Darkling Fields of Arvon

by James G Anderson

  "It is good now," she said softly.

  "I saw him . . . . M-my father. He spoke to me, but he looked—"

  "Hush. Be still. Whatever you beheld, it is good. Your face is smooth, no longer troubled. So, too, your eyes. Although, for a while, you had me worried, Kalaquinn. Your cries and groans, they filled my cottage like a storm."

  Kal rose and sat on the edge of the bed. "But I think I'm too late, Mistress Katie. The healing water, it'll have come too late. I think he's . . ."

  "It may be he is, yes. And if so, there is naught you can do about it but continue with your appointed task. You must not linger on what might have been. Take courage and be strong. There is much that lies before you that must yet be accomplished."

  "Re'm ena, but that's near enough what he said to me himself."

  Katie arched a brow questioningly.

  "In my sleep, I mean. I dreamt . . . He said . . ." Kal shook his head. Then, looking up at the old woman, he began again. "I am encouraged by the words my father spoke to me in my dream." Kal saw his face gently reflected in her grey eyes for a moment. Then Katie hm-hmmed knowingly to herself and turned back to her kitchen.

  "Come with me now. I've prepared a posset. It'll keep you until Gelanor and Gwyn return and we sit down to supper together."

  "Supper smells delicious, whatever it is," Kal said as he pushed himself off the bed and followed Katie into the kitchen. The hearth fire had burned down to glowing coals, and the kitchen window had been thrown open to the sunlit warmth of the summer day. A breeze played in the sheer curtains.

  "There you go. Help yourself." Katie pointed to a steaming mug on the table. Kal settled himself on a bench, lifted the cup, and sipped.

  "Ah, good." The Holdsman sighed contentedly, warmed by the spiced sweetness of the drink.

  "From the goats I keep out back. A hard lot to keep fenced in, but I've always held it's goat's milk makes the best posset."

  "How long did I sleep?"

  "Not nearly as long as you needed after your adventure with Gelanor's band. It's but midday. The good thing is that I'll have a chance to show you something you must see before leaving Mousehold."

  Kal drained his mug and set it down in front of himself.

  "You are done? Good, then. Let's be off," Katie said, snatching the empty mug from the table. Untying the apron from her waist, she bustled out of the kitchen. Beside the front door she lifted a hooded cloak from where it hung on a peg. A bright leaf-green in colour, it had a hem interlaced with elaborate patterns of gold thread. The garment seemed to be woven of heavy, coarse fibres. It had an awkward look. Nonetheless, when the woman threw it around her shoulders, it rippled and flowed like silk.

  At the door, Kal lifted his sword belt from its peg. Katie turned to him and smiled, a twinkle in her grey eyes.

  "Leave them. You won't need weapons. Not here, not on Carric-thona in these waldscathe-infested woods."

  Katie set a brisk pace from the cottage, striding past the ruins of the glence and up the flank of Mousehold's glade into the surrounding forest. The wide path ran for nearly a quarter of a mile along the bottom of a narrow depression lined on either side by the Woods of Tircoil. It was here only this morning that Kal, in the company of Gelanor's men, had joined the big bard himself in song.

  Beads of sweat pricked Kal's forehead and trickled down his face. He found himself pressed to match Katie's quick stride. She began humming under her breath, a tremulous sound that blended in wonderful harmony with the twitter, rustle, and buzz of the forest. Kal recognized the tune at once and smiled. It was Carric-thona.

  The woodland had the feel of an enormous hall, its floor clear of undergrowth and bramble, and its mighty trunks, branches, and deep canopy stretching up high overhead. He listened, enchanted by the tune Katie hummed, as they continued along the straight path between the ancient trees. For nearly two hours they walked unswerving into the depths of the Woods of Tircoil. Eventually, Kal marked a lightening ahead, a breach in the solid forest that grew steadily larger until the two came to a small stream, which they crossed by means of a quaint stepped bridge of sharply cut stone blocks. From the bridge, they came into the open. Kal blinked in the sunlight as Katie hurried on through a gateway in a low stone wall.

  "Re'm ena, but that's a strange-looking glence! As shaggy as a sheepherder's dog, what with all the ivy clinging to it. And where's the glence tower?" Kal stood, puzzled, mopping his brow with a sleeve.

