The Bitterbynde Trilogy (26 page)

“Rowans.”

The girl caught her breath, looked up. The Gailledu had indeed led them into a wood of rowan-trees, the trees of protection, before he and the pig had left them.

Soft mosses made a comfortable resting place. Imrhien's legs ached. After they had eaten from their depleted rations, she took off her boots. In the safety of the rowans, the man and the girl slept the profound sleep of absolute weariness, sprawled as if dead in the deep leaf-mold.

In the morning they left the rowan-grove and struck out northeast on their journey.

They had not gone more than a few yards when the Gailledu barred their way. Without speaking, he shook his dark head and pointed to the west. Sianadh stopped, planting his staff firmly in the ground.

“Good morrow to ye. Ye led us to good rest last night, sir—now we be at your service. But if it be another way ye're wanting us to go, that we cannot do.”

With a sharp, chopping movement the leaf-clad youth brought the side of one open hand down into the upturned palm of the other. The gesture could mean only one thing.

Sianadh shifted uneasily.

“He wants us to stop going this way and go around, Imrhien.”

She nodded, feinting a step to the left.

“So ye think he be right, eh? Nay. It cannot be. We must take the direct route. We have already lost too much time, and our supplies be short. Our goal cannot be more than a day away if we keep on. Who knows how many extra leagues we may walk, how many days we may lose by changing our course? Good sir, your advice be gratefully received, but with respect, we cannot follow it.”

Sianadh began to walk around the Gailledu, but there he was, barring their way again. His brown eyes flashed in anger. One last time he shook his head and made the “stop” signal. Then he stepped aside. Uncomfortably Sianadh met Imrhien's eyes.

“Do as ye wish. I b'ain't changing.”

From her hair the girl took a blue wildflower she had plucked that morning, not knowing its name. She stretched her hand out to the Gailledu. After a few moments he took the flower from her fingers, turned, and went into the forest. She stared after him, then followed the Ertishman.

There was little communication between them, many an anxious glance over their shoulders and many a jump at wind-tossed shadows. After an hour or two they came under dark pines growing among granite boulders. Roots gripped the rocks like arteries caging hearts. Malice brooded beneath heavy boughs. Queer sights and sounds troubled their passage as before, but this time the travelers knew that they were not being deceived, that what they saw was real. While they carried the four-leafed clover, their eyes penetrated glamour's masquerades.

The Summer heat thickened, grew stifling. Glad they were to find, in the afternoon, a black forest pool. Although they bathed their feet and splashed their faces, some inner cognition warned them not to drink. The pines had snared a patch of flawless lavender sky between them, high above, but it was not permitted to reflect in the inky water.

Branches swished aside, and a shaggy little horse came to drink. It cocked a friendly eye, shaking droplets from the soft muzzle, snorting softly.

The allurement of waterhorses was such that when they were near, they seemed in no way to be eldritch or perilous—a certainty drew over those who beheld them that here was but an innocent and playful steed, as
lorraly
as themselves, and that it would be ridiculous to suspect otherwise. Only gramarye or a determined stubbornness could save mortals from this enchantment.

“Put your boots back on quicklike and let's get out of here,” hissed Sianadh.

The horse trotted over to them, its hooves almost soundless on the pine-needle carpet. Imrhien's hands were shaking so much that she could not lace her boots. Sianadh's lips moved silently. The horse nuzzled his shoulder, pranced and frolicked in the most joyous manner, curving its neck enticingly to be caressed.

The more they avoided the pretty thing, the more it played. As they moved away it bounded in front of them, bending its foreleg in a seductive invitation to mount and ride. In and out of the trees it gamboled, the long tail flouncing high—everywhere they turned the horse frisked in their way, its spell drawing its net over them, until in desperation Imrhien brandished her ashen staff in both hands, right before its eyes. The creature reared on its hind legs, neighing, then Sianadh was there, the skian's leaf-shaped blade glittering cold in one fist, a scoop of salt glittering cold in the other.

“Avaunt!”

Shrilly squealed the horse. It rolled its eyes and pig-rooted. The travelers advanced. It backed off, wheeled, and galloped straight for the pool. In it jumped, smoothly, with hardly a splash. Only ripples were left behind, spreading slowly across the dark face of the water.

