Hunting the White Witch
A month went by. It was the lush flowering of the summer, the trees of the Garden City still founts in the blue air, and the Palace bathed in its red shadows, and the lions making their lazy thunder from the park. All this has combined into a changeless, never-ending afternoon in my memory. Afternoon when, with the connivance of her women, Malmiranet and I would lie close as garments in some fiery chest while her son was trapped in Palace business with his council. Though there were also nights. At the feasts, each supper being a feast in the Heavenly City, Sorem would occupy the king’s chair, the Royal Elect, I on his right hand and his commanders about, and the notables who would expect their places. Malmiranet, Empress of the Lilies, in silk of snow or gold or wine, would sit at the table’s farther end. Exactly where she had sat twenty years back, fifteen years old, Jointress of the Empire, Hragon-Dat’s unwanted consort. They had seen her grow big with child, some of these same old goats and their wives who littered the banqueting hall under the frescoes of tigers, that child who was to become Sorem.
She had here a queen’s apartments, hung with gauzes and beaded curtains, yet on her wall, too, were an ivory hunting bow and crossed spears burnished by old use. She said she never used them now. There was a tall palm beyond her window. She told me she had climbed it once, when she was six or seven, having seen a slave do it. She told me indeed all about her life, between the milestones of our lust that marked out our nights like shining blades. Her life was as I had supposed it, though not for an instant did she seek pity. She was proud and cruel, having been well taught, but to those she loved, generous and fiercely giving. Between her love for me and her love for Sorem, she was hard put to it to find a remedy. I thought it foolish, this clandestine way of going on, but would not waste our time in persuasion. I thought, I will speak it through with him, some evening when he is free of court nonsense, and then she shall see. Still, I put it off.
In fact, I put off much. It seemed a usual contrivance here. Even Hragon-Dat was left alone in some secluded underroom; why not everything else?
I had grown lethargic in all things but love. It will happen when you have been fighting long, and it had occurred to me I had been fighting most of my days. Now, here was the sunny island in the wild ocean, and I lay upon it, forgetting that the sea encircled me still.
It is difficult to remember the sea, however, when you can no longer hear it. The threat and the fear had gone, died, as I had intended, on that night of fire.
Bit-Hessee in ashes, only a few ghost stories to emphasize its passing. It appeared to me, in these amber days, that my nightmares had been purged and would return no more; every nightmare, even those of the white witch.
True, I had sworn a vow to a shade, or to my own conscience—to my father if I would have it so. But maybe she was gone with Bit-Hessee, Uastis the cat. Yet if she hid and lived, there would be better methods of ending her, with all the resources of the Masrian Empire to help me to it. Vengeance was a dry gourd after all; surely my father would wish greatness for me, even if it delayed her death? There was space for everything.
Caught in the slow pacing of Masrian court preparations for the Ceremony of Anointing, I came to move slowly also, as if through warm water, the beach always in sight. I, too, had swallowed southern honey.
So, with a little hunting and riding through the enormous inner parks, and many a bee-buzzing formal council, and the feasting, and the hours of love, this crimson afternoon poured on into a lengthening shadow of night I never dreamed would end it.
* * *
The day of coronation, devised by astrologer-priests for its auspiciousness, was fixed. Into Bar-Ibithni, bright with its fresh paint and brickwork, flooded a concourse of people, anxious to see the show and batten on it where they could. From the outlying townships and minor cities, from the coastal plains and the archipelagoes, from the arid rock castles of the east. Lords and little kings coming perforce to offer homage, peasants to stare, traders to sell, and itinerant robbers to slit purses and drunkards’ throats.
