The Bitterbynde Trilogy (29 page)

Imrhien held herself ready to flee.

Yet frozen the warriors remained. Not another move was to be had out of them.

After a few minutes of the same, the girl stepped forward and pushed another soldier in the back. She had begun to lead the charge—the wintry army's attack against night.

That afternoon, down in the twilight Cave of Doors, she came upon the Ertishman. The lower cataract shouted white noise. If you stared at the racing water for too long, you felt as though you were falling upward. Imrhien gazed at it gloomily, stumbled, and steadied herself against the wall, grazing her elbow.

“So,” shouted Sianadh over the shouting, “ye lost the game.”

Morosely, the girl nodded. The black army had beaten the white. After the game concluded, the combatants had moved back to their original positions and the discarded gauntlet had corroded to nothing, in a rain of blackish flakes. In horror she had flung it from her hand even as it decayed.

Sianadh sourly scrutinized the rune-doors one last time. They left the cave and sat together in the leafy shade along the riverbank. Ferns overhung the water. In the clear depths, the long leaves of water-plants stretched and swayed languorously along the current. The river eddied against fallen branches, bubbled around rocks, sang to itself.

“No matter, no matter,” muttered Sianadh, half to himself, “I have solved much of this runic riddle, methinks. The symbols over those great doors be like Ertish in some ways, and the words I have deciphered have an echo of meanings known to me or guessed. But I do not know enough of them to make sense of it. See what ye can build of them—there is something about ‘quiet raiment,' and ‘rising up.' Then the words speak of the ‘houses of champions' and something else about ‘strength' and ‘singing melodiously,' and a good deal about ‘water.' Can ye fathom it?… Nay?” He sucked his teeth thoughtfully. “Below this riddle be written a set of twenty-nine runes that form no words at all. Alas, I need further clues. But I'll not surrender, I'll strive all the harder for this setback. Now, let us practice the Battle Royal with our set of wood and stone, and mayhap ye will win your game before I solve my puzzle. Remember now—ye strategically position the pieces and then strike. When ye can fight using tactics as cunning as my own, almost, ye shall climb Waterstair again.”

She climbed Waterstair again. This time she picked up the blue gauntlet, the gauntlet of andalum. Night versus day, shadow against light, the carven armies struggled in the age-old contest, yet there was a dance to it—the one side the shadow of the other, the other the reflection of the one, as perhaps is true of adversaries of flesh.

Yet in the second conflict, the andalum gauntlet failed also. Like the talium, it aged swiftly to dust in the aftermath of defeat, as chalk-white matrix and coal-black matrix rasped softly back into formation. What would happen if the challenger lost a third game? Would the last glove merely crumble and no opportunity be left for adventurers who came in later days? Perhaps the rocky corridor might bar itself against the loser alone but remain open to others, while three new gauntlets climbed the stone pedestal with their fingers and lay there like waiting armadillos. Perhaps a sudden rock-fall would, after all, crush the failed challenger, as punishment for lack of cunning and for the temerity of challenging the clever makers of the statues.

“One chance left.” Sianadh sucked his teeth again. “Yan, tan, tethera. Third time lucky, as they say.”

For three days they played Kings-and-Queens, hour after hour. How pleasant it was, at night, to sink into dreamless sleep where no warriors of light and dark slew one another in the ballet of silent, civilized, symbolic warfare.

Sunrise washed the treetops with dilute gold.

“May all fortune be on your side, Imrhien. And if ye do not win this time, I shall never forgive ye!”

The Ertishman's strong bellow, proving his lungs undamaged by their cracked cage, reached to the cliff top. Imrhien waved back, then threw aside the vine-curtain and slipped down the rock passage, eager yet dreading the last attempt.

This time I shall command the black army
.

The glove slipped easily over her hand.
Red gauntlet, with you my dark warriors shall win
. She lifted her head and regarded the black host. Grimly they stared straight ahead, as always—at least, it was to be assumed that the knights whose faces were obscured by helms were also gazing blankly into the distance.
Coal-ebony-sable lady, warrior queen of night, go with fury into battle. Shadow, eclipse light
.

There would seem an inevitability about this last trial.
Third time lucky …

She pushed the black queen's wizard's spearman.

