The Witch OF Endor

by Karim Kattan

There remained, in the mountains of Endor, a scattering of the elder people. Most of the others — the handfuls left — had moved to the cities of the south decades before. These people of mountains and hills, of ice fields and pine trees, now dwelled in seashore havens and desert cities, resort towns and neon oases.

The few families who had remained, huddled in the mountains surrounding Endor valley, lived in a half-dormant, savage state. He was acutely aware of their presence, hiding in the snow and behind the pine trees. Their half-closed almond eyes burned with a wildness he knew well. He was himself descended from these elder people; this mountainous terrain was his original land, this cold, this smell of pine trees. Yet the wind bit his flesh; the mountain suffocated him. He was only from here in imagination. In reality he was from an oasis of the south. His world was one of gurgling springs, swaying palm trees, and the bustling black market where anything — including eyes, diamonds, livers, rifles, children — could be sold and bought. His was the world where the hot winds wrap the body in a gentle, insistent caress. Here the wind was a slap in the face.

He had been invited to the ball. It was an honor reserved for a happy few, the richest and noblest of the kingdom of Summerlands. They, obviously, never invited any of the elder people. Yet he had received the invitation — in formal gold lettering on a piece of paper that was most likely worth many stalls in the market. He had worked for this, pugnacious man that he was. He had taken advantage of the unique color of his eyes, clear like river streams; and of his skin — alabaster, they said. He had practiced day in and day out how to pronounce the vowels perfectly, where to lilt, where to pause; how to use fully his throat to produce sounds as foreign to him as the snow. He had lost, gradually, the raw and hoarse words of the elder people to adopt the light language of the Summerlands. He had moved from the deepest south to the middle ground, the capital city, and he had smiled like they smiled and bowed like they bowed and worked like they worked.

And here he was. Endor. The snow was falling softly all around the castle. It snowed in the kingdom of Summerlands perhaps once every three years. “Once in an apricot’s bloom,” was the consecrated phrase. But here, in the mountaintop realm, it never stopped. The flakes, unfamiliar to the guests who hailed from the shores and the desert, swirled around them. The castle was enmeshed in darkness; only its tiny oval windows gave a little light, a little gleam reflected in the snowflakes. It trembled in this ocean of dark. Music, loud and boisterous, gilded and ornate, resonated in the castle, around it, and echoed deep in the mountains.

So, this was Endor. This, the valley of sinews and anise, the silvery mother earth. And today was the night of Endor, the loveliest and most magnificent of nights. Men and women, in twos and threes, crossed the massive stone bridge that led to the castle, their hair bound with crowns of flowers and gold, their fingers and necks heavy with sparklestones and silk. The skies split in half, so it was said, during this night and the trembling moon granted the wishes of any and all. The gates of the castle were wide open, and the music and light seemed to extend their hands to all the guests: Come in, please. A harmless, benevolent gesture.

Endor, in the northernmost part of the prosperous kingdom of Summerlands, was indeed a place that excited the mind and pleased the vision, a place of rest in the snowstorm. It was the mountaintop, snow-filled crown of a civilization whose accomplishments were glittery seaside resorts and metal pipes thrust in the sandy flesh of the desert. The lights of the castle of Endor blazed bright, beacons illuminating the night, and in contrast the full moon above it looked like a pitiful, guttering candle.

Solstice, he thought; solstice: the night of Endor. The outer darkness gathered around the castle, whose lights blazed brighter and whose music grew louder to ward off the longest night. The darkness beat at the windows, and splattered against the gate, and scratched at the stones but could not make its way in. He felt the castle tremble under the onslaught of darkness.

He noticed, without looking, how the shapeless forest around the castle and in the valley swayed to a harrowing beat. Primal voices, screeches, called out from the midst of the forest and from the edge of starlight. They blared and shrilled and shrieked, thrusting themselves into his mind. Solstice: He knew, somehow, that snakelike eyes were peering up at him from the valley.

Some still remembered the story. The people from beyond the sea had landed here one day, on the shores of the Summerlands, the country of the elder people.

What, they asked, is this land wedged between a river and a sea, this stretch of nothing? What, they asked, is this nothing? Let us make it into something, they said.

