The Riddle

by Alison Croggon

  For the barest moment, Maerad hesitated. It would be so easy to die, to renounce all her struggles and suffering, to escape the terrible grief that racked her spirit. But something within her refused to choose death; it would come to her eventually whether she chose or not, but an inner voice stubbornly cried out: not now. Slowly she said in a cracked voice, so quiet it could hardly be heard, "No, I don't want to die."

  Ardina leaned over her and kissed her forehead. From her cold lips blossomed a delicious glow that coursed through all Maerad's body, as if she were falling into a divinely comfortable bed and all her hurts were healed. She looked up into Ardina's wild face, and it seemed as if the entire world vanished into a golden mist: only the brilliant, unsettling eyes, eyes as yellow as topaz or citrine, burned in her mind like two lights of haven, as she drifted into the blessed shades of sleep.

  Chapter XIV

  MIRKA

  MAERAD didn't want to open her eyes. She didn't know where she was; she knew she hurt all over and that she had a bad headache. She was lying on something soft, and the air around her was warm. In her nostrils was a strong smell of woodsmoke laced with fish.

  She lay very still, listening. She heard the sounds of someone moving around, and then a faint metallic clang, and the gentle pop of a burning fire. Gingerly she touched what was covering her: it was soft and warm, some kind of fur.

  She heard someone moving toward her and tensed as a hand stroked her forehead. Involuntarily she opened her eyes. She looked into a cracked, ancient face, and a pair of very pale-blue, watery eyes.

  "Om toki nel?" said the face. Maerad looked back without speaking, and the mouth, a cave of wrinkles, opened in a smile, revealing a few blackened teeth. "Na, na, ek lada." The face nodded. "Na, na."

  "What?" said Maerad. Her voice came out as a croak. "Who are you?"

  But the figure had turned to shuffle back to the fire, which gave the only light in that tiny room, and was busy with a pot that hung suspended over it. She was, Maerad realized, a very old woman, smaller even than Maerad. She looked like a shapeless bundle of rags: she was wearing an unidentifiable number of clothes, oddments of furs and cloth, which all looked as if they hadn't been taken off since she had put them on. A few wisps of yellow-white hair citing to the polished dome of her scalp.

  Slowly she turned around, holding a bowl in two hands, and shuffled back, carrying the bowl with infinite care so she might not spill its contents. She sat down next to Maerad on a sawn-off log, which passed for a stool, and offered her a spoonful of something. It was where the smell of fish was coming from, and it made Maerad feel slightly nauseous.

  "Eat," said the old woman. "Eat. Good."

  Maerad struggled to sit upright, but her muscles would not obey her. The old woman nodded to herself and pushed the spoon against Maerad's lips until she opened her mouth to protest. Before she could speak, the old woman had slipped the spoon between her teeth. Maerad choked and involuntarily swallowed. It was a thin fish soup, and despite the smell, very good indeed. The nausea she had felt identified itself as ravenous hunger. The woman waited patiently while Maerad coped with her first mouthful and then gave her another spoonful, feeding her like a very small child until she had finished the bowl.

  "Good, good," she said. Her face cracked into a smile again. "Sleep now."

  Maerad's eyes were already shut.

  She didn't know how long she lay there in that tiny hut, drifting between sleep and brief waking. The old woman fed her soup, cleaned her and changed the furs when she was incontinent, and stroked her forehead wordlessly when, as sometimes happened, she woke from terrible nightmares of the mountainside falling, and slow, weak tears ran down her face. Sometimes daylight showed through tiny cracks in the walls like impossibly bright stars, and sometimes it was night; Maerad had no sense of continuity and didn't know if it was one day and one night or many. The wind wailed sometimes and died down, the rain beat sometimes and went away, and through it all she heard the old woman's voice, talking to herself in her own tongue or singing or humming, a ceaseless gentle monologue like the running of a river. Time simply vanished. Maerad accepted her ministrations passively; she felt like a baby, incapable of the simplest things, of feeding herself, walking, or even of speech.

  But one day—a day later? a week? a month?—she could sit up and take the bowl in her hands and feed herself. And this time, when she handed the bowl back, wiping her mouth, she said, "Thank you."

