The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  After treading upon the five hundred and eighty-eighth step, the companions reached a level place. Many gnawings ate at them, not least hunger. But no food was to be obtained, no heartening dragon’s blood was there to be sipped, only water filming the sandstone substrata in random patches. Of course—the stair ended below the uttermost dregs of the minacious Ravenswater.

  Caitri collapsed.

  How long is it since we slept? Tahquil’s rationality was hampered by a melange of weariness, hunger and longing. My wits are fuddled. I cannot reason aright. I only know that we must keep moving.

  ‘Caitri has never entirely recovered her strength since being struck by aelf-shot,’ she said aloud to Viviana. ‘A stroke’s effects can linger. By rights, we ought to have left her safe in Appleton Thorn. We must keep moving, for warmth.’

  Viviana stated, ‘There’s dragon’s blood.’

  ‘I do not wish to use it all up,’ Tahquil quickly replied. She had no desire to reveal the truth at this time, thus paving the path to despair.

  ‘’Tis inexhaustible,’ countered Viviana.

  ‘Not necessarily. Let us hoard it for more dire circumstances.’

  ‘What could be more urgent?’

  Caitri made a small sound like a sick bird.

  ‘Lean on me,’ said Tahquil to the little girl. ‘I am no stalwart to bear you on my shoulders, but I can lend you strength.’

  For what it is worth.

  ‘Come, Caitri,’ she urged, ‘think what awaits us at the end of this under-mine—the fair, green orchards of Cinnarine blowing in sunny breezes at the height of Summer.’

  Caitri stood up. She hooked her arm around Tahquil’s shoulders. Viviana took hold of her other arm.

  ‘And fruit,’ the courtier said indistinctly, as though the juices already ran voluptuously in her mouth. ‘Ripe fruit in bunches, waiting to be plucked and slurped.’

  They walked on, side by side. Moisture trickled down Tahquil’s face. Unlike the moisture behaving similarly on the walls, it was briny.

  The under-mine was decorated with eroded carvings and cracked stone furniture. Pointed arches and ribbings had been incised into the natural sandstone. A gargoyle fountainhead jutted from the wall, spouting a thin jet of water into a worn basin. Further on, other fountains protruded, dry and clogged. The tunnel roared softly, like a predator; the resonance of the overhead current. Close, so close over their heads, the entire mass of the Ravenswater oppressed. Tahquil wondered—How many tons of water? A million? Partitioned only by a layer of rock how thick? Fifty yards, thirty, perhaps in places only ten? That power, generated by water’s flow but unable to be sensed by humankind, would here hold ultimate authority. To pass so close beneath the river would be anathema to wights. No cause for human alarm would emanate from eldritch quarters.

  ‘Hour-honoured’, and ‘historic’ were the words Whithiue had used to describe this under-mine. Ancient were its supports, old and neglected its rising vaults. What rises must fall. One day, or one night, the river would come crashing down through this roof. Would it be this moment?

  Fie! Tahquil chided herself. Light-loving aboveground dwellers typically turn to morbid musings when forced down to the world below, with its connotations of graves and decay. If this secret way has held back the Ravenswater for centuries, there is no reason why it should choose this particular moment to surrender.

  The tunnel passed through an archway endowed with carvings of harvest-laden wains, and widened out into a rectangular cavern, high-vaulted. The leaf-ring’s dandelion radiance extended to the walls. Tahquil looked for patches of shadow—evidence of other entrances and exits.

  What if this were a maze, like the diggings of Doundelding—a labyrinth to lose, abuse and confuse wanderers? No openings showed themselves, save one archway directly ahead. As they made for it, part of the cavern wall gave a heave.

  In Tahquil’s chest, an arrow-impaled bird clapped wings of fear. ‘Keep moving!’ she cried. ‘Hurry!’

  But though they tried to run, it seemed as though she and her companions swam through honey. Their limbs, overtaxed, were loath to obey.

  On the wall a lustre awoke and ran along a flexuosity. A dorsal wing partially erected itself, brazen, like a half-opened fan. A spangle disclosed then reshuttered its eye. The cavern’s exit dwindled until it was a hundred miles away, unreachable.

  ‘Hasten!’

  Rustlings and scrapings issued from the margins of the chamber. A stone mouth gaped in front of the travellers. Swallowed, they fled the place with many a backward glance.

