Hunting the White Witch

by Tanith Lee

  The island of the mountain was rich then with summer. It was a garden of slender waterfalls, fields of wild flowers, wild bees, and wild vines, with everywhere the sea folding blue as sapphire about it. It was like the paradise of some mythus, where gods should live; unconsciously, I think, she had not been immune to her deification, though she disdained its associations. She picked, from some village, a nurse for the children, for she had been brought another child swiftly, word of her interest having flown. The nurse was a woman with a talent for babies, a peasant with no inhibitions and no offspring of her own, barren, and sore with unsatisfied maternity. Karrakaz selected others like her in the years that followed to attend the physical care of these charges. She herself, as the children grew, free as all the other wild things on the island, began to uncover in them those magic Powers that had descended to them, with their whiteness, from the Lost.

  Karrakaz was not a lover of children, I had reason to know. She had few dealings with their extreme youth. But this she saw to: that they should be untrammeled by the dogma and the codes that society, in whatever form, barbaric or civilized, imposes on its creatures; that no query of theirs should be ignored; that no injustice should overcome them. She could read their minds, and did so. Frustration was a dog that never bit them. Anything that might have clogged their psychic heritage was kept at bay. Love of life, celebration of mind and flesh, the purity of unstigmatized sex and fearless meditation, this was the cornucopia she poured upon them. She gave them everything that inadvertently she had denied to me. They should have turned out better than they did.

  Yet, venturing from the mountain, this free, this perfect, this brilliant, to observe the unfree, imperfect, dull and fettered world; she had not planned for that, nor the chemistry that would begin to work on them. Before, they had been only happy; now, reflected back from the gritty glass of contrast, they noticed they were gods.

  Hearing Ressaven speak of it, I could only conclude that she had also followed this mirage and endured its dissolution with her demon-mother, and that she perceptively shared in the guilt of Karrakaz, her ominous sorrow and regret.

  Of Ressaven herself, no hint was given in the history. I supposed she kept from me that she was also the child of the sorceress, because she was persuaded I would become hostile. It seemed she might reason I should not stumble on the truth, since we were so unalike in appearance. I considered the notion of her father, pondering if my sister had ever known him, and if she had despised him ever, as a mortal. She had mentioned a purging of fires, but not where she had found them in this cushioned life.

  That she had been appointed guardian to the Lectorra was apparent. I recalled the tale that Karrakaz never left her mountain.

  We had reached the island shore by now, a long skirt of crystalline ice that fanned out into a pleated palisade of cliffs above, all bathed in the transparent black of night. The silver cumulus had sunk upon the mountaintop. It was how the Masrians would paint a holy mountain in a picture, its summit girdled with a band of cloud. Surely, this was a mysterious place, apt for its role.

  I stood on the beach, and said to Ressaven, “What does Karrakaz avoid on the mainland? Why is she so afraid to leave this citadel, that she sends you in her stead?”

  “What does she avoid? Simply her own legend, what she has become for men, despite her efforts to avert it. She did not mean to be a goddess of the western lands, nor to recreate a race of gods. But, as you see, she is a goddess and the Lectorra are gods. In the villages, here and there, they have begun to worship her and her white brood. So now she withdraws the legend, keeps herself aloof.”

  Then she told me something that surprised me indeed: That Karrakaz no longer communicated directly either with the shore-folk, or with her Lectorra. A handful of them, her first chosen, still dealt with her face to face; my guide, Mazlek, was one of these few. For the rest, none of them had seen her or heard her voice in some years.

  “She is deliberately making herself an enigma,” Ressaven said, “because she intends to ease herself from their minds, and ultimately, Zervarn, because she intends to leave this mountain, to abandon her Chosen to their hubris and the harsh lessons of the world. For how else are they to learn? How else is she ever to be free?” She stared at the ocean with her wide cool eyes. She said, “What was begun was foolish. She understands that now. To continue the foolishness would be a wickedness. To ignore the wickedness would be worse than wickedness. The enterprise that Karrakaz began here, out of her loneliness and her own unthinking dream, might bring back the very horror that her race engendered, and perished by. The Lost were evil, vile, debased. They could not help it, they had no fire, no measure of the soul, only this endless possibility of Power. And the Lectorra are the same. Throughout these years of her hiding and her silence, she has permitted no more albino children to be brought to White Mountain. Presently she will leave those that remain. They must work out their own destiny. She has harmed them enough by her nearness; now only her desertion of them is feasible.”

  “Yes,” I said. “She is clever at that.”

  Ressaven turned to me. “Bitter words,” she said, “yet you have come from it very well. Do you suppose these poor little gods you held in the air, blustering and weeping, will grow as heroically as you, or as strong?”

  “She disgusts me,” I said. “Her schemes, her vacillations, her mistakes. Everything fits. Disorder and cruelty. Haphazard misery. That is her.”

  Then I saw her anger. I had not anticipated it; her serenity misled me. Neither had I ever imagined the rage of a woman could unnerve me, but she was like no other.

