Quest for the White Witch by Tanith Lee

You are a god, Vazkor, son of Vazkor.  And you do this thing not only to make a path to a witch's hiding place, but to prove to men what has come among them.

Two decades ago, Karrakaz, the only survivor of a long dead race of almost unkillable psychics, awoke after centuries of suspended animation to be heralded as a goddess or a witch by the barbaric nomads and sophisticated city folk she met.  Vazkor, the sorcerer and ambitious general, dominated Karrakaz and leveraged her abilities and renown in support of his usurpations and war mongering; the crises he launched shattered the social and political order, and might have made him ruler of a continent, but Karrakaz asserted her independence and turned on him, killing him.  Then she was carried away in a flying saucer.  Such was the tale described in Tanith Lee's 400-page 1975 novel The Birthgrave.

During all that excitement Vazkor found time to impregnate Karrakaz.  Karrakaz was unable to abort Vazkor's child, which had inherited her super durability, so when she gave birth she left the baby boy with some barbarian nomads.  That boy's adventures to the age of twenty were described in Lee's 1978 novel of 200 pages, Vazkor, Son of Vazkor.  When he realized who his true parents were, Tuvek, as his adoptive tribe had named him, vowed to kill the mother who had abandoned him and killed his father.  At the end of Vazkor, Son of Vazkor, he as lead to believe that his mother must be on a distant southern continent he had never before heard of, and set sail for this mysterious land.  In Quest for the White Witch, also printed in 1978, Tuvek narrates for us his adventures on this continent and his pursuit of his mother.

Tuvek can't swim and doesn't know how to sail, but luckily a slave he has freed from some of his enemies and now worships Tuvek is an expert guide and sailor, and this guy accompanies our protagonist across the briny deep.  A hurricane strikes, and after he and his buddy are nearly killed Tuvek stretches his psychic muscles, first doing a little weather engineering and ending the hurricane and then walking on water--he even gives his comrade the ability to stride across the waves with him.  Able to heal or kill people instantly, and to hypnotize them into doing his will, Tuvek has no trouble taking over a merchant ship captained by a pederast and crewed by galley slaves and their brutal overseers. 

The first third or half of Quest for the White Witch has a more jocular tone than did the preceding novels.  For example, Tuvek uses his miraculous powers to play what amount to practical jokes, like hypnotizing slave overseers into lashing themselves--in the face!--with their iron-toothed whips.  And his powers are so great we can't expect anything conventionally bad to happen to him; he can knock out a dozen soldiers in an instant with a thought, and heal any of his comrades who get injured.  Fortunately, things turn grim and gross further into the narrative and the later sections are full of the tragedy and suffering we are looking for--sure, Tuvek can't be killed, but he can suffer alright! 

Tuvek's newly acquired ship and its crew, now his worshipers, carry him to the vessel's home port, a bustling city on that southern continent.  There is no intercourse between this continent and that of Tuvek's birth, and the people here have never heard of Vazkor or Karrakaz  (or so it seems.)  Tuvek takes up lodgings in a brothel that caters to male homosexuals, a favorite haunt of his ship's captain, and makes himself the talk of the town under the name of Vazkor by performing such PR stunts as healing scores of mendicants in a city park, hoping to draw the attention of and smoke out his mother.

Like 180 pages of this 300-page novel take place in this town, and Lee tells us all about the city's history, geography, social and ethnic demographics, and so on.  Tuvek gets involved in court intrigues, a duel, and sexual trysts, and he makes friends and enemies among all levels of society; significantly, a subaltern ethnic group hopes he is their god of darkness, come to restore the glory of their empire and punish the more advanced ethnic group that conquered them a century ago and now rules the city,  relegating them to membership in a slave and servant class with restricted rights (they can't own blades, for example.)  He uses his powers to heal many people, and to kill people, and Lee spends a considerable portion of her text on Tuvek's conflicting and ambiguous feelings about his power and the role he is playing in the city; like his parents he is essentially cold and callous, and finds healing masses of poor people to be irritating work.  Tuvek doesn't heal the wealthy for free, either, but instead charges them high prices to make the money he thinks he needs to track down his quarry.  His investigators fan out through the city, looking for clues as to the whereabouts of the white witch who birthed and abandoned him.  

In the middle third of the novel Tuvek, with total disregard for human life, manipulates the opposing factions within the city and engineers an uprising by those primitive colonized darkness-worshipers; he then helps the faction of the aristocracy he favors to crush this rebellion and seize power from the tired and obese old pederast sitting in the throne.  (The faction Tuvek champions is led by a young vigorous homosexual who has a crush on Tuvek.)  This campaign features disguises, secret passages, and Tuvek's first use of his powers to actually fly, something that was foreshadowed back in The Birthgrave.  Thousands of people lose their lives and important parts of the city, like the port, are wrecked; those natives who have been under the heel of the colonizers for a century are almost wiped out, even those who were not rebellious being killed by the fearful majority during the crisis.  