  A sere slithering sounded.

  ‘What was that?’ Viviana snapped.

  ‘I know not.’

  ‘Can it follow us? Is it following?’

  Tahquil gave no answer. Caitri’s arm across her shoulders weighed like a collar of iron. Presently, Viviana cried, ‘It comes after.’

  ‘I know,’ said Tahquil.

  That which trailed them equalled their pace, while the river’s ear-numbing roar crescendoed. Onward they hastened. Against the tunnel’s wall, a high-backed chair stood like an empty throne, crudely engraved with motifs of candles and swords. A scrolled pedestal upheld a stone cup.

  The flesh of the travellers crawled like corpse-maggots.

  It was not until the passageway flared to a second chamber and they had crossed the greater part of it, that a disturbance forced them to halt, whirling to face their pursuer. The sidings of this subsequent dungeon roused now, shimmering from bland stone-grey to coils of iridescence. Fugacious rainbows rippled along reptilian convolutions like oil spilled on water; rubious, rubicelle, aureate, viridescent, argent, cerulean. A fork, nigrescent, flicked out and tasted the air.

  ‘Fare thee well, dear friends,’ said Viviana sardonically.

  Caitri clung to her in unspeaking horror.

  ‘I never thought to be worm’s food before I met the grave,’ the courtier added, with a bitter smile.

  Tahquil held up the ringed hand. The watch-worms, their colours cycling, neither flinched nor drew back.

  ‘It seems they do not fear the ring’, said Tahquil. ‘But I have met such a worm before, in Gilvaris Tarv.’

  ‘Tell it your name, then,’ sneered Viviana. ‘Maybe ’twill remember you and smile as it bites.’

  ‘I wonder, could this be the same one? There’s no way of knowing.’

  ‘Do they eat humankind?’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps discerningly.’

  ‘If discerningly, then you are done for, sweet my lady.’

  ‘The worm I saw slew only one who had tormented it.’

  ‘Tell it we adore it, since you two are on such good terms.’

  ‘Viviana, you are amusing when spiteful.’

  ‘Die laughing,’ carelessly said Mistress Wellesley, goblin-corrupted, not herself.

  Thrice the monstrous beasts circumnavigated the cavern, aiming their crystal eyes from all angles. One, perhaps the one which had followed the travellers, unclosed its maw, unhinging its dislocatable lower mandible to reveal a second set of jaws nestled within. These opened, shut and were closed upon. With a flutter of its dorsal spines and vestigial gill-wings, the oscillating worm recoiled on itself, retracting through the archway. The others subsided against the wall carvings, dulling to an emberous glow as of moonlight seen through stained glass or candlelight shining behind jewels.

  ‘Reprieved,’ said Tahquil, wiping the sweat from her brow.

  ‘My life I’d not wager on it,’ said Viviana as they vacated the precincts through a patterned archway, dragging Caitri, half-insensible, between them.

  The throaty call of the river drew away and upward. Their way passed through a third worms’ nest in the rock, another stretch of passageway and then a cul-de-sac footing a spiral stair. There, at the limit of endurance, on the naked floor they prostrated themselves and let insentience claim them.

  When they awoke after their vulnerable hours, aching and stiff, thin grey scales lay scattered about like coins. Watch-worms
had been moving, close by.

  Unmolested, the travellers drank from a gargoyle wall-fount. Afterwards they climbed the stair.

  This stair seemed endless. The climbers, crawling on hands and knees, eventually resigned from craning their necks in search of a hint of light to indicate that they were approaching the northern exit. At length Tahquil, in the lead, put out her hand to reach the next step and yelped with surprise.

  She had encountered a drapery of leaves.

  No light gleamed through the interstices of this curtain.

  ‘It is night outside,’ whispered Tahquil.

  ‘Have we reached the orchards of Cinnarine? Do you smell the fruit? Do you?’ demanded Viviana, sniffing the air like a dog.

  ‘No. But grey malkins may be lurking out there. They saw us enter the under-mine, and surely they know the location of this exit. They only have to run across the bridge, surround us and wait for the flies to embrace the web.’

  ‘Thank you, O swanmaiden,’ Viviana said, rolling her eyes heavenward.