  "Good?" said the old woman. "Na, na, good." She carried the bowl back to the fire and wiped it carefully with an old cloth before she put it away on a stone shelf beside the fireplace. Maerad didn't go straight back to sleep, as she had before, but instead looked around curiously. She had never seen such a hovel, a ramshackle hut built of bits of stone and wood with rags stuffed into holes to keep out the wind, barely high enough to stand up in. For the first time, she noticed a yellow dog curled up asleep in the corner on a pile of ragged blankets, where she supposed the woman was sleeping, for Maerad had the only bed: a simple pallet piled with blankets and furs.

  "Where am I?" she asked.

  The old woman looked up and stared at her with rheumy blue eyes. "You Annaren?"

  Maerad nodded.

  The old woman pointed to the ground. "Here, Zmarkan." She pointed behind her, using the Pilanel name for the Osidh Elanor. "Idrom Uakin." Then she slapped herself on the chest with both her hands. "Me, Mirka." She grinned, showing her blackened teeth again. "You?"

  "I'm Maerad."

  The old woman came up to her and squinted into her face. "You good?"

  "A bit better."

  Mirka nodded, satisfied, and went back to her business of tending the fire and stirring the soup. Maerad sat in silence and watched her.

  "How did I get here?" she asked at last.

  "You come to my door. You forget? You very sick. Aieee, very, very sick." Mirka shook her head, making clicking noises with her tongue. "Bad storm, maybe you forget. I find, and bring you in. Mirka Mikinim, big famous once, no more, just old, just old." She cackled, a sudden younger light in her pale eyes. "You lucky girl. You dying, yes?"

  "Minikim?" repeated Maerad. She found Mirka's broken Annaren hard to follow, and the Pilanel word defeated her.

  "I forget the word. Witch? Dhilla? I mend people. Once."

  "Healer?" said Maerad, and then tried the Speech. "Dhillarearen?"

  Mirka paused in her scrubbing. "Yes, once," she said in the Speech. "You are a Dhillarearen?"

  "Yes," said Maerad; it was a relief not to have to struggle through barriers of language. "I don't know. I haven't had the right schooling to become a Bard."

  The woman cackled again. "Schooling? I am one of the Pilani. We don't send all with the Voice down to Annar, although some go. But that was a long time ago. I live here now, and wait for death to come and visit me. But, instead, I find you. What does that mean, eh?"

  "I don't know," said Maerad. She felt confused, and even this short conversation tired her. The old woman came closer and examined her face.

  "You are pretty under those scabs, I can see that. Never fear, there will be no scars; the young heal quickly, and Mirka remembers healing, even if she forgets much else. You must sleep if you are to heal." Mirka put her hand on Maerad's brow, and sleep swept through her like a wave. But then she started up, remembering something with a sudden panic. "What about my pack? Was my pack with me?" "Yes, my chick. I couldn't get your hands off it when you came in, you were holding it so tightly What is so precious to you, that you cannot let it go? Nothing is that important. Sleep now...."

  Time began to run consecutively, and to differentiate into day and night. Maerad managed to get out of the bed the day after first talking to Mirka, although her legs were so shaky she could scarcely walk across the hut. Mirka supported her, making clicking noises, with the dog walking at her heels, as if it too were helping. Just walking across the room made Maerad dizzy, and she had to sit down; Mirka waited until the trembling stopped, and then p
atiently made her do it again.

  The day after that she went outside, her eyes watering in the bright daylight, and sat and watched as Mirka, who was much stronger than she looked, chopped wood and tended to her chickens, which scratched around in a little coop scarcely smaller than the hut itself. It looked as eccentric outside as it did inside, its single clay chimney crookedly defying gravity, its walls a patchwork mixture of mud daub and stones and wood, but it was strangely homelike.

