One wintry morning her body was found suspended from the Iron Tree in Cathair Rua, she having hanged herself from its icy branches.
Yet that was not the end of her story. For although she had hanged herself, she had done the job inefficiently, and thus it happened the sister of Fionnbar Aonarán was not yet dead when a commander of the Knights of the Brand, leading a few men of his squadron, came riding through Fountain Square. This commander, in his late twenties, was named Conall Gearnach. He was a man of extreme passions, fervent devotion to honor, and a strong sense of justice.
At the center of the square stood a well with low walls of stone, and it was beside the well that the leafless plant grew, the extraordinary tree known as the Thorn of Iron, or the Iron Tree. Slender spikes thrust eagerly from every bough and twig, long and cruel as a northern Winter. So numerous were the thorns, jutting at all angles, that they formed a kind of basketwork of swords.
At the sight of the forlorn figure swaying from the boughs of this barbarous tree, Conall Gearnach gave a mighty shout, unsheathed his knife, and flung it with all his strength and skill. His aim was true; the blade sliced the rope and down fell Fionnuala, gasping and half-throttled, into the lowest barbs.
“Get her out,” Gearnach ordered his knights, and so they did. Fionnuala had been but superficially wounded by the sharp spines, for she had fallen at the outer limits of the tree, but her face, arms, and hands were badly scratched, and congested, too, by semi-strangulation. She was awake, in pain, and unable to speak.
“You abject slattern!” the commander reprimanded. “How dare you presume to take your own life? I have seen men desperate to stave off death, who would surrender all their gold to live for just one more day. Life is a priceless treasure! And you—you would treat it as a worthless thing, while at the same time flouting the king’s law. To leave a corpse abandoned in a public place is a crime punishable by imprisonment. Now you have a second chance. Recover your wits and get ye gone before I change my mind and have you clapped in irons. Go and do some good!”
After voicing his rough and somewhat arbitrary concern for the well-being of one of the citizens, Conall Gearnach rode off with his troops. A kindly woman who had poked her head out of her window in order to find out the cause of the noise now came creeping from her lodgings. She helped the unsuccessful suicide to her feet, then took her home and gave her shelter, caring for her until she was mended.
Fionnuala did not know what to make of these events. She had expected to die, and at first it was difficult to know what to do, how to think, when death was replaced by life. The woman who had taken her in told her, “You ought to look upon your rescue as a gift.”
“How should I proceed?” Fionnuala asked in bewilderment.
“You must go to one of the carlins. They will know.”
However, when Fionnuala was physically healed it was not to a carlin she took herself, but to the druids.
“For,” she said to herself through the mists of her confusion, “they are most powerful.”
To the druids she made confession in an incoherent, rambling manner, mentioning no names but asking for absolution for her terrible deeds, which haunted her, making her thoughts unbearable, her dreams intolerable.
The druids said, “You must give twenty pieces of gold to the Sanctorum so that the druidhood might intercede on your behalf. Then go away from here and kneel in the dust, and repeat this chant five hundred times:
“ ‘O Fates, wise and magnificent.
O Fates, splendid and powerful.
O Fates, be generous to your lowly servant.
O Fates, prithee grant me peace.’ ”
So she did as the druids bidden her, but when the penance was finished she felt no closer to lightness of spirit, and was tempted again to try to end her own life. In a final attempt to find an answer she consulted a carlin, who said, “It is much easier to chop down an oak tree than to cultivate one from an acorn and nurse it to maturity. From what you have told me, you have chopped down many trees during your miserable life. You must become a gardener. Devote your days to the nurturing of living things, so that in selflessness you might make recompense for your heinous acts and learn what is truly valuable.”
Fionnuala went away, and took a lease on a piece of land in Slievmordhu which had been abandoned, rendered barren by bad farming practices that had leached the soil of goodness. There she made a garden.
