The Riddle (13 page)

Maerad was to find that visitors were not so infrequent as Ankil had intimated; at least once a week a Velissos villager would struggle up to the meadow, leading a pony that carried supplies on its back — wood or grain or wine — and leading it back down laden with cheeses or combs of honey or some especially requested healing potion.

It all bespoke a life of hard physical labor, and, indeed, Ankil was busy from dawn to dusk. At night he sat with them in the fragrant kitchen or, if it was not too cold, outside on the porch, and they told many tales and sang many songs, their music echoing out over the mountains of Thorold.

Maerad and Cadvan had their own routines, although they helped Ankil in his tasks whenever they could. Cadvan was now intensively drilling Maerad in High Magery, practical and theoretical, and she continued to learn the Ladhen runes and Nelsor scripts, although they hadn’t many books with them. In the afternoons, mentally tired by the work, it was a relief to practise swordcraft and unarmed combat. It also provided much entertainment for the goats, who after a couple of days would gather around them in a circle, their jaws constantly chewing, following the strokes with interested expressions, skittering off in mixed alarm and hilarity when the sparring became too violent. One, a huge billy goat, constantly made rude remarks. Occasionally he was so obnoxious that Maerad would purposely let a loose slash go his way, and then, his dignity affronted by having to skip backward, he would butt the other goats so they scattered in alarm.

Maerad found a tranquility in this simple life, very different from the busy intensity of Busk, and her nightmares again subsided. The longer she stayed with Ankil, the more the peace of the mountains began to enter her. Sometimes, when her day’s work was done and Cadvan was off helping Ankil with the garden or the goats, she would climb to another tiny meadow nearby and just sit, letting the deep quiet fill her up slowly, an unhurried accretion of light. From this meadow she could look over the whole south of the Isle of Thorold, right down to where the sea vanished into blue mists of distance. At these times, the things that troubled her seemed far away and unimportant: all that mattered was the hum of the bees and the chirp of birdsong, the way the sun gleamed on the edge of a blue wildflower, the distant bleat and clink of grazing goats.

In these moments she usually didn’t think about anything. But when she did, her thoughts most often turned to Hem. He would rise vividly in her mind, his gangly limbs, which had, nevertheless, a surprising grace; his dark, haunted face with its mischievous smile; the intense blue eyes that alone hinted that he was her brother. She remembered the terrible day that she and Cadvan had found him, stinking of urine and terror, concealed in a Pilanel caravan. Maerad still dreamed sometimes of the slaughtered bodies of the family who had hidden him. It had been the first time Maerad had really understood the horror of Hulls — the “Black Bards,” as Hem called them. It had opened up a shocking vista of emptiness that appalled her.
Hulls enjoy the suffering of others,
Cadvan had said to her at the time;
it answers some lack within themselves. . . .

Maerad sometimes felt she was all lack. It frightened her. Hem had filled an emptiness within her that she had not been aware of. She smiled, thinking of how he refused to call himself Cai, his birth name; he was, he insisted, Hem. But she also wondered what was behind that refusal, what it was about himself that he sought to deny. She had thought it was because Hem was not comfortable as a Bard. But perhaps it was something else. Hem, after all, was not an Annaren name; it came from the wandering people of Zmarkan. Maybe, without realizing it, Hem was cleaving to the distant memory of their Pilanel father.

There was about her brother something irrepressible, a spark that even his abused childhood had not extinguished; and yet she feared for him, feared that the blackness stamped in him was a damage that would never be healed. But, Maerad thought fiercely, it must be healed; she could heal it, if they only had time.

At least she knew her brother was alive, and that mere fact made her feel a little less alone in the world. No matter how many friends she made, Maerad still felt deeply alone. Part of it was her fate as the One, but it was more than that. She had been alone for as long as she could remember.

It was inevitable that their evening conversations would turn at some point to Maerad and Cadvan’s quest, and to the
Riddle of the Treesong.
Ankil hadn’t expressed any curiosity about their reasons for concealment in the mountains, although he was clearly well informed about the recent events in Busk.

