The Riddle (12 page)

Elenxi turned up later, obviously well pleased. “It’s the same story over the whole isle,” he said, rubbing his hands. “Outrage at Norloch and vows of resistance. There are caves all through these mountains, which I’ve advised them to stock well with provisions and supplies against an invasion. In a week, all Thorold will be ready.” He took a deep draft of wine, and then looked down at the table. “By the Light, I hope it doesn’t come to that,” he said soberly. “School against School — and Norloch, the center of the Light, the aggressor — such a thing has never happened. Kings have always fought, alas, to make their kingdoms greater, but Bards have never made war against each other. But if it does come to that, Thorold will not fall.”

Looking at the fierce old man, now pouring himself another drink, Maerad thought that she understood why Thorold had held out against the Nameless One during the Great Silence. Thoroldians would make bitter and ruthless enemies, she had no doubt, and in defense of their own she suspected they would never concede defeat.

The three Bards continued their trek, riding from village to village across the mountainous terrain of Thorold, for three days. The weather cooled on the third day, and Elenxi sniffed the air suspiciously, wondering if there was to be a storm. That night they stopped at a tiny village called Velissos, huddled in the lee of a high ridge. Elenxi was obviously well known there, and they were greeted warmly. They stabled the horses at the tiny tavern, which was really little more than the front room of a house. They planned to leave the horses in the village; from here they would go on foot.

The storm broke with a sudden violent downpour almost as soon as they reached shelter, and Maerad looked with wonder out onto the wall of rain, a solid gray curtain that hammered down on the tiled roof of the tavern.

“We’re deep in Thorold now,” said Cadvan. “This is mountain country. You can feel the bones of the earth.”

“Well, as long as it doesn’t break my bones,” said Maerad.

“It won’t, if you’re careful,” Elenxi answered. “Which you should be. We’re near the Lamedon now, and it’s tough country. These are my people.”

Maerad looked around her at the Velissos villagers. They did seem tough; these were the shepherds and goatherds who made the delicious white cheeses Maerad had eaten in Busk, and most of them looked as craggy as the mountains their holdings clung to. Some of the men were almost as big-boned as Elenxi, and the women looked strong and capable.

“They breed special goats here, because the mountains are so steep,” said Cadvan. “On one side their legs are shorter than the other, so they can graze more comfortably.”

“How strange,” said Maerad. “Poor things! What happens when they have to turn around? Wouldn’t that be a bit difficult for them?”

“Well, they breed different goats for different hills — right-legged goats to move one way, and left-legged —”

Elenxi snorted with laughter, and Maerad realized she’d been taken in.

“Oh, that’s not fair! It might have been true,” she said. “And there I was believing you.”

That night they brought out their instruments, and there was dancing. Maerad was amazed by how the taciturn villagers became as high-spirited and noisy as the Bards of Busk; she was picked up and whirled around by big men with huge black mustaches and muscles as gnarled and brown as old trees. After the dancing there was singing, and the whole tavern joined in, their hands clasped to their breasts, their voices trembling with emotion. They retired late, after finishing with an old favorite of the Thoroldians,
The Song of Theokas,
a lament that throbbed with sorrowful desire:

When she went to bed, Maerad snuggled into the sheepskins against the surprisingly sharp cold, the lament still ringing in her head, and its meld of love and sorrow echoed all night through her dreams.

The following morning, they picked up their packs and left Velissos with many warm farewells. Elenxi led them up a path even more vertiginous than those they had already traveled, winding its way around tumuli of granite and along sharp ridges. They were so high up now that it was cool, although the sky was clear and blue, and the air held a special freshness, as if they were the first to breathe it. Very often, little mountain streams leaped down the slopes, some no wider than a step, pouring in miniature waterfalls into pools full of shiny pebbles. Maerad tasted the water: it was so cold it numbed her lips.

“It’s fresh from the snowline of the Lamedon,” said Cadvan, nodding upward to the bare stony pinnacles that stretched above them.

Maerad watched a pair of eagles circling so high up they could hardly be seen. She didn’t look down for very long or very often, because the height made her feel a little dizzy.

“It must be harsh here in winter,” she said.

