Riddle-Master

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Morgon set down an empty glass, worried suddenly about Raederle alone with their horses. A trader beside him asked a friendly question; he grunted a reply. He was about to leave when his own name caught his ear.

  “Morgon of Hed? I heard a rumor that he was in Caithnard, disguised as a student. He vanished before the Masters even recognized him.”

  Morgon glanced around. A group of musicians had congregated around a jug of wine they were sharing. “He was in Anuin,” a piper said, wiping spit out of his instrument. He looked at the silent faces around him. “You haven’t heard that tale? He caught up with the High One’s harpist finally in Anuin, in the king’s own hall—”

  “The High One’s harpist,” a gangling young man with a collection of small drums hanging about him said bitterly. “And what was the High One doing through all this? A man loses his land-rule, betrayed in the High One’s name by a harpist who lied to every king in the realm, and the High One won’t lift a finger—if he has one—to give him justice.”

  “If you ask me,” a singer said abruptly, “the High One is nothing more than a lie. Invented by the Founder of Lungold.”

  There was a short silence. The singer blinked a little nervously at his own words, as if the High One might be standing at his shoulder sipping beer and listening. Another singer growled, “Nobody asked. Shut up, all of you. I want to hear what happened at Anuin.”

  Morgon turned abruptly. A hand stopped him. The trader who had spoken to him said slowly, perplexedly, “I know you. Your name hangs at the edge of my memory, I know it. . . . Something to do with rain . . .”

  Morgon recognized him: the trader he had talked to long ago on a rainy autumn day in Hlurle, after he had ridden out of the Herun hills. He said brusquely, “I don’t know what in Hel’s name you’re talking about. It hasn’t rained for weeks. Do you want to keep your hand, or do I take it with me?”

  “Lords, Lords,” the innkeeper murmured. “No violence in my inn.” The trader took two beers off his tray, set one down in front of Morgon.

  “No offense.” He was still puzzled, searching Morgon’s face. “Talk with me a little. I haven’t been home to Kraal in months, and I need some idle—”

  Morgon jerked out of his hold. His elbow hit the beer, splashing it across the table into the lap of a horse trader, who rose, cursing. Something in Morgon’s face, of power or despair, quelled his first impulse. “That’s no way to treat fine beer,” he said darkly. “Or the offer of it. How have you managed to live as long as you have, picking quarrels out of thin air?”

  “I mind my own business,” Morgon said curtly. He tossed a coin on the table and went back into the dusk. His own rudeness lay like a bad taste in his mouth. Memories stirred up by the singers hovered in the back of his mind: light gathering on his sword blade, the harpist’s face turning upward to meet it. He walked quickly through the trees, cursing the length of the road, the dust on it, the stars on his face, and all the shadows of memory he could not outrun.

  He nearly walked through their camp before he recognized it. He stopped, bewildered. Raederle and both the horses were gone. For a second he wondered if something he had done had offended her so badly that she decided to ride both horses back to Anuin. The packs and saddles lay where he had left them; there was no sign of a struggle, no flurries of dead leaves or singed oakroots. Then he heard her call him and saw her stumbling across a shallow section of the river.

  There were tears on her face. “Morgon, I was beside the river getting water when two men rode past me. They nearly ran me down. I was so furious I didn’t even realize they were riding our horses until they reached the far side. So I—”

  “You ran after them?” he said incredulously.

  “I thought they might slow down, through the trees. But they started to gallop. I’m sorry.”

  “They’ll get a good price for them in Ymris,” Morgon said grimly.

  “Morgon, they’re not a mile away. You could get them back easily.”

  He hesitated, looking at her angry, tired face. Then he turned away from her, picked up their food pack. “Heureu’s army needs them more than we do.”

  He felt her sudden silence at his back like something tangible. He opened the pack and cursed himself again, realizing he had forgotten to buy their supplies.

  She said softly, “Are you telling me we are going to walk all the way to Lungold?”

  “If you want.” His fingers were shaking slightly on the pack ties.

