The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  The rumor of their industry was everywhere: hammerings, blastings, the squeak of wheels, the rattle of a windlass, shoutings of orders, a burble of voices, and laughter. The travelers picked up their pace. Even through the mists of pain the Ertishman seemed encouraged by the evidence of human aid close at hand. But within another hundred yards or so, their expectations crashed into ruin.

  They came upon a side-cavern lit by dozens of tiny lanterns in the hands of diminutive manlike beings who milled to and fro. Each of these wights was about eighteen inches in height, dressed after the manner of tin-miners, and grotesquely ugly. Their faces were cheery, however, as they bustled back and forth with picks and shovels and crowbars across their shoulders, or pushing barrows, or carrying buckets on poles. One of them rounded a corner quite close by and stopped in his tracks. His jaw dropped as he confronted the two mortals.

  “Methinks,” wheezed Diarmid to Imrhien, “they are seelie.” He fixed his gaze on the tiny miner. “Can you”—the Ertishman paused for breath—“show us the way out?”

  “Ooh, Mathy, what’s that behind ye?” exclaimed the little fellow, pointing over their shoulders, his quaint eyebrows popping up with surprise. In their weakened condition, the travelers fell for the trick. They took their eyes off him. When a split moment later they turned back, not one of the miners was to be seen—only their tiny tools lying where they had been dropped and a lingering echo of tittering and squeaking.

  Disheartened, the travelers moved on. They could hear the wights emerge behind them, even before they were out of sight, and return to their scurryings. It would have been useless to round on them, trying to catch them unawares. The wights were apprised of their presence now and would be gone in a puff of dust before the mortals could try to seize them, or draw breath, or even blink.

  These small folk seemed very preoccupied with the business at hand, but the girl had seen no ore in the buckets and barrows, and despite all the wielding of picks and shovels, not one of the little miners had been actually digging. Despite all their great show of labor, she could find no palpable trace of their work. They were, in fact, performing nothing.

  Imrhien’s head ached and she could not remember when she had last slept. Leaving behind the scenes of pointless industry, the travelers drew into a side-cavern and lay down. Diarmid fell asleep instantly. Imrhien tried to keep watch but eventually succumbed to slumber. The singed rooster dozed, with one eye half-open.

  Another sunless dawn arrived without altering the stasis of time in the realm below roots and foundations and graves and riverbeds. After the dying harmonics of the cock-a-doodle-doo—more starved and feeble now—there came no answering rumble, no shifting of unbalanced rock into undercut interstices. The supports held strong in this section of the mines.

  All their food had been stolen, or buried under the rock-fall with the pouches and Thorn’s cloak, but Imrhien still had the phial of Dragon’s Blood tucked into her belt, and there seemed to be some kind of sustenance in this elixir. She shared it with Diarmid. Its warmth warded off the eternal chill of underground.

  Drearily, the bird pecked about. Eventually it found a few stray glow-worms, which it swallowed. Imrhien shook Diarmid awake and spilled water into his mouth. His condition had grown worse; his lips were cracked and caked, his eyes glassy. He spoke no word at all. She propped herself under his arm to provide support. Thus they went haltingly forward.

  The passage still sloped straight up, arriving among more and larger side-chambers. The small tinners could be glimpsed flitting elusively here and there. Farther on they became scarce, until they vanished altogether.

  The hubbub of mining continued, dimly, behind and ahead. After about an hour the passage went past an aperture lined with crystals. Lights glimmered from within. Overcome by exhaustion, Diarmid sat down to rest against the wall outside this niche. Curious as to the source of the light, Imrhien looked into it and spied three wightish miners—yet they were different from those they had first encountered; not so ugly, they had the faces of hearty old diggers. These were real mine-workers. The one in the middle was sitting on a stone, his jacket off and his shirtsleeves rolled up. Between his knees he held a small anvil, no more than three inches square, yet as complete as any ever seen in a smith’s shop. His left hand clutched a boryer about the size of a darning-needle, which he was sharpening for one of the tinners, while the other was waiting his turn to have the pick he held in his hand new-steeled.

  Diarmid groaned. Imrhien turned to check on him. When she looked again, the trio had, not unexpectedly, vanished.