They met the natives, the elder people, who spoke of the wrath of a witch of Indur. And then — for those who come in boats to coasts unknown can sometimes be savages — they hunted down the elder people; they chased them up into the mountains, and down into their graves, and they burned them, and sewed their mouths shut and poured lead in their ears and wax in their eyes.

Yet still they spoke of the witch of Indur, and when they put the elder people in camps and behind bars, their eyes covered with wax, their mouths sewn shut, and their ears filled with lead, still they whispered of the magic of Indur, and how it would one day return. And so the invaders grew scared.

Neither the best of their scientists, nor the wisest of their priests, nor the most cunning of their magicians could decipher what Indur was and how it would return. The invaders were masters of the light. They did not know, therefore, how to explore the darkest recesses, the hideaways of solstice, the dark side of that which glimmers.

Then one day, an old hermit came from the mountains in the north of the Summerlands. She had spent her life in meditation up there, in the snow, she claimed. And there, she had been told, she said, by the beasts of the forest with whom she shared her life, that the witch would come one day to the castle that loomed high above the mountains and it would be on the night of the trembling moon. And so the invaders decided they would trap and kill the witch, lest she wreak death and disaster on their newborn kingdom.

On the night of the trembling moon, they threw a splendid ball to welcome her. The finest gold and the best wines were offered; the most beautiful men and women came to dance and sing; music resonated into the night, calling one and all to join. A single glass of wine was laced with poison so strong that it would kill anyone instantly. She did not come. Every year, they threw a ball, and every year sent out messengers far and wide, proclaiming that it was in honor of the witch of Indur. Every year, the music was so loud that it sounded as if the night herself had become one long musical note, and the golden glass was laced with the most powerful bane of the kingdom. Yet she never came.

Over the years, the invaders became the natives; and the witch became a legend; and, eventually, her name faded into obscurity, as did the fear she kindled in the hearts of men. They had conquered a land wedged between a river and a sea, and nothing, neither history nor a witch, had managed to stop them. The mountains had been silenced, as had the shores; and indeed, that stretch of nothing had become the Summerlands; and the elder people — few and far between these days — had stopped speaking publicly of the witch, though they were now called Indurians. Yet, every year, the invaders-turned-natives threw the ball of the trembling moon, for Indur, then Endor, and thus the meaning of that night was lost in the mists of time.

The mountaintop where the castle stood eventually took the name Endor. And because they were, at heart, savages, each year a cup was laced with Indurian poison, and one of the guests would be bound to drink it. And because it was a ritual, sacred since time immemorial, the guests accepted the rules of the ball; and it made, some said, the night merrier. And when the poisoned one fell to the ground, usually with an abrupt thud, there was always a pause. The music would stop playing, for just a few seconds, a quiver in time. And then the crowd would erupt in cheer around the lifeless body.

The night’s victim, each year, was buried with highest honor.

The westering sun was painting delicate orange shapes on the snowy slopes when he arrived at the castle. The ball was already in full swing in the main reception hall, an octagonal room of mirrors and candles; gold and red as far as his eyes could see. The first thing he noticed was how the light from the chandeliers on high seemed to bounce off the gilded chairs and the candelabra; how, as if alive, it slithered up the stone walls and into the velvet curtains. How malevolent it was, as if it were hunting down any hint of darkness to destroy it. And somewhere here was poison, too; and somewhere death among the light.

Triumphant light: It bent into the arms of the women and the necks of the men, curved around the crystal and the silk; it wriggled its way into the innermost folds of the clothes, where rage or sorrow might have been hiding. It hopped and danced, bewitching them all with its goldenness. It infiltrated the wine, quickening it into fire. It scratched at his eyes, which were used to the dark and the deep. The bloodthirsty light left him no respite. It appeared to prop the other guests up, however: They were engulfed in light, breathing it in and out; their clothes, their eyes, reflected it; their mouths seemed to devour it; their hair and their nails were caked in it. Beings of light, indeed.

