The Riddle (44 page)

Maerad was on a sled, bound hand and foot. The white sky passed endlessly above her. She could hear the panting of running dogs, their almost silent padding through the snow, the swish of a sled, hoarse male shouts in a language she did not recognize. She looked to her right: alongside were running white wolves, strong and fast. One looked at her and grinned, its red tongue lolling from its mouth, and then, as she watched, its shoulders swelled and sprouted wings, and it flew up into the sky. She turned away, frightened, and a blond, bearded face looked into hers. Filled with a sudden hatred, the reasons for which she did not know, she tried to spit, but her mouth was parched. Hands raised her and gave her water. She swallowed; it burned her mouth like fire, but she had moisture in her mouth. She spat into the light blue eyes. They blinked, and disappeared, and the darkness swept over her.

Maerad’s mother, Milana of Pellinor, stood before her in a tower of glass. Her face was marked with inconsolable grief. In her arms she clasped Hem, not as Maerad had last seen him, but as a baby. Both of them turned to face Maerad, who was outside the tower. There was no door. Maerad was overcome by a longing to join them, to be held again in her mother’s arms. She beat her hands against the glass until they were bloody, but she could not break it; she beat and beat, until she could see the bones of her hands, like broken white twigs in a mess of blood and flesh.

After that dream, Maerad awoke. The world around her seemed to be real. Hem is dead, she thought; the dream told me. He is dead, murdered, like everyone else I have ever loved. The thought brought no tears. She was beyond tears, beyond grief; she was empty of all feeling, a shell as light as a feather. All her body burned with pain, apart from her left hand. Her left hand was almost completely numb.

She was bound; that was no dream. She seemed to be tied to a sled. Slowly she remembered what had happened to her; she remembered Dharin’s death, and the final fight with the Jussacks. She blinked, trying to work out where she was. She was on a sled, being driven over the endless plains of Zmarkan. She had been captured by the Jussacks. Dharin had said they would kill her, but they had not killed her. She wished they had.

All Maerad wanted was to die. Even that had been denied her. She had thought about killing herself once before, after the death of Cadvan, but then the life in her had cried out, had pleaded for its existence. Now even that visceral pleading of the body was gone. The darkness was friendly and warm; it waited for her, a dark pool into which she could slide her body and rest forever, free from grief, free from torment: free, most of all, from her failure.

When the blond face appeared again, she turned away and shut her eyes and mouth, so she could not be given food or drink. Her head was lifted, and water was forced between her lips from a leather bottle. She was too weak to keep her jaw clamped shut, and when the water dribbled into her mouth, she automatically swallowed. She tried to spit out the next mouthful, but could not. She tossed her head from side to side, but someone held her head firmly, so even that protest was thwarted. Some warm soup was forced into her mouth and she nearly choked before she swallowed. I could kill myself by choking, she thought, and the next mouthful of soup she took eagerly, trying to fill her mouth so much that she could not breathe, so that the soup would go into her lungs and drown her, but despite herself she swallowed it. The same thing happened again, until she had finished the bowl.

Then she was left alone. Maerad lay on the jolting sled, tears at last spilling from her eyes. Even her body betrayed her.

Time no longer existed. Life was an unending torment, rushing forward through an endless night, slipping between evil dreams and worse wakings. The Jussacks did not want her to die; they were going to a lot of trouble to make sure that she didn’t. She was fed and even kept clean, no easy task in the harsh conditions. She barely needed to be tied; she was so weak that she could not even lift her arms. Sometimes the wind howled and snowflakes settled on her face, and until someone noticed and she was covered, being unable to brush them away was a worse torment than almost anything else.

When she could feel any emotion, she felt hatred. It was like a cold poison in her soul. Her body’s ills she learned to ignore, except for the times that the pain was so overwhelming it filled her whole mind, so that she felt she would go mad, if she were not mad already. She was racked by fever and chills, almost convulsive enough to break her bindings. But despite this, her body began to heal. After a time, the convulsions stopped, and she was merely tormented by the cold. The Jussacks gave her enough furs to keep her from dying, but not enough to keep her warm. She dreamed that her left hand had frozen and fallen off, a chunk of ice, and woke surprised to find it was still there.