I knew little enough of the surrounding geography, having spent my days so far in Bar-Ibithni alone. This diversity in peoples and beasts to be observed in the streets took my fancy, more sweets to please my languid hours. Particularly I liked the notion of the eastern tribal clans, whose women veiled their faces in transparent gauze that hid nothing, and went bare-breasted into the bargain; or the black men, traders in ivory and sapphires, who rode in from southern jungle forests on gray angry monsters of pleated skin, which had a horn in the snout, bloodshot eyes, and ugly manners, a sort of misshapen unicorn, prone to defecate without warning. (For this, the poor loved them, dung being useful in a variety of ways. I rarely saw these grunting unicorns without a train of hopefuls, complete with shovel and bucket.) From Seema, too, came magicians with faces muffled in red veils and swords like butchers’ cleavers in their belts, who would dance with ropes that came alive, or seemed to, in the Market of the World, or else fold their bodies into minute packages of knotted bone and hide. I had gone to look at them with some of the Citadel men, and seeing me, the Seemases bowed almost to the earth, an action that amused me, having lost its significance in a drowse of calm. Noting that even foreigners honored me as the sorcerer, the crowd laughed and clapped. They did not offer me the love they offered Sorem, but knowing my part in the crushing of Hessek, there was often a clamor when I went by—though never anymore for healing.
As I was turning away, one of the magic-men came up to me and twitched my sleeve. I could see only his eyes above the red muffling, but sometimes that is enough.
“Your power is beyond the power of men,” he said to me, using some outlandish language that would be nonsense to all about us, including the educated aristocratic officers who were my companions. If I had needed a reminder of my powers, this surely was one, to know at once, as ever, what he said and be able to answer as if in my mother tongue.
“My Power is beyond the power of most men I have met,” I said.
“Truly. But there is one other. Not man, but woman.” If he had drawn his handsaw weapon to slice off my head, I hardly think I would have started more than I did. “Which woman?”
“The one you sought, lord of sorcerers. White as the white lynx. Uast.”
Denades, who was next to me, seeing my face, said, “What does the fellow want, Vazkor?”
“A personal matter,” I said, “an ancient feud of my forebears.” Denades nodded and stood aside. Secret debts of honor, family feuds, these were understandable Masrian commodities. To the Seemase I said, “How do you know this, and what is your purpose in coming to me with it?”
“In my own way, lord, I, too, am a magician,” he said somewhat ironically. “They relate strange tales here of the burning of the Old City over the marsh, of the ghosts there. Not all are ghosts. I seek no profit, nor to entrap you, lord. If you will come to my sri, I will show you.”
Denades caught the word “sri”—the Seemase traveling wagon—and said, “If he’s suggesting that you go anywhere with him, I’d advise not.”
“I have no choice,” I said to Denades. “He has information I want. Don’t trouble yourself. I’ll be safe enough, and so will the red-veil, if he’s civil.” The Seemase understood; I saw from the creasing of his eyes that he smiled. While he was still smiling, I reached out and into his mind, a contact brief as ever, for I would never learn to like such plumbing, but sufficient to reveal his honesty, and a deal of genuine mystic lore besides.
“We will wait here for you, then,” Denades said, “or shall I, or any of us, go with you?”
“My thanks, but I’ll go alone.”
“Sorem will put me to the sword if any harm befalls you,” he said.
His eyes were playful. He meant me to have all the meaning of that. Denades would follow Sorem into any battle and guard his back like his dog, yet he, too, made jokes, and I was tired of them.
“Lead me,” I said t
o the Seemase. He bowed, and we went off across the marketplace, stared at by every pair of eyes that could see, and also by a couple of “blind” beggars.
The Seemase magicians had made their encampment in a rented field adjoining the horse market. Six black wagons, strung with scarlet tassels and amulets of copper and bone, stood in a half-circle on the horse-cropped grass. A small fire burned, covered by an iron grille out of courteous deference to Masrian custom, and two women were cooking the midday meal on it. They were richly dressed, with necklaces of golden coins, their faces bare and only their hair hidden in red turbans. Strange tradition to reveal the woman and mask the man, but I supposed it was to do with their magic.
