The Riddle

by Alison Croggon

  "How did you and—my father know that the One would be born to him?"

  Sirkana fixed her dark eyes on Maerad's face. The room seemed suddenly to dim around them, and she felt herself becoming dizzy, as if she were looking into a deep well.

  "I dreamed," said Sirkana in the Speech. "When I was ten years old, I dreamed of a great darkness. And my brother Dorn held up a child against the darkness, and the child was made of light. And I knew it was his child." As Sirkana spoke, Maerad saw the dream vividly in her mind, as if it were her own. "When I was twelve, I dreamed again the same dream, but by then I had the Voice, and this time Dorn spoke and told me who the child was. And again when I was fourteen, and sixteen, always the same dream.

  "I told my mother of the dreams. She knew I had the Voice, and she counseled me to tell the headman of the clan, which I did. But I did not tell Dorn until I was sixteen; it was the only thing I kept from him, ever. I feared what he might do if he knew. And I was right to fear. But at last I did tell Dorn, and that night he had a dream of his own, the only foredream he ever dreamed. In his dream a great darkness rose over the land, and he was swallowed inside it. He was frightened, but he said to me that he must learn what it meant. It was after that he left for the Schools of Annar, and I knew I would never see him again."

  "And when you saw me, you recognized me?" said Maerad softly.

  "I did," said Sirkana. "But not with my eyes. With other vision. I have watched for the signs and listened to the songs since I was a young girl. I knew the Chosen would come in my lifetime, and I have been waiting."

  Maerad looked blankly at the wooden walls, which flickered with dim firelight. Since she had entered Murask, she had felt as if she had fallen into a dream herself; the ground seemed to be falling away from beneath her, tipping her into some other world. But somehow Sirkana's words comforted her, in an obscure way she did not understand; they seemed some kind of recognition. When she looked up, the room was full of light again, and the other Pilanel were looking baffled.

  "What were you saying?" asked Tilla. Her voice was a little shaky, and Maerad, glancing toward her, saw she had gone pale.

  "Maerad is the One, and she has arrived here, as foretold in the songs," said Sirkana. "It is the final sign." She made a strange gesture, touching her closed fist to her heart and then to her forehead, and the others followed suit. "Are we agreed then?" They all nodded.

  Agreed to what? thought Maerad. She still couldn't find her bearings. Everything seemed to have been settled, but she hadn't asked for anything. She took a deep breath and sat up straight, looking at each of the Pilanel in turn. "I have to find the Treesong, the root of the Speech," she said. "That is my quest. And I need your help. I have nothing. . . ." She spread out her hands in a gesture of humility. "I don't even know where to go."

  "Where do you need to go, little chicken?" said Vul. Maerad started at his using Mirka's term of endearment, and bridled a little. She was not, after all, a child. But Vul's face was gentle, and she did not think he had intended to insult her.

  "I believe I need to find the Wise Kindred. Mirka has the Voice, and she fell into a sort of trance and she said—she said all riddles were answered there. I need to know about the Split Song. It's all connected." As Maerad said this, a mocking voice echoed in her head: You don't know what you're talking about. It's words, just words....

  "There is time to debate all of this," said Sirkana. "If you need to find the Wise Kindred, then we shall help you. You cannot go there alone: it is a long journey, and a hard one, to the Labarok Isles, even without this early winter."

  She turned to the other Pilanel. "I swear you all to secrecy," she said. "I do not trust all of our people enough for the news of the One's return to be widely known. There is peril enough."

  Each in turn, they nodded solemnly, and Maerad felt herself sag with relief. There was, indeed, peril enough.

  Chapter XVII

  THE PILANEL

  MAERAD was exhausted after her meeting with the Pilanel. When she returned to her little room, she sat down on the bed, staring blankly into space. She felt strangely lost. Even when she was alone in the empty spaces of the Arkiadera Plains, the map of her world had been certain, if perilous. But now it was as if all the familiar signs had been erased, revealing a strange new country.

