The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  The flanks of Gloomy Jack were dominated by stringybarks and peppermint gums. Brittle twigs and sloughed strips of bark crunched beneath the wayfarers’ boots. There was a sameness about the tall, pale trunks that made the girl feel as though they were getting nowhere. Even in the shade the air shimmered with heat, and from somewhere ahead came the piercing shrill of cicadas.

  He could plainly be seen, the lissom brown youth who walked for a time under the leaves a few yards to the left, for he made no effort to conceal himself. He did not look toward the travelers, but Imrhien studied him until he left them. His features were elfin: a turned-up nose, high cheekbones, a sharp chin, and pointed ears jutting from long dark hair that tumbled past his shoulders. His feet were bare and his sylvan raiment gorgeous; a collar of yellow, scarlet-veined leaves of the flowering cherry, ovate and serrated; a long russet-brown tunic of five-pointed plane tree leaves stitched with green thread and trimmed with lace of oak, moss-lined, belted with braided rushes; dagged hell-sleeves of wine-crimson Autumnal foliage that hung to his calves; breeches of velvet moss tied with ivy at the knee; and two folded lily leaves for a cocked hat with a feathery fern frond for a plume. He carried a staff of goldenrod, and at his feet trotted a small white animal with scarlet slippers of ears and crimson garnets of eyes.

  “I have heard him spoke of back in Tarv,” whispered Sianadh. “They say he took care of a little girl, Katherine, who was lost in the forest; she was later found unharmed and grew to be a fine woman, and she always did say how kind he had been to her, the Gailledu. I know it be he, for he has black hair and is dressed all in moss and leaves like they say. And if I b’ain’t mistaken, that there little red-eared pig with him be a beast of good fortune.”

  At midday they came to a steamy gully overhung by tree-ferns and refilled the leather bottle from a sweet-tasting, tan-colored streamlet. Two ladies in long black dresses had been sitting under the trees, their long dark hair crowned with circlets of blood-red garnets. They stood up and glided over to a little pool in a hollow. A powerful rush of wind roared up from the dell, and with a cry, two black swans rose away through the air.

  “We shall rest where we are,” said Sianadh, “and not disturb a pool favored by swanmaidens.” He opened the pack. “This dried stuff be dull to the palate, and I could wish for nobler fare. Plenty of it left, however. Ye do not eat much.”

  His companion was by now getting used to thinking of herself as a girl and being thought of as such by this educated gentleman of a rough peasant who treated lads and lasses the same except for an extra degree of mannerliness to the latter and a degree less of badinage and freedom with his language, both of which slipped when he forgot about them. She watched him picking round pebbles out of the stream, pocketing the slingshot he had taken out of his knapsack.

  “Bide here, chehrna. I saw turkeyfowl in the brushwood, and I’ve a mind to catch one.”

  <> In panic she pulled on his coat, <>

  “Have no fear.” Gently he disengaged her hands. “The Bear always comes back. ’Twould take a pretty big turkey to best me. Mind the knapsack, and do not stir from this spot. The ashen staff has power in itself—keep it by.”

  Then he was gone, not noiselessly, but the sounds of him were soon swallowed up in the forest and overridden by the pitiless, maddening cicada thrum arising now on all sides.

  Listlessly she lay for a time on the cool, scratchy grass of the stream’s bank. Bubbles formed and danced on the water. The insects’ buzzing made her head ache. A small white pig with poppy-petal ears snuffled in the herbage by the water’s edge. It lifted its head and looked at the girl with a pair of holly-berry eyes, then trotted away and stood as if waiting. When she did not move, it advanced a few steps, then moved away again and put its head down in a patch of long grass. Her curiosity aroused, she picked up the knapsack and went to look. Instantly the pig kicked up its heels and scampered off. Where it had stood, not a blade of grass was broken. She knelt and picked a handful of grass. It was full of four-leafed clover. Tucking some in her pocket for luck, she returned to the stream.

  It was difficult not to doze; heat and lack of sleep pressed on her eyelids, and Sianadh seemed to be taking a long time. She splashed her face with water to stay awake and stuck her fingers in her ears to shut out the cicadas.

