The Riddle

by Alison Croggon

  The following morning, they picked up their packs and left Velissos with many warm farewells. Elenxi led them up a path even more vertiginous than those they had already traveled, winding its way around tumuli of granite and along sharp ridges. They were so high up now that it was cool, although the sky was clear and blue, and the air held a special freshness, as if they were the first to breathe it. Very often, little mountain streams leaped down the slopes, some no wider than a step, pouring in miniature waterfalls into pools full of shiny pebbles. Maerad tasted the water: it was so cold it numbed her lips.

  "It's fresh from the snowline of the Lamedon," said Cadvan, nodding upward to the bare stony pinnacles that stretched above them.

  Maerad watched a pair of eagles circling so high up they could hardly be seen. She didn't look down for very long or very often, because the height made her feel a little dizzy.

  "It must be harsh here in winter," she said.

  "It is," Elenxi said. "Winter is when the herders come in, the goats and sheep are shut up in their sheds, and we eat the sweet stored apples and grain and tell long stories by the fires. And then the storms howl about our heads! The weather here is like the people: fierce and unpredictable." He grinned.

  It was very tiring, climbing these slopes. No wonder the Velissos people were so strong, Maerad thought. You needed muscles of iron just to walk around. After three hours they paused for a meal, and then pressed on. Maerad's thighs were beginning to ache badly, and she was glad of the walking stick Elenxi had cut for her from a thorn tree. At last, they reached one of the meadows that were scattered over the mountains, like emerald liquor in cups of stone. This one was much bigger than most of them, and at its end was a stone house surrounded by three wooden huts and a small garden. Goats wandered the grass, their bells clinking lazily as they cropped, but otherwise there was no one to be seen.

  Maerad flopped down and lay on her back, squinting at the blue sky through the nodding grasses and wildflowers. "Leave me here," she said. "Oh, my poor legs!"

  "What, complaining so after a mere leisurely stroll?" said Elenxi, lifting his eyebrows. "If you're to be an honorary Thoroldian, you'll have to do better than that."

  "Mercy!" said Maerad. "I'm not sure I have the strength to be Thoroldian. You're all made of wire."

  Elenxi dragged her up, and they made their way across the meadow to the stone house. Goats came up to them and butted them curiously, their tails wagging comically. Maerad looked into their strange yellow eyes, but didn't try to talk to them. She was sure she'd have plenty of time later.

  As they neared the house, a man as big as Elenxi came out, his arms spread wide. "Welcome, my brother!" he said, enfolding Elenxi in an embrace and kissing him on both cheeks and then turning to the other two. "I am Ankil. And you are Cadvan and Maerad? I am glad to meet you at last, Cadvan; welcome, Maerad. Nerili has told me much about both of you. Come in, come in. I have wine, I have water, I have food. Come in and rest yourselves."

  Maerad studied Ankil with an intensifying curiosity. He was very like Elenxi, but what puzzled her more was her conviction that he was a Bard. He had about him something of the subtle glow by which Bards could recognize each other, although in his case it had an evanescence that made her feel unsure; it was strangely different in him. And, in any case, what was a Bard doing up in the mountains herding goats?

  The house was surrounded by a small version of the wide porticos obligatory in Thorold, and there was set a table and a single chair. Ankil went into the house and returned with three stools. "Guests are not frequent here," he said cheerfully. "So you must forgive the cobwebs on these." He gave them a perfunctory brush and disappeared inside.

  Maerad dropped her pack on the porch and sat down gratefully, rubbing her legs. Before long, Ankil was back with a tray on which he had placed a carafe of rich Thoroldian wine, another of cool water, four cups, and fresh bread and cheese. They sat and ate, their appetites sharpened by the mountain air and their long walk.

  By herder standards, Ankil's house was luxurious; it was smaller than most houses Maerad had passed in the villages on their way, but much more substantial than the plain wooden huts she had seen dotted around the mountain pastures. She found out later that unlike other herders, who moved to the mountain pastures only in summer, Ankil lived there all year round. The house was clearly very old, and had been built with thick granite walls through which were punched small, shuttered windows. The roof, made of clay tiles, was steeply raked to prevent a buildup of snow, and the whole was built on high foundations, so the porch was several steps up.

