The Bitterbynde Trilogy (175 page)

A silver-clasped hunting-horn, white as milk …

Ashalind's fingertips disturbed the water's surface. Where two Kings had stood, one old and frail, receiving a gift from the other, young and straight and strong, now there flickered only a dazzle and a haze. The vision dissipated.

‘Thorn,' she murmured. Time had not scathed him. He was, then, as she knew him now.

A silver and ivory fish leaped from the pool and flopped among the flowers. Caitri touched it, but it was merely a leaf.

‘The founding of this friendship between royal houses occurred before my birth,' said Ashalind. ‘I have never heard it told at Court or anywhere else. A thousand years on, the story has been lost to mortal-kind.'

‘Save for a pocketful of learned bards,' amended Tully.

‘Is the tale true?' wondered Ashalind.

‘Even so,' Morragan affirmed sharply.

‘Mistress,' said Caitri, who had been watching in silence, ‘it seems that the Faêran King was too merciful to refuse the last stroke to his enemy.'

‘Do not make me impatient, little one,' Morragan said gently to her, and there was that in his tone which struck Caitri dumb. Far off, a cry went up from the heart of the wood and, rising penetrating and high-pitched to the stars, faded and died on the wind. The nightingales abruptly ceased their melodies. The courtiers of the Prince murmured amongst themselves like a breeze through fields of barley, and in this solemn quietude, the Each Uisge broke into a horse-laugh, coarse and savage.

‘There is more,' continued the Raven Prince, unmoved. ‘Less than a dozen years ago, a time of sore of need arrived for the House of D'Armancourt, provoking the winding of the Coirnéad. Fortunately, my brother must have considered awakening to be a pleasant diversion. Even the Pendur Sleep grows wearisome at last. View the glass anew, gulled bird, and be apprised.'

The depths of the looking-pool swirled and cleared.

They revealed a seascape on a clear night. Waves rolled shorewards, long lines of luminous lace. Two human figures, richly dressed and silhouetted in starlight, were strolling along a slender tongue of land that ran between a freshwater loch and the sea. At the nobleman's side the Coirnéad swung, yet it was not Thorn who walked along the strand. Here was a strapping young Feohrkind monarch, well favoured, walnut-haired—the prototype, in fact, of young Edward, the son of his body. This then, was the true D'Armancourt heir, King-Emperor James XVI, of mortal blood, and beside him his bonny queen.

The scene unfolded …

When sojourning at Castle Taviscot by the sea, it was the wont of the King-Emperor James XVI and his Queen-Empress to bid their guards and courtiers to leave them, that together they might savour each other's company in privacy. On this night, as they walked beneath the stars, in love and with no presentiment of danger, they became aware of something coming towards them. Its monstrous shape struck fear into them, but with water on both sides they could deviate neither to the right nor the left, and they knew it was unwise to run from supernatural creatures. A glint of hope lay in putting on a bold face and not showing fear in any way, so the royal couple took courage from one another and went unfalteringly, if not swiftly, forward. As the thing approached, they recognised it with horror. It was Nuckelavee.

The lower part of this unseelie incarnation was like a huge horse with flappers like fish's fins about his legs. His single eye was red as a dying star. Where the horse's neck should have arisen, there grew instead the torso of a huge man, with arms that almost reached to the ground. Grossly three feet in diameter was his head, and it kept rolling from one shoulder to the other as if it meant to topple from the neck. The mouth was as wide as a shark's, and from it issued breath like steam from a boiling kettle. But what to mortals appeared most revolting of all was that not a shred of hide or skin covered the monster's naked body. Hideously, he was flayed all over. The whole surface of him was red, raw flesh, in which blood, black as tar, ran through yellow veins, and great white sinews, thick as hawsers, twisted, stretched and contracted as the monster moved.

The King-Emperor placed himself before his Queen, shielding her from Nuckelavee. The couple walked slowly, in utter terror, their hair on end, a cold sensation like a film of ice between their scalps and their skulls, and a cold sweat bursting from every pore. But they knew it was useless to flee, and they murmured to one another that if they had to die, then they would rather die together, facing what slew them, than die with their backs to the foe.

