Hunting the White Witch

by Tanith Lee

  Then I saw smoke mundanely rising to the left of the road, from a stand of trees, and next a building came in sight with a chimney-vent above.

  “A hospice,” Mazlek said, “prepared to receive all who wish shelter. Mainly, the backlands folk who seek Karrakaz are afraid to enter a city of the Lost Race, and shun the hostel. But you naturally, lord, will welcome the luxuries of civilization.”

  “Will I?”

  He smiled.

  “No trick, lord. Did you not save my life on the river?”

  To say I did not trust him would be overcourteous, yet I was pained to admit I was glad of a diversion from my path. I should meet her before another sunrise, which was all at once too soon. An hour with hot water, a razor, and some thought would not be amiss. I had been bathing in fistfuls of snow and the smashed glass of pools, and for my beard and hair I looked like a wild man escaped from some carnival.

  Truly, I would rather not go to her like this. Not out of vanity—it was that she had left me to struggle up a savage, and I would not be one for her. I meant her to see, despite the odds, that the wolf’s cub reared among hogs was yet a wolf, and fit to match her.

  There were two flaxen attendants in the hostel, men who did not, presumably, fear the ruin or the witch. One shaved me and trimmed my hair as I lay soaking in a green sunken pit brimmed with the scalding water from the hypocaust. I asked him what he did there. He said his village lay over the hills to the west, that he had been a leper, but through the goddess of the mountain he had been cured. Then his service here was in payment for the cure? Not so. He liked the locality, the mystical aura of Power hereabouts stimulated him—mage-craft he called it. He was inclined to chatter, so I questioned him. I asked him what his goddess was like. It turned out no one had seen her, saving, of course, her own people, those she elected to take because they were white, as she was. She never left the island, and none ventured there without her express invitation. Those who met her, met her veiled, almost invisible, in some dim sanctuary. Generally they did not need to dare such a thing, for her selected companions (the attendant called them specifically Lectorra, “Chosen”) could heal in her name, even the very sick.

  Yes, he said, the Lectorra came now and again to Kainium and the villages. You could not miss them. Like my guide Mazlek, they were notable for their albino looks, their pride, their enormous attraction. Young men and girls beautiful enough for gods. Which, he said, they could safely be accepted as. Yes, yes, he had seen them walk on water, fly, change base metal to gold, vanish into air, take on the form of beasts, call up rain in a dry season, calm storms so the boats farther up the coast could fish the ocean. Also they had strange teachings, for example: that the earth was round instead of flat, a ball floating in a void; the sun a similar ball, all fires, about which the earth circled warily. And the moon ran about the earth like a round white mouse, pulling the tides with it.

  The attendant, like Long-Eye, was not afraid of the everyday actuality of his gods.

  Presently his fellow brought me a suit of clothing, such being kept here apparently for the use of ragged travelers. (I had been many things in my time, now I was a ragged traveler.) However, the new clothes were a good woolen weave dyed dark blue, the calf-length tunic with a border of red. It would not humble me to wear them.

  Emerging from the bath chamber, I did not search for Mazlek. He would have slunk off as soon as I gave him the chance, and by now would have taken boat, or boot, or that fabled sea pathway I had heard mentioned, and got to the mountain. She would want to be informed of every detail: my appearance, my mood, my capabilities. However, it was no huge matter, for she had seemed to know plenty in any event.

  The attendants brought me lastly my bandit knife, having cleaned and polished it to the high gloss only a non-fighting man would coax from a blade. The irony of this symbol amused me somewhat. That knife, returned so freely. She did not fear me at all, it appeared. Or else, she would have me suppose she did not.

  * * *

  Thus, I walked down the broad ancient road into the cadaver of Kainium. My reflections were dour. I believed myself stoical. I might anticipate every manner of happening now, yet I was equipped to meet it. Before the sun sank, I should probably have met her, too. Whatever fate would spring from it would be fulfilled. A lifetime of question and doubt answered. The book closed.

