The Riddle

by Alison Croggon

  All right. Now.

  This time, Maerad was so anxious for their melding that she knocked Cadvan over. He staggered to his feet, gasping, and Maerad stared at him in bafflement: why could they not meld?

  Maerad, it's like you're attacking me, said Cadvan. If you do that again, you'll destroy me. We shall have to fight separately. We need to make semblances to confuse it. They are not clever, these creatures.

  Maerad shook her head in confusion, but had no time to think, for the iridugul had recovered itself and was now raining blows upon them in a rage. Cadvan was concentrating on keeping his shield intact, and simultaneously working a glimmerspell, a semblance of himself and Darsor, which he could leave behind him for the iridugul to attack.

  Maerad cleared her mind, trying to ignore the furious hammerings of the iridugul. First she made another shield that enclosed Cadvan's, reinforcing it, and then she began to work a glimmerspell. To make even such an easy charm under such attack was difficult, but she concentrated grimly I am Maerad of Pellinor, Elednor Edil-Amarandh na, she said fiercely to herself; why am I being so stupid?

  Maerad's semblance took a little longer than Cadvan's, but after what seemed like an eternity, they had created shining replicas of themselves. Cadvan extinguished his magelight and took Darsor's reins. They waited, choosing their time, before they slipped out of the shield of White Fire and stumbled along the base of the cliff, leaving the iridugul to attack their empty images. The hail pelted into them as soon as they left the protection of the light, but Maerad put her head down and ran with Cadvan as fast as she could, hugging the wall, praying the iridugul was too enraged to notice the tiny figures scrambling along the mountainside like furtive mice. It was now nearly dark.

  They had almost reached a hairpin bend in the road, when disaster struck. At the bend was a sheer precipice guarded only by a low stone wall and one of the standing stones, which rose like a black, ominous finger in the seething grayness around them. As they neared it, Maerad disbelievingly watched the standing stone rise up in the air: and suddenly there materialized in front of them not one, but two iriduguls, one holding the standing stone over its head as a weapon.

  Cadvan stopped dead, instantly throwing a shield around them, and mounted Darsor, who was foamed with sweat. Maerad looked back desperately; she could see the first iridugul still attacking their semblances, its fury increasing as its club seemed to pass through them without hurt. Three!

  Maerad, we're going to have to blast them and run, Cadvan said into her mind. And then he noticed, for the first time, that Imi had gone. Where's Imi?

  She ran off....

  Cadvan said nothing, but reached down and pulled her into the saddle behind him. Then, without even pausing for thought, they both sent out bolts of White Fire, aiming for the iriduguls' eyes, and Cadvan urged on Darsor, who leaped forward in a surge of muscle, making for the bend in the road. Maerad heard the screams of the iridugul, an unbearable noise like the tortured wrenching of stone, and just hung on as Darsor plunged forward. The great horse spun himself around the sharp bend, making Maerad's neck crack with the violence of the turn, and tore on down the road into the gale, bolting for his life.

  Maerad heard the splintering of rock as the standing stone crashed into the road at their heels, and somehow Darsor sped up, his hooves skidding on the icy stones. Then suddenly an iridugul was before them, bringing down a fist like a massive rock on the cliff above them, and there was a rumbling as if the whole side of the mountain was collapsing. Maerad looked up, and with a sick horror saw a landslide of snow and boulders moving with a ghastly slowness toward them. She instinctively covered her eyes, forgetting for that moment everything except her fear of death. Darsor reared, and she fell off onto the road and rolled, coming to rest at the very edge of the precipice. She scrambled up in time to see Cadvan, his face glimmering pale, turn in shock and call her name, trying to pull up, but Darsor's reckless pace was unstoppable. She saw the greathearted horse plunge on through the gathering shadows, still globed in Cadvan's shield of White Fire, trying with his last desperate strength to beat the inexorable rockfall. She instinctively ran the other way, away from the pebbles that were just beginning to trickle down the slope, and then turned to watch, pushing her soaked hair out of her eyes, her chest heaving in great sobs of breath.

