Hunting the White Witch

by Tanith Lee

  The energy of that blow was weak, not from her choice, I thought, but because, being young, she had not come to her full Power. Lucky for him. I believe she would have slain him for touching her, otherwise.

  Again the mirror. This hubris. An infant unlearned and unlessoned. But if I felt anything, it was not anger. I made my way through the floundering voiceless anguish of the crowd, and came up behind the man, who had fallen backward. I leaned over him, touched him, and healed him.

  He rolled over on his face, clutching his eyes, then rolled again and sat up. He had good reason to be bewildered. He could bring himself to his repaired vision only in stages. The crowd was uncertain of what went on, but looking at them, I perceived the Lectorra knew well enough.

  I have seen a lair of wild dogs react much the same, physically bunching together before the spears, their eyes gleaming and their mouths open to bite.

  Shortly, one of the dogs snarled, as one always will.

  “You,” Sironn grated, “you’re only a man. What are you doing?”

  Then the pack bayed freely.

  “A trick!”

  “The goddess warned Ressaven of him.”

  “He cannot withstand us.”

  The blind fellow, no longer blind, leaped to his feet behind us. From his yelling, we became aware that he supposed the bitch’s lightning shaft had healed his eye. It was she who denied it, by slinging a twin shaft at me.

  I knocked her feeble Power aside easily. There was a crackle in the air, energy deflected upon energy. The crowd of humans behind me made their first cry.

  I observed what the Lectorra were at, a collective attack upon me gathering in their unhuman faces, their vital brains. But they were only children, spiteful because the scourge had never harmed them, because they knew the world was round and they the lords of it.

  I had made vows and to spare, but the present cannot be ruled forever by the past. I used my Power for this small enterprise, because it was the time for it.

  The Lectorra, all five, I forcibly levitated some feet up in the air, like kicking dolls yanked on strings. I held them like that, with a grim exactness.

  They squalled in a panic, and attempted to release themselves, and found they could not. They could not equal, let alone disarm me. They tried and the bolts and flares of energy they cast at me began a fetching firework display upon the beach. I heard, from their bawling, how Sironn, the youngest boy, had a voice not yet broken. The little girl—I had lain with younger than she, yet her fifteen years seemed slight to me then—engaged my pity, for she began to weep. The older ones blustered, meaning to kill me, exhausting themselves with their futile thrusts of Power till the sweat beaded and the fine hands trembled. They had never had such a thrashing, and in public, too. At length I let them down, like eggs, upon the snow.

  The moment I turned away, one final levin bolt smashed uselessly at my back. I guessed it was the elder girl, who had taken her medicine hardest. I said, not looking about, “Let it go, sweeting. I’ve surprised you sufficiently. Don’t entreat for more.”

  There was peace after that.

  As for the village folk, they had shied from me in horror. I had shattered their legends for them, and their faces were resentful and unwilling. The man with the cured eye was at the fire and pouring beer into himself, and ignoring me the way the feasters are said to ignore Death who sits down among them in the Masrian story.

  Then, when I raised my hand, a number flinched and shouted, imagining more violence to be unleashed now on them.

  I said, “If you will stay, I will heal you.”

  It needed a woman to call, and from the rear of the crowd, “Are you hers—the Chosen of the goddess?”

  “No, madam,” I said, “nor do I laugh at the blind.”

  “Well then,” she said, “I’ve my sick boy here. Shall I bring him to you?”

  “You bring him,” I said.

  They let the woman experiment for them. She brought me a boy with a disease of the lungs. He was coughing red phlegm and had to be carried. I made him well in a moment and, after that, seeing I had earned my salt, the others came to me.

  Behind, on the dark night just behind the torches, the Lectorra stood motionless, like five white trees rooted in the silver mud.

  I thought, the sores and maladies vanishing under my hands, Here I am again at this rusty gate. Yet I was glad of it. I think, all told, I shall rarely be eager to heal, but it is a marvelous thing, and in truth I am thankful for it at last, aware of what has risen in me from the seeds of indifference and mockery.

