Hunting the White Witch Read online

  Presently the sky darkened to an iron green.

  “She is coming,” Long-Eye said.

  I never in my life had met so briefly ominous a sentence.

  This was where my blind quest had brought me, my dream of power that would lead me straight to the goal, unhindered.

  Long-Eye’s face, more than wooden, was serene. He was safe, being with a god.

  “Long-Eye,” I remarked, “are you supposing I am about to work a wondrous spell to subdue the elements?”

  He shrugged, and this supernatural, indifferent confidence shattered the last vestige of my lethargy.

  Then the storm came, the hurricane.

  The voice of the wind swept toward us over the sucking roll of the waves. It was like the howling of an enormous flesh-and-blood voice box—and made less pleasing by this resemblance to something human or animal—growing impossibly larger and more imminent with each second. Such a noise had no place in the real world, but it was unmistakably here. It was the kind of clamor to run from, save there was no place to bide. Then a tree of lightning flooded up the shadow sky, branches and claws slitting the overcast from horizon to horizon. From the lightning’s roots sprang the storm itself, a sheet of solid yet preposterously volatile lead, that smote the skiff one hammer blow straight on her back. She leaped, as the flying fish had leaped, as if to get free.

  The sea hit me. My mouth was full of water. I tried to take a breath and that was water, too.

  The wave passed on with another riding behind it. The boat bravely attempted to chase up the length of it. The vast swell—black shot with green like a bolt of rotting Eshkirian silk—slammed under the keel. The skiff swung, poised on her tail, and capsized.

  So the invincible god was to be drowned after all. The invincible god could not swim.

  The black water gushed up over my head; I was bottled in it. My panic was indescribable; there was no sequence as I thrashed and choked in that stranglehold of heaving ink.

  Long-Eye, taught to swim strongly in a poisonous blue river one swallow of which meant death, hauled me up. He dragged my hands together around the floating mast.

  A moment of precious air was followed by fifty seconds drowned in the vitals of a roller. The wind screamed in my eyes and ears.

  Even through the dark, I had a glimpse of Long-Eye’s face, as blank and noncommittal as I had ever seen it. When the next big breaker smashed over us, he clapped his palm across my mouth and nostrils and stopped me taking on a fresh lungful of water. With the cordage of the sail, he had lashed his left hand to the mast. Somehow now, between the surges regular as heartbeats that thrust the sea at the sky, he contrived to lash my left hand also to this life raft.

  “Fool,” I said, “you chose the wrong master, fool of a slave.”

  By way of a change, the black sky fell down on the black sea.

  The hurricane lasted in fact, in the first portion, for about three hours.

  How we survived it, I had no notion. I quaffed deep of the sea, that much I knew, and brought it back again. The buffets of water and wind numbed me, though I felt my ribs crack in the old place. There was no feeling in my feet and legs up to the crotch, but there I had grown painfully erect as if the sea indeed would couch me. The flesh of my face was flayed like the hide of a whipped man. My hands turned blue as they grappled the mast, and the left wrist was braceleted where it was tied with my own raw, bloody meat. Long-Eye was in a similar case, or worse, his cheeks peeled open and half-blind. We learned soon enough that both his legs had been broken by the force of the waves.

  But for his trick with the lashing, we should have been fathoms down some while before. Even with it, our bruised and battered carcasses were fair set for death. I had fed on fish, now fish should feed on me. Barely conscious, I clung to existence—the mast; survival reduced to pure stubbornness, abstract motives literally washed away.

  After those three hours of hell (I reckoned the duration only later from the positions I had vaguely noted, when I could see them, of the sun), I appeared to myself to be drifting up into another sea, the water grown so level I thought it had congealed, so level it actually nauseated me after the turmoil that had preceded it, and to which I had grown accustomed. Then, lacking the frenzied beating of the sea, my numbness began to wear thin, revealing a hundred bursts of pain of variable intensity.

