Hunting the White Witch

by Tanith Lee

  A Hessek palace three stories high, five before the top two floors collapsed, had been reborn as the Inn of the Dancing Tamarisk. Here, traces of weird Hessek splendor remained, an antique silver cage of crickets chirping just inside the door, round-bellied lanterns of red glass, a costly, threadbare pornographic carpet on the wall. Painted Thei-boys sat primly in a row on a low gallery, peering through latticed fans, waiting to be picked by the customers. Meantime, the rain hustled down the cracked panes of green crystal, and plopped through the ceiling.

  My four bandits were good insurance. Modest Darg had not told me Semsam paid him tribute. As the friend and “blood-brother” of a bandit lord, and a Sri magician into the bargain, I was fed and accommodated at no expense, and promised a ship to wherever I wished to journey. Probably they reckoned me a fugitive from justice. Many such, I imagine, dashed in and out of Semsam.

  Presently we donned oiled sharkskins, and walked down to the dock.

  The sea, pebbled and scythed by the deluge, blended into an auburn distance. Westward, beyond the points and spits of rocky bays, the sun was lowering itself on the silver wires of the rain. My guide, a crippled Hessek cutthroat missing a selection of items from his anatomy, indicated the shipping with a portion of finger.

  “There, Lauw-yess. The Tiger or the Southern White Rose both trade with the outer islands.”

  “Master wants to go farther south than islands,” rapped one of my bandits in inventive Hessek.

  The retired cutthroat marveled at me, and rubbed his broken nose with his left hand, from which all members but the thumb were missing.

  “The Lauw-yess wishes to go south and west, then, to the big land there, the land with the white mountaintops? That’s a journey of many months, lord, or more. Gold there, and gems they say. Only one ship ever went there and came back rich.”

  “What ship is that?” I asked him.

  “Dead ship now,” he said, “and the crew—” He made a gesture that meant “Prison” or “the rope,” in other words the law of the Masrians. “Yet,” he added, “Lanko might risk the voyage. He’s had bad dealings with Masrian patrols, and could do with ocean between them and him. If you can pay—”

  “Pay?” demanded the talkative bandit. “The blood-brother of Darg Sih to pay?”

  In fact, I had come from my tomb with some money in my belt; not that I had thought to provide for myself, it had merely been there. When I attempted to pay for my keep among the Sri, I had found the coins put back, with the finesse of a slit-purse, in my pocket the next day, and the next, and at length I had given in to their generosity. However, if I had sufficient to reimburse a pirate captain for a many-month excursion into the unknown remained to be proved.

  “Take me to Lanko and we’ll argue it out.”

  My guide said he would rather I went without him, Lanko being a man of uncertain mood. His vessel lay around the nearer point, in a cove, obviously hiding from Masrian lookouts.

  In the driving rain, therefore, my escort and I picked our way around the point, over black and white sands, and up a narrow by-water, which assured me at least that Lanko’s navigator knew his trade.

  There was a break in the cliff; the ship stood against the silver brownness of the sky, black on the rain light, great sailed, as if he were primed to be off again, asleep with one eye open. If I had needed a portent to tell me, here it was. This was the ship as I had foreseen it on Peyuan’s island, exact in every detail, as the Vineyard had not been. The ship that would lead me to Uastis.

  It was two masted, like the Vineyard, but with only one bank of oars, built tall, nevertheless, tall and knife-slender, a greyhound of a ship ready to run.

  A man challenged us as we went along the bank.

  The bandits grew vociferous; it appeared Lanko disclaimed fealty to any other than himself. I dissuaded them from brawling, and we got aboard.

  A number of sailors, Seemase from their look, stood and stared at me and at Darg’s ranting soldiers. I noted some of the watchers had that unmistakable top-heavy build of the oarsman, though none were shackled and did not seem to be slaves.

  The man returned, and told me Lanko would see me alone. The bandits roared and snorted with the false but lethal, hastily conjured fury of professional villains. Finally, I got into the midships cabin, and the door was shut.