  Darsor and Cadvan raced along the cliff side. It was too far to the next bend; they would never make it.

  Just as they vanished in the gloom, the entire side of the mountain slid onto the road with a terrible sound like thunder that just rolled on and on and on, and the ground beneath Maerad shook and trembled so she was nearly flung off the road. Icy sludge and pebbles struck her face. The edge of the rockfall was only a body-length away, and she crawled toward the cliff face, sobbing with terror. When the noise stopped, she looked up. Where the road had been was just an impassable blankness of rock and ice, and the iridugul had vanished.

  There was no chance Cadvan and Darsor had escaped. Buried beneath those mountains of rubble, she understood with an agony as clear and sharp as a fresh wound, were those she loved as much as her own life. Maerad covered her face with her hands, stunned and disbelieving. Cadvan and Darsor were dead. It couldn't be true; it must be some awful nightmare. She slid down the mountain wall, hiding her face. It could not be true, and yet it was. In a paroxysm of grief she beat her forehead against the mountainside until it bled and fell insensible onto the frozen stone.

  Zmarkan

  O raven, where are you flying

  Over the ice and snow?

  0 raven, surely I'm dying

  And my mother doesn't know.

  Fly through the bitter weather,

  Fly through the starless night,

  Where my people come together

  To sing by firelight.

  Find my mother and kiss her

  For I'll not kiss her again.

  How sorrowfully I miss her

  Staunching my final pain.

  Find my darling lover

  Whose lips are sweeter than wine.

  Tell her my life is over

  And she will never be mine.

  0 raven, where are you flying

  Over the ice and snow?

  0 raven, now I am dying

  And my mother doesn't know.

  Traditional Pilanel folksong,

  Library of Lirigon

  Chapter XIII

  THE PIPES OF THE ELIDHU

  WHEN Maerad opened her eyes, it was so dark she thought she had gone blind. She tried to sit up, but her body wouldn't obey her. Perhaps I'm paralyzed, she thought, or maybe I'm dead. The thought was strangely comforting, and she lay in the darkness for a long time, without memory or thought. After a while, a sharp rock pressing into her cheek became irritatingly uncomfortable and she tried to move again. This time she was able to shift her head, and as she did, sensation flooded back into her body. She hurt all over, as if she had been beaten with sticks from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes, and she was wet through and freezing. Groaning, she managed to crawl up, and sat with her back to the cliff wall, holding her head, her body shuddering with violent, uncontrollable tremors.

  As she sat there, memory crept back, first one image and then another. She did not search for it; something within her pulled back from the terrible realization of what had happened to her. But randomly, inexorably, images floated into her mind. Finally, with a numbing feeling of shock, she remembered the terrible sight of Cadvan and Darsor engulfed by the landslide. She stared blindly into the darkness, her eyes dry.

  This time she really was alone. All her complaints and resentments of the past days seemed so trivial now. This was the disaster Cadvan had tried to warn her of, and she had brushed off his warnings, sure and arrogant in her power. And her power had failed her. She hadn't been able to meld with Cadvan, as a Bard should, and she hadn't been able to work her Elemental powers either. She had cowered abjectly in the middle of herself, and she had failed. As she remembered
what had happened, she was almost glad of the physical pain; compared to her mental anguish, it was a relief.

  Cadvan and Darsor's deaths were her fault. And Imi, she thought, had been killed in her panicked flight, or worse, lay with broken legs on some inaccessible slope, dying a slow and terrible death of thirst and starvation.

  As she tasted the full bitterness of her self-accusation, Maerad considered whether to throw herself off the side of the mountain. It would be a just punishment, she thought coldly. Such a creature as she had no reason to live. Such a creature as she deserved no friends, if she failed to protect them.

  Gradually the darkness became less absolute, and she could see the outlines of the road glimmering against the lighter darkness of the sky, and the huge black mass of rocks close beside her that entombed Cadvan and Darsor. She looked up and saw a blur of silver above the black blades of the mountain range where the moon, now at her full, hid behind a bank of clouds.

