The Bitterbynde Trilogy (112 page)

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.

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
.

‘D
ORMANCY
',
A SONG FROM
T
APTHARTHARATH

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.

Now she leaned over, unhooked the bright metal band, waded to land, and lay down on a muddy knoll above the tide. Her body spasmed as she gave back to the sea the water that had invaded her lungs. Clad only in a pale shift, she sprawled there like a hank of pallid seaweed, long and lank. Somewhere on the sea or under it, her discarded gown floated; a headless, handless specter among specters more truly terrible.

Drying in the mild night within a thin casing of salt and ash, the girl lifted her aching head. She was conscious now of the careless clatter and tinkle of water chuckling down a stony sluice. A brackish freshet bounced down a rock wall, like a handful of silk ribbons. Rohain drank a long and delicious draft. As she leaned, two articles fell forward and swung in front of her face: her jade-leaved tilhal and the vial of
nathrach deirge
, both strung on strong, short chains about her neck. At her waist the tapestry aulmoniere remained firmly attached, though bedraggled. For the retaining of these precious accessories she was grateful.

She sat by the laughing trickle and looked about in wonderment. This was no rocky shore or strand. Farther uphill, trees were growing, with green turf mantling their feet. Perhaps, after all, the ocean had carried her inland. Under the starless sky, its vestigial moon a haloed sliver of bluish green, the savage waters that had spat her out were now receding, as though the tide were ebbing. They seemed to clutch at the land as they dragged backward, scoring the turf with their talons. Through the ash haze Rohain saw the mermaid figurehead, wedged between two tree boles. The monstrous wave was shrinking back into itself, leaving behind a swathe of wrenched-up trees, dragged boulders, plowed ground, doomed seaweed, wreckage, flotsam, and a ragged, half-uprooted wattle-bush that shook itself and sprouted a muddy foot whose ankle was encircled with a gold band and whose toenails were painted with rose enamel.

Staggering and slipping through the blowing ash haze, her own feet squelching in sodden turf where alabaster shells lay among bone-white flowers, Rohain seized the foot.

‘Via!' she gasped. Relief surged—one other, at least, had survived. Further than that she could not bear to surmise.

Viviana moaned. Rohain helped her from the network of wattle twigs and boughs that had caught her like some flamboyant fish. Scratched and bleeding in her silken shift, the lady's maid could not speak. The only sounds from her were made by the ringing and clashing of the metal chatelettes of the chatelaine fastened to her belt, which had somehow, through the dunking, been spared.