The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  She found herself on the second highest platform of a tree which appeared identical to all the other trees in Khazathdaur. From the ledge directly below, the cables of a flying fox ran back towards the first tree. From the platform immediately above, a profusion of funicular cordage radiated in three other directions. This tree was an aerial crossroads.

  Tying the sprig of dried thyme to the pulley she tugged three times on the slide cable, sending a quiver along its length. This cable was so thick and long that the quiver dissipated before reaching the end of the visible section. Vigorous repetition of the exercise was eventually answered by a sudden tension of the retrieval cord. Unhooking the pulley she hurled it forth and watched it disappear behind curtains of shadow. It occurred to her that she ought to have checked the upper platform for danger before sending for her friends. Now there was no time for it.

  Presently, the slide cable tautened and began to hum. Out of the half-light hurtled Caitri. Like a fruit on a vine she was tightly clenched in around herself, eyes shut.

  ‘Open your eyes!’

  The pulley slowed on its final short ascent. Caitri’s boots touched the stage. She released the rope too soon—borne forward by momentum she toppled over the further edge. Tahquil grabbed two handfuls of clothing and pulled her back with all the force she could rally and they both sat down hard, the ride rope pendulating about their ears.

  ‘Horns of the Ant!’ expostulated Caitri, white with shock.

  They sent for Viviana who arrived with speed, propelled by proportionally greater inertia. Swinging her legs down, she alighted gracefully, as though well practised.

  ‘That was easier than I had expected.’

  Her companions blinked at her.

  ‘Where to from here?’ Viviana asked. Oblivious of their astonishment at her natural prowess, she surveyed the forest. ‘From the platform above us, the highways lead in three different directions.’

  ‘North. We must ever go north,’ said Tahquil. ‘But as to which direction is which, I have no notion. I lost my bearings during the confusion of the flight from that lop-headed creature, and now the sun cannot push its beams through these leaves to show us its path.’

  High up, a sweet, soft rain began falling in a long sigh, a gift of clear water to swell buds, soothe parched leaves and rinse the long green hair of the forest. No drops yet penetrated the canopy.

  When the shower had passed, the companions climbed the spindly ladder to the higher platform.

  ‘See!’ said Caitri. ‘Flowers bedeck the anchor point of the central cable, and its carrier rope is here, too. The carriers are missing from the other two flying foxes.’

  ‘A clear directive. ’Tis obvious,’ said Tahquil grimly. ‘No matter which way is north, the Tree-Dwellers have indicated the path they wish us to follow. Let us hope they are as benevolent as the urisk has told.’

  ‘But we could use the retrieval cords to haul back the other ride ropes,’ suggested Caitri sensibly.

  ‘I have no wish to offend these forest denizens. We move within their domain—never forget it. Over us they have the power of life and death. We must bend to their will for now, yet remain wary.’

  They negotiated the second flying fox in the same manner as the first. It brought them to a similar tree in similar surroundings.

  ‘This sameness proves irksome,’ said Viviana. ‘I feel as though we go nowhere, or in circles.’

  ‘’Tis impossible that we should be going in circles,’ declared Caitri. ‘Take note—we have travelled in a straight line, so far.’

  As if to mock these words the next garlanded flying fox veered off on a diagonal, bringing them this time to a platform within view of other enshelfed autarkens which were strung together by rigging. As they went deeper into Khazathdaur repeating these flying performances, they became more adept at takeoffs and landings. Also, the number of rigged trees multiplied.

  ‘’Tis a veritable spider’s web,’ marvelled Viviana.

  Having traversed about a dozen spans, each measuring a good forty yards, they stopped to rest on the subsequent platform. Their arms and legs ached with the unaccustomed strain of clinging tightly to the ride ropes, urged by the knowledge that no safety cord was attached. Nothing could rescue them from a certain fall, should their grip loosen.

  In the gloom far off to the right, a geometry of long triangles could be discerned indistinctly. It appeared to be an interweaving of lines strung between the tree pylons at great height. Once or twice it seemed to the travellers, peering into the dimness, that small figures moved along these lines.