“It is,” Elenxi said. “Winter is when the herders come in, the goats and sheep are shut up in their sheds, and we eat the sweet stored apples and grain and tell long stories by the fires. And then the storms howl about our heads! The weather here is like the people: fierce and unpredictable.” He grinned.

It was very tiring, climbing these slopes. No wonder the Velissos people were so strong, Maerad thought. You needed muscles of iron just to walk around. After three hours they paused for a meal, and then pressed on. Maerad’s thighs were beginning to ache badly, and she was glad of the walking stick Elenxi had cut for her from a thorn tree. At last, they reached one of the meadows that were scattered over the mountains, like emerald liquor in cups of stone. This one was much bigger than most of them, and at its end was a stone house surrounded by three wooden huts and a small garden. Goats wandered the grass, their bells clinking lazily as they cropped, but otherwise there was no one to be seen.

Maerad flopped down and lay on her back, squinting at the blue sky through the nodding grasses and wildflowers. “Leave me here,” she said. “Oh, my poor legs!”

“What, complaining so after a mere leisurely stroll?” said Elenxi, lifting his eyebrows. “If you’re to be an honorary Thoroldian, you’ll have to do better than that.”

“Mercy!” said Maerad. “I’m not sure I have the strength to be Thoroldian. You’re all made of wire.”

Elenxi dragged her up, and they made their way across the meadow to the stone house. Goats came up to them and butted them curiously, their tails wagging comically. Maerad looked into their strange yellow eyes, but didn’t try to talk to them. She was sure she’d have plenty of time later.

As they neared the house, a man as big as Elenxi came out, his arms spread wide. “Welcome, my brother!” he said, enfolding Elenxi in an embrace and kissing him on both cheeks and then turning to the other two. “I am Ankil. And you are Cadvan and Maerad? I am glad to meet you at last, Cadvan; welcome, Maerad. Nerili has told me much about both of you. Come in, come in. I have wine, I have water, I have food. Come in and rest yourselves.”

Maerad studied Ankil with an intensifying curiosity. He was very like Elenxi, but what puzzled her more was her conviction that he was a Bard. He had about him something of the subtle glow by which Bards could recognize each other, although in his case it had an evanescence that made her feel unsure; it was strangely different in him. And, in any case, what was a Bard doing up in the mountains herding goats?

The house was surrounded by a small version of the wide porticos obligatory in Thorold, and there was set a table and a single chair. Ankil went into the house and returned with three stools. “Guests are not frequent here,” he said cheerfully. “So you must forgive the cobwebs on these.” He gave them a perfunctory brush and disappeared inside.

Maerad dropped her pack on the porch and sat down gratefully, rubbing her legs. Before long, Ankil was back with a tray on which he had placed a carafe of rich Thoroldian wine, another of cool water, four cups, and fresh bread and cheese. They sat and ate, their appetites sharpened by the mountain air and their long walk.

By herder standards, Ankil’s house was luxurious; it was smaller than most houses Maerad had passed in the villages on their way, but much more substantial than the plain wooden huts she had seen dotted around the mountain pastures. She found out later that unlike other herders, who moved to the mountain pastures only in summer, Ankil lived there all year round. The house was clearly very old, and had been built with thick granite walls through which were punched small, shuttered windows. The roof, made of clay tiles, was steeply raked to prevent a buildup of snow, and the whole was built on high foundations, so the porch was several steps up.

Unusual for a Thoroldian house, it was built on three levels: there was a cellar, used for storage and work; above that a kitchen and living area; and on the top, above the stove, two bedrooms, with sloping ceilings and shuttered dormer windows that poked out through the tiles. In the rooms were fragrant mattresses stuffed with dried mountain grasses and covered with soft sheepskins. During their stay, Ankil moved out to one of the ancillary huts, where he slept on a mattress in the empty stalls, for the goats slept in the meadows during the summertime. Maerad felt guilty when she saw this, but Ankil just laughed and said it was no punishment for him to sleep like a proper goatherd.

She soon found out why Ankil had the puzzling Bardic glow. He and Elenxi were, indeed, brothers.

“I went down to the School, like Elenxi, when I was a boy,” he told them over the midday meal. “But, you know, I just didn’t want to be a Bard. Not like Elenxi here,” and he poked him with affection. “He is the clever one. But me, I got bored with all that.”

“He was in love,” said Elenxi, smiling.