  Maerad's face itched with blood, and she clumsily tried to wipe her eyes with her gloves, which were rimed with frost. I need something to drink, she thought, and some of the generalized pain in her body identified itself as an overpowering thirst. Her lips were parched and cracked. Oh, I'm so thirsty and so hungry, she thought. But there's nothing to drink and no food—

  She sat unmoving, sunk in hopelessness, and it was only when she shifted to ease the aches in her body that she remembered that she still wore her pack. In a sudden panic of haste, she fumbled it off her shoulders and started trying to open it, but her fingers were so numb they kept slipping off the fastenings. Eventually she got the pack open and found a waterbottle, of which she took a long draft, and the medhyl, which brought a little fire into her chilled veins, and then she unwrapped some of the dried biscuit. She ate only a little of that, because it hurt to chew. Her lips felt as if they were on fire.

  She felt restored enough to make a tiny magelight, and with its help searched through the bag until she found some balm, which she put on her lips and then smeared over her face, slightly easing the stinging pain. Briefly she touched the reed pipes the Elidhu had given her. For an instant, the light greens of early spring woodlands filled her mind, and she remembered Ardina as she had first appeared to her, in the forests of the Weywood, long, long ago it seemed, in another life. A bar of a song floated into Maerad's mind.

  Maerad picked up the pipes awkwardly in her gloved hands, studying them as if she had never seen them before. She had never played them. They were simple cut pipes such as a child might make, fashioned of a dark purplish reed bound with woven grasses. She wondered what they sounded like.

  She ought to make a lament for Cadvan and Darsor and Imi. That was what Bards did. And she was still a Bard, even if she had betrayed her calling. She thought briefly of her lyre, but she knew her hands were too numb to play it. And some other part of her thought she was unworthy to touch her lyre, as if she had renounced her right to that most precious of her possessions.

  She sat for a long time while the night grew colder, holding the pipes loosely in her hands. At last, reaching a decision, she drank some more of the medhyl. Then she painfully pulled off her gloves and rubbed some of the medhyl and some balm into her fingers. Her fingers burned unmercifully, but, at last, she managed to make them flex and curl enough to hold the pipes properly. She held the instrument to her lips and blew experimentally. Her lips were so cracked that at first she could not make any sound at all, but she persisted, and with a small feeling of triumph managed to get a tiny sound. It made a thin, high fluting, like the wind over rocks.

  She played up and down some scales, becoming, despite her extremity, absorbed by her fascination for music. Maerad had played similar instruments as a child and she had some virtuosity with them. These had an unusual richness of tone, and she found she could bend the notes expressively. When she had tested the pipes to her satisfaction, she stood up. This took some time, as on her first attempt her legs simply buckled beneath her, but she continued with a single-minded stubbornness until she was able to stand upright without having to lean against the rock wall, planting her feet doggedly on the ground.

  She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and played.

  She played for Darsor and Imi, her friends, who had been with her through so much. She played for their beauty as they ran free on the Rilnik Plains, racing and kicking and nipping each other, the wind blowing out their manes in ripples of sable and burnished silver, while she and Cadvan ate the evening meal. She played for their simple, undemanding companionship, for Imi's nose leaning on her shoulder, whickering softly to comfort her, for the wordless comfort of her sympathy. She played for Darsor's dour humor, his endurance, and his plain, steadfast loyalty. And, last of all, so that it might not go utterly unremarked even if she died where she stood, Maerad played for Darsor's heroic attempt to rescue them from the landslide, for his shining, unbroken spirit and his great heart that had never quailed nor admitted defeat, even in the face of total disaster.

  She finished, her eyes still shut, and bowed her head for a few moments of silence. Then she lifted her pipes again and played for Cadvan.

