Quest for the White Witch: The exciting conclusion to an epic trilogy

Quest for the White Witch (aka Hunting the White Witch) by Tanith Lee

It would be hard to imagine any reader experiencing the first two novels in Tanith Lee’s BIRTHGRAVE TRILOGY – namely The Birthgrave and Vazkor, Son of Vazkor – who didn’t feel the overmastering desire to press on to Book #3 immediately after. In that first volume, which was initially released in June 1975, the reader had been introduced to a petite, albino, amnesiac woman, with a range of superhuman abilities, who had wandered across a medieval-seeming landscape in search of herself. In Book #2, initially released 2½ years later, in January 1978, her son, whom she had abandoned as a sort of tribal changeling, picked up the narrative thread 14 years later. That son, Tuvek, had only learned of his real mother when he was 19 years old, and had sworn an oath to his deceased wizard father, Vazkor, to hunt down and slay his unknown female parent, all the while coming into possession of his own bequeathed superhuman abilities. As that Book #2 had wrapped up, Tuvek and the slave Long-Eye, who worshipped the 19-year-old lad as a god, had pushed off in a skiff to track down the albino sorceress in another land to the southeast. What could possibly happen next? Fortunately for Tanith Lee’s many fans, a lapse of 2½ years would hardly be required to find out!

That Book #3, Quest for the White Witch, first saw the light of day a mere month following the publication of Book #2! As had its predecessor, the novel was first issued as a $1.95 DAW paperback with cover art by Gino D’Achille. It was a fairly faithless cover, portraying a woman – a redheaded Barbara Bouchet type – holding on to an enormous leashed lizard, elements not to be found in the story itself. DAW would come out with another edition in 1983 with a more faithful piece of cover art by Ken W. Kelly, as well as an edition in 2016 (the year following Tanith Lee’s passing, at age 67) with the book’s title changed, for some obscure reason, to Hunting the White Witch. Internationally, this Book #3 would be released in the U.K. (1979 and ’85), Holland (1980 and ’86, as De Witte Heks, or The White Witch), Germany (also 1980, as Die Weiss Hexe, or The White Witch), and France (1986 and ’89, as La Quete de la Sorciere Blanche, or The Quest of the White Witch). In size, this final novel of the renowned trilogy was midway between its two predecessors: 400+ pages (or 185,000 words) for the first, 200+ pages (or 90,000 words) for the second, and 300+ pages (or 135,000 words) for this third. Similar to Book #2, it turned out to be an epic fantasy of the highest order, with not a hint of the science fictional element that had been such a surprising feature of Book #1. And similar to both its predecessors, this concluding installment was just crammed with exciting incidents, a remarkable amount of color and detail, and any number of highly dramatic sequences and gasp-inducing revelations.

Now, whereas the action in Book #2 had picked up almost a decade and a half following the events of The Birthgrave, Book #3 picks up just moments after its predecessor. Once again, Tuvek narrates his story, which covers the course of two full years; he is all of 21 by his tale’s conclusion. Tuvek had begun evincing remarkable abilities in that second book – the power to slay mentally, to heal his own bodily injuries astonishingly quickly, to understand and speak all languages – and as his next narrative proceeds, we witness him begin to command so many powers as to be virtually godlike. Thus, by this book’s end, he is also able to heal and rejuvenate others with a laying on of hands, go indefinitely without food and water, influence the weather, dissolve metallic fetters mentally, start fires with a glance, levitate objects, mesmerize anyone, make his own horse soar through the air, surround himself with something akin to a force field, control his body heat to the point where he can easily subsist in frigid conditions, walk on water, be aware of an object’s history by touching it (psychometry), and, perhaps most astonishing, resurrect himself from the dead! Not to mention, of course, his tribal talents of hunting and swordsmanship. Truly, a formidable character! As had his mother in Book #1, during his travels, he would be justifiably hailed as a healer by some, a god by others. And as in his first narrative in Book #2, here, his story is divided into two lengthy and discrete sections.