  “You are no longer a barbarian among the tents, Zervarn,” she said. “Do not mock a bloody sword; you carry too many in your belt.”

  I mastered myself. She was only a girl, though it was hard to remember it.

  “You and she,” I said. “Either you lie together in a bed, or she birthed you.”

  That threw her, as I intended. She frowned, with that stasis coagulating in her eyes again. Then she said, rather low, as if she, too, must take herself in hand to speak, “We are losing time here.” She moved away from me, and on ahead, to where a narrow path opened in the cliff.

  It was as I had guessed. My beautiful sister, who had not wished that I discover it.

  On the rocky way I noticed for the first time that her feet were bare as they met the frozen cliff, except for twin anklets of gold, which shone down on the snow.

  As we climbed, the sharpness of the breakers softened below, to a sound like the distant running of horses. It was so quiet then that I heard my breathing, and hers, and the muted chink of those gold anklets, which sometimes struck together.

  5

  Inland, the cliffs poured over into a valley bowl of black and white woods, with the mountain rising from them at the island’s center.

  The path, which led us upward and over the rampart of the cliff wall, slid downward to this interior valley country, which seemed hidden, as if by intent, from the beach, the sea, and the mainland. The only flowers there now were snow flowers and the ferns of ice patterned over winter pools, yet from the shapes and skins of trees beneath their flaking bark, I made out hawthorns, wild cherry, rhododendron, and countless others which with the thaw would fire into white and violet, blue, carmine, and purple. It would be a maze then, this secret plain, starred and powdered with lights and shades, and the winding canals curdled with shattered blossom. I wondered what birds would come there, and what fish dart in the streams, and if they would be good to eat—and then recalled I had no need of the death of their pink flesh. In any event, I should be long gone from White Mountain when the spring entered its gate.

  But Ressaven. What would she be doing here in spring? Flowers in her hair no doubt, as a girl would have, and her arms and shoulders bare and spangled with the green and lavender cannonade of sunlight shot through blossom. Probably she would open her thighs for some white-haire
d boy-man among the grasses. Or maybe she would be far from this haven, out in the unfree, imperfect, dull and fettered world, with me.

  Half a mile from the cliff, something pale shone in fragments through the weave of the trees. The path looped in and out, and there against a glint of frozen water like an oval coin was an extraordinary tall house, three terraced stories, spear ranked with pillars, with windows of multicolored glass: a miniature mansion of the Lost Race straight from Kainium, but not a wreck.

  “What’s this?” I said. “Do you bring humans here after all to labor for you?”

  “No,” she said. “There are several such small palaces on the island, and a marble town on the mountain slopes. They were in ruins, but the Lectorra rebuilt and repaired them.”

  “I don’t visualize you, lady, neither your fellow gods, toiling about the masonry with mallets, scaffolding, and pulleys.”

  There were pebbles lying between the villa wall and the brink of the pool. Suddenly six or seven of these flew up like startled pigeons, skimmed across the congealed surface, and plummeted down with a crack of breaking glass upon the ice. She said, “The Power of the mind and the energy of Power that can fling pebbles can also raise a marble block, shape a column, and lift it upright on its base. True, men from the mainland advised us—at least, spoke with Karrakaz some years since, to advise her. But we employed no hirelings and forced no slaves. What help we asked we paid for, sometimes in gold, to which we are able to gain access in the city, sometimes in humble barter, wild honey, fruits, and the milk-cheese of our goats.”

  “Now I am to picture you at the milking?”

  “Yes. I have milked a goat,” she said. “And I have learned how to charm the bees so they do not sting me when I must steal some of their harvest from them.”

  “A homely milkmaid witch.” I did not believe her story, or not all of it. The white villa-mansion would have required vast strength to set it to rights by mind alone, a mental strength I had not observed among the Lectorra. Those pillars—I might have raised them, if my brain had been turned to mason’s games. But those here could not, save for Karrakaz herself perhaps, and this one, the daughter.

  I said, “I have had much traveling and little rest. Is your palace equipped for us to break the journey in for an hour?”

  “Yes,” she said. She smiled, and I wondered if she knew what I was really at, suggesting we pause here, and if it meant she complied.

  The bare blossom-trees grew about the porch. The double doors were oak wood, and gave at a twist of the iron ring. The house was as it must have been centuries before, or near enough, an irony of Karrakaz’s or Lectorra whim.

  The anteroom was flanked by red pillars. The pillars in the hall beyond were green and slender, carved to resemble the stems of great flowers, the flower-heads opening scarlet against the flat roof, which was the clear blue of a summer sky, and painted so cunningly with clouds I part expected them to move. Screens of fashioned ivory stood before the red marble walls, with one huge window set in the chamber’s farther end. Its leaded mosaic panes—red, blue, green, and purple—would admit a fantastic daylight. A staircase went up to one side; the balustrade was ivory enhanced with gold, the shallow steps, white marble. In an urn of green jade at the room’s center grew an orange tree in a full double bloom, of flowers and tan fruit, some freak fancy of the Lectorra, doubtless, to outwit the season. Its scent filled the hall, which was unnaturally temperate. I thought of the system of hot pipes in Eshkorek, and realized a similar construction must be in use in the villa, though with no slaves to tend it, if her protestations were to be credited. (I was coming to credit them. I felt a casually expansive yet controlled and sensitive use of Power here, something I envied, being still uneasy with my own. In fact, to reveal these riches, Ressaven had set fire to the ranks of candles on their silver and golden stands by single intent glances of her eyes. It disquieted me still, to see these arts exercised thus unselfconsciously by another.)