  None of Charpon’s luxury here. Plain furnishings, a deal jug of liquor of the kind with stoppered mouthpieces from which to drink. Lanko himself was a tall Seemase, Conqueror blood somewhere, with a lard face and canny eyes.

  He glanced me over, and said, “Sri, eh? Bit of a way from your wagon, eh, conjurer?”

  I thought, I killed Charpon for a ship I never had to use. That crime sticks in my throat because it was futile, as much as anything. And here is a new Charpon. His ship I must have, but I won’t kill him, not I, nor any other I send as a deputy of my cowardice.

  I said, in the Seemase tongue Lyo had inadvertently taught me, “I want transport on your vessel, Lanko. How much?”

  “Huh! You speak Seemase, do you, boy? Not money, though, I think. I carry no passengers.”

  “One passenger,” I said.

  “Where to, Sri-man?”

  “South and west.”

  “No land there,” he said.

  “Three or four months out, there’s land.”

  “You’re speaking of the continent where the gold grows in apples on the trees, and the whales swim alongside and lay down their bones for you on the deck, and in winter the girls sit up on floating pillars of ice in the water and show you their goodies.” He unstoppered the jug, drank, and stoppered it. “More ships go that way than come back. Plenty of stories come, but no men.”

  “One ship got rich there.”

  “Rich, and the Masrians had it from them.”

  “I heard,” I said, “that you’d be glad to put some sea between yourself and the Bar-Ibithni patrols.”

  “So I would,” he said. “You clever lad.”

  He had a knife and he was going to instruct me with it. I felt this from him like a sudden heat in the cabin. I had wondered what I should do in this sort of situation, and now I found out. As the knife ripped upward toward my face, I caught and spun it from his grasp, utilizing the energy of my will more quickly than ever I could have acted with my body.

  He snatched himself away from me, and his chair went over. His cunning eyes showed calculation rather than alarm.

  “I said you were clever,” he said. “Now magic a mouse out of my ear.”

  “I’m not a showman, neither your enemy,” I said. “State your price, or let me work my passage. If you won’t go westward, take me as far as some isle where I can find another ship that will.”

  He picked his knife up from the floor and stuck it in the table. There were marks there where he had done it before. He did not bother with the fallen chair.

  “Why do you want to go west to a land four months from Semsam?”

  “That’s my affair.”

  He smiled at the knife. I thought, in a desultory, pointless way, I could dispense with all this, bind him to my service, hold him to it, and kill him if he failed me. Somewhere a voice answered: Charpon, Long-Eye, Lyo, Lellih. Malmiranet.

  “You’re set on going anyway, to evade the Masrian patrol. Why not pick up some gold while you’re about it? By the time you get back, they’ll be through hunting your ship. If they have not, you can buy them off with your riches.”

  “You have it worked out for me, do you not, Sri-man?” he said. He looked at me smiling, then, “Can you row?”

  It was like fate catching hold of my arm.

  “I can row. But not as a slave.”

  “None of my rowers are slaves. This is a free ship. I’m one man short since the stenchful soldiers chased us. That’s my offer, then. You for the oar, and I’ll carry you for your usefulness. When w
e reach the isles, we’ll see.”

  “Very well,” I said.

  “Very well,” he parroted. He dislodged the knife and pointed it at me. “What else can you do, wizard? Charm fair weather for us? Call breakfast fish from the sea?”

  I thought, I could walk it. Three months stroll over the azure ocean, fly up and lie on a cloud when I grew weary, couple with mermaidens when I itched. My Power seemed abruptly preposterous, funny. It had never seemed so previously.

  “You employ me as oarsman. Nothing else.”

  On deck, I read the name of the ship, written along the inside of the bulwarks as well as without: Gull. At long last, a ship named for the sea.

  It was still raining in the hour before sunup when Gull edged from the cove.

  His sails (he, too, was a male ship) were the dull gray-green of open autumn water, a camouflage. I was below, and did not see the headlands slick away into the rain, nor the sun come up at length on the larboard side.

  I had pulled this oar, or the forerunner of this oar, part of a day aboard the Hyacinth Vineyard, Charpon’s ship, that the portent of this. But no shackles now, and no Comforters with their eager flails. These were free men, though no doubt escaped galley slaves off other vessels, putting their compulsory education to use.

