The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  Even the small sound of their boots on the cobbles seemed to bounce too loudly off disintegrating architecture as they tramped the streets. Every abandoned mansion, every collapsed bothy and gaping hall, seemed to be roofless, dank, still puddled with the morning’s rain.

  “There be no choice,” Sianadh said reluctantly. “We shall have to retrace our steps. Near where we came in, not far from that bridge, I saw a building with a roof, beside a pond. It looked to be an old mill. ’Twere too near the stream for my liking, right on it, in fact.” He shrugged. “Anyhow, ye need not fear with me by your side.”

  His hand strayed again to the amber tilhal.

  Chipped gargoyles watched the travelers return through the echoing streets, now dim in the graying light. The structure beside the green glass pond turned out to be an old mill indeed; the great wheel in the race below the dam had mortified countless years ago. Slime dripped from its flanges. The front door of the mill had long since rotted to dust. Sianadh looked up at a weathered inscription over the gaping doorway.

  “Faerwyrd, the key; idrel, the sword; nente, the stitch; ciedre, the moon …” Painstakingly he deciphered the runes. “The thorn, atka; the dragon, slegorn; F, I, N—Fincastle’s Mill. Well then, Fincastle must needs welcome visitors this night.”

  Inside, the mill was cool but dry. There were several chambers, but the travelers settled on a small one that boasted a large stone table in the center, as well as a fireplace. Sianadh gave a shout of laughter when he saw this, and it was not long before they had gathered enough wood from a nearby garden, rampantly overgrown—which also yielded onions and ripe passionfruit—to have a fire going and fuel to spare.

  “This will keep away wild beasts and cook our supper as well!” the man said gleefully, rubbing his hands. “And we can eat like Kings at our own table. I have strips of dried beef to make an onion stew, thickened with a bit o’ oat flour. That’ll stick to your ribs!”

  His companion fetched water from the stream, whose reflections in the evening were now colorless. Willows trailed long withies onto its surface. Sickly stems of paradox ivy twined about the feet of a collapsed bridge.

  Their supper was comparatively lavish, but despite Sianadh’s urgings the girl could not touch the meat. The passionfruit tasted delicious. Afterward the Ertishman leaned contentedly back against the knapsack with his hands behind his head and wistfully reflected, in the glow of the fire, on the delights of a drop of whiskey after a meal. The girl, however, wanted to ask questions.

  <>—indicating their surroundings.

  “The city? There be many such as this throughout Erith. The Ancient Cities, some call them. They were built many centuries ago at the beginning of the Era of Glory, now long gone. Some gramarye be in them, they say, for the walls of the Ancient Cities still stand and have not been buried beneath layers of dust and silt blown in by the winds of centuries, or cracked apart by heat and cold and living roots. Cities so fair and wondrous have never been made since. But they were abandoned, because they were not built from dominite. Dominite be full of talium trihexide, that metal what the mesh in taltries is made of. The power of the shang wind can pass through all other stone and all other metal, and so it did. The folk in those days were careless about wearing taltries. Nowadays there be severe laws governing that. So ye see, the Ancient Cities became cities of ghosts whenever the unstorms came. Too many ghosts, as time went by, until few had the heart to live amongst them.

  “See, the images be the imprints of real folk, stamped forever on the places where they have suffered or had great joy. When we feel strongly and passionately, we make a force. The shang wind stains the air with that force—also it whips up those feelings in us. Some people are afraid of the Shang, and others revel in it. They say the name comes from some old speech, ‘sh’ meaning wind and ‘ang’ meaning the Greayte Star of the south, so it be the Star’s Wind.

  “I have heard of another old, forsaken city in the far north, in Avlantia where the Talith used to dwell—but the architecture of that place is different. And there are no ghosts. They say the folk all left that city in a time before the Era of Glory and never returned. It is not known why or where they went, but the most common story is that a sickness or a plague wiped them out, or some terrible curse drove them away. Now the ruins of the old city steep alone in the mull of their splendor, I guess, and only the great gold lions of Avlantia roam there.”

  A glister of sparks arced from the fire as he tossed on an extra piece of wood.

  <> She drew her taltry away, pointed to her hair.

