The Iron Tree: Book One of The Crowthistle Chronicles

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  Jewel was witness to a countenance beautiful beyond reckoning, but she was not drawn to it; rather, she shrank away, for there was something terrible about this ineffable beauty; something that hinted of unspeakable power and more—of alienness that frightened her.

  And she was not easily frightened.

  She could not look away. Fascinated in spite of her dread, she felt compelled to trace, over and over again, the haughty lines of the countenance; almost as if she were seeking some flaw that perfection could never possess, or as if something inside her were compelled to travel forever the addictive pathways of symmetry. It was only when serried ripples crossed the surface and the image blurred and vanished that she was able to wrench her gaze from the water.

  The pool laughed at her with its emptiness. Suddenly she felt cold, threatened and vulnerable. She was about to jump up and run home, but some perverse impulse led her to dip her hands and drink a few drops, as if to defy the phantasm, as if to show the pool she had no fear of its mysteries. Her thirst barely slaked, she rose quickly to her feet and made haste to the cottage.

  She told Eolacha what she had seen, asking if any man had ever been drowned in that part of the marsh.

  “Not to my knowledge,” replied the carlin, studying the fearful face of the child. “Jewel, are you certain it was no water wight you saw, floating just beneath the surface?”

  “I am certain. That face was like no water wight I have seen or heard of. Besides, our home pools are shunned by wights.”

  “Generally,” Eolacha appended.

  “What I saw was not as—as real as any wight.”

  “A wraith?”

  “More real than that.”

  “A dream perhaps.”

  “My eyes were open.”

  “One may still dream thus.”

  Jewel considered this statement. “Perhaps you are right, a seanmháthair. I hope so, for the vision was sorely unsettling.”

  “Perhaps ’tis one of the marsh’s mysteries, like the Galleon. Do not distress yourself, child. Recall, you are well guarded.” Jewel touched the bone amulet her father had given her and was reassured.

  Until, that same night as she slept, a dream really came to her.

  She seemed to be looking upon a high, windblown place, vertiginous, exhilarating, perilous: black crags beneath glittering stars. A strange and beckoning melody was being played upon a violin, but it was as if the music were being bowed upon her heartstrings, for a pleasurable ache resonated beneath her ribs, and the vibrations carried throughout her body, and she felt as if her blood fizzed with tiny sparks. As she ached, she longed to find the source of that music and was drawn to a great jagged tor whose shoulders blotted out the stars. She lifted her eyes. There, upon the summit, his hair and garments moving as if blown by the wind, although there was no wind, stood the musician.

  The starlight caught him in a glass of silver.

  Like fine stands of black seaweed eddying in a turbulent current, the attenuated strands of his hair wafted languorously, in sinuous patterns. This was no mere gypsy showman with jiggling elbow, sawing at a fiddle. Quite the contrary. Tall and lithe was he, like a skillfully fashioned figurine of jet and electricity and smoke, and as his long fingers danced along the neck, the bow gliding across the strings, his body swayed slightly, gracefully, in time with elaborate rhythms. He was part of those rhythms; more than that, the essence of the music sprang from the nature of his existence. The sidereal spheres themselves leaned closer to listen, or so it seemed, and the world held its breath.

  The music swelled. It was as if a second violin had joined in, and a third, and a fourth: this one producing a higher-pitched, unearthly song. In concert these elements wove in and out of one another, creating the most thrilling of harmonies: melliferous as desire, sharp as pain. Next entered the mellow voices of violas, the rich tones of cellos, and the throaty, subterranean growl of basses pitched to disturb the very roots of passion. Yet there were no other instruments: there was no orchestra. Clearly, the source of every sound was the single violin being played by the musician on the tor.

  Then Jewel, the dreamer, was impelled by a desire to see the face of this virtuoso, and it seemed to her that she drifted closer. But his countenance was averted, hidden by shadowy clouds of blowing hair, until all at once he turned slightly and his locks gusted back, and she saw.

