The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  Then he had surged between the open doors at a limping run—a gait that (he grudgingly admitted later) had been caused by his climbing the bluff in search of her, passing out owing to the effects of the exertion on his damaged ribs, and waking to find himself lying flat on his back with a swollen ankle. Fortunately, the sight of abundant wealth seemed to act as an effective remedy for agony. Sianadh, crowing, lost himself for most of the day in the ship-cavern and the inner storehouse beyond. Infected by his excitement, or perhaps by some innate quality of the treasure, his companion forgot her weariness and joined him.

  There had been another terrifying instance when, emerging with a silvery candlebranch in hand, Imrhien had been wrenched off her feet, to hurtle into the air at a breathtaking rate. Too late she had realized that the silver was, in fact, sildron. On releasing the object, she had fallen instantly some ten feet, to be clumsily caught by Sianadh, who deposited her on the ground in a careless heap.

  “The caves be floored with andalum, girl! Be careful what ye bring into the open. Oghi ban Callanan, ye nearly broke my back to match my ribs and foot—ye’ll be the death of the Bear!”

  She frowned, misliking his choice of words.

  Now a nine-branched candlestick would he floating somewhere in the upper layers of air, to be scooped by the salvage nets of some passing trade-ship or pirate jackal.

  By the end of the day they had wedged open the doors with stones, furnished and redecorated their campsite, and gathered a conglomeration of fruits. It was time to feast in celebration of success.

  “Two days and two nights, Imrhien, ye were away up there. And ye wonder why I went looking for ye! What a laugh—to think the doors would open to anyone who pressed the buttons in sequence. The game-board must simply have been set there for the door-makers to amuse themselves! Seems odd to me, but as they say, other races, other customs—eh, Imrhien? Ah, but no matter. All that stuff be irrelevant now—’tis the time for reveling.”

  Thus began under Waterstair a happy period, a kind of golden era. Imrhien and Sianadh explored the trove, sometimes wandering awestruck in the caverns, at other times bearing chosen pieces into the sunlight. Their camping spot took on the effect of a splendid palace interior, sumptuously furnished, stamped in rich colors against a green backdrop of fern and foliage. Grass-heads tufted against inlaid mahogany table-legs. Precious stones glittered, heaped carelessly upon gray river-rocks. Birds alighted on crocketed chair-backs and on damasked helmets of war. Painted beetles crawled up the stems of chalices worth a peasant’s lifetime of labor and sometimes halted, looking as if they were part of the exquisite decoration thereon. Flowers bloomed like dyed silks in the same mosses that couched golden torques with eyes of ruby. It was indeed a surrealistic pageant.

  The armors shone with the nacreous colors of seashells—gleaming greens, opalescent blues, silvers swift and pure, lustrous moon-gray, and the soft golds of sunrise.

  “Do ye see these armors, d’ye see from what materials they be fashioned?” asked Sianadh, fascinated. “Not so much as a steel rivet amongst them. Many of these metals I have not before seen, but I have heard of such—the platinum and iridium so beloved of the Icemen, here in alloy silver white; chromium, gold, and silver; copper as bright as Muirne’s hair, dimmed by no patina of verdigris; yellow bronze and talium. I know not these even rarer types—here a metal as green as the ocean and there another blue as the evening sky—perhaps cobalt salts have been used—’tis a glasslike surface and seems like ceramic, yet is not brittle. No iron or steel can be found anywhere in this trove. Its makers misliked it for some reason.…”

  He scratched his head deliberatively.

  “I can only reckon on one reason.” He looked up. “Doch, there’s a wasp in the wine!” Distracted by concern for his fermenting fruits, he hurried off without elaborating.

  During these days of leisure, when there seemed no need for much haste, Sianadh was wont to recline negligently among piles of gold and jewels, telling stories of his travels in the Known Lands of Aia, various scurrilous escapades—into which he had been drawn as an unwilling, innocent, and wrongly suspected participant—and of his sister, Ethlinn, who at the age of sixteen had fulfilled her ambition to become a fully fledged carlin, to their mother’s sorrow. On Littlesun Day in her sixteenth year, Ethlinn had received her carlin’s Staff from the Coillach Gairm, the eldritch hag of Winter. She had given up her powers of speech in return for the ability to wield the Staff. Sianadh spoke often of his youth in Finvarna. When he talked of his native land, a light would come into his eyes and a lilt entered his voice. His eyes misted, and he would gaze as if at some far-off place.

