding me, when I had grasped an alien language as if it were my own, even then, maybe, it had simply been my legacy of Power passed down from her, breaking in me because it was the season for it, because I had a need of it.

  It seemed the memory of my father Vazkor was leaving me.

  * * *

  Three days later, breathing deep of the cold air, and needing no other substance to sustain me, I was making north across the ridges of the caldron mountains. Five days later, striding down their backs, the weather mellowed somewhat, and no snow fell.

  I came to a river, frozen save at its center, where there was a gap narrow enough for a strong man to leap. Seven days beyond the river, I came on a forest of pines and next of black oaks, green with ivy. From a high terrace, I saw a loop of the sea below and the land curving off about it to west and north. I went that way and discovered a village down on the shore, before evening.

  Blue seals were bathing about half a mile out in the sunset water, and men—they looked in the distance much as men do everywhere—sat mending nets by a great fire, and I could smell the frying fish, which no longer stirred my belly, and see the yellow lamps lighting.

  I did not go there, having no necessity, also, I believe, out of the way of mixing gregariously.

  I was journeying, because it must be, toward that habitation I had sensed to be Uastis’ own. I wanted questions answered, and maybe still I wanted her death. Yet love of life is a curious thing, and comes like wine fumes in the heart and head at certain seasons.

  Gazing down at that village on the shore—the playing seals, the western flash of the low sun—I needed no more than simply to exist, in order that I should be thankful for my birth.

  Part II: White Mountain

  1

  I CONTINUED NORTHWARD, parallel to the sea on my right hand. The quality of the winter, and of the terrain, had changed. Inland, forests folded away into round-topped hills; I saw a distant town with walls and towers, and birds flying overhead. I saw pasturage, and even the stacked steps of vineyards, everything under the snow now, in stasis before spring should powder the earth with other colors. A couple of times I found myself on a road, and passed men there. Wagons with roofs of painted hide drawn by shaggy horses, a fellow in an open chariot, driving wildly, as if he had some fury to get rid of, cursing me from his way. The chariot had a noble clumsiness, big-wheeled and breast-high in front, and clanking with plaques of bronze. The man had a head of peppery blond hair, lopped at the nape of his neck. He looked for all the world to me like a Moi tribesman got up in Eshkorek city clothes, though the fashion was somewhat different, the voluminous cloak of scarlet wool looped and pleated about him, caught back over the right arm on a shoulder boss, to show the striped gray fur that lined it. A day or so after this encounter, a woman went by in a litter draped with white bearskin, and she herself muffled up in other white furs. She, too, was fair haired, though more darkly fair than a Moi. She made her bearers and the three outriders stop and one ride after me to take me back to her. She wanted to know who I was, where I was going, if she might help me in any way. It appeared that wherever I went I should find women much the same.

  I said I was a stranger. She said she could see as much. The language we used reminded me, in an odd way, too, of the city tongue of Eshkorek, though it was, in its essentials, different. She told me she was the daughter of a lord across the next hill; the road had turned inland about a mile back toward a pink-towered mansion, no doubt his. She entreated me to break my journey there. When I courteously refused her, she laughed. Since I had not given my name, she began playfully to call me “Zervarn,” which in this tongue meant something like “Dark Acquaintance.” From that I gathered black hair to be uncommon.

  Finally, she put her white-gloved fingers on my arm and said, “Let me guess. You’re going over the river to Kainium, to ask for the goddess. Ah!” she added, triumphant. “He blanches! So. I am right.”

  Whether I lost my color, I hardly know; I think I must have done. Expecting it all this while, the shock of finding it jolted me.

  “Kainium,” I said. “Which goddess is goddess there?”

  She smiled, taking on her, strangely, a kind of occult air by proxy.

  “I don’t know for sure, Zervarn my darling. They call her Karrakaz.”

  My heart hit my ribs. I said, “That might be she I seek.”

  “Go then, chase your goddess. It is some two hundred miles away, and then you must cross the river. Better to remain with me.”