  “Your yellow locks. Aye, the Talith were a yellow-haired race. Not many of them left now. Still, a few of them do dwell scattered about in different countries. Avlantia was their native home. They say it is a fair country, full of red-leaved trees in the west and overflowing with flowers in the east. The climate be warm and pleasant. But that does not suit the other races, I suppose, else Avlantia would now be overrun with Feorhkind, Erts, and Icemen. But it be not. Few folk visit those northern lands, and fewer dwell there, if any.”

  He tilted a red, bristling eyebrow at her. “How far back in your own past do ye recall?”

  She conveyed to him as much as she could, drawing pictures in the dust with her finger and using gestures. He showed her more handspeak, which she absorbed greedily. Then he shook his head wonderingly.

  “I do not know what to make of ye, Imrhien. Ye wear a poor excuse for a tilhal that looks to be not worth the wood it’s chewed out of—and what be that scar on your gullet?”

  Her hand flew to her throat. She had not been aware of a mark there, being in the habit of avoiding looking at reflective surfaces. Indeed, a raised weal of hard tissue striped the front of her neck. It had nothing to do with the beatings she had received in the Tower—those had always been directed at her back and shoulders. She shrugged, frowning.

  “Ye have no memory of it? ’Tis like a whiplash. My cousin had a mark like that on his arm he got when he was cracking whips with some of the feckless lads on the farm.” Thoughtfully Sianadh chewed on a twig. “I was born and bred on a farm, see, in Finvarna. ’Twas a good life. We had a bauchan to help us in them days. He and me dad often fought, but the bauchan helped us when we needed it.”

  He pushed his toes closer to the fire and stared reflectively at the cracked ceiling.

  “One day, for instance, as me dad was coming back from the market, the bauchan pounced out on him and they ended up in a brawl. Then when me dad got home he found out he had lost his best handkerchief, the one he prized because a wizard had put charms in it and me ma had embroidered his name on’t when they were courting. He was certain the bauchan had it, and he went back to look for it. Sure enough, he found the bauchan rubbing the handkerchief on a rough stone. ‘It’s well you’ve come, Declan,’ says the bauchan. ‘It’d have been your death if I’d rubbed a hole in this. As it is, ye’ll have to fight me for it.’ So they fought, and me dad won back his handkerchief. But it was not long after, when we had run out of firewood and the mud was feet deep and me dad’s bad leg stopped him from fetching a birch he had felled, we heard a great thud at our house door and there was the tree, lugged through the mud by the bauchan.”

  Sianadh scratched his beard abstractedly. “He was a good thresher, too—I do not know how we would have managed without him at harvest time. But I had no mind to be a farmer, when I grew up. I was too restless. This sildron mine will be the making of me, for sure. Mind, I have told no one else of the map, not even my nephew Liam in Gilvaris Tarv. See, I knew I had to come alone, just to find out if the map was valid or merely a jest.”

  He fell silent. Drowsily the girl poked the fire with a stick. It blazed up.

  “Time to sleep now.” The Ertishman stretched his arms and settled down with his head on the knapsack. His companion folded the small blanket under her own head and soon fell fast asleep.

  She did not know how long she had been asleep when she struggled awake, feeling a great wei
ght pinning her feet down. The fire’s light showed the mountain that was Sianadh snoring nearby. Something very heavy was moving up on her body, breathing heavily. With all her strength she shoved it off and sprang to her feet. Sianadh awoke with a start, and there came the sound of something rolling out the door.

  The Ertishman half crouched, drawing his skian. “What was that? Did ye see it?”

  The girl shook her head, picked up a stout stick of firewood, and went to the door. Beneath her ribs a rabbit jumped.

  Looking out, she could see nothing but starlight on water and the dark outlines of trees, hear nothing but frogs gurruping in the millpond. Sianadh stoked the fire. They sat with their backs to the flames, staring into the shadows. The fire leaped and crunched. The girl’s blood thumped in her temples.

  Knockings and scrapings began in the next room, but when the man put his head around the door to look, they ceased. Then came the sound of objects being thrown around, behind the walls, and ringing blows as of hammers on anvils.

  “Pah! ’Tis a pack of foliots. They be only trying to scare us,” said Sianadh.