  * * *

  The streets were straight as good spears. My footsteps echoed off walls, along colonnades, as if another strode near. Bits of crystal sparkled in windows. It did not have exactly a bad feel after all, the city. Just age, death, the resentful cold lament of something forever finished.

  I walked north. The big mountain-island showed between the shapes of the ruin, still ghostlike over the mirror of the water.

  The sun was westering already, painting streaks of thin red color on the whiteness of the avenues, washing the features from distant roofs and platforms, and hiding their decay. In silhouette I could have sworn those heights were habitable, save there were no lamps. Then lights came from another quarter, northward and below, on the shore. A greenish fever of torches between the city and the sea.

  I halted and watched these lights a moment. It would require no more than a third of an hour to reach them; by then the sunset would be crushing out the day. But they looked like an ominous greeting, a beacon to summon me, torches to light me to the feast.

  Just then something brushed my brain, soft as a finger brushing the neck. There, in the portico of a tumbled mansion, poised and quiet as if it were evening in some market town and she stepped out to view the traffic from her porch, was a girl in a green mantle. Her hair was white, all looped and curled like a court woman’s, and on her shoulder sat a white kitten, stony still. It was an apparition to make any hesitate, and as I took in her face, I beheld what I can only describe as an almost unnatural loveliness, perfect enough that I never reckoned to see better. Truly, as my barber had declared, one could not miss the Lectorra of the goddess.

  She had not tried to probe my mind. The signal had been communication merely, and she did not aim at more. She spoke.

  “You are Zervarn,” she said. It appeared that Mazlek had dallied to spread news here, too. (The cat yawned. Its eyes were nearly as pink as its narrow tongue. The girl’s eyes were white; she had the same green gem in her forehead as Mazlek had had. No doubt it was some unnecessary extra mark of their order, which they all affected; Lectorra uniform.) “Welcome to Kainium, Zervarn.”

  “My thanks for your welcome.”

  “My thanks for your thanks,” she said. She pointed past me, downward to the beaches. “That is the way to what you seek.”

  “What do I seek?”

  “Karrakaz, or so you have frequently been saying.”

  “So I have. And are you to guide me now?”

  “You need no guide. Follow this straight street to the terrace of steps, and descend. An old garden leads toward the beach. The torches burn at the end of the garden, where the shore confronts the mountain in the sea.”

  She made no move to come closer, so I turned and obeyed her directions. It had an atmosphere of theater, all this, which I assumed deliberate and infantile on the part of the one who had planned it. Yet it fitted excellently the aura of the city and the day’s ending.

  There were some two-hundred-odd steps twisting down between the broken columns; at one point a dry fountain on a marble plinth depicted a girl wrapped with an enormous serpent, a pornographic, beautiful thing to rouse the blood, despite the ice frozen cold on their ardor.

  The garden spilled from the steps and folded away toward the beach and the sea, audible but no longer visible, for the eastern vistas were closed now with tall trees. The sky was reddening, reddening the snow. To the southeast several towers rose at intervals from the pines and cedars of the garden. I had not glimpsed them before, but I soon stopped to regard them better, for they had that unmistakable sea
l of unreality I had come on in the Sarvra Lforn of Eshkorek. The two nearest towers thrust only their summits from the trees. One was shaped like the head of a horse, basalt black with a glittering eye like green sugar; to the east of it, the other was the mask of a lion with a mane of gilded brazen spokes. Farther south statically bloomed the cup of a giant orchid, whose gold-tasseled stamens, rising from the layered cervix, I gauged as the turrets of four inner steeples. Where there was a break in the pines, one complete tower revealed itself as a rearing snake with a lizard’s head, the scintillant eye a window, on its throat a collar that must surely be a balcony. From the green glow of it, it might be jade, vast plaques of jade set on in scales. The low sun caught the blink of gold and jewels on all of them, these monstrous toys.

  As I stared, out of the tree shadows before me came strolling two white people, boy and girl. They were about fifteen, adolescent, yet not like their age. The boy said to the girl, “This must be the man Zervarn.”