  I recalled how I had played a game, waiting, Power like a trick in my sleeve, on Charpon’s ship. I had rowed then for the sake of the game, amusing myself because I knew that when I chose I could resume instantly my superior role of god-magician. Now I rowed with no hope of this transformation scene to exalt me. My chained lion of Power. I would unfetter him to heal, to defend myself—indeed, that much had been instinctive. But to unleash my abilities to master others simply because it was convenient to me, because it saved me coins or labor, that I would no longer do. If I feared anything anymore, I think I feared that I might break my own resolve.

  The grinding of the oars jarred my flesh against my bones. I had got soft in Bar-Ibithni. This bitter medicine would do me good.

  We were leaving one Wilderness for another, for the sea is also a desert. Besides, there are deserts of the soul more arid than any bone-bleached waste of the world. I was yet in a Wilderness, would stay in it till the questions of my life had been answered, if they ever were. A great sweep of mental landscape, empty of comfort save for the brief watering places of human companionship, liking, love, where now the wells had run dry. Before me, across the waste, was a faceless goal of white stone: the place of the sorceress, but whether at the desert’s end, or simply at the horizon with another wilderness beyond, I would not see till I had come there.

  4

  The dream of western gold had tempted Lanko, as I had known it would. For thirteen days of warm, sullen, blowy weather, Gull ran between the outer islands, here coming to dock for taverns, sex, barter, or robbery, now and then fleeing like a scalded cat before the prophecy of Masrian shipping. The isles were broad rocky chunks protruding from the swirl of the ocean, their inland hills bearded with forest where wild sheep galloped. Mostly the men there lived by fishing, and were of the Old Blood. Great pyres were lighted on the uplands, smoking as the ship went by. It was a festival of Ancient Hessek, “Burning the Summer,” to propitiate winter, which brought storm winds, rams, and riotous seas.

  Shifts at the oars were split in two sections of six hours each, with two hours between. At night the ship made do with his four tall sails and the shark’s fin at his bow. When in port, the rowers also went ashore to carouse and let loose trouble where they pleased. They shared any booty with the crew, had a ration of salt-meat, fruit, biscuit and wine, and koois after a hard forced shift—when pursued by Masrians, or themselves pursuing some hapless craft. I discovered myself rowing Gull on such a course of sack one night, having been roused from sleep along with others. I thought at first we were escaping the patrols, till the grunted felicitations of the wretches about me set me right. A small merchantman, strayed off course from Tinsen and at anchor by some island, had been spotted by Lanko’s predatory watch.

  The Drummer beat like a madman, grinning and yelling encouragement the while, and we burst our arms from the sockets. Presently we must have rammed the luckless merchantman. A crash of timbers and men falling from the benches followed, next a berserk scrambling aloft to participate in the prize.

  I came out on the deck, and saw the trader-ship leaning in the water, holed in the starboard flank, upper deck ablaze with torches. It was not a Masrian vessel but a Tinsen galley, black as pitch, with a single red and black sail. An iron grappler provided a dangerous causeway for Lanko’s men, who struggled over it and then returned with sacks and casks. The Tinsenese had offered no opposition but cowered in the torchlight, imploring their ancient gods, promising Lanko’s vessel a vengeance plague such as had fallen on Bar-Ibithni the Beloved of Masri.

  When we were clear and cruising off down the night, leaving the bright-lit, howling Tinsen trader behind, the crew of the Gull waxed joyous with koois, showing each other ropes of black pearls and figurines of milky jade. The query arose: What need to go to the west now?

  I leaned by the rail, watching all this. I knew this ship was my means of passage, yet I did not intend to force Lanko to do anything. The riddle was resolved by Lanko himself, who appeared in a filthy red velvet Masrian kilt and shirt.