  They are succeeding, thought his protegee.

  A pitiful howling cranked itself up and abruptly turned into laughter. From various places in the floor and through holes in the walls, flame whooshed high, dazzlingly bright, and was as inexplicably extinguished. Strange lights came and went, stones were flung, chains rattled, doors ostensibly opened and shut, although no doors existed within the premises.

  The frightful manifestations continued into the night. Neither of the travelers slept.

  Silence had descended and the fire had burned low when a fuath came in through the mill door. Fuathan as a malignant, water-dwelling genus comprised many species—this particular fuath appeared like a small, ill-favored man, about three feet in height, very raggedly dressed in gray-green clothes that were dripping wet.

  “Who are you?” it said. “And what do they call ye?”

  At that, Sianadh spoke up boldly. “Who are ye yourself? And what do they call ye?”

  “My Self,” said the fuath slyly.

  “And I am called My Own Self,” the man replied casually. “And my friend be called Me.”

  The travelers kept sitting by the fire, and the fuath sat down with them, closest to the flames. Its clothes could not seem to dry; they were still sopping wet, although a puddle formed around it. Behind the walls the noises abated. The girl sat very still. Deep-cored shadows came creeping in from the open door. Undaunted, Sianadh vigorously stirred up the fire. But in the next instant his companion wished he had never done so. Sparks and cinders blew out and burned the fuath, who jumped up and went whirling about fiercely, shrieking and bellowing in a voice quite disproportionate to its size.

  “I am burned! I am burned!”

  And from under the hearthstone a dreadful voice answered.

  “Who has burned ye?”

  “Get out of sight!” Sianadh cried, diving under the stone table. The lass slid in behind him, and not a moment too soon. They huddled there in the darkness, shivering, and heard the awful voice ask again, “Who burned ye?”

  “My Own Self and Me,” yelled the fuath.

  “If it had been any mortal man,” said the voice, “I would have been revenged, but if it was ye yourself, I can do nothing.”

  The fuath rushed out, lamenting. A pressing silence folded around, thick and gelatinous.

  All night the girl stayed with Sianadh under the table in suspense, hoping to be saved, scarcely daring to breathe. Toward dawn, when the stirring song of magpies beckoned the sun, there came the presentiment of an unstorm.

  Then morning gleamed, and with the sun’s first light they were free.

  They gathered up the precious knapsack and left Fincastle’s Mill as quickly as possible, heading back into the city. When they had put several streets between themselves and the mill, they halted. The sky was clear and hard, like blue enamel, and the morning was already warm.

  “My breath and blood! The nights here be more tiring than the days,” groaned Sianadh. “If I don’t get some sleep soon, I shall be starting to look like Domnhaill’s old bloodhound. Doch, my mouth tastes as if I’ve eaten Domnhaill’s old bloodhound.”

  He rinsed his mouth and spat on the ground.

  “Pah! This drink’s not much better. For mountain stream water, it smacks of slime. Slimy fuathan, no doubt. ’Tis plain the one that so cannily calls itself My Self be half-witted, which be fortunate for us. It has a mighty protector somewhere under the hearthstone. If things like that be about, ’tis time to take stronger measures. Ah! for a few wizard’s spells and a good broadsword …”

  He bade Imrhien go behind a dilapidated wall for modesty, to turn all her tattered clothes inside out and put them back on, while he did likewise. Then he broke two stout, straight branches from a mighty ash tree that overhung the street—“to bash their heads in with”—and trimmed them. With staffs in hand they marched along the wide lanes and byways that crossed one corner of the sprawling municipality.

  A sweet, clear ringing started up as if all the bluebells in a wood had tiny silver clappers and trembled in a breeze.

  “Uncomber’s on the way,” said the Ertishman, reflexively touching the hood hanging back from his shoulders. “Ha. No matter if we leave off our taltries. What be two more ghosts among many? Besides, I cannot speak for ye, but I be too weary to drum up any excitement, unless a big featherbed appears in front of me.”

  Imrhien glanced at him and smiled. With bloodshot, red-rimmed eyes sagging above smutty pouches, he did indeed look like a mournful hound. She wondered what bale-eyed monster she herself resembled.