As they pressed on, fear threw their thoughts into confusion, tearing from them the ability to reason soundly. Precisely when it was most needed, they gave no thought to the familiar Coirnéad swinging at the King-Emperor's side, and its power of summoning help. The King-Emperor recalled only what he had heard of Nuckelavee's aversion to fresh water, and therefore, led his wife to that side of the road nearest the loch. The appalling moment arrived when the lower part of the head of the monster came abreast of them. Its mouth stretched open like an abyss. Its breath was a forge blast on their faces, the long arms stretched out to seize the mortals. To avoid, if possible, the monster's clutch, they swerved as near as they could to the freshwater loch.

James stepped into the shallows, kicking up a splash onto the foreleg of the flayed centaur, whereat it gave a snort like the rumble of a landslide, and shied over to the other side of the road. Seizing their opportunity they ran with all their might. The wind of Nuckelavee's swipe whipped the garments and hair of the mortals as they narrowly evaded the monster's clutches. Urgent need had they to flee, for Nuckelavee had whirled about and was galloping after them, roaring like a tempest-riven ocean.

A shallow channel meandered across the path ahead. Through it, the excess water of the loch drained into the sea. The couple were aware that if they could only cross the running water they would be secure, so they exerted every fibre to the utmost. Bravely strove the Queen, despite the heavy petticoats that hampered her progress. Her husband bore her up, half carrying her. She struggled, but royal, daintily shod feet were no match for Nuckelavee's pounding hooves and the monster was gaining ground swiftly.

‘The Coirnéad!' desperately cried Queen Katharine, knowing in her heart that already it might be too late. James reached for the horn but even now several moments were lost before he was able to grasp it, for all his effort was focused on helping his flagging wife reach the rivulet. As they reached the near bank, the long arms made another attempt to seize them. The couple made a desperate effort to spring to the safety of the other side, but they never reached it. Katharine fell.

Seizing her, Nuckelavee bellowed his triumph, but James jammed the horn to his lips and blew upon it with all his strength, before turning to fight the monster.

Pure and clear, piercing as water crystal the Summons of the Coirnéad rang out.

A wondrous and terrible sound was the call of the Faêran Horn. Even Nuckelavee raised his ghastly flayed head as the full and mellow note lifted to the sky like an awakening of the first dawn. The horn's music roused the blood of all listeners to leap like the waves of the sea. So stirring was it, it might have summoned the very trees to pull up their roots and walk, or bidden the very stones to burst up from the clay and turn over. Strong and compelling, it carried over hill and vale, water and wood, across the leagues of Erith to a certain green hill.

A tall hill was Eagle's Howe, and fair, the turf growing over it, dense and green, and a crown of oak, ash and thorn at the summit. A hill guarded by gramarye. In days of yore, men had titled it King's Howe. This was the resting place elected by Angavar and his exiled knights and ladies at the end of the Era of Glory when, growing weary of Erith, they chose to cease dwelling among men and enter the Pendur Sleep.

Here they slept yet.

Another Faêran hill, far off, had sheltered the followers of Morragan for some centuries—but the Crown Prince had already woken and departed forty years since. Some said that a shepherd named Cobie Will woke him, by accident and by foolishness, believing the knights of Faêrie to be warriors of legend who would lend their strength in times of need. Others would have it that those sleepers were not wakened by any mortal, that they woke of their own purpose, weary of sleeping, and that the horn Will blew was merely one of many accoutrements belonging to them and not an instrument placed there for the summoning of Faêran help by mortals in need.

Whatever the reason, the cavities of Raven's Howe lay empty. But it was to the vaults of Eagle's Howe, or King's Howe, that the urgent summons of the Coirnéad came winging like an eagle-owl on the night wind.

Beneath the verdant swell of the Howe there existed a vast and exalted hall, vaulted with ancient tree roots as thick as saplings. Between the arches of these roots the walls shimmered along living veins of precious metals. Gems winking scarlet and leaf-green tossed back light from the fire in the centre of the chamber. In the dim radiance behind the flames a hundred of the finest horses slept, and sixty couple of hounds. Fuelless, the fire flared like a giant flower fashioned of ripped silk, coloured tangerine and opal. Its soft, red-gold luminance lapped a hundred rich couches draped with padded velvets and cloth-of-gold. Hereon lay, like peerlessly carven tomb-effigies, the sleeping forms of the Faêran nobles who had been exiled with their King on the Day of Closing.