  After reaching the next tree they looked across to discover that the distant webs had become more complex, and traffic on them had increased. Instead of a flying fox, suspension bridges led off from this platform. They were made of wooden slats tied across a pair of parallel cables, with a single handrail of rope. The entrances of two were barred with slender cords. Through the handrails of the third, nosegays of leaves had been stuck.

  ‘Upon my word,’ exclaimed Viviana, ‘this is more like it! I never thought I would joy in walking upon such a rickety affair, but after dangling from those fox ropes, this appears to be safety.’

  ‘Mayhap ’twill lead us to the Tree-Dwellers’ city,’ said Caitri, glancing to the right. ‘I’d as lief behold it, and them.’

  To run the gamut of the suspension bridge was no mean feat, as it turned out. The whole creaking contrivance wriggled and shook like an angry watch-worm the instant the travellers set foot on it. Under the differing rhythms of their footsteps it bucked out of synchronisation and was as like as not to suddenly smack up jarringly at their boots as they put them down, or to drop away under their steps so that they stumbled. Haltingly they made their way, careful not to glance down. Between the slats a great nothingness opened to the forest floor, far below and dark-mantled. One single fortunate shaft of sunlight momentarily struck down like a gold pin through the bridge as they crossed, and the leaves continued to shower down all around, and the forest breathed uncountable sighs.

  Now they could see, over to the right, what might have been a tree city. Amongst the long bridges and flying foxes and catwalks, the elevated walkways and flyovers, the autarkens supported wider, more solid platforms. Some of these were walled. Small dwellings perched there, built close against and around the tree boles. Small oblong windows and doors showed black against the grey of the structures, and a rumour came to the ears of the companions, almost below the reaches of hearing—voices on the static airs, and perhaps the sound of singing.

  ‘We are being led away from the tree city,’ sorrowed Caitri. ‘Why should they fear us?’

  ‘Or scorn us,’ said Viviana, ‘or be sending us astray.’

  ‘Why should they provide us with victuals only to lead us to ruin?’ Tahquil asked.

  ‘Perhaps they wanted to fatten us up for their larders,’ responded Viviana gloomily.

  ‘Methinks,’ said Caitri, ‘’tis neither scorn nor fear, but a desire for privacy tempered with goodwill. They wish to speed our passage, that we might not stumble into their midst and trouble the patterns of their lives.’

  ‘Scorn,’ repeated Viviana.

  A loud screech made them all jump; the bridge heaved and undulated. From everywhere or nowhere resounded a guttural pronunciation:

  ‘I walk with the owl

  And make many to cry

  As loud as she doth hollow.’

  Wings juddered forth like squeaking hinges. They flapped away, to be swallowed by darkness.

  ‘I thought there were no birds here,’ said Viviana.

  ‘That was no bird.’

  Gingerly, with trembling knees, they set out to cross the next beflowered bridge.

  It seemed that the day was closing. Pale grey leached to dark grey around and over and under the swaying, airy road. The wighting hours approached. Already, maniacal laughter tore through the trees, punctuated by simpering giggles and tortured groans.

  Almost sumptuously, the ne
xt platform was surrounded by a low wall. It was laden with fruits, foliage, flowers and rain-filled gourds.

  ‘Here we may sleep without fear of falling,’ said Viviana gratefully.

  They feasted, sipping a drop of the seemingly inexhaustible dragon’s blood as the evening drew chill. Taking turns to stand watch that night they saw, further off, tiny lights moving, up in the remote heights away to the right, which they had begun to call the east. The Tree-Dwellers’ city.

  Closer at hand, the forest’s emanations were more eldritch. Sweet, wild music came spiralling on the cool draughts, a music that tugged at the heartstrings, its cadences evoking lost loves and lonely mountain urns in the moonlight. At the same time, way down below, something out of sight went clanking across the forest floor, shuffling, as if chained and gyved and fettered in iron.

  In the pit of night the lights of the tree city blinked out, one by one. Silence settled in, except for the incessant susurration of leaves. Tahquil, who was on watch, remembered a place where harps and flutes resounded, and sweet voices sang—yet, trying to recapture the fleeting images of the Fair Realm was as hopeless as trying to hold water in a sieve, as vain as trying to fashion ropes from sand, as futile as reaping with a sickle of leather.