  “The gaunt cliffs along the west coast of Finvarna be the westernmost edge of the Known Lands. There the gulls scream and crowd like snow on the heights. Beyond them, thundering, the terrible ocean stretches out darkly westward and northward to where the Ringstorm rages. All of Finvarna borders upon the ocean. In the west my land be wildly beautiful, desolate, a land of mountains, lakes, bogs, and rivers. Often ’tis shrouded in low curtains of cloud. Isolated, inhospitable, and rugged be the west—mysterious and wight-haunted. The people of that region work closely with seelie dwarves in metalwork: gold, silver, bronze, and copper. The land is as harsh as the folk are kindly, generous, and hospitable. We Erts welcome everyone into our homes—members of the family, friends and acquaintances, strangers, all alike. In Finvarna we do much visiting, for we be fond of news—and we dress for the occasion, and there might be a song or two when there be visitors. Above all else, we value eloquence and music. And playing Kings-and-Queens,” he added, and after a reflective pause, “and hurling. That’s a sport to live for. It is said the game was taught to my countrymen by the Strangers, in times long ago, before that race disappeared from the world. D’ye know of the game?… No? Here’s the sign for it. See, it is hitting a ball with sticks, like this.” He demonstrated.

  “Not that I be overpatriotic, mind. Patriotism be the cause of many a young life lost on the fields of war. I be the King-Emperor’s man—an Erithan first, a Finvarnan second. Yet a place can call to ye, it can beckon to your very blood.” He sighed.

  “In other parts, forest covers Finvarna, or wide-open rolling grassland, never enclosed by fences or walls. There the mighty herds of giant elk graze, and their antlers branching as wide as trees. Here and there ye might spy the ruins of small castles and tower-houses. South of the river lie rich farming lands, and that is where my mother’s folk came from. So fair, Finvarna. So far. Will I see it again? Ach! Why should I he getting meself heartsick for me home? Homesickness be a scourge—it devours the life that feeds it. Me grandmother allus used to say, ‘There be two days ye ought never to fash yerself with—yesterday and tomorrow.’”

  Sometimes the shang wind blew. reviving no tableaux in this place where humankind rarely passed. Once or twice, at dusk, the girl glimpsed, on the edge of vision, a wild, white horse etched like ivory on the forest, its single horn a lance of moonlight—one of the elusive creatures that Sianadh called cuinocco.

  At their leisure the treasure-finders discovered and rediscovered the secrets cached behind the rune-doors—treasures that, among their complexities, often seemed to shift position unaided. They examined and puzzled over them and chose what to take when they departed for the city. In the course of these incursions, they came upon a third and smaller side-chamber heaped with sildron bars and objects, some wrapped in andalum. To this the capuchin’s tunnel had penetrated.

  But the fascination that drew them most was the swan-ship, mighty and beautiful. It was a ship fit for royalty. They left her until last, then hesitantly, with profound awe and respect, boarded her via the spidery ladders and catwalks supporting the deep scoop of her hull, to tiptoe across her gleaming decks and trace with trembling fingertips her immaculate fittings. Every separate feather was delineated on the folded-back wings. They were enameled in white and outlined in silver. Except for the jeweled eyes and ceres, everything glimmered moonshine
and alabaster—glistening masts, white silken sheets, and shrouds.

  “What a joy, to fly this queen of swans!” Sianadh gazed up at the yardarms. “The masts be too tall to fit her out of the doors. They would have to be dismantled before she could be rolled out, and ’twould be a task for many men.”

  There were other joys. Sianadh had demanded to know where Imrhien had obtained the spidersilk vest.

  “For”—he elaborated in his role of tutor—“spidersilk be twelve times stronger than iron and incomparably light. ’Tis stronger than a mail-shirt and more comfortable, but the cost of one would feed a common family for ten years. It all comes out of Severnesse—that country be full of spider-farms, but ’tis not a lucrative trade—so much silk is needed for just a square inch of fabric, and spiders be so unreliable.”

