Hunting the White Witch

by Tanith Lee

  She lay yet within the bronze box, which I did not like to see. (Even at such a moment, this obsolete superstition unnerved me.) I took the hand she had let fall, and spoke her name. I helped her to sit up, then lifted her from the cask. She stood before me, as she had stood countless times before me, and her eyes were bright as swords, though she did not speak to me or make any movement of her own.

  I led her through into the other chamber, to the silken bed, and poured her wine. At first she would not drink, till I set the cup to her lips. To see the soft ripple of her throat as she swallowed brought home the wonder to me afresh. The responses of sex live close by death—it has always been so, nature striving to replenish the store—and rape has followed the battlefield time out of mind. For all the prelude, I was hot to lie on her now, among the shiny silk. Only her wide eyes kept me from it.

  “Malmiranet,” I said. “What is it? You’re safe and I am with you.”

  As if at a signal, she placed her hand again over her breast. There was no longer any mark of the knife on her, as I could well see when I leaned and rested my mouth there.

  It had not been her practice to be so wooden. At length I told myself I asked too much, and, holding her by me, tried to explain to her the things she must already be aware of, but perhaps could not comprehend. Fool that I was, I even required her to inform me why she had slain herself. I had some notion to shock her from her reticence if I could not bring her to me more gently.

  I heard my own voice go on and on, as if I lessoned a child. And she in my arms, like a wide-eyed child, unspeaking.

  * * *

  I was weary, and fell asleep somewhere in my monologue, and woke in the near black tomb to find her there beside me yet. A star stood over the vent in the dome and showed me her eyes, still fixed as gems.

  I rose and lighted the lamp that had been provided for my ghostly comfort. In an ivory chest close by, a pile of clothes were lying—my own gear from the Palace; even the jeweled collars in a tray, and the boots below.

  I glanced about at her, and she watched me silently.

  “I will dress myself as befits a civilized man,” I said to her, “since you’ll have nothing to do with me. Then we leave this place.”

  I had no plan; all ways were open but inchoate. My world was centered here, despite my words. I had found I could not quite think what I should do with myself and her. Smash down the wall, that was easy, erupt out into the amazement of the city—or, if I pleased, levitate myself and her to the opening above, destroy the grille and, as once before, travel over a starry nighttime sky. But to what?

  There had been a star when I was dying in Bailgar’s boat, I remembered it now, one star visible through the murk, like the star in the vent of the tomb. A distant breath of unease passed over me, for even inside safe walls, one may hear the wolves howling.

  “Who rules Bar-Ibithni?” I said to her. “The council, or has the old man got back in the chair?” This allusion to Hragon-Dat brought me to Sorem. I had forgotten him, an indication of my true state if I judged myself. Sorem, too, was dead, locked in some gold case. I could raise him, if I felt it proper to my scheme of things. Would he then look at me as she did, and with such bright, unblinking eyes?

  I had been examining the chest rather than continuing to gaze at her. Her stare had begun to strike chill on me. The rustle of her skirt made me turn about.

  A curious phenomenon. I could survive death, yet my instincts to avoid a mortal blow were as insistent as ever.

  She had stolen out as quiet as air and up to me almost as quietly. Her face had not altered, nor her look, but she had brought me another gift. One of those slender hunting spears, which she had raised to plunge between my shoulders.

  I jumped aside. The spear flashed down and bit upon the wall and the head broke from the haft. I recalled how she had told me once she had not gone hunting in a long while. The wood had softened; still it was the force of her striking that snapped the shaft. She had meant a second death for me, and to spare.

  I caught her by the arms, but she made no other move at me. She was expressionless and she did not struggle. I wondered how I had slept by her and come to whole. Was it some madness of grief or terror on her that drove her to this?

  “Malmiranet,” I said, “in what way have I done you wrong? Tell me. I will set it right.”