  In the merciless light of day, Mirka looked even odder; her clothes were shapeless, clearly once having belonged to many people—men, women, children—and scavenged for their warmth. They were now all worn down to the same gray-brown color and seemed to adhere to her skin. She obviously never bathed. Despite this, Mirka was not unpleasant to be around; she smelled like woodsmoke and earth and some bitter herb. The dog, whom Mirka called Inka, which Maerad later discovered was the Pilanel word for dog, followed her everywhere, always at her heels. When she fished, Inka curled up beside her and went to sleep, and Mirka slept at night with the dog, by the fire. Maerad never heard Inka bark or growl, and she took no notice of Maerad whatsoever, once she had sniffed her and decided she was harmless. She was, like Mirka herself, a scrawny, tough creature—a continuous silent presence who seemed, after a time, like an aspect of Mirka herself.

  The hut was hidden in a small clearing in a forest of spruce that filled a little gully on the northern side of the Osidh Elanor. On one side was an ancient wild pear tree, its gnarled branches heavy with sour green fruits. Brambles twined themselves crazily about the walls of the chicken coop. A small stream, cold as ice and flickering with minnow and other fish, ran close by the hut, and on sunny days Mirka would sit for hours with her fishing rod, catching the mountain trout that made up much of her diet. Behind her rose the staggering panorama of the Osidh Elanor, snowfield and fir forest and naked gray peaks, but Maerad couldn't see past the gully into the downlands at the mountains' foot.

  Mirka told Maerad that she had lain in her pallet, barely alive, for seven days. She had simply appeared on her doorstep, and unquestioningly Mirka had taken her in, tending her and bringing her back to life. Maerad had no memory of anything after seeing Ardina, and supposed that Ardina had brought her down the pass to the old woman to be healed. She counted on her fingers; seven days made it well into autumn, about seven weeks since they had left Ossin.

  "I'll have to leave soon," she said. "I've lost so much time."

  "How can you lose time?" asked Mirka. "Time doesn't belong to anybody." She grinned. "You can't go anywhere while your legs are like cloth. And you need fattening." She pinched Maerad's forearm so hard that she cried out. "You are scrawny as a sick chicken."

  "No, I suppose not," Maerad answered sadly. She couldn't walk across Mirka's clearing without her legs trembling; a hard journey was beyond imagining. She realized she had already decided to pursue her quest for the Treesong; it was the only way she might redeem herself in her own eyes. She met the thought without quailing. After that terrible night on the mountain, the thought of dying no longer frightened her.

  "Where do you wish to go, anyway?" Mirka looked at her, her head cocked to the side like a bird.

  "I have to go to Murask."

  "To Murask?" A shadow fell over Mirka's face and she walked away mumbling to herself, as if Maerad were not there, and would not answer any of Maerad's questions.

  Finally, Maerad said, "I thought you were Pilanel. Murask's a Pilanel town, isn't it?"

  "The young, they are always impatient," said Mirka crossly, waving her hands at Maerad as if to shoo her away. She fell into her own language. "Na, na, im Pilani." To Maerad's surprise, the old woman's eyes filled with tears, and then she sat down on a log and began to bawl, as unselfconsciously as if she were a three-year-old child.

  Maerad was discomfited; she did not know how to respond or why Mirka was crying. In the end, she just held the woman's hand until she stopped and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

  "Yes, I am Pilani," she said. "I and my family. But I have no family anymore. I no longer wish to go to Murask for the winter gathering and the stories and the dances. My family is dead."

  "Dead? How?" asked Maerad, and then instantly regretted asking, because Mirka started crying again. But finally she stopped, hiccupping, and looked at Maerad.

  "It does good to weep for the dead," she said. "They need their tithe of tears. And I thought I was all dried up and couldn't weep anymore. Well, perhaps you have opened a new spring in me, my young chicken. I had daughters once." She chucked Maerad under the chin and went back to splitting wood, as if nothing had happened. But she talked between the ax strokes.

  "I had daughters and sons and a husband, and I thought it was good. I knew, because I was one with the Voice, that I would outlive them, but I thought to see them grow and bear their own children. But one day the Jussacks came and killed them all. And that was that."

  Maerad waited in silence for her to continue. Mirka stopped to wipe her brow and then started swinging the ax again. "I was the only one left. They said I was mad after that. Maybe I was. The sun darkened and the night was full of horror. If I could have saved my darlings by lifting the mountains with my naked hands, I would have done it. But I could not."