  The girl laughed and said, “How he gazes! We are not ghosts, Zervarn.” But in their whiteness, the sun blushing on them, making them look part transparent, the dark around the fantastic carved gem-towers beyond, they were stranger than any ghost I had ever trusted did not exist. “He is examining the tombs,” the girl said, “the tombs of the Lost Race.”

  “Should you like to enter one?” the boy asked. “We will show you.”

  Tombs—I had believed the Old Race did not die. Yet the dead city itself belied that. Something could kill them, certainly, and white bones lay for sure in the lizard towers and orchid towers, amid the jewels burning, and probably with treasure heaped on the floor. A prosaic piece of reasoning occurred to me, the yarns of Jari and Lanko’s kind of the gold that grew on trees. No doubt that was some memory of this very tomb garden, and others like it, maybe. But I wondered how many pirates had dared pilfer from the Lost People of Kainium.

  “Tombs are for the dead,” I said to the surreal children in front of me. “See, I am alive.”

  “The Lost did not die as men die,” the boy said. “Each lived for centuries. And then, after more centuries of sleep, sometimes they would wake, rise from their tombs, and return.”

  “She told you that,” I said, “Karrakaz. Fount of wisdom.”

  I thought, as I had thought with every one of these beings I met, Is this her seed, half kin to me, a son or daughter got from her lying with some albino buck, some child she kept?

  Suddenly, hand in hand, like a cabalistic painting on the wall of a magician’s house, the two of them rose upward in the air and drifted away, grinning back at me, among the trees.

  Hot and cold chased over my spine. Though I could perform the selfsame act, now I witnessed it for what it was: The mirror of my Power held up for me to see.

  I told myself I had begun to understand her plan now, if plan it was.

  I found a glimmering brown skull in the snow. I could not tell if it was mortal or god, and there seemed a sobering moral in that. I took it up and snow fell from the eye sockets. I set it back beneath a white-clad cypress, and its black glare watched me away.

  This dreamlike wonder-working, the extra-normal surroundings, were meant to rob me of any human values, and any human rage or vengeance I should have left.

  The sun sank into the depths of Kainium as I emerged on the beach a few minutes after, a beach broad and white with ice between the city and the water. Beyond the ice, silver mud flats ran out into the surf, and the sea was like cold silk flung shining there toward the advancing eastern night. And against that night, garishly lighted by the last sun ray, the huge mountain in the ocean, directly opposite this shore and finally immediate, was a shock of cinnabar.

  About forty yards off the torches burned, still greenish in the dusk, and a crowd was moving there on the light, men and beasts, and farther on a bonfire splashing up at the dark, showing the humps of wagons, carts, and the other traveling impedimenta of humanity.

  What this was I did not know. Yet I had only to pause, to use my wits, to guess.

  Lectorra, the goddess’ chosen, roamed the mainland, and a crowd of people gathered here facing the mountain-island itself. It was to be a time of healing, when these uncanny adoptive progeny of Karrakaz laid their restorative hands on mortals. She did not come. She never left her island, I had been told, but her Lectorra could work her magic, having been taught by her, and I had seen as much.

  The torches were not a beacon for me, after all, except in as much as they should demonstrate to me that my Powers were far from unique in Kainium. Healer, magician, in all things the tribe of the goddess were there before me.

  I went slowly to the light, slowly out of a kind of bitter savoring of events, these last drafts of wine to be tasted.

  Men, their women and offspring, packed close together about the fire and the resin brands, singing, which I heard over the breakers as I came to them along the beach, some parochial ballad of their villages. All this to keep the night at bay, the phantom city from exercising its spell, while they waited for gods to arrive.

  On the outskirts of the group, a boy feeding a shaggy horse before a wagon caught my footfall and froze, nervously eyeing me. But I was a black-haired man, not white. His alarm changed to simple curiosity. I must be an Inlander and obviously sick, or I would not be here where invalids came seeking aid: nothing to fear.

  I could see sick ones now, lying about on litters, some of them unable to move, a few alert with desperate attention. A small stir as I passed through. A woman made room for me on a rug spread near the fire. A man, unspeaking as she, offered me a mug of hot beer they had been mulling to warm themselves. This mute kindness touched me, the compassion of human beings pulled together in harmony by the peculiarity of their mission.