  And then, at length lifting my head, I found the crowd had slid aside, and some ten paces off another waited, though not for healing.

  A sixth Lectorra, a girl, and alone.

  Her mantle was bluish black as the sky and the sea had grown, but a white hand held it, a white hand with a narrow wrist ringed by a bracelet of green polished stone. Her hair was white as the moon’s white rising, and her face was beautiful enough to strike through my loins, my joints, the ribs of me, like a note of music sounded in the depth of sleep.

  I beheld her distinctly. She looked a year or so older than the others, about nineteen. Yet her eyes were swords; they pierced me, then pierced into the white children who lingered there at my back.

  “Ressaven,” I heard the oldest boy call to her. “Ressaven, you were not here, and he—”

  “I saw what he did. I saw what went before.” Her eyes returned to me. Though she was young, younger than I, yet her eyes were clever in their knowledge. It seemed she could have read me like a magic crystal if she willed it. “You are Zervarn,” she said.

  “I am Zervarn. Did she tell you to expect me?”

  “She?” This Ressaven questioned as Mazlek had questioned me.

  “Your goddess Karrakaz.”

  “She is not a goddess, but only a woman possessed of Power,” the girl said. “Your Powers, too, are to be reckoned with.”

  “So I believe.”

  “Oh, you may believe it,” she said.

  She began to walk toward me, and my blood turned like the tide. To stare at her was as if I leaned above a chasm of lights. Of the whole tribe of Lectorra, she is the nearest one to the old lady, I thought. It shines on her like phosphorus, that closeness of Power. The torchlight burned in her hair, and as she moved, I could see the line of her apple breasts through the dark mantle, the dancer’s narrow waist, and strong, slender limbs. The green Lectorra gem was between her eyes, also. She put back her head to look at me.

  “You have sought Karrakaz a good while,” she said.

  “And you, Ressaven,” I said, “shall take me to her.”

  “Perhaps it would be less harmful to you if you left well alone.”

  “Does she threaten me, then, the old hag on the mountain?”

  “No. She wishes no ill to you.”

  “That’s generous of her. I cannot promise the same.”

  Her breath carried the scent of flowers, and her mouth was the color of a winter sunrise in that winter face. Lashes, like dark silver blades, did not play about with her straight glances; those terrible young witch’s eyes poured out their naked and uncompromising verity upon me. She had no lies to bandage up the cheats and inadequacies of others. Here was a plain where no quarter was given, or accepted. I tried, for one instant, to conjure in her place the ivory of Demizdor, the amber of Malmiranet. But the beauty of all the beautiful women I had known was guttering out like lamps.

  To test myself, I put my hand on this one’s shoulder.

  A shock of electricity went through me at the contact, like Power itself, and obviously through her also, so that for a moment the alcum of her eyes was clouded.

  I thought myself then a fool to have searched for kinship among the others. Here was my half-blood, my half-kin. A daughter of Karrakaz. Ressaven was my sister.

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  I had come searching for wormwood. I put my hand into the pit of vipers and found instead flowers grew there, and wine cooled in a silver chalice and the sun rose in the black window.

  Then I thought, This is another enchantment, one more ploy to throw me from the trail. The hound forgets the scent of the bear when he catches instead the tang of a she-wolf in the spring. She will have me riding her white mare, and unremembering all the rest.

  Ressaven. My sister.

  I could recall, if I wished, Peyuan’s daughter, black, blue-eyed Hwenit, her overfond liking for her brother, and my portentous verbiage upon the matter. And here was I in the same case, lusting for my sibling, and the morality of it, the incest—damned and inappropriate word—slid off me with the ease of smoke. I needed no argument to fortify myself. Confronted with the fact, no ethic restrained me, nor seemed to have a right to.

  Maybe she noted the passage of this through my eyes, for her own became suddenly extraordinarily still, almost opaque, as if she heard some word inside her mind that frightened her.

  Karrakaz had sent her to me, yet not warned her of the outcome. Then again, perhaps even this was part of the drama, the dream, meant to ensnare me. The mortal crowd had melted back toward its wagons, and the Lectorra came slinking up to Ressaven now. They apparently held her in some awe; no doubt, being the first among the first, Karrakaz had made her their mentor, the intermediary between them and the goddess.

