The Gift (59 page)

Cadvan came up and stood beside her.

“Alas for Norloch!” he said.

“Yes,” said Maerad. She clutched the rails to stay her trembling, the aftershock of the battle. Cadvan gazed back over the water.

“I’m glad we’re going to Thorold,” he said. “Maybe because it’s an island, it has always been one of the most independent Kingdoms. If the First Circle issues a warrant on our heads, it will most likely be ignored there.”

“A warrant?” Maerad turned to look at Cadvan with wide eyes. Cadvan shrugged.

“It is likely, Maerad. Blood has been spilled. And unless the First Circle is restored under Nelac, which seems a faint chance, we are outlawed now. We’ll have made some powerful enemies tonight.”

Maerad bowed her head, feeling oppressed. She wondered for a few seconds if she had the strength to flee both the Light and the Dark. It was too hard. . . . She had thought Norloch the end of her journey, but it seemed it was only the beginning of another flight, this time into the unknown, her fate more uncertain than it had ever been.

“I regret the death of Gast,” Cadvan said, after a pause. “He was not an evil man, merely misled. He was doing what he believed right.”

Maerad thought:
He was going to kill you,
but she didn’t say it. “Did you know him well?” she asked, turning to face Cadvan.

His eyes were dark with sadness. “No, not well,” he said. “He came from the School of Desor.” He was silent for a time. “Civil war is an ugly thing, Maerad. It pits friend against friend, and makes enemies of those who by rights should be our allies. I had hoped never to see it. But such are these times.”

They gazed over the water, listening to the ugly cries of battle, now beginning to fade with distance.

“Do you think Enkir is dead?” Maerad asked suddenly.

“I would like to think so,” Cadvan said. “But I feel no certainty, which is perhaps a sign that he still lives. He draws his power from a source that is more than human, and that may have protected him. And if Enkir is alive, I fear for Norloch. He is still First Bard, the most powerful Bard in Annar, and if he is alive, he will use the chaos of tonight to his own ends.”

“But maybe Nelac could stop him?”

“Perhaps,” Cadvan answered. “But as he said, how deep does this darkness go? When people are afraid, they will give up almost anything for an illusion of safety. Only Nelac knows how deeply Enkir has betrayed the Light, and Enkir has already accused him of treachery. Nelac helped us escape, and I have killed one Bard, at least. You do not have to be evil to be mistaken.” Cadvan’s voice was bleak. “The weight of evidence may well seem to count against anything Nelac can say.”

“But can’t the Council tell what the truth is?” Maerad said with a sudden passion. “They’re Bards, aren’t they? Aren’t Bards supposed to know?”

Cadvan gave her a tired smile. “Truth is not so simple, Maerad. You know that. It all depends from where you are looking, and it changes. . . . Do you think it is so easy to trace the workings of the Light? How do any of us really know that we choose rightly?”

Maerad thought of Norloch, high citadel of the Bards, now revealed as the center of Darkness, and then of Cadvan’s confession earlier that night, and fell silent. She was filled with sudden disquiet. She had thought the Dark and the Light as easy to distinguish as night and day; but Cadvan seemed to be saying that was not the case at all, that certainty was but a comforting illusion.

“Do you think we are doing right?” she asked at last.

Cadvan did not answer her at first, and then he sighed. “Yes, I think we are,” he said. “At least, we do the best we can, knowing what little we do. But sometimes there is no choice before you, except between bad and worse.”

Then Owan called Cadvan over to him, wanting more help with the wind, and Maerad was left alone at the railings, brooding, staring back at the burning city.

As the boat crossed the harbor, driving a white furrow through the waves, the sounds of fighting died away completely beneath the soft creaking of the sails and the sough of the waves. Maerad gazed long at the citadel, feeling the trembling in her limbs gradually cease.

The ships were still burning along the quay, throwing a dreadful glare on the water, and with a stab of dismay she saw fire leaping in the higher Circles. The First Circle seemed to be all on fire. She thought of Nelac; he said he was taking his students down to a lower level. They would not be in the First Circle still, surely? She hoped bitterly that Enkir was dead. Perhaps then the Circle would be restored.

Despite everything that had happened in the past few hours, Maerad felt as if her blood were burning with life. She was weary, weary to the bone, but she wasn’t at all sleepy. Slowly, looking across the widening water, she felt herself relax, and she thought, for the first time since it had happened, of her instatement: of the surge of fire that had passed through and transformed her. She was different now. She was the Fire Lily, Elednor of Edil-Amarandh.

She sat down on the deck and looked searchingly up at the stars. There, just as she had seen it in Gilman’s Cot, blazed Ilion, solitary and bright. She thought of Hem: where was he now? Was he too staring up into the night sky, thinking of her? And maybe her mother, Milana, also had done just this; maybe she too had searched for the brilliant jewel of Ilion among the constellations, and thought of it as her star.

