The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  Overhead, the sky was a drama of clouds, dark thunder-grey in the centres. The sun behind them made a dazzling white-goldness of teased wool around the edges. Fraying spaces revealed the azure layers deepening to infinity behind the clouds.

  Out away towards a distant haze stretched Blackwatervale, a deep valley embowered in wild and lovely woods, filled with gauzy veils of vapours. The river’s snail-track spurled down the centre, but only an aqueous glint appeared here and there through the trees. Close together clustered those trees, but as the slopes of the land rose up on either side, so the stature of the trees dwindled. Like sleeping giants the high, grassy fell-tops loured bare and windswept against the horizon—the domain of grey stones and vacuous bights of space, the haunt of cool barrenness and avenging winds to catch the traveller unawares and whisk him off the brink. Yet down their sides plashed their tinsel hair, skein on skein, strand on strand. Thickly wooded, the gills tumbled from the very edges of the fells to the valley floor. Sometimes they vanished, falling into sinkholes and coursing through underground caverns until, driven against a bed of solid sandstone, they were forced out as springs or founts upon the hillside. Larger becks toppled through the mist on the high crags and down their own little valleys in chains of falls.

  Beyond the western wall of Blackwatervale a tenebrous line indicated the serrations of Bleak Fell’s spine. To the east, the high route of Wight’s Way pressed against the sky. But it was lost from view in the mists.

  Keeping to high ground the riders picked their way to the right. Cotton grass and heather rolled green, brown and purple at their feet. Curlew and snipe flew up into the crisp air and grouse broke cover chattering a warning: ‘Go-bak, go-bak.’

  Noon saw the travellers reaching the southern limit of Wold Fell. This formidable ridge dividing two river valleys culminated in a flat top, as narrow and tortuous as a crumpled ribbon. Here and there, its width contracted to no more than two feet. A few steps further on, it would broaden to seven feet or more, only to narrow again within a furlong. In places, thrusting crags flanked this high way, but in the greater part the ground fell steeply away on both sides. Those who would walk this open, windswept path might obtain a view of both valleys, Blackwatervale on the one hand and Ravenstonedale on the other. Out of the fell-sides, sometimes only yards below its crest, rivers were born. The walker might perceive the slender beginnings of the Blackwater spouting forth beneath his left heel, while the many sources of the Ravenswater trickled below his right.

  Because it hung above these stony gushings and spoutings and did not cross them, this was a road favourable to creatures of eldritch. At noon it might appear quiet and inviting. Later it would not be so.

  ‘We ought to turn now down to the slopes of Blackwatervale,’ said Tahquil, ‘to put some distance between ourselves and these heights before nightfall. Here, where the incline to the left is gentler, we might find our way. And here, by rights, we ought to part company.’

  ‘Nay, do not leave us, Master Arrowsmith,’ cried Viviana before he could make reply. ‘Do not heed the urisk’s words. I am certain you may cross these tiny waterways without trouble—why, up here they are a mere finger’s width and nothing at all compared to the Churrachan.’

  ‘Yet so many,’ said Tahquil. ‘And there may be a need to find a route lower along the hillsides for safety, where flow many streams like the Churrachan. Your bravery, sir, is not at question. But freshwater, running, must be like poison to you.’

  ‘Its force pulls and tears,’ he confessed. ‘It cruelly disrupts the eldritch patterns of gramarye woven into the fibres of half my being. Yet only half—the other half can master it.’

  Tahquil remonstrated, ‘To ride or walk the lower slopes of Lallillir would drain your strength. She will be our watcher, the swanmaiden, according to her geas. You can leave us in no better care.’

  The man shook his head. ‘Come. It is dangerous to tarry here,’ he said. Loosening his reins he moved on.

  Flower heads of hard rushes poked up out of the middle of the plant’s round rosettes. The one-sided blooms of mat grasses thrust forth like tiny hay rakes. Among this low vegetation the horses’ hooves slipped and slid on the steep ground. Soon their riders dismounted and led them by the reins, in single file, with Arrowsmith in the lead. It was not long before they must cross a chattering cascade no bigger than the dribble poured from the spout of a pitcher—then another, and another. Tahquil watched Arrowsmith’s back. He did not falter. The fell rose high to their right, blocking out all view of Ravenstonedale. Below, a sea of trees engulfed the valley sides and floor. From all around echoed the sounds of water babbling, chuckling, clattering, arguing vociferously, gossiping, laughing; the rich warm roar of a far-off river behind the high crystal chimes of droplets striking clear liquid, flung from a great height.

