The Riddle (40 page)

Maerad tried to recall what she had been told of the Winterking. His name, she remembered, was Arkan, and like Ardina he was a powerful Elidhu. He had been Ardina’s adversary during the Elemental Wars, long ages before, and he had allied himself with the Nameless One to crush the Light, which had led to the Great Silence. The ice creatures, the iriduguls, had been his creations, and also the stormdogs. Even his emissaries were more fearsome than almost anything she had seen.

“What do you know of the Winterking, Dharin?” she asked at last.

“Oh, he is but a legend to the Pilani peoples,” he said. “Though some say he is worshiped by the Jussacks, and their persecution of us is his revenge. For it is said we helped to cast him down after the Great Cold, when the Iron King, him you call the Nameless One, covered all this world in terror and darkness. Then he was bound to remain beyond the Ice Sea, in the far north, and was not permitted to dwell in his stronghold, the Arkan-da, near the Idrom Unt, those mountains that you Annarens call the Osidh Nak.”

Maerad nodded. “And the Arkan-da is to the east, then?” she said, trying to get her bearings. “Well, I am glad if that means we are traveling away from the Winterking. The farther I am from him, the better I feel.”

This was not strictly true: Maerad still felt a cold will pressing on her mind. She automatically shielded herself against it as soon as she woke up, and kept a private vigilance for any sign of the Winterking’s creatures. But Dharin’s words comforted her all the same.

Over the next few days the wind fell away, leaving behind it cold blue skies, and Maerad was able to see that the landscape was at last beginning to change. To their right, in the distance, she could see the ghostly outlines of mountains, and they began to strike little woods of spruce and firs, startlingly green against the snow. The land here was hilly rather than mountainous, with more pitfalls for the unwary driver: stumps of dead trees, or lichened rocks that jutted out of the snow. Dharin drove with greater caution and Maerad took the reins only when she could clearly see the way ahead.

Six days from Tlon, they came over a huge ridge, sparsely dotted with firs, and saw before them a wide expanse of ice more than a league wide that filled the valleys between the white hills. Dharin stopped his team and looked over it, shading his eyes.

“This is the Ippanuk Glacier,” he said. “Probably the most dangerous thing we have to cross.”

“Glacier?” asked Maerad.

“A river of ice. It comes from the Votul, the mountains you see there.” He waved his hand to their right, where a ghostly range vanished into the hazy distance. “Well, there’s no time like now,” he said, squaring his shoulders. “We can see well, and from here I think we can pick a safe path.
Ot!
”

It was the first time Dharin had betrayed anything like anxiety, and Maerad looked at the glacier with doubt; if he said it was dangerous, it must be dangerous indeed. He drove the dogs slowly down the ridge and onto the glacier, bumping over the boulders and lumps of dirty ice that littered its edges. The sound of the sled changed as soon as they hit the glacier, becoming a scraping noise rather than a smooth swish through the snow. As they moved toward its center, Maerad realized that the glacier was not silent; it made strange grinding sounds, like rock on rock, and ominous creakings, and sometimes it sounded like the cry of some strange creature. With a shudder, she realized that it was a faint echo of the cries of the iriduguls, when they had attacked her and Cadvan in the Gwalhain Pass.

The ice itself varied. Sometimes it was clear as an emerald, and she could see through green depths to what she was sure was the rocky bed of the glacier, far below them, but most often it was opaque, full of flaws and cracks. It was hypnotically beautiful. Sometimes she saw strange things, like visions, emerging through the clarities: a green tree, its branches bent as if it were caught in a storm, but utterly still, or a cloud of boulders suspended as if in midair. Once she had a glimpse of a huge beast with heavy furred shoulders and long white tusks. Dharin was frowning in concentration, so she didn’t ask him if he knew what it was. It wasn’t long before she saw why he moved with such painful caution over the glacier; the dogs’ claws, sharp as they were, often slipped on the ice, and the whole was riven by deep crevasses, which could appear without warning just below their feet. They went too close for comfort to one, Dharin’s cry to halt causing a scrabbling of claws as they backed away from a chasm that Dharin had not sighted earlier, its treacherous blue-green edges opening to a bottomless darkness like a terrible mouth. The dogs liked the glacier as little as Dharin; they kept their tails low down, and every now and then one of them would whine with anxiety. The short day was nearing to a close before the dogs, their ears pricked forward with relief, came to the end of the glacier, and heaved the sled up the opposite ridge.

