Hunting the White Witch

by Tanith Lee

  I raised my eyes, and there on the steps above me was Ressaven.

  She wore male garb, like the kitten girl, but of black wool, and there was no blade in her hand.

  She regarded me steadily, as if there had never been a word, let alone a coupling, between us.

  “Only I separate you and Karrakaz now,” she said.

  “A dangerous separation,” I said. I did not accept her stance; it was too exact. She remembers everything, I thought, and to spare.

  “No,” she said. “I am here to prevent you, and I mean to do it. I am more gifted than the others.”

  “How she values you, that stinking hag,” I said, “to send you out against me.”

  For that last instant she was my Ressaven. Then she blazed up like a candle. The fire of the Power left her like a flight of burning birds. It burst through my shield, and hit me.

  I had not expected this strength from her, despite her trick, despite the very appearance of her, which might have warned me.

  The blow was enough to stagger me, and the atmosphere crackled from the charge. Swiftly the thought went through my head that the lady meant business, and that she might master me if I did not settle her first. But I did not like to strike back at her. Though neither she nor I, the descendants of Karrakaz, could receive death, and each must be aware of that.

  A second fire sizzled from her; I blocked it as best I could, and sent my own bolt flying, running after it up the staircase toward her. As her Power impaired mine, mine must lessen hers. The daylight seemed to detonate about her. That she felt the impact I never doubted, and in its aftermath I seized her and held her pinned against me. Though her psychic force rivaled my own, physically she was not at all my match. I searched her eyes, in which the Power flicked and surged.

  “Ressaven,” I said. “Know me, Ressaven. Cease fighting me.”

  “And you, cease fighting me,” she answered, her voice the coldest thing I ever heard, and the most desolate.

  “You could not kill me,” I said, “nor I kill you. Even if both of us willed it. And would you see me dead, even for an hour, and rejoice? Do it, then.”

  “As you say, I could not. But I ask you—”

  “I will go up to her,” I said, “and no threat or plea of yours will stop me.”

  She smiled and said, as one other woman once said to me, “I am so little to you.”

  “You are world’s end to me, and the heart of my life. But this has been before me since I was begun in her womb.”

  She eased herself from me.

  “There is the door, then,” she said to me. “If I cannot keep you from it, I cannot.”

  I turned from her and stared up the steps to the wide-open porch under the pillars. Her resistance had seeped suddenly from her as occasionally it will in any hard battle where the cause is already lost. I thought no more of it.

  I had not lied; I loved her and had determined to have her, but for now, only that stairway and that door had meaning. The slow thudding in my side reminded me of disquiet, and the ice of the winter had pierced through into my vitals.

  “Ressaven,” I said, though I recall I did not look at her, only at the door ahead of me. “If there is anything in this you must forgive me for, I hope you will forgive me. And have faith in me, too.”

  She did not reply, and I did not glance again at her, but went up the stairs in long strides to keep pace with the pounding in my chest, beneath the porch and through the portal.

  The discarded whimperings and sweats of childhood and the sick fears of a man had found me out. I swam through a heavy sea of horror, but nothing could push me from it.

  The hall was lofty, sculptured with gloom. I grasped not much of it, its size or shape or furnishing. Only one rich chair of ivory and jade, placed to confront any who dragged himself through that door as I had done.

  I stopped and faced the chair, and ached with my fear to the roots of my bones and the beds of my teeth, like a whipped boy of three or four who is hauled to the priest of the tribe for a further striping. Then everything went from me, and there was just a blank immobility and a silence in me, like death.

  For sitting in the ivory seat, veiled and unmoving and as immediate as the ground, or the air, or my own future, was the sorceress. Was Karrakaz, my mother.

  2

  I could not make out her face.

  I had come this far and through this much, and yet I could not see her.

  I stood there, stuck to the spot, and gaped at what I could not see. She spoke to me.

  “A last favor, Zervarn. Come no closer.”

  “I owe you no favor,” I said. I swallowed and got it out, “No favor, my mother.”

