The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  Come thou, Einion’s Yellow One,

  Stray-horns, the Parti-colored Lake Cow,

  And the hornless Dodin,

  Arise, come home.

  At the first sound of the seeming-lady’s call, the white cow had pricked up her round ears and trotted off. As the song went on, other cattle emerged from various places and moved up the hillside toward the singer, gathering to the summons. They surrounded the green lady, who formed them into ranks and led them down into the dark waters of the lake surrounding Findrelas. Only a cluster of yellow waterlilies marked the spot where they disappeared.

  Diarmid, as if waking from a dream, turned his attention back to the fire, coaxing it to take hold blowing life into it.

  “The herds of Finvarna are said to have the blood of elf-bulls,” he said between breaths.

  Thorn had disappeared again, but soon he came back, singing in full and mellow voice:

  ’Tis the thrill of the chase with the wind in your hair

  And the riding to hounds with a company fair

  ’Tis the thunder of hooves over meadow and hill,

  ’Tis the song of the arrow that flies to the kill,

  The hunting of the stag, O! The hunting of the stag!

  ’Tis a soft Summer’s eve with the moon in the trees

  And the glimmer of stars and a rose-scented breeze

  ’Tis the laughter and music that ring through the night

  And the feet that move swiftly in patterned delight

  Dancing on the grass, O! Dancing on the grass!

  “A trivial ditty to which no salt-worthy bard would admit,” he concluded, “but what it lacks in poetry it amends with gaiety.” He bore armfuls of vegetation, including a small, perfumed flower which he dropped in Imrhien’s lap. Hunger, which had been troubling her since she recalled they had eaten nothing since dawn, abruptly disappeared in the standard manner for lovesick fools, leaving only the soreness of shoulders and the sting of blistered hands.

  “Waterlily corms and bulrush rhizomes must be roasted under the coals,” explained the Dainnan, seating himself by the fire. “The seeds of waterlilies are sweet—as are these, the seeds of wild ginger—eat them raw. Nardue is not so palatable. And if not prepared rightly, it starves instead of nourishing.” He scooped foaming milk from the pail, using the silver-clasped horn. “This instrument is stoppered now, but there is more to its purpose than a drinking vessel.” They shared the warm drink around their circle of three. Sedge corms had been harvested, too, and there were peeled waterlily stems and the very new, white shoots of the bulrush, to be eaten raw.

  “Can the roots of water-iris be eaten?” Diarmid asked, noticing that Thorn had brought a handful.

  “No—they have other purposes.” Thorn tucked the bulbs away in a pocket of his tunic.

  The goshawk returned after a long absence and went swooping after crickets. His master ignored him, intent on crushing leaves of star boronia.

  “The wood of white-leaf crackles in this corner of our fire. Its ashes, mixed to a paste with water, are a treatment for blisters. Crushed leaves of star boronia, steeped, wash away soreness of the sinews. So, you both may sleep comfortably this night. The smoke of quandion leaves drives away mosquitoes and similar winged pests. Throw them on the fire when you hear the Vectors’ whine. The nights are cooler in this season, which is not to their liking—yet, sensing mortal breath, the Vectors will come.”

  It was dark by now. The goshawk perched on a high branch, dining on something limp and ratlike. The fire crackled. Imrhien raked the cooked food out of the coals. A loud, harsh cry like the roar of an angry bull funneled out of the dark distance. Three times it came. Diarmid peered into the shadows, his hand on the longbow.

  “’Tis the call of the boubrie only,” said Thorn.

  Diarmid’s wariness dissipated. “Boubrie birds—I have seen them. They eat only sheep or cattle. It is far from its usual haunts, this one, unless it can stomach eldritch cattle.”

  “Mayhap it simply passes by.”

  The cry sounded again farther away, plaintive, anguished, and lonely in the night.

  Supper finished, Diarmid and Imrhien soothed their hurts with the infusions and pastes prepared by the Dainnan, who, wilderness-hardened, needed no cures.

  “Errantry shall be the nightwatchman and shall awaken us at the slightest hint of peril.”

  As if in reply, the hawk uttered, “Swee-swit, swee-swit.” He flicked his tail, scratched the side of his head with a talon, then sat hunched on his bough, one leg tucked up inside the apron of his panel.