The game, slow and subtle, tense and attenuated, stretched from morning to afternoon and then to evening. Imrhien pondered every move, plundered each one for its utmost variety of possibilities. She sustained herself with water from the river, fruit from the vine, thoughts of hope for Sianadh and his optimistic plans.

On the walls of the statue-cave, the luminosity of the quartzlike embedded gems and the fungous growths increased. Night had drawn its dim veil. The girl took it as a good omen. Yet she knew that even then, victory might go either way.

Night dragged on. Through darkness the game progressed. The challenger allowed herself no sleep, although the grass was soft and inviting and the heat of Summer high. Instead she sat cross-legged, her clouded eyes masking inner visions of a thousand scenarios, a thousand thundering battle-plains. The snow queen proved herself a canny adversary, Winter of course being a hardened veteran of many battles. Prisoners of war lay scattered on the border tiles around the platform, their prostration revealing the swivel hinges under their bases that had attached them to the board's hidden mechanisms and would probably do so again. Morning saw Imrhien and her swarthy battalion hard-pressed, defending against a brutal assault from the white host. Night was retreating now, both within the cavern and without. Winter closed in around the tall, dark king, threatening to freeze him to death.

Late afternoon suffused the hollow with an amber softness, like tufts of saffron-dyed wool. Imrhien's head swam with weariness.

And suddenly, the black king lost his lover. The queen of night was taken, and he was left undefended, threatened on all fronts. There was nowhere to run. Doom had descended on the battlefield, and there could be only defeat for the tall dark monarch.

Imrhien's shoulders tensed. Her hair tingled on her scalp. She waited for some final blow, some catastrophe to sweep away the unsuccessful challenger. They stood, the game pieces, their visages changeless. No smile of triumph warmed the ice-pale faces, no look of despair weighed down the polished black brows. The slender snow-lily regina and her knights held the dark lord prisoner.

Nothing happened.

The red gauntlet, the copper, began to fray upon her hand. She threw it down, relieved, tired, dispirited, fed up.
Third time unlucky
.

From the cavern she fled, and cast herself on the grassy apron at its mouth. Such foolish ambition, such presumptuousness! How could she, a novice, hope to defeat the wisdom of ages? Let her leave this place. Let Sianadh forget his foolish dreams. The concept of wealth easily gained was but a madman's cipher. Reality was only poverty, ugliness, and homelessness. Beneath this cliff, under the very ground on which she lay—and overhead also—existed nothing but dirt, cold stones, blind worms, and sunless hollows, fathoms deep.

She rolled over and lay sprawled on her back, summoning the strength to climb down and face the Ertishman. High in the rich mazarine blue of the evening sky, the first stars were pricking through. Some sparkled more brightly than others. The girl's thoughts strayed. Sianadh had said he could see these same stars in his home country. What constellations described themselves up there in the daisy fields of the sky, and how were they named? One group of stars stood out, white points so brilliant that they were like the dazzle of sunlight on water.

She counted them—yan, tan, tethera times tethera. These stars burned with a brilliant silver-white flame in contrast with the fainter garnet-red and topaz-yellow sparkles in their vicinity. Even their positions seemed significant—a line joining the bright stars might form a curve here, a point there—

It came to the star-gazer that a marked resemblance existed between the gemmy scatters on the cavern walls and the starry patterns in the sky. Those bright shiners now—what had the Ertishman once told her concerning them?

Abruptly she leaped to her feet and ran back into the cave.

Nothing had altered. The fallen lay where they had crashed. The statues that remained standing loomed gray in the waning light. Reaching up, Imrhien touched the glowing gems of the wall, each in turn. The point of a beak, a ceres, an avian head, an eye—now her hand swept down the long, graceful neck to the curve of the wing. The nine stones gleamed like white fire caught in globules of water. One after the other, she brushed them with her fingertips, confirming, in awe and wonder, that they matched the constellation pulsing overhead, the sign of the Swan. She fancied each one sank a little into its socket and sprang back. These stones had been placed
just so
.

This,
this
at last was the key.

Had it been so simple, all along?