  But it was certain that they had now come into the working levels of the Doundelding tin mines. Sometimes they caught sight of a small railway running parallel with their course, on a ramp at about knee height. Wooden trams rolled along it, propelled, it seemed at first glance, merely by flickering azure lights that had hold of the rope traces and drew the vehicles up the incline with ease, despite the fact that they were loaded with shining ore. These lights were tricksy; if one did not look directly at them, it could be imagined that they centered around small figures wearing bright blue caps—but it was hard to be certain.

  The hearty wightish tinners, all with their sleeves rolled up, were chipping and hacking away at the lode with their picks. Their yellow lanterns shone on piles of freshly excavated tin ore. It was as useless to approach them as it had been to approach their unproductive mimickers farther back. As soon as Imrhien took her eyes from them for an instant, or even if she blinked, they were gone. Their elusiveness was severely frustrating; often she was on the verge of tears, begging them with her stained and blistered hands to come back, to help, to show them the way out. Only one fact gave her courage—surely, with those miniature trams rattling up and down so frequently, she and Diarmid must now be close to the surface.

  At one point, the floor of the passage ended in a narrow stair leading upward, and they had to climb. Several flights later they could drag themselves no farther. Rolling into a side-cave to rest, they sipped a drop of Dragon’s Blood and were overtaken by slumber so swiftly that they had no knowledge of the transition.

  The rooster crowed hoarsely, as if it had an ear of wheat stuck in its throat. It seemed to have little heart for crowing, merely going through the performance out of a sense of obligation. Imrhien lay on her back, the unyielding floor of cold adamant pushing up against her shoulder blades. Shivering slightly, she stared up at the fungus-lit roof. The warming effects of her drink from the red phial were wearing off. Had it been five days since they had left the world of light and air? Had it been four, or six, or twenty?

  Dutifully she struggled to her feet. Without the elixir’s fire in her blood she must keep moving to ward off the cold. It was becoming harder and harder to waken the Ertishman. After much shaking and splashing, he revived. He did not ask for food, merely water—then he heaved himself upright and set forth. There was a strong will driving him, but it would not be enough to keep him going for much longer.

  The stair wound on and up, hour after hour, then became a steep ramp, then a short stair followed by a shallow incline. By now their path had diverged from the straight rail-track of the trams, and the miners’ knockings had contracted to the right. Suddenly a breath of sweet air met the travelers, filled with a fragrance of leaves and grasses. On its perch, the rooster lifted its drooping head. Imrhien turned excitedly to Diarmid, but engrossed in the struggle to stay on his feet, he had noticed nothing.

  Eagerly Imrhien dragged the dazed Ertishman forward. She expected at any moment to encounter a portal giving on to the world’s surface, but once again hope dissolved into disappointment.

  Unpredictably this slope ceased its climb, leveling out to the horizontal. The sides of the passageway were no longer formed of solid rock, rough-hewn. Here, the great, twisted roots of trees intruded, forming archways over the tunnel and twining in and out of the walls. Worms glistened like tubes of pink glass, antlered beetles lumbered along crannies. The cockerel attacked the
se small beasts voraciously. A rat skittered into a rock-mouth. At the sight of it Imrhien felt sick.

  From up ahead issued a whirring and a whizzing. It was mingled with a chorus of song in treble-pitched and bass voices: euphonious singing, high and sweet like starlight, deep and cool like a mountain lake. The sounds seemed to be emanating from behind a wooden door set in the wall of the tunnel. When they reached this door, Imrhien pushed it open a crack and peeped in cautiously.

  She saw a wide cavern, well lit, in which numbers of queer old wives sat spinning, each on a white marble stone. Every shape of deformity was upon them, and they all had long, long lips with which they held the yarn. One old wife was walking up and down, directing them all. Approaching one spinner sitting a little apart from the rest, who was uglier than all of them, she said, in hardly intelligible tones:

  “Bundle up the yarn, Scantlie Mab, for ’tis time to tae tak’ it wheer it belongs.”

  The watcher closed the door softly so as not to disturb the wights. There had been no sign of an exit from that chamber.