She stank of blood. Dharin’s blood had soaked into her fur coat, and although the worst of it had been cleaned off, the fur along her collar was rough with it and she could feel the dry clots in her hair. It was Dharin, the last thing she had of him, and she did not complain. And then her period began and she felt as if her whole body were weeping blood, that she slept and woke in its sour smell.

There was one man who, it seemed, had been given the duty of keeping her alive. At first, he looked to Maerad like all the other Jussacks: they were all as pale-skinned as Maerad, with long blond hair, long plaited beards, and pale blue eyes rimmed by blue tattoos. She didn’t seek to differentiate one from the other: to Maerad they were all nameless savages.

This Jussack was not quite as tall as the others, and despite the tattoos, in other circumstances Maerad might have thought he had a pleasant face. When he needed to clean her, which he did using a cloth soaked in a kind of clarified fat or oil, he was always respectful, almost apologetic. And his feeding of her was, if practical and brusque, not without gentleness. Maerad noted these things unwillingly. She did not spit in his face now, but she would not respond to his attempts to communicate, even though sometimes it was clear that he was trying to tell her his name and was asking hers. She pretended she didn’t understand.

Shortly after dreams and reality untangled themselves, she was inspected by the sorcerer, who was the leader of the small troupe. He looked her over as if she were goods that must be brought intact to their destination. The sleds had stopped, and as she had been every night, Maerad was carried into one of the Jussack tents and laid on the floor. The sorcerer entered, stooping in the tiny space, and inspected her. Maerad became aware of his gaze and opened her eyes. He was clearly a
Dhillarearën,
but the bile rose in her throat. There was a wrongness in his Gift that she had not sensed in the other Unschooled Bards she had met — Sirkana or Inka-Reb. But he was not a Hull. Somehow, thought Maerad, he was something worse: darkness twisted within him like a poisonous smoke.

“Who are you, to look at me?” she said in the Speech. Her voice was harsh with disuse.

The sorcerer looked back at her expressionlessly, although she saw the muscles around his eyes flinch in distaste. “I am who I am,” he said. “You are no one, to ask such a thing.”

“You murdered my friend,” said Maerad. “Why have you not killed me?”

“You killed a man,” said the sorcerer. “The punishment for that is death. But we have other plans for you. They are not your concern.”

“You are all base murderers,” answered Maerad. Her mind was slow and thick, and she felt too tired to argue. “That man would not have died if you had not attacked us. It’s your fault he died, not mine.”

“Be that as it may,” he answered. “You are ours now.”

“I belong to no one.” A dull rage rose inside her. “You have no right . . .”

He stared at her with contempt. “You are a woman. Be silent.”

If Maerad had been in possession of her powers, she would have blasted him into nothing with no compunction. She stared back at him with loathing, refusing to lower her eyes. Something faltered in his gaze, and instead of challenging her, he turned away.

“Why have you captured me?” asked Maerad. “Where are you taking me?” But the man would not answer her.

He examined her as if she were a piece of livestock, looking at her teeth and inside her mouth and checking her limbs. Furious at the indignity, Maerad bit his hand, and he hit her across the jaw with a casual violence. What he saw clearly did not please him, and he spoke sharply to the Jussack, who trembled at his side, his head bowed in fear and humility. He picked up her left hand and pressed it. A little feeling came back into it, mostly pain. Then he gave the other Jussack what was clearly a long list of instructions and left the tent.

After that, her situation improved slightly. Maerad was given more furs and did not suffer so much from the cold. She was also untied, so she had some freedom of movement on the sled. She thought of casting herself off into the snow, but there was plainly no way she could do so unseen, and she would immediately be picked up and probably bound again.

At this time, she also realized that Dharin’s sled traveled with them. It was being driven by one of the other men. She wondered what had become of the bodies of Claw and Dharin; no doubt they had been left, unhonored and unburied, in the snow. The thought was agonizing. And where was her pack? Her lyre? They must be in the sled. . . . But she was still too tired to think properly, and her thoughts slid into a confused maze.

She was bewitched by some spell she did not recognize, in a way that paralyzed and sickened her. The enchantment came from the sorcerer, and she began to push against it. She felt his will resisting her, and she was sure that she was a stronger
Dhillarearën
than he was, but no matter how she tried, she could not unlock the spell. It held her fast.