  I had grown to a knowledge of her face, of her body and its gestures; I could have picked her out if she had been masked and draped among forty women. Now, her body familiar, its contours positive through the silk, and the chiseling of that face of hers unlike any other’s, and those narrow hands, one wrist with its wound serpent of gold that I had seen her wear when all the rest of her apparel was gone now, when she was identifiably one woman only, yet she was not that woman. This was some doll, fashioned in the absolute likeness of Malmiranet, but Malmiranet it was not.

  I had let her go, and I had walked away from her, keeping my eyes on her, nevertheless. I took garments from the chest and began to clothe myself. It seemed always so with me, that after the greatest and most miraculous feats of my life, I must be made to feel, by emotion or by circumstance, a whipped brat among Ettook’s tents. I could not bear the searing blankness of her stare on my nakedness, like the leveling of a blade. We had been skin on skin too often; it was hard to find winter risen from that fire.

  What I had put on I scarcely noticed, some workaday suit of the Crimson Palace, too fine for anything but lounging in. With the jeweled accouterments there was a belt of rare white snakeskin, chased with gold and with a buckle of lapis lazuli—something she had given me. I showed it to her, remembering how she had buckled it on me, and what followed.

  She took half a step toward me, her hand outstretched and my heart leaped in my throat, wondering what would come this time.

  What came was this: all passivity left her, she flung back her head, her mouth opened wide, and she screamed. Not a woman’s screaming but the ululation of an animal, piercing, feral, almost continuous.

  I ran to her and pulled her to me. I tried to stop her cries, tried to rock her, console her. The terrible wailing went on and on. When I drew her head against me, she sank her teeth in my shoulder till they met, and still she cried in her throat like a beast, even as she gnawed my flesh.

  My blood had grown cold, and I shook as if my death had returned for me. I have no recollection of what I said nor of what I did, until my desperation drove me to that thing I hated and abhorred, to seek the reason in her mind.

  The mysteries of existence and of surcease remain with me, with me more than with most for, in setting me apart from them, my heritage has denied me, for a while at least, the answer all other men learn too swiftly. The grape of truth is often bitter, but not to taste it in its season would be to waste the vine. One answer I had, there in that tomb with its painted flowers, its clothes chests and its gold. Not mine, but all other human flesh decays, and at its death, what lives within it goes elsewhere. Maybe to some other place, some fiery world such as the Masrians talk of, or to the black pit of the tribes, or to something too wonderful to conceive of, or maybe to nothing, to smoke, to air, to silence. Whatever else, no magician, however masterful, can bring that substance, that element—spirit or soul—back into the vase which held it. Or no, I will amend that. I will say only that Vazkor could not, after Malmiranet’s death and the failing of her flesh, recall her. Everything of her I had healed. She was whole, her organs sound, she breathed and her heart beat. But she, she was in another country. The creature lived and moved and made its noise, but it was empty as the sarcophagus from which I had lifted it.

  The brain I had entered was like a twilight fog at sea. Objects pushed up from the mist, mirages or rocks, the fragmented, now meaningless, remembrances of her brain, like a catalog chipped in stone that the dust storm has eroded. The violence that had sprung from them was basically motiveless, a misinterpretation, a bewildered f
lailing in the dark. For the creature I had raised was in confusion. A state vague and stupefied, a frenzy concocted of instincts and impulses. Though her brain had retained its melted images of me, the eyes of the automaton did not recognize their significance. Its response was primeval. I had introduced this disturbance, and it must denounce me, destroy me. From which it would seem there was some reasoning there, but there was not. As a sail changes to the wind, so this thing angled itself this way and that. No more. All this I know, who searched for a woman inside that skull, and met only the tenantless desert.

  I seemed to have grown as vacant as the being I held in my arms, my soul to have left me.

  Yet I could not help but be gentle as I reached and stilled what I had set in motion, those ticking clocks within the wooden doll. I gave her back her body’s death.

  Gradually the tremors of physical life fell quiet, the head slid softly aside, its blind eyes closed. When I had wiped my blood from her mouth, I saw again my woman’s face, as I had known it.