  <> she signed to Diarmid. The young man’s glazed glance alighted on the hand-signs without seeing them.

  They went on.

  Ahead, light glimmered—not the luminosity of lanterns or underground life forms, but the mother of all radiance—the light of day.

  It strengthened, blotting out the fungi, whitewashing the walls, stabbing at their eyes. The cockerel ran forward with a strange cry. To Imrhien, it seemed that they were stumbling forth into a blaze of glory, an inpouring of pure whiteness beyond which there was only more whiteness, brighter and more brilliant.

  They had reached the surface.

  10

  ROSEDALE

  Briar and Bird

  How far is the Vale of the Rose?

  Not too far, as fly the Black Crows.

  She is there, who waits at sunrise—

  Ever her gaze turns to the skies.

  How far is the Vale of the Briar?

  The Black Rook is a swift flier.

  He is there who waits at twilight

  Until the day has fled into night.

  THE SISTER’S SONG

  The tunnel emerged under a flat rock protruding from a hillside, where bracken-ferns and sweet-briars overgrew the entrance. Above and behind loomed the hilltop. To the right, a green slope rose to obscure the view. To the left and straight ahead stretched a belt of scattered birches. Directly over the trees, a dandelion sun fell toward late afternoon in a floss of clouds like thistledown. A ragged line of birds winged its way across the landscape. Atop the birches, rooks perched in rows like untidy black fruit. They uttered their rasping calls and suddenly took to the skies.

  A breeze, heady and sweet as any wine, tweaked fronds and made them nod agreement. The cockerel pecked and strutted about the travelers’ feet. The Ertishman’s weight sagged a little more on Imrhien’s back. She had thrown his arm about her shoulders in order to support him. She braced herself. Slowly they made their way down the hill, with the fowl in tow.

  There was no path or track, but their eventual goal lay toward the west, so they followed the sun’s path down into the trees, their boots swishing through piles of bronze and gold leaves. The gaps between the slender, papery stems afforded a view of a land sculpted into unnatural formations beneath its grassy mantle: flat-topped mounds dropping steeply away on all sides, giant pyramids, broad stairs cut into the sides of hills, sunken pits with straight sides, filled to the brim with rainwater. Once, as they halted for a brief respite, Imrhien looked back. Thunder Mountain reared against the sky, its sharp peak mantled in cloud.

  Faintly, so faintly that Imrhien had to hold her breath to catch it, a familiar grinding noise came rumbling down the wind. On a rise to the south of the birch-grove stood an old wooden gravity-mill, overgrown with rambling briar-roses in faded profusion. So smothered in prickly stemmed vines was the old mill that it was scarcely recognizable as an edifice. Long, symmetrical mounds stretched out beside it. The ground appeared to have been whipped out from under the northern half of the building, for on that side the walls sagged and a rusted railway track that had risen on a transomed ramp to its top floor had half collapsed. Most of the supports were broken, and the remaining section hung in midair. Below, other rails, still attached to their sleepers, leaned in suspense over sunken hollows. Over all these walls and roofs and through the windows trailed the wild roses, rich with orange-red hips and patterned with the last lingering leaves of Autumn. This place was the source of the steady thrum of dunters.

  More fortuitously, a cottage peeped from a clump of trees nestled on the slopes and banks below the abandoned mill. A rutted lane ran toward it, between hawthorn hedges twined with dog-roses. Thin blue smoke twisted from the chimney—a welcome and enticing sight. Toward this, the travelers bent their erratic steps, summoning the last of their strength.

  As they approached, a soft, clear tinkling came to them in gusts. The thatched roofs of the cottage and outbuildings looked out from among spreading rowans bubbling with coralline berries, from whose boughs small bells of bronze depended. They rang prettily as the breeze swayed them. A stone wall meandered in and out of the borders of this coppice, and a wide wooden gate opened out of the wall into the lane. It swung open easily, giving on to a stone-flagged path edged with rosebushes. This path led to a second gate in a low hedge, over which rambling roses had been trained in an arch. Beyond a trellis stood the house, covered with wisteria and columbine and climbing tea-roses whose green leaves were barely touched with the burnish of the season, plump rose-fruits pendant on their stems like ovoid lamps. Sunlight through the rowans damasked the brick chimney on the western wall, although rainclouds were by now boiling up from the east. Iron horseshoes hung on nails over the front door and every window.

