The Riddle (2 page)
Authors: Alison Croggon
dh
— a consonantal sound halfway between a hard
d
and a hard
th,
as in
the,
not
thought.
There is no equivalent in English; it is best approximated by hard
th. Medhyl
can be said METH’l.
s
— always soft, as in
soft,
not as in
noise.
Note:
Dén Raven
does not derive from the Speech, but from the southern tongues. It is pronounced
don RAH-ven.
MAERAD was a being of the upper regions of air, bodiless and free, without self or memory or name. She gazed at the landscape beneath her, fascinated. For a long time she didn’t even recognize it as a landscape; it looked like a strange and awesome painting. For as far as she could see, there stretched a huge red expanse covered with ripples, like sand under water, but these ripples, she began to understand, must be enormous. She was very high up and she could see very far, and there were no clouds at all, only a tiny shadow moving over the earth, which she realized after a while was her own. She seemed to be flying with some purpose in a particular direction, although she couldn’t remember what the purpose was.
After a while, the land changed: the red ripples ran up against a ridge of purple rock and stopped, and she was passing over mountains whose shadows stretched long and sharp behind them. On the other side of the range ran tracks like rivers, lighter veins spreading in delicate fans, but she could see no water in them. The colors of the earth changed to subtle purples and dull greens that signaled vegetation. In the far distance she could see a whiteness that seemed to gather light to itself: it looked like a lake. But a lake of salt, she thought with surprise, not water. . . .
Then everything shifted. She was no longer in the sky, but standing on what seemed to be the spine of a high ridge of bare rock that dropped sheer before her. She looked over a wide plain that stretched to the horizon. The soil was still a strange red orange, but this land was nothing like the one she had flown over: it seemed blasted, poisoned, although she could not say how. As far as she could see, there were rows and rows of tents, interspersed with large open spaces where masses of figures performed some kind of drill. A red sun sent low, level rays over the plain, casting black shadows back from the tents. Somehow the figures didn’t seem human: they marched with a strange unchanging rhythm that cast a chill over her heart.
Maerad had never seen an army before, and the sight shocked her: so many thousands, uncountable thousands, anonymous as ants, gathered for the sole aim of injury and death. She turned away, suddenly sickened with dread, and saw behind her, on the other side of the ridge, a white, bare expanse. The sun struck up from it, hurting her eyes as savagely as if someone had stabbed her. She cried out, clutching her face, and stumbled and fell. Her body, now heavy and corporeal, fell with the ominous slowness of a dream: down, down, down, toward the cruel rocks below.
Maerad woke, gasping for breath, and sat bolt upright. This was an unwise thing to do, as she was sleeping in a hammock slung below the deck of a small fishing smack called the
White Owl.
The hammock swung dangerously and then, as she flailed for balance in the pitch dark, tipped her out onto the floor. Still trapped in her dream, Maerad screamed, putting out her hands to break her fall, and hit the wooden floorboards.
She lay still, breathing hard, as above her a trapdoor was flung open and someone came stumbling down the steps. Maerad could see his form silhouetted against a patch of stars, and then a soft light bloomed in the darkness, illuminating a tall, dark-haired man who moved easily with the motion of the boat.
“Maerad? Are you all right?”
Maerad sat up, rubbing her head. “Cadvan,” she said with relief. “Oh, I had a terrible dream. I’m sorry, did I cry out?”
“Cry out? It sounded as if a Hull were in here, at least.”
Maerad managed a wan smile. “No Hulls,” she said. “Not yet.”
Cadvan helped her up, and Maerad groped her way to a bench along the walls of the tiny cabin and sat down. Her hands were trembling.
“Bad dreams?” said Cadvan, looking at her intently. “It is little wonder you should have nightmares, after what we’ve been through.”
Maerad felt his unasked question. “I think it was a foredream,” she said, brushing her hair out of her eyes. “But I don’t understand what it was about. It was horrible.” Foredreams, in Maerad’s experience, were always horrible.
“Tell me, then.” Cadvan sat next to her on the bench.
Maerad haltingly told him of the dream. Put into words, it didn’t sound so awful: the worst thing about it was the feeling of despair and horror it had inspired within her. Cadvan listened gravely, without interrupting, and when she finished, there was a short pause.
“What you describe sounds to me like the deserts south of Dén Raven,” he said. “And perhaps your dreaming semblance stood on the peaks of the Kulkilhirien, the Cruel Mountains above the Plains of Dust, where the Nameless One was said to have marshaled his forces in the days before the Great Silence.”
“Was it a vision, maybe, of the past?” Maerad looked earnestly at Cadvan, and he met her eyes.