So tirelessly did she work, so unremittingly did she break the clods and spread the compost, and sow, and sprinkle water, and carefully pick the snails off the new sprouts, that the garden took shape and began to flourish. The more it expanded upward and outward the more ardently she tended it and brought fresh seeds to plant. She lived on the vegetables she grew therein, and the eggs of the hens that scratched and ate the insects, enriching the ground with their droppings. Lovely trees raised luxuriant heads. Beneath their eaves sprang flowers and hedges and worts and all manner of herbs. Word of the wonderful garden began to spread, and people came to look at it. The scarred crone let them pluck fresh herbs to treat their ailments, allowed them to wander freely amongst the flowerbeds and groves, never hindering them from sitting on the lawns or strolling by the rocky pools. She hardly ever spoke to them, nor they to her, and she would tell her name to no one, but visitors found comfort in the place she had brought to fruitfulness: this bower of greenery and beauty, and no one despoiled it. Fionnuala Aonarán toiled in the garden for years, until the night she died at a venerable age; thus, her life was not utterly destructive and wasted after all, and when she had passed away they buried her under a stone in her garden, naming her “The Crone of the Herbs.”
But that was all in the future.
In High Darioneth, Arran was preparing to leave his family and friends and the Four Kingdoms of Tir when the scholar Agnellus suddenly reappeared in their midst. He was flustered and excited, making great haste; his face was flushed and his eyes bright. At first they thought he had been taken by a fit of madness, for he was burbling and gesticulating urgently. His words seemed to make no sense.
“Raise her from the grave!” he was shouting. “Raise her now! For I have learned strange news, and it might be that there is hope at last!”
When the scholar’s meaning had sunk in, Arran gave the agitated man one terrible look. Quietly he said, “If this turns out to be some false news, if she is disturbed for no reason, if she is brought to light only for me to see her fair face in ruins, I will be haunted forever, and I will hold you responsible, Agnellus.”
Such behavior and speech had awful impact, coming from the son of the Storm Lord. Agnellus was momentarily frightened, but he did not waver. “Take her from the ground!” he insisted. “Do it, for I have read the truth as it was written down by an eldritch wight, who cannot lie, and I say to you this must be done!”
Without another word Arran sped away up the mountainside to the cemetery of the weathermasters, and there were many who followed after.
The grave was breached. From amongst the thorny briars the coffin was raised. They carried it to the gracious reflectory that stood nearby, surrounded by its lustrous water-pools mirroring the mountains and sky, and placed it upon a catafalque of green-veined marble. Then Arran Maelstronnar commanded everyone to leave him alone with the casket while he opened it, and so harsh was he, and so dangerous, that all acquiesced, but Avalloc kept guard just outside the door, and Agnellus with him, and the child Astăriel was enfolded in the protection of others who held her dear.
There was not a sound outside or inside the reflectory. It seemed as if even the wind had ceased to blow. Those who waited heard the sound of the lid’s clasps being snapped back. They heard the creak of the soil-clogged hinges as the cover was raised, and then a very long silence ensued.
At last, when no one could endure it any longer, Avalloc made to enter the building, but he stopped abruptly and reeled back, as if he had run into an invisible barrier, for from the interior came a keening, a song like weeping, wo
rdless, high, and almost inhuman.
Then the Storm Lord threw back the door and entered, while the rest of them followed at his back.
This is what they saw within.
Atop the plinth of jade-streaked marble the coffin remained, the lid cast aside. Beside it sat Arran, and in his arms he cradled the pristine, flawless body of his wife. Her black hair was spilling like ink-drawn lines across the ash-gray folds of his doublet.
Jewel seemed to be merely sleeping. Death had not touched her, had not corrupted her flesh in any way. She remained as beautiful as falling water.
The song of Arran ceased, and he rocked his bride very gently. Almus Agnellus fell to his knees, as did all those who had entered behind them, but Avalloc Maelstronnar looked long upon his son, and the wife he held in his arms, and he said, “What can this mean?”
Agnellus spoke. “After I left here I had cause to consult my notes and books of lore, and as I was searching amongst my papers I came across a scroll which I could swear I had never seen before. On it were words written in an archaic tongue of eldritch, by means of a wondrous hand, a calligraphy of spiky flourishes and gothic ornamentation. Fortunately I am learned in that esoteric speech and was able to decipher the meaning. I learned this: that a woman who mothers an immortal child must inevitably be tinged by that immortality. If she is fatally wounded she shall not die, but shall instead fall into a deep and lasting sleep that resembles death.” He drew breath and appended, “Jewel lives.”