  "Who are the Jussacks?" ventured Maerad uncertainly, afraid that she would reactivate Mirka's grief. Mirka didn't reply at first but chopped the wood with a new viciousness, as if she were splitting the heads of her enemies. When she had finished, she sat down next to Maerad.

  "The Jussacks are bad, savage men," she said. "They worship death. They keep their women in holes in the ground and they drink the blood of those they kill. They do not know what it means to have mercy."

  Maerad had never heard of the Jussacks and looked at Mirka blankly. "Do they live in Zmarkan?" she asked.

  "Aye, sometimes, sometimes. They are like Pilani; they do not stay in one place, but they do not use caravans. They ride with little leather houses rolled up on the backs of their saddles, and where they want to stop, they put them up. They ride very fast, and you never know that a Jussack band is coming until it is too late."

  "But why do they kill people?" asked Maerad.

  "I told you." Mirka began to look as if she might start bawling again. "They worship death, the Great Ungiver. It is said they eat the hearts of their enemies. They believe that anyone who is not a Jussack has no right to be on this earth. They kill us and they steal our horses."

  Maerad was silent after that. Mirka sat beside her, mumbling to herself in Pilanel, lost in some other reality; she smiled and nodded, as if she were speaking to someone who was not there. She was, Maerad thought to herself, more than half mad, but there was something about her that forbade pity. She did not pity herself.

  Maerad's strength returned quickly. She had not told Mirka who she was, apart from her name, or anything of her story, and Mirka did not ask; she accepted Maerad as if she were an injured bird, sent by the heavens for her to care for, who would one day recover and fly away. She no longer needed to sleep so much, and as the weather continued fine, she washed her clothes in the stream, scrubbing them with some hard soap Mirka gave her, and bathed briefly in the freezing waters. She had been absolutely filthy, grimed in sweat and blood, and it was a relief to be clean again. After the first shock, which made even her teeth numb, she stood under a tiny waterfall and washed her hair, and when she stepped out of the water, her skin felt as if it were burning with life.

  But as Maerad's body revived, she began to feel her grief more keenly. More than ever before, she missed her brother; she wanted the closeness of kin, the wordless understanding that she and Hem had enjoyed for all too brief a time. She thought now that Hem was not dead, but she wondered if he had been captured. Or perhaps Turbansk still stood. She had no way of knowing. Not knowing was almost worse than anything.

  Sometimes she thought she held his restless, bony body when she slept, as she had so often when they traveled together and his nightmares ha
d troubled him, and she was surprised when she awoke to find her arms were empty. At such times, his absence was a physical ache; she missed him with her skin, in the marrow of her bones.

  But, most of all, Maerad was tormented by regrets about her breach with Cadvan. Again and again she went over their conversations, wondering how things might have been different if she had been less angry, if Cadvan had been even a little less stern; perhaps if their minds had been able to join (and why could they not? why did Cadvan feel it as an attack?) they could have destroyed the frost creatures. She saw the final conflict as her failure, and her failure only.

  She was also troubled by the death of Ilar. She could no longer hide from herself that she had intended to kill the Bard; and she wondered what Cadvan had meant by the new darkness he had perceived in her. She knew something within her was changing, but it wasn't something she could easily perceive: she simply suffered it. It was as if, at some level below speech, there were two Maerads, and she could recognize neither of them, and worse, they were at war. The only way she could resolve this inner conflict was to think of continuing her journey.

  She sorted through the few scraps of knowledge she had about the Treesong: the foredream that had told her to look to the north; the idea that the Split Song and the Treesong were somehow linked, that the Treesong was of the Knowing of the Elidhu, that a poison at the root of the Speech had to do with the secret of the Treesong. Nelac's certainty that she and Cadvan must solve its riddle comforted her; surely so wise a Bard would not have sent them on a nonsensical journey? Their quest had depended on a deeper knowing, akin to her instinctive knowledge, when she had first encountered Hem, that they belonged to each other. She had to trust that deeper knowing, as Cadvan had, and be content not to understand everything. In the cold light of rationality she had very little to go on: dreams and guesses, riddles in themselves. Perhaps Cadvan had had a clearer idea of what they might do once they had crossed the Osidh Elanor, but that knowledge was now lost to her. She was on her own.