  Before him, outlined against the sky, on a beautifully landscaped knoll that rose from the centre of a small lake, stood a domed shape covered with olive-green leaves. The ivy-covered glence seemed to glint and glimmer in the sunlight as the breeze stirred the leaves to life.

  "Come along, Kalaquinn. Come," the woman said, bending her head and smiling.

  Kal sprang forward after Katie through the opening in the wall and onto the cobbled path leading to the strange structure. A long expanse of low turf banked the lake to the left and to the right, dropping away in fragrant patches of thyme to its pebbled shores. The lawn was broken only by the footpath on which they stood and the ramparts of a stone well to their left overshadowed by a great old yew. Ahead of them, little rock gardens planted in terraced rows with stonecrop and saxifrage flanked the narrow tongue of grass that ran not a hundred paces into the lake, then widened and rose, footing the leafy glence.

  Following Katie across the spit of land and onto the knoll, Kal looked up at the glence now looming over them. Its face was veiled by a dense mat of leaves attached to long branches as thin as tendrils. They mounted the rising ground, and Katie stepped towards a break in the foliage, a deep-set arch of intricately plaited withes. The braided and interwoven willowy twigs were still green, alive and in full leaf.

  Kal entered the dome close behind the woman. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the murky half-light that seemed to seep into the windowless place.

  "What kind of glence is this?" Kal stared at a grey column, the limbless trunk of a huge tree that rose from the centre of the glence where the temen stone should have been. "And the inside—the walls . . . Why, they are entirely hidden by ivy."

  "Not hidden. Look closely, Kalaquinn."

  Kal walked to the edge of the floor, head stooped, peering squint-eyed, then tentatively touched the densely knit mass. He plucked a heart-shaped leaf, its underside a muted silver-grey, like all the leaves concealing the inside walls of the glence. He turned the leaf over. Its glossy surface was a deep olive, and a filigree of veins chased the surface of the leaf to its toothed edges. He dropped the leaf and began to scrabble at the walls, trying to find something solid behind the silvery leaves with his probing hands.

  "But what do you mean?" He turned back to Katie, frowning. "There are no walls here."

  "Aye, there are no walls. Not leastwise walls of stone."

  "Not walls of stone? You mean . . . you mean to say that this . . . this latticework of leaf and twig, that's the wall?" Kal moved back towards the centre of the chamber.

  "Indeed, the wall. A living wall."

  "Forgive me, Katie. I'm missing something in this. It must be my mind, still half bound by sleep." Kal rubbed his face and shook his head.

  "I've been playing with you, Kalaquinn," Katie said and laughed. "There is no need for you to doubt your senses. What you see . . . No, what you're standing in is a—how shall I say it? What you're standing in is a glence tree."

  "A glence tree? What's a glence tree?"

  "Look around you," Katie said with a sweep of her arm. "All is living wood."

  Kal stepped closer to examine the immense trunk at the centre of the chamber. Facing him was a large arching cleft, easily half again the height of a man, in the massive bole. As he approached it, he saw placed within the deep-set hollow, on a floor roughly knee-high from the ground, a simple wooden stool. Kal turned slowly away from the opening. There, between him and the bright entrance to the glence, rose a small pillar, a nubbled stump bark-covered and branchless. He had mis
sed it when he first entered the glence, and now he moved towards it with fascination.

  "Aye, the harpstone," Katie said. "Except that, like everything else, it's not stone."

  Kal looked to his left. There, not thirty paces away, was another pillar, and directly across the domed space from that, to Kal's right, another. He knew a fourth pillarlike stump would be opposite him, hidden from his view by the tree trunk.

  "Not stone," Kal said as if to himself.

  "Root. They are roots pushed up by the tree."

  "A glence tree." Kal looked up into the dark green reaches of the tree's crown far overhead. He could just make out the flit and dart of birds among the high branches.

  "Aye, a glence tree, with living walls, living temen stone, living harpstone, living dexter, sinister, and hind stones. A living tree, aye. A glence tree," Katie chirped cheerily like one of the sparrows above.

  "I've never seen a tree so . . . I've never seen anything of the like." Kal shook his head as he strode back to the tree trunk. He stretched out his hand and traced his fingers along the creased and furrowed pattern of dark runnels crisscrossing the smooth grey bark. "It even looks more like jointed masonry than bark. And it's so broad across the trunk."

