THE BITTERBYNDE TRILOGY

Book One: The Ill-Made Mute

(c) Cecilia Dart-Thornton.

they had finished, a random design of smashed cephalothoraxes and carapaces remained, like pressed orchids, scarcely visible on the black stone floor with its shining flecks.

Truly, the lesser creatures had little chance.

Most of the time, Grethet was elsewhere. She would appear briefly to tend the fire, sometimes bringing food, abruptly leaning close to her ward to whisper, so that he shrank from her stinking breath.

"Boy," she would always say, "You, boy. You do as I say. It is better."

The youth in his weakness was grateful to be left alone, to lie in the warmth feeling the pounding of the ravening heart in his birdcage chest; drifting in and out of exhausted, dreamless sleep.

He had been discovered, like a babe, with eyes shuttered against the world; this finding being the foundation of his aliveness. But unlike a babe, he was gifted with more than raw, untutored instinct - his body remembered, if his mind did not A wide, if basic, world-understanding was patterned there, so that he comprehended heat and cold, high and low, light and dark - if not the word-sounds which symbolised them - without having to experiment. He recognised that a frown or a sneer, a suddenly engorged vein at the temples or a tautened jaw boded a forthcoming kick or blow; he could walk and work and feed himself as though he were normal, as though he were one of them. But he was not one of them. A huge piece was missing; the sum of a past.

Without memories he was merely an automated husk.

Some nights the youth half-woke, with tingling sensations making a race-track of his spine and standing his hair to attention. Some days that same surge charged the air, rousing the blood like strong liquor. These crispate experiences generally dissipated after an hour or so and as time dragged on, he became accustomed to them and did not think on them any further. They were a phenomenon that issued from Outside, and Outside was, for now, beyond his reach.

But oh, it beckoned - and sounds came to his ears from Outside - voices, the distant silver fanfare of trumpets, shouting, the heavy tread of boots, the barking of dogs and often, very often, the clatter of hooves on faceted planes of black stone that sparkled like a star-pricked sky.

One night, awakened by one such commotion, he crept on trembling legs into an adjoining store-room. Through a thin slot of a window in the thick stone wall he glimpsed a round, red-

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