  It was, of course, the face in the water: handsome beyond imagination, vehement, pitiless, utterly dazzling. In terror, the dreamer drew back, or perhaps she cried out in her sleep. Violence and cruelty smouldered in those long eyes. Such eyes. Their color was, of all colors, dark violet, like a rage of storms. Yet the infernal beauty of the violinist failed to seduce Jewel; on the contrary, she quailed. It might be that she looked upon the very quintessence of danger, and she wished only to take flight. At any moment the musician might actually turn his gaze upon her, and then surely some hideous doom would befall the cosmos. The dreamer wrenched herself backward, felt herself falling, threw out her arms in a reflex response, and awoke gasping and thrashing in her bed.

  She vowed never again to drink from that pool.

  For many days and nights after that she avoided the stump. Eventually, when she ceased to avoid it, she did not see the face there again, nor any other submerged image. Time passed and she thrust the entire incident from her mind.

  Later, Eolacha mentioned to Lilith what Jewel had seen.

  “Indeed, I do not know what to make of such an uncanny mirage, if mirage it was,” said the carlin. “Mayhap some rootless power imbued the water, conjuring some vision of the future, or the past, or some legend.”

  “Or conjuring merely some feckless vanity,” said Lilith.

  Winter came stealthily on white feet, rustling garments of icy silk encrusted with frost-pearls. Tenember, last month of the old year, was a time of great significance, for its twentieth day was Midwinter’s Eve. By that date, Grianan the Winter Sun had shrunk to its minimum size, hanging like a cool disk in the southern skies, and the strength of the Cailleach Bheur was at its most potent. The eldritch Winter Hag had been walking the wild places of Tir since Lantern Eve, smiting the land to adjourn proliferation and invoke bitter weather, and by Midwinter’s she was ready to choose from among any mortal women who were willing to present themselves as candidates to be carlins.

  She had never been known to utter a word, the Cailleach Bheur. That is to say, she never spoke to mortals. But on Midwinter’s Eve, women might go alone out into the untame places, and there they might encounter her, or not. Anywhere in Tir she might be discovered, fishing in a half-frozen pool, or seated on a stone milking a wild doe, or standing beneath a holly tree. If a woman did encounter her, there was no telling what might occur. The blue-faced crone might overlook the woman, merely passing by with no sound but a dim crackling as of black frost, no sensation but that of a breeze chill enough to rip through the nerves of the bones. Or the Guardian of Winter might stop and regard the warm-blooded mortal with eyes so terrible, so fathomless, they had no backs to them, so cold the wind seemed to blow through them. And then the hag might stretch out her hand, and if the daring woman did not falter, if she stood her ground bravely, the Cailleach Bheur would extract something from her.

  Something precious. Something the eldritch hag wanted for her own.

  There would be a rapid, sharp pain. Then the skinny, ice-blue fingers would brush the forehead of the chosen candidate, and in return, the gift of the Wand would be bestowed, along with all it entailed.

  There might well have been more to this strange initiation, but if there was, no mortal was able to speak of it.

  In Ninember, last month of Autumn, Eolacha had sought Cuiva Stillwater. She had said, “Your children have grown up to be strong and independent. This Midwinter’s would be an auspicious time to go out.”

  Cuiva had met the carlin’s gaze and held it. A range of emotions had flashed across her face and the light of eagerness had illuminated her eyes. She had merely nodded
, brimming with too many words to let any escape.

  On Midwinter’s Eve, Cuiva was gone from home all night, and her husband Odhrán Rushford kept vigil through the long, dark hours, though his rushlight burned low and his shoulders drooped and his lids threatened to paste themselves together. He dreaded the morning, wondering whether his wife would come hobbling home lame or crippled, sightless or bereft of her nose, or her hands. ‘Twere better, he agonized, if she were to be passed over. To achieve the Wand may well be her life’s wish, but at what price?

  Ever and anon he rose up and paced to the window or craned from the doorway into the frozen stillness of the Winter’s night, while at his back, warm in their beds, his three children slept tranquilly.

  The morning opened like a flower of ice, immobile and brittle, catching all the colors from the cold dazzle of the day’s eye, breaking them apart and scattering them in eye-stabbing glints through the frost that powdered everything unsheltered. Waterfowl hooted in the reeds. Every reed was a stiff, black sword begemmed with miniature crystals, rattling in the breeze.