  Unusual for a Thoroldian house, it was built on three levels: there was a cellar, used for storage and work; above that a kitchen and living area; and on the top, above the stove, two bedrooms, with sloping ceilings and shuttered dormer windows that poked out through the tiles. In the rooms were fragrant mattresses stuffed with dried mountain grasses and covered with soft sheepskins. During their stay, Ankil moved out to one of the ancillary huts, where he slept on a mattress in the empty stalls, for the goats slept in the meadows during the summertime. Maerad felt guilty when she saw this, but Ankil just laughed and said it was no punishment for him to sleep like a proper goatherd.

  She soon found out why Ankil had the puzzling Bardic glow. He and Elenxi were, indeed, brothers.

  "I went down to the School, like Elenxi, when I was a boy," he told them over the midday meal. "But, you know, I just didn't want to be a Bard. Not like Elenxi here," and he poked him with affection. "He is the clever one. But me, I got bored with all that."

  "He was in love," said Elenxi, smiling.

  "Well, that too," Ankil said. "My Kiranta was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Her eyes were as gray and stormy as the sea and her hair was black as olives, and her skin was like the pale golden silk they make in the valleys. Yes, I was in love. But it was more than that: I could never learn how to read and write. No matter what my mentors tried, I couldn't make any sense of those squiggles they call letters."

  "So what happened?" asked Maerad, fascinated.

  "Well, when my teachers had all thrown their arms into the air and declared that there was nothing they could do, I came back to Velissos and married my Kiranta. I didn't want to be a Bard; I just wanted to tend my goats and trees and garden and grow my children. I was very happy for a long time. But then"—he shrugged—"as is the way of things, my children grew up and my Kiranta grew old. And that's when Barding caught up with me, you see, because I did not grow old. I was little different from the way I had been when I had come back from the School, and Kiranta's hair grew gray, and then white. But my Kiranta looked no different to me, because I loved her; for me she was always the same beautiful girl who looked for me in the pass, with her eyes shining."

  Ankil sighed heavily, and Maerad felt tears start in her eyes. Cadvan was looking at Ankil with a quick empathy. "That is hard," he said.

  "Yes, it was hard when she died," said Ankil. "It is always difficult to have Bards in a family, and we have so many in ours— Well, I buried my Kiranta, and wept for her, and I still miss her; every day I miss her. So I made sure my children had what they needed, and I came up here. And here I've been ever since."

  In the silence that followed his story, Maerad wondered how long Ankil had lived here, in this beautiful, isolated meadow. One hundred years? Two hundred?

  "Did you not want to go back to the School?" she asked.

  "Ah, no, young Bard," he said. "It was too late for me, and there was still that little matter of the reading and writing. I am more useful here; I breed fat goats and I make a famous cheese."

  "He is too modest," said Elenxi. "Ankil is a famous healer, and many send all this way for his help."

  "Pffft, that is nothing," he said. "I am content."

  "Were any of your children Bards?" asked Maerad curiously.

  "Yes, two," said Ankil. "One is in Gent, another in Turbansk. And my granddaughter is First Bard in Busk."

  "Nerili?" excla
imed Maerad in surprise.

  "Yes, my little Neri. She is the image of my Kiranta, and when I see her, I am both proud and sad; she calls up in me so many happy memories, and so many sorrowful reflections. So you see, although I was no good as a Bard, I have made my contribution."

  Elenxi stayed the night before heading down the mountain to confer with more villagers. They had a merry time—merry enough for Maerad to feel very unwell the following morning. She was fascinated by the two brothers, at once so similar and so different, and looked from one to the other in wonder all night: one a Bard of the First Circle, the other a goatherd. The respect between them was palpable. There was no sense that Elenxi felt in any way superior to Ankil; in fact, she felt that he deferred to his brother in a way she hadn't seen him do to anybody, not even Nerili. Elenxi, she found, was the older brother, by four years, so seniority did not explain it.

