The Riddle (59 page)

She wandered through the orchard into a garden just now greening from its winter slumber, and continued over a path of raked white gravel toward a beautiful house. Maerad knew it was her home, although she had never seen such a place before. It was a long, double-storied building of yellow stone, with wide windows that shone in the sunshine.

When she reached the front door, it opened of its own accord, and she passed inside. She entered every room, seeking something, but they were all empty. She ran upstairs, breathless, beginning to feel distressed, flinging open every door in an increasingly desperate search, but no one was there. A panic seized her, and she ran down the stairs and out of the house into the garden, tears falling down her cheeks.

And then she saw Hem among the apple trees, a half-eaten apple in his hand. He waved and started running toward her, his face radiant with joy.

He was coming home.

THESE notes are intended to be supplementary to and in some cases to update the Appendices to
The Naming,
the first volume of Pellinor, in which I sketched an introduction to the history and society of the Bards of Annar, and discussed briefly the central importance of the Speech to Bardic power.
The Naming
comprises the first two books of the
Naraudh Lar-Chanë,
the
Riddle of the Treesong,
the great Annaren epic that chronicles the Second Rising of the Dark in Edil-Amarandh.
The Riddle
is translated from Books III and V of the
Naraudh Lar-Chanë.

The complex and fascinating world of Edil-Amarandh is one of the fastest-growing areas of contemporary scholarship, with branches in the disciplines of sociology, literature, history, anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, women’s studies, and even in the sciences; and it is consequently almost impossible to keep up with all the ongoing research. These notes cannot be anything but the briefest introduction to this field, but I have done my best to ensure that they accord with the most recent scholarship available.

Edil-Amarandh is a general term for the continent that stretched from the deep North down to beyond the Suderain, from the Western Sea to the wilderness beyond the eastern side of the Osidh Annova. It is a term from the Speech, which can be translated variously as Earth-Throne or Navel of the Earth, and referred to the whole of the known world. Maerad’s Bardic Truename,
Elednor Edil-Amarandh na,
was similar to saying, in modern English, “Maerad of the World.”
²

The Bards used two calendars, referred to as the Afinil and the Norloch yearcounts (A and N). The history of Edil-Amarandh was divided into three main Ages. The Age of the Elementals ended approximately 5,000 years before the time of the present story and concerns mainly the Wars of the Elementals, especially the War by Arkan, the Winterking, against the Elidhu of Annar, led by Ardina. Legends and songs, such as the many lays concerning Ardina, were preserved in tradition from this time, and were written down later.

Second was the Dawn Age, when the culture of the Dhyllin flowered across Annar, centering on the legendary citadel of Afinil. The Afinil yearcount started on its founding. It is reckoned that Bards, or
Dhillarearën,
appeared in Edil-Amarandh shortly before the Dawn Age, in a period known as the pre-Dawn, or Inela. The Afinil yearcount starts in the Dawn Age, and it continued until A2041, when Sharma, the Nameless One, overthrew the forces of Imbral and Lirion in the Battle of the Firman Plains and began the tyranny of the Dark, which became known later as the Great Silence.

Lanorgil
³
named the third Age the Restoration; it dates from the founding of Norloch, and institutes the Norloch yearcount. At this time, Maninaë founded the Schools and the Monarchy of Annar.

The Great Silence, which lasted more than a millennium from A2041 to A3234, was not counted as an Age.

The largest realm in the continent was Annar, but within Annar the different regions were widely diverse; there were huge differences between, say, Innail and Il-Arunedh, despite their speaking a common language. The diversity of Edil-Amarandh was even clearer in the Seven Kingdoms, which were distinct both from Annar and from each other in their cultures and languages. The sharing of power between Bards and what might be called for convenience “civil authorities” varied in each of the Seven Kingdoms. But perhaps because they were relatively small, and also because they were (despite being called kingdoms) not strictly speaking monarchies, conflict between the dual authorities was extremely rare and never reached, as it did in Annar, the point of civil war. In two of the kingdoms — Amdridh and the Suderain — civil authority was determined by heredity, although rulers could be legally deposed by the other authorities if they were considered by the population to be exceeding or abusing their powers. This, in fact, happened only once, in Turbansk in A1333, when Aleksil the Tyrant, who was mightily resented for the crippling taxes he instituted to finance his opulent court, was overthrown in a bloodless coup after a popular uprising supported by the School of Turbansk. More common than hereditary succession were varying degrees of democracy, ranging from full enfranchisement (Lanorial, Culain, Lirhan), where every adult citizen was expected to vote, to partial representation, as in Thorold and Ileadh, where village Mayors or Thanes would represent popular interests and vote for the Chamber in Thorold, or the Parliament, in Ileadh.