In the first, much longer one, we pick up with Tuvek and Long-Eye in their skiff on the high sea. When a sudden hurricane capsizes them, causing the two to nearly drown, Tuvek becomes aware of two latent abilities. He wills the hurricane to cease and then walks himself and Long-Eye over the choppy waters, till they come upon an oared galley. Once aboard, Tuvek allows himself to be made a slave pulling an oar, till he quickly tires of the business and takes over the ship. Arrived at the port city of Bar-Ibithni, he sets himself up as a healer and wonder-worker. In time, he befriends the prince Sorem, whose father, the emperor, had practically disowned him in favor of his second son, Basnurmon. Tuvek ultimately fights on the side of Sorem when a civil war of sorts erupts. Bar-Ibithni had, around a century earlier, been conquered by the Masrians, who currently control it. Tuvek allows the native Hesseks to worship him, ultimately betraying them to the Masrians in that war, which pits race against race and prince against prince. And all this while, our Tuvek manages to carry on a secret love affair with Sorem’s mother, the ex-empress Malmiranet. But despite Sorem’s ultimate victory and coming into full power, a double disaster soon strikes, in the form of an enormous swarm of flies that blankets the city, and the arrival of the Yellow Mantle, a horrible plague that kills thousands, including our narrator! But never fear! Tuvek, after many weeks, arises from his underground tomb and, with a fresh clue as to his mother’s current whereabouts, sets out anew. So ends the first, lengthier section.

In the second, he travels for weeks, with a small caravan of mystics, across the barren Wilderness, ultimately taking another ship for a months-long voyage to a wintry waste. He pays his way by manning the oars again (not as a slave this time) and acting as a healer, but the seamen soon grow suspicious of him and toss him overboard. Little deterred, Tuvek walks across the ocean’s surface to the shore, and spends many weeks trudging across the snowy terrain. In the abandoned city of Kainium, which had been built eons before by the Lost Ones (the dead race from which both he and his mother sprang), he finds white-haired, albino children with abilities almost on a par with his own, and learns that these children, the so-called Lectorra, have been adopted and trained by his mother, who dwells on an island some miles offshore. He even meets a woman, Ressaven, the oldest of the Lectorra, who he feels must be his half sister. And it is on that mountainous island that Tuvek finally does indeed come face to face with his mother, who he has travelled so far to destroy…

As I said when reviewing Books #1 and 2 of this series, it might seem that I have gone overboard in setting out the story line above, but again, what you have just read is but the sketchiest of outlines in a book with so many subplots and details that I could not possibly touch on here. Indeed, this is the kind of book that crams in so much plot and detail that you can read around 10 pages, pause to look back, and be stunned by how much has transpired therein. Thus, I had to chuckle when Tuvek at one point remarks “Only eleven days, and so much in them.” And oh my goodness, what a love affair with the English language Tanith Lee seemed to be having! As in the first two books, more hugely impressive prose is to be had here. And so, we get sentences such as these: “The night had passed like a folded wing.” “I was lowered and left to die in a stinking dark, the anus of despair.” “Her breath carried the scent of flowers, and her mouth was the color of a winter sunrise in that winter face.” I don’t know where or how Tuvek learned to master the writer’s craft so well, even given his apparent knowledge of all languages, but his prose really does stun the reader, and often. He even sent me scurrying off to the dictionary on several occasions, to look up such words as “cochineal,” “jointress,” “titivate,” “bothy,” “leman” and “hypocaust.” Pretty impressive, indeed, for an unschooled tribal warrior!

Lee’s book grows almost unbearably suspenseful in its final 50 pages, as we wait breathlessly for the long-anticipated meeting of mother and son; a meeting that those darned Lectorra do their utmost to prevent, using both illusion and raw power. Is the reader’s patience rewarded? Well yes, I suppose so, although that ultimate confrontation is like nothing you might be expecting, incorporating a tragedy of sorts of almost Sophoclean dimensions! Typical for this series, there is much in the way of grotesquerie; take, for example, the Hessek priest whose mask is comprised of mummified beetles, and the Yellow Mantle sickness itself, whose effects you don’t want to know, trust me! Also typical for this BIRTHGRAVE TRILOGY are the assorted sexual acts seen or discussed here: straight sex (of course), gay and lesbian sex, bisexual sex, sex with transvestites, incestuous sex … but no human-lizard sex, as was shown in Book #1. Say what you will about the young Tanith Lee, she was no prude, that’s for sure!

