The Riddle (29 page)

Maerad picked up the pipes awkwardly in her gloved hands, studying them as if she had never seen them before. She had never played them. They were simple cut pipes such as a child might make, fashioned of a dark purplish reed bound with woven grasses. She wondered what they sounded like.

She ought to make a lament for Cadvan and Darsor and Imi. That was what Bards did. And she was still a Bard, even if she had betrayed her calling. She thought briefly of her lyre, but she knew her hands were too numb to play it. And some other part of her thought she was unworthy to touch her lyre, as if she had renounced her right to that most precious of her possessions.

She sat for a long time while the night grew colder, holding the pipes loosely in her hands. At last, reaching a decision, she drank some more of the medhyl. Then she painfully pulled off her gloves and rubbed some of the medhyl and some balm into her fingers. Her fingers burned unmercifully, but, at last, she managed to make them flex and curl enough to hold the pipes properly. She held the instrument to her lips and blew experimentally. Her lips were so cracked that at first she could not make any sound at all, but she persisted, and with a small feeling of triumph managed to get a tiny sound. It made a thin, high fluting, like the wind over rocks.

She played up and down some scales, becoming, despite her extremity, absorbed by her fascination for music. Maerad had played similar instruments as a child and she had some virtuosity with them. These had an unusual richness of tone, and she found she could bend the notes expressively. When she had tested the pipes to her satisfaction, she stood up. This took some time, as on her first attempt her legs simply buckled beneath her, but she continued with a single-minded stubbornness until she was able to stand upright without having to lean against the rock wall, planting her feet doggedly on the ground.

She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and played.

She played for Darsor and Imi, her friends, who had been with her through so much. She played for their beauty as they ran free on the Rilnik Plains, racing and kicking and nipping each other, the wind blowing out their manes in ripples of sable and burnished silver, while she and Cadvan ate the evening meal. She played for their simple, undemanding companionship, for Imi’s nose leaning on her shoulder, whickering softly to comfort her, for the wordless comfort of her sympathy. She played for Darsor’s dour humor, his endurance, and his plain, steadfast loyalty. And, last of all, so that it might not go utterly unremarked even if she died where she stood, Maerad played for Darsor’s heroic attempt to rescue them from the landslide, for his shining, unbroken spirit and his great heart that had never quailed nor admitted defeat, even in the face of total disaster.

She finished, her eyes still shut, and bowed her head for a few moments of silence. Then she lifted her pipes again and played for Cadvan.

She had loved Cadvan, and he had loved her, and, she knew now, with an unassuageable bitterness, that she had misunderstood that love. He was her first friend, the first who had seen her for who she was; he had rescued her from slavery and petty tyranny and shown her the world of Barding, a world of loveliness and humanity she had not known was possible. She remembered her first sight of his shadowed face, exhausted and sad, in the cowbyre in Gilman’s Cot, and how she had trusted him, and had continued to trust him despite all the conflicts between them. She remembered the hours of his teaching, how freely he had given her the gifts within himself, how patiently he had revealed the secrets and wonders of the world to her astonished eyes. She remembered the brilliance of his rare smile, when the fountain of his joy spilled over and illuminated everything around him.

Now that he was gone forever, it was as if, for the first time, she could see him clearly: imperfect, driven, haunted, stern, divided within himself; but also true, honest, generous, strong, and gentle. He had been, all at once, her father and her teacher and her friend. Her grieving love welled through the pure, haunting notes, filling the desolate mountainside with inconsolable yearning for everything she had lost. Her tears spilled down her face and froze on the pipes and on her fingers. Maerad, lost in the music, did not notice she was crying.

At last, she finished. She let the notes die away into silence, and remained still for a long time, her head bowed, her eyes shut. Then she painfully took the pipes from her lips; in her long playing they had frozen there, and they pulled away the skin. She felt a little warm blood run down her chin and freeze. She straightened herself and opened her eyes.

For a moment, Maerad thought the moon itself was standing on the mountainside. She blinked in dazzlement. The bare rock of the road and the wall behind her shone like burnished silver, and behind every blazing boulder and pebble stood a black shadow. Before her stood Ardina, but she appeared neither as a wild Elidhu of the woods, shimmering naked in a bower of branches, nor as the agelessly beautiful Queen of Rachida. Maerad saw her as the songs described her, as Cadvan had sung of her once, long ago: the enchanting daughter of the moon, a being spun of sheer moonbeams, beautiful and evanescent.

Maerad was past astonishment. She thought she must be dreaming, or suffering a fantastic vision, as people were said to do sometimes in the extremity before death, and she gazed at Ardina as if it were completely natural that she should be there.

The Elidhu was suspended slightly above the ground, unmoving save for her hair, which stirred in a wind that Maerad could not feel. She seemed to be waiting for Maerad to speak. At last, as the vision did not disappear, Maerad bowed, but the movement was too much for her, and she slid down the mountain wall, until she was sitting on the ground, still staring at Ardina, her body racked again by uncontrollable tremors. At that, the Elidhu stepped toward her, putting a hand on her forehead. It felt like ice, but thrillingly alive, as if the energy of a mountain river coursed through her veins. Maerad’s shuddering stopped.

“Are you dying, my daughter?” Ardina asked. “I think you have put all your life into your music. I wish I had asked you to play before; I have heard no such music since the days of Afinil. But even then, only the Elidhu could play with such wildness and such skill and such sadness.”

Maerad tried to speak, but her throat was so parched she couldn’t make anything beyond a croak. She just nodded, swallowing. Yes, she was dying.

“I think you did not mean to call me.” Ardina laughed, her head to one side. “You forget what I said: that if you needed me, you should play the pipes I gave you. But you had another desire, I think.”