  He heard her move finally. She went back down to the river to get their water skin. She said when she returned, her voice inflectionless, “Did you bring wine?”

  “I forgot it. I forgot everything.” He turned then, blazing into an argument before she could speak. “And I can’t go back. Not without getting into a tavern brawl.”

  “Did I ask you to? I wasn’t even going to ask.” She dropped down beside the fire, tossed a twig in it. “I lost the horses, you forgot the food. You didn’t blame me.” She dropped her face suddenly against her knees. “Morgon,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. I will crawl to Lungold before I change shape.”

  He stood gazing down at her. He turned, paced a half-circle around the fire, and stared into the gnarled, haggard eye of a tree bole. He tilted his face against it, felt it gazing into him, at all the twisted origins of his own power. For a moment doubt bit into him, that he was wrong to demand such a thing of her, that even his own power, wrested out of himself by such dark circumstances, was suspect. The uncertainty died slowly, leaving, as always, the one thing he grasped with any certainty: the fragile, imperative structure of riddlery.

  “You can’t run from yourself.”

  “You are running. Maybe not from yourself, but from the riddle at your back that you never face.”

  He lifted his head wearily, looked at her. He moved after a moment, stirred the lagging fire. “I’ll catch some fish. Tomorrow morning, I’ll go back to the inn, get what we need. Maybe I can sell the saddles there. We can use the money. It’s a long walk to Lungold.”

  They scarcely spoke at all the next day. The summer heat poured down at them, even when they walked among the trees beside the road. Morgon carried both their packs. He had not realized until then how heavy they were. The straps wore at his shoulders as their quarrelling chafed at his mind. Raederle offered to carry one, but he refused with something kin to anger, and she did not suggest it again. At noon, they ate with their feet in the river. The cold water soothed them, and they spoke a little. The road in the afternoon was fairly quiet; they could hear the creak of cartwheels long before the carts came into view. But the heat was intense, almost unbearable. Finally they gave up, trudged along the rough river bank until twilight.

  They found a place to camp, then. Morgon left Raederle sitting with her feet in the river and went hunting in falcon-shape. He killed a hare dreaming in the last rays of the sun on a meadow. Returning, he found Raederle where he had left her. He cleaned the hare, hung it on a spit of green wood above the fire. He watched Raederle; she sat staring down at the water, not moving. He said her name finally.

  She got up, stumbling a little on the bank. She joined him slowly, sitting down close to the fire, drawing her damp skirt tightly under her feet. In the firelight, he took a good look at her, forgetting to turn the spit. Her face was very still; there were tiny lines of pain under her eyes. He drew a sudden breath; her eyes met his, holding a clear and definite warning. But the worry in him blazed out in spite of her.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were in that much pain? Let me see your feet.”

  “Leave me alone!” The fierceness in her voice startled him. She was huddled over herself. “I told you I would walk to Lungold, and I will.”

  “How?” He stood up, anger at himself beating in his throat. “I’ll find a horse for you.”

  “With what? We couldn’t sell the saddles.”

  “I’ll change into one. You can ride on my back.”

  “No.” Her voice was shaken with the
same, strange anger. “You will not. I’m not going to ride you all the way to Lungold. I said I will walk.”

  “You can hardly walk ten feet!”

  “I’ll do it anyway. If you don’t turn the spit, you’ll burn our supper.”

  He did not move; she leaned forward and turned it herself. Her hand was trembling. As the lights and shadows melted over her, he wondered suddenly if he knew her at all. He pleaded, “Raederle, what in Hel’s name will you do? You can’t walk like that. You won’t ride; you won’t change shape. Do you want to go back to Anuin?”

  “No.” Her voice flinched on the word, as if he had hurt her. “Maybe I’m no good with riddles, but I do keep vows.”

  “How much of your honor can you place in Ylon’s name when you give him and his heritage nothing but hatred?”