  Tahquil took off her pack. With all her might she flung it through the leaves. It landed with a thud, followed by silence. No sound of snarling or rending of fabric by sharp fangs disturbed the quietude.

  ‘No malkins,’ said Tahquil, and she heaved herself out of the hole, through the foliate curtain, before Viviana could append, ‘At least, none foolish enough to dine upon a hempen pack.’

  On a rising slope of darkness she lay. Of fruit-glutted orchards there was no sign. At the top of the slope a row of pointing pines was chiselled in black up a sky heavily sugared with stars. Far below and behind ran a river as heavy and lustrous as polished antimony—the Ravenswater, bisected by the swooping birds’-wing arches of Black Bridge.

  They had emerged once more in Ravenstonedale, but on the other side of the bridge.

  ‘It is perilous to remain here,’ said Tahquil to Viviana as they seized Caitri by the arms and hauled her out of the crypt-like masonry. ‘We must make for the heights. That way lies Cinnarine, for sure.’

  The memory of a long, dark cry scoured through her head like lonely winds.

  ‘Easier to utter than to execute,’ said Viviana. ‘I cannot go much further without nourishment. Fruit is what I need. Just a plum, or a small grape …’

  Caitri groaned.

  ‘Take her by the ankles,’ said Tahquil, hoisting the recumbent form by the shoulders. They began to carry Caitri up the side of the valley, which the night had burned as black as cinders.

  The wind remained in the south.

  Awkwardly, with their burden, Tahquil and Viviana climbed the slope towards the pines lining the ridge top. Immediately behind the trees, immersed in their witchy shadows, a hedge grew high, untame and recklessly burgeoning. Formed of interlocking hawthorn bushes, this antique row of shrubbery stretched far in both directions. Small birds nested in it, tiny creatures of eldritch scampered in it, but large wights or lorraly beasts could never penetrate its dense and overgrown pleachings or brave its countless cusps. In days of yore the now vanished orchardists of Cinnarine had planted this hedge-barrier along the outer perimeter of the sandstone windwall.

  The windwall deflected the south wind and kept out the morthadu roaming in the vale of the sinister river. Those same orchardists had also constructed the undermine, and a door was set in the windwall above the place where the under-mine emerged, but the iron-studded oaken beams of that door had long ago been penetrated and sundered and replaced by a weaving of living thorns, so that now no sign of its erstwhile existence remained.

  Tahquil and Viviana studied the hedge behind the pines and guessed its purpose.

  ‘I would rather be on the other side of that,’ stated Viviana.

  The two of them paced it for several yards in opposite directions, searching for a chink, an opening, a gap, knowing in their hearts there was no hope of this and being proved accurate.

  They met together beside Caitri. She had dragged herself into a sitting position, resting her back against the rugose flank of a pine tree, her eyes as blank as two extinguished lamps.

  ‘I expect to hear at any time the hunting notes of the morthadu,’ said Tahquil, ‘or see the baleful eyes of a malkin. Viviana, have you any rope in your pack? I have left mine down by the under-mine and am loath to retrace and retrieve.’

  Without a word Viviana pulled out the vortex of hempen rope she had carried all the way from the abandoned cottage of Tavron Caiden near Hunting-towers. Sullenly she watched Tahquil select a pine and hoist herself up into the lower branches, the rope coiled about her shoulder.

  The bark of the pines was deeply scored, harsh and unforgiving, like a clay surface baked in a desert sun. It tore at unprotected flesh. The rough lips of each crevice curled back on themselves in a grating snarl. Yet in all other affairs the pines showed benevolence. Their fallen needles mantled the ground with fragrant layers which allowed no growth of nettles or poisonous weeds or throttling undergrowth. Their arms were conveniently spaced and positioned for easy attainment, sprouting low on the trunk, sweeping the ground, offering a facile stair. The trees themselves stood vigorous, strong, noble. Higher up, dark green cone-laden boughs reached right across the top of the hedge of the windwall.

  Blood oozed, stinging, from Tahquil’s shins. It gathered in drops on her scraped elbows as she pulled herself up to the next branch and peered over the topmost sprigs of the green-berried hedge.

  Almost imperceptibly, the air lightened by one shade. Far, far away—or maybe it was only a fancy—a cock crowed. And there beyond the hedge she beheld a sea of leaves stretching away to the north. It was gently tossed by tendrils of the south wind which flicked lasciviously at the skirts of the orchard trees to reveal, here and there, catching the waning starlight, clusters of hard orbs on their stems.