And it was true.
The voice of the Storm Lord, wontedly assured and commanding, trembled as he asked, “But how can she be awakened?”
“Alas,” replied the scholar. “The scroll could not tell me that. Yet in the past I have studied widely, and methinks no answer can be found in the Four Kingdoms of Tir.”
“Then is there no hope?”
“There is always hope,” said the scholar, but he was weeping.
They bore her to the house of Maelstronnar. Agnellus and every trusted carlin and druid known to the weathermasters endeavored to find ways to waken her. Cuiva the White Carlin was summoned from the marsh. Potions were smeared on Jewel’s lips; hartshorn was wafted beneath her nose; music was played; rhymes were chanted, all to no avail. But Arran attended the physicians closely, and would allow no one to meddle with his bride. He administered all unguents with his own hand and would permit no radical procedures to be attempted.
“She will not be violated,” he avowed.
After all possible measures had been tried the enterprise was abandoned. Cuiva departed for the Great Marsh of Slievmordhu, carrying both good and bad news to Earnán.
An octagonal cupola perched atop the house of Maelstronnar. Its walls were not fashioned from timber or stone but from panes of thick, transparent glass. They were double-glazed, strong enough to withstand bitter cold, and strong winds. This high chamber commanded a panoramic view across Rowan Green to the mountains on the far side of the plateau. Before his eyesight began to fail Avalloc had used this cupola as an observatory and housed his telescope there. To this lovely eyrie the weathermasters carried the sleeping beauty.
There they laid her on a canopied couch, amongst soft cushions of damasked silks and crimson velvets. Here, vigilantly watched night and day, she rested in perfection. The eight walls of glass looked out upon spectacular alpine scenery, but if Jewel beheld any landscape at all, it must have been the landscape of a dream, for her eyes were closed, and it was as though the gossamer wings of the Blue Lycaenidae butterfly rested motionless thereon.
Below the cupola, hard against the outer walls of the house, wild roses began to sprout. Dristan Maelstronnar would cut them down, only to discover they had burgeoned again, more vigorously than ever, so in the end Avalloc advised him to let them be. The sinuous stalks scrambled up the walls and across the slate tiles until they reached the cupola, where they entwined themselves together, loosely framing the eight glass panes with their tiny thorns, their spear-head leaves, and their five-petaled rosettes. Jewel on her couch of silks seemed encaged in an open wickerwork, a bower of flowers and thorns. Yet on the empty grave down in the cemetery, the briars withered.
As he traveled the by-ways of Tir, Almus Agnellus continued to marvel at the strange manner in which he had learned of Jewel’s continuing vitality. “It was the oddest thing,” he was inclined to murmur, “but the scroll looked to have been freshly written, on clean papyrus, in a hand so bizarre it could only have been eldritch, and an ink so sharp and luminous I have not seen its like before. Or since,” he would add, “for the scroll has now vanished from my archives, as mysteriously and conveniently as it appeared. It is as if someone or some thing deliberately furnished me with that knowledge at a time when it would be useful, so that Jewel might be rescued from the grave!” And he would shake his head in amazement.
Declaring he would seek forever, until he could find a way to bring back his lost bride, Arran departed from the Four Kingdoms after all. The fever of true devotion burned in his countenance, in his every movement and sigh, waking or sleeping. “The places to which I am bound,” he said as he took his leave, “are not fit for a child. Nor will I take with me any mortal creature, and as for luggage, I would fain travel unhampered.”
Amongst the briar roses he kissed the petal-pink lips of his icon wife and bade her goodbye. He left behind his daughter, his father, his family and friends, and all his inheritance, including the Storm Lord’s golden sword, Fallowblade.
“Fare thee well, my darling,” he murmured to Astăriel. “Ever shall I think of thee.”
Neither father nor daughter possessed the ability to let fall tears, but upon their brows grief was graven deeply as they parted.