  She bent again, to turn the spit, he thought, but instead she grasped a handful of fire. “He was King of An, once. There is some honor in that.” Her voice was shaking badly. She shaped a wedge of fire, spun thread-thin strings down from it through her fingers. “I swore in his name I would never let you leave me.” He realized suddenly what she was making. She finished it, held it out to him: a harp made of fire, eating at the darkness around her hand. “You’re the riddler. If you have such faith in riddles, you show me. You can’t even face your own hatred, and you give me riddles to answer. There’s a name for a man like you.”

  “Fool,” he said without touching the harp. He watched the light leap soundlessly down the strings. “At least I know my name.”

  “You are the Star-Bearer. Why can’t you leave me alone to make my own choices? What I am doesn’t matter.”

  He stared at her over the flaming harp. Something he said or thought without realizing it snapped the harp to pieces in her hand. He reached across the fire, gripped her shoulders, and pulled her to her feet.

  “How can you say that to me? What in Hel’s name are you afraid of?”

  “Morgon—”

  “You’re not going to change shape into something neither of us will recognize!”

  “Morgon.” She was shaking him suddenly, trying to make him see. “Do I have to say it? I’m not running from something I hate, but something I want. The power of that bastard heritage. I want it. The power eating across Ymris, trying to destroy the realm and you—I am drawn to it. Bound to it. And I love you. The riddler. The Master. The man who must fight everything of that heritage. You keep asking me for things you will only hate.”

  He whispered, “No.”

  “The land-rulers, the wizards at Lungold—how can I face them? How can I tell them I am kin to your enemies? How will they ever trust me? How can I trust myself, wanting such terrible power—”

  “Raederle.” He lifted one hand stiffly, touched her face, brushing at the fire and tears on it, trying to see clearly. But the uneasy shadows loomed across it, molding her out of flame and darkness, someone he had not quite seen before and could not quite see now. Something was eluding him, vanishing as he touched it. “I never asked anything from you but truth.”

  “You never knew what you were asking—”

  “I never do know. I just ask.” The fire was shaping itself between them into the answer his mind grasped at. He saw it suddenly, and he saw her again, at the same time, the woman men had died for in Peven’s tower, who had shaped her mind to fire, who loved him and argued with him and was drawn to a power that might destroy him. For a moment pieces of the riddle struggled against each other in his mind. Then they slid together, and he saw the faces of shape-changers he knew: Eriel, the harpist Corrig, whom he had killed, the shape-changers in Isig he had killed. A chill of fear and wonder brushed through him. “If you see . . . if you see something of value in them,” he whispered, “then what in Hel’s name are they?”

  She was silent, gripping him, her face gone still, fiery with tears. “I didn’t say that.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “No, I didn’t. There’s nothing of value in their power.”

  “Yes, there is. You sense it in you. That’s what you want.”

  “Morgon—”

  “Either you change shape in my mind, or they change shape. You, I know.”

  She let go of him slowly. She was uncertain. He held her, wondering what words would make her trust him. Slowly he realized what argument she would hear.

  He loosed her and touched the harp into shape at his back. It filled his hands like a memory. He sat down while she watched him at the edge of the fire, not moving, not speaking. The stars on the harp’s face, enigmatic, answerless, met his gaze. Then he turned it and began to play. For a while he thought of little but her, a shadowy figure at the edge of the light, drawn to his harping. His fingers remembered rhythms, patterns, drew hesitant fragments of song out of a year of silence. The ancient, flawless voice of the harp, responsive to his power, touched him again with unexpected wonder. She drew closer to him as he played, until step by step she had reached his side. She stood still again. With the fire behind her, he could not see her face.