After the glacier, they faced nothing worse than the deep cold. Now their course was northwest again: Dharin was aiming for a point on the coast about forty leagues from the glacier, along one of the many fingers of land that thrust out into the frozen sea. The Labarok Isles were west from there.

“Do we sail to the isles, then?” asked Maerad, thinking about her previous experiences of sea travel and wondering where they could find a boat in such uninhabited country.

“No, we drive the sled over the sea,” he answered.

Maerad thought he was joking until he explained that the sea was frozen, and they would be driving across thick ice. “Maybe very thick, given this early winter,” he said. “The Labaroks are islands, to be sure, but in winter they might as well not be. The sea freezes and joins them all together, except around the Isles of Fire.”

As they moved away from the mountains, they started traveling more swiftly. In less than two weeks, through the ever-shortening days, they had traversed almost the entire expanse of the frozen northlands, and the dogs still ran as eagerly as they had on their first day out of Murask. Maerad’s respect for their toughness and loyalty had increased as her fears had vanished; sometimes she even chatted idly with Claw, whose harsh, unwavering determination stirred a sense of recognition within her own breast. These dogs obeyed stern laws of necessity, which were not as strange to Maerad as she might have supposed; she had suffered a harsh childhood, and understood more intimately than most Bards the crude politics of survival. Claw referred to Dharin as “Master,” and she bowed to no one else, human or animal. Since finding that Maerad possessed what the dogs called the “wolf tongue,” Claw treated her with tolerance and respect, but she also made it clear that Maerad’s authority over her was limited.
I will obey you,
she said.
But you are not my master.

Three days after they had crossed the glacier, they stood at last on the shores of the Ipiilinik Igor, the Sea of Fire. They camped before heading out across the ice, and when the day was still dark and the stars sparkled frostily above them in a clear, frozen sky, they began the final leg of their journey. Traveling over the sea ice was a little like riding over the Arkiadera Plains: it was flat and they could make good speed.

The sun rose, a ball of cold flame, and Maerad looked around with wonder. The flatness of the sea was punctuated by high towers of ice, blinding white with blue shadows, which were sculpted by the wind into a multitude of bizarre shapes. Dharin told her they were icebergs, mountains of ice that had not melted over the summer and had now been trapped by the frozen sea. It was, Maerad thought, utterly strange and utterly beautiful, like something from a dream. After a couple of hours, she saw in the distance what seemed to be a great fountain of steam spouting high into the air.

“That is the first island,” said Dharin. “We do not go there.”

“What is it?” asked Maerad.

“These islands have many mountains of fire,” he answered. “They heave up melted rock from the heart of the earth, and they make these hot fountains. Nothing lives on that island; it is scalded every two hours by boiling water. We call it Terun-Ol, the Island of Heat. If you wait, you will see the fountain disappear. There is another island, farther away, that is also made of mountains that make fire, the Irik-Ol. But we shall not be passing there, since it is so hot that the sea does not freeze around it, even in midwinter.”

As they neared the island and then passed it, Maerad watched the plume of steam lessen and then finally disappear. Then, after a long interval, it suddenly spouted up again with a noise like thunder.

Maerad thought that if anyone had told her about such a thing, she would have dismissed it as a fanciful traveler’s tale — it seemed so bizarre that such extremes of heat and cold could exist in the one place.