  They stoked the fire and lay down to sleep.

  It was a clear night. All over Mirrinor, frogs were chorusing. Acutely conscious of Thorn reclining nearby in idle vigor, the archetype of male beauty, Imrhien lay looking up at the stars. “The Uile” was the name she had once heard Sianadh give to that vastness: the All that cradled Aia, the boundless ocean of suns, moons, and strange worlds. Far above, the Swan constellation unfurled its wings protectively over Erith. A myriad stars above, a myriad frogs below. The stars drew down so low that she could have reached up and touched the nearest; and the deeps of the star-filled sky were so dizzying that she might have fallen into them.

  The whine of a Vector penetrated her reverie, and she sat bolt upright. Errantry gave a warning whistle and began to chatter in shrill anger. The fire was still bright—she tossed leaves on it, and pungent blue smoke billowed up. The Vector was close, and others were closing in behind the first, stretched waifs on wings of starlight. The bizarre, almost human look of them was eerie. Improbably thin were the attenuated, delicate dancer’s legs—the ankles no larger in diameter than the thickness of a man’s thumb, the limbs twice as long as a woman’s.

  They were human in form, yet not in proportion. And not in movement, either, for they could not turn their heads at all; their large-eyed faces were directed straight ahead, their fragile flower’s stamens of arms terminated in innocent, tiny hands. Their childlike and gossamer appearance belied their nature. They could alight on a sleeping man without waking him and insinuate their poisoned needles deep into his flesh, sucking his blood, injecting itches, fever, the parasitic worms of filaria, and slow death. Devoid of human emotions, they resembled engines of clockwork going about their business, patient, ruthless, relentless, maddening.

  Where they met the smoke the Vectors moved away, but they always returned, drawn by their senses. In a circle they hung in the still airs, their piercing, high-pitched drones unceasing. More of them gathered. Diarmid threw extra leaves on the fire.

  “’S death—they’ll have us at any moment!”

  “The leaves must last us until morning,” said Thorn.

  <>

  “Does the wind ever blow, in Mirrinor?” asked the Ertishman. He had drawn his skian and was slashing futilely at the Vectors, who gently drifted out of reach on every air current engendered by his vigorous movements.

  “Rarely.”

  But even as Thorn spoke, the air stirred. A light breeze arose and strengthened. The Vectors were thrown together, then torn apart. They hovered as best they could on their weak aerofoils, but the breeze caught them up and carried them away, and the night became still again.

  “They will return.”

  Diarmid and Imrhien huddled down to sleep, uneasily. The girl dozed sporadically. Whenever she opened her eyes, they were filled by the white light of stars that stippled the sky like a glimmering net thrown from one horizon to the other. Against the stars, the tall, dark figure of Thorn stood quiet and vigilant.

  Sometimes she would study him covertly from under her lashes, marveling. His was not the comely regularity of the classic statue carven to the measurements of ruler and quadrant and the laws of arithmetic. His was the lawless beauty of the cloud-crowned mountain, the violent ocean, the blowing stars—a wild beauty, in that it was impossible to pin down, to describe, or to measure.

  Vectors came and went i
n the night, always heralded by Errantry’s cries. With scented smokes, Thorn warded off their blood-seeking tongues. By dawn, the quandion leaves were all gone. As were the Culicidae.

  At uhta, in the insipid light of before-day, Imrhien raised her head. White vapors from the lakes curled through tawny abelias and soaring snowmints, settling in fine droplets on their leaves. All the trees seemed to be floating free of the ground, suspended on a sea of pale cloud. Away eastward, the sun would soon be rising crimson out of the mists to paint the Autumn trees with gilded rose. Errantry began his raucous morning oratory. His master was already awake and moving about—she wondered whether he ever slept. Diarmid was beginning to stir.