“It is possible that you might dream of the past,” he said. “Foredreams come from beyond the Gates, where time is not as it seems on this earth. But I think it more likely you saw the armies of the Dark as they are now, massing in the south for an attack on Turbansk.”
Maerad drew in her breath sharply, and thought of her brother, Hem, now riding to Turbansk with their friend Saliman.
“I hope that I dreamed of something else,” she said. “It was an evil thing I saw. The soldiers looked — they didn’t seem to be human beings.”
“They sound like dogsoldiers to me,” said Cadvan. “They are not creatures born as others are; they are forged of metal and flesh by some ill art in the mighty armories of Dén Raven. They are invested with a strange parody of life, so they seem to have will and intelligence.”
Maerad’s heart constricted with fear for her brother: so young, so damaged, so lately found and lost again. For an instant, she saw his face vividly before her, with its mixture of arrogance and mischief and vulnerability and, behind that, a bitter desolation she did not quite understand, but which pierced her heart with pity.
She had, by the strangest of chances — although Cadvan said it was not chance at all — discovered Hem in the middle of the wilderness. She had long thought him dead, slaughtered as a baby during the sack of Pellinor. He was now a gangly twelve-year-old boy, dark-skinned like their father, and unlike Maerad, whose skin was very white; but they both shared the same dark hair and intense blue eyes.
She had felt bonded to Hem even before she knew who he was. For most of her sixteen years Maerad had been unbearably lonely, and when she had found Hem — silent, terror-stricken, and even more destitute than she had been — her starved soul had flowered toward him: she loved him fiercely, protectively, with all her passion. The thought of the army she had seen in her dream marching on Turbansk, marching on her brother, filled her with black dismay.
Cadvan broke her gloomy reverie by offering her a brown stoppered bottle and a glass from a cupboard nearby. “Have some of this,” he said.
It was a strong spirit designed to ward off chills on cold nights at sea, and Maerad gulped it gratefully, feeling the liquor sear a path down her gullet. She coughed and then sat up straight, feeling more substantial.
“If my dream is true, it is a very great army,” she said at last. “Turbansk will be hard pressed.”
“It is ill news, and not only for Turbansk,” said Cadvan. “But even that vast force is only one piece in the great stratagem the Nameless One is now unleashing. And you, Maerad, are as significant to him as that huge army. Maybe more so. Everything turns on you.”
Maerad bowed her head, oppressed beyond measure by Cadvan’s words. On me? she thought bitterly. And yet she knew it was true.
She pressed her hands together to stop their trembling, and glanced at Cadvan as he sat down again beside her, his face somber and abstracted with thought.
Their first meeting came vividly into her mind. It had been a mere three months before, but to Maerad it felt like a lifetime. She had been milking a cow in Gilman’s Cot, the grim northern settlement where, for most of her short life, she had been a slave. He had stood silently before her, amazed and disconcerted that she could see through his charm of invisibility.
It had been a morning like any other, notable only for being the Springturn when winter, in theory at least, began to retreat from the mountains. Then, as now, his face had been shadowed with exhaustion and anxiety and — Maerad thought — an indefinable sadness. Despite everything — despite his being a stranger, despite her fear of men, learned from the violence of life in the cot — she had trusted him at once. She still didn’t really know why; it went too deep for words.
It was Cadvan who had revealed to her who she was, and he had helped to unravel some of the history of her family. With her mother, Milana, Maerad had been captured and sold as a very small child after the sack of Pellinor, the School where she had been born. It was Cadvan who helped her escape from the misery of slavery, who had told her of her Gift and opened up to her the world of Bards. He had taken her to the School of Innail, and for the first time in her conscious life she had found a place where she felt at home. A sudden sharp ache constricted Maerad’s throat as she thought of Silvia, who had become like a mother to her in the short time they had known each other; and then of Dernhil, who had loved her. Despite that love she had spurned him, and when Dernhil had been killed by Hulls — the Black Bards who were servants of the Nameless One — she had mourned both his absence and a vanished possibility that she would always regret.
She wished fiercely that she had been able to stay in Innail —
loved as you should be,
Dernhil had said to her — and that she could have spent a quiet life learning the Bardic Arts of Reading, Tending, and Making. She would have liked nothing better in the world than to learn the scripts of Annar and decipher their immense riches of poetry and history and thought, or to study herblore and healing and the ways of animals, to observe the rites of the seasons and keep the Knowing of the Light, as Bards had done for centuries before her. Instead, she was on a tiny boat in the middle of a dark sea, hundreds of leagues from the gentle haven of Innail, fleeing from darkness into darkness, her future more uncertain than it had ever been.