It dazzled him and made him feel ill. He needed a break. He went out on one of the balconies, which overlooked the magnificent vistas of Endor. He could barely see anything in the dark and the snow. He stared dumbly at the flowerbeds. Lilies of the valley, surviving despite the snow in this magical part of the Summerlands. The earth, the air, everything is electric here, he thought. Lighting a match for his cigarette, he feared the air would explode. A waiter politely approached him. Dismissively, he showed the servant his wrist, where a red mark proved that he had drunk the compulsory glass of wine.

Some alleged that it was best to come early, as they would probably only serve the poison later, in order not to cut the party short. Others said it was best to come near the final deadline when the moon is half-up. He did not care either way.

He was not in his place here. He knew it; they all seemed to sense it, too. A woman floated up to him, all alight, and asked with childlike wonder, “Are you Indurian?”

Of course, he knew why they were thus called. He was here, in the abode of the priestess of the pines, in the valley of snow. Of course, he knew why he was here.

Of course, he knew. The woman had eyes of ultramarine blue. They looked like gems. He could have gouged them out and sold them — still bloody — on a black market somewhere in the south. Pretty necklaces, they would have made. She had — he was loath to say it like that — porcelain skin, not unlike his own. It would have sold for a pretty penny, too, down south. All in all, very expensive. And the man coming up behind her, slightly shorter than her, hair floating in the wind, he looked like a prince from a very foreign fairy tale, like nothing the earth here produced: very handsome face and eyes, very nicely set chin and impeccable teeth. The way the light glinted on his features, and in his obsidian eyes, very expensive, too. How his long, beautiful lashes seemed to invite some form of darker violence. A handsome couple, lots of money, he’d make a fortune down south.

Of course, he was not here for that. There was nothing to preserve. Of course, he felt why he was here, and it was terrifying. He was, he reflected, like an anglerfish, in the deepest of the deep. Except, instead of darkness, he was drowning in light, and his ring, thank heavens, produced the damp darkness he needed to survive. He could lure the obsidian-eyed boy and the girl with the lapis-lazuli gaze out of the castle and far away, to preserve their bodies. And then he’d sell down south, the eyes, the teeth, the organs, too, perhaps. He would have to look into that.

He felt a part of himself, which was woman, awaken. He looked out into the darkness. He would have sworn he could see two piercing eyes in the darkness, he could see them despite the flurries of snow and the encroaching darkness, two eyes, watching him. The wind whipped his face. Snakelike, devil eyes. The man and woman blabbered this and that to him, and he answered, charmingly, automatically, not paying much attention to what was being said. They were both elated; they had drunk together and — well, so far, so good. Though some, the man stated, said that the poison only started showing its effect several hours into the night. “Really?” the woman asked, worried. “Yes, that’s how they keep the party going,” he answered, his eyes shining with a sort of masochistic glee.

He gazed at his gold ring, his darkness. It had been given to him by his father when he left his village, in the deepest south of the Summerlands. His village. Famous throughout the south for the seemingly endless water that flowed there, in the heart of the desert: water, eternally gushing from the tangled earth. Sparks of life, there. A whole village of Indurians, thick eyebrows and something dark in their eyes. And a darker violence in all of them, every single one: an intergenerational violence that was passed on from one body to the next at birth. That glint of comets in their eyes. The violence of the Indurians, he reflected, was healthy. It was pure and open, and it circulated like spilt blood. He looked over his shoulder at the reception hall and thought that this, here, was perverse; an undercurrent of brutality that made no sense to him. It was a form of savagery that an Indurian would be ashamed to participate in.

It was coursing through his veins, the ancestral violence of his people; it was bouncing in his arteries and shaking his throat; it was molecular violence, engraved so deeply within him. Not like what happened here. He knew the ancestral adversary, the sleeping power, the dreaded name.

So, this was Indur, the old. So, this, here up north, was where she had lived, his ancestress, a witch from Indur. This is where one day she must have read in the clouds of the invaders coming in gray boats and of the lead poured in the ears and the eyes shut with wax; and here, most certainly, she read in the shadows of the clouds reflected on the snow that he would be born two thousand years from then. His blood jolted; her blood running through his, boiling like a sea. Blood that whispered to serpents and pine trees. The dreaded blood of a witch from Indur, a witch from the outer, resonating darkness. So, here, somewhere, she must have quivered in the air and disappeared in a flash two thousand years ago.