  "Big enough to make another chamber within itself," Katie said.

  Kal lifted his gaze again to the branched roof high above him, his hand still resting on the trunk. "Re'm ena, but it is amazing." He breathed the words, then dropped his hand and turned back to look at Katie. "It must be nearly as big as the Great Glence itself."

  "Bigger. Or so I understand. Go on, have a look inside," Katie said, pointing in the direction of the stool that had been placed in the heart of the tree.

  Kal stepped up over the threshold and peered at the rounded walls of the small vaulted chamber only faintly illumined by the filtered light from the outside. The wooden walls felt rough to the touch, deeply pitted and scored, while, underfoot, the floor seemed unevenly hewn, although more or less level. On a stand in the back of the hollowed trunk, there was a harp.

  Kal lowered himself onto the board stool at the centre. Facing Katie, he looked out past the harpstone root to the leaf-fringed entry of the glence tree and the falling path beyond. "Of course! It lies on Carric-thona!" He clapped to himself and chuckled, caught up in the excitement of discovery and feeling slightly giddy. "A glence tree!" He settled a little and looked around himself again. "But, Mistress Katie, how is it that the tree doesn't die with its heartwood hewn from it?"

  "It's a glence tree. Nothing is hewn from it."

  "You mean it grows this way?"

  "Aye."

  "With this great hole in it?"

  "Aye, like all glence trees."

  "Like all glence trees? There are more besides this one?"

  "Yes, there are—or at least there were more. Many more. Alas, there is now but one, to my knowledge, in all of Ahn Norvys, and you're standing in it . . . . Well, rather, sitting in it."

  "But why is it not talked about? Why is it that nobody knows about it? Wilum never mentioned it."

  "Ah, there's a story. One that begins far away," Katie said wistfully with a sigh, seating herself sideways on the ledgelike lip of the oval opening. "One that begins far away on the other side of Ahn Norvys in a distant time." Her voice now changed in tone.

  "Silence!" Her command rang from the hollow bole of the great tree. Kal was taken aback and looked at the woman, thinking that she was addressing him.

  "Silence! Be still!" Katie said in a voice that belied her years with its strength. Kal realized that this was a part of the telling that she was giving. It seemed to him that the birds, the leaves, and even the wind had quieted themselves to lend their attention to the woman.

  "Silence!" she said again, her voice trailing off. A moment passed, then she resumed in song, in a haunting melody that at once struck Kalaquinn with its stark beauty and its sadness.

  "Harken, my hearth-kin, your hearts bestill,

  while great deeds dare I relate.

  May the doings deign to dwell in this tale-shaping

  of the ancients you are and shall become.

  "You are the faithful fellowship, you friends of Jodris,

  whose blessed and brazen assays

  did foil the fiend's foundrous attempts

  to subvert the voice of goodliness.

  "And you, whose blood still bears the boon-stain,

  you, progeny of the People, a chosen

  lineage, lost yet living still,

  you, exiled-ones, attend, I sing.

  "Yet as bold and braw be my breasted heart-seat,

  Still I quail to quarter in song-frame

  the woeful words that welcome once more

  Joy's dour sister, sorrow.

  "Though fingers will fumble upon frail strings,

  and tear-blind eyes will ache anew,

  brace yourself, my brave heart, brook thee not

  to let grief garner its victory.

  "So hearken, my hearth-kin, and heed the rehearsal,

  for once blessed Beldegrayne did the anagoroi

  its mist-enshrouded mountain isles marvelously bedight

  with the Life-tree and its lyric life-melody.

  "But by wile and wizardry, the wicked one stole

  into the hearts of the holiest

  and stole the song and so the seed

  of the People's promise and hope.

  "Oh weep! Oh weep! The gleacewhinna are gone;

  lost are limb and leaf,

  every bough and bole are broken—but one!

  For in far-westerly woods, one grows,

  "One graces a glade unguarded and wild;

  but its music is mute, and whispers

  in echoes of ages past, ancients long-dead,

  long-remembered, lost, lamented.

  "Hearken, my hearth-kin, your hearts be unsettled,

  by my telling of travail. Attend,

  the Gleacewhinna woods a wasteland lie;

  you, her People, deprived, lament! Lament!"

