The Bitterbynde Trilogy (152 page)

Several nights after entering Lallillir, they came to a gorge cut out of the fell-side, between two ferny shoulders. Along its nadir gushed a loud, broad stair of water, so dark and swift in the moonlight that the companions gave it a name—‘Black Force'. This watercourse was too wide and swift to cross on foot, and the swan-girl, during one of her brief visits, had advised the travellers to divert their path to lower levels. She told them that stepping stones crossed the Force where, silted and shallow, it entered the Blackwater.

The deeply cloven rift that birthed Black Force was too stark and precipitous to allow anyone to cross, except goats and other sure-footed beasts. The travellers began to search for another route. Above the cleft, the fell-top hung like a curtain against a roil of hyacinthine clouds, banners heralding a storm. Tahquil tilted her head back and studied the horizon measuringly.

‘I would like to go that way,' she said at last, ‘but 'tis more than likely the fell-tops are rife with creatures of eldritch, despite the growing light of day, such as it is. Indeed, here we are too close to their roads for comfort. Reluctant am I to say this, but we must go all the way down to the ford of stones.'

‘Let us sleep first,' said Caitri. Her young face looked drawn and haggard, grey as a crone's. At her side Viviana sat slouching, hollow-eyed.

‘Sleep,' said Tahquil gently. ‘I shall keep watch.'

Her two companions lay down in the dawn, beneath the meagre shelter of a jutting rock. New light brushed the ancient, cracked stone, burnishing it with nacre. Dew twinked gold, ruby and sapphire on the beards of grasses.

At dusk, the eerily gorgeous shape-shifter returned.

‘Windwater soon shall skim, sheeting, from far west-away sea,' she declared. Her flawless alabaster face peered obliquely from the long flowering of black hair. On her brow was bound a headband woven of scarlet geraniums. The white feathers edging the cloak's front opening glowed palely.

‘From salt-stream steams, water-hoisting winds scull, shimmering,' she proclaimed, ‘funnelled forcibly high where sharp horns of first fell scrape skies. Soon water-clouds shall shed windwater, wetting Elfinwoodsdale and, hastening for hinterlands, shall shower wild wolds, steeps and summits, hills and heights, hollows and holms, fissures, fosses and furrows. Streams, waters, forces of Blackwatervale shall swell, shape-shifting, forming formidable sluices. Hurry! Hasten! Slow wingless ones ford Swarth Force soon, soon since she's still small. When windwater falls, fierce, foaming, fulminating waters will forbid further wayfaring.'

‘Your warning is well received. I presume by “Swarth Force” you mean “Black Force”,' said Tahquil coolly. ‘Yet you did not warn us earlier of the approach of wood-goblins.'

‘
Ho-iss
!' The bird-girl raised her narrow arms, the feather cloak fanning from them in jagged folds like wings. ‘Shift-swan slave hoped wingless ones were wiser.'

‘In unfamiliar waters even
fowl queens
may become ensnared,' said Tahquil, unable to resist a hint of sarcasm. ‘Warn us of everything. Do not fail us another time.'

‘Hearken,' hissed the swanmaiden, leaning one degree closer. ‘Sweet-speaking handsome one woos where sprigs hang heavy with fruit. Fair face, fair words, sinister intent. She who falls for shadows shall soon weave her shroud.'

‘You speak of dangers in Cinnarine, which lies far ahead, if we ever reach it. But more immediately, what awaits us in Lallillir?'

‘Water wights haunt shores of Swarth Force—seelie, harmless. Fair or foul, sweet wench of shining hair or wizened hag, slender, well-favoured stalwart or strange, hairy fellow. Speak well. Wet wights wish for fire's heat. Show hospitality. Say “welcome”.'

‘Gruagachs? You speak of gruagachs?'

‘Sooth,' said the swanmaiden, or perhaps it was the wind that spoke, for she was no longer there.

Out of sight to the west, far beyond Swarth Fell and Bleak Fell, several thousand tons of water approached rapidly. High above the sea they rolled, driven by powerful atmospheric pressures. Part of the ocean had once again risen, distilled, into the welkin; another quarter-turn of the wheel that forever rotated, pumping the pure and colourless heart's blood of Aia.