  The cataracts matured as the travellers descended.

  ‘We shall not own a dry boot between us before long, if I am not mistaken,’ predicted Viviana, sloshing through the most recent rill. She spoke loudly, to be heard above the white noise.

  Keeping above the tall trees clustered on the lower slopes, they levelled out their course. Open country provided a better vantage from which to scan for danger. Here, brakes of low bushes squatted, well spaced and no more than waist-high. Horizontal surfaces were a rarity on the fell-side. Caitri laughingly declared that her right leg must be growing shorter, her left longer.

  As night approached, Arrowsmith seemed weary. On reaching a spot where the incline flattened out to form a semicircular apron ringed with low scrub, they halted to make camp. The Summer evening drew in, damp and mellow. Lily-of-the-valley sprang in crevices, its racemes of tiny snow-bells sweetly perfumed. A rush-fringed pool had collected in the hollow at the centre of this grassy ring. On the utterly black surface of the water the campfire mirrored itself.

  Having helped to construct the fire, Arrowsmith lay back on the ground, breathing heavily. He refused to take food. Constellations of sweat bestarred his brow. His face was dark, as if congested.

  Tahquil offered him water. ‘You are ill. Turn back,’ she said, unintentionally echoing his earlier words.

  ‘No,’ he muttered. ‘I will heal.’

  Caitri rinsed a strip of cloth in the opacity of the pool. She shrieked. Clumsily, Arrowsmith jumped to his feet, knife in hand.

  ‘I thought I saw something,’ said the little girl, between fear and doubt, ‘something in the water.’

  There was nothing to be seen now, not even a ripple.

  Arrowsmith sank down, his knees buckling beneath him. Caitri laid the damp cloth across his forehead while Viviana arranged his cloak in folds across his body.

  ‘Don’t fuss,’ he rasped. ‘’Tis hale I am. I shall keep watch.’

  A moment later his lids were shuttering his eyes. His jaw sagged. Starlight silvered his face to match his arctic hair, and pooled blue shadows under his cheekbones. Save for the slight rise and fall of his chest he might have been unliving. Water hurdled and gurgled, bubbled and burbled and snickered like a chorus of eldritch voices. Osmosis seeped.

  Tahquil took first watch. She sat with her mud-smeared face turned to the pool, which remained profoundly calm, profoundly black.

  How secretive is water, and how deceptive! It can act as a shield to throw off sheets of light, or as a sucking void like this well, to absorb light, or as a kind of passive nothingness to let light down through sheer translucency. But even when it allows radiance to penetrate, water bends and magnifies—distorts and plays tricks on the eye. An arm inserted partway appears disjointed, severed at the point of entry. Reflected in the convex surface of a drop, a face bulges at the brow and the eyes slide outward like a fish’s.

  Little wonder that so many wights are attached to water.

  This pool, now. So dark is it, so absolutely blank-faced, that its depth is a mystery. It might be a mere scum of water skimming a flat bowl—no more than a puddle. Yet again that inkiness might extend far below us, deep into
the fell-side, a hundred feet, two hundred feet—even as far as some subterranean river system below the valley floor …

  Lallillir crooned soothing lullabies close to Tahquil’s ears, singing songs of the susurrating sea and a synthesis of shadows sliding stealthily shorewards, soon to subsume …

  The leaf-ring clenched. With a sick spasm, its wearer’s head jerked up.

  Have I dozed?

  Something had broken through the pool’s surface from below. It poised there studying her, unblinking. What it was, she could not be certain, but it looked like the staring head of a debauched sheep or goat. As she watched, the apparition sank without haste. Seven ripples opened in ever-widening circles from its absence.

  Viviana and Caitri slept consummately. Arrowsmith muttered thickly in his sleep. He had rolled against a prickly bush and flung out his arm. Thin runnels of blood flamboyantly striped the back of his hand but he had not woken. She rose to attend him and throw more wood on the fire.