Maerad did not answer, but a fresh tear rolled down her cheek, and Ardina sighed. “I warned you once, about love. Mortals die like the reeds, and then within the world’s circle is only absence. Ah, my dear daughter, there is no remedy for love or grief. They persist beyond all boundaries.”

Ardina’s words pierced Maerad to the quick. She bowed her head to hide her face and saw that she still clutched the pipes in her hands. With a dogged deliberateness she put them back in her pack, and then lifted her pack onto her lap and clutched it, almost as if she were drowning. She could scarcely feel it with her numbed hands, but it was solid and real, and obscurely comforting. Ardina watched her closely, but without impatience.

“Do you choose to die?” she asked, almost disinterestedly. “For I will not interfere with any choice of yours. I know what it is to desire death, and to be refused it. But if you do not choose death, I will help you. It pains me to see such suffering in thee, daughter.” With that intimate address, some of the despair that had frozen Maerad’s heart melted, and she met Ardina’s gaze. The fey, yellow eyes of the Elidhu were soft with compassion.

For the barest moment, Maerad hesitated. It would be so easy to die, to renounce all her struggles and suffering, to escape the terrible grief that racked her spirit. But something within her refused to choose death; it would come to her eventually whether she chose or not, but an inner voice stubbornly cried out:
not now.
Slowly she said in a cracked voice, so quiet it could hardly be heard, “No, I don’t want to die.”

Ardina leaned over her and kissed her forehead. From her cold lips blossomed a delicious glow that coursed through all Maerad’s body, as if she were falling into a divinely comfortable bed and all her hurts were healed. She looked up into Ardina’s wild face, and it seemed as if the entire world vanished into a golden mist: only the brilliant, unsettling eyes, eyes as yellow as topaz or citrine, burned in her mind like two lights of haven, as she drifted into the blessed shades of sleep.

MAERAD didn’t want to open her eyes. She didn’t know where she was; she knew she hurt all over and that she had a bad headache. She was lying on something soft, and the air around her was warm. In her nostrils was a strong smell of woodsmoke laced with fish.

She lay very still, listening. She heard the sounds of someone moving around, and then a faint metallic clang, and the gentle pop of a burning fire. Gingerly she touched what was covering her: it was soft and warm, some kind of fur.

She heard someone moving toward her and tensed as a hand stroked her forehead. Involuntarily she opened her eyes. She looked into a cracked, ancient face, and a pair of very pale-blue, watery eyes.

“Om toki nel?”
said the face. Maerad looked back without speaking, and the mouth, a cave of wrinkles, opened in a smile, revealing a few blackened teeth.
“Na, na, ek lada.”
The face nodded.
“Na, na.”

“What?” said Maerad. Her voice came out as a croak. “Who are you?”

But the figure had turned to shuffle back to the fire, which gave the only light in that tiny room, and was busy with a pot that hung suspended over it. She was, Maerad realized, a very old woman, smaller even than Maerad. She looked like a shapeless bundle of rags: she was wearing an unidentifiable number of clothes, oddments of furs and cloth, which all looked as if they hadn’t been taken off since she had put them on. A few wisps of yellow-white hair clung to the polished dome of her scalp.

Slowly she turned around, holding a bowl in two hands, and shuffled back, carrying the bowl with infinite care so she might not spill its contents. She sat down next to Maerad on a sawn-off log, which passed for a stool, and offered her a spoonful of something. It was where the smell of fish was coming from, and it made Maerad feel slightly nauseous.

“Eat,” said the old woman. “Eat. Good.”

Maerad struggled to sit upright, but her muscles would not obey her. The old woman nodded to herself and pushed the spoon against Maerad’s lips until she opened her mouth to protest. Before she could speak, the old woman had slipped the spoon between her teeth. Maerad choked and involuntarily swallowed. It was a thin fish soup, and despite the smell, very good indeed. The nausea she had felt identified itself as ravenous hunger. The woman waited patiently while Maerad coped with her first mouthful and then gave her another spoonful, feeding her like a very small child until she had finished the bowl.

“Good, good,” she said. Her face cracked into a smile again. “Sleep now.”

Maerad’s eyes were already shut.

She didn’t know how long she lay there in that tiny hut, drifting between sleep and brief waking. The old woman fed her soup, cleaned her and changed the furs when she was incontinent, and stroked her forehead wordlessly when, as sometimes happened, she woke from terrible nightmares of the mountainside falling, and slow, weak tears ran down her face. Sometimes daylight showed through tiny cracks in the walls like impossibly bright stars, and sometimes it was night; Maerad had no sense of continuity and didn’t know if it was one day and one night or many. The wind wailed sometimes and died down, the rain beat sometimes and went away, and through it all she heard the old woman’s voice, talking to herself in her own tongue or singing or humming, a ceaseless gentle monologue like the running of a river. Time simply vanished. Maerad accepted her ministrations passively; she felt like a baby, incapable of the simplest things, of feeding herself, walking, or even of speech.

But one day — a day later? a week? a month? — she could sit up and take the bowl in her hands and feed herself. And this time, when she handed the bowl back, wiping her mouth, she said, “Thank you.”

“Good?” said the old woman. “
Na, na,
good.” She carried the bowl back to the fire and wiped it carefully with an old cloth before she put it away on a stone shelf beside the fireplace. Maerad didn’t go straight back to sleep, as she had before, but instead looked around curiously. She had never seen such a hovel, a ramshackle hut built of bits of stone and wood with rags stuffed into holes to keep out the wind, barely high enough to stand up in. For the first time, she noticed a yellow dog curled up asleep in the corner on a pile of ragged blankets, where she supposed the woman was sleeping, for Maerad had the only bed: a simple pallet piled with blankets and furs.

“Where am I?” she asked.

The old woman looked up and stared at her with rheumy blue eyes. “You Annaren?”