The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

Groping in the dark she found a series of slats in parallel—a ladder.

  ‘You first.’ Roughly she hauled on Caitri’s elbow and felt the little girl pass her, ascending energetically. The ladder wriggled like an eel.

  ‘Your turn, Via.’ The courtier needed no second urging. She swung up behind Caitri, then hesitated.

  ‘My lady—’

  ‘Go on, if you love life. It hunts after us yet!’

  Indeed it did. Fungous parasitic growths on the ramrod tree boles gave off enough corpse-light to show a more intense black in the blackness—a chimney gliding nearer, swifter. With Viviana’s boots out of the way, Tahquil grabbed a rung, hoisted herself up, hung in space, scrabbling for a footing, booted a toehold and began to climb up the serpentine rails.

  But too late.

  An extrusion of darkness came forth; a long, hinged jaw. With one rapid movement Tahquil pulled out her knife, aimed and threw it. It hit its mark. The blade flared cobalt as the weapon vaporised, destroyed instantly. The enemy barely flinched, yet the attack had been enough to cause a hesitation, and in that instant Tahquil had climbed beyond the reach of that long, toothy jaw. Clambering on as fast as strength permitted, she unintentionally rammed her face up against Viviana’s boot heels.

  ‘Get up!’ she screamed. ‘It is still coming!’

  Inexorably, the twisted head was moving up the ladder. Tahquil flung down a second knife. It blazed up like the first, obliterated. The pursuer’s hook-jaw reached for her ankles to pull her down.

  A pipe tune puffed through the forest like smoke.

  It stopped short, replaced by yelling:

  ‘Yer greet laithron doup, yer hawkie’s hurdies Wryneck, ye couldnae catch me if ye had wheels on.’

  The insult was not stinging enough to provoke retaliation perhaps, but sufficient to bring on another pause. Additionally, the chimney-thing was tugged backwards by the power of its spoken name. In that instant of reprieve, Tahquil surged upward to find an astonishing emptiness on the ladder. Viviana’s boots were no longer there, but hands gripped Tahquil firmly under her armpits and heaved her up sideways, up and over onto a platform. With a rattling swish the ladder dropped, collapsing back to the forest floor, still bearing its singularly nightmarish burden.

  Sucking in great draughts of air, the companions reclined with their backs to the tree-trunk, alone on the platform. Somewhere nearby a stream of gibberish broke out, burbled on for a while then bleated off into the distance.

  It seemed that for the moment they had reached safety.

  ‘How did you cut down the ladder?’ gasped Tahquil.

  ‘We did not,’ panted Viviana. ‘Some things did. They were here with us but I had no chance to look at them. They helped us get off the ladder, then they dashed away.’

  Their unidentified rescuers had apparently deserted them. Tahquil crawled to the side of the wooden floor. Savage spikes of iron protruded horizontally from its edge. Grasping one for security, she peered down through the gloom.

  ‘We’re only about twenty feet from the ground. That thing may be able to get up here, given time. We ought to climb higher.’

  ‘We have no choice,’ said Caitri, gazing at the overhead murk. Flush with the treetrunk, another ladder led upwards. Meanwhile, down on the leaf-mold, ill-boding footsteps went pad-padding purposefully.

  ‘Wryneck made only silence. Others are on the move down there,’ said Viviana, easing her bundles where the strings cut into her flesh. ‘The higher we go the better pleased I’ll be.’

  But the aftermath of fear was enervation. They remained drooping against the treetrunk, procrastinating against further ascent, overcome by lethargy.

  Not a lateral shoot, twig or limb branched out from these autarken pillars. They stretched sheer-sided from the ground to the canopy one hundred and fifty feet above. There they burst into multiple bifurcations, forming an interweaving grid, a huge, mottled ceiling whose girders supported a natural roof thatched with layer upon layer of leaves and other types of fruition. The canopy linked all the trees of the forest, yet up there the slender twigs were so fragile that only birds and the lightest arboreal creatures might cross it.

  Heavy breathing and a kind of intermittent tearing effect erupted beneath the travellers’ feet. Between a pair of jutting iron spikes, two green flames were rapidly approaching. Beneath this pair of eyes, a snarl widened. Black lips everted on shiny red gums embedded with sickles of gleaming enamel.