  A noise nearby startled them. Something huge came crashing through the golden abelias, and a head reared over the top of the bushes. Like a gigantic black waterbird it appeared—the neck was almost three feet long, the bill half as long again and hooked like an eagle’s. Webbed were the feet and armed with tremendous claws. This creature gave a deafening bellow. Two small white forms shot out of the trees and across the clearing. Thorn had the longbow in his hand and an arrow nocked before the girl could blink. The great bow sang, and the first arrow was scarcely on its way before a second whined after it, and two hares tumbled on the ground, rolling over and over, a shaft through the heart of each of them. The boubrie crashed off toward the water’s edge, bellowing.

  “Here is your breakfast,” said Thorn, retrieving the hares and slinging them on the ground beside the smoldering fire. He placed his booted foot on the still twitching carcasses and pulled out the arrows. “They were doomed. Had I not taken them, the wight would have done so.”

  Diarmid, with difficulty, mastered his amazement.

  “I thought you did not hunt hares, Sir Longbow.”

  “Never did, never shall.”

  “Then, these are eldritch things?”

  “Think you I cannot tell the difference? No. That was not hunting.”

  Thorn took the bloody arrows and went off toward the waterlily pool.

  The Ertishman turned to Imrhien. “Know you how to dress these?”

  She shook her head, not untruthfully. Let he who would eat them, prepare them—she would be no scullion, not any more.

  The boat was found where they had stowed it. Spiders had spun sticky, glistening webs all over its sides. As the travelers put out from shore, Thorn commented on the fact that the small island on which the swanmaidens had landed the night before was no longer to be seen. Only an empty shining sheet of water stretched there now.

  “’Tis one of the floating isles,” he said, “of which Mirrinor has many. Findrelas, however, has its roots firmly planted beneath the lake.”

  Diarmid took first turn at rowing, his hands bandaged with strips torn from Imrhien’s petticoat.

  Bridges linked some of the isles of Mirrinor, although they were few in number and varied in design. One or two were ancient constructions of greenish stone, moldering and crumbled. Three or four were rickety wooden pontoon-bridges, and others were simple affairs suspended across the water, attached at either end to tall trees.

  “Few men ever dwelled in this region,” said Thorn. “None have dwelled here for more than a few years. Only some edifices of stone remain, which once they built. Other creatures made the wooden bridges. Those builders cannot cross running water, but the waters of Mirrinor stand still.”

  Here in this place forsaken by mortalkind, wights and other wildlife were numerous. A pony’s head broke the water’s surface and stared steadily at the occupants of the boat. Weeds were tangled like green ribbons in its mane. The waterhorse swam to a northern shore and heaved itself out, disappearing from view into a clump of trees. In the time it takes to draw one breath, its alternate shape of a rough, shaggy man emerged on the other side of the thicket and trotted away into the distance. Close at hand, naked little folk no more than twelve inches high, thin and pale as the sickle moon, dived off lily pads and gamboled in the water. Startled by the boat, they fled with melodramatic cries of dismay. Mallards quacked in the reeds.

  A sparse shower of rain passed over, leaving an archway of pastel colors in the skies. Thorn disconnected the bowstring and thrust it under the front opening of his shirt to keep it dry. At evening, mists arose languidly from the meres. Through them, the haunting strains of solemn music came drifting to the ears of the voyagers. A shadow loomed. The white haze thinned and drew back for a moment, revealing the mouth of a channel between two islands. On either side of this waterway tall, funereal trees stood in rows. From this gap a light barge emerged, propelled neither by oar nor by sail. Its smooth passage stenciled two glimmering furrows along the water’s surface. Folds of rich cloth-of-silver were draped over the barge’s sides, the hems trailing in the lake. Cradled within lay a knight, clad in armor the color of moonlight. His hands were crossed upon his breast, his helm was open. Dark were the lashes of his shuttered eyes against the pallor of his face. In the bows of this vessel a shrouded figure stood, motionless. As the barge glided on, the veils of mist closed in, hiding the vessel and muffling the haunting melody, which faded slowly into the ageless quietude of the water-world.

  Diarmid broke the hush.

  “By my oath, what was that which passed yonder?”

  “It was An Bata Saighdear Ban,” said Thorn. “The Boat of the Pale Warrior.”

  In response to the Ertishman’s puzzled frown, he added, “Forever, that vessel glides upon the waters of Mirrinor.”

  “Once, was that fair knight a living man?”

  “No, never.”

  “And he who rides at the prow?”