  I had not decided whether to play my part and remain to watch with them, or to make on, when their singing broke off, and two or three pointed along the shore, southward.

  The Lectorra had appeared abruptly, apparitions evolving from the crimson dusk like slender twinkling white lights. They were not walking but gliding this way, their feet some inches off the ground. It would have been nicer, if they had flown through the air; this was the calculated unostentatious ostentation of a cruel mocking and insensitive youth. Decidedly, Gyest had had the right of it. Sympathy is the sister of fear. These creatures had nothing left to fear, and fear in others was a game to sport with.

  The human crowd made no sound. Somewhere a single dog whimpered, but fell quiet of its own accord.

  The Lectorra alighted a couple of yards from us, just where the torchlight would make marble of them. There were five, the girl and the boy I had intercepted in the tomb garden, another two boys about sixteen years old, and a girl the same age. All were garbed in white, as Mazlek had been, white on white. All had that green speck between and above their eyes. All were beautiful with a beauty that knotted the guts and stifled the breath. Not a beauty to be restful with, unless one was inclined to worship them. Which I was not.

  I had no necessity to puzzle what they would do next, for they kept none of us in doubt for long.

  “Ressaven is not here,” said one of the older boys.

  “She should have come,” the elder girl said. “See how many there are.” She glanced over the people. She smiled contemptuously and said, “How ignorant and rough they are. What point in saving them?”

  “They should offer us homage,” the youngest boy, he I had met in the garden, remarked, “but they only gawk. They think we’re the circus show come to amuse them, perhaps.”

  “I don’t want their homage, but they should bring us gifts,” the elder girl said. “They should bring us their gold if they have any. Or perfume, or good leather for harness, or horses. Anything. But they expect all for nothing. I do not think I wish to touch their smelly brown bodies with my hands.”

  “Nor I,” said the younger girl. She slid her arms about her male compan
ion’s ribs and murmured, “I will touch only you, Sironn.”

  They had been speaking all this while, of course, in the city tongue, or that more antique version of it Mazlek had used. I alone understood their simpering banalities, the crowd merely waited, in unknowing meek patience, for the noble gods to begin their miracles.

  Whether the Lectorra had noticed me among the throng I was not certain. Perhaps not, for a form of inner silence had steeled on me that seemed to shut me from everything.

  The gods had fallen now to noncommittal staring.

  The people, unsure, stared abjectly in return.

  Presently a man near me, mistaking the immobile stance of the Lectorra for invitation, or else unable to support further inactivity, stumbled out of the crowd and up to them, and kneeled down on the ice before them.

  “Lordly ones,” he stammered.

  The Lectorra gazed at him with delighted distaste.

  “What does he require?” the boy Sironn asked of the sea.

  “Mighty ones,” whispered the man, “I am blind in my left eye.”

  The elder girl it was who fixed him with a white frown. Very carefully and clearly, in the village tongue, she said, “Be thankful, then, that the right eye is yet healthy.”

  Her companions, diverted, laughed, the fiendish silly laughter of imbeciles.

  The man at their feet, obviously thinking his comprehension, or his speech, at fault, explained again. “I am blind in my eye. I can see nothing.”

  “Oh, there is little to see in any case, I would suppose, in your wretched hovel,” said the oldest boy, who had spoken before.

  The younger girl bent to the man, and sweetly instructed: “Take a fire-charred stick at midnight and put out the eyes of all the other clods in the village. Then you can master them with just one eye. They will make you king.”

  The man, kneeling on the icy beach, put his hands up to his face. His expression had altered to terrified confusion, and still he reckoned it was his own fault, that he had not made himself lucid to them. He stretched out to the elder girl, instinctively begging sympathy from her superior years and what he imagined to be the qualities of her womanhood. His fingers brushed her mantle, and she wheeled to him with a dazzle of fury in her colorless eyes, and lifted her own hand. From her palm sprang a thin dagger of light that struck him in the brow.