The Bitterbynde Trilogy (8 page)

The world depended on the properties of sildron for many purposes.

Eotaurs' beautiful swanlike wings were used mainly for maneuvering, the species having been bred, over hundreds of years, from the original tiny bird-horses to a ridable size. However, their greater bulk now required sildron to become airborne. Sildron, like magnetized iron, possessed invisible properties so strange and powerful that it seemed almost eldritch.

Diverse cargoes were brought from the outlands by Waterships. Some were destined for the Tower, others must travel farther inland. At Isse Harbor, freightage that was too large or inexpensive or heavy for thoroughbred Skyhorses was offloaded to heavily guarded road-cart caravans or hauled up on ropes to the Windship Dock 112 feet above ground level, at the seventh story. There it was loaded onto the mighty sildron-raised vessels. Eotaurs and carrier pigeons were not the only sky-travelers to come and go at the Tower, although they were the swiftest. The grandest of all, the Windships had the capacity to carry passengers and large cargoes.

The wind bellied their sails as it did for any Watership, but swaying treetops were their waves, birds their fish, mountains their reefs, the diurnal pulse of light and dark their tide, and clouds their foam. Sildron gave them lift, sildron pushed against the ground to power their small, unstable propellers.

This silvery metal shod and girded the eotaurs, it lifted and propelled the vessels of the sky. All the wealth of the Windship lines and the status of the twelve Stormrider Houses, the glory, the power, the skills, passed from generation to generation in traditions going back many centuries, all depended upon that most costly and rare of metals, even though it exerted no force against water and could not cross the sea.

It was so precious that it was the property only of kings and nobles. Watching the Windships go by in the skies, the most lowly of servants at Isse Tower often wondered what it would be like to go voyaging in them, up there where the clouds drifted like pillowy featherbeds, their scalloped borders gilded by sunshine, where it seemed that a voyager might sail on without a care, without pain, and the past would not matter.

His entire history was forgotten, gone without a trace. What took its place, always, was an aching sense of loss. Sometimes, when not too weary to ponder at all, he wondered who it was that peered out from his eyes and listened with his ears. Sometimes he conjectured about who his parents had been and where they might be now, and whether they had abandoned him because he was mute and malformed. Brand Brinkworth had once told of a legendary prince who had longed for the perfect wife and whose wizard had fashioned a maiden for him out of a mass of beautiful flowers. Later, the servants had speculated on one another's origins had they been created from some fleshless material, mostly guessing “weeds” or “dung,” and the foundling wondered, in the cold recesses of his reverie, whether such a misfit as he had never been born but had been shaped or raised up out of starless depths by some raving and witless magician.

Often he tried to convey to Grethet the many questions about his beginnings. She seemed unable or unwilling to understand, slapping him away impatiently. He knew only that he was imprisoned here by his need to survive and that in this fantastic Tower he had come among a proud people who scorned excessive displays of joy or sorrow, excitement or fear, but who, beneath the iron bands they imposed, seethed with hidden turmoils.

Taunts and blows made life painful. Loneliness was his only companion. But certain things made it bearable—the sound of the wind crooning in the battlements, the days when vapors blanketed the world far below and he stood on an island in the clouds, the nights when rain pattered on the outer walls, the songs of birds on the morning breeze, the
tok-tok-tok
of the moss-frog whose call was reputed to improve the flavor of cellared wine, the salt sea-breeze tasting of far-off adventures, the sight of the Greayte Southern Star like a green firework burning low in the night sky, the warm, friendly noses of goats, hounds, and capuchins, glimpses of eotaurs and the mighty Windships that crossed the airs, stories told by the kitchen fire.

The stories, too, marked the passing of days and provided vicarious journeys from the sequestered Tower. They were the only way of finding out what it was like in Aia, the world, beyond the demesnes—lifelines to something Beyond.

He wondered:
Will I escape someday, or are the demesnes of the Tower to be my graveyard
?

All the talk was of the wedding to be held at the Tower in Teinemis, the Firemonth. The Lady Persefonae, daughter of Lord Voltasus and Lady Artemisia, was to be married to the young heir of the Fifth House, and the ceremony was to take place only forty-two days after Greatsun Day. The word on the floors below the dock was that the wedding cake was to be decorated with real Sugar shipped from the Turnagain Islands and that a Confectioner was to be flown from Caermelor, the Royal City, specially for the job.