One night, they were speaking of Maerad’s Elemental ancestry, which interested Ankil keenly. Maerad showed him the gold ring that the Elidhu Ardina had given her, and then ran upstairs to get the pipes that she had been given when they met in the Weywood in Annar. Ankil inspected the pipes closely; like all Bards, he was a musician. He refrained blowing through them, handling them gingerly, as if they might be dangerous.

“I used to make pipes like that when I was a child,” Cadvan commented.

“As did I,” said Ankil. “Out of the river reeds. They’re the kind only children make. It’s like those rhymes that children sing. They are never taught them by adults, but they sing the same nonsense from Zmarkan to Turbansk.”

Ardina’s face sprang vividly to Maerad’s mind: her wild, fey face, with its yellow eyes, cleft by an iris like a cat’s. Maerad had seen her both as the grave Queen of Rachida and as the wild Elidhu. There was, she reflected now, something childlike in her different guises; perhaps it was why the Elementals were so distrusted by Bards.

“The Elementals do not read books, as I do not,” said Ankil. “They have their own Knowings, and their memories are deep. I have spoken myself with the Elidhu Lamedon.”

“Indeed?” said Cadvan, his interest quickening. “I did not know he still spoke with humans.”

Ankil laughed. “He does not. But I, it seems, am half goat and half eagle, and so he deigns to speak to me. It is like talking to a storm! But he has told me many interesting things, and sometimes, when I am troubled, I will visit him.”

“How does he appear to you?” Maerad asked eagerly.

“Sometimes he won’t appear at all. I climb all the way up there, and come all the way back. But when he wills, he appears to me as a form of mist, or sometimes he will speak as an eagle, but bigger by far than even the Thoroldian mountain eagles.”

“I am quite certain that Bards have not taken enough account of the Elementals over the centuries,” said Cadvan. “To all our peril.”

“I too think that,” said Ankil. “But not many Bards agree. Here in Thorold it’s a little different, perhaps: I believe Elidhu blood runs in the veins of many Thoroldians. There are many tales here of love between water sprites and men, or of women who have gone into the mountains and come back ten years later leading a little child with strange eyes.”

“I wonder if the Lamedon would know anything about the Treesong,” Maerad said.

“Well, there is nothing in the library in Busk.” Cadvan made a gesture of disgust. “I have been inhaling ancient dust for weeks, to no avail.”

“The Treesong?” said Ankil.

“We’re supposed to find it,” said Maerad.

She felt no doubts about trusting Ankil, and she plunged without hesitation into the tale of their quest. Ankil listened with close attention, his bushy eyebrows drawn together. Cadvan sat in silence, his face clouded with thought.

“Hmmm,” Ankil said when she had finished talking. “Well, I do not know if the Lamedon can help us. He is not overfond of Bards, as he has told me on many occasions, and he has no interest at all in the struggles of the Light and the Dark, and never has had. He is not like the Elidhu of Annar, who remember the Dhyllin and the days of Afinil, when Bard and Elidhu sang together.”

“Do you think he might talk to me?” asked Maerad doubtfully. “I can speak their language.”

Ankil gave her a look of such candor that she almost blushed. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I think it more likely that he would not. And could you climb to the peaks of the Lamedon?”

Maerad thought of how the heights even here made her dizzy, and shuddered.

“No,” she said.

“I don’t think so either,” said Ankil frankly. “It is a challenge even for a skilled climber, and even in summer. And you are so slight — the wind would pick you up and throw you into a crevasse or send you sailing toward Busk.”

“A shame,” Cadvan said restlessly. “Though it might be as fruitless as my search through the documents of Old Thorold. How do you find something if you do not know what it is?”

“I don’t know,” said Ankil. He was frowning in thought. “But I am thinking that it reminds me of something. Do they tell in Annar of the Split Song?”

“No,” said Cadvan. “The Split Song?”

“It is a very old story, and not a well-known one.” Ankil picked up a boot he had been mending and spat on the leather. “I will tell you if you like. It was told me by an old man when I was a little boy, and I thought it such a strange tale it has stuck with me all these long years.” He began to polish the boot carefully, pausing every now and then to admire its sheen; when Ankil told a story, he always started doing something with his hands. Maerad settled herself comfortably. She liked Ankil’s stories.