  Then Cuiva came walking along the causeway, walking lightly like the mist over water, and she was laughing, and she carried a carlin’s Wand. Her husband ran to her, wrapped her in his arms and kissed her, then pulled back and studied her intently, anxiously. But he had already seen.

  Once, a tumult of riotous honeyed curls had cascaded about Cuiva’s face; now a mass of silver-white filaments swirled there. All color had been emptied from her hair, her lashes, her eyebrows. Her eyes, once hazelnuts in amber, had also changed. The irises, like her lips, had faded to softest magnolia pink. Once carnation, her cheeks were papered with bleached tissue.

  “I am a carlin,” she said wonderingly, exultantly. “She took only my colors!”

  Her husband did not hear her through the roaring of the tide of relief and the grate of a voice—his own—repeating her name. Lifting her across his arms, he carried her home.

  A rider came from Ashqalêth—Yaadosh. He brought the dolorous tidings that Jarred’s mother had died in her sleep.

  “But do not mourn too deeply,” he said anxiously, resting a hand upon his comrade’s shoulder, “for death came suddenly to her, without pain.”

  Jarred could not reply. Stunned by the news, he merely nodded, his head bowed in grief.

  Yaadosh said, “Your aunt Shahla told me your mother had been a little unwell for a short while, with pains in her left arm. One morning she did not waken, and the new druid’s agent said her heart had failed. He said he had seen such deaths before, but Shahla said her face was a picture of utter peace.”

  In his saddlebags Yaadosh carried the small number of copper coins Jarred’s mother had left for her only child. Jarred accepted them and then handed them to Earnán as back rent. He built a great raft and stacked it with dead wood collected from the sheep lands, with a wreath of leaves and berries as the crown. Then he fired a pyre that blazed so high its radiance could be seen for miles around, setting it adrift on Charnel Mere in the night, between the lightless water and the lightless sky. He stood to attention like a soldier on the dim shore, the final sentinel of his parent’s memory, and sang an old Ashqalêthan song of farewell.

  Yaadosh did not stay long.

  “I’m off again to seek adventure,” he said. “There’s naught for me in Ashqalêth.”

  Winter seemed longer that year.

  Carter’s Way was the broadest and longest path through the wetlands. It ran along the top of an ancient dike or levee. The upper surface of this high embankment was so broad and smooth that even donkey carts could be driven along it, which was why it had been given its name. In ancient times it had been constructed by builders whose intention had been to drain part of the marsh and make it fit for grazing.

  Every year beneath the last full moon of Winter, the men and women and children of the Great Marsh of Slievmordhu would go out to Carter’s Way, carrying stoups filled with water and sticks of yew. When they arrived at the top of the broad wall, they ranged themselves along it. Then they emptied out the water and beat the mossy stonework with the sticks, chanting.

  “Tiddy Mun without a name, here’s water for thee, take thy spell undone.

  Tiddy Mun without a name, the wall is broken, sain us again.”

  This ritual was known as the Watering. Unlike some of the annual ceremonies of the marsh, its origins were well known, and the tale was passed down through the generations.

  Long ago the dryland farmers had come to drain the marsh, with tempting promises of all the fortune that would result.

  “Drained marshes make good farmland,” they said, “rich land for the growing of crops. We shall build a great wall across here, so that a wide, shallow lake might drown these weedy islets. Elsewhere we shall dig ditches to drain other regions. The flow shall be diverted away under the ground to join subterranean rivers deep beneath the rock layers. What an expanse of dry land we shall uncover! And how much better your lives shall be!”

  But the marshfolk were dubious about these words. They knew the Tiddy Mun could never dwell in a drained marsh; and where would all the waterfowl go, and the fish and the eels, and the wights of water? However, the farmers were wealthy, and they were abetted in their enterprise by the druids, so they bade their workers toil on despite the protests of the marshfolk, who in those days were few in number and led by a weak Chieftain, with no carlin amongst them.

  One by one the laborers building the dike disappeared without a sign, and the marshfolk knew the Tiddy Mun had taken them.