The relationships between these different authorities were extremely complex, and varied from kingdom to kingdom, but they worked effectively to balance the possible extremes of each. Bardic authority was complementary to the civil authority of non-Bards, and each took supreme authority in different areas. Bards in the Seven Kingdoms were greatly respected. They provided education, expertise, and training in various arts and crafts; the rituals of the year such as the Midsummer Festival described in Thorold in
The Riddle;
spiritual authority; and (not unimportantly) a great deal of entertainment — music, in particular. Civil authorities took care of most areas of justice, administration, and defense, although there was a lot of crossover — for example, a plaintiff could appeal to a Bardic tribunal if he felt aggrieved by civic justice, and Bards, both as soldiers and mages, were important contributors to a region’s military power.

By their nature, the civic authorities tended to be parochial in their concerns, whereas the Bards’ view was wider. In practice, this led to cultures of negotiation and diplomacy, and mitigated against any tendencies to absolute rule. It also led to frustrations: the Bard Liric was not alone when he complained peevishly during a dispute over the placement of a bridge in N356 that the Councilors of Lirhan were “stiff-neck’d and ignorant” and that Lirhan’s citizenship was “barell-headed” for electing them. Many Bards complained over the centuries about the conservatism and resistance to change of the civic authorities. There were frequent arguments about trade and other interests between the different kingdoms: most of these kinds of disputes were resolved through the mediation of the Bards. However, despite these hiccups, nothing disturbed the model of dual authority in the Seven Kingdoms, and in the presence of external threat it was proverbial that all smaller disputes were forgotten to protect the common interest. The Seven Kingdoms were proud that they had been the centers of resistance to the Nameless One during the Great Silence, and both the civic authorities and the Bards nourished that tradition, represented by a common code of fealty to the Light and the Balance, which, at its best, balanced both local and general interests.

Although it was by far the largest in area and population of all the realms of Edil-Amarandh, Annar’s power over the surrounding territories was nonexistent: it was a relationship of cooperation, promulgated in large part by the practical unity of Bards. Any attempt by Annar to assert central rule was always resisted fiercely by the Seven Kingdoms.

The most serious crisis before the events of this book occurred during the Long Wars (N710–N751), when Dhuran the Red (so named for his red hair and bad temper) proclaimed Annaren the Empire and himself Emperor after a coup in which he assassinated his brother, Ilbaran III, in N710. His claim to rule the Seven Kingdoms by Right of the Triple Sceptre led to open warfare between the Seven Kingdoms and Annar. He launched invasions against Lanorial and Ileadh after they sharply rejected his authority as both illegitimate and a corruption of the Balance and the Light. The actual invasions were easily beaten back, since Dhuran was simultaneously embroiled in ruinous civil war against the sons of Ilbaran, Baran, and Ebaran, and did not have the resources to mount an effective offensive. For most of the four decades of conflict that followed, the Seven Kingdoms, after severing their alliances with Norloch and Annar and strengthening their defenses, remained warily aloof from these internecine wars, waiting to see who would win. None of the claimants for the throne was an attractive prospect: the two sons of Ilbaran were as ruthless in their pursuit of power as Dhuran, and the fourth possible candidate, Dhuran’s daughter Ilseticine the Fair, was murdered by Baran early in the Long Wars. When Dhuran was cast off the throne by Baran in N749, the new King’s first act was to take the title of the White Flame (the prefix
Nor
), an act of staggering hubris that signified his appropriation of the traditional authority of the Bards. The newly styled Nor-Baran instituted a tyranny crueler than that of his predecessor: exacting an implacable revenge on anyone he knew or suspected of opposing him, and imprisoning and executing his brother, Ebaran, for treason. He also announced that the Schools would now exist only by Royal favor, and that any Schools that did not acknowledge this would be destroyed by force of arms. Even Dhuran the Red had not dared to alienate the Bards.

At this point, the Seven Kingdoms became deeply alarmed, as they rightly guessed that armed invasion of their territories was not far away, and made open alliance with the Bards of Annar. Nor-Baran’s defeat and death in battle occurred two years later.

The Long Wars led to the final overthrow of the monarchy, the end of the line of Maninaë, and the subsequent rule of Annar by the Norloch Bards. This outcome was often considered, especially in the Seven Kingdoms, a calamitous result, since it upset the balance between civil and Bardic authority, although two centuries of wise and fair rule by Noldor (First Bard from N745–N866) and Nardil (N866–N939) ensued. However, Enkir’s reign as First Bard from N939 amply bore out their forebodings.

The history of the relationship between the Seven Kingdoms and Annar was, therefore, by no means untroubled. This background contributed to the disquiet with which the First Bards of the Seven Kingdoms had been watching developments in Norloch after the sacking of the School of Pellinor in N935, ten years before the events recounted in the
Naraudh Lar-Chanë.
Although Enkir was a practiced politician, and was careful to stress his fealty to the Light, his uncompromising insistence on the necessity of central authority and his increased campaigning against female Bards ensured that his rapid rise to power and his appointment to Norloch’s First Circle in the early decades of the N900s was viewed with alarm in the Seven Kingdoms. The First Bards and civil rulers were disturbed enough to strengthen what had always been an unofficial alliance designed to protect the Seven Kingdoms against the machinations of Annar.