  Despite her close kinship to the Pilanel, she did not feel at home in Murask: it was alien and confusing, the people harsh and stern, if not unkind. She felt no echo of the strange familiarity that had puzzled her when she had first entered Innail, even though the School had been as different from her life in Gilman's Cot as could be imagined. She was sure that Hem would have felt differently about Murask. He was not immediately comfortable among Bards; she had put it down to his nightmarish childhood, being kidnapped by Hulls after the slaughter of Pellinor and dumped in a grim orphanage in Edinur. But perhaps it was more profound than that, and his discomfort was the same kind of refusal that Sirkana had expressed, a belief that there were other ways of unlocking the Gift. And, unlike Maerad, with her fair Annaren skin, Hem would have been accepted as Pilanel without question.

  She was glad that Sirkana intended keeping her identity secret. She thought she now understood how the Dark had known about her, why they were always, as Cadvan had said, two steps ahead of the Light. The Hulls must have known about the Pilanel prophecies; they must have known somehow about Sirkana's dream and Maerad's father's decision to move to Annar. Sirkana had said she did not trust all her people. There may well be a spy in Murask now, and it seemed there had been one here before Maerad was born. Although, she thought, Dorn might have confided in a Bard of Annar who had betrayed him. She thought of Helgar, and the other Ettinor Bards she had so distrusted in Innail; they had been spies, if not for the Nameless One himself, certainly for Enkir. Maybe Dorn had spoken to Enkir himself? It would not be unlikely; why would Dorn have mistrusted a Norloch Bard of such standing?

  Restlessly, Maerad stood up and paced the room. She felt stifled; she needed some fresh air. She opened the shutters over the window, thinking to lean out and see what the world looked like—it must be late afternoon by now. There were two sets, both of thick, stout wood, bolted fast. When she opened the outer shutters, they tore out of her hands, banging back against the wall, as a blast of freezing wind gusted into the room, dumping a small drift of snowflakes on the floor. Maerad had a glimpse of swirling whiteness before she wrestled the shutters back and bolted them closed again. She hadn't realized there was such a storm; the walls of the house were very thick. If she had been out in the open, she would have frozen to death. She had beaten the snow by one day.

  The thought rattled her slightly, and she sat back down on the bed and decided to unpack. As she took out her familiar objects— her lyre, Dernhil's book, the bottle of medhyl, now quite depleted—she began to feel less displaced. She missed the wooden cat she had given Mirka, but even its absence was part of the tally of her life. When she had arranged the room to her satisfaction, she sat on her bed and opened Dernhil's book. It had been a while since she had been able to read his poems, and, perhaps perversely, she felt more Bardic than she ever had. She wasn't at all sure of what she thought about being claimed as a Pilanel.

  That night she was invited to dine with Sirkana. Zara fussed around her, even insisting on plaiting her hair, and making sure that her robes were straight. Then she solemnly led her down to the hall again, where a long table had been set, with a bench on either side, full of people. The noise of conversation rose up to her as she walked along the gallery outside her room, and Maerad's heart leaped into her mouth; she had not been among people for a long time, not since leaving Ossin. Going down to meet them took all her courage. She did her best to conceal her nervousness, but it was difficult when she entered the hall and every head turned to look at her. Sirkana, who sat in the middle of the table, beckoned her to an empty place on her left, and Maerad sat down, looking curiously at the men and women who sat around her.

  Sirk
ana was as austerely dressed as she had been earlier, except that she now wore a plain necklace made of gold links, which glinted like the gold rings in her ears. "Tonight we dine with the heads of the southern clans," she said in the Speech. "You may meet some of your kin."

  Maerad looked at the dark, tough faces of the Pilanel and inwardly quailed. "What shall I say of myself?" she asked.

  "As little as you may," said Sirkana. "These are good people, but a loose word may enter an evil ear. Tilla, Dorn, Vul, I trust with my life; your story is safe with them. I shall say you are on pilgrimage from Annar, and have brought word from Mirka a Hadaruk: that is enough to explain the honor we do you." She winked slyly at Maerad, an ironic smile softening her stern face, and Maerad felt herself relax.