  There was a couch in the form of an ebony lioness and ivory chairs in the form of her crouching cubs, all snowed over with furs and rugs, as was the heated floor.

  “You must go trapping often,” I said.

  “Never,” she said. “We take only the pelts of beasts that die in the course of nature, or the woven fleece of living animals.” She looked at me, a strange look, and said, “But you have been hunting often, and would not understand such measures. Now, shall I bring you food and wine?”

  The dwelling, which must be hers, seemed well supplied for visitors, its hypercaust going, candles ready, larder stocked. For whom did they keep food? Could it be, despite Mazlek’s boast at the inn, that some of the Lectorra still needed to cram their bellies?

  “No wine or food for me, lady,” I said. “I live on air, as they say, as any magician should.”

  “So I was told,” she said.

  The candles blazed bright. I put my pack down, with the mask hidden in it, on a lion-cub chair. She stared at me, and abruptly her face sharpened into desolate hunger, as if she had glimpsed some distant sanctuary she could never reach. I thought, She is nineteen, yet maybe she has never been with a man, never come on one she desired, and they dared not force her. Though I could not, even then, be sure of her, if it was to lie with me she wanted, or some deeper unknown thing, some ancient wish or fear in her heart. For she looked afraid, too.

  I went near to her, and put my hands on the fastening of her dark mantle. She did not stay me, only went on staring into my face. For myself, I kept my eyes on the lacing, and spoke trivia for safety.

  “This splendid palace would have been only a humble rustic outhouse to them, I suppose, your Lost Kainium folk. I saw an underground road of theirs once, clothed with gems and metal and high as the sky, which they had named Worm’s Way. And this, possibly, they would call the Dove Cote or the Hut. Fitting mansion for a witch who milks goats and gathers fruit in her white hands.” At that I took up her hand. I anticipated the tactile electricity to sear between us again, as it had the first time, but now we were primed to it. There was only a dazzle of nerves in my skin that touched on hers, which ran straight through me like silver wire.

  “Well,” I said.

  The mantle slipped off. She wore a blue dress under it, blue as the ceiling, with her whiteness gleaming under. Her body looked like a fire, trying to burn through that gown to reach me.

  But she drew her hand away.

  “Zervarn,” she said, “son of Vazkor—”

  “No names,” I said. “No more names, Ressa. You led me here, and I followed most willingly.”

  “I did not mean—I did not think—”

  “Think now, and of me.”

  “Karrakaz,” she said.

  “Let her wait. That’s for tomorrow. I’ve forgotten her, as she expediently forgot me.”

  “But—” she said.

  “Be still,” I said.

  Her eyes swam, her mouth, even now trying to speak to me, merged into mine before it could form words, forming instead to welcome me, and draw me in. Her body stretched to me. Her shoulders came free of the blue water of the dress, her breasts rose from the cloth into my hands, each with its central star of fire that became the axis of my palms. She turned her head and cried out softly that this must not be, and yet her arms wound on my back and clung to me as if the world tumbled and only I remained to hold her safe.

  I folded her aside and against me and had us down among the mounded furs. Wherever our bodies met, a fresh conflagration stirred our flesh. This is new, I thought, but the thought burned from my skull. The dress had been expressly designed for me to loose it; the fastenings melted. Her limbs were cool and smooth, but a warmth within. The silver fleece on her loins did not look human, nor any part of her spread out before me like a flaring snow in the candle-shine, and jeweled with the smoky flush of mouth, the two pink stars upon her breasts, the rose cave into the ice. She was
not virgin, and yet, like some goddess-maiden in a legend, her innocence seemed renewed especially for me. But she was knowing, too.

  Her head fell back. She surrendered herself to me with a silent, savage delight, no longer denying anything.

  * * *

  The unpainted lids of her eyes were like fine platinum. I put my lips there, and tasted salt. I asked her why she wept.

  “Because this should not have been between us.”

  Many a woman has said that, a tedious lament, but with her it was not the same.

  “It was bound to be,” I said. “We are like and like, you and I, Ressa.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And can it be that is your objection? Because we came from the same door, brother and sister? No matter. The fathers were different. Besides, it is a tribal way of seeing things, to balk at this little incest. Come, am I to suppose you educated in a tent? I thought a Javhetrix schooled you.”

  Her tears were dry. Her eyes, which I had seen blinded by pleasure a minute before, were now once more those large opaque disks, unreadable, but reading everything.

  “Then again,” I said, “who will know, since we shall be leaving this magic mountain of your birth?”