  Amazed at the previously unsuspected depths of their strength reserves, the mortals shinned up the next ladder. Before they had attained the platform above, a yowl of white rage seared their ears. Looking back they saw a massive paw, its talons unsheathed, swipe up over the edge of the recently vacated platform. Destructive, poison-coated needles of steel that could rip open a man’s belly with one clout now scored furrows across the planks, generating a chilling screech. The interstices between the spikes were too narrow—one of the claws, impaled, tore off. The woodwork shuddered from a mighty blow to its underside. Part of it gave way and tumbled slowly into the gulf, revealing the cat’s rabid maw, saliva-dripping fangs, flattened ears, slitted eyes and powerful, switching tail. The three birds it hunted did not wait to inspect it further. Reaching the precarious safety of the higher perch they pulled the ladder up after them.

  By now, six or seven well-thewed felines were swarming up the surrounding trees. With an agility belied by their size, they leaped from trunk to trunk, twisting in midair to present themselves belly-first to their destinations, claws hooking deep into the bark as they closed on each tree stem. The forest giant supporting their human quarry stood somewhat apart from the rest—the space around it was just a little too extensive for the grey malkins to bridge it with their aerial manoeuvres. One, having hitched its way to a higher level than their platform, sprang out and across, performed the spine-wracking twist and, by inches, missed landing right beside them. It plummeted, contorting.

  Their tree was protected from malkin attacks by its spiked platforms, its wide separation from sturdy outreaching boughs, and the provision of wide, rusty metal bands which clasped the circumference of its trunk at regularly spaced intervals. Claws could not penetrate these deflective bands. Higher climbed the fugitives now, forsaking the clamour of the frustrated hunters. Bundles and bottles banged between their shoulder blades. Every twenty or thirty feet the ladder passed through a cutout in a higher platform fastened against the huge trunk. Each time they reached such a haven, they rested a moment, gathering strength.

  At last they could go no higher.

  The reason for this was twofold: they had in truth exhausted themselves with their exertions, and there were no more ascending ladders. The light-emitting growths were sparser in these upper regions but a silver-of-blue tinge to the air hinted of moonlight behind foliage laminae. Some ropes, anchored to the tapering bole with hooks and pulleys, projected sideways in a graceful curve. Their opposite ends were lost to view. Hot and flushed, the travellers drank deeply from their water supply and sank down to wait out the night like a trio of wooden dolls, too alert for danger to fall comatose.

  Tahquil laid her head against the tree bole and thought she heard the hydraulic pumping of green blood within that cortex as though it were the pulse beat of her own life. Her mind, as always, turned to Thorn.

  From the moment she had first espied him beneath the trees of Tiriendor, the kernel of her thought had been always with him, so that at times she felt detached from the play of life, as though she were an onlooker viewing her physical surroundings from somewhere at his side. Since the Langothe’s return, another yearning had been added to love’s anguish, and now, faced with the possibility that they might never meet again, that somewhere in the world Thorn might be slain in battle and lost to her forever, the two agonies combined as one. She felt they hammered out her blood to thinness until it was but silverwater in her veins, and she with bones of crystal, so drained as to let the light through, was a wafer, a leaf of glass to be blo
wn away in the bitter south wind.

  Yet she clung on, as her hand clung to the ridged and whorled bark of the giant autarken—for within that crystal burned a poignant flame not yet extinguished by despair. Fancy bore her far from Khazathdaur and somewhere within her skull she stood in a starlit glade of Faêrie beside a tall knight. His dark head was crowned with sharp white stars like thorns.

  Always, shadowing every word and deed, sweet sorrow and terrible longing desolate my heart.

  Sounds carried long distances and rose up high, in Khazathdaur. From far below fountained a busy whirring as of spinning wheels in motion. This carried on for a while until, without warning, jolly music struck up as though a band of fiddlers and pipers played accompaniment to a rollicking peasant barn dance. Yet there was a queer element to it. It seemed only a copy, a hollow attempt to emulate the orchestrated merriment of such an occasion—even a parody. It stopped as suddenly as it had started, chopped off in the middle of a bar.

  ‘Sooth, this is no picnic,’ remarked Viviana. Her face, in the gloom, looked pallid as dead flesh.