  Sianadh burst out of the trees, turkeyless.

  “Imrhien, there be a market going on over that rise! Ye should see! A grassy meadow, full of little folk buying and selling just like any town fair. They be dressed in red and yellow and green like proper little lords and ladies—their pretty painted booths have all sorts of commodities for sale. There be pewterers, shoemakers, peddlers with all kinds of trinkets—everything we usually see at fairs be there, including the food stalls. Roasted quails! Raspberries and cream! To my mind, if we step up politelike, we might be so bold as to barter for some of their cakes and pies and glazed hams and custards and ale.… Come!”

  He grabbed the knapsack and led the way. When they came almost to the top of the rise, they dropped to their bellies and crawled to peer over the edge.

  What Imrhien saw differed vastly from what Sianadh had described. She shot a puzzled glance at him, but his eyes were aglow, and a wide, vacuous grin split his stubbled jaw.

  There was indeed a smooth, close-cropped sward and a milling crowd of little folk at their market trade, but the booths were shaky affairs of peeling bark, the garments of the participants were tattered and dirty, the dishes and ornaments they hawked were crudely carved from wood, and the dainty foods of which the Ertishman had spoken were nothing but fuzzballs, weeds, live and dead insects, cuckoo’s spittle and acorns, piled up on leaf plates.

  The girl tried to stop him, but ineffectually, as Sianadh rose and went down among them, opening the knapsack to show what he brought to barter. The men and women, no higher than his knee, crowded around, laughing shrilly and talking in some foreign tongue, picking over the oatmeal, the dried figs, the raisins, hazelnuts, bread, and salt beef. Overjoyed at the bargains he struck, Sianadh reached out to take the ghastly victuals they offered him, cramming them into his mouth straight away. At this the girl jumped out of hiding and ran to him, knocking the rubbish aside.

  “Hue and cry, girl! There be plenty for both of us,” he growled through a mouthful. She grabbed his wrists; he pushed her away, and then a pricking of a hundred pins stung her calves; the little folk flocked around armed with thorn-weapons to drive her away. It was no use persisting. She hopped out of their hostile reach and waited for Sianadh. Presently he appeared, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. The knapsack bulged.

  “Full of goodies.” He patted it contentedly. “Ah, what a feast. Did ye try some?”

  She frowned. <>

  “Ye be too choosy, lass. Come now, we must be off.”

  <>

  Sianadh flinched. He took a moment to consider this.

  “Ye see?” he repeated carefully. “What did ye see, Imrhien?”

  Unable to explain, she flung up her hands in frustration.

  “Come back to the fair with me. Put your hand on your hip and crook your arm so that I may look through it.”

  To the rise they returned. It seemed the fair was over, for the last of the little folk were hurriedly abandoning the stalls, not packing them up but leaving them as they stood.

  Sianadh bent to look through the crook of Imrhien’s arm.

  A torrent of oaths and expletives in at least three languages followed. He ran down the slope, shouting and kicking the stalls to pieces. Weed, seedpods, and bits of bark went flying.

  “Doch pishogue! Doch, doch skeerda, sgorrama wights with their glamour! Obban tesh, what have I eaten?” He charged into some bushes and was violently ill. Between spasms of choking he raged, “Sun’s teeth, did I eat that? Blast me beardless, I ain’t never seen nothing green like that … plagues of rot, but those look like slugs …”

  When he finally emerged he shamb
led off to the swanmaidens’ pool and jumped straight in. Meanwhile Imrhien emptied the detritus out of the knapsack and watched parts of it crawl away.

  “Have ye the Sight, then?” Sianadh: hunched, sour, and dripping.

  She shrugged.

  “Ye might have warned me.”

  She stamped her foot.

  “All right, ye did warn me. The worst of it be, those weevilly siofra have taken the best part of our provisions. And I have lost the stomach for hunting—I think it bailed out with them slugs.”

  Despondent, she made no reply. In silence they resumed their journey.

  Birds came clamoring to their evening roosts. Darkness was already gathering, and they had found no safe nook in which to spend the night, when the Gailledu reappeared with the white pig and beckoned. The travelers hesitated, undecided.

