The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  Fishing-boats—the entire fleet—made ready to launch.

  The false night was so dense now that it was impossible to discern even an outline of the mountain. Where its top should have loomed, there burned a red glare. Over this spurious sunrise strange lightnings snapped continually in an endless display. It looked like a wicker cage of eerie lightworks forming the death-blue, pumping veins of the smoke-tree whose black leaves continued to pour over the nightscape.

  The islanders pushed open their doors with difficulty because of the detritus piled up outside. Down from the village to the harbour they fled with their goats, their hounds and horses, their cattle and sheep. Some folk wept; not many—this was a hardy people. Their strings of lamps, like blobs of grazed yellow resin, could hardly be made out in the gloom. Deep drifts of ash and pumice blocked the streets. Larger stones rattled down, causing hurt; a rain of pain. The darkness was so profound, so unnatural, that it was not like night at all. It was a windowless, doorless chamber. Only the tower of coldly flickering lightnings over the mountain could be clearly seen. Generated by tiny fragments of lava in the ash cloud rubbing against each other to build up enormous charges that tore in thundering bolts through the column, it rose to an unguessed ceiling.

  The refugees boarded the boats, stepping from the land they knew in their hearts they would never see again. Great waves leapt up as tall as houses and smacked into one another. Through the chaos, the boats bravely put out into the ashen harbour. They sailed across to the Rip and through it, while smoke roiled on the water and fire boiled in the sky. Now blackened by poisonous effluvium, the brass bells of Tana rang out a lonely farewell from the swaying belfry. As the fleet passed the point, a mild glow as of candlelight exuded from the upper room of the Light-Tower.

  ‘The Lightkeeper!’ exclaimed Rohain, in the leading ship. ‘He is still within!’

  ‘He refused to leave,’ said Avenel, at her side.

  Already, while the fleet yet rode out of the harbour, the land woke again and shuddered. As if in answer, the Light beamed forth for the last time, pure and white like a Faêran sword cleaving the murk. Then the mountain roared violently, the scarlet glow flared brightly, and a huge wave opened from the shore, almost swamping the ships, bearing them forward. Bombs of burning rock fell hissing into the sea on all sides. Some went through the rigging and landed, red-hot, on the decks, threatening to set the ships alight before the wary crews scooped them in shovels and tossed them overboard. As the last ship passed through the Rip the island writhed. The Light-Tower itself leaned a little, then, very slowly, as if resisting, it collapsed into the sea. All the way down, the Beacon lanced out courageously, a descending white blade, extinguished only when the waves closed over it.

  In a shower of darkness and cinders, the vessels plowed across the deep.

  Whether they would escape with their lives or not, none could say.

  Behind them, the sea-volcano that was Tamhania had become wildly unstable. Some delicate inner balance had been meddled with. Once, it had slept. Now it awakened. A heat so great it was almost inconceivable, hotter than the hottest furnace; a heat that had been lying in wait for more than a millennium at the base of a fracture beneath the island, miles under the sea, now was mobilized. Raising a mindless head, it set its huge shoulders—sinewed with magma, veined with fire—against the scabbed-over crust of soil, to split the lid that held it barely in check. The sea-bed struggled. Deep within the mountain, under tremendous pressure, molten rock welled up through fissures. At temperatures of thousands of degrees, it began to form a dangerous mixture with the volatiles in seawater: venomous fumes to rise like serpents out of vents, stinking sulfurs to belch from fumaroles, asphyxiating exhalations to flow invisibly downhill and gather in hollows, acid vapors to slowly eat through whatever they touched, and strong enough to etch glass, fiery ethers to glow in great veils against the sky, explosive gases to burst open the heart of the volcano with a thunderclap.

  Like a chimney catching fire, the central vent began to roar. With each new explosion, blocks the size of palaces hurtled up to the surface, ripped from the throat of the vomiting cone. The air filled with flying rocks. Long streaks of flame arched into the air every few moments. Above the vent a cloud boiled out, convoluted like a monstrous brain, its cortex twenty thousand feet above sea level.