On the fell-sides of Lallillir a poignant wail drew itself out like spun flax and wound itself on night's spindle—an eldritch storm-harbinger's alert. The moon like a thin smile stretched itself behind the imminence of rain and was intermittently obscured. Sporadically moonless and starless, the night concealed stumbling blocks, rude fountains and other obstacles. The three who endeavoured to hasten downhill on the southern shore of Black Force had only the tilt of the land to guide them, and brief glimmers of nocturnal radiance, and the shouting waters and a sense of the cold stream-bed at their right hands, steep deep, rugged as broken teeth. Soon this wicked, chuckling, innocent gush would be fed from the skies. The fell-tops, the fell-sides would deliver to it the excess of the saturated air's bounty in long strands, in shallow blowing sheets, in beaded chains and spatters of glassy globules mirroring the night. Then, Black Force would transform. A brimming, thundering engine, it would grow mighty enough to bruise the bones of Erith, to break trees, to crush those who dared to step across the stones strewn across its terminus.

Before then, would-be traversers must reach the crossing place.

Down alongside Black Force they clambered in a hurry. Fallen logs lay across their way, bright with dinner plates of orange fungus. Here, tiny siofra frolicked. The wights themselves were reminiscent of red-capped mushrooms. They swaggered, slyly peeping and snickering—until Viviana, in a temper, cast a stone at them and they seemed to go up in smoke, leaving only a hollow, heartless emptiness of roaring water that was somehow worse than the petty harassment, and accompanied by the awareness of being studied by antipathetic eyes.

Again, clouds shrouded the stars.

Slipping, staggering, they went blindly in the darkness, crawling sometimes, feeling with their hands for purchase. In this domain of unseelie watchers, Tahquil had no inclination to draw attention by removing her glove to exploit the ring's illuminative qualities. Hampered by obstacles of rocky outcroppings, cliffs, thickset rearing tree-roots whose soil had been washed from their arches in past times of spate, and deep brakes of fern across their route, the travellers wondered in dread whether it would take the entire night to reach the river.

Thunder gonged the sky in the distance, pushing Tahquil and her companions forward with greater urgency. Progress, however, was protracted; for while speed was paramount, care must be exercised. A turned ankle, a fractured limb would ultimately prove fatal.

Above the dinning of approaching thunder and the cacophony of water could be heard a rattling of shells, a chorus of shrill laughter, an argument of nasty tongues in some unfamiliar patois—yet this might have been imaginary, a hallucination of hearing, brought about by continual high-level noise. Tahquil even considered she could hear an orchestra of violins. The uncanny melody revolved continuously in her head, playing throughout the inmost halls of her brain.

There was no stopping for rest or refreshment. Fat raindrops began to fall desultorily, patting the cheeks of the travellers like fond mothers. The damsels licked their moisture from their lips. No one spoke. No one emitted any sound save an indrawn breath when balance was momentarily forfeited, an involuntary yelp when an unseen rock or twig scored flesh, a muffled exclamation at unexpected eccentricities of the terrain. All night they battled on, the gravid rainclouds pressing lower over their heads, the thunder pounding its premonitory drums ever closer. Static charges were building in the ether. Towards the bleak morning, an eldritch singing started up from all directions—a joining of reedy and croaking and pure, high voices structured in a weird progression and relationship of chords, raising the hair of the listeners.

At
uhta,
they reached the ford.

For a moment, a rift in the clouds allowed a sidereal gleam to splinter down. The mouth of Black Force smiled wide and shallow. Flat stones spanned it, as promised by the swanmaiden. Dark as polished jet, the torrent ran rapidly between these spray-spattered slabs. The opposite bank of the Force was hidden in an undergrowth of umbellifers—wild angelica, lesser water parsnip, hemlock—their flat-topped blossoms nodding like meringues of white lace.

In that very pre-dawn hour, the heavens unleashed their pent-up tears at last. Rain sprang down in diagonal spars. As though they were aware of the impending increase in their strength, the waters of Black Force noisily poured themselves with greater exuberance around the flat, irregular stones. They spurled in cascades of black sheened with silver, in whirlpools like spiral nebulae, in whale spouts and tiny fountains, all dimpled by the impact of raindrops whose craters were ringed with leaping droplets of displaced water like tiny, split-second coronets. Wet and shiny the flagstones lay, in a lengthy disjointed line. Some low-lying ones were already water-filmed.