The grumble of heavy stone was a phenomenon she had expected, but its source was not. It had split in half, the tessellated game board, and was sliding apart. Jumping back to a safe distance, the girl watched the crack widen to reveal broad stairs spiraling down under the ground. An entrance—but where might it lead? To a treasure hoard or to some ancient dungeon, long inhabited by monsters or unseelie wights? The hammering of her heart filled her senses, drowning all other sounds. Sianadh—she must go back for him. She could not venture down there alone, could not go at all into that well of cold stones, blind worms, and sunless cavities. She stood still, unwilling to leave what had been so hard-won and might vanish if she looked away.…

In subterranean darkness, the walls of the spiral staircase shone softly yet were not studded with the same bluish phosphorescent fungi as the stone passageway. This glow was mellow gold, like the leaves of poplars in Autumn. It radiated up from below.

Something lurks down there, for certain, to make such a shining!
It seemed not an eerie light—rather, it looked benign yet somehow untamed—like the shine of a lamp in a window at night, but not as domestic; like the glimmer of candlelight upon ripe bullion it was perilous to covet; like the soft light of a harvest sunset or long, low shafts of morning at the waning of the year.

Sianadh was unfit to climb. He could not help her. Was she to go back to him now and confess cowardice, in the face of his blustering bravado? After he had risked his life for her more than once, could she not do the same in the cause of pursuing his dream? A sudden recklessness seized her. She bowed low to the statuettes made of moonbeams and the figurines wrought of captured shadow. Before she could change her mind, Imrhien plunged down the stair beneath the stair.

Here where the sun never shone, a bone-coldness permeated—the intense frigidity of stone that had never quickened to the touch of the daystar. Yet even though the river flowed somewhere high above, no dampness reached out clammy fingers or slid weeping down the walls. The air was not dank or musty or tinged with the odors of subterranean centuries—soil, stone, roots, pale, soft-bodied things that hid from light—instead it was as sweet as the free and blowing airs of the upper world, which carried the scent of flowers and leaves and the subtle freshness of clear skies. Whoever had designed the system of ventilation shafts had achieved a wondrous feat—it was surely an efficient arrangement, built to last. The engineers of this substructure could only have been masters of their art.

Knowing little of mines, the intruder treading the stairs understood enough to suspect that this was not one at all. Exactly what it was, beyond a long, terraced spiral bathed in dim golden light, could not be guessed.

It was hard to estimate how far down the stairway took her. She was wondering whether the corkscrew drove headlong forever into the deeps when an archway opened before her and her skin prickled as though an unstorm were rolling in. After leaping down the last few treads, she stepped through the opening to behold a staggering, muted glory.

The arch gave on to a gallery halfway up the wall of an immense, high-vaulted chamber. On the floor below, thousands of baffling shapes gleamed faintly. They were piled high and crowded as far as the eye could penetrate. From them emanated the pale golden shining. Imrhien's hand flew to her pocket. The four-leafed clover remained reassuringly there—this was no glamorous illusion. The stairway now led her down the inner wall. Slowly she progressed, scarcely breathing, her hair crackling and lifting of its own accord as though she moved under water, her gaze caressing the mass of treasure, of incalculable wealth, revealed in this cold subterranean shining. Around the trove pulsed an eerie force like the unstorm and the world's storm combined, dangerously exhilarating, invisible, but already dissipating up the stair as if fleeing through this new rupture.

If a cornucopia of gorgeousness had been spilled at her feet, all sense of time was snatched away in exchange. How long she wandered in the treasury, she forgot to remember. At every turn, some new and wondrous object appeared to hand—gold cups and plates ornamented with jewels, silver-gilt candlesticks, ornate nefs, porringers, cast-gold aquamaniles shaped like lions with their tails arched across their backs to form handles, all manner of tableware, carven chairs inlaid with ivory or gold and silver wire, richly chased and engraved caskets filled with jewels, ropes of pearls, bracelets, rings, torques, gold-mounted cameos and intaglios, fine chains and gem-crusted girdles, shirts of mail, gauntlets, helms, greaves, cuirasses floridly engraved, etched and embossed with gold or silver—an entire armory—and weapons of an unknown metal, honed spite-sharp; damascened swords with ornately pierced or chiseled guards and mounts, gemmed scabbards fretted with precious metals, battle-axes, halberds, partisans, glaives, spears, pikes, lances, and jewel-pommeled daggers—a complete arsenal. Among these were many curious artifacts whose purpose could not be guessed. All possessed the same virtue as the statues at the overhead entrance, a supernatural beauty that could not possibly have been wrought by the hand of man. And all remained untouched by dust or decay, as if Lord Time were powerless here.