  A downpour of rain mixed with ash fell on the fishing boats. Some substance in this mud glowed in the dark, and soon the masts and decks looked as if they were covered with a myriad tiny embers. Behind the fleet, the steady roar of the dying mountain-island continued, as the boats sailed on through the night—or was it the day? Missiles screamed like unseelie avengers and howled like frights. A subsonic pounding was going on, as though giants worked at their subterranean forges, their hammer blows thud-thudding relentlessly on huge anvils, echoing in caverns where nightmarish bellows pulsed, blaring gouts of smoke up through the chimney. Against the blackness of night, roseate fire-curtains gleamed, speckled with gold. Far away on the slopes of tormented Tamhania, jeweled rocks went spitting, spinning over ash wastes where tall fumes leaned now instead of trees. In the harbour, seawater vaporized like immense billows of smoke. Heavy, deadly gases hugged the contours of the mountainsides, streaming down in rivers. Water floated like smoke, gas flowed as if it were liquid.

  But the pressure from miles below did not decrease. Tamhania fought, opening new smoking fissures in its flanks, letting the crimson paste ooze out in languid rivers to incinerate and slowly crush the houses of the village. The island bellowed as it threw its guts into the air.

  Hours passed. The fleet now sailed under true night, although all celestial lights were extinguished by the tons of ash and fine debris spreading across the upper skies of Erith. The luminous mud scintillated along the boats’ rigging. Tamhania was the light of the plenum: a fire-fountain, its noise circling the rim of the world like an iron wheel rolling around a bowl. Floating rocks—porous, gas-filled chunks of pumice like hard, black sponge—made the water hazardous. Infinitesimal specks of ash mixed with spray plastered the faces, clothes, beards, and hair of the refugees. The mixture stung their eyes and curdled to slippery scum on the decks.

  As ring-shaped waves rush away from a stone dropped into a pond of still water, so the ocean reacted to the dreadful murmur of the island. The escaping fleet was rocked by ever-larger swells; long copings dividing extreme abysms. As morning was finally reborn, the sun rose dripping out of the sea like a corrupt gem fastened to the sky’s filthy cloak. Those who stood on deck looking back, clutching the railings, saw a brilliant burst of light. Soon, over the continual roaring, the sound of a truly enormous explosion came bounding and crashing across the wavetops. It hit the boats with force and passed away to the horizon. The vessels dipped and lurched, but they held together. The passengers did not rejoice. They knew what would follow. Sound travels faster than ripples in water. Heedless of modesty, all the passengers doffed their footwear and outer clothes in case they should be thrown into the water. Many could not swim.

  Viviana pinned her locket-brooch to her chemise, and belted on her chatelaine. ‘When I come ashore,’ she declared bravely, ‘I want to have useful articles about me.’

  The sun climbed higher. In the middle of the morning, a second massive explosion shook the entire region as the side of the volcano’s central vent was blown off, engendering spectacular outbursts of tephra and huge clouds of steam. Its reverberation smote the vessels with an open hand.

  ‘Make ready,’ the word passed from vessel to vessel. ‘The first wave comes.’

  The crew raced to douse most of the sails, leaving a staysail for steering. As they did so, two helmsmen struggled at the wheel to turn the ship until her bowsprit pointed in the direction of the island, far-off and invisible in a smoky haze wandering ghostlike across the sea. The sailors held the rudder steady, keeping the ship’s bow pointed into the volcanic storm.

  They saw it before they heard it—a darkness partitioning the sky.
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  A wall.

  A long, long wall with no end and no beginning, that seemed to suck up every drop of water before it. It grew in a beautiful glossy curve, like a shell. Inexorable, stupefying, it approached.

  ‘Hold on!’ someone screamed pointlessly against the roaring din of this menace. The helmsmen fought to control the wheel. A swift wind drove against the boats—tons of air displaced by tons of water. The wall rushed across the sea to the fleet, gathered itself up and hung over like a shelf. Timbers shifted and squeaked under the onslaught of elemental forces. Besmirched with mud, Rohain clung to the mizzenmast. She had been lashed to it, because she was unable to keep her feet against the wind’s muscle. The wind screeched in her ears, vacuuming out all other sound. Looking up, she saw tons of coiling water suspended over her head. Bellowing, the wave came on, up and over. Rohain felt the deck drop away as she was lifted into the air. She held her breath.

  Down she fell. The boat fell with her. Blood rushed to her feet, and an explosion of water assaulted the decks.