Some were garbed in fantastic armour, which had been wrought in the time since the fateful day of the Closing—harness whose lamellae gleamed with the sheen of nacre or emerald, with the polish of lamplight flaring on snow, of starlight dancing on water, of moonlight imaged in ice or sunset reflected in steel. Some wore half-armours and yet others were clad in finery that seemed stitched from leaves and shadows and stars. As for their faces, helmed or unhelmed, the beauty of all the Faêran lords blazed brighter than all the lights of the universe. Yet, one amongst them blazed more brightly than all the rest combined.

Into the long silence of the Howe's enchanted dome lunged a bronze spear of disruptive sound. Warm and strong, the Summons of the Coirnéad—‘Awake! Awake!' as if in echo of the thrilling Call to Faêrie long ago, a millennium past. An instant after the sound reached the hall's bell-shaped interior, clanging within its shining walls, the Sleepers on their couches stirred. A few raised themselves up on their elbows.

But tardily they roused. Already the most sumptuous couch, occupied when silence ruled, lay deserted. Even before the resonances of the horn's beseechment had faded from the changeless air, Angavar High King, was present no longer.

Not yet fully awake, the knights of the Fair Realm lapsed into the Pendur Sleep once more.

On a starlit beach many leagues distant from King's Howe the silver mouthpiece of the Coirnéad was shaken from the lips of James of Erith as Nuckelavee, in the manner of a man cracking a whip, snapped the young King's spine. The monster's maw hung open, slavering, ready to clamp down over James and crush the last life from his mortal frame.

Yet at the last instant, the wight was stayed.

A voice thundered across the shore, a voice both dangerous and beautiful. A Word was uttered. A command wrote itself in letters of fire across the firmament.

James felt himself lowered gently to the sea-rinsed sand, his wife Katharine lying beside him. He could not move, could not even turn his head, but there was no pain. The lovely face of Katharine bore no mark of savagery and her eyes remained open. They were grey-brown as driftwood, yet it was as though they had clouded over and she waited somewhere else, hidden behind those clouds. Away in the ocean Nuckelavee splashed and bellowed amid a flood of crimson, his almost-immortality on the brink of annihilation. The vengeance of the left hand of Angavar had been laid upon him.

The Faêran King knelt beside the royal couple.

‘It is too late for thy lady,' he said to James. ‘Death has taken her beyond the reach of my healing. Thee, I can still cure.'

But James sensed the vitality ebbing from him and glimpsed the same clouds drawing in as he had seen in the eyes of his love, and he considered that he might find her if he searched behind them.

‘Nay, friend,' he said to Angavar, for there existed a bond between them, although they had never before met, ‘nay, friend, I would not be sundered from my Kate. Allow me now to claim the greatest gift given to mortals. And if thou wouldst aid me for the sake of sworn friendship, promise me only this—take my place, as once you took the place of my longfather William. Remain waking, to protect my son Edward until he comes of age and is crowned King-Emperor. Let Erith believe her sovereign lives, lest she tremble on her foundations, lest war tears her apart again. Keep the Empire whole and well governed until it passes into the hands of my son.' He gasped for breath and a thin red ribbon unrolled at the corner of his mouth. ‘Have I thy word on't, Angavar King of Faêran?'

‘On this I give thee my oath, James of Erith,' said Angavar gently, as the light bled from James's eyes. ‘I swear it shall be so.'

The bodies of James XVI and Queen Katharine were borne back to King's Howe upon Faêran steeds. There they remained within the atmosphere of enchantment, untouched by decay, to this day.

Three ripples shimmered across the face of the looking-pool and the exposition melted, subtly, into another …

When James's retainers came hastening at the call of the Coirnéad, which had reached their ears also, they found—as they supposed—the King-Emperor in disastrous straits. He was lying on the beach, half submerged in bloody sea-foam, the waves surging around him.

‘The monster has slain Kate,' he said as they carried him from that place. But they never found her remains, only the severed arm of a man, part of a horse's hoof and some pieces of flesh, skinless, disgusting, washed to shore on the tide.