Accompanied only by the impet Fridayweed, who chose to go with him, Arran Maelstronnar disappeared from the known lands of Tir, and no one knew whether he would evermore be seen there. Over the northern mountains he went, and it is thought he wanders afar in the Unknown lands.
Arran now passes from this tale. If the rest of his story is ever to be told, it will be told elsewhere.
Autumn ornamented the Four Kingdoms of Tir with the colors of fire opals. At High Darioneth, clouds clung lovingly to the mountain peaks, mists lay dreaming in the valleys, and soft hazes veiled the horizon. The sun’s rays were as rich and mellow as saffron wine. Cerulean shadows lazily stretched their lengths across the ground; it was as if the mountain ring steamed gently in a vat of amber dyes suffused with blue. Leaves indolently fluttered from their twigs like shavings of copper, rust, gold, and verdigris, scattering light as they floated down.
The harvests were bountiful that year.
As sacks of nuts were trundled to the storehouses, nutteries and silos by the wagonload, the harvesters sang in chorus to make their workload seem lighter. Some played instruments; at Rowan Green the thin melodies of pipes or flutes could sometimes be heard, plaintively spiraling up from the plateau.
Once a month, Astăriel tended the empty grave of her mother, which, now that the briars had vanished, she had whimsically fashioned into a wild garden. Late on a golden Autumn afternoon as she made her solitary journey up the winding road to the cemetery, she met the urisk. She had encountered it twice before, and even conversed with it. Having grown up in a house with a domestic brownie and an impet that lived in the furniture, she felt no awkwardness in the presence of eldritch wights. The creature’s appearance did not discomfit the girl. To her it seemed not extraordinary in the least to be confronted with a creature that, from the waist up, looked like an ugly little man with pointed, tufty ears, a turned-up nose, and eyes set slantwise. Two stumpy horns protruded from the urisk’s curly hair. It was dressed in its habitual shabby jacket and torn waistcoat, with dilapidated breeches covering its shaggy goats’ legs. The cloven hooves pattered softly on bare slabs of rock, where the thin soil had washed away. In silence, keeping to the shade of the pines, the wight accompanied her.
At sunset, having weeded the plot and set it to rights, Astă
riel found her way to a high place above the cemetery. Here grew liquidambar trees lush with fans of jeweled foliage, and a great mossy boulder crowned a rocky shoulder. The boulder was almost a hundred feet tall, but its sides were weathered and cracked, providing plenty of footholds. The child liked to climb it, because from the top an unbroken view of the entire surrounding area could be obtained.
Astăriel and the urisk seated themselves on this vantage point, looking out across the ranges toward the distant lands. She had positioned herself in a lingering pool of sunlight, while the wight immersed itself in the indigo shadows of a standing boulder. The day was not yet over, but already the moon hovered in the sky, a curved glimmer like the reflection of a white feather. The little girl let her weathermaster’s awareness float out in concentric ripples. Around her the air was chilly, the temperature plummeting. The still airs would soon be in motion. A low-pressure trough over Narngalis was moving eastward as a cold front approached from the west. There would be scattered showers and thunderstorms that night, before the northerly wind freshened a little. The next few days would bring heavy falls and isolated thunderstorms easing to showers, after which the weather would continue cold and windy. Subsequently, snow would fall on the peaks, but the winds would ease.
As she sat atop the rock the child could read the invisible signs of the weather and feel the brí surge in her, responding to the tides of air, but she could not know all about the myriad human activities, personal dramas, and natural occurrences that were playing themselves out across the Four Kingdoms of Tir. An old vagrant called Cat Soup was sleeping, huddled in rags, beneath a tangled vine in the garden of a house at King’s Winterbourne. At the royal palace of Narngalis, the pages were lighting the lamps. Far away in Grïmnørsland an evening breeze was causing the pine trees to sigh, while down amongst their roots several pairs of oddly shaped eyes peered and blinked, and the silken soughing of the resinous boughs was briefly embossed by a burst of high-pitched laughter. Beyond the forest two boy-princes, one with hair of gold, the other with hair of bronze, raced each other on horseback under the watchful eye of their guardian, a Knight of the Brand.
The Well of Tears: Book Two of The Crowthistle Chronicles Page 64