  Somehow the valiant little vessel had ridden up to the crest and down the other side of the wave, gathering so much speed that she buried her bow in the bottom of the trough. Behind the mother wave came her daughters, rank on rank, rearing to a height of ninety feet. Time and again the boat was wrenched high only to race down and bury herself in the deadly darkness of the troughs, with only the stern jutting from the water. There, half-drowned, she would shudder as though contemplating surrender, eventually raising her bowsprit to lift again. As she came up, tons of water would come sluicing down the bows onto the deck.

  No human cry could be heard against the roar of wind and sea. Visibility was almost canceled. At a hundred and thirty-five knots, so strong was the wind that passengers and crew must close their eyes lest it snatch out their inner orbits. Closed or open, there was little difference in what could be seen. Night rode down in the wave-troughs, while their ridges bubbled with a crust of scorched foam so thick that it blocked out everything except the tiny rocks that struck like hammers, and the horizontal daggers of rain or spray.

  When the waves of the aftershock had passed, Rohain was able to see that the fleet had broken up, dispersed. No evidence remained of the boat carrying the Duchess of Roxburgh and her children. It was impossible to know which vessels had survived. On the far horizon stood a column of gas, smoke, and vapor, thirty miles high. And the second major wave was on its way.

  Too soon, it came roaring after its leader. Not a wall, this was a mountain—a moon-tide altered from the horizontal to the vertical. Tied securely to various pieces of equipment on deck, the ladies-in-waiting screamed. Again Rohain’s boat lifted over the crest, borne, incredibly, a hundred and ten feet high to glide down the mountain’s spine. Yet this time she did not glide—momentum launched her off the top and thrust her down through the centre of the following wave. She emerged on the other side, her passengers and crew struggling for breath, and immediately fell into the next trough, to be submerged again up to the wheel. The battering of noise and water weakened her seams. The boat began to break up, taking in water. Those who were able manned the hand-pumps.

  What was it Thomas had said as they boarded? ‘Lutey is aboard with us, Rohain. He can never drown.’ Did merfolk swim beneath this leaking nutshell hull, bearing it up, protecting it, keeping the promise they had made? What of the rest of the fleet? There was no sign, now, of any of them—not so much as a broken plank.

  Ahead, Rohain glimpsed, between leaning hills of liquid, a striated coagulation that might have been land. Under ragged remnants of sails like street-beggars’ laundry the voyagers travelled on, trying to hold a course for this hopeful sign, but largely at the mercy of wind and water. The waves had subsided to sixty feet. On the sloshing decks, Rohain waited anxiously with Edward, Ercildoune, Lutey, the village mayor, Viviana, and Caitri, hoping that it was all over.

  Oh, but it is not over, said her heart. Three crows, there were. That is the eldritch number. Yan, tan, tethera. Third time pays for all, they say.

  Robin Lutey held up the mermaid’s Comb. On the ivory, the mesh-patterns of pearls and gold glinted like sunlight through waves, even in the dimness. Bracing himself against the boat’s canting, he thrust the Comb into Caitri’s hair.

  ‘You are but young,’ he shouted, his voice barely audible against the wind and sea. ‘Too young to die.’

  ‘Are you suggesting there will be another wave?’ yelled Prince Edward. He was standing beside Rohain, among their bodyguards.

  Lutey nodded, held up his index finger.

  ‘One more.’

  ‘In that event, we must all once again be secured to the boat,’ called Rohain.

  ‘Nay!’ Lutey replied. ‘Remain free, in case the vessel breaks up. Better to swim unfettered, if needs must.’

  ‘If aught should happen, my lady,’ bellowed the Bard, close to Rohain’s ear, ‘not that aught shall, but should it, thou shalt be safe. Thou’rt protected. It is necessary thou shouldst know this. And the Prince also shall be safe, and now thy little maid also. Rohain, I may never see thee again. There are so many things I cannot say. My heart is full, howbeit by my honour I may not unburden it.’

  ‘But no!’ she shouted. ‘How should I be safe and not you? And Viviana, and my ladies!’

  ‘Mayhap Viviana too shall live.’ His voice sounded hoarse, as if he had swallowed gravel. ‘She told me she was born with a caul on her head, which is why her mother named her after a sea-witch. If she carries it with her then verily, she shall not die by drowning.’

  ‘Thomas …’

  Rohain’s eyes were oceans, overflowing.