  “Neither.”

  Water gurgled softly beneath the timbers of Waterleaper’s hull.

  “How long should it take to cross this place?” asked Diarmid.

  “Ten days, maybe eleven.”

  Their course took them along channels through water-meadows luxuriant with hog-bean and sharp-flowered rush and the golden kingcups called marsh-marigolds. Their vessel swam through flooded jungles of coppiced trees: alder, willow, casuarina, and poplar, where birds, otters, and beavers flourished. A pair of lynxes came to the water’s edge to drink, majestic and aloof.

  At nights, viridescent lights, ringed by pale circles in the mist, bobbed beyond the flicker of the campfire. The vapors would swirl apart to reveal black waters and close in again. Then they would melt and the sky could be seen overhead, thickly encrusted with twinkling white stars like seed-pearls sewn on a velvet cloak. Sometimes Diarmid spoke softly of Muirne, trying to regain her with memories, certain—he said—that she had survived and would be found again, safe and well, certain that they would be reunited. Culicidae Vectors always came, lured by breath and warmth. They whined for blood all night at the edges of the smoke. Once, one of them hovered very close to Diarmid, and he woke to Errantry’s shrill scream, lashing out instantly. The frail, venomous Vector dropped from the air, and he crushed it with a stone. It flattened out to nothing, a mere spindly outline with a crimson splash at its center. The other Culicidae droned on monotonously as though nothing had occurred, as though they cared naught for their own kind, which indeed they did not.

  One bright morning, busy filling the water-bottle at a limpid spring, Imrhien caught Thorn’s smile as he rinsed his knife farther downstream, and she flicked a tendril of water at him by way of reply. He returned the splash. Caught up in a sudden spontaneous joy whose founts she had not guessed, she dropped the bottle and scooped water at him with both hands. Fine droplets flew back and forth like diamonds, catching the light, in a game such as children play. They both returned to camp shaking their dripping hair. She, between shock and shame and delight, could not name her inner turmoil.

  On two nights, shang winds came and blew the Vectors away, without much disturbing the surfaces of the lakes. Mirrinor then glittered gorgeously, like a million green-and-silver candelabra, like fires of burning emeralds and ice crystals.

  The shoulders of the mercenary and the gir
l ached from daily rowing and were nightly soothed with herbal balms. At times Thorn revealed to them much lore of the wilderness. At other times he would fall silent for hours, looking out across the water-plains and myriad eyots of Mirrinor as though he saw beyond, to a place no other eyes could see. It seemed some secret sorrow existed deep within him, hidden behind the mirthful gray eyes, although no word betrayed it.

  Once, after they had tied up the boat and were making their way along the shores of some islet, danger came on them from an unexpected quarter. All had seemed peaceful, until the trees began to roar and toss before a blasting wind. A huge shadow obliterated the sun’s pearl, and with a scream as of seven hundred madmen, something came down at Imrhien on leather wings twenty feet in span, sharp-taloned on their leading edge. The force of its wing-beats tore leaves from their stems. The long, pointed beak gaped red-gulleted, showing double rows of teeth. Small, pushed-in eyes blazed from beneath bony ridges. Feet like bunches of scythes extended to rend its prey. Next the scream rose suddenly to a new height, like a metal auger puncturing the skull, and the tyrax lurched across the sky, crashing down into the undergrowth. The feathered shaft of an arrow protruded from each eye, and the twang of a bowstring stayed on the air like a memory.

  Thorn stood, straight as a spear, and watched the great reptilian flier fall. The end of the longbow he held in his hand rested lightly on the ground. The beast thrashed for a few moments, then stilled.

  Diarmid moved warily to look at it and returned, shaking his head incredulously.

  “I thought our days were numbered. Two shots, and both dead accurate.”

  “’Tis the best way to slay them—shafts through the eyes.”

  “Aye, Sir Longbow, but I have never seen such marksmanship.”

  “A Dainnan must be skilled in archery.”

  “Such skill is beyond measure. It seems that in all things you can never fail.”

  Thorn threw him an odd look, almost angry. “Fail? Oh yes, I have been known to fail. I have failed at crucial moments. And for that, I have paid dearly.”