  She had loved Cadvan, and he had loved her, and, she knew now, with an unassuageable bitterness, that she had misunderstood that love. He was her first friend, the first who had seen her for who she was; he had rescued her from slavery and petty tyranny and shown her the world of Barding, a world of loveliness and humanity she had not known was possible. She remembered her first sight of his shadowed face, exhausted and sad, in the cowbyre in Gilman's Cot, and how she had trusted him, and had continued to trust him despite all the conflicts between them. She remembered the hours of his teaching, how freely he had given her the gifts within himself, how patiently he had revealed the secrets and wonders of the world to her astonished eyes. She remembered the brilliance of his rare smile, when the fountain of his joy spilled over and illuminated everything around him.

  Now that he was gone forever, it was as if, for the first time, she could see him clearly: imperfect, driven, haunted, stern, divided within himself; but also true, honest, generous, strong, and gentle. He had been, all at once, her father and her teacher and her friend. Her grieving love welled through the pure, haunting notes, filling the desolate mountainside with inconsolable yearning for everything she had lost. Her tears spilled down her face and froze on the pipes and on her fingers. Maerad, lost in the music, did not notice she was crying.

  At last, she finished. She let the notes die away into silence, and remained still for a long time, her head bowed, her eyes shut. Then she painfully took the pipes from her lips; in her long playing they had frozen there, and they pulled away the skin. She felt a little warm blood run down her chin and freeze. She straightened herself and opened her eyes.

  For a moment, Maerad thought the moon itself was standing on the mountainside. She blinked in dazzlement. The bare rock of the road and the wall behind her shone like burnished silver, and behind every blazing boulder and pebble stood a black shadow. Before her stood Ardina, but she appeared neither as a wild Elidhu of the woods, shimmering naked in a bower of branches, nor as the agelessly beautiful Queen of Rachida. Maerad saw her as the songs described her, as Cadvan had sung of her once, long ago: the enchanting daughter of the moon, a being spun of sheer moonbeams, beautiful and evanescent.

  Maerad was past astonishment. She thought she must be dreaming, or suffering a fantastic vision, as people were said to do sometimes in the extremity before death, and she gazed at Ardina as if it were completely natural that she should be there.

  The Elidhu was suspended slightly above the ground, unmoving save for her hair, which stirred in a wind that Maerad could not feel. She seemed to be waiting for Maerad to speak. At last, as the vision did not disappear, Maerad bowed, but the movement was too much for her, and she slid down the mountain wall, until she was sitting on the ground, still staring at Ardina, her body racked again by uncontrollable tremors. At that, the Elidhu stepped toward her, putting a han
d on her forehead. It felt like ice, but thrillingly alive, as if the energy of a mountain river coursed through her veins. Maerad's shuddering stopped.

  "Are you dying, my daughter?" Ardina asked. "I think you have put all your life into your music. I wish I had asked you to play before; I have heard no such music since the days of Afinil. But even then, only the Elidhu could play with such wildness and such skill and such sadness."

  Maerad tried to speak, but her throat was so parched she couldn't make anything beyond a croak. She just nodded, swallowing. Yes, she was dying.

  "I think you did not mean to call me." Ardina laughed, her head to one side. "You forget what I said: that if you needed me, you should play the pipes I gave you. But you had another desire, I think."

  Maerad did not answer, but a fresh tear rolled down her cheek, and Ardina sighed. "I warned you once, about love. Mortals die like the reeds, and then within the world's circle is only absence. Ah, my dear daughter, there is no remedy for love or grief. They persist beyond all boundaries."

  Ardina's words pierced Maerad to the quick. She bowed her head to hide her face and saw that she still clutched the pipes in her hands. With a dogged deliberateness she put them back in her pack, and then lifted her pack onto her lap and clutched it, almost as if she were drowning. She could scarcely feel it with her numbed hands, but it was solid and real, and obscurely comforting. Ardina watched her closely, but without impatience.

  "Do you choose to die?" she asked, almost disinterestedly. "For I will not interfere with any choice of yours. I know what it is to desire death, and to be refused it. But if you do not choose death, I will help you. It pains me to see such suffering in thee, daughter." With that intimate address, some of the despair that had frozen Maerad's heart melted, and she met Ardina's gaze. The fey, yellow eyes of the Elidhu were soft with compassion.