The Riddle (63 page)
Authors: Alison Croggon
10.
Across Annar, the fealty to the Light and the Balance served as what we might recognize as an organized religion, and it is tempting, but I believe a little misleading, to see the Bards as the equivalent of priests, with the concept of the Light serving as a substitute for God. It was, more properly, a complex and evolving system of ethics, developed over millennia from the days of Afinil and preserved through the Great Silence, to be reinstated during the Restoration. To a contemporary eye, many of the Bards’ most important documents seem unsettlingly modern. The idea of canonical texts received straight from the Godhead would have been treated with ridicule by Bards, who were pragmatically historical in many of their studies. Their belief in prophecy, for example, was not connected to a belief in a God who foresaw everything, but to a certain set of theories about time: Bards believed that linear time was illusory, that the present was coexistent with all other times, and Seers were those Bards able to pierce the veil of the present and perceive its multiple realities. See
Knowing the Light: Comparative Studies in Annaran Spiritual Practice,
ed. Charles A. James (Oxford: Cipher Press, 2001) and also
The Ethics of Balance: Ecology and Morality in Annar
by Jennifer Atkins (Chicago: Sorensen Academic Publishers, 2003).
11.
Tulkan of Lirion, a Bard of Afinil, wrote one of the most popular lays, but it was only one of innumerable variants on this theme. Tulkan’s is particularly attractive, as it is written in the complex metrical pattern known in Old Lironese as
inel-fardhalen.
It is notoriously difficult to translate, as Old Lironese had many more rhyming words than Annaren. Old Lironese was little used in Lirigon after the Restoration, as most people spoke Annaren, but Cadvan of Lirigon was a famous scholar and translator from this archaic tongue and made the most widely quoted translation. The song is worth quoting in full, for its insight into the nature of Ardina as much as its own virtues, and here is my own translation from the Annaren.
When Arkan deemed an endless cold
And greenwoods rotted bleak and sere,
The moon wept high above the world
To see its beauty dwindling:
To earth fell down a single tear
And there stepped forth a shining girl
Like moonlight that through alabaster
Wells, its pallor kindling.
Such beauty made all beauty dim
And homage called from voiceless stone:
Like whitest samite was her skin
Or seafoam softly glimmering:
A star that lit the night alone
She stepped the winter woods within,
A pearl a-glisten in the gloam,
A moonbeam fleetly shimmering.
Then wild amazement fastened on
The Moonchild’s heart, and far she ran,
Through all the vales of Lirion
Her voice like bellnotes echoing:
And from the branches blossom sprang
In iron groves of leafmeal wan,
And Spring herself woke up and sang,
The gentle Summer beckoning.
She passed into the mountain keeps
Where stormdogs guard the ravined walls,
A moonbeam piercing dismal deeps,
Down jagged ridges clambering:
Until she found a crystal fall,
A river frozen in its leap,
And in its depths a marble hall
Of lofty spires was trembling.
In wonderment she silent fell,
And stood before the wall of glass
Enraptured by the citadel,
Its endless, sparkling mullions:
Like lilies caught in sudden frost,
Which grow no more, but comely still,
Forlornly cast those towers of ice
Their cold and lifeless brilliance.
She knew not that the hours passed
Nor noticed that the darkness fell;
And as she looked, she thought at last
Her heart must break with heaviness:
She wept, though why she could not tell:
For love unborn, for beauty lost,
For all that lives and breathes and will
Grow cold and lose its loveliness.
And in the icy halls a king
Woke from his spellbound sleep and saw
A vision of the banished spring,
A form so fair and luminous
That from his frosted eyes the hoar
Ran down like tears and, marveling,
He felt the chains of winter thaw
And years of thraldom ruinous.
Ardina met his eyes, and through
Her moonlit veins a shudder ran
That kissed her skin with fiery dew,
Its marble pallor chastening:
A doom it seemed to see this man
In whose dark eyes such ardor grew,
A grief stored up through summer’s span
From joy to winter hastening.
Between them stood the wall of ice
And round them barren winter waste,
But each saw in the other’s face
The light of springtime lingering:
Like thunder broke the charméd frost,
And freed at last to bitter bliss
Immortal maid and man embraced,
Their light and shadow mingling.
So swore Ardina and Ardhor
That ever would the other cleave,
And heavy was the doom they bore
In war and clamor perilous:
Through grief and death they passed alive
To meet on the immortal shores
And still in starry glades their love
Shines ever strong and sorrowless.
12.
Book II:
Naraudh Lar-Chanë,
Maerad of Pellinor and Cadvan of Lirigon, Library of Busk (N1012).
13.
The Elidhu in Afinil,
the Bard Menellin, Library of Norloch (A1505).
14.
The Enemies of the Light,
Piron of Il-Arunedh, Library of Thorold (N562).
15.
Fragment:
Arkan of the North,
Elagil of Afinil, Library of Thorold (N554).
16.
The Symbolism of the Treesong Runes,
Professor Patrick Insole, Department of Ancient Languages, University of Leeds. Unpublished monograph, 2003.