Sometimes Maerad thought she could see pale shadows running at a distance, parallel to the sleds. They looked like wolves, but if she tried to stare straight at the movement, she could see nothing but bare snow. No one else seemed to notice them, and she dismissed them as hallucinations.

At night, she dreamed of wolves.

The days passed, each one identical to the next. Maerad tried, with little success, to work out how long she had lain insensible; time then had ceased to exist. She made little scratches on the wooden rail of the sled. If she had been delirious for seven days, she had been their captive for two weeks now.

She began to be able to tell her five captors apart. The Jussack in charge of her was clearly the youngest and the lowliest in rank; he seemed to be about Dharin’s age. The others were all grown men, who looked to be between thirty and forty. Maerad thought them brutal thugs: they reminded her of the men in Gilman’s Cot, among whom she had been raised. The recognition called within her a deep contempt, which fed her hatred. The sorcerer, who was called Amusk, was the chief among them, and all the others deferred to him with varying degrees of fear.

Despite herself, she began to feel some sympathy for the man in charge of her. Although he tried to give no sign of it, Maerad thought that he disliked the sorcerer Amusk as much as she did. The youth’s sled was usually the leading one, and after a while Maerad realized a gift similar to Dharin’s, an infallible sense for knowing where he was. It explained, Maerad thought, why so young a man had been taken on a mission with the older men.

And she began to understand that these men considered it to be demeaning to look after a woman, and that the youngest Jussack’s task was a humiliation for which he was often teased by the other men. Their comments made him angry, and once she saw him draw a knife on one of his tormentors, who backed away, shaking his head, his arms spread wide, clearly not wanting to fight. Despite this, the Jussack looked after her diligently. She noticed that he attempted to speak to her only when no one else could overhear, and when the other men were nearby, would sometimes speak harshly to her, as if to conceal any empathy he felt.

After the sorcerer’s visit, Maerad did not ignore the young man the next time he tried to tell her his name. He put his hand on his chest and said: “Nim.” Then, plainly asking, he pointed to Maerad.

“Maerad,” she said. “I’m Maerad.”

For the first time, she saw him smile. It transformed his face, and she realized for the first time just how young he was. He might even be as young as I am, she thought. “Nim. Maerad,” he said, pointing from one to the other. Maerad nodded.

He disappeared out of the tent and returned with a warm meat stew. Maerad was now able to feed herself, although when she was not on the sled, her feet were tied to prevent her attacking anyone or escaping. Nim handed her a steaming bowl.
“Hulcha,”
he said.
“Ij lakmi.”
He mimed the actions of eating.

“Lakmi?”
said Maerad. “Eat? I eat?” She pointed to the bowl.
“Hulcha,”
she said. Again Nim nodded and smiled.

Well, I might as well learn Jussack, thought Maerad, as she began to eat the stew. It’s not as if I have anything else to do. But then, with a cold shock, she realized she was beginning to think kindly of one of Dharin’s murderers. She suddenly felt sick and pushed the bowl away, and would not speak to Nim anymore. When she did not answer him, he looked disappointed and hurt, almost like a small child who had been snubbed, but he covered it swiftly and said something to her that sounded like a curse, and laughed in the way the older men laughed, with a crude, knowing brutality. Then he took her bowl and ate the stew himself, hungrily.

After that a diffident relationship developed between Maerad and Nim. Maerad learned the Jussack language quickly, and over the next few weeks they began to have simple conversations. Although their talks were always underlaid by a mutual wariness, something grew between them which, in different circumstances, might have developed into a friendship. As things were, it was a kind of tacit alliance.

It was Maerad’s only comfort, if their often difficult and uneasy conversations could be called comforting. Her loneliness was almost unbearable, and her secret talks with Nim were the only human contact she had. Some stubborn will reasserted itself as her body slowly strengthened, although she was always tired from her unceasing battle with the sorcerer’s will. She felt little power within her. It was a strange emptiness, as if a limb were missing, but still she resisted. Although she had no hope for herself now, she did not feel entirely hopeless. There were still things she could do, perhaps, even if she faced certain failure. It might not be entirely vain to attempt to escape.