  She turned from me and said to them, “You have the blood of the Lost, and you become like them. Always I have been with you before on the days of healing. This one time you have shown me how it is with you.”

  The talkative oldest boy gazed at her defiantly, revealing his unease.

  “You tell us the Lost Race perished because of their pride, but they had a right to be proud, and besides, Karrakaz lives and she is of their race, and, as you say, we are descended from their seed, which they spilled in women’s loins centuries ago for amusement. That is why she chose us, since we bear their likeness. So they are not dead, Ressaven. See—here they are.”

  “Yes,” she said. Her face was grave, and her voice, though it had no anger, was like steel. “They are here, in you. Humanity’s curse, which found them out, may find you also. Think of that.” Then she observed that the younger girl was crying again, and she went to her and stroked her hair gently, and said, “It is hard, I know it. It is very hard.”

  Presently, like the children they were, she sent them home to the island. The tide shifted about this hour, leaving bare an old causeway that began in the sea a quarter of a mile out from shore. The quarter of a mile, needless to relate, they ran over, and the village people moved from their fire and their wagons to watch that white flitting of specters walking on the ocean. For me, the villagers had few glances. I was the unknown factor, I did not fit into their scheme either of normalcy or the supernatural, and was best ignored.

  “You were lenient with her brats,” I said to Ressaven.

  “And you were harsh,” she said. “You have encountered the fire that burns and fines; you have come through it. They have no fires, no ordeals, no yardstick.”

  “You are Lectorra, too. How is it Ressaven is not like the others?”

  “I have had my fires,” she said simply. “Not all of us can avoid them.”

  “Also,” I said, “you are nearer to the lady on the mountain, are you not? A deal nearer.”

  She looked very long at me. You could tell little from her face, only this youth, this loveliness, and this stunning clarity.

  “You are the son of Vazkor. Truly.”

  “Truly I am,” I said. After what I had thought in the valley, of his memory going from me, it was strange she should say this to me. The surf made its noises pulling from the beach. The mountain had faded from red to gray. “She told you everything, did she?” I said. “How she would have skewered me forth from her, and when she could not, and had murdered him, she left me to become a boar-pig among the tents. I might have been a king, but for her meddling.” But when I said it, I tasted how stale it had become, my eternal accusation, with so much use.

  As if she knew that, she said, part smiling, “You are a mighty sorcerer and a mighty man, and could carve a kingdom, if you wanted, from any portion of the world you chose. No one made you a king, Zervarn. You have made yourself what you are. Be glad of it, for it is better.”

  “How am I to judge that?” I said. “I never had a chance at the other.”

  “When she bore you, Karrakaz had no birthright to offer you. For herself she hoped for less than nothing.”

  “She has been feeding you these lies since first you lay on her knee,” I said, “that is why you credit them.”

  “You hate her, then,” she said, and her wide eyes widened further, as if to see me more clearly.

  “I am past hating her. She is the riddle of my life that must be answered, that is all. Will you take me to her now? I can seek her alone, if I must, and discover her. I have got this far.”

  “Indeed you have,” she said. “Come, then. Her dwelling is some hour’s journey across the island.”

  * * *

  We walked up the shore some way, beyond the fires, to a place where we could cross over the ocean unseen. Neither consulted the other in this, but it did not surprise me to note we were of like mind. I asked her how long the causeway kept above water, for the tide was already swelling in once more. She told me that path would be gone before we reached the island. She did not ask if it would trouble my Powers to make the whole crossing in the sorcerous way.

  The sky was black, and the sea, both gemmed with stars.

  I said to her, “I grew among men who thought those lights to be the eyes of gods or the lamps of spirits or the souls of dead warriors shining with their valor after death. Now I gather that the stars are only circular worlds or spheres of flame like the sun. It is a great disappointment to me.” She laughed. It was a pleasing laughter, like bright fish flashing up from a shadowy deep pool where one did not think they would be. “And where did you learn such stuff?” I said.