  Over the coming days, she began to understand Elenxi's respect. Ankil was, for all his unletteredness, as wise as Nelac, Cadvan's teacher in Norloch, and beneath his gentleness and apparent simplicity was a rare strength of spirit. His memory was prodigious, and his life had left him plenty of time for reflection. He was a vast storehouse of songs and tales, and his knowledge of herblore was, Cadvan told her, reputedly unrivaled in Thorold.

  He lived a life of comfortable austerity. Inside his house was tidy and clean, and everything in it had the beauty of functional things well made. There was little decoration, and no books at all. The kitchen was dominated by a black-iron wood stove with a huge, smoke-blackened chimney. It was furnished only with a broad table and stools, and was surrounded by shelves, which were well stocked with bottles of dried herbs and pulses and grains and salt. Yet more herbs hung in bunches from the ceiling, interspersed with bunches of onions and garlic, infusing the room with a pungent fragrance. The cellars were carefully sealed against damp and were stacked with jars of pickles and jams and preserves and honey, bags of nuts and grains and flours and pulses, and shelves of fruits and vegetables gathered from the previous year—wrinkled golden apples and pears, turnips and potatoes and carrots. And barrels and barrels of wine. There was no meat, because Ankil would not eat animals. Some food and all the wine came up from the village, but the bulk of what he ate was grown and preserved by Ankil himself.

  Maerad was to find that visitors were not so infrequent as Ankil had intimated; at least once a week a Velissos villager would struggle up to the meadow, leading a pony that carried supplies on its back—wood or grain or wine—and leading it back down laden with cheeses or combs of honey or some especially requested healing potion.

  It all bespoke a life of hard physical labor, and, indeed, Ankil was busy from dawn to dusk. At night he sat with them in the fragrant kitchen or, if it was not too cold, outside on the porch, and they told many tales and sang many songs, their music echoing out over the mountains of Thorold.

  Maerad and Cadvan had their own routines, although they helped Ankil in his tasks whenever they could. Cadvan was now intensively drilling Maerad in High Magery, practical and theoretical, and she continued to learn the Ladhen runes and Nelsor scripts, although they hadn't many books with them. In the afternoons, mentally tired by the work, it was a relief to practise swordcraft and unarmed combat. It also provided much entertainment for the goats, who after a couple of days would gather around them in a circle, their jaws constantly chewing, following the strokes with interested expressions, skittering off in mixed alarm and hilarity when the sparring became too violent. One, a huge billy goat, constantly made rude remarks. Occasionally he was so obnoxious that Maerad would purposely let a loose slash go his way, and then, his dignity affronted by having to skip backward, he would butt the other goats so they scattered in alarm.

  Maerad found a tranquility in this simple life, very different from the busy intensity of Busk, and her nightmares again subsided. The longer she stayed with Ankil, the more the peace of the mountains began to enter her. Sometimes, when her day's work was done and Cadvan was off helping Ankil with the garden or the goats, she would climb to another tiny meadow nearby and just sit, letting the deep quiet fill her up slowly, an unhurried accretion of light. From this meadow she could look over the whole south of the Isle of Thorold, right down to where the sea vanished into blue mists of distance. At these times, the things that troubled her seemed far away and unimportant: all that mattered was the hum of the bees and the chirp of birdsong, the way the sun gleamed on the edge of a blue wildflower, the distant bleat and clink of grazing goats.

  In these moments she usually didn't think about anything.

  But when she did, her thoughts most often turned to Hem. He would rise vividly in her mind, his gangly limbs, which had, nevertheless, a surprising grace; his dark, haunted face with its mischievous smile; the intense blue eyes that alone hinted that he was her brother. She remembered the terrible day that she and Cadvan had found him, stinking of urine and terror, concealed in a Pilanel caravan. Maerad still dreamed sometimes of the slaughtered bodies of the family who had hidden him. It had been the first time Maerad had really understood the horror of Hulls—the "Black Bards," as Hem called them. It had opened up a shocking vista of emptiness that appalled her. Hulls enjoy the suffering of others, Cadvan had said to her at the time; it answers some lack within themselves....