  I told her I should never forget her kindness in directing me. She kissed me, and we parted.

  Two hundred miles, a river, a name: Kainium. I foresaw a little farther than that: a breadth of sea, and from the sea, lifting, a shoulder of alabaster. A white mountain rising from the ocean, face to face with a scatter of a city on the shore.

  I had bad dreams that night, lying in a ruinous watch tower above the coast where the steel-blue sea ran in and out among the ice floes. Malmiranet was carried dead to her death box, and the outer air gushed in to waken me in mine; Demizdor was swinging from a silken rope, her neck broken like a bird’s; Tathra lay between my hands with her unblinking eyes . . . . It all returned to me, and more.

  Then, near dawn, this: Noon on a cold slope, white snow down, white sky above, at back the smoke-stained wall of a city. Between the slender penciled shapes of winter trees, a woman and two men riding. Light lost in black garments, bright as arrows on metallic masks. The men wore the Phoenix of the cities, though not like the designs that I had seen in Eshkorek, cast in silver. The woman wore the face of a cat, cast from warm yellow gold, with green gems about the eyes, emeralds dangling from the pointed ears, and golden plaits behind, mingling with her white hair.

  They came into a miserable scramble of huts. It was a steading of the Dark People, Long-Eye’s multitudinous slave folk. I saw the gray-olive wooden faces, the rank blue-black weeds of hair. A crone came up; the woman dismounted from her horse and went away with her into a hovel.

  So much I had seen from a distance. Now something drew me close, into the door. I saw women’s things: blood, pain, vileness, through the smoke. The crone bent to her task like a black toad. What she did sickened me, yet I could not look away.

  Uastis the goddess groaned only once. She was brave as she tried to get rid of me in the healer’s hut.

  The day washed out in night, the night into a predawn gray.

  The white-haired woman stirred. She whispered. “Is it finished?” Her voice was very young (she had been a girl then, hard to remember it), very young and tired, worn out with hurting.

  The black toad crouched there and said, “No.” Uastis said, “What n
ow, then?” She braced herself for what would be next, the way a man will when he’s told the probe must go deeper yet to free the spear-head from his flesh.

  The toad woman said, “Nothing now. A loving child. He will not be parted from you.” And Uastis sighed, only that.

  Yet her desperate denial, locked up in her brain, rent me, burned me. I withered in it. She would have cut her womb from her with a knife if she could have cut me from her with it.

  I woke in a sweat, and some of the salt in my eyes was more than sweat or the sea, for the habit of tears, once learned, is facile. I thought, Well, but I knew this all along, that she hated me. Though I did not know she set bone instruments to dig me out, yet I might have reasoned it. Well, but I live, I live, and she’s near and shall answer.

  I felt a depression like a black cloak smothering me.

  I got up, and started out on the two-hundred-mile walk to the river, and Kainium.

  It was nearer to the spring in that direction, still winter but more yielding.

  I passed through several towns, something in them of that northeastern style I recollected from the ruins of my warrior youth. White arcades, tall towers that no longer looked so tall to me, roofs of colored tile. Westward and inland there was a form of government, some prince or other sitting on his backside ordering this or that. Here, along the coast, was a shore province, far-flung and considered feral. Such gems of information I picked up from gossip as I went through. I was more interested in other news.

  I heard a deal of her, of Karrakaz the goddess. The closer I got to the river estuary, the more I heard. Kainium was a rough, haphazard area, less lawful than this provincial coast. It was where one went to get ensorceled. If one came back, one came back with goat’s ears, or in the form of a warmwater seal. For the home of the goddess, that was a mountain of crystal out in the ocean. Sometimes there would be a road on the water that one could cross over by, sometimes the sea would cover it, and sweep the unlucky into the depths. If one were sick, one might risk the journey. Men in the last months of terminal disease had reputedly returned whole and well unless they had got goat’s ears, or been changed into a seal, presumably.