He had to go out into the darkness of Indur now. He took his leave of the uniquely colored couple, who had not stopped talking. It was a shame, really. The air quivered. Near one of the balconies, he saw a grand staircase of beautiful white stone that plunged into the darkness. He descended the handsome stairs, one by one, until he reached a promenade down below. It appeared to circle the whole valley, most assuredly a beautiful stone structure during the day. Now, it looked like the dreary pit of the ocean and the snowstorm felt even stronger here. He could make out the intricate engravings in the stones, an epic of a triumphant people. He breathed in. He was far from the perversion above, though the din of the music followed him, and even the light of the castle managed to make its way here, slightly. The smell of pine trees: This is where she wanted to go. He climbed atop the massive stone railing and jumped into the night. He landed on the slopes of the mountain, covered in snow. He would hurry; the cold was burying its fangs into every single part of his body. He knelt near a pine tree. Something unfamiliar expanded in his chest. Was that, perhaps, the poison?

He felt he knew what he was doing, yet his body was moving of its own accord. His mouth whispered to the trees words in a language his body had long since forgotten, dreaded words in a foul tongue, and from his open eyes, darkness spread. His mouth spoke a language that inflicted doom, that drew down the destructive pale moon. He spoke, unknowingly, dizzyingly, barely realizing where he was. The slopes were like a whole other planet swimming in and out of his vision. The world slid sideways. This, surely, was the poison. Of course, he would have been the one to drink it. Of course, the Indurian would have the dumb luck of dying on that night of all nights, blabbering insanities to the trees.

They were people of light and fire, of the open skies; he was an Indurian, made of cold streams and living shadows in the mountains. His blood boiled, a raging sea, water rising in his chest, as he spoke to the trees a language he did not understand. And then he saw it, in the sky: the changing light at Endor.

And he understood then that it was not the poison. It was she who spoke; she who said: Let the light be murky, let the valley become a hellmouth, and let the castle become a shallow grave. I will make them flee my island and they will dance on embers, and they will fall to the ground and writhe in pain, bodies twining, twisting, wreathed in pain. Let their heels turn black and let them fry, slowly, like frogs. Let them dance and roast.

It was not the poison, it was her. It didn’t matter, really, who drank the poison. Tonight, they would all die. The changing light, up behind the castle, soon quickened into a firestorm, erupting in the middle of the snow. This was her magic. And still he knelt there, watching the sky turn violet, then red, then colors he did not know, and he thought that he might have drunk the poison after all.

The witch’s blood boiled, and he saw, in his mind, the porcelain-skinned girl with her lapis gaze and the obsidian-eyed man, and their own pain somewhere beneath, and for an instant his hand stayed, time stopped, the fire held its breath, the chandeliers stood still. He could save them. He could force his mouth shut. But the vengeful witch spread her wings in his chest and whispered

let

them

burn.

Host Commentary

As this is the last episode of this occasion, I want to take this opportunity to thank all our writers and narrators for trusting us with their stories and performances. It was important to us to do this right, and the stories we’ve had–and the one we’re about to have–are textbook examples of the power of fiction to move you, to illuminate and bridge gaps and share the fundamental awe and terror and confusion of being human. I’ve been listening to PodCastle for about 700 episodes now–I was the other side of the mic for a long time before I was this side–and I honestly can’t think of another run of four stories that have been so consistently excellent and powerful across a month, so thank you all.

It bears repeating, because it is important for it to be said loud and often, that we absolutely stand in solidarity with the citizens of Palestine and against the merciless cruelty of the Israeli state’s occupation and genocide, a government and military that repeatedly and unjustifiably attacks civilian infrastructure such as schools and hospitals, that withholds and prevents aid from entering Gaza, that makes no attempts towards peace or resolution but instead is taking the opportunity to utterly destroy a country and a people.