  At the same moment the dark water coalesced, clothing itself with a shape. The shape ascended as smoothly and quietly as oiled machinery.

  Dripping, a large goat emerged.

  The goat’s eyes were two wells of darkness. Water streamed from its greenish hide.

  Tahquil stared at the fuath, not daring to move. She remained this way, motionless, on and on into the atrophying night. Her heart threw itself urgently against her side as though trying to escape. A desert had invaded her mouth. At length, with utmost care and deliberation, Tahquil began to move her hand towards the dagger strapped at her side. Closer her gloved fingers crept, while her eyes never left the goat-thing, yet never locked with its gaze.

  The goat grinned.

  Rather, it drew back its caprian lips and bared its fence of teeth. Bedded in bloodless gums, the teeth were long and pointed as stakes, yellow as old parchment, stained slime-green.

  The fire went out with a hiss of steam.

  Tahquil jerked her head towards the sound. When she looked back the entity no longer stood before her. Footprints led away from the pool, impressed into the mosses; the prints of cloven hooves.

  Over at the pickets the horses began to stamp and whinny. Tahquil snatched the last burning brand out of the fire. Its uncertain glare described a form moving amongst the tethered animals—not that of a beast, but a woman. The figure stooped. A horse screamed, that unmistakable scream of mortal terror. The others instantly caracoled into a frenzy, pulling at their pickets. One mare uprooted her stake, another broke her rope. White-eyed, neighing shrilly, they fled. Tahquil ran towards the two horses which remained. One lay stretched on the ground, a terrible rose blooming under the arch of its neck where the throat had been torn out. The other struggled still to break free. Something was standing over the prone form—not a woman but a four-legged beast, as before. It raised its head as Tahquil approached.

  The hairs of its chin-beard dripped crimson. It had been feeding.

  The dagger dropped from Tahquil’s nerveless fingers. An extraordinary stench of rotting vegetation surged over everything, so powerful that she retched. It was that same nauseating odour of decay given off by deep vases in which flowers have long since died, their immersed stalks putrefying to become mush in the dregs. A spatter of spray assaulted her. Hooves plunged, long teeth snapped. Outlined against the sky she beheld an appalling shape—not a goat nor yet a woman or a man, but a man and a beast locked together in combat. In the thicket of their belligerence, Arrowsmith’s blade glittered. Viviana was screaming, Caitri shouting, ‘Avaunt! Avaunt!’ Tahquil regained her feet and darted out of the way as Arrowsmith and the fuath came crashing down. Teeth snipped and snapped. Flames burst from the firebrand as she whirled it, ready to strike. Then came a rush of air and a beating of great wings.

  With a snarl the fuath sprang sideways. It swung its wicked head. Five antagonists faced it, four armed with iron and fire, the fifth—for an instant a winged woman seemed to be rising there, but in the next instant it was clearly a swan, neck arched, head stretched forward like a serpent’s, wings at full span as they stirred the air to a storm. Wind roared and clapped, mingled with the fierce sibilation of the bird.

  Coldly, clear as ice through the tumult, the goat spoke with a woman’s voice:

  ‘Raggid forrn,’ it pronounced, oddly.

  The fuath jumped into the pool, which sealed itself seamlessly.

  ‘Viviana, saddle the horse,’ Tahquil cried. ‘Caitri, watch the water. Encourage the fire.’

  Arrowsmith swayed and tottered. She ran to his side.

  ‘Are you wounded?’

  ‘Nay,’ he gasped. ‘The hooves gave my ribs a drubbing but the teeth did not meet in my flesh. And you? The damsels—’

  Pushing herself under his arm, Tahquil manoeuvred him to the remaining horse, which stood trembling as Viviana tightened its girth. Arrowsmith’s eyes rolled in his head. It appeared that he was not fully cognisant of his surroundings, nor of what had occurred. Weakened as he was by many crossings of running water, the act of repulsing this unseelie attack had driven him to the verge of death. His existence hung in the balance.

  ‘Get up in the saddle. We will follow after,’ Tahquil said, forcing ardent conviction into the lie.

  ‘The horses …’

  ‘They are near at hand.’

  ‘The world tilts. Weary. So weary—’

  ‘Get on your horse, Galan, in the name of reason. Only death waits for you in Lallillir.’

  ‘You will follow.’