  Sirkana formally introduced Maerad as Mara, and she was toasted in welcome. Then it seemed any formalities were over, and the feast began. On Maerad's other side was a tall, stocky young man with a gentle face. He introduced himself in excellent Annaren as Dharin, and they began to chat; he had traveled widely in Annar and wanted to know where she was from. He had never been to Thorold, and when she mentioned that she had been there, he plied her with questions.

  It was a high feast in the Zmarkan style, and food just kept coming and coming: first little pancakes stuffed with some kind of herbed cheese, then pickled plover's eggs, then a soup of a surprising pink color with sour cream and dill, then a roast goose stuffed with hazelnuts and wild onions, then some kind of dumpling filled with spiced offal, then a huge side of roasted venison. And there was still more: thick spicy sausages that seemed mostly stuffed with fat, and pickled cabbage, and a number of dishes that Maerad couldn't identify at all, and, remembering her experience with mussels, left well alone. Nobody seemed to mind when she stopped eating, but she found herself amazed at how much the Pilanel could eat and drink and still stay upright.

  The meal was accompanied by shots of a fiery liquor, drunk from very small clay cups, and as the evening wore on, the conversation got louder and louder. Unexpectedly, Maerad found she was enjoying herself, and not only because of her conversation with Dharin. The Pilanel, for all their stern demeanor, gave themselves to pleasure as wholeheartedly as the Thoroldians. When the food at last stopped arriving, there were calls for music, and three Pilanel drew out fiddles and drums and pipes and began a wild dance tune that got into the blood like a fever.

  "Come," said Dharin. "We must dance."

  Maerad demurred, feeling shy, but Dharin took her hand and dragged her into the middle of the hall, where there were already many dancers. Maerad was glad that she hadn't overeaten, because she would have surely been sick; Dharin whirled her around like a top. The Pilanel dances were very similar to those she had learned in Thorold, and before long Maerad had lost her self-consciousness and entered the pure pleasure of the present. It felt like eons since she had last been able to forget all the troubles of her life. All the fears and doubts surrounding her quest, all her griefs and regrets, were swept up into the tempest of the music, poising her exactly in the center of the moment, a clear vessel of joy.

  "You dance like a true Pilani," said Dharin as they returned to their seats. "Life is hard, no? And full of sorrow. The Pilani dance in defiance of death and grief and hardship. They choose to burn before the darkness, rather than to gutter out like a dim flame."

  Maerad looked up in surprise; she had just been thinking something similar. "Yes, it is good to dance," she said. "And it makes me feel stronger, as if I can face peril a little better."

  "You are overyoung to face perils," said Dharin. Maerad glanced at him ironically; she thought he was not much older than she was. He intercepted her look, and grinned. "Well, you are right, life is no respecter of youth or age. It will pour its troubles equally over all."

  Some more than others, thought Maerad, for a moment lapsing into self-pity. But it made her few moments of pleasure all the more precious.

  By the following day, the storm had blown out, leaving an unfamiliar white world with strange lights and glints. Pilanel children tumbled into the snow, bundled in brightly embroidered jerkins and scarves and hats, and threw snowballs at each other. Across the wide, empty turf in the middle of the Howe the snow lay knee deep, with a thin deceptive crust that broke into icy sludge. The sky was swagged with heavy, yellowish clouds, presaging more snow.

  Maerad breathed in the icy air, feeling the tingle of blood rushing to her cheeks; she liked this weather. Sirkana had offered to show her around Murask, and Maerad met again some of the Pilanel she had dined with the previous evening.

  When the clans came to Murask for the winter, they returned to their traditional quarters. These were—apart from Sirkana's house, which was the central meeting hall—tunneled into the thick wall of the Howe, but to Maerad's surprise, they were far from the gloomy, airless caves she had expected. They were pleasant dwellings, with bright murals and comfortable, warm furnishings. Typically, the animals—dogs, deer, horses— were kept in large, barnlike rooms downstairs, while upstairs were the living quarters. Pilanel clans varied enormously in size; they could range from five to a hundred people, and did not necessarily comprise people from the same family. They were often practical groupings arranged according to need and custom— where a clan traveled, for instance, during the summer, or how they made their living. Some worked as minstrels or sold handcrafts, some were horse breeders and traders, some were traveling tinkers and cobblers, some herded deer. When they arrived at Murask, they tended to arrange their living quarters likewise. Mostly this was established by tradition, and the same clan occupied certain dwellings for generations without count.