  Tirnan Alainn—Faêrie.

  How should I so love a place? she thought. A land of dream and legend, perhaps no more tangible than dreams and legends—a land which lies beyond the stars, and which is no more suited for my dwelling place than the sea is fit to be my abode. Why should I waste and weary and pine for a shining jewel that can never be grasped? Surely the rough homespun and coarse bread, yea, even the cool silks and Sugar-cakes of Erith ought to be enough for me. Yet, the Langothe overrides both my aversion to the Faêran and my love for my native land. It pulls the tide of my blood, and that I cannot change. Something in the very core of my being responds to its call—a recollection that seems to come from before my birth. It is like some powerful race-memory that awakens and reaches forth and, unavailing, mourns. For when I first set eyes on the Fair Realm, it seemed I had always known it. I recognised every tree and cloud, every lake and mountain as my heart’s desire. Now would I go thence, if I could, like a shotten arrow.

  She wondered again how long it would take for the Langothe to claim her life. Some of the children of Hythe Mellyn had succumbed within weeks of their return to Erith. Others had lingered for months, slowly fading. She, Tahquil, endured constant pain, and victuals held no relish for her. Yet her strength had not yet waned. Perhaps it was some property of Thorn’s ring, or maybe part of the arcane gift Nimriel had bestowed on her in the Realm. Whatever the reason, the Langothe did not seem to be killing her as swiftly as she had expected.

  On her finger, the gold ring tightened.

  The sharp smack of a whip sliced the darkness. Tahquil peered over the edge of the stage, between the armouring of flabellate spikes. Shrunk by distance and lit by its own ghastly luminescence, a coach and four raced through the trees. The driver on the box wore a three-cornered hat and a short cape. What rode within the black coach Tahquil could not discern. The conveyance slowed to a halt and then rolled slightly backwards, in the manner of all wheeled vehicles finding their point of rest. In that similarity was the only commonality between the black equipage and more lorraly turnouts.

  A door opened.

  A boot weighed heavily on a step. A second dented the dank mold of the forest floor. Now a statue stood beside the coach. Motionless, the horses stood also, and the driver sat ramrod straight on the box. Then, as a sphere gyrates on a swivel, the statue’s head turned. One expected to hear the sound of machinery in motion.

  Tahquil held her breath. Oddly, she could perceive all this quite clearly from her perch, even through the gloom. It was spread before her like a miniature scene, like clockwork figures on a table, lit by a soft, eerie radiance.

  As silently as it had appeared, the sculpted form was gone. The coach rocked with the motion of a weight settling inside. The door closed, the horses moved off with an echoing clang of harness, and the whip’s crack shot upwards to explode beside Tahquil’s ears.

  Whether this unseelie manifestation had been tracking her and her companions she could not say, but such a powerful wight, so close by, could hardly fail to pinpoint its prey. It might be supposed that, fortunately for the mortal damsels, the creature had been hunting something else; that it was not aware of mortal watchers close by, or even of their presence in the forest. Tahquil knew the carriage for the same vehicle she and Muirne had seen before the attack on Chambord’s Road-Caravan. She knew it now, with the certainty of recall, to be the coach of the Cearb, that unseelie slaughterer of Men and cattle they called the Killing One.

  Day after day the three wayfarers travelled along the highroads of Khazathdaur, leaving behind the mysterious village or city of the Tree-Dwellers. Sturdy, numerous bridges leading to every quarter gave way to less numerous flying foxes. The arms and shoulders of the travellers ached from the tension of gripping ropes; their sinews transmuted themselves to agonised cables of steel.

  When the shang came, the autarkens took on the mellow burnish of aged gilt; a sombre sheen like the last rich rays of vintage Summer lingering languidly on sated bronze. Every falling leaf became a spangle, each rope a chain of fireflies; the canopy turned into a shimmering galaxy of green-gold. The only tableau the travellers saw was of two children gathering flowers on the forest floor where no light-loving petals had bloomed for centuries, their images existing beyond harm there on the leaf carpet which now buried them to their waists. There was no other evidence of the psychic debris that haunted scenes of passion.