She at first mistook the next island for another iceberg: a sheer needle of rock, it thrust straight into the sky like a high tower. Dharin said it was called the Nakti-Ol, Bird Island, because in summer huge flocks of birds would nest there. “They say that they rise in the sky like a great swarm, so many that they darken the sun,” he said. “I am sad that they are gone and that we will not see it.”

The sun was already beginning to dip beneath the horizon when Dharin pointed to a low, dark rise of land ahead of them. “That is the Tolnek-Ol, the land of the Wise Kindred,” he said.

Maerad squinted through the gathering darkness. The long journey here, with all its difficulties and wonders, had pushed the Treesong to the back of her mind. It had been a relief to briefly forget about who she was, to merely live with Dharin and the dogs. The quest rushed back into her mind, and apprehension tightened her breast. Now, perhaps, she might find some answers. The only problem was, she wasn’t at all sure that she knew the right questions.

THEY reached the shore of the island well after dusk. Dharin would not set foot on the Wise Kindred’s land after dark, and so they camped on the sea ice for the night. The weather was clear and still, and the countless stars opened above them, seeming like brilliant cold fruits that Maerad could simply pick out of the sky. Dharin and Maerad fed the dogs and then sat outside on the sled talking, the tent seeming too close on such a night, despite the bitter cold. It would still be some hours before they felt ready to sleep.

In the distance Maerad could hear a strange barking, which echoed through the deep silence that surrounded them. The dogs pricked up their ears, but subsided when Dharin told them to be quiet.

“What is it?” asked Maerad.

“Seals, I expect,” said Dharin. “There must be a seal ground not far from here. Well, that is good news; I will ask the Wise Kindred if I may hunt here. I need more meat for the dogs.”

The traditional Pilanel telling of the northern journey included the courtesies expected of strangers who visited the Wise Kindred. Dharin now instructed Maerad in the Pilanel tellings of the northern peoples, and she listened gravely.

“You must understand,” he said seriously, “that those we call the Wise Kindred are only one of many peoples who live in the cold north. The Pilanel tell of at least twenty different peoples on the coast of Hramask, from Orun to Lebinusk, and there are probably more. And you must not think that one group is the same as the next: they have different customs and they speak different languages. The Wise Kindred are understood to be the oldest of all. Their name for themselves, Inaruskosani, means ‘those who first walked on the earth.’”

Maerad nodded humbly, reflecting, not for the first time, how little she knew of Edil-Amarandh and its peoples. They were more various than she had ever supposed; every time she thought she was beginning to understand the world, some other aspect would open and reveal a new ignorance.

Dharin talked on softly, enumerating the different names of the peoples of the north and what he knew of their customs. The different peoples very seldom fought among each other; Dharin said it was because their lives were so harsh that they had no time for war.

There was, he said, a common language called Lirunik, which was used by the northern Pilanel clans and the various peoples of the far north when they needed to speak to each other. Dharin had spoken this language since he was a child, as his father had been a great trader, and he would act as interpreter.

After a while, silence fell upon them, and they just sat, listening to the sleeping grunts of the dogs and the distant coughs of the seal colony. A waxing moon let fall its chilly light over the endless white sea. To the south, Maerad could see a red glow on the horizon, where the fiery mountains of the Irik-Ol poured out the molten heart of the earth. Here, she thought, all is water, ice, fire, stone, and air; the anguish of human beings seems trivial beside such huge, elemental forces. She felt a great peace descend on her heart.

They had sat thus for some time when Maerad felt a tingling in her skin, and at the same time became conscious of a strange noise that she couldn’t locate. It sounded at first like a very distant whistling, then like the ringing of countless tiny silver bells. The noise reminded her of the voice that had spoken her Truename, Elednor, when she had been instated as a Bard. It grew in intensity, sounding now like ringing, now like a hissing of water or wind, now like a faint crackling, and she turned to Dharin, a question on her lips. But Dharin had turned around, facing north, and was staring at the sky. Maerad followed his gaze and gasped.