  The trove revealed a veritable wardrobe of spidersilk. Sianadh carefully selected a suitable vest, then exclaimed, “Ah, to the fires with it. I deserve an entirely new outfit.”

  He disappeared in a frenzied cloud of apparel, like a dog digging up a bone, and emerged clad in gray from head to ankle: a dagged doublet and full-sleeved shirt, a pleated jacket, ill-fitting hose cross-laced at the ankle, a kerchief tied rakishly over his head, and a long cloak fastened with a gold brooch. Not least, he sported a new belt of linked silver serpents’ scales buckled with an ornate clasp. Each scale was intricately engraved. Over this regalia he battened an armor of ridged lamellae in which he swaggered for half a day until the heat became unbearable and, rather irresponsibly, he abandoned his outer casing under a tree like some drab cicada reaching adulthood. Of his old clothes he retained only the habitual taltry and the stout boots.

  Accordingly, the girl swapped her rags for spidersilk, too, folding a swatch of it into a soft-draped gown cinched at the waist with a girdle of beaten gold. In a fit of rashness she added gold rings, bangles, a filigree collar, and a circlet for her hair.

  “Ye look fine! Gold be your color. Ye were right not to choose the silver.”

  Embarrassed, sensing an odd discomfiture in Sianadh, she turned from the man and caught her own image reflected in a bronze mirror. Her belly knotted. A slender incarnation: narrow-waisted, exquisite as a doll from the neck down, the shoulder-length hair spilling thick and heavy as raw bullion, the face hideous as a gargoyle—such an obscenity seemed familiar, in a way that shocked her.

  The rings and baubles clinked, landing in a heap, shucked quickly from her limbs. She exchanged the gown for baggy male attire.

  The upper trapdoors, the two halves of the Kings-and-Queens game-board, had closed by themselves, quietly and (somewhat sinisterly) without warning. The pieces had returned to battle-ready formation, but no replacement gauntlets had appeared. Wishing to take no chance of being unaccountably and irreversibly locked in, the adventurers ensured that the lower portals in the Cave of Doors remained firmly wedged open.

  The weather turned sultry.

  Long gray lines of scud rolled in rapidly, ragged and low, driven by the South Wind. They blanketed the sky, pressing it down under their weight until it seemed that the firmament was supported only by the treetops. At first, the clouds released a spattering of warm raindrops, then it began to pour in earnest. Imrhien and Sianadh took shelter in the swan-ship cavern, where the rain’s patter was drowned out by the muted roar of the swelling waterfall. Sianadh took this opportunity to teach handspeak and to recite the history of the world, learned by rote, embellished by a few of his own amendments.

  “Since ye don’t know anything, I’d better learn ye. Beginnin’ with the years before the Year 1, when the countries of Erith were not united, that was when they used to fight against one another,” he instructed. “As the tribes grew more numerous, these fights became wars—Eldaraigne, Namarre, Avlantia, Finvarna, and Severnesse were the main combatants, for Rimany and Luindorn had no central ruler like the others. Indeed, Luindorn was not then inhabited by men.

  “At this time the Talith yellow-hairs, your own folk, were the most civilized and stately—far more so than the other three peoples. Their armies were efficient and well-equipped defense engines, but the Talith, they had no wish to extend their lands by invasion. They wished only to remain and flourish in Avlantia. My folk, the Erts, were always farmers in Finvarna. The white Icemen of Rimany, they were deadly fighters in their own country but like the Erts and the Talith had no desire to steal the lands of others. Icemen can thrive only in cold, sunless climates. If they come north, they must hide from our sun, so ye see, other lands are not much use to ’em.

  “The Feorhkind, the brown-hairs like your sailor friends and those dogs of pirates, they be a warlike race. Over the span of many decades, or centuries—I forget which—they populated Eldaraigne, Namarre, Luindorn, and Severnesse, using Namarre as a penal colony at first. Some of the colony’s convicts escaped imprisonment to roam the weird regions of that northern country—which is why Namarre became a haunt of brigands. All of that happened a long time ago, before the Year 1.