‘Too soon the waters rise!' Cairn's shouts filtered through the tumult of rain, through the crashing and booming of air rapidly expanding along the paths of lightning. ‘Sorrow take the swan's foul and paltry advice—we are too late to make the crossing!'

Tahquil turned a rain-lashed face towards the little girl.

‘No. If we do not cross now it might be many days before the Force subsides enough. It is perilous to wait for long in one place—because of what lies ahead, no less than what comes from behind. I dare not waste any more time.'

She pulled a rope from her pack and tied one end about her waist. After paying out a few lengths, she attached Caitri similarly. The other end of the rope she offered to Viviana.

‘Crossing now is folly,' shrieked the courtier. ‘I remain here.'

‘Solitude in Lallillir is a worse folly,' bawled Tahquil, securing the straps on her pack. ‘And each moment we stand here in argument, the waters rise a little further. Come!'

She strode to the stony verge of the watercourse. From this point, the distance to the nearest stepping stone was a daunting five feet or more across boiling glass. Stepping back a couple of yards, she ran up and launched herself out over the water, landing jarringly on the barren islet. From there she leaped to the second step.

‘Caitri?'

Presently, the young girl followed. Looking back, Tahquil saw Viviana gaining the first stepping stone. Rain sluiced down in blinding sheets, in drowning torrents, in liquid walls. The air was solid rain. It hammered on their heads, their shoulders and packs. It dragged down their clothing, filled their boots, their eyes, their mouths and ears and overbrimmed the cups of their skulls.
Down, down, down,
it sang, and
down, down, down
sang the surging Force meeting the swarming river. Another quarter-turn of the wheel—what rises must fall.

Like improbable frogs, the travellers bounded from one stone to another, and now each landing place was skimmed with the newborn flood. The water was a silver dragon, its surface laminated with scales formed by pelting raindrops. The dragon clashed and steamed.

There was no turning back—the ford's centre point had been achieved. Now, as much distance divided them from the northern shore as from the southern, and both were invisible. They imagined themselves marooned in a vitreous chamber, close-walled. Tahquil leaped to the next islet. Her foot splashed into the two inches of water racing over it. The vigorous current tugged and she leaned against its drag, leaned on billowing robes of fluidity.

The rope cinching her waist jerked her painfully to her knees. Taut as a gittern-string it dragged at her, stretching like a rod away into the massed armies of rain lances. Caitri, one moment ago a shadowy figure melting through layers of water, had vanished. She had been taken by the waters, and Black Force was rising.

Tilting her weight back, Tahquil braced herself against the submerged rock, contrary to the determined pressure of this tide. She drew hard on the rope. Her sinews cracked. At vision's edge, the form of Viviana crouched and did the same. The river boiled. Its flow banked up powerfully against the form of Caitri downstream, held against it by the ropes. The driving waters curled like surf over the little girl's head. When they dragged her in she was conscious, but Black Force had whisked her pack away and the waters were still rising.

Tahquil held Caitri in her arms, putting her mouth to the child's ear.

‘I have not the strength to support you. Should we jump together and our timing fail, we should both fall. You must do it alone.'

‘Cut the rope,' gasped Caitri. ‘I cannot.'

‘No.'

Tahquil left her, then, and sprang away through dark curtains. Her only hope lay in desperation. She willed Caitri to follow, and in a moment the antics of the rope indicated hope fulfilled.

The current's pressure grew. Soon the rising tide would become irresistible and sweep the feet of the travellers from under them, tossing them into the flood like dolls, filling not only their eyes but their lungs, their stomachs, the last moments of their awareness. Squinting through the vertical gloom, Tahquil perceived a ragged, linear darkness—the opposite shore. Breathing water, choking on fire, gasping for breath, they gained it at last.

There in drenched debilitation they lay and allowed panic to drain from them in pools on the ground, letting the rain rinse it from them and course down to suffuse the Blackwater along with the raging waters that had induced that terror.

Fear ebbed and light waxed, but the silver flails of the rain did not let up their scourging. The pewter and grisaille radiance of the day revealed drowning forests on the northern shore of Black Force, and now the travellers were shivering. Beneath a half-fallen tree they sipped the glistening red syrup of
nathrach deirge.
Somewhat revived, they struggled to their feet and tramped off in search of a dry place to eke out the day in repose.