  The more Maerad saw of Murask, the more intrigued she became. The settlement was a complex and efficient structure, like a hive, and those who had built it had been very ingenious. It had a piping system, like the Schools, and very effective drainage, and it never ran out of water, which was supplied from a spring with outlets inside the Howe itself and in Sirkana's house. Slow, peat-burning furnaces kept the Howe from freezing even in the most savage weather, and all of it was warm. Maerad asked Sirkana how old it was, but she answered that no one knew; Murask had been there from time immemorial, and was far older than the Schools of Annar.

  About half of the tunnels through the Howe were used for storage. Each year the clans would bring back supplies for the long winter—grains, oils, nuts, strings of onions, dried bunches of herbs, preserved fruits—traded over the summer. Or if they were not traders, they would lay aside hard cheeses made from milking their herds of shaggy deer, or slaughter the young animals in the autumn and smoke the carcasses in the huge smoke rooms in the Howe. Each clan brought all that they could, and the food was held in common. "We are fat together, or we starve together," said Sirkana. "And this year is a thin year. This is why it will be such a blow if the Pilani who spend the summer in Annar cannot come home for winter; we were hoping that they might be able to make up the deficit. From what you say, they will have to turn back."

  Maerad thought of the blocked road in the Gwalhain Pass. "I don't know," she said. "Maybe someone determined could dig their way through. If they had a lot of people with them."

  "It is late in the year for such digging," said Sirkana, and sighed. "Well, they may yet come. We will not close the gates against them. But it bodes ill for us."

  It was not until that afternoon that Maerad had a chance to talk about her quest. They had ended up in Sirkana's private rooms, which were not much bigger than the chamber Maerad had been given, and Sirkana made her a sweet herb tea. They sat in comfortable silence for a time, pursuing separate reflections, but then Maerad gathered herself. She was not so daunted by Sirkana as she had been, and when they had first met, Sirkana had spoken of Pilanel lore, about a riddle that might illuminate the Treesong. She leaned forward, her brows creased.

  "Sirkana, do your people have a tale of the Split Song?" she asked.

  Sirkana looked up in surprise. "The Split Song? Nay, I do not recall...."


  "Or the Treesong?"

  Sirkana shook her head. "Not that I know," she said. "And I am deeply learned in Pilani lore."

  "It's something to do with the Elidhu," said Maerad.

  "The Elidhu no longer speak to mortals," said Sirkana. "They departed from the human world when the great darkness fell."

  "Some do," said Maerad, beginning to feel a little impatient. "I have spoken to Elidhu. But what I have to do is to find the Treesong, which has something to do with the Elidhu, and which has also—well, Cadvan and I thought—to do with this tradition of the Split Song."

  "It is all riddles," said Sirkana, smiling. "We say the One is a riddle, perhaps the greatest riddle of them all. But of course I will help you."

  Maerad frowned again. "Mirka said that the Wise Kindred answered all riddles, and knew what was half and what was whole, and that seemed like a clue. My heart tells me that I must find the Wise Kindred. You seem to know who they are and where they dwell. Tell me."

  "They live far, far away," said Sirkana. "In the land of ice and fire, the Labarok Islands. They live where the snow never melts, and where winter is one long night and summer one long day."

  "How far away is it?"

  "No Pilani has been to the Labarok Isles in living memory," said Sirkana. "But it is said that they are thrice as far as Murask is from the Idrom Uakin." Maerad was baffled for a moment, until she remembered that was the Pilanel name for the Osidh Elanor. "It is a perilous journey, especially in winter."

  "Can it be done, though?" asked Maerad urgently. It came over her that she could be caught in Murask all through the northern winter, and then, even if her quest succeeded, it could be too late.