The Riddle (35 page)

“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.

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.

Sirkana 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 à 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.