A DROP of sweat trickled slowly down Hem’s temple. He wiped it away and reached for another mango. It was so hot. Even in the shady refuge of the mango tree, the air pressed around him like a damp blanket. There wasn’t the faintest whisper of a breeze: the leaves hung utterly still. As if to make up for the wind’s inaction, the cicadas were louder than Hem had ever heard them. He couldn’t see any from where he was, perched halfway up the tree on a broad branch that divided to make a comfortable seat, but their shrilling was loud enough to hurt his ears.
He leaned back against the trunk and let the sweet flesh of the fruit dissolve on his tongue. These mangoes were certainly the high point of the day. Not, he thought sardonically, that it had been much of a day. He should have been in the Turbansk School, chanting some idiotic Bard song or drowsing through a boring lecture on the Balance. Instead, he had had a furious argument with his mentor about something he couldn’t now remember and had run away.
He had wandered about the winding alleys behind the School, hot and bored and thirsty, until he spotted a seductive glint of orange fruit behind a high wall. A vine offered him a ladder, and he climbed warily into a walled garden, a lush oasis of greenery planted with fruit trees and flowering oleanders and climbing roses and jasmine. At the far end was a cloister leading into a grand house and Hem scanned it swiftly for any occupants, before making a dash for the fountain, which fell back into a mosaic-floored pond in the center of the garden. He plunged his head under the water, soaking himself in the delicious coolness, and drank his fill.
Then, shaking his head like a dog, he surveyed the fruit trees. There were a fig, a pomegranate, and two orange trees as well as the mango, the biggest of them all. He noted with regret that the oranges were still green, and then swung himself easily into the mango tree and started plundering its fruit, cutting the tough skin with a clasp knife and throwing the large stones onto the ground below him, until his fingers were sticky with juice.
After he had eaten his fill he stared idly through the leaves at the blue of the sky, which paled almost to white at the zenith. Finally he wiped his hands carefully on his trousers, dragged something from his pocket, and smoothed it out on his leg. It was a letter, written on parchment in a shaky script. Hem couldn’t decipher it, but Saliman, his guardian, had read it out to him that morning and then, seeing the look on Hem’s face, had given him the letter as a keepsake.
To Hem and Saliman, greetings!
Cadvan and I arrived in Thorold safely, as you may know if the bird reached you. We are both much better than when we last saw you.
I was very seasick on my way here, and Cadvan and I had to fight an ondril, which was very big, but we got here safely. Nerili has given us haven, and you will have heard the rest of the news from the emissary.
I hope you have arrived in Turbansk with no harm, and that Hem finds the fruits are as big as the birds said they were. I think of you all the time and miss you sorely.
With all the love in my heart,
Maerad
Already they were being chased by monsters. Hem knew that an ondril was a kind of giant snake that lived in the ocean. Cadvan was possibly even braver than Saliman, and Maerad (to Hem’s twelve-year-old eyes at least) was braver still; but they were only two, and the Dark so many, and everywhere. And where was Thorold, after all? Somewhere over the sea, Saliman had told him, and showed him a shape on a chart; but Hem had never even seen the sea and had only the vaguest idea of distance on a map. It meant nothing to him.
Hem stared at the letter as if the sheer intensity of his gaze could unriddle its meanings, but all it did was to make the page swim and blur. The only word he could make out was
Maerad
. And what had Maerad not written down? What other dangers was she facing? The letter was already days old: was she still alive?
Maerad was the one person in the world he felt at home with. In the short period they had been together his nightmares had stopped for the first time in his life. Even before she knew he was her brother, she had taken him in her arms and stroked his face when the bad dreams came. Even now it seemed amazing; Hem would have hit with his closed fist at anyone else who took such liberties. He had trusted Maerad from the start: he sensed her gentleness, and underneath that, her loneliness and sadness. But more than anything else, Maerad accepted him just as he was, and didn’t want him to be anything else. Maerad, he thought painfully,
loved
him.
Now Maerad was so far away that she might as well not exist at all. It was almost two months since he had last seen her, and she could be anywhere in Edil-Amarandh. And here all anybody could talk about was the war. It lay inside every conversation, like a fat evil worm. It might kill Maerad; it might kill him. They might never see each other again.
Hem puffed his cheeks and blew out a big breath, as if trying to expel his morbid thoughts. There was Saliman, of course. Saliman was everything Hem would have liked to be himself: tall, handsome, strong, generous, brave, funny . . . Hem had adored him, with a passion akin to hero-worship, from the first time he had seen him. It had seemed like a miracle when Saliman had offered to be his guardian and to bring him to Turbansk, the great city of the south, to go to School there and learn how to be a Bard.
Since he had first gained the Speech and had been able to speak to birds, Hem had dreamed of coming to the south, where — the birds had told him — grew trees full of bright fruits as big as his own head. And now, here he was. He lived in a grand Bardhouse with Saliman, and had as much to eat as he wanted, and dressed in fine clothes, rather than the rags he had been used to. But although he now sat in a tree surrounded by the sweet fruit he had once dreamed of, happiness seemed as far beyond him as ever.