  Far away, on Tamhania, seawater poured into the volcano’s ruined vent and hit the hot magma.

  Then the world tore asunder with shocking force.

  Such a tumult could only have one source. The whole of the island had been blown upward into the air. Once, long ago, born out of the sea, this stratovolcano had arisen. Now, by the same process, it was being destroyed. After its death, the regulation of the markless sea would disguise its latitude, marching over its former position as though it had never existed.

  But for now, the blast travelled out in all directions at more than seven hundred miles per hour. At three hundred and fifty miles per hour, the wave hunted it.

  Not so much a wave—the third was an entire ocean standing on end, more than a hundred and fifty feet high. It swamped the entire sky. It was the ocean folding in on itself; the ocean turning inside out. It came, and it picked up Rohain’s boat, and the boat travelled on its curling crest in a screaming wind while, underneath, the sea-bed rose and the water shallowed and the wave gathered until it was a hundred and seventy feet tall and beneath the keel, so dizzyingly far below, there was land.

  ‘Stay close to me!’ cried Edward, taking Rohain by the waist. She clutched him tightly.

  ‘Farewell, one and all!’ called the Bard through gritted teeth.

  Time slowed, or seemed to. In a flash, Rohain realised—a wave like this had happened before. This was not the first time a sea-volcano had erupted in Erith.

  … to the east, two miles from the sea, lies a thing most curious; the ancient remains of a Watership caught in a cleft between two hills.

  Was this to be the fortune of her fishing-boat? To be carried in its entirety, along a river valley for two miles and be deposited, a shattered hulk filled with shattered corpses, far above the level of the distant ocean?

  Instead, with a sound curiously reminiscent of the plucking of violin-strings, copper nails began to pull free and pop out of the hull’s stressed planking. Timbers burst apart. Caitri clung to Lutey. Viviana’s mouth opened like a tunnel of fear. Rohain reached for her, but she and the Prince were flung forth, out into the maelstrom. His hold was wrenched from her waist. Thomas slid away down the vertical deck. Crumbling, capsizing, shattering to fragments, the boat fell down the back of the ocean.

  Ash rained down. It rained on and on.

  Fine
particles infused the air.

  The sun, no longer yellow, had metamorphosed to sea-turquoise. A sunset ranged across one third of the sky—such a sunset as had never been seen by mortal eyes. Flamboyant it was, brilliant, gorgeous. Burning roses formed from rubies were strewn among flaming orange silks, castles of topaz on fire, and great drifts of melting glass nasturtiums. The horizon itself seemed ablaze.

  Long after the sun had disappeared, the dusty air shimmered with rainbows. An emerald nimbus ringed the bitten moon. This then, was Tamhania’s epitaph; that its substance would be dispersed all over Erith, bringing night after night of strange beauty, and that wheresoever its fragments touched, the soil would be nourished with the aftermath of its existence, giving rise to new life. And perhaps in that new life would spring an echo of what had once been.

  7

  THE CAULDRON

  Thyme and Tide

  Fires in the core of cores lie quiescent;

  Once they jetted from its maws, incandescent.

  Lava from the magma bath, effervescent,

  Nullified all in its path, heat rubescent.

  Once upon a cinder cone light flew sparkling—

  Now a crater-lake unknown, deep and darkling.

  ‘DORMANCY’, A SONG FROM TAPTHARTHARATH

  All the time—through the drag and suck, the lift and toss, through the seethe and sudden swell battering ears to deafness, eyes to blindness, skin to numbness, through the forced drafts of brine gulping and gurning in her stomach, the salt stinging her mouth, the dread inbreathing of water provoking a panic of suffocation, her heart racing for air, splashes of red agony on a black ground like an eruption of the lungs; through it all, the object remained beneath Rohain’s hand and bore her up: the Hope, the wooden Hope that floated on the top of the ocean.

  Another surge, and the buoyant piece of timber scraped on something. Rohain found solidity beneath her feet. She tiptoed on it and it was snatched away, relinquished, abducted, returned. She walked, emerging from the flood. The wood weighed her hand down now—why so faithful? Why could it not leave her? Wiping blur from her eyes with her free hand she looked down. The leaf-ring on her finger was caught in a bent copper nail, partly dislodged and jutting from the fishing boat’s figurehead. Thorn’s gift had saved her.