A tear stood in Sianadh's eye. He stared at the pool's secret waters, shaking his head.

“Ah, but 'tis a
tambalai
thing, and a rare, or I'm no judge of horseflesh. It went hard with me to repel it. A pity.”

Without waiting to see more, the two companions hastened on their way.

The needle-carpet deadening their footfalls, they pushed through curtains of shadow. There seemed no end to the pine forest. Imrhien's scalp prickled with the certainty of being followed. Dread of some terrible stalker swallowed her heart.

Light emptied out of the afternoon. Tree trunks loomed like prison bars, and growing darkness made it difficult to see where they were going.

A grayish glimmer ahead, more a decrease of darkness than an increase of light, showed where the trees thinned. In a few more yards the travelers stepped out from the forest under a starry sky. A half-moon was ascending. The Greayte Southern Star lit the landscape palely. To either hand, the forest rows stretched out in an endless picket fence. The companions stood at the top of a slope covered with low bushes: gorse, melaleuca, and broom. The long hillside slanted down to a narrow gorge running from north to south, along the floor of which flowed a swift river. To the north, an escarpment rose to a mountain peak. Faintly discernible on the ravine's far side there rolled undulating grasslands scattered with trees.

“The river!” Sianadh's eyes glittered. “At last, the river that runs from Bellsteeple to the south. Ah, but I cannot tell at which point we have arrived at these reaches. We must follow this tributary of the Rysingspill, but whether upstream or down is not clear.”

Undecided, he stood in thought, surveying the scene until frenetic laughter from the forest startled them both into action and they hastened down the slope.

Riddled with holes, Imrhien's hoots were giving way; they were not as stout as Sianadh's, not being made to withstand journeys in the wild. Now the sole of the right boot came adrift, flapping. She had to stop and take it off.

“Do not throw it away, lass. Do not leave behind any things ye have used. Fires of Tapthar! What can that be?”

A groove was gouged into the hillside to the right, running straight down from the forest to the ravine. No vegetation grew on its worn and slippery surface.

“This queer slide be too treacherous to cross. We must turn upriver,” said the Ertishman when they had reached the lip of the channel. “And may the Star grant us safe haven this night.”

A pearlescent cloud layer roofed the gorge. Halfway up its slopes, wispy shreds of cloud clung. The river's cleft was narrow and very steep, the sides plunging straight down from the cliff edge perhaps sixty feet to the water below. Massive boulders humped out of the gushing waters like gray leviathans. The current raced and boiled, churning furiously among them with a sound of torrential rain. The loud voice of the river filled their ears with its hissing roar, threaded with limpid notes like bubbling silver.

The travelers marched along the cleft's rim. Tiny white moths flitted. Something came hurtling down the hill on the muddy slide, shrieking with laughter, and shot out over the river, leaving only echoes of its madness.

“
Obban tesh
,” swore Sianadh, quickening his pace, “I could not tell for sure, but it looked as if that sliding thing were headless and carrying its noggin under its arm.”

Imrhien limped after him, lugging her ruined boot in one hand, her ashen staff in the other. The moon rose a little higher. Far below, the river gushed. Then the terrible sound began.

Thud, thud
. A rhythmic pounding shook the ground like a giant hammer, then stopped, giving way to an empty silence. From somewhere behind, in the darkness, it had come. Abruptly it started up again:
thud, thud
, getting nearer. Once more the sound ceased.

A strange lisping sound was emanating from Sianadh's mouth. He was trying to whistle, but his lips were too dry. Beads of sweat stood out on his brow. Nausea gripped the pit of the girl's belly like a squeezing fist.
Thud, thud;
it came again, remorselessly, the vibrations running up through the travelers' feet. The Ertishman began to run, the girl hard on his heels.

The moon vanished behind a cloud, and Sianadh stumbled; a cry escaped his lips, and his head jerked up toward the greenish light that appeared, bobbing, several yards in front of them. An obscure figure held up a lantern. Long, dagged sleeves draped from its arm.

“Follow me, quickly!” Low and pleasant, the voice was slightly cracked, like that of a youth entering manhood. “Come! There is no time to lose.”