The marginalized autochthons achieve their revenge, however.  One title held by their god of darkness is "Shepherd of Swarms," and in some pretty disgusting scenes the city is struck by a plague of flies so thick hundreds of people die when the insects enter their mouths and nostrils and choke off their breath!  Many people who survive the plague of flies then die of the diseases the flies have brought!  Tuvek doesn't use his psychic powers to battle the plagues because he finds that the mysterious enemy behind the pestilence feeds off any sorcerous energy he radiates!  Is this plague the work of the god of darkness, or some other magician concealing him- or herself behind that image--could it be Karrakaz herself preemptively seeking to destroy Tuvek?  (The revelation of who is behind the plagues is a well-plotted and very effective little twist.)  

The city section of Quest for the White Witch ends with yet another good horror sequence, as Tuvek appears to die of the plague, and then rises from his grave, he being practically invulnerable, after all.  He finds along with him in his tomb his lover, the bisexual mother of that gay prince; she committed suicide after her son's death from plague and the taking of the throne by his rival.  Tuvek tries to raise her from the dead, but her soul has left for another plane, and he only succeeds in animating her soulless body, which acts in a violent, unhinged manner.   

As his father did before him, Vazkor son of Vazkor has devastated a city and a society in the failed pursuit of his own selfish goals, and like his mother before him he has been the cause of suffering and death to all his friends and lovers.  Suddenly, a new clue comes to his attention, and he heads out of the ravaged city to continue his quest, though his recent experiences have sobered him and he does not feel the hate for Karrakaz he felt when first he made his vow to slay her.  

At the end of The Birthgrave, Karrakaz met a kind tribe of vegetarians who oppose the incest taboo, and Tuvek met the same tribe at the end of Vazkor, Son of Vazkor.  In the final part of Quest for the White Witch, Tuvek joins a wagon caravan of kindly people who believe in free-love group marriages.  The caravan takes him to a port town when he books passage aboard a pirate ship to a third continent where Tuvek now realizes Karrakaz must to be.  He could just fly there, of course, but Tuvek has become reluctant to use his powers for selfish reasons of convenience.  (Tuvek grows as a person over the course of his two books, and of course Lee has to figure out ways to limit the use of his miraculous powers to make the story work.)

I like stories of ocean voyages, and Lee does a good job with Tuvek's long voyage across the sea with the pirates, who first adore and then detest Tuvek.  They abandon him on a barren spot of the third continent when they finally reach it, and Tuvek travels on foot through snow to a ruined city of the ancient lost race; there he meets ordinary humans who worship his mother as well as young people with traces of the blood of Karrakaz's people whom she has trained to use their latent psychic powers.  Like their ancestors, these kids are arrogant abusive jerks.

Then comes the culmination of this 900-page epic--Tuvek meets his mother.  She tells him all about Vazkor's coldness and cruelty, and her own suffering, and abandons his vow to kill her.  All well and good, we readers think.  But then comes the sense-of-wonder ending that blows our minds and perhaps turns our stomachs, the ending we have sort of been expecting for a while--Karrakaz seduces Tuvek and they have sex and we are lea to believe they will breed a new race of super beings, one that, because Karrakaz and Tuvek have learned how to be good through all their relationships and adventures among the mortals, will not be arrogant and evil but instead kind and just.  

The first half or so of Quest for the White Witch, while good, disappointed me a little because I did not appreciate the less grim tone and sort of felt the wealth of information about and the many incidents in the town were something of a sideshow from the quest for Tuvek's mother.  But the second half pours on the tragedy and horror and is really quite good.  As a whole, Quest for the White Witch has a lot to offer sword and sorcery and horror fans.   

There is also plenty of stuff in Quest for the White Witch for all you gender studies types.  The people of the southern continent call ships "he," not "she" as we typically do (or did; maybe we aren't supposed to do that anymore.)  Sex between men and boys is common in the city, and the city is home to a multitude of pretty boys who dress as women--it is suggested that all this pederasty and transvestism is partly a byproduct of the fact that women of the subordinated race are rarely allowed to leave home and when they do venture out they must conceal their bodies and faces.  It is also noteworthy that, while our protagonist is a heterosexual man, the plot is driven mostly by the women and gay men he interacts with, his actions being a response to them and how they make him feel.  Whether Lee portrays women and homosexuals in a positive, sympathetic, or realistic light I will leave for individual readers to judge; suffice to say Lee presents all her characters and themes in a way that is ambiguous and challenging.  Lee's depictions of colonizing and colonized populations offer another example: neither the ruling ethnicity nor the subjugated are presented in a particularly sympathetic light.  Lee doesn't seem to see it as her job to teach us how to think or how to live, but to shock, disturb and entertain us, and because she is a master at all the traditional nuts and bolts of writing--pacing, tone, painting images, etc.--and has no qualms about dealing with material both outré and horrible, she succeeds admirably in her aims.

Thumbs up for Quest for the White Witch and all the Karrakaz books, all of which appear to be widely available; note that some recent editions of Quest for the White Witch have been printed under the title Hunting the White Witch, and that the edition I own, UJ1357, has many annoying typos.