  The platform swayed ever so slightly with the slow dance of the tree. It moved in rhythm with winds far above, blowing among the massed leaves. The forest’s lullaby soothed the weary travellers into a slumber so profound that a slight creaking of ropes and a sigh of cloven air could not waken them.

  Silver-of-blue diffused, becoming a dense green twilight. The morning sun filtered through translucent tiers, millions upon millions of leaves whispering and murmuring continuously. Khazathdaur could never be truly silent. Leaves rustled in upper winds that never seemed to ruffle the airs below the leaf canopy, bringing a sound like the sifting of fingers through a coffer full of tiny crystals. Hundreds of thousands of leaves glided slowly down as though threaded on invisible filaments.

  In Tahquil’s breast the hard ache for the land beyond the stars drew salt water that quivered in her eyes, reflecting leaves.

  By the morning light the travellers spied, on the platform’s opposite side, freshly heaped vegetation. There was a dazzle of white blossoms with luteous centres, and fruits like leathery gourds with skins striped and speckled in what might have been, in another light, shades of madder. There was a leafy bough from which some of the outer rind had been stripped, and three dried, hollow gourds filled with pure water, and a small woven-twig cage packed with spun-silk cocoons like bonbons, pastel pink, softest saffron, palest pearl. From the calyxes of both fruit and flower trailed long beards of cellulose fibres.

  Out of the blossoms arose a honey fragrance so intense as to be almost intoxicating. The travellers discovered these nectar-brimming blooms could be eaten. The crisp autarken leaves proved edible also, tasting of sweet angelica. Slashed open, the fruits revealed dark red flesh like a wound—a meaty, palatable pulp. The bark’s inner cortex, when peeled away from the core, tasted like strips of chewy bread. Caitri slit open one of the long, oval cocoons. A pale, blind grub wriggled there, rearing its blunt head. Flinching, Caitri dropped it as if it had scalded her.

  ‘Oh, poor thing.’

  Instantly remorseful, she scooped it back into the cage. They made no more attempts to dine on the cocoons.

  ‘’Tis a wonder they didn’t bring us dead birds,’ said Caitri.

  ‘Here no birds sing,’ said Tahquil. ‘Have you not missed them?’

  ‘Not I. I am sated on sweetmeats,’ said Viviana with her mouth full of honeyed blossom. ‘Who ever would have thought that one could eat flowers!’

  ‘We eat cauliflower,’ said Caitri. ‘At least, others do.’ She wrinkled her nose.

  ‘And Sugared violets, and rose petals,’ added Tahquil, biting a fruit.

  Caitri looked up at the high canopy, dim and grey, sparsely raining leaves.

  ‘I see no such flowers or fruits as these within reach. I fancy they all sprout in the higher regions. I wonder how the Tree-Dwellers get them down.’

  ‘I cannot imagine,’ said Tahquil. ‘But I do imagine that the urisk asked those Tree-Dwellers to aid us by dropping one of their ladders. After all, it was his voice calling us and not some pixie counterfeit luring us into Khazathdaur to meet our doom.’

  ‘Yes, the little fellow proved trustworthy,’ said Viviana, ‘I’ll grant that. The trows unintentionally aided us also. If they had not stolen my chatelette we would have been still sitting beside the soak when that thing called Wryneck came upon us. He might have cut us off from the forest and the Tree-Dwellers’ assistance.’

  They fell silent at the mention of this horror.

  In the jade twilight the forest world was all perpendiculars tapering down to vanishing points in darkness far below; a vertiginous perspective. On the ground, peril waited. Overhead swayed slender boughs and twigs too fragile to bear the weight of anything heavier than a possum. To either side stretched reeling chasms of air so vast that merely to look into their depths was to feel oneself falling.

  It seemed there was nowhere to go.

  Tahquil examined the apparatus of ropes and pulleys tied to hooks nailed into the trunk.

  ‘These ropes are made of the fibres growing from the bases of the fruits and blossoms—strong, tough, coarse cordage, twisted together. Ropes would be useful in our situation. Perhaps we could manufacture some …’

  ‘We shall have no use for ropes or anything else if we remain perched up here forever,’ said Viviana. ‘I wish those Tree-Dwellers would return to help us.’