  He took a bite of a piece of hard ship’s bread and handed her another.

  “No need to be so cheerful.”

  But she felt happy, and the unstorm’s approach amplified that. There were wild herbs thrusting up vital shoots in the creviced shoulders of marble statues and warm breezes sweeping unhindered through necrotic palaces. There were reasons for cheerfulness.

  All the leaves in the weed-choked gutters rose up as one; the air swirled thickly with them in the first onrush of the shang, and the blue-black clouds it brought covered the sun’s face. Her hair stood up yet again in justification of one of the wind’s many nicknames.

  “Not afraid, chehrna?”

  <>

  “Well then, we shall keep on walking and see what we shall see.”

  Day became night and sunshine, moonshine. The lights began, and so did the silent tableaux, faint because of age.

  In a casement window overhanging the street, two slender lovers wept and parted, each richly dressed in brocade and jewels of an old-fashioned style. His coach and matching four waited below at the door; the horses arched their frosted necks and tossed sparks from foaming manes. Carriage lanterns flickered. The young man turned and looked up for one last glance before he boarded, and she waved with a lace handkerchief. The burnished coach, with escutcheons painted on each door, bowled silently away, suddenly vanishing, and the lovers were back again in the window, the carriage waiting below.

  In a wilderness garden a child on a swing flew endlessly back and forth, laughing; the golden ropes stretched up to nothing, for the tree had fallen centuries before.

  A funeral procession came up the street, lavishly ornate, the hearse drawn by six shining blacks in silver harness and tall midnight plumes. A chatoyance of flowers covered the bannerol over the coffin. Six tall men in black top hats walked ahead; behind came hundreds of mourners: mounted knights, veiled women, and men in black outfits of a mode long past, their pale faces sagging with grief. They passed so close that Imrhien fancied she could hear the rustle of silk.

  Parks and civic gardens must once have existed here, for the travelers saw tangled places where no jagged towers or smashed porticos reigned. Here, two gallants dueled, as in the forest near Isse Tower, dying over and over. There, people with flowers in their hair danced around a bonfire. A translucent youth
and maiden stepped from the boles of horse chestnut saplings, to twine arms and kiss, her girdle a lattice of misty emeralds.

  A castle had stood on the higher ground. Its many turrets now were crumbled, but a lone piper yet paced far above, where the battlements had been, where now was emptiness. With his bag beneath his elbow, the pipes slung over his shoulder, their tassels swinging as he strode, he played a dirge for some dead and long-forgotten prince. All these passionate joys and sorrows, which had meant so much to those who had lived, which had been the world to them, now were only flickers staining the airs. As dry leaves before the wind, their reasons, their thoughts, their cherished plans, had been long swept away; those who viewed these brief afterimages could never know their story.

  The city lived its glory days again, poignant memories pulsating brighter and dimmer with each fluctuation of the shang wind that spangled with metallic fires the overgrown shrubberies and arboreta, that limned with thin streams of molten argentum the fallen capitals, ruined spandrels, decomposing parapets and balustrades: the stairs leading nowhere.

  Imrhien had pulled on her taltry, but as they walked together through a square lined with stone dragons Sianadh, unhooded, turned and flung up his hands, crying in a flare of exultation:

  “I be My Own Self, and I be here, so look ye, I have gilfed this town with my mark.”

  A few moments later, looking back from a tangential boulevard, Imrhien saw the imprint of him standing triumphant.

  The wind fled, chiming away to the distance. They crossed the farther outskirts of the city and reentered the forest just as the sun came out.

  Sianadh squinted at the map.

  “Now we have been led out of our way somewhat, but we be back on the right track now.” He tapped the compass, whose needle spun wildly.

  “Reaper’s Pike should be off to our left, and Skylifter rises over there.” His hand waved vaguely. “We be walking on the flanks of Gloomy Jack. These mountains be snow-capped in Winter, but not now, not when Midsummer’s almost here. And well for ye, Imrhien, I might add. If ’twere Winter, ye should have to catch a wolf and skin it to clothe ye in the cold. Look for round stones as we go. With my slingshot I might go hunting later for something smaller for our supper.”