  The farmers merely obtained replacements.

  Ditches were delved, masonry was carted in, and the vast embankment was raised stone by stone. When the last block was put into place and a great portion of the marsh began to dry out, the Tiddy Mun’s ire was finally raised against the marshfolk as well as the farmers and laborers. The milk of the goats curdled, then the goats themselves began to die of disease, then the infants of the marshfolk wasted away and perished in the arms of their mothers.

  When these dreadful trials first began to plague the marshfolk, they blamed bogles or other unseelie wights as the culprits, so they made more charms to hang above the doorways of their cottages and they begged the druids to help them drive off the wicked wights. But no matter what they tried, misfortune continued to harass them, until the wisest among them fell to wondering. “Perhaps,” they said, “it is the Tiddy Mun himself causing all this sorrow and strife.”

  Then the marshfolk met together.

  “Why would the Tiddy Mun work ill on us?” some asked. “He is our friend!”

  “It might be that he thinks we are at fault,” said the wisest among them. “It might be that he thinks we are behind the draining of the marsh.”

  All saw the logic of this, and at once they agreed that they must do something to show the Tiddy Mun that the walling of the waters was none of their doing. The men and their wives and the ailing children joined in a solemn procession to the top of the wall, each one bearing in his hand a stoup of water. The men carried hammers and crowbars also. When they arrived in the middle of the wall, the men went down to the foot of the dry side. They hammered at it and prized at the stones until they had created some breaks in the stonework. The water came trickling through, then flowing, then gushing as the force of its weight widened the holes in the wall but did not destroy it altogether. Meanwhile, atop the dike, the women and the sickly children who were positioned along the edge tipped out the contents of their stoups, crying aloud their petition to the Tiddy Mun.

  When they had done all this, the men climbed up to join their families. The people assembled, motionless, and listened. Their hearts struggled in their chests. They strained every nerve, hoping to catch a sound like the call of the lapwing, but all they could hear was the gushing and the bubbling of the water running through the holes in the wall.

  Then, all around them, an extraordinary keening and piping burst forth. The parents among them cried in grief and joy, “Those are
the voices of our own lost babes! They are pleading for the Tiddy Mun to put an end to the spell!”

  “How can you be sure?” asked the younger men and women in amazement.

  “We can feel infant hands touching us,” sobbed the parents, “tenderly patting our faces. And childlike lips are kissing our cheeks, cold as lily petals, and gentle wings are flitting around us in the darkness.”

  Even as they spoke, silence fell. Even the falling cascades quieted, as if they had lost their chattering tongues.

  Then from far away over the black water came the cry of the lapwing, pewit! and the marshfolk understood the Tiddy Mun was recanting his spell.

  The people came away from the wall laughing and weeping with happiness. In their excitement, the youths and damsels ran home as exuberantly as children on a feast day, but the parents followed more slowly, mourning for the sweet babes they had lost.

  From that night forth, the sickness and ill fortune vanished from the marsh, and its inhabitants began to flourish. They did not demolish the pierced dike, for its top made a broad, fair, and useful road. The farmers’ laborers kept blocking up the holes in the wall, but overnight they would mysteriously open again, and eventually the farmers gave up and went away. Over the years the silt rose on each side, becoming quagmires, and will-o’-the-wisps proliferated.

  This, then, the origin of Carter’s Way.

  It was why, at the last full moon of Winter, the marshfolk went out and performed the water ceremony, striking the stonework with sticks and repeating their rhyme to remind the Tiddy Mun of what had passed.

  That year, after all others had returned to their homes from the Watering, Eolacha tarried. Despite her advanced years, she seemed oblivious of the fierce and savage cold. Her household waited with her, a little distance removed, not knowing what to expect. They saw her standing alone, a frail pale streak against the immensity of the dark marshlands, lit by the world’s silver satellite. Raising one skinny arm, she threw the Wand far out across the water. It spun, fell effortlessly but strangely slowly as though through transparent syrup, and disappeared into the water. Then, from the outer rim of the darkness, somewhere across the marshes, came a sound rarely heard in those regions; the long-drawn, eerie howl of a wolf.