“Once, long ago, when time was an egg, before there was above and below, or before and behind, or deep or through or wide, there was a Song. There was no voice to sing it, and there was no ear to hear it, and the Song was lonely in the nowhere and nothing that everything was. For what is a Song without a voice and an ear?

“Now it happened, as you know, that the world was made, and the sky spilled over the nowhere like a bolt of blue silk, and then the stars tumbled over it as if someone had dropped countless gems, and the earth was solid beneath it, rock and iron and fire. And the earth loved the sky, and the sky loved the earth, but they could not touch each other, no matter how they tried. And how they tried! And both began to weep from sorrow, and from the sky came the first rain, and the earth filled up with rivers and seas, and where the rain touched its fire, great steams went up and made the clouds and mists, and out of the clouds and mists were born the Elidhu, the oldest children of time, and then the trees and the silent and still plants of the earth, with their flowers like trumpets and their leaves like lyres. But the Elidhu had neither voices nor ears.

“Now, the Song said to itself, at last there may be a voice to speak and an ear to hear. So it came out of the nowhere into the now, and slipped into the veins of the Elidhu, as if it were a shoal of minnows slipping into a stream, and each Elidhu felt the Song within it like a shudder of life, and all the sounds of the world burst in on them: the fall of the rain, and the sough of the sea, and the endless sighing of the wind through the green trees. And they opened their mouths in wonder, and so it was the Song leaped out of their mouths, and at last became itself. And the Song was happy for a very long time.”

Ankil put down the boot and picked up another.

“Well, it happened after a long age that a shadow fell upon the world, and there were great wars and so death entered the world. And there was much suffering for all creatures: the plants and the beasts and the humans and the Elidhu. But the shadow was beaten back, and then there was a long peace. All this time the Song lived in the Elidhu and was happy, although it found that the world was more complex and more sad than it had thought. And so the Song changed, and became more beautiful as it changed, for the shadow and death entered into the Song and made it bright and dark and high and deep. And the voices of the Elidhu lifted in joy, for they loved the beauty of the Song.

“But it happened that a king arose, and he heard the Song, and he was overborne by longing for its loveliness. He could not sleep and he could not eat for thinking of the Song, and each day that he could not have the Song for himself was to him an eternity of dust. And one day he stole the Song from the Elidhu.

“But the Elidhu would not let it go, and the Song split in two, with a terrible noise, like the sound of the whole world cracking, and one half went south and one half went north. And when it split, the bright went one way, and the dark went another. And ever since the world has been twain, and the Song has been unhappy.”

There was a long silence, apart from Ankil’s brushing.

“Is that it?” asked Maerad.

“Yes,” said Ankil, nodding. “That is it.”

Cadvan was sitting up straight and alert, his face eager. “Ankil, I’ve never heard that story before,” he said. “But the Song — the Song of the Elementals — surely it’s the Treesong?”

“Well, it still doesn’t tell us what it is,” said Maerad.

“No, maybe not . . . but the story obviously refers to the Wars of the Elementals, and then to a king. . . . It has to be the Nameless One. Sharma, the king from the south.” His brows knotted. “And I think it is talking about the Spell of Binding he made, to banish death and to cast out his Name. Maybe he split the Treesong. . . .”

“Well, you’ve said for a while that you thought the spell had to do with the Knowing of the Elidhu,” said Maerad. “Maybe you’re right. But how do you find a song? Was it written down?”

“I don’t know. It could be that’s what the story means by the Song being stolen, that it was written down instead of living in the Elidhu. It’s all so vague.” Cadvan thumped the table in frustration.

The three fell into a reflective silence, watching the old moon swinging above the mountain pastures, and Maerad became aware of the sounds of the crickets singing in the grass, and the sleepy nighttime coughs of the goats.

“Do you know what they call the Nameless One in some places in Thorold?” asked Ankil thoughtfully, breaking the silence.

“What?” Cadvan turned to him.

“The Half Made.”

“The Half Made. The Split Song.” Cadvan looked down at his hands. “It has to be connected, surely?”

“Perhaps.” Ankil had finished polishing his boots and placed them neatly side by side next to his chair. “Well, for what it’s worth from an old goatherd, I think it as likely as not.”