“Well, that too,” Ankil said. “My Kiranta was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Her eyes were as gray and stormy as the sea and her hair was black as olives, and her skin was like the pale golden silk they make in the valleys. Yes, I was in love. But it was more than that: I could never learn how to read and write. No matter what my mentors tried, I couldn’t make any sense of those squiggles they call letters.”

“So what happened?” asked Maerad, fascinated.

“Well, when my teachers had all thrown their arms into the air and declared that there was nothing they could do, I came back to Velissos and married my Kiranta. I didn’t want to be a Bard; I just wanted to tend my goats and trees and garden and grow my children. I was very happy for a long time. But then” — he shrugged — “as is the way of things, my children grew up and my Kiranta grew old. And that’s when Barding caught up with me, you see, because I did not grow old. I was little different from the way I had been when I had come back from the School, and Kiranta’s hair grew gray, and then white. But my Kiranta looked no different to me, because I loved her; for me she was always the same beautiful girl who looked for me in the pass, with her eyes shining.”

Ankil sighed heavily, and Maerad felt tears start in her eyes. Cadvan was looking at Ankil with a quick empathy. “That is hard,” he said.

“Yes, it was hard when she died,” said Ankil. “It is always difficult to have Bards in a family, and we have so many in ours. . . . Well, I buried my Kiranta, and wept for her, and I still miss her; every day I miss her. So I made sure my children had what they needed, and I came up here. And here I’ve been ever since.”

In the silence that followed his story, Maerad wondered how long Ankil had lived here, in this beautiful, isolated meadow. One hundred years? Two hundred?

“Did you not want to go back to the School?” she asked.

“Ah, no, young Bard,” he said. “It was too late for me, and there was still that little matter of the reading and writing. I am more useful here; I breed fat goats and I make a famous cheese.”

“He is too modest,” said Elenxi. “Ankil is a famous healer, and many send all this way for his help.”

“Pffft, that is nothing,” he said. “I am content.”

“Were any of your children Bards?” asked Maerad curiously.

“Yes, two,” said Ankil. “One is in Gent, another in Turbansk. And my granddaughter is First Bard in Busk.”

“Nerili?” exclaimed Maerad in surprise.

“Yes, my little Neri. She is the image of my Kiranta, and when I see her, I am both proud and sad; she calls up in me so many happy memories, and so many sorrowful reflections. So you see, although I was no good as a Bard, I have made my contribution.”

Elenxi stayed the night before heading down the mountain to confer with more villagers. They had a merry time — merry enough for Maerad to feel very unwell the following morning. She was fascinated by the two brothers, at once so similar and so different, and looked from one to the other in wonder all night: one a Bard of the First Circle, the other a goatherd. The respect between them was palpable. There was no sense that Elenxi felt in any way superior to Ankil; in fact, she felt that he deferred to his brother in a way she hadn’t seen him do to anybody, not even Nerili. Elenxi, she found, was the older brother, by four years, so seniority did not explain it.

Over the coming days, she began to understand Elenxi’s respect. Ankil was, for all his unletteredness, as wise as Nelac, Cadvan’s teacher in Norloch, and beneath his gentleness and apparent simplicity was a rare strength of spirit. His memory was prodigious, and his life had left him plenty of time for reflection. He was a vast storehouse of songs and tales, and his knowledge of herblore was, Cadvan told her, reputedly unrivaled in Thorold.

He lived a life of comfortable austerity. Inside his house was tidy and clean, and everything in it had the beauty of functional things well made. There was little decoration, and no books at all. The kitchen was dominated by a black-iron wood stove with a huge, smoke-blackened chimney. It was furnished only with a broad table and stools, and was surrounded by shelves, which were well stocked with bottles of dried herbs and pulses and grains and salt. Yet more herbs hung in bunches from the ceiling, interspersed with bunches of onions and garlic, infusing the room with a pungent fragrance. The cellars were carefully sealed against damp and were stacked with jars of pickles and jams and preserves and honey, bags of nuts and grains and flours and pulses, and shelves of fruits and vegetables gathered from the previous year — wrinkled golden apples and pears, turnips and potatoes and carrots. And barrels and barrels of wine. There was no meat, because Ankil would not eat animals. Some food and all the wine came up from the village, but the bulk of what he ate was grown and preserved by Ankil himself.