  “Karrakaz was once the guest of men who knew these things to be true. That the earth is round, that it spins, and that the sun does not move.”

  “No doubt she was shown the proof,” I said.

  “No doubt she was.”

  “Well,” I said, “she has filled your head with fine stories.”

  “Think, Zervarn,” she said softly. “The sea glides under our feet; we tread on the backs of waves. You believe that, yet you cannot believe the world is round?”

  A cold wind blew from the farther shore, from the jaws of a tall silver cloud above the mountain. It blew her hair like a fire behind her. I swear I never witnessed anything more beautiful than she was, stepping over that dark ocean, darker than the sea and paler than the stars, with those wings of her hair spread upon the wind.

  “If you believe it,” I said, “I will believe it.”

  “Will you believe what I said of Karrakaz?”

  “I will believe that you believe it, honestly. But for me, I must have her excuses from her own mouth.” After I had said that, Ressaven was silent. I wanted her to speak to me, for somehow her being there with me was hard for me to accept unless she spoke in a woman’s voice. She looked unreal, or worse, more real than anything else, rather as the fabulous ruin of the city had looked more real, as if it had stood in space before the sea or the coast or the sky were made. I did not like this effect she had on me. I had the mistress of the house yet to face, I could not afford to kneel before the slave. I said, “Inform me, at least, Ressaven, how she came here and began this breeding stock of hers.”

  So, as we walked over the water, and presently up onto the long strand of the island, she talked to me of White Mountain, and of my mother. Despite myself, I hung on the words, hungry for news I had waited twenty-one years to get.<
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  Yet I was struck immediately by the tone in which Ressaven now uttered the name of Karrakaz, with a curious kind of tenderness, and regret. It seemed the child became the mother during the narrative. Manifestly, Ressaven marveled at her witch-dam, and simultaneously she pitied her. It made me wonder suddenly to what estate the sorceress had descended, if she were failing or debilitated, or what; and if I, the questioner and the avenger, had arrived too late to snap at a crumbled bone.

  Karrakaz, lost daughter of the Lost Race, had survived, by a prodigy, a kind of prolonged catalepsy, the death that overtook her nation. She had, thereafter, journeyed through a diversity of delusions, and several hells—Ressaven was not specific—to reach a treaty with herself. During that era of struggle she had wandered the northlands; later she came to the south, and there, perhaps near Bar-Ibithni, or in Seema, she had been brought a sailor’s rumor of the western shores, their ruins, their treasure, and their fair-haired races who bore, with some frequency, albino children. It was too close an omen for her to avoid. Some forerunner of Jari, a pirate adventurer, had brought her west. Probably her voyage had been better managed than my own.

  She reached the wreck of Kainium. She had seen its like before and recognized it as the building of her forebears. Once, she had experienced a terror of such spots, for she had feared the Lost and the strain of their blood in her; that hubris she had finally sloughed. With her demons conquered, she no longer feared either her race or their ruin. In a bizarre fashion she even felt a tug of nostalgia, pleasant homesickness sweep her, pacing that decay of majesty, all that remained of the places of her infancy.

  The villages about stirred gradually to an awareness of her. Intuitively they sought her for healing. Shortly, she came upon a white-haired child wanted by no one. (I interrupted to ask Ressaven if this oldest and initial Lectorra were she; I was trying to catch her out. But she smiled and said, “No.” She looked almost playful for an instant, the way a girl will, veiling her origin in mystery, but, continuing, her face resumed its solemnity.) She said that from my own trouble I would understand the loneliness Karrakaz had felt, one woman, and extraneous to the clans of humanity. I refrained just then from answering with the obvious, that she had borne a son, and need not have been alone. As for the loneliness, it was no stranger to me, that gap of isolation. Karrakaz, apparently, had mastered her solitude, but, meeting the albino baby, plainly atavistic blood of her own Lost Race, she visualized irresistibly that the child would resemble her, and could be trained, if the strain of Power was accessible in it, to a similar ability. It was the last temptation, and she had succumbed.