If you’ve listened through the end of my outros each episode, you’ll know that I’ve personally donated to a different charity supporting the Palestinian people each week. If you haven’t stuck around that long, I would ask you too to consider matching my donations of $30 each to the Palestine Red Crescent Society, the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, Medical Aid for Palestinians, and today’s charity, the Alliance for Middle East Peace; or whatever you can afford to donate, to whichever charities operating in the region that are close to your own goals; or to any of the many individual fundraisers having to be run by Palestinians on social media to survive the genocide in the Gaza Strip. Thank you.

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “The Witch of Endor” by Karim Kattan, and if you enjoyed that then there’s a few other of his speculative stories freely available online: “Native Country” in Strange Horizons[1], “The Eleventh Hour” in Translunar Traveler’s Lounge[2], and The Abode of the Palms in khōréō [3], all easily findable through your search engine of preference or through the links we’ll include in the website post for this episode, with the text version of this outro. If you’re fluent in French, too, he has three novels out, with “Le Palais des Deux Collines” winning the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie award in 2021, and his latest novel “L’Éden à l’aube” was released this year, a queer love story in occupied Palestine.

There’s more reading from Karim that I’m going to discuss now, too, because not only is he an excellent fiction writer, he is an excellent essayist, vulnerable and challenging and honest. In an opinion column on Le Monde[4] only days after the Hamas atrocities of October 7–with a precursor and caveat that “as I am writing, I am afraid of exposing myself to hatred, accusations of cruelty or to misunderstanding. But we have to write because the media is saturated with every voice but our own.“–he writes: “We can say: Massacres like those that took place at the Tribe of Nova festival rave party are an undignified horror and that Israel is a ferocious colonial power, guilty of crimes against humanity. Acknowledging one horror does not mean minimizing another. The fate of my country and my people is not a zero-sum game.” It should shame the world that it does not yet have the same clarity as expressed here, mere days afterwards, by someone who has seen and suffered decades of oppression and violence at the hands of Israel.

As an aside, that webpage links to another opinion column[5] by an Israeli historian of the Holocaust, Amos Goldberg, who points out that just because Israeli actions in Gaza do not resemble the Holocaust, that does not mean it is not a genocide. As the headline quotes him: “What is happening in Gaza is a genocide because Gaza does not exist anymore.” In an earlier piece in the online Israeli magazine Local Call (Siha Mekomit)[6], Goldberg points out most cases of genocide–the Srebenica Massacre, the Rwandan Massacre of the Tutsi, the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar–are initially justified as “self-defence”, and are often enacted not just through direct violence but through the conditions we see Israel deliberately cultivating in Gaza. “What is happening in Gaza,” he says, “is genocide because the level and pace of the indiscriminate killing, the destruction, the mass deportations, the displacement, the starvation, the executions , the elimination of cultural and religious institutions, the crushing of the elites (including the killing of journalists), and the sweeping dehumanization of the Palestinians – create an overall picture of genocide, of intentional and conscious crushing of the Palestinian existence in Gaza.”

There is another of Karim’s essays at The Baffler[7] which relays a conversation he had in the days immediately after Hamas’s attack, wherein the organiser of a conference he was due to give a keynote speech at phoned him to make sure that, given “the current situation”–as she euphemistically called it–Karim “wouldn’t say anything horrific”, and imploring him instead to “find a positive solution.” Absurdly, incredibly, she deigned that he could still talk about things like “exile, memory, transmission, borders,” but he could not name the place from which he was exiled. As Karim says, in processing his response to this:

What she was requiring of me was to render every single complication of my political and intimate being palatable and harmless, to stop being a liability to her. These are the contradictions that we are expected, as Palestinians, to solve within ourselves: to exist without talking about why we exist.

As he closes this essay:

The voice on the phone, like much of the world around us, was asking the same thing: please, let us find a positive solution. If only you could vanish, or—easier yet—if only you had never existed at all, and if only you could spare us the horror, the displacements, the bombings, the killings, the starving of a people that you are forcing us to unleash upon you. The world itself echoed in this voice on the phone telling me: there is a solution, if only you weren’t so stubborn, there is a solution, which is to vanish within the contradictions wrought upon you; if only you could disinvite yourself from the world, if only you did not complicate the world with your existence, if only I did not have to talk to you, if only I did not have to listen to you, if only.