Unsurprisingly, she here regales her readers with any number of exciting sequences and bravura set pieces. Among them: the monstrous hurricane at sea that almost does in our narrator; Tuvek’s rejuvenation of a wizened crone, Lellih, before Bar-Ibithni’s Hall of Physicians (the now-youthful Lellih will play a major role in upcoming events); Tuvek’s visit to the Shaythun worshippers in the swampy remnants of the Hessek town Bit-Hessee; the infiltration of the emperor’s Crimson Palace to spirit Malmiranet away before the fighting; the back-to-back-to-back triple punch of the civil war, the attack of the flies (if you thought the avian attacks in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 masterpiece The Birds were impressive, hold on to your hats here!), and the Yellow Mantle; Tuvek’s rising from the dead, and his attempt to resurrect someone near and dear to him, only to find that she is now a soulless zombie; our hero’s long slog through a winter wonderhell, during which even he almost succumbs to starvation; that battle that Tuvek engages in with the Lectorra, while they casually fling bolts of energy at one another as if they were in a Marvel superhero movie; and finally, of course, Tuvek’s epochal meeting with the heroine of Book #1 … the woman he had waited for years, and traveled so many thousands of miles, to kill.

For the rest of it, Quest for the White Witch amplifies what had already been an accomplished feat of world building (in whichever world this happens to be), and so here we get a further wealth of detail regarding architecture, peoples, customs, foods and religions. The conqueror Masrians, for example, are fire worshippers, and allow no open flames to be exhibited. Thus, we learn, all their meals are stewed, not roasted or broiled, whereas the offshoot sect known as the Fire-Eaters is looked down upon because of their habit of ingesting live flames! Besides the profusion of detail, Tanith Lee’s book also gives us at least two very shocking surprises – one involving Lellih, the other concerning Tuvek’s meeting with his mother – about which the less said, the better, I suppose. Oh … and one final thing: Do you remember the scene in the wonderful Errol Flynn movie entitled The Sea Hawk (1940), in which Flynn and his companions, after slaving away as oarsmen in a Spanish galley and subsequently capturing the ship, resume their arduous rowing as free men, now lustily singing all the while? I couldn’t help but be reminded of that scene when Tuvek, after having done similar brutal work as a slave, happily returns to the same occupation, but now as a free man. The fact of being free – and free of the lash – makes all the difference, I suppose … even to a rapid healer such as Tuvek!

To be perfectly honest, I did have some very minor problems with Tanith Lee’s otherwise very fine work here. For one thing, I can’t help but feel that this trilogy would have been well served by the inclusion of a map showing the relative placements of the many cities in Book #1, and especially how that land mass lies in relation to Bar-Ibithni and Kainium here. Tuvek sails east for several weeks to reach that first city, and then west for many months to reach the latter. Is Bar-Ibithni on a different continent than, say, the cities of Book #1? It’s impossible to say. This reader also found the incest highlighted in the book to be rather … icky, more so even than the incest shown in Book #2, but that’s just my own cultural bias speaking, I suppose. I was also disappointed that we ultimately never learn how the Lost Ones attained to their astonishing superpowers before being wiped out as a race. But perhaps what disappointed me the most, as I just inferred, is the fact that we never do learn definitively what planet this trilogy is set on, and perhaps even more important, when. Oh, there’s some mention of the world having a single moon, and there’s even a reference to the earth (with a lower-case “e”), but that’s it. I’d been looking forward to a revelation as to time and place throughout this entire trilogy, a revelation that Tanith Lee oddly withholds, for some reason. I have been told that in one of her books in the later WARS OF VIS TRILOGY – namely The Storm Lord (1976), Anackire (1983) and The White Serpent (1988) – it is suggested that all six books are set on the same world … again, whatever world that might be. And trust me, based on my experience with THE BIRTHGRAVE TRILOGY, I certainly wouldn’t mind reading another Tanith Lee trio, just to find out! Anyway, so much for my minor quibbles. Quest for the White Witch, for the most part, remains a hugely captivating entertainment. It brings the curtain down on a trilogy of truly remarkable epic fantasies, all the more impressive for having been written (in shorthand!) by a woman still in her late 20s, and just starting out on her much-lauded career. It would seem that, similar to Ressaven, Tanith Lee was, early on, a young woman with considerable superpowers all her own!