  Her voice was like a mist. It floated about in my head rather than in the room, where my own rang and roused echoes.

  “What do you want from me?” she said.

  I laughed, or I believe I did, some stupid noise that meant nothing.

  “Yes, I suppose I must want something, or I should not be here. Are you alarmed, Mother, to find me here? Your son you imagined safely stowed in the northlands, in the tent of Ettook.”

  “You wanted at one time to kill me,” she said, “but you have become aware, I would hazard, that you cannot kill me. What else is there? There is no love between us, no claim.”

  All true. I could not kill her, could not avenge my father, no longer meant to try. What questions could I ask her that she would not turn aside with lies? What could I demand from her even? I had grown into my Power, and wealth and kingship I could take, as Ressaven had said. And for Ressaven, I could attempt to make her go with me, and if she would not both of us would lose some part of ourselves, but I could not force her after all. She was not a woman I could simply take. She was as much as I. Thus, in the end, what did I want here before the witch-goddess? Yet I did not turn about to leave.

  “I request you to tell me,” I said, “what passed between you and my father. I would get it clear, you understand.”

  “I am willing to show you, in your mind, what passed between Vazkor and Karrakaz. But you will not credit what I show you as being accurate.”

  “Probably not. But do it. I can judge you, lady; even the falsehoods will reveal events to me you strive to hide.”

  I knew it meant I must let her further in my brain, but that, of all things, did not trouble me, nor the contact seem distasteful. Let her come in and observe how cunning the apartment was, the glints and fires of a magician’s cleverness, that could withstand her, now that I was ready and alert. Let her notice I had done well without her.

  She came there. She gave me her history, her time with Vazkor, which had not been long, not even a year, although she bore the scar of it, his cicatrix that he had scored in her emotions as he marked it on the bodies of others.

  Despite my own reassessment, it was bitter for me to face the actuality of Vazkor. Most surely not my god or guide. The antithesis of myself. No fervor in him, no greed for life, only his ruthless craving to possess, which took no pleasure in possession. He would have mocked my method of existence; he would have warped me from myself if he could. She did not lie to me, I grasped that in an instant. It was full of the turmoil of her woman’s pain, that story, and its rawness proved its authenticity. Yet, he was a man, an emperor, a mage. His genius stirred me then, and to this hour. I wish I could go back across the years to him to find him out. I pity him, my father, who began me in a single spasm of calculated sex. I pity and I revere him.

  He had risen from obscurity, the Black Wolf of Ezlann, some city noble’s bastard got on a girl of the Dark People, and inveigled his way into the proud ranks of the Gold Masks by means of treachery, violence, and sorcery. He was a magician, self-taught, and he meant to build an empire worthy of his stature. He removed what came in his path. When Karrakaz came there, he used her to create a goddess figurehead, the curtain that conceal
ed his power-lust and made it possible. He taught her misery, cynicism, and hubris. She would have given him her service from love, if he had asked it, but he left her at length no option but dislike. He had scourged her spirit in his efforts to crush her ego. At the end he had destroyed any of humankind who were dear to her, not to influence her then, but merely because it was expedient. All cloth must be cut to his fit. Me, he put in her like a beast in a stall, both to chain her and to ensure his kingdom. When she would be a warrior he reduced her to a womb, and when she would be a lover he showed her she was a garment hung on the wall for his occasional wearing. Some women are such things, but not Karrakaz. He overreached himself with her, as in all else. Presently his luck turned, his empire tottered, his armies deserted him and the jackals howled about his stronghold. Then came a day when he dealt one final blow to her she would not brook. In her desperation, she found she could outmatch him. Thus, she killed him with Power, as sometime one with Power must have done, as I should have, I believe, if I had lived as his son and he had set such lashes on me as he set on every other. Yes, I should have slain Vazkor, as I had slain Ettook. Indeed, I should have hated Vazkor with a hatred beyond any hate I ever experienced. If she had bowed herself beneath such a yoke as his forever, she could not have been the vessel that fashioned me.