Five large white oxen were lying in and out of the shade of a tree, gazed at askance by the horses on the other side of the fence. There had been no horse in Seema till Hragon Masrianes claimed the territory, and the light sri wagons still travel in a chain, two or three at a time, linked together by couplings of brass, and hauled at the front by a yoke of oxen or bullocks. The land route from Seema to Bar-Ibithni is long and hazardous, and would have absorbed more days even than are found in a Masrian month, leaving no margin to arrive before the ceremony of coronation, so I concluded that this party had come here by ship—men, women, wagons, animals, and all.
The women by the fire gazed and giggled softly. One kissed the air at me. My guide seemed unperturbed.
“You allow your women great freedom,” I said.
“No,” he answered. “God allows them that, and the men of the Sri do not presume to take it from them. We are not actually of the Seemase race, Lord Vazkor, but an older strain, and our ways are rather different. We have a saying among the Sri: Keep what you can, and what you cannot keep, let go, for it is already gone.”
We went up into one of the wagons. It was dark, but pleasant smelling from bunches of herbs hung in clusters from the hoops above. He lighted a lamp, then took down a copper disk from a peg and set it on the rugs. We sat, and he drew my attention to the disk, which was highly polished as a girl’s mirror; in fact, I had taken it for that.
“The lord has seen my mind,” he said, “but the ways of the mind are muddy, even to those who must live in them. Therefore I offer you this means, the copper. This is the way of the Sri, between adepts. Thoughts projected onto the disk by one mage are revealed to the other. There can be no chance of deception, neither any intimate contact of the brain displeasing to both.”
I sat and looked at him, despite the rest, unsure. Unsure, I believe, because I completely trusted him. For all I could have mastered him with my powers, he made me feel a boy before a man. From his eyes and his hands, I judged him in his fiftieth year, strong and agile, his wisdom a natural weathering and sharpening such as wind and rain produce upon the rocks of the desert. Sitting before him, I had that same sense of impermanence as I had known on riding from the Citadel on the night of the rising, the sense that far too soon a man is in his grave, and how small are the hurricanes and mountains of his life—vengeance, love, might, and conquest—compared to that tiny heap of bone dust at its end.
At last I recollected what I had come to find, and bowed my head over the psychic copper, and concentrated my will upon it. In a moment my blood ran like ice and my metaphysics left me for sure.
They had come by sea, as I had reckoned, and their tall galley had passed by the unlighted shore of the night marsh with dipped sails. From the rail, scenting sorcery as the hound scents lions, the man of the Sri beheld this on the shore: A white shape, dwarfed in the distance to the size of his small finger.
I beheld in the disk, as he beheld it, that whiteness, and I experienced, as he had done, the smoke of force that rose from it. It was the force of hate. He had shuddered to feel it. He had heard of the burning of Bit-Hessee and of the things that haunted there, but this thing he knew to be no phantom. A white woman, with white hair and white hatred growing from her soul like a huge tree. And her Power was as great as mine.
Scattered near her on that muddy open shore were dark shapes with gray Hessek torches in their hands. The breakers and the creaking of the oars and the sails of the ship hid any sound they made.
The old miasma came slinking over me.
The copper was suddenly empty and my host was holding out to me an agate cup with liquor in it.
I drank and he said, “I knew her name. She had written it on the night for any who could read it. I knew also she had marked you for her evil. The mark is on you like a brand. Yet, lord, this whole city has been marked. Not only the men who razed Bit-Hessee, not only the men who dreamed of razing it. Truly there is a black cloud above the golden towers of Bar-Ibithni, the Beloved of Masrimas. A black cloud which shall hide his sun.”
I stood up and my limbs were trembling. I suppose I must have looked like death.