Here on the earth’s surface,
thought Maerad,
people labor and suffer and die. Does any of that anguish touch Ilion?
She wondered if the stars could sense the vibrations of human joy and wonder, of grief and despair. Did the stars know what was right and wrong? What were the Dark and the Light to them? She remembered what Ardina had said to Cadvan:
the Light blooms the brighter in the darkest places.
Perhaps, at this distance from human affairs, another pattern emerged from the chaos, another kind of necessity, and even evil became part of a larger music.

Maerad stared into the sky, feeling her heart pulsing in her body and her blood coursing through each tiny vein. She felt as if she keenly understood, for the first time in her life, the intricate relationships between all things, a web of infinite beauty and complexity. Between the small orb of her eye and the distant star, she felt the pull of a tiny glowing thread, one of the infinite gravities that wove together the living and the dead, the far and the near, the tiny and the immense, in one everchanging, everrenewing world.

As this understanding swelled inside her, the fears that haunted her gradually subsided and disappeared. For the first time since she could remember, she thought of her mother without sorrow. She saw her in her mind’s eye, tall and unbroken and beautiful: Milana, First Bard of Pellinor. She would be proud of her daughter now.

Maerad breathed in the sweet night air with a fierce exultance. This night, she thought, she did not care what the future held, what perilous journeys and dimly guessed terrors awaited her. For tonight, the present was enough.

THE difficulties of dating the extraordinary civilization of Edil-Amarandh, or even of pinpointing its exact geographic location, are well known. Estimates vary wildly, dating its mysterious disappearance from 10,000 to 150,000 years before the beginning of the last Ice Age. Initial theories, which saw the Annar Scripts as confirmation of the persistent accounts in Plato, the Mabinogion, and elsewhere of an Atlantean nation overwhelmed by flood, have generally been discredited, since Edil-Amarandh appears to be far older than these texts suggest and has sharply divergent cultural differences. Some people, however, have suggested that the continent of Edil-Amarandh may be sunk beneath the Atlantic, west of the African and European coasts, as was theorized of Atlantis.
¹
However, despite these arguments, the voluminous records available make it possible to elucidate a detailed history of Annar and the Seven Kingdoms.
²

The Bards used two principal calendars: the reckoning of Afinil (indicated with A) and the Annaren or Norloch Calendar (indicated with N). These calendars were in general use throughout Edil-Amarandh. The events recounted in
The Gift
took place in the Year N945, which is to say 945 years after the Restoration of the Light under Maninaë.

The history of Annar and the Seven Kingdoms is divided into three Ages (the Great Silence is not regarded as an Age), according to the
Chronicles
of Istar of Norloch (N398), from which this account is mainly taken.
³

The Age of the Elementals ended approximately a thousand years before the founding of Afinil, that is, about 5,000 years before the time of this story. Thus by the Restoration, much of its history was lost, and the little that remained was partial and fragmentary. However, after the founding of Afinil, the Elementals who remained recounted many of the events of that Age,
⁴
and so many stories and songs were preserved through the Bardic tradition, although again only scraps of that lore were preserved after Afinil was razed by the Nameless.

Elementals (or the Elidhu) were immortals and were so called because they bore affinities with natural forces such as fire, water, earth, air, the sun, the moon, and the tides. They were often associated with particular places or regions, such as rivers or mountains. After the Elemental Wars, many of the Elidhu retreated into their pure forms and were not seen again as sentient beings, although some still remained as visible spirits. They could take different forms at will, and in the days of Afinil often visited that city in the guise of humans and learned from the Dhyllin the arts of speech, song, and music, in which they especially delighted. The Lady Ardina was the most celebrated of those Elidhu who became part of the human world. After the dominion of humans and the estrangement between the two races, for which the Nameless was in large part responsible, most withdrew into their elemental forms and were rarely seen. Their number was not known.

The Age of the Elementals was marked by the dominion of the Ice Witch, Arkan, who came from the north and covered Edil-Amarandh with a perpetual winter. At this time the Elementals threw up some of the mountain ranges of Edil-Amarandh, the Osidh Elanor (the Mountains of the Dawn) and the Osidh Annova, in an attempt to bar Arkan’s approach. All living things at this time suffered greatly, and it was said that humans at this point almost disappeared from the face of the earth. The Ice Witch was resisted and finally overthrown by an alliance between some of the Elementals and the peoples of Edil-Amarandh, led by the Elidhu Ardina and the King Ardhor. The final war against Arkan convulsed the entire continent: “The sea poured in over what had been land, and lands rose where had before been sea.”
⁵
When the war ended the coastline was entirely different, and became the shape presently mapped.

Human history and songs are recorded from that time — the legend of Mercan, for example, which was preserved in the
Scrolls of Lir
at the Library of Lirigon — but the years were not logged. Small communities of men and women lived in settlements east of the Osidh Annova, and there was a strong and proud people who lived near what is now the Lir River, the descendants of whom later became the Dhyllin.