  The hurricane seemed spent, the ocean abruptly flat, the sky pastel and very bright with low sun. The unnatural lull was, however, the vortex, the storm’s eye that travels at its center—merely an interlude, the cat toying with the mouse.

  This fact Long-Eye presently told me. Even in my half-wit state, his fortitude appalled me.

  I glanced about, illogically glad of the lull despite its transience. The sun was lying over in the west, on my right hand now.

  “If you are in the mood to curse me,” I said, “do it.”

  My speech sounded like a drunkard’s, blurred and thick.

  “You will act when you are ready, lord,” Long-Eye said imperturbably.

  “When I am ready? Don’t you see yet, fool’s slave? I am incapable. Behold, I manumit you. Curse me.”

  He said, “Mast not enough to save us. Without the lord’s power of will, we should not still be living.”

  Apparently he continued to believe I had illimitable abilities, yet did not reproach me for not using them. What he imagined me playing at, I cannot guess.

  I rested my face on my arm over the mast. My mind was blank.

  Suddenly, between one breath and the next, it reached me. It was like a voice calling, far back in my brain—Here. Look for me here.

  All your life you must be ready to change course, open for it. Then, when the signal comes, you are prepared. When I was a boy in the krarl, learning to hunt or to ride and mainly my own teacher, for the environment was hostile to me, I must continually go over the actions of what I did: Now, I set my hand so, and now my foot. One day, a great surprise—I found I had done everything by instinct without thinking it through first: I had learned. Something like this occurred in the storm’s eye, as I have later concluded. At the hour, it was as if a black window broke in me and radiance streamed through it, a revelation, such as men say they have of their gods or their destinies. It is only their own wisdom, maybe, catching up to them at last.

  The light was bronze now, and the sides of the waves like jewelsmith’s work, heavy seas of amber and beaten gold.

  Something ran molten together in my chest. It was the break healing in my ribs. Dead flesh flaked from my face and hands, which had knit whole beneath. I broke the lashing on my left wrist. Then I did what magicians dream of. I got to my feet, easy as a man rises on a boat’s deck. I stood upright on a floor of choppy brazen gold, and I walked on the ocean.

  I analyzed this, after. When it occurred, a sort of aberration came with it, precluding reason. Analysis told me, however, only one fact. Belief is the root of this power. Not to tell yourself you may, but to know you can. I have journeyed far enough since, in the seasons of my life, to understand by now that the skill is not as exclusive as I then supposed it. The sorcerer-gods are only those born knowing the key to the brain’s inner rooms. That is their luck, but beware—the meanest may search out the key, or stumble on it, and become gods also.

  Having achieved one miracle, the rest seemed little more than a process of mathematics.

  I kept my balance lightly, as a charioteer does, levitating my body without effort, my feet braced on the smooth toiling of rollers. The sky was veiling again; the wind threatened from a different quarter.

  I stared at sky, at sea, one with it, master of it.

  Power gives wings, and fire. Power is the wine after which all other wine is mud. To control the raging elements becomes explicit and simple. Rope the wind, disperse in fragments the hurricane that bounds the vortex wall. Pressure to pressure, thigh against thigh, the m
ind wrestling briefly with the insensate motive of the storm. The blows are diverted and the vast forces quenched.

  The hurricane died over the sea like a huge, ghostly bird.

  Ultimately, the act had been swift, positive. Behind the storm was a green cloud, out of which a quick rain fell. I could see Long-Eye, horizontal on his back, capturing sufficient of this rain in a leather water bottle of his own—the clay pots had been smashed and lost. I watched him with a certain prosaic interest. As I walked on the water.

  Gulls flew over, refugees of the storm. The air was charged with ozone and a scent of iodine from floating stirs of ocean weed. Nothing seemed strange in the sunset; the apotheosis was in the man, not the world about him.

  Long-Eye lay unprotesting and observed me till I should remember his plight. Gods were selfish, their right and their failing.

  In the end, I collected myself and went to him.