  I laid her down, not where I had taken her up, but in that couch she had given me.

  Her flesh had not yet begun again to die, for this moment it was sweet and perfect. She looked like sleep. I did not ask her pardon; it had not been her I wronged. My trembling had stopped. I lifted up the lid, the huge golden lid I had cast from me. I must use my Power for that, and even as I did it, I thought, This is the last hour I use it. It has brought me sorrow and folly. I am a child with fire. Let me wait till I have been taught by my life and by the world. I will not be a sorcerer again till I have reined myself and what is in me.

  The shadow enlarged itself over Malmiranet, and hid her. Only the small sun-hole was left. The peacock with its broken tail, the horse, and all the flowers would reflect on her, and when her beauty was merely bones, their whiteness would take color, blue and rose and gold, at the passing of the sun.

  The star had vanished from the roof of the tomb. The black was warming into mauve.

  One ultimate act of Power was needed to open the wall. One initial step was needed to carry me into my life, which was altered. Something glittered on the silken bed, a bead that had fallen there from the flounces of Malmiranet’s red skirt.

  I sat and turned it in my fingers, that bead, as the world turned toward the dawn.

  6

  Human alarm takes many forms. Some appear comic if one’s mood is desolate and drained enough.

  There was a door into the tomb. They had brought me through it, and she had come that way also. It could not be seen from within, among the branches of the painted trees, but the priests of the necropolis could effect entry when and if they chose. I believe they did not often choose such visits. No doubt they would have foregone this one, if they had not been pushed by decrees other than their own.

  I had never thought how it might seem.

  A tomb contains the dead, who are properly immobile and unspeaking. Though Masrians leave lamps for the ghosts, nobody expects they will be lighted.

  First had come my own muffled yells and bellowings, then the enormous crash of my coffin lid on the tiles, followed by a destruction of masonry and the brazen clamor that marked my opening of Malmiranet’s sarcophagus. The domes are solidly built but provide excellent echo chambers with the vent in the roof to let the noise out upon the air. Probably a timorous watch was posted at this juncture, who did not pass a barren night. Maybe they heard me speak, my movements. Certainly, the glowing of the lamp through the aperture would have been noticed. Finally, the snapping of the spear that missed my body by inches. And after that her terrible cries—so terrible to me that they have lingered in my sleep along with all my other hauntings, less poignant but how much more awesome to the priests outside.

  They waited till sunup. Bar-Ibithni had had a surfeit of the dark.

  The door was flung wide suddenly on the twilight morning of the tomb and on the shadow of my brain; a golden eastern sky gilded everything, and somewhere there was a rill of doves purring, for the priests kept silent a long moment, as if to let me hear them.

  There were ten priests in all. Their eyes popped as if invisible nooses tightened on their gullets. Here a hand dropped a magic censer—for purpose of exorcism? There one was turning red with fear, the way some fat men do.

  So I had my dismal joke, as I sat there resurrected. I even had the humor to recall it was not the first time I had come back from death to men’s eyes, and these not the first priests to marvel at me, though they were without Seel’s fury, and this place something finer than the krarl.

  Abruptly one of them spoke my name and fell to his knees. It was less a gesture of reverence than a loosening of the joints in fright, but the rest aped him. Presently every man kneeled, every man whispered, “Vazkor, Vazkor.” (I was back in another place of my past, a fortress-rock in the mountains, seeing the masked city men of Eshkorek kneel before a tribal brave, who was Vazkor, the Black Wolf of Ezlann returned from the grave.)

  The joke died, as I had not.

  I thought, I have taken sufficient for one morning.

  I said nothing, made no sign. I walked by the kneeling men and out into the sunny avenues of the Royal Necropolis.

  I could have made myself a king that day, Lord of the Masrian Empire. Who could have withstood a deathless sorcerer-god? No man whose name I call to mind. I could have been an emperor, and conquered fresh empires, as my father had meant to do before even he got me, indeed, as he had begun to do, before even he was very much older than I on that day.