“Who are ye?”

“Have you forgotten so soon your friend and guide of the rowan-wood? Hasten. If you do not, the Direath will get you. The lantern shows the path.”

Thud, thud
.

Sianadh opened his mouth to speak, but the lantern bobbed away. He grabbed Imrhien's hand and scrambled after the light, his breath grating in great shredded gasps, but she pulled her hand free. Something was wrong. She wanted to scream out a warning but could only tug at the receding knapsack. The left shoulder-strap broke and hung trailing. She could hear nothing but the voice calling, see nothing but the lantern dancing away, away, and out over where the cliff edge must surely lie, and Sianadh being lured to it, like a moth to his doom, heedless of her tuggings. She flung herself at his back, managing to catch the trailing strap in the same moment that he lunged forward and, with a shout, dropped out of sight. The sickening crunch of sliding gravel came to her ears and the brief clatter of Sianadh's staff spinning into the void.

He was gone.

The light went out.

Flat on her belly the girl lay blindly in the dark somewhere on the airy rim of nothing. Blood walloped in her ears. A small wind soughed in the gorse, and the Greayte Star's light struck through thin altostratus cloud. Peering over the precipice, she spied Sianadh's brown, stubby fingers clinging to clumps of clay, his shaggy head pressed hard against the rock face. Immediately she twisted the trailing pack-strap around the nearest firm-rooted bush, for the knapsack still hung from his shoulder.

Sianadh looked up, blinking dirt from his eyes.

“The ledge beneath my toes be crumbling. I do not want to die. O Ceileinh, Mother of Warriors, save me!”

His companion leaned over, pulled on the knapsack from above. At that moment, Sianadh's footing gave way. He reached for the strap and with a jerk was brought up short, his full weight depending from it. The little bush bent sharply. Faithfully, it did not break. Screwing up his face, Sianadh heaved himself up with the strength of his knotty arms—his head, then shoulders appeared over the brink. The girl helped him up by his sleeves and hair. The leather strap snapped apart as he grabbed the little bush. Thus anchored, the man paused for breath, still halfway over the cliff, before levering the rest of his bulk up to safety. The battered pack dropped from his shoulder. Unable to stand, he crawled away from the edge. Something small and wicked shot out of nowhere, kicked the knapsack over the cliff, and fled, repeating, “Tear, tear,” as it went.

Imrhien wiped the filth from the man's face. He was very pale beneath the grime.

Thud, thud, thud
.

The thumping thing was coming after them yet. Sianadh struggled to his feet.

“Ye be the leader,” he gasped. “I am a fool—he only speaks to children, the Gailledu. I should have known that light-man was but a treacherous hobby-lanthorn. 'Tis too late—we have already shown fear. Give me your staff. I shall take on whatever comes thumping at our backs.”

It was midnight. The fishing-boat moon with its one sail rode a fathomless sea, casting star-nets to catch comets. In the vast landscape below, two tiny figures ran along a cliff top pursued by the footstep of some fierce and gloomy specter from a madman's dream. The land fell sharply, the river's walls diminishing and the roar of the water becoming louder, until the hunted ones found themselves beside a sluicing torrent in a channel not ten feet below. Loud as it was, it could not dull the approach of the predator, a hunter that seemed to sport with its quarry, now speeding up, now dropping back, driving them on to the limit of endurance.

“If ye can swim, we should try to get over the water. They cannot cross it, especially southward-running. But I fear ye should be swept away.”

It was then that they caught sight of the bridge.

Massive river redgums lined the opposite banks. One had fallen across the river. Half its roots were still buried, and it lived, its green branches spilled in a cluster on the ground on the near side. Spurred on by the prospect, the companions raced for this thicket, but too late. The heavy pounding increased its pace, and with a roar, the Direath was upon them. They turned, at bay.

A monstrosity.

It loomed over them, taller by at least two feet, clad in a close-fitting mantle of dark blue feathers. A single hard and hairy hand grew out of its breast-bone, and a single veiny, thick-soled leg grew from its haunch. Its one eye glared from the center of the forehead. In its bony hand it held a thick club. It poised motionless, as if waiting.