  I healed his broken limbs, the bruises and wounds at a touch, as before, feeling no virtue go from me. I asked him if he noted anything when I did this, any pain or curious sensation. I was hungry for facts, could not get enough of my talents. He said it was like a tremor of electricity disturbed in an animal’s coat in summer, nothing more. I placed my fingers on his face to renovate the skin; he said it was like spiders running. His legs were stiff and needed massage before he could work them. Once he was able, I unstrapped him from the mast, and told him to get up and follow me.

  His face, almost invisible now, for the night was black and the moon unrisen, scarcely altered.

  “I am the lord’s slave.”

  “If I tell you to do as I do, you shall manage it.”

  Left in the water any longer, he would die of it. His devastating trust, his human wits by which he had saved me, were things I prized with a sudden and emotional fervor new to me. I grasped his shoulders.

  “You know I can equip you to do this.”

  “Yours is the cloak that covers me,” he said. It was a ritual phrase out of some primeval and obscure ancestral past.

  He let go the mast, the wood was mostly sponge by now, and set his hands out as if to balance himself. By his shoulders, I drew him up to stand, as I did, on that faintly swelling, calm night sea.

  Thus we remained, between heaven and ocean, the clouds pouring slowly over above, the waves tilting gently beneath.

  Long-Eye began to weep, without shame or restraint. Then he bared his teeth and threw back his head, staring up at the sky, grinning and crying. After a minute, he rubbed his palms over his face, and looked at me. He was again as passive as I had ever seen him, as if he had rubbed expression away with the tears.

  I turned, and began to walk due east, the direction the storm had driven us to as if some fate were still in it. He followed me, as I had instructed. His faith never wavered. He fixed his eyes on my back and trod unerringly across the sea.

  Now that I had a power beyond any man’s hopes, beyond even my own, I felt neither confusion or excitement.

  It was as if a million hands had clasped with mine, a million deep vaults given up their treasure and their secrets. A sense of omnipotent loneliness more absolute than the desert of space, a sense of omnipotent continuance more definite than if an army of my forebears had stretched away from me, each linked to each and culminating in this final existence which was mine.

  Yet I was not thinking of my father. Neither did I think of her, the lynx woman, save as a lamp somewhere before me, which, armed with the thunder, I should one day extinguish as she had extinguished his dark light.

  I was thinking of what was in me, truly, of my self.

  Old beyond age, younger than the chick, I strode across a mosaic floor now black and silver, now splintering into yellow as the sun rose like a wheel from the east. The night had passed like a folded wing.

  And I saw the ship on the farthest edge of distance, etched there, immobile, as if awaiting me, almost as I had seen it on the shore of the island, behind my eyes.

  2

  To the people of the southern ocean, the sea is the woman; what rides her and must be stronger than she, that is the man. So the ship was masculine that rode at anchor in the bright morning, storm-blown a great distance from the trading routes of the south.

  He was a tall galley, this male ship, towering up from the water on his double oar-banks, twenty-five oars to a bank, fifty to a side, a hundred oars all told. The two high masts, stripped spar-naked after the hurricane, striped the dawn-burned sky.

  When he sailed, he had been a brave sight, twenty-four man-lengths fore to aft, a vessel painted blue as a summer dusk over his ironwood planking, the prow gilded, and the vast curving whale’s tail of the stern. The sails were indigo figured in ocher, with a triangular wind-catcher or shark’s-fin sail at the stern. His name was written on his side in southern picture writing:

  Hyacinth Vineyard.

  He had gone west of north, the ship, swallowing up red amber and black pearls, jade, cloth, pelts, purple dye, and antique bronzes from the archipelagoes of Seema and Tinsen, before he turned for home.

  One morning, out of sight of land, the wind dropped. The oar-slaves, every black scaled like the backs of reptiles from the beatings that fell on them like rain, day in and out, grunted and sweated up their hate and agony on the iron-bladed poles. It is the only death sentence that crucifies a man sitting, and may take ten years or more, if he is sufficiently tough and maddened, before it kills him.