  But I was beyond empires; I had achieved, or lost, that much at least.

  I got out of the pillared archway with no trouble. The guard there, making eyes at the gardener’s boy, paid me no special attention, and probably took me in my Palace gear for a noble come to offer in the little temple, for friend or kin.

  The streets of Bar-Ibithni, sponged with saffron lights, seemed as when I had first gazed at them: busy, opulent, luxurious. The fringed litters went by, the rich men and the merchants, the boy-girl “Theis” in their tinsel clothes, and occasionally a Hessek slave on an errand. It was very strange, dreamlike, as if the separate scourges, the uprising and its fires, the swarm of Shaythun and the yellow plague, had never been save in some nightmare curtailed by the dawn.

  My eyes were dazzled. I had been too long from the sun and too long from men. My way turned east of itself, to leave this enchanted, self-healing wonder behind, and reach the open land beyond the old palisade, the vineyards, and the groves, and perhaps the place where I had flown down from heaven on a white horse, and she and I had nearly missed the signal of the burning docks so deep we were in another fire.

  On the road, not far from the edge of the Palm Quarter, I met a woman.

  She was obviously an aristocrat’s slave, most likely his concubine, dressed fashionably and prettily, and she even had her own slave to walk behind her, to hold a parasol above her curly head, and with a club in his belt for overfriendly citizens. She stepped out from the gate of a great house with green enamel cats along its walls—it was my staring at the cats, my eternal symbol for Uastis, that made me see the girl. She appeared to be set on the same direction as myself, and she was crying.

  Till she glimpsed me. Then she put her hands to her mouth and halted, as if at a chasm in the pavement. The male slave, primed to her reactions, strode forward and scowled at me, and told her she should have no insolence from me while he stood by. But she choked out, “No, Chem. Everything is well. This gentleman has done me no harm.” Then, starting softly to cry again, she came toward me.

  I do not properly recollect what I felt. That she recognized me was sure, that she craved something of me also was evident. My heart beat in heavy leaden strokes, knowing already. She was a Masrian slave, tall and slender. She would have had a look of Nasmet, but for her sadness.

  “Forgive me if I am foolish,” she said. “It can’t be, for they told us he was
dead, dead for thirty days now, and buried secretly at the order of the Empress.” I could say nothing. She said, “But I have often seen him, here in the Palm Quarter. He was a sorcerer, and he could heal all sicknesses. Or can it be that you, sir, are Vazkor?”

  Then I found I was answering her, not meaning to.

  “And if I were Vazkor?”

  The tears streamed from her eyes. She, too, dropped on her knees.

  “Oh, my lord. It’s my child. They said you would not heal anymore, but I will pay you anything. My master is rich and careful for me—anything, my lord.”

  The male slave, who had been standing looking warily at us, now moved up and put his hand on her shoulder.

  “It’s no good, lady. Suppose he were Vazkor, he could do nothing. Your child died last night. You know it. We all know it, and grieve with you, even the master. But that’s an end.”

  But the girl raised her face to me, running with its tears, bright with them and with a burning hope, and she said, “Vazkor could raise my child. He could raise the dead. Oh, my lord, make my child live again.”

  A warrior does not learn how to weep in the krarls of the red people, nor can he learn it after in hubris and Power. Yet there will come one day a blow so gentle that it will split the rock and find the spring beneath. The fates are kind to women, or to any that can with ease wash the sores of life in such water. Even when it comes hard, it is a balm.

  Yet I had enough of my past still with me that I turned away from her, that she should not see me weep.

  Easier to hide a wound than crying from a woman. She knew at once, and at once she was changed. She rose and put her arms about me, and held me like a child, like her own maybe who was gone, and whom I could not give back to her. As if she understood it all, she asked no more of me. Nothing she had from me, yet she would comfort me, and truly, I found comfort there in that leafy street beneath the enameled wall, with the stoical slave idling nearby till our display should be done.