In response to the servants' complaints about the burden of extra work imposed by the forthcoming celebrations, Brand Brinkworth increased the quality and quantity of his evening tales.

He related a cheery account of the lucky and extremely virtuous farmer's wife who would rise up in the morning and find that all her work had been completed for her overnight, finished to perfection—the cows already milked, the hens fed, the butter churned, the house cleaned from top to bottom, and a fire twinkling brightly in the hearth, with a pot of porridge bubbling merrily over it.

“Life went on like this for some time,” said the Storyteller, “but then the goodwife became curious to see who was being so kind and helpful. One night she rose from her bed, opened the kitchen door a crack, and peeped through. You can imagine her astonishment when she saw a crowd of busy little bruneys with green caps, sweeping and polishing, making everything spick-and-span. But she noticed that their clothes were rather plain and ragged, and she felt sorry for them, so she spent the next week sewing until she had made splendid new outfits for them all. These she laid out in the kitchen one evening, and that night she rose again from her bed and peeped through the door. Well, those little bruneys were delighted with their new clothes. They put them on at once and danced about with glee, but then with a shout they vanished clean away and the farmer's wife never saw them again.”

“Addle-pated woman!” exclaimed a scullery maid. “The first thing any fool knows about seelie wights is that they mislike being thanked for their good turns. Thanking them with gifts or compliments is taken by them as an insult!”

“Not so,” another disagreed. “I'll warrant they vanished because they thought they were too fine, in their new clothes, to do lowly work anymore.”

“Now there,” said Brinkworth, stroking his beard, “is a matter about which many folk disagree. A bone, one might say, of contention. To thank or not to thank. My own opinion is that by the thanking-gifts, the bruneys knew they had been spied upon. They detest spying as much as any eldritch wight, seelie or otherwise, and that is why they went away.”

“Body o' me! If any of them helping-wights ever come here to the Tower, I'll thrash anyone what spies on them or thanks them,” declared Rennet Thighbone. “I never get no thanks, and I don't see why tricksy wights should. Anyway, I never seen one in me life, and I reckon it's all just cock-and-bull.”

“So ringed is the Tower with rowan, iron, and wizardry,” commented Brand Brinkworth, “there's never a minor wight of seelie or unseelie could invade us. That is why you have never seen one, Rennet.”

“What I say be no cock-and-bull,” said Teron Hoad the ostler, licking his lips. “This be truth.”

The kitchen's occupants nervously gathered closer together. Hoad's accounts were famed for their gruesomeness, and they did not want to miss a word. It seemed he felt it his duty to darken the mood if it chanced to become too cheery; for this he had unwittingly acquired the name “Hoad the Toad.” Two of his fingers were, inexplicably, missing. He kept them pickled, in a jar—a foible that added to his sinister reputation.

“I speak of the Beulach Beast what used to haunt the Ailagh Pass in Finvarna,” the aforesaid ostler began with relish.

“Used to haunt it?”

“Aye. It went away after its blood-search was successful. Only during the night hours it used to be heard, uttering shrieks and howls that chilled the blood of those who heard and made them flee in horror and set them to locking their doors and shutters.”

“How was it formed?”

“Sometimes like a man with one leg, sometimes like an ordinary man, sometimes like a greyhound or a fell beast of foul description. Folk dared not venture out after dark in those parts, for the Beast would be always on the prowl. Finally it got what it was after.”

He paused for dramatic effect.

“What, Hoad? What?” bleated the listeners. Hoad deliberately looked over his shoulder and lowered his tone confidentially.

“One morning,” he said, “a traveler was found dead by the side of the road—pierced by two deep wounds, one in his side and one in his leg. He had a hand pressed to each hurt. It was said that these injuries were too frightful and strange to have been made by a man, and indeed the Beulach Beast must have done it, for it was not seen or heard again at the Ailagh Pass.”