  The beautiful ship, courtesan-colored, pretty as a fancy boy and named for one, and for the earth rather than the sea, powered by a heaving of pain and fury in his oar-gripped bowel. He met the hurricane at midnight, the one stranger not to be bargained with.

  A night and a piece of a day the galley fought the tempest.

  The sails were taken in but presently broke lashings, rent, and were stripped. The oars, unusable, were belayed. The rowers’ station, though decked over, was nevertheless awash from the hatches, and dead men lay about in the untidy and unhelpful manner of the dead, for the overseer had tried to outrun the weather and paid for it by breaking the ribs and guts of others.

  The ship staggered and wallowed at the mercy of the boiling cold sea and the black gale. He was well built for such work, or he would not have lasted.

  About noon they passed into the cool eye of the storm. The sailors, of whom many were additionally slaves and recent landsmen, ignorant as I had been and thinking the fury done, lay facedown on the deck praising their amulets, as they had similarly lain wailing and puking at the storm’s violence. Others, knowing this lull to be the vortex and worse to come, were for throwing the precious cargo overboard as offerings to the sea. The officers, their greed larger than alarm or superstition, decreed otherwise. The naval instruments were broken or mislaid; no coast was visible. The master took stock, unsparing of his amber-necked whip.

  Even at the tumult’s height this man, the master, Charpon by name, had been grim rather than disturbed. Charpon was a “Son of the New Blood,” thus, however lowly, a bastard fragment of the elite, the ninety-year conquerors of the great city that was home to the ship. His emotions were limited to avarice, obscure but definite pride, a certain brutal, unimaginative intelligence, and a liking for the flesh of boys.

  While the Hyacinth Vineyard hung gently rocking under him, oddly becalmed between the two walls of the hurricane, Charpon, his face like a fist, stood in the bow, whip in hand, on lookout for the returning storm. He was not thinking of death but rather of the abacus in his brain that was clicking away his profits in lost slaves, lost goods, a foundered vessel. He owned the ship; it represented the twelve years of his life he had labored to buy it.

  Then, the hurricane failed them.

  After two or three hours, the sky clearing into deep gold and the sea smoothing into a silk finer than the dyed stuff in the galley’s holds, the crew descended to their knees once more to give thanks to t
he ocean.

  Smoke was burned before an image in the raised forecastle. It was an effigy of copper, depicting a male warrior-god grasping lightnings and mounted astride a lion-fish with enameled wings of blue and green. This was the demon of waves, Hessu, the spirit revered by the Hessek sailors of the “Old” Blood. Charpon did not bother with it.

  The ship put down anchor to lick his wounds. Parties were herded up to patch and hoist the sails, stop leaks with heated bitumen, and sling overboard the useless dead. The master and his seconds prepared for the task of plotting their course afresh.

  The day went out in night. A watch was set about the vessel; ten exhausted men, still half afraid the hurricane might attack again, like a tiger in the night, superstitiously telling the little red beads of Hessek prayer-necklaces, promising sweets to all the spirits ashore.

  The sun, having circled under the sea, rose from it in the east. Suddenly one of the watch yelled out in terror, “S’wah ei!” a cry that roughly means, “May my gods guard me,” and thereafter repeated the plea with vehemence. A whistle was blown and sailors came running. By now the watch had collapsed on the deck, whining. Soon Charpon arrived, whip curled in hand.

  “What does the piss-brain say?”

  The sailors, having caught the plague of fright, yet aware of their master’s irreligious and mundane preference, hesitated to tell. A kiss from the whip, however, loosened their tongues.

  “Lauw-yess.” (It was a Hessek word, expressive of respect and obedience.) “Ki says he saw a man, in the sea.”

  At this Ki, appearing demented, began to mutter and groan and shake his head.

  Charpon struck him.

  “Speak for yourself, worm.”

  “Not a man, Lauw-yess. A god. A god, the fire-god of the Kings—Masri, Masrimas, dressed in fiery flakes of the sun. I saw him, Lauw-yess, and he walked. He walked on the sea.”