  Tahquil secured the rope around a branch, close to the trunk.

  ‘Caitri,’ she called down softly, ‘we are come to Cinnarine. Take hold of the rope. We will help you. One last effort and then you may rest.’

  ‘I cannot do it,’ said Caitri, but the warble of one of the morthadu came wavering from the direction of the river, and she struggled to her feet, stepping on the primary branches, hanging onto the rope. The branches bounced, swishing their tufts of clean, green pins beneath their new burden. Along an extended, horizontal limb she crawled on her belly, inch by inch, the cruel bark abrading. Just underneath the limb, the spikes of the hedge stuck up. They looked harsher than the pine bark, even in their pretty dresses and bunches of jade beads. The long bough dipped flexibly, even under Caitri’s slight weight, as she edged further from the trunk. Down it bent, but she had moved past the hedge and with a cry of relief and despair she fell off, disappearing with a crash on the northern side of the windwall.

  Her companions called her name and received an answer—not the answer they had expected, but the loud cries of many of the morthadu, now almost upon them. Viviana shinnied up the tree like a squirrel. She and Tahquil pulled up the rope, as a cock crowed again, far off in some very distant remoteness. The unseelie dog-wolf-simulacra loped into the half-light of uhta and gathered about the foot of the tree, rearing up to put their front paws on the lower branches, gazing up out of furnace eyes and raising the great ruffs on their shoulders like black manes.

  These were not mortal creatures, there was no doubting it. Long ago, the child Ashalind had seen some wolves of Erith. The pups tumbled playfully as their parents licked them with long, lolling tongues as pink as newborn voles. Like the pines, erect and graceful, strong and untame, the wolves had possessed a vigour and a nobility unknown by wights of unseelie.

  The morthadu, the colour of bereavement, were incarnations of malignance. They and the shadows seemed to belong together, to slide in and out of one another. Fascinated, Viviana and Tahquil stared down at the milling mass.

  ‘Go, Via,’ urged Tahquil. ‘Cross the wall. Caitri needs us.’

  In her turn, Viviana crawled out along the bough. Tahquil, overly con
scious of the steady regard of the attentive crowd below, watched the courtier instead. Viviana went as far as she could. When the branch narrowed enough that it was impossible to keep balance, she swung herself down, hung by her hands for an instant and dropped. The morthadu began a terrible chorus as Tahquil also left their scope, but the sky was brightening swiftly now. A blinding ray punctured the east and the treetops of Cinnarine were suddenly turned to flying green-gold. The sun rose over the wild orchards almost as rapidly as Tahquil fell into them.

  Now the morthadu fell silent and fled, coursing away in a fleet pack like lean, black waves down the valley. On the other side of the windwall, the warm winds of Summer were tossing hot motes of sunlight like crushed gilt through the trees, and caressing the sweet grasses of Cinnarine.

  It was Midsummer’s Day.

  4

  CINNARINE

  Forbidden Fruit

  Cinnarine—orchard green, in Summer’s listless noon,

  Tourmaline, tangerine, when winds of Autumn croon.

  Leafless treen, gnarled and lean when frost bestows its sting—

  Cinnarine, Blossom Queen in heady days of Spring.

  FROM THE CHAP-BOOK: ‘POEMS OF THE NORTH COUNTRY’

  Gentle brooks flowed in the folds and pooled in the hollows of this land. The orchards, for centuries untended, had spread wide and far. Wind and water and birds had borne their seeds away, broadcasting them over acres far beyond the borders of the original plantations, whose ancient moss-bearded trees, or the descendants of them, remained hidden in the secret cores of Cinnarine. Stretching one hundred and seventy miles from south to north, a wild tangle of fruit trees had grown up. They had aged, toppled and decayed in the grassy mold to give nourishment to rank upon rank of succeeding generations.

  At this warm season and latitude, early fruit, peeping from beneath chaste leaves, ripened to shades of maroon, jacinth and passion-red, rosamber and cochineal. Already the first astringent apples, cherries, peaches, pears, yellow and red plums were ready to be gathered. Apricot and orange trees, figs and mulberries grew in their midst, fruited with bitter green jewels, for the season was too young for their bounty.