  “We’ll sail to the westlands, because I have decided it, and because this gentleman, this half-naked Sri gentleman stripped for helping our oars along, promises gold there. Rivers of it, lakes of it, and gemstones growing on the bushes. Don’t you?” he added to me. I said nothing. Lanko looked around and said, “We all remember hanged Jari’s ship that he brought back from there, so low in the water from riches he near sunk?” Getting drunk on their easy piracy and the koois, Lanko’s dogs barked for him, and for me. They began to call my advent beneficial, declaring the Tinsen galley was due to my good fortune rubbed off on them. Lanko, little eyes sharp, offered me a piece of the loot. I declined. He said, “Come, Sri, you don’t travel so light. What of that silver cat’s face in your pack?”

  I knew someone had been fumbling there, not he, but they had told him.

  I still said nothing. He smiled at my silence, and looked me over.

  “Never been in a fight?” he said. Stripped to my breeches as I was, he could see the absence of scars.

  “Not in any fight I lost,” I said.

  I could perceive he recalled how I took his knife.

  Smiling, he went away.

  * * *

  They caught a big fish on the fourteenth day. Its flesh was saccharine and I did not care for it, but Lanko’s men were delighted, savoring it as a delicacy, and telling me this, too, was lucky.

  They had begun to consider themselves now not merely pirates on the run from justice, nor reavers getting out to pillage, but doughty adventurers sailing to uncharted realms. Their talk was all tales and myths, and the recountings of Jari’s men before the law mounted them on ropes. Huge white sharks gamboled in the western seas, that would play with men rather than devour them, and girls with fishtails still conveniently equipped with organs of pleasure. South of west lay cold lands, where ships constructed of ice made war upon each other, ramming and clashing under the huge stars. Northwestward the sea was warmer, yet the mountaintops were capped with snow. One dusk, as the fellow rowers of my shift gnawed and champed their supper on the upper deck, I caught the name “Karrakess.” It was sufficiently like the other to stir me. I asked the man of whom he spoke.

  “Oh, some god-lady,” the man said. “She’s worshiped along the coast there.”

  “What is she like?”

  “Oh”—he made round eyes at me—“ten feet tall, with snake-headed breasts and a vulture’s head.” He burst out in guffaws at my guileless childish interest in goddesses. It was only some name he had picked up from Jari’s crew; he knew nothing.

  On the fifteenth day we saw the final
island melting behind us under a pall of rain, but the ocean ahead was clear, sparkling like smashed green glass.

  I wondered after if in some way, not meaning to, I had yet influenced them psychically. They had grown to such enthusiasm and determination to proceed, even at the year’s turning, when weather was uncertain and inclined to violence, and their wild baying of stories had none of that superstitious glowering under the eyes common to Seemase, Hessek, and mix sailors. And, most peculiar, there was this strange, sudden eulogizing of myself. A fresh wind—then I had sent it. A sunny day—my work. On one occasion the watch spotted a trading ship to the north of us. They were about to abandon their course to appropriate this bounty, but a squall blew up and they lost sight of it. Then it was, “The Sri magician’s god has directed us away, for the ship had no treasure aboard.”

  Presently, the inevitable occurred. A man with a festering sore in his foot came to me to heal it. I had already put an end to these miracles once, and resumed at Gyest’s prompting. He had shown me that the burden, which the suffering of men would lay on me if I refused them help, was eventually unsupportable. So, I healed the sailor, trying the trick with the bandage as I had with the man in Darg’s camp. Naturally, this one did not obey me, investigated his sore, and found it gone. Soon, I had the whole of the ship’s invalids to attend to. My days, and nights, grew leprous with rotten teeth, galls, skin cancers, and similar honey. My reputation burgeoned, to my disquiet and boredom, and my black shame. It is a common, not illogical supposition on the part of the cured to reckon you have done it out of love for him and for humanity in general. This naive and stupid trust, coupled to my unliking heart, sent me running like a sick and angry cur into some kennel-yard at the bottom of my soul.

  On the twentieth day, we had seen the last of any land for some while. Gull was stocked below with kegs of water and wine, salt meat and dried fruits. The air of adventuring and excitement continued. My best hours had become those twelve when I could bury myself with the pole of the ironwood oar, mindlessly turning in the dark toward the unknown faceless thing on the horizon of my wilderness.