  Each night the forest sprang to renewed vigour with queer sights and sounds. Far below, a heartbroken sobbing would start up like a millwheel, or weird, high singing would weave resonating glass rods through the forest, or eldritch knockings and tappings would echo through the lofty vaults, emanating from down among the roots. Sometimes strange smoke rings came floating; blue-grey wreaths of vapour that moved slowly through the trees. O, O, O, they made, before some transient breath of air deformed them, like buckled wheels. High on their airy perches the travellers would shiver, bearing witness to these phenomena; however, they sensed also that they were watched over by the elusive Tree-Dwellers. Food and drink, though monotonous, were never in short supply.

  Yet ever and anon they felt other eyes upon them. Other beings bided here in Khazathdaur, amongst the serried wooden towers, the attenuated vaults, the fluted shadows like widows’ veils trailing from every soaring bough, the endlessly falling leaves drowning in a watery twilight. It was ancient, this world of neck-breaking heights and breathtaking depths unknown by wind or sunlight, and it was filled with secrets. Gnarled roots dug deep below centuries-old layers of leaf mold imprinted only by the strangest of footprints or wheel ruts, a soft, yielding compost that covered up many curious things and out of which many curious things grew …

  In the far reaches of the forest where stands of massive oaks began to mingle with the autarkens, the smell of aniseed came pouring like a rich oil upon the air. Grey malkins were about. Their eyes made the night into an aiode of emeralds. On the wide bands of iron nailed to the tree boles, the claws of the great cats could find no purchase. The predators yowled their frustration. Sometimes the night was further troubled by a loud ululating wail like theirs, yet almost human—Black Annis howled her dismal hungers in a cave somewhere down beneath the mold and stones. Once upon an eve there came a muttering, in a low monotone:

  ‘Ellum he do grieve,

  Oak he do hate,

  Willow do walk

  If you travels late.’

  ‘Zounds,’ whispered Viviana, ‘was that Black Annis, d’you think?’

  If travel by bridge was slow, rope and pulley was faster. Fourteen days after coming under the stasis of Timbrilfin-Khazathdaur, there came a time when, alighting skillfully on a rather unkempt and shaky platform with frayed edges, instead of being greeted with a highwa
y signposted by leaf or flower, the travellers found that they had reached a dead end.

  In any event, there was nowhere to go but back into the forest’s heart or down the rickety ladder which swung against the trunk and vanished away towards the ground. It appeared that this tree was the furthest outpost of the network rigged and maintained by the Tree-Dwellers. All around, mighty tree stems continued to plumb the distance from canopy to floor in slatted hues of grey and black. Yet there was an end to the aerial roads.

  A last offering of forest fare awaited the travellers, but their dismay at this turn of events blunted their appetites.

  ‘Where to now?’ mused Caitri, staring down over the crumbling, barbed edge to where perspective falsely indicated that the bases of the surrounding trees huddled close together.

  ‘Down, by my reckoning,’ replied Tahquil. ‘Let us go swiftly, before night draws in—and we would be well advised to carry some of this fare with us. It may be long ere we find any other provender now that we are leaving the auspices of the Tree-Dwellers.’

  ‘Conversely,’ said Viviana, ‘it may be a short while before we personally provide provender for the grey malkins of Black Annis. The claws of the lovely Dianella are seeming ever more amiable by comparison.’

  ‘Do not underestimate that lady’s weaponry,’ said Tahquil.

  Down the long, long ladder they stepped, past the iron bands that deflected predators’ claws. Twenty feet from the ground the stair of rope and wood stopped short at a narrow ledge. On hooks there, a rope had been coiled, one end of which was belayed to the tree. This last distance must be descended by rappelling, with this rope passed under one thigh and over the opposite shoulder so that it might be paid out smoothly and gradually.

  ‘I shall go first,’ said Viviana. ‘I am practised at this trick, for my brother and I used to clamber upon the oaks in Wytham Park when we were children, although our parents were kept ignorant of our vulgar behaviour. My lady has first braved every enterprise thus far, and it is now my turn. Should you not allow it I shall not be able to countenance myself.’