The Riddle

by Alison Croggon

  And now they were on the first leg of their ride. It was not so bad, Maerad reflected; she would feel stiff for a few days until her muscles adjusted to the riding, but now the sun had risen fully and drawn off the mists, it was a beautiful clear autumn day. The horses were fresh and eager, and the birch woods were beautiful, their motley white trunks stretching up gentle grassy slopes starred with masses of small white flowers, the shadow of their branches dappling the ground with sunlight and shadow. Some leaves were just beginning to lose their green. Soon they would fade to yellow and spiral down to the forest floor; then their branches would be naked and the flowers would die, and the sere colors of winter would creep into the forest: browns and grays, and the peaceful white of snow.

  It was the first time she and Cadvan had traveled alone together since they had arrived in Norloch, almost six weeks before. She fell into the rhythm of their being together; it was easy, a companionship born both of their shared dangers and long hours of uneventful journeying. But as they cantered through the woods, she found herself meditating on how their friendship had shifted since she was instated as full Bard in Norloch. While they had been in Thorold, their relationship had been mediated by many other people. But now that it was just the two of them again, she felt as if their friendship were suddenly thrown into relief, and it seemed to her less knowable than even she had thought.

  For all their relaxed intimacy, there were depths and passions within Cadvan that she didn't understand. She had seldom seen him angry, but the glimpses she had had were frightening, and she had only recently witnessed the power that was the source of his fame throughout Annar. Once, for a mere moment, he had permitted her to enter his mind, to feel his private perplexities and shames as if she were inside his skin. She had found it very hard to bear, and even that concession, so difficult for him, had revealed only a small part of himself.

  He was one of the most private people she had ever met: something within him drew away from human contact. In Thorold he had been more relaxed than she had ever seen him, but even there she had felt his abiding solitariness. And yet he was, paradoxically, capable of profound friendship, and was loved deeply and loyally by those he befriended. He was not an easy man to know. She remembered what Nelac had said of him: If he seeks to keep something hidden, it is near impossible to find it out. She thought of the moment on the boat when he had looked at her so unsettlingly. She flinched away from the memory thinking confusedly of Gahal's warning: Beware of yourself. There was something within her that Gahal did not trust. It made her feel uneasy, because she knew her knowledge of herself was uncertain. Involuntarily she glanced over at Cadvan's dark profile, seemingly abstracted in thought as he rode beside her.

  It was all too complex to unravel, and too disturbing. To divert her mind, she decided to run through the alphabets and runes she had learned in the past weeks. It passed the time, and the soft rhythm of the horses cantering over dead leaves melded with the rhythm of the letters: onna, inla, tref chan, edlan, cuif va, a, rich, pa, dha ...

  There followed days of hard riding through the woods and farmlands of Ileadh. On their left the purple shoulders of the Ileadh Fells reared above the woodlands, and to their right ran a wide plain, the fertile downlands of the Osirian, well stocked with grazing cattle and sheep, and run through by many small streams. The weather continued clear, but there was a chill in the air each night that told them summer was over: the moon, waning now to a nail paring, had a blue halo about it, and the stars blazed coldly in a frosty sky

  When they neared Gent, they charmed themselves and the horses with a glamor that could deceive even Bard eyes. They had decided to disguise themselves as messengers, which would both explain their haste and the fact that they were strangers. Darsor and Imi became handsome bays ridden by two young men dressed in moss green, with a messenger's red feather pinned to each of their cloaks.

  The charm was a speciality of Cadvan's and, to her chagrin, Maerad found it almost impossible. It took four attempts before she managed her own transformation, and in the end Cadvan had to help her with Imi, which considerably piqued her pride. It was also exhausting; she was dizzy for some time afterward.

  They joined the Bard Road at Gent, and on the well-made course their pace picked up. It was sixty leagues to Carfedis, Gent's sister School, which stood at the border between Ileadh and Annar, and then a farther eighty along the Bard Road to Edinur, where they would turn north and cross the Aldern River. The North Road ran with the Valverras Waste to the east, and the Caln Marish, a maze of fens and marshes, on its other side. By Cadvan's reckoning, they would reach Edinur in ten days.

  They arrived at Carfedis late on the fourth day, and passed into the School, handing the First Bard, Melchis, a letter from Gahal. Maerad was too exhausted to take in more than a confused impression of halls painted with bright murals and a stone-lipped pond outside the Bardhouse, where many white swans swam like ghosts in the dusk. For one wonderful night they ate well, bathed, and slept in comfortable beds. And then they were on the road again, before the sun peeped above the horizon, pursuing their punishing journey north.

  Maerad had bad memories of both Edinur and the Valverras Waste, and her heart sank as they neared them. It was in the Valverras that she and Cadvan had found Hem shaking with terror in a ransacked caravan, and the Pilanel family, who had taken him in, brutally murdered by Hulls. The image of their pathetic bodies haunted her, and they began to appear again in her dreams. After they left Carfedis and entered Annar, she began to feel more keenly that she and Cadvan were on their own; it made her edgy and irritable, and once or twice they found themselves on the verge of an argument.

  Her mood wasn't helped by the dramatic change in the countryside. As soon as they left Ileadh, the fertile garths of the Osirian gave way to uninhabited plains stretching flat as far as the eye could see, inhabited by shaggy wild ponies and goats whose white bones littered the tough tussocks of grass. The soil was thin and sour, supporting only the rankest vegetation, and everywhere were shallow pools and bogs in which grew stands of black reeds that rattled constantly in the wind. Maerad's spirits drooped further with every day they continued through this unvarying landscape.