  "Ah, me . . ." Katie fell silent, her head drooping. At length, she looked up into Kal's face. "That was the first bit of the 'Lament of Beldegrayne,' " she said, "but rendered into Arvonian by one of the last speakers of the mother tongue in the Black Cape."

  " 'Lament of Beldegrayne'? I don't recall ever hearing of it."

  "No, I don't suppose you would have."

  "But Beldegrayne . . . Ah, yes. I can only remember hearing of it once or twice. If I remember the myths correctly, it was supposed to have been a hidden island, some garden land. It was imagined to be somewhere deep in the Breathing Sea, was it not?"

  "Myths, eh?" Katie eyed Kal with a brow raised in reproof. "Very few stories survive, but that's only because very few of the people survived. Beldegrayne has been forgotten in the histories of Ahn Norvys."

  "It was a real place?"

  "Aye, as real as you or me. But forgive me, Kalaquinn." Katie smiled. "I should start at the beginning. What do you know about the Ina Pik Whinna?"

  "The Ina Pik Whinna? Very little. Only that they were an ancient people, a people of the Age of Echoes. Didn't they live in an area that is now a part of Kêl-Skrivar, in the shadowedland?" Kal leaned forward from the stool, his hands clasped. "But legend has it that they perished after the First Undoing, when their homeland fell under evil sway."

  "So legend has it," Katie said, smiling. "So legend has it. But legend sometimes offers only a distorted reflection of the truth, especially when a legend has faded in a people's remembering. Ahn Norvys has forgotten the Ina Pik Whinna and their story. But the 'Lament' tells it true."

  Katie fell silent, closing her eyes, and the muted tones of birdsong cascaded over them from above. At length, she looked up again at Kal.

  "Beldegrayne was the home of the Ina Pik Whinna. Beldegrayne, not lands in what is now the shadowedland, as legend tells. The Ina Pik Whinna were the people of the tree." Katie paused and lifted her hand, sweeping it in an arc through the ai
r above her. "You see? Ina Pik Whinna, People of the Tree. The People of the Gleacewhinna—this is a Gleacewhinna. The name means 'Tree that Is' or 'Tree of Being,' and the name is the most ancient word of my people."

  "You are Ina Pik Whinna?"

  "Ina Pik Whinnan, yes. A descendent of the People. The Gleacewhinna was a gift to the People—"

  "Gleacewhinna," Kal blurted out in his dawning comprehension. "Gleacewhin . . . Glence! So that's why the tree looks like a glence. The trees—they were grown to resemble glences? But a gift from whom?"

  "No, Kalaquinn, it is the other way around. It is not the trees that resemble glences, but glences that resemble the trees."

  Kal looked at the old woman in confusion.

  "Hush, Kalaquinn, stay your questions for the moment and listen. The tree, the Gleacewhinna, was a gift given at the very dawn of time, given as the symbol of life and blessing, of peace and prosperity. The Gleacewhinna is the peace of the heavens rooted in the soil of the world. It was given the People by the anagoroi. The People lived on Beldegrayne, an island, as you mentioned, hidden deep amid the mists of the Breathing Sea, among the islands of what you would now call the Wyvern Archipelago."

  "But what—"

  Katie raised a finger. "The Gleacewhinna," she continued, "grew in Beldegrayne, and multiplied until the whole land, the entire island, became a forest of these mighty trees. Ah, there were trees that would make this Gleacewhinna seem a dwarf. There our singers sang, and, in the woven melodies, even the Gleacewhinna themselves would give voice. That was life to the Ina Pik Whinna.

  "But the peace of our hidden island was to be short-lived. Some of the anagoroi grew jealous of the gift. They coveted the Gleacewhinna for their own. This was the time of the First Undoing, and evil came to Beldegrayne, and evil perverted the hearts and minds of the Ina Pik Whinna. It was the vile creature Conna-gwyhn who set his mind on the Gleacewhinna and came with silken tongue to win the hearts of the People."

  "Conna-gwyhn?" Kal could not contain himself. "The legends surrounding Ardiel make reference to Conna-gwyhn as the enchanter who subverted Vali, the forgeman, craftsman of the Talamadh."