  A harpist echoed him in the shadows of his memory. The more he played to drown the memory, the more it haunted him: a distant, skilled, beautiful harping, coming from beyond blackness, beyond the smell of water that went nowhere and had gone nowhere for thousands of years. The fire beyond Raederle grew small, a point of light that went farther and farther away from him, until the blackness came down over his eyes like a hand. A voice startled him, echoing over stones, fading away into harsh cadences. He never saw the face. Reaching out in the darkness, he touched only stone. The voice was always unexpected, no matter how hard he listened for a footstep. He grew to listen constantly, lying on stone, his muscles tensed with waiting. With the voice came mind-work he could not fight, pain when he fought with his fists, endless questions he would not answer out of a desperate fury, until suddenly his fury turned to terror as he felt the fragile, complex instincts for land-law begin to die in him. He heard his own voice answering, rising a little, answering, rising, no longer able to answer. . . . He heard harping.

  His hands had stopped. The bones of his face ached against the harpwood. Raederle sat close to him, her arm around his shoulders. The harping still sounded raggedly through his mind. He stirred stiffly away from it. It would not stop. Raederle’s head turned; he realized, the blood shocking through him, that she was hearing it, too.

  Then he recognized the familiar, hesitant harping. He stood up, his face white, frozen, and caught a brand out of the fire. Raederle said his name; he could not answer. She tried to follow him, barefoot, limping through the bracken, but he would not wait. He tracked the harpist through the trees, across the road to the other side, where he startled a trader sleeping under his cart; through brambles and underbrush, while the harping grew louder and seemed to circle him. The torch, flaring over dead leaves, lit a figure finally, sitting under a tree, bowed over his harp. Morgon stopped, breathing jerkily, words, questions, curses piling into his throat. The harpist lifted his face slowly to the light.

  Morgon’s breath stopped. There was not a sound anywhere in the black night beyond the torchlight. The harpist, staring back at Morgon, still played softly, awkwardly, his hands gnarled like oak root, twisted beyond all use.

  MORGON WHISPERED, “DETH.”

  The harpist’s hands stilled. His face was so worn and haggard there was little familiar in it but the fine cast of his bones and the expression in his eyes. He had no horse or pack, no possessions that Morgon could see besides a dark harp, adorned by nothing but its lean, elegant lines. His broken hands rested a moment on the strings, then slid down to tilt the harp to the ground beside him.

  “Morgon.” His voice was husky with weariness and surprise. He added, so gently that he left Morgon floundering wordlessly in his own turmoil, “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  Morgon stood motionlessly, even the flame in his hand was drawn still in the windless night. The deadly, flawless harping that ran always in some dark place beneath his tho
ughts tangled suddenly with the hesitant, stumbling efforts he had heard the past nights. He hung at the edge of his own light, wanting to shout with fury, wanting to turn without speaking and go, wanting even more to take one step forward and ask a question. He did, finally, so noiselessly he scarcely realized he had moved.

  “What happened to you?” His own voice sounded strange, flinching a little away from its calm. The harpist glanced down at his hands, lying at his sides like weights.

  “I had an argument,” he said, “with Ghisteslwchlohm.”

  “You never lose arguments.” He had taken another step forward, still tense, soundless as an animal.

  “I didn’t lose this one. If I had, there would be one less harpist in the realm.”

  “You don’t die easily.”

  “No.” He watched Morgon move another step, and Morgon, sensing it, stilled. The harpist met his eyes clearly, acknowledging everything, asking nothing. Morgon shifted the brand in his hand. It was burning close to his skin; he dropped it, started a small blaze in the dead leaves. The change of light shadowed Deth’s face; Morgon saw it as behind other fires, in earlier days. He was silent, hovering again within the harpist’s silence. It drew him forward, as across a bridge, narrow as a blade, slung across the gulf of his anger and confusion. He squatted finally beside the fire, traced a circle around it, keeping it small with his mind in the warm night.

  He asked, after a while, “Where are you going?”

  “Back, to where I was born. Lungold. I have no place else to go.”

  “You’re walking to Lungold?”

  He shrugged slightly, his hands shifting. “I can’t ride.”

  “What will you do in Lungold? You can’t harp.”

  “I don’t know. Beg.”

  Morgon was silent again, looking at him. His fingers, burrowing, found an acorn cap and flicked it into the fire. “You served Ghisteslwchlohm for six hundred years. You gave me to him. Is he that ungrateful?”