“How can I match her?” I cried out stupidly, not actually to him. “What Power I use she feeds on. She. I tried, I was rid of her, yet she persists. Whatever I do is turned against me.” My mind was racing. I thought to go straight to that shore, the avenue of dead ships, the blackened ruin, and kill her there. It was what I had vowed to do. Or perhaps I should become the quarry. She had marked me, then let her follow me. Leave Bar-Ibithni whole, Sorem its Emperor, and Malmiranet, my woman, on the Lilly Chair of the Crimson Palace, thinking I had fled like a coward . . . .
He took my arm.
“I am a messenger,” he said, “no more. I can offer you no counsel. But my name is Gyest, if you should require my services.”
I wished he might have helped me, but despite his own acumen of strengths, I understood too well he could not. Paradox. My ability towered over his, and I was a shivering baby.
I thanked him. His eyes were fatalistic. The city was under her curse and he remained in it. What you cannot keep, let go, for it is already gone. Life also, presumably.
Outside, the sky was as blue as the sapphires the black men brought from the south on their ugly unicorns. No cloud in sight.
* * *
Denades and a couple of his captains had remained to wait for me. He raised his brows and said, “Bad news, then. I hoped not.”
None of them knew anything of my life beyond a few necessary minor items, and were always anxious for the chance to learn more.
“Someone lives whom I had calculated dead,” I said.
“Oh? What now, Vazkor? Can it be you’ll adhere to our customs, the code of the challenge?”
“The challenge is already offered, and accepted.”
Denades stared at me, between approval and distrust.
“Hardly a fit moment, however, my Vazkor, two days before the anointing of Sorem for Emperor.”
I spurred my mount up through the market, so bright with noise and color and show under that unclouded sapphire sky. Denades kept pace with me.
“Does Sorem know?”
“He will, inside the hour.”
He frowned and kept quiet.
I had put a bold face on it, perforce. Nausea pervaded my body. There was a dream I had as a child, later in another form, some wild animal I had come upon on the hunting trail and slain, only to have it start up again, bleeding from its gaping mortal wounds, and leap for my throat. Presently Denades spurred his horse off to the Citadel, no doubt to spread the news.
I would have to fight. There was no other choice. Fight and fight again, however many times the dead beast came at me. It was not this city I gave myself to rescue, no, nor the life or the esteem of any man or woman in it. It was my own terror. I would rather meet the sickening thing head on than turn my back to it. I had thought her dead, or of no consequence, space to seek her, maybe space to forget her even. How Uastis must mock me in her ruin.
7
I entered the Crimson Palace, as it always seemed I did then, in that eternal afternoon. The sun, swimming into the apex of the tall western windows, crucified the rose-re
d walls and pink marble floors with long nails of pollinated light.
Sorem was with the council and the priests, learning off his actor’s lines for the coronation. On the day preceding it, he must enter and abide within the Masrimas Temple, tradition prior to the ceremony. I had seen little of him in any case, since we took the Heavenly City. We had gone hunting once after the wild boar that were tamely bred and let out of cages into the game park for the sole purpose that the nobility might chase them—a dissolute, idiot sport it seemed to me after, though I had not chafed then. Sorem, disliking it as I did, had promised me better hunting in the southern hills, puma and lion and various water beasts in the vales there, when we should have days to spare for it. He had been always promising me things through this month of afternoon, and sending me gifts when he was away with the council, so I could not ungraciously refuse them. I had barely noticed, being with his mother more often than in my apartments to receive them, but now I had begun to ponder if he mistrusted me after all, and tried to keep me loyal by bribes.
Nasmet ran up to me on her gilded feet as I lingered, looking drearily at the sun. She put a flower in my hand, which was Malmiranet’s signal to me. Nasmet appeared to have no envy, playing out this liaison which was supposed to be ours, but which led me to her mistress. Usually I was eager enough, and glad to see the girl.
She took in my difference, and said, “She would not have you with her if you have business elsewhere.”
“Business with you, maybe,” I said, my fear giving everything a perverse flavor. “You’d like that.” I put my hands on her waist. I did not want her, yet I would have had her if she had been willing.