  Her magic left her at his death; she did not think she would regain it. She bore me in the tent on Snake’s Road, glad to be rid of the last fetter of Vazkor. But she had no enduring gladness; her demons belled at her heels. She had nothing to give any other, even if she had wanted me. So I was her gift to Tathra, which saved my mother (I cannot call her otherwise) from disgrace, ousting, perhaps, a blacker wage. I had been the sword that kept off Ettook’s injustice from Tathra for nineteen years. Only her gods know if there was any joy in them for her, but I will hope that there was. She would not have had them if she had not been given the status of a living son.

  When I raised my head, my eyes burning and my mind tender from the beating it had got, there was a desert in me, as if the cities of my character had crumbled. For the truths I had sketched for myself so glibly were riveted now upon the wall.

  “My thanks for your account,” I said to the veiled figure who sat quiet as a stone before me. “I will decide some other day how I am to swallow it. But I admit that if you have wronged me, you also have been wronged. There is an emptiness between us, lady. That is the sum of it.”

  “Then you will leave here without rancor. And without profitless delay.”

  “If you wish. But, lady, have you never been curious about me? Did you imagine me dead, or what?”

  “For some while I sensed your approach to this place, your search for me. I never realized you would achieve such Power. You are all any mother would desire of her son, a prince among men. And for a sorceress, what better son than a master-sorcerer? But it is too late for kinship.”

  Her un-voice was melancholy in my skull. I understood she had not spoken with her lips at any time.

  I said aloud, “But I have never seen your face. Even in those psychic visions of your past, I never saw it.”

  “Lellih showed you a face,” she said. Then she had read my brain, though I had not essayed hers. No matter. I felt no menace from her, no seeking to undermine me.

  “A cat’s face, a hag’s face. Not yours, surely. Lady,” I said, and my throat dried so I mumbled like an old man, “let me look at you once, and I will leave you.”

  She did not answer. I waited. She did not answer still.

  It was not the fury of a god or the petulance of the child whose parent denies him, it was my tribal upbringing, which would not let me be cheated of my bargain.

  She was the goddess Karrakaz, but she was not in that moment quick enough for me. I sent my Power like a gust of winter wind to lift her veiling off her body and her face and cast it aside.

  Karrakaz had sat as immobile as a stone, and small surprise. She was a stone. The image of a seated woman made of a pale polished marble, dressed in woman’s garments, veiled and fixed in the ivory chair. I had all this while been entreating from a statue. What had hoaxed the mainland folk had made a clod also of me.

  What went through me I can hardly say. I was angry, but not hot or from my wits. For the mind-voice of Karrakaz, which could not be any other’s but her own, had come from somewhere near.

  I did not take a step either way, but I filled my lungs and I shouted, “Where is she? Let her come out. I am done with jokes. There will be death and hell let loose on this mountain if there is one more game played against me. Where is the sorceress?”

  “She is here,” a woman said at my back. The voice was flesh and blood. It said, “I did not mean to lay this heaviness on you, Zervarn. I intended only to fathom what you were, to draw you, if I could, to an acceptance of me, not as a myth and a vileness, but as a living creature. I loved you from the first; how could I not? You are Vazkor’s image, Vazkor that I loved, and very like another, too, a man I knew as Darak . . . . In some strange fashion you also resembled him, as if his seed had lingered in me to help form you. More than these, in you I beheld myself, not the albino Lectorra of the westlands, but a full-fledged magician, a man of my own race born again through me. I did not recognize what the rest should be, but it was some fate on us. And you have lived sufficiently as a mortal and by mortal codes that this will trouble you and make you afraid. I tried, how hard I tried, you remember, deceit on deceit, to keep you from this knowledge. If only you had been obedient in a single thing, you could have gone from here without a weight upon your shoulders.”

  I recognized the voice and had no necessity to turn, but turn I did, and found her there close enough to take once more in my arms.