  On the fifth day, as Cadvan had predicted, they entered Edinur, once a rich farming community like the Osirian. But Edinur was no more cheering than the wastelands they left behind them. The last time they had passed through Edinur at night. Now they rode through in daytime, and the blank, pitiless light exposed its full despair.

  It hit Maerad as they entered the first hamlet. It was a collection of maybe two dozen houses, once a thriving community, but now it looked more like a battlefield. At least three houses had been burned down, and nobody had bothered to tidy their melancholy remains. They stood, shells of blackened timber and rubble, with bindweed and wild ivies already groping over them. Other houses just seemed to have been abandoned, their shutters swinging in the breeze, their doors, once painted brightly in reds and blues and oranges, hanging drunkenly off their hinges, their orchards and gardens grown wild with neglect.

  A group of grubby, barefoot children were playing in the road. When they heard the clatter of the horses, they looked up, frightened, and scrambled off into one of the houses. They were pitifully thin and their clothes were rags and scraps, barely enough to keep them warm in summertime, thought Maerad, let alone the coming winter. A child, little more than two years old, was left behind in the road bawling for his playmates, his upper lip encrusted with snot. Maerad pulled up Imi and stopped, bending down to speak to him.

  "Where is your mother?" she said. The child leaped back in terror, fell over in a puddle, and began to scream more loudly. At this, Maerad dismounted and picked him up. He was a mess of tears, his ragged clothes wet through. She tried to soothe him, but his crying simply got louder, and he struggled in her arms until she was forced to put him down again.

  Suddenly a door shot open and a big woman ran out, holding a frying pan, screaming. "Leave him alone, you scum
! Get your filthy hands off him!"

  Maerad, completely taken aback, moved away from the child, her hands in the air. The child kicked her shins and ran for the woman, clinging to her dirty skirts. Her face was gray with tiredness and her hair was a matted mess of knots and filth.

  "I'm sorry," said Maerad. "He—he just fell over. I wanted to find his mother. I didn't mean—"

  "He's got no mother, as you well know. You're all the same, all of you." The woman stood square, the frying pan raised above her head.

  "Lady," said Cadvan. "I assure you, we meant no harm. We are but messengers passing through, and we thought to help the child."

  The woman looked at him steadily, a glimmer of doubt in her face, and then slowly lowered the pan. She glanced furtively at Maerad, and something like shame entered her expression; Maerad had a sudden glimpse of the woman she might have been, had despair not nearly destroyed her. "Well, then. You speak kindly." She paused, as if searching for unfamiliar words. "I am sorry. His mother died of the sickness and it makes me fret, looking after all these kittens, and their parents under the ground, and no help. But I'll not let them be taken." She lifted the pan again, and Maerad cautiously backed away.

  "Taken?" she said.

  "It's always men who come. Men in cloaks. And they take the children who still live, they say to go into orphanages. With nary a question of those who care for them and love them." She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. "They've taken eight from here. But they'll not take any more. Not while I'm here." She lifted the pan again and shook it, spitting. "Orphanages! It's not orphanages they're taken to, I'll warrant you that."

  Maerad thought of Hem and his tales of the Edinur orphanages in which he had been dumped as a small child, and shuddered.

  "Where would they take them, then?" asked Cadvan gently.

  The woman spat again. "It's for their armies, if you ask me," she said. "I've seen them marching through here, with all their rabble, and some of those soldiers are no higher than your breast."

  "Armies?" began Maerad anxiously, but Cadvan silenced her with a look.

  "Excuse us, goodwife," he said. "We did not mean to alarm you." He dismounted and walked toward her. She backed away nervously, but didn't resist when he took her hand. "Be of good cheer. What is your name?"

  "My name?" She spoke as if her name were a thing long forgotten. "My name is ... Ikabil."

  Cadvan leaned forward and kissed her on both cheeks, murmuring something Maerad could not hear. "Farewell, Ikabil. Go well, with the Light in your heart." He returned to Darsor and remounted.

  A look of amazement came into Ikabil's eyes, and she stood very still. Then she smiled, and Maerad saw, instead of a harridan exhausted and brutalized by long suffering, the gentle and strong woman she had been. A new peace had flooded into her face. She bowed wordlessly, stroking the toddler's head. He still clung to her skirts, hiding his face, but he had stopped grizzling.

  "We should go now," said Cadvan to Maerad, and she swung onto Imi. The woman raised her hand.

  "May the Light shine on your path," she said shyly.

  The Bards lifted their hands in reply and trotted through the hamlet. They rode on for some time in silence.

  "What did you say to that woman?" Maerad asked at last.

  "Say? Oh, I just said some words of healing," said Cadvan, jerking out of a deep reverie. "She was a good woman, in great pain. It is not true that suffering is good for the soul. Too much, and even the strongest will break."

  "What happened there? Was it the White Sickness?"

  "Yes. It is a terrible thing, Maerad, and it is all through Edinur. There are few healers who can deal with it."

  Maerad had heard people speak of the White Sickness in Busk; Cadvan had not spoken of it to her when they had ridden through Edinur two months beforehand, though even then, through the shadows of night, she had seen its scars.

  "It appeared in Annar only two decades ago," Cadvan said. "Myself, I think it was brewed in Den Raven by the Nameless One, to kill the strong and to break the spirits of those who survive. You've seen the results. Those who are most likely to die from it are the young and strong. If you catch it, you first go blind, and then you go mad. Those houses were probably burned by those dying of it. Either that, or their neighbors, in terror of catching the illness."

  Maerad listened, her heart contracting. "Why is it called the White Sickness?"

  "It's because of the silver cloud that covers the eyes of those who suffer it." Cadvan shook his head. "It is a terrible thing, Maerad, to see one who has this disease. Their eyeballs are white and sightless, and their bodies burn with a wasting fever that devours