  “James D’Armancourt the First, he was called the Uniter, and he was a powerful and wise King of Eldaraigne. He united the countries of Erith by force and by wisdom, made of them an Empire. He seized power over the other countries by clever strategy and greater numbers, both by war and by treatying with their Kings. The first King-Emperor was he, in the period called the Uniting of the Kingdoms of Erith, or ‘Unity.’ There came to be peace under his reign. It was decided to use a new system to number the years, whereby the Year 1 was the Year of Unity. Before this, each country had used its own reckoning and all years were numbered differently.

  “Long-lived and late to marry were the Kings of the House of D’Armancourt. The son of the Uniter, who succeeded him, was wise—but the son of his son seemed to be too impulsive and reckless to hold on to this fragile balance of power. Nevertheless, he changed for the best, as youths often do when the shrewdness of maturity has grown on them, and he ruled wisely from then on. Indeed, he became known as William the Wise.

  “The Year 89, during the reign of William the Wise, was a terrible year. It is said that this time marked the passing of the Faêran, the Secret Race—or at least the vanishment of most of them—to the places beyond the Ringstorm or else to the hollow hills, or wherever immortals go when they tire of our world. There were fierce storms. It was then that the shang winds arose for the first time. The people did not know how to deal with these winds until William the Wise issued laws about the making of chain mesh hoods out of the talium trihexide and the Wearing of them. Also in this year of turmoil, sildron was first discovered and became, immediately, royal property. The Houses of the Stormriders were founded, and the Windship lines as well. Although a harsh year, it also marked the beginning of the Era of Glory, when, so they say, the few Faêran who remained worked together with the Talith to design and build the cities in every country, great cities such as the one we passed through in the forests of these mountains. The first men of the Dainnan also were gathered together, the King-Emperor’s special company—peacekeepers in those golden times, warriors in later days.

  “The Faêran, like wights of eldritch, could not abide the touch of cold iron. And like wights, they never left an image on the shang whether bareheaded or no. The Feorhkind in their arrogance had taken to leaving their taltries off in an effort to imitate the Fair Folk. They tried to deny their passions so that they could pass through the unstorm without leaving imprints. It is said that ye can be in a shang storm without a taltry, but only if ye curb your passions, which is why Stormriders and others value control over anger and laughter and such. In backwaters and outliers like the Relay Stations, where they are so much in awe of the Fair Folk that they will not name them, or even speak of them aloud in company. many folk still think themselves noble if they show no passion.

  “In the middle decades of the millennium came a time of terrible plague and war, beginning around the Year 561. It was called the Dark Era. This came about when the last of the Faêran who still lingered, perh
aps growing weary of Erith, disappeared out of the world. The Faêran have not been seen since the beginning of the Dark Era. The remaining Talith dwindled rapidly, and their culture passed away, simply fading into the grass that grew among the ruins of their cities.

  “It was then that the D’Armancourt Dynasty faltered. The King-Emperor was toppled from the throne of Eldaraigne and indeed of the Empire, and he fled into hiding with his family and retainers. Lawlessness spread throughout the lands. Weakened by pestilence, the countries were vulnerable to attack from Namarran raiders and outlaws, and evil wizards who had grown strong and formed rank alliances with things unseelie. It was then that the Stormriders and the Dainnan became warriors and remained so for three centuries.

  “During the Dark Era, the Feorhkind took over the Ancient Cities. What with sickness and strife and unshielded heads, the Ancient Cities came to be haunted with afterimages and were eventually abandoned in favor of the older, less elaborate cities. Caermelor remained, having been built of dominite and the Wearing having been enforced there.

  “More than two hundred years ago, the rightful heir to the High Throne arose, emerging from self-imposed obscurity. The D’Armancourt line, although hidden, had remained true throughout the long years. By then Edward the Eleventh, who was later called the Conqueror, had grown to a strength like unto his forefathers. Calling to his side the wisest men of Frith, a council of seven known as an Attriod, he amassed a great and powerful army. After a successful campaign he regained his throne and pushed the outlaws back to Namarre. Eight hundred and forty-nine was the Year of Restoration, two hundred and forty years ago.