“They might have got rid of it, but it will just go somewhere else,” commented Thighbone, scraping his callused fingers with a paring-knife. “They'll never get rid of the Buggane what haunts that Great Waterfall near Glyn Rushen.”

“That is a water-bull, is it not?” the stoker interjected dubiously.

“Aye. Not a seelie one, my friend, not at all, but a water-bull just the same. It is particularly dangerous and vicious. It lives in the pool right under where the Waterfall drops. Sometimes it is a man, but usually it takes the form of a big black calf what crosses the road and jumps down into the pool with a sound like the rattling of chains.”

A lackey shook the chains of the cast-iron stew-pot, and everyone jumped.

“I'll box yer ears for yer, ribald clown!” Thighbone yelled indignantly.

The servants soothed the cook, and eventually he went on with his contribution.

“I heard a story of the Buggane not long ago, from a peddler in the last road-caravan. Seems a girl was working outside her house in Glyn Rushen, which is not far from the Great Waterfall—she was cutting up turnips for the pot, when the Buggane came roaring along in a man's shape, picked her up, slung her over its back, and made off with her toward its home under the pool before anyone had time to save her. But the lass was lucky—she still held in her hand the knife what she had been slicing turnips with. Just as they reached the pool she cut through her apron strings and was able to get free and run home like the wind, all the while in terror thinking the thing was coming behind her.”

“That be not unlike one of the tales of the Each Uisge,” mused an understeward. “Seems a good idea to wear an apron around the haunts of these water wights.”

“You'd look a right gowk in a pinafore,” snorted the buttery-maid.

A half-deaf cellarman with crow's-feet engraved at the corners of his eyes now roused himself.

“What about the old Trathley Kow what haunts the village of Trathley, in middle Eldaraigne?” he shouted. “He's a bogie more mischievous than bad, but they'll never see
him
leave.”

“On my troth! I hope he never does go,” said the understeward. “He's always good for a fine story, the prankster that he is. Always he finishes his jokes with a laugh like a horse's whinny, at the expense of his dupes!”

“I heard a good tale of the Trathley Kow,” offered a dimpled chambermaid, “which happened to two young men from a village near Trathley. It being a holiday, they had arranged to meet their sweethearts one afternoon at a stile by Cowslip Lane, but lo and behold, when the lads arrived there they saw their sweethearts across the meadow, walking away. They called out, but the lasses seemed not to hear, so the lads ran after them. On they went, for two or three miles, but although they went as fast as they could the young men could not catch up! They were so mindful of watching their quarry, they did not much look where they were going, and to their dismay they found themselves up to their knees in a muddy bog. At that moment their sweethearts vanished with a loud ‘Ha ha!' and there was the Trathley Kow instead. Well, as you can imagine, the lads got themselves free of the muck in a trice and took to their heels at once. That waggish wight pursued them over hill and dale, hooting and mocking them. They had to cross the Shillingswater to get back home, but in their fright they both fell in! They came up covered with weeds and mud, and of course, each took a look at the other and immediately mistook him for the Trathley Kow!”

The chambermaid's audience fought to contain its merriment.

“Go on, go on,” begged the stoker, red in the face, his eyes watering.

“Bawling with terror, they fought each other off and ran to their separate homes, each telling a story of having been chased by the Trathley Kow and almost drowned in the Shillingswater!”

The listeners stuffed their fists in their mouths, from whence burst sounds like escaping steam.

“Well,” Hoad the Toad interjected darkly, “those foolish lads are fortunate they did not live closer to the mountains.”

The mood dampened.

“Why?” piped up a spit-boy dutifully.

“Well, if they went out a-walking like that, the Gwithlion would have had them for sure.”

“Ah, the Gwithlion,” said Brinkworth, nodding. “Wicked wights they are.”

“What do they do, Master Hoad?” inquired the spit-boy.

“Hideous hags they are,” said the ostler, “hideouser than old biddy Grethet, if your brain can invent such. They mislead and waylay travelers by night on the mountain roads. Sometimes they take the form of goats. Not content with roaming about in the dark, they even visit the houses of the mountain people, especially in stormy weather, and when the Gwithlion knock at the door, the folk within know they must be greeted hospitably for fear of the harm they might do.”