  ‘The urisk said they have highroads of their own up here,’ said Caitri, tracing the outward-leading cables with a forefinger. ‘I believe this is the beginning of one, and another leads out from one of the platforms below.’

  Tahquil unhooked a thick rope tied in a massive knot near its free end.

  ‘The Tree-Dwellers’ gear is cleverly designed,’ she said, inspecting it. ‘Simple and effective. This is what I know as a flying fox. Pryderi used to have one rigged. It led from the balcony of his house to the bottom of the hill. He would let me ride it when I was a child—I liked to pretend I was flying. If my father had known he’d have had an apoplexy.’ She pulled hard on the rope to test it. ‘It is secured firmly. And see, by this mechanism this knotted ride rope can be pulled back to its starting position when the rider has disembarked at the other end.’

  ‘Yes, but where is the other end?’ pondered Caitri.

  The cables swayed almost imperceptibly, pale lines passing into an indifferent gloom beyond which a jungle of tree pillars could be dimly glimpsed.

  ‘There is only one way to find out.’ Tahquil gave the ride rope one last tug.

  ‘I shall go first,’ she said. ‘If all’s well, I’ll send back something tied to the ride rope as a token—a bunch of these dried stytchelthyme sprigs, since it appears I am adorned with so many of them. This retrieval cord will follow me. It must be allowed to unroll freely as I go, and it must be coiled neatly when the ride rope is brought back, or the whole operation may fail. Should the retrieval cord snag and the flying fox be halted abruptly in midflight, the passenger would be flung off. There is no safety cord to hitch us on.’

  ‘You are not going to jump off this ledge on that contraption!’ Viviana cried. ‘What if you fall? ’Tis a long way down—I cannot even glance over the edge without feeling swoony.’

  ‘Take heart, Via,’ said Tahquil bracingly. ‘There’s nothing else for it.’

  ‘’Tis always the same saw,’ desponded Viviana. ‘There is no choice. Are we naught but flotsam on this quest, to be tossed about at the whim of contingencies not subject to our command? Methinks the only choice I have made so far was to accompany you, my lady, and yet even that was not a choice, for I could not in all conscience do otherwise.’

  ‘Speaking from experience,’ said Tahquil, ‘I would say that perhaps I have only ever made one true choice in my life and that everything else I have ever wrought has been a result of causes beyond my choosing. I searched for the stolen children for seven years but how could I not seek them? I entered the Fair R
ealm but how could I resist the chance to save them? I chose to leave the Fair Realm at the last moment but even then, if I examine my heart, I know I had to leave and in truth it was no choice. Perhaps you are right.’

  ‘True choices,’ said Caitri sagely, ‘are made all the time—the small decisions. If we have no say in where the road takes us, at least we can decide how to place our feet and what to look at along the way.’

  ‘The Duke of Ercildoune used to argue that we choose our own destinies—’ began Viviana.

  ‘This conversation is becoming too allegorical for me,’ Tahquil broke in, changing the subject. ‘When I reach the other end, I shall tug on this thick cable, the slide cable, three times. That will be the signal for you to start hauling. Fare thee well.’

  Seizing the rope with both hands she swung forward. As she left the platform she tucked her feet up on top of the knot, wrapping herself around the thick ride rope. Over her head the pulley squealed, running along the main slide cable down into darkness and the unknown.

  She rolled down the cable’s incline at exhilarating speed, her hair and taltry and cloak streaming out like banners. To either side the forest flashed by as though she flew along the middle of a columned canyon.

  The cable stretched a long way, as far—it seemed—as Summer’s end.

  At last the flying fox’s terminal rushed at her with alarming rapidity out of the gloaming—another platform on another tree. Just before the end station, the pulley reached its lowest point and turned uphill, slowing the headlong rush of the ride rope and its rider dangling underneath. Tahquil’s boots clipped the shelf’s edge. She yelped in pain, let go with one hand and was dragged unceremoniously onto the ledge by the ride rope before she remembered to release her grip. The pulley having reached the apogee of its swing, it lost the last remains of momentum and succumbed to gravity’s seduction. It reversed direction and slowly began to slide back down. Righting herself, Tahquil seized the rope just before it swung off the edge and out of reach. It would have pulled her over the edge with it, except she flung her weight backwards, hauled hard and quickly hooked it over a peg jutting from the trunk.