  “I used my mother’s name, in the beginning, to deceive you. The younger Lectorra know me only by that name, and the shore people, for long since I expunged my physical memory from their brains, so they should not cry after me as the goddess I was not. Mazlek, Sollor, Denarl, they know me and who I am, and would have saved you this, as I would.”

  I went on staring down at her, but I had grown sightless.

  I should have reasoned other things before. That the self-renewing flesh of the Lost Ones, which defied blemish or scar, would neither age nor wither. That forty years or more would not therefore mar her skin or body, that she could look nineteen, and did. I should have read her eyes, the likeness between us, her holding off from me, her weeping.

  My Ressaven. Not my sister. This woman I had loved, this woman I had lain with, was Karrakaz. My mother.

  * * *

  She predicted for me accurately. I had been too long with men to forswear their codes. A sister half my blood was a minor thing to this. In the kiln that had formed me, I had stayed my own appetite. The serpent gnawed upon its own tail.

  My manhood shriveled. It seemed to me then that never again could I lie on a woman without the ghost of this speaking its clammy incantation in my loins to make a eunuch of me. It seemed, too, that never again could I walk among the clans of men but that the brand would glare from my forehead. Maybe I had been marked for this from the beginning, for it had come to me suddenly how Chula had railed against me that I lay on Tathra, that perhaps Chula’s dirty mouth had been, in that moment, an instrument of prognostication.

  This, then, was the gift the sorceress had laid by for me, this atrocity. She had not meant it, no, but she had foreseen. I had wandered in ignorance into the trap.

  I left her, and her mountain in the sea. I said no word to her, could not bring myself to exchange words. I ran from that place with no pride, and no capacity for anything.

  I did not walk over the ocean to the shore, but attempted to swim and partially drowned myself, and crawled on the land to spew up salt water, trying to spew up my anguish with it.

  In these fevered actions I strove to bury the most terrible despair of all. For many months I strove to bury it. She had never
been mother to me, would never be. Tathra was my mother, and Karrakaz my enemy once. And now, only a woman. A beautiful woman, world’s end, life’s heart, those phrases one brings out that never touch the burning certainty within that has no use for phrases. I loved her yet. That was the rock on my back, the felon’s mark on my brow. I loved her, my sin and my shame.

  3

  I went inland and traveled about the towns and cities of the west. Sometimes I healed the sick, but privately. I accumulated no tags of god or wizard; what I did I did from pity, to relieve my guilt, as Gyest had prophesied I would. I could have been thankful for Gyest to talk with in those red-roofed cities. I do not recollect any meetings of note. I had a woman in some town there, who ran after me up the road for three miles. I was still man enough for that sort of trouble after all, despite the burden of my incest.

  I never had a single dream of Vazkor. That dark shadow had entirely gone from my side. Shadowfire, the reflection of the flames upon the wall; how little I had anticipated the fire itself.

  Of her I never thought. My mind was closed to her. My musings were only of the dark venture we had shared. Here was the strangest part of it, for while the sense of the sin nauseated me, yet I could not, even now, equate her with the sin.

  It was the abstract nature of the world that brought her back to me. The sound of waves breaking on a clear cold shore, the moon coming up through a cloud of trees, the silver bird that cries for dawn, the spring, which was flowing over the land at last.

  Eventually the tide of the spring had reached the headland where I had slunk to gnaw on nothing. The wild fruit trees in the valley beyond the ruined cot that housed me became surfed with white and green, as they would have become by now in the valleys of the mountain island, and I could not go on with this death of mine that called itself life.

  I sought for counsel, which only she could give me, for purpose, which was with her. She and I, the gods knew, if gods knew anything, how long we should continue to exist on this earth. Seasons and empires and centuries might go by, and we remain. She on her island or wherever she might wander, and I who had no race, no home, no country, and no kin, wandering some other road, not hers. Dear God, she was my mother by blood, but I never suckled at her breast, I never grew in her sight. She trained me to nothing; she never knew me, save as a lover returned to her.