  Diarmid staggered, steadied himself with one hand against a porch-post, and regained his balance. In his eyes, Imrhien read the determination to achieve one thing—to stay on his feet until they found a haven.

  Prithee, she silently begged the occupants of the cottage, do not turn us away. Do not despise the ugliness of my face. Give us shelter.

  She knocked three times on the door.

  From within there came a sound as though someone pushed back a stool or chair. A voice called, “Is that thee, Da’?”

  Diarmid moaned, almost inaudibly.

  A bolt slid back with a click. And another. The door opened and a young woman’s face appeared. With a short scream, she slammed the door. Presently she reopened it, wide-eyed.

  “Who are thee? What’s thane business?”

  The man swayed. “Please—”

  With an exclamation, the girl flung the door wide.

  “Tha be ’urt! Why didn’t tha say so!”

  And with that, she put her small shoulder beneath Diarmid’s free arm and helped Imrhien to half carry him indoors. The cockerel barged past, jumped on a spinning wheel, and flew up to the rafters.

  They laid the sick man on a bed in the corner. The girl locked the door and bustled about the room, hanging a kettle of water over the fire, bringing clean bandages, setting food on the table. Kneeling beside the Ertishman, Imrhien watched her. She appeared to be about Muirne’s age—perhaps twenty Winters old. Beneath her red head-scarf, her hair flowed walnut-brown and glossy. A dozen string-thin braids were twined decoratively among the tresses. Her cheeks and lips blushed with the tint of roses. She wore a well-laundered kirtle the color of oatmeal, covered with a spotless white pinafore apron tied in a bow at the back. Setting a bowl and a pile of clean linen before Imrhien, she said:

  “Wash thane man’s ’urts now and I’ll give tha some salve afore tha binds ’em up.”

  Imrhien made the sign for “Thank you” and began her task.

  “Tha doesn’t talk. Wha’s the matter wi’ tha, my dove? Got a spell on tha?”

  Diarmid cried out inadvertently as the old blood-stiffened bandages were peeled from his hands. Doggedly Imrhien contin
ued her ministrations.

  “Talk now, sir,” the brown-haired girl said gently, “and tha will nae feel it so much.”

  Diarmid, stung to confused wakefulness, began to babble. Somewhere in the clutter of words, he managed to force out his own name and Imrhien’s before he fell back, groaning.

  The girl handed the salve to Imrhien, and she finished her work.

  “Let ’im sleep. ’E’s too hot, anyway. Somethin’s got at ’im.”

  Imrhien nodded.

  “Come to table, my dove. Tha look ’alf-starved, don’t thee? Anyway, they call me Silken Janet and tha’s come to Briar Cottage, in Rosedale. Welcome to thee.

  To lie, bathed, with clean-rinsed hair, between utterly clean—if coarse—sheets, with a belly full of warm bread and milk—this must surely be close to contentment.

  Yet tired as she was, Imrhien could not sleep. Thoughts of the dark-haired Dainnan would not leave her in peace. She watched the fire-glow and candlelight flicker on the spinning wheel, under-lighting the rafters where the rooster slept in a small, self-assured bundle. In another corner, Diarmid tossed and moaned. Silken Janet had swept the hearth with a goose-wing and set out a saucer of milk by the doorstep “for ’edge’og what comes by at nights,” but she had not gone to bed; indeed, only two beds were to be seen in this one-room cottage.

  “I’ll make meself a bed o’ bracken and hay,” their hostess had explained—but she had not done so, and she seemed restless. She paced up and down, stopping sometimes at the shuttered windows as if listening and then kneeling by Diarmid’s side to dab his forehead with cool water in which mint leaves had been sprinkled.

  Raindrops had begun to patter on the thatch. Farm animals mooed or bellowed or clucked at intervals from somewhere out in the night—this did not perturb Silken Janet. She smoothed her hands down the front of her apron, picked up the goose-wing, and swept the hearth for the umpteenth time.

  The wind took hold of the shutters and rattled them. Janet’s head jerked up.