  Maerad sometimes felt she was all lack. It frightened her. Hem had filled an emptiness within her that she had not been aware of. She smiled, thinking of how he refused to call himself Cai, his birth name; he was, he insisted, Hem. But she also wondered what was behind that refusal, what it was about himself that he sought to deny. She had thought it was because Hem was not comfortable as a Bard. But perhaps it was something else. Hem, after all, was not an Annaren name; it came from the wandering people of Zmarkan. Maybe, without realizing it, Hem was cleaving to the distant memory of their Pilanel father.

  There was about her brother something irrepressible, a spark that even his abused childhood had not extinguished; and yet she feared for him, feared that the blackness stamped in him was a damage that would never be healed. But, Maerad thought fiercely, it must be healed; she could heal it, if they only had time.

  At least she knew her brother was alive, and that mere fact made her feel a little less alone in the world. No matter how many friends she made, Maerad still felt deeply alone. Part of it was her fate as the One, but it was more than that. She had been alone for as long as she could remember.

  It was inevitable that their evening conversations would turn at some point to Maerad and Cadvan's quest, and to the Riddle of the Treesong. Ankil hadn't expressed any curiosity about their reasons for concealment in the mountains, although he was clearly well informed about the recent events in Busk.

  One night, they were speaking of Maerad's Elemental ancestry, which interested Ankil keenly Maerad showed him the gold ring that the Elidhu Ardina had given her, and then ran upstairs to get the pipes that she had been given when they met in the Weywood in Annar. Ankil inspected the pipes closely; like all Bards, he was a musician. He refrained blowing through them, handling them gingerly, as if they might be dangerous.

  "I used to make pipes like that when I was a child," Cadvan commented.

  "As did I," said Ankil. "Out of the river reeds. They're the kind only children make. It's like those rhymes that children sing. They are never taught them by adults, but they sing the same nonsense from Zmarkan to Turbansk."

  Ardina's face sprang vividly to Maerad's mind: her wild, fey face, with its yellow eyes, cleft by an iris like a cat's. Maerad had seen her both as the grave Queen of Rachida and as the wild Elidhu. There was, she reflected now, something childlike in her different guises; perhaps it was why the Elementals were so distrusted by Bards.

  "The Elementals do not read books, as I do not," said Ankil. "They have their own Knowings, and their memories are deep. I have spoken myself with the Elidhu Lamedon."

  "Indeed?" said Cadvan, his interest quickening. "I did not know he still spoke with
humans."

  Ankil laughed. "He does not. But I, it seems, am half goat and half eagle, and so he deigns to speak to me. It is like talking to a storm! But he has told me many interesting things, and sometimes, when I am troubled, I will visit him."

  "How does he appear to you?" Maerad asked eagerly

  "Sometimes he won't appear at all. I climb all the way up there, and come all the way back. But when he wills, he appears to me as a form of mist, or sometimes he will speak as an eagle, but bigger by far than even the Thoroldian mountain eagles."

  "I am quite certain that Bards have not taken enough account of the Elementals over the centuries," said Cadvan. "To all our peril."

  "I too think that," said Ankil. "But not many Bards agree. Here in Thorold it's a little different, perhaps: I believe Elidhu blood runs in the veins of many Thoroldians. There are many tales here of love between water sprites and men, or of women who have gone into the mountains and come back ten years later leading a little child with strange eyes."

  "I wonder if the Lamedon would know anything about the Treesong," Maerad said.

  "Well, there is nothing in the library in Busk." Cadvan made a gesture of disgust. "I have been inhaling ancient dust for weeks, to no avail."

  "The Treesong?" said Ankil.

  "We're supposed to find it," said Maerad.

  She felt no doubts about trusting Ankil, and she plunged without hesitation into the tale of their quest. Ankil listened with close attention, his bushy eyebrows drawn together. Cadvan sat in silence, his face clouded with thought.

  "Hmmm," Ankil said when she had finished talking. "Well, I do not know if the Lamedon can help us. He is not overfond of Bards, as he has told me on many occasions, and he has no interest at all in the struggles of the Light and the Dark, and never has had. He is not like the Elidhu of Annar, who remember the Dhyllin and the days of Afinil, when Bard and Elidhu sang together."