Though I think the line from that essay that I would rather leave you with is, instead, this:

Gaza is not an abstraction. It is a shore and beaches and streets and markets and cities with names of flowers and fruits, not an abstraction but places and lives and people that are being bombed into oblivion.

But I don’t want to end this month of Palestinian Voices with such sorrow; I want to end it with optimism, and hope for a peaceful future without oppression. The last of Karim’s essays I want to discuss today is Imagining Palestinian Futures Beyond Colonial Monumentality, in The Funambulist[8], which is almost speculative non-fiction in the way it talks on how the architecture of colonialism–the wall of apartheid that cuts through Bethlehem, the illegal settlement of Har Homa on the hill of Jabal Abu Ghneim–also colonises the mind, and shuts down avenues of imagination just as it shuts down avenues in the city. “One of the functions of the wall,” he writes, “and of settlements, is to remove all imaginations of possibles, and to naturalize domination.”

After discussing the only street he can recall from before the wall, one now hidden by it, that “was lined with flowers in spring”, and “seemed to coil round the neck of the hills, growing longer until it reached the ends of the earth, like a road of promise”, he says:

we are throwing away, yet again, the language and concepts and timelines that were imposed upon us, that wasteland of ideas, so that our words, our realities, and our imaginations can flourish. We will speak as we speak, and name things for precisely what they are. And it feels like that road stretching to the horizon: Palestinian creativity, this year, seems to be reaching new heights in how it expresses, illustrates, and accounts for colonization, and how it moves beyond it. It speaks with urgency, conviction, and precision, regardless of what the world is willing to hear… Our uncompromising vocabulary and our fiction are tools to testify to the existence of this road and, when memory fails, to reinvent it as many times as necessary, until we are free.

To close out this outro, and this month of Palestinian Voices–in which I hope you have learned much, and appreciated much, and been able to see Palestine as more than a parade of atrocities but as a land of joy and culture and above all, people, just people, who suffer and hope and cry and love and dream the same as any of us, and that you remember this going forward despite the best efforts of the worst people to make you forget this most basic, this most obvious of facts–I’d like to relay a story about olive oil that came across my feeds earlier in the month, and which I’ve been saving to tell you. As best I can make out through the layers of internet copy-pasting, this was originally written by Dima Seelawi on Facebook, though I could only find reposts[9]. It opens

When I was young, I never really understood my parents insistence to only use olive oil imported from Palestine. It took a long time and a great distance in a process that was neither cheap nor convenient. The oil came in old beat-up containers that did not look appealing to me at all.

It continues

After living in Palestine for a year during the olive picking season, something changed. The olive picking season in Palestine is holy.

Palestinians relate to the weather based on how it would benefit or harm the olives. There is well-known unspoken rule about treating olive trees with respect. There is a day off from work just to pick olives. On public transportation, it is not unusual to hear someone on the phone telling their friend to stop by for their share of this year’s olive oil stored in what used to be a Coca-Cola or a liquor bottle. A driver will stop in the middle of the way to give his brother- in- law a jar of olives that are so close to one another that they start to crush showing their insides.

“Palestinians drink more olive oil than water,” she jokes, before ending with:

Wherever you are, if it’s accessible to you, make sure your olive oil is Palestinian. Your ancestors would want that.

Thank you for listening this month. May the olive trees of Palestine grow strong and heavy for centuries to come, rooted in undisturbed land and tended by happy Palestinians.

As much as I am trying to make this month’s outros about Palestinian joy, the unavoidable truth is that the citizens of Gaza are suffering in historic, unconscionable ways. For each episode of this special month, I have donated $30 to a different charity supporting the people of Gaza, and I ask you to do the same, if you are able–to all of them alongside me, to one of them, or to another that you find closer to your heart, but please, help if you can. For this final week I want to look not at current suffering but to a future without, so I’ll be donating to the Alliance for Middle East Peace, a coalition of over 160 organisations working towards a sustainable peace in the region and a better future for Gaza: you can find out more about their work, and make your donation, at allmep.org. Thank you.