  Calling on the last of his strength, Arrowsmith heaved his frame up and flung his leg over the horse’s back. Losing consciousness, he gradually fell forward onto his mount’s neck.

  They roped him securely to the animal, placing the knots beside his dangling hands so that he might reach them when he revived. Turning the horse to face south, Tahquil sent it on its way with a slap on the rump. Glad to be granted freedom, the gelding leaped forward, moving swiftly along the treacherous incline in the wake of its escaping comrades.

  Now they looked for the swanmaiden, but in the elusive manner of wights, she had vanished.

  ‘No time to lose,’ said Tahquil, gathering up a bundle. ‘We must away from this place, ere the fuath returns to finish this night’s work.’

  She wept, and the others wept also, as they abandoned the carcass of the poor faithful beast that had stood no chance against the eldritch slaughterer. When they looked back they saw the sea-shell curve, the hull of its flank pale under the starlight, while from the ominous pool a shape arose once more, with the smooth precision of oiled machinery.

  Through the night they walked, afraid to stop, afraid to cease the crossings of running water. When they had put a goodly number of falling streamlets between themselves and the fuath’s pond, they dared to speak.

  ‘Galan was kind and generous,’ said Caitri, her eyes swimming. ‘I shall never forget him, or his sisters. I hope we shall meet again.’

  ‘Perhaps we shall, one day, out upon the waves,’ Tahquil said. A breeze from the west breathed coolly upon her cheek.

  ‘He shared hearth and board with us,’ added Viviana. ‘We are in his debt.’

  ‘We must travel by night from now on,’ said Tahquil briskly, endeavouring to distract her friends from melancholy, ‘and use the days for sleeping. Our senses must be sharp and wakeful during the wighting hours.’

  ‘The swanmaiden ought to have warned us not to camp by that fuath-haunted sink!’ fumed Viviana aggrievedly. ‘That is her duty! A poor sentry she has shown herself.’

  At uhta, they halted from sheer exhaustion, throwing themselves down in a gully, narrow and rugged, near the confluence of two streams. Spikes of frog-orchids grew amongst the upland grasses. Hooded, toothed and spurred, their yellow-green flowers were tinged with russet. Below, the valley lay lead-grey in the half-light, the ancient furrows and folds of the land flowing down with unhurried grace to meet the riverbanks.

  ‘I shall call the swanmaiden,’ said Tahquil. ‘Wi
ghts are unable to dishonour their word. She has vowed to oblige herself to whosoever should summon her with that feather.’

  ‘How shall you call her now?’ asked Caitri. ‘The feather is gone.’

  ‘I know her calling-name.’

  With that, heedless of invisible eavesdroppers, Tahquil cupped her hands around her mouth and called, ‘Whithiue!’ into the echoes of the valley. Thrice she called the name—to the north, to the south and skywards. Thrice the walls of the fells tossed the syllables from one incline to the other.

  The swan answered; a dark rune scribed on a grey slate sky, a swart and swooping serenity of flight, falling behind an outflung arm of the fell.

  With the demure protocol habitually practised by shape-shifters, the swanmaiden made her transformation beyond the view of mortal observers. Soon afterward, she was standing amid the angular rocks edging the gully’s head, her pale face like a flower on a dark stem.

  ‘Welcome,’ said Tahquil. ‘Pray sit with us.’

  A low ‘Whaiho’; perhaps a symbol of derision. A soft pre-dawn breeze stirred the feathers of her cloak, but the preternaturally lovely maiden remained as poised as a bird stalking fish, and did not step forth.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Tahquil, ‘explain yourself from your exalted position. Why did you not warn us as promised? Our lives were endangered by a fuath. Had you informed us of its presence we would never have bided by its pool.’

  The swans have their own language. Can she understand my words? Is it possible for her to reply?

  ‘Whaiho,’ presently the swanmaiden deigned to say in a low, mellow voice. ‘Sedulous stealers are squeamish.’

  She understands very well. Her command of the Common Tongue is estimable—at any rate, it appears she is adept at alliteration.

  ‘We are not thieves,’ Tahquil said aloud, ‘nor are we squeamish. Mayhap it is hard for you to comprehend, but we do not wish to be slain. You have promised to do your best to prevent this occurrence, have you not?’