  “They say he be seelie, but …”

  Imrhien pointed to the pig, jabbed a thumb at herself, and showed the Ertishman the wilted clover from her pocket.

  “The pig gave ye what? Four-leafed clover? Ach! So that be what peeled the glamour from your bonny green eyes and not the Sight, after all.” He took some for his own pocket.

  “When these dry I shall tuck them inside the lining. The little maggots shall never put the pishogue on me again, and if I ever see ’em, I’ll do more than box their pointy ears. Yon leaf-boy looks the same to me now as he did before I took the clover. I believe he means us well. Shall we follow?”

  Imrhien nodded. The Gailledu and his pig seemed different from the other wights they had encountered. Nevertheless they followed warily through the gloaming, Sianadh’s hand resting on the skian. The warm and darkening forest was teeming with presences. Their guide urged them to hurry forward. A sound of galloping horses came behind; the travelers broke into a run, but there seemed only trees and more trees and the Gailledu’s half-glimpsed form and the pig, flitting ahead—then Sianadh stumbled against a great, smooth bole, gasping, and the unseen riders thundered past and away.

  “Rowans.”

  The girl caught her breath, looked up. The Gailledu had indeed led them into a wood of rowan-trees, the trees of protection, before he and the pig had left them.

  Soft mosses made a comfortable resting place. Imrhien’s legs ached. After they had eaten from their depleted rations, she took off her boots. In the safety of the rowans, the man and the girl slept the profound sleep of absolute weariness, sprawled as if dead in the deep leaf-mold.

  In the morning they left the rowan-grove and struck out northeast on their journey.

  They had not gone more than a few yards when the Gailledu barred their way. Without speaking, he shook his dark head and pointed to the west. Sianadh stopped, planting his staff firmly in the ground.

  “Good morrow to ye. Ye led us to good rest last night, sir—now we be at your service. But if it be another way ye’re wanting us to go, that we cannot do.”

  With a sharp, chopping movement the leaf-clad youth brought the side of one open hand down into the upturned palm of the other. The gesture could mean only one thing.

  Sianadh shifted uneasily.

  “He wants us to stop going this way and go around, Imrhien.”

  She nodded, feinting a step to the left.

  “So ye think he be right, eh? Nay. It cannot be. We must take the direct route. We have already lost too much time, and our supplies be short. Our goal cannot be more than a day away if we keep on. Who knows how many extra leagues we may walk, how many days we may lose by changing our course? Good sir, your advice be gratefully received, but with respect, we cannot follow it.”

  Sianadh began to walk around the Gailledu, but there he was, barring their way again. His brown eyes flashed in anger. One last time he shook his head and made the “stop” signal. Then he stepped aside. Uncomfortably Sianadh met Imrhien’s eyes.

  “Do as ye wish. I b’ain’t changing.”

  From her hair the girl took a blue wildflower she had plucked that morning, not knowing its name. She stretched her hand out to the Gailledu. After a few moments he took the flower from her fingers, turned, and went into the forest. She stared after him, then followed the Ertishman.

  There was little communication between them, many an anxious glance over their shoulders and many a jump at wind-tossed shadows. After an hour or two they came under dark pines growing among granite boulders. Roots gripped the rocks like arteries caging hearts. Malice brooded beneath heavy boughs. Queer sights and sounds troubled their passage as before, but this time the travelers knew that they were not being deceived, that what they saw was real. While they carried the four-leafed clover, their eyes penetrated glamour’s masquerades.

  The Summer heat thickened, grew stifling. Glad they were to find, in the afternoon, a black forest pool. Although they bathed their feet and splashed their faces, some inner cognition warned them not to drink. The pines had snared a patch of flawless lavender sky between them, high above, but it was not permitted to reflect in the inky water.

  Branches swished aside, and a shaggy little horse came to drink. It cocked a friendly eye, shaking droplets from the soft muzzle, snorting softly.

  The allurement of waterhorses was such that when they were near, they seemed in no way to be eldritch or perilous—a certainty drew over those who beheld them that here was but an innocent and playful steed, as lorraly as themselves, and that it would be ridiculous to suspect otherwise. Only gramarye or a determined stubbornness could save mortals from this enchantment.

  “Put your boots back on quicklike and let’s get out of here,” hissed Sianadh.

  The horse trotted over to them, its hooves almost soundless on the pine-needle carpet. Imrhien’s hands were shaking so much that she could not lace her boots. Sianadh’s lips moved silently. The horse nuzzled his shoulder, pranced and frolicked in the most joyous manner, curving its neck enticingly to be caressed.

  The more they avoided the pretty thing, the more it played. As they moved away it bounded in front of them, bending its foreleg in a seductive invitation to mount and ride. In and out of the trees it gamboled, the long tail flouncing high—everywhere they turned the horse frisked in their way, its spell drawing its net over them, until in desperation Imrhien brandished her ashen staff in both hands, right before its eyes. The creature reared on its hind legs, neighing, then Sianadh was there, the skian’s leaf-shaped blade glittering cold in one fist, a scoop of salt glittering cold in the other.

  “Avaunt!”

  Shrilly squealed the horse. It rolled its eyes and pig-rooted. The travelers advanced. It backed off, wheeled, and galloped straight for the pool. In it jumped, smoothly, with hardly a splash. Only ripples were left behind, spreading slowly across the dark face of the water.

  A tear stood in Sianadh’s eye. He stared at the pool’s secret waters, shaking his head.

  “Ah, but ’tis a tambalai thing, and a rare, or I’m no judge of horseflesh. It went hard with me to repel it. A pity.”

  Without waiting to see more, the two companions hastened on their way.

  The needle-carpet deadening their footfalls, they pushed through curtains of shadow. There seemed no end to the pine forest. Imrhien’s scalp prickled with the certainty of being followed. Dread of some terrible stalker swallowed her heart.

  Light emptied out of the afternoon. Tree trunks loomed like prison bars, and growing darkness made it difficult to see where they were going.

  A grayish glimmer ahead, more a decrease of darkness than an increase of light, showed where the trees thinned. In a few more yards the travelers stepped out from the forest under a starry sky. A half-moon was ascending. The Greayte Southern Star lit the landscape palely. To either hand, the forest rows stretched out in an endless picket fence. The companions stood at the top of a slope covered with low bushes: gorse, melaleuca, and broom. The long hillside slanted down to a narrow gorge running from north to south, along the floor of which flowed a swift river. To the north, an escarpment rose to a mountain peak. Faintly discernible on t
he ravine’s far side there rolled undulating grasslands scattered with trees.

  “The river!” Sianadh’s eyes glittered. “At last, the river that runs from Bellsteeple to the south. Ah, but I cannot tell at which point we have arrived at these reaches. We must follow this tributary of the Rysingspill, but whether upstream or down is not clear.”

  Undecided, he stood in thought, surveying the scene until frenetic laughter from the forest startled them both into action and they hastened down the slope.

  Riddled with holes, Imrhien’s hoots were giving way; they were not as stout as Sianadh’s, not being made to withstand journeys in the wild. Now the sole of the right boot came adrift, flapping. She had to stop and take it off.

  “Do not throw it away, lass. Do not leave behind any things ye have used. Fires of Tapthar! What can that be?”

  A groove was gouged into the hillside to the right, running straight down from the forest to the ravine. No vegetation grew on its worn and slippery surface.

  “This queer slide be too treacherous to cross. We must turn upriver,” said the Ertishman when they had reached the lip of the channel. “And may the Star grant us safe haven this night.”

  A pearlescent cloud layer roofed the gorge. Halfway up its slopes, wispy shreds of cloud clung. The river’s cleft was narrow and very steep, the sides plunging straight down from the cliff edge perhaps sixty feet to the water below. Massive boulders humped out of the gushing waters like gray leviathans. The current raced and boiled, churning furiously among them with a sound of torrential rain. The loud voice of the river filled their ears with its hissing roar, threaded with limpid notes like bubbling silver.

  The travelers marched along the cleft’s rim. Tiny white moths flitted. Something came hurtling down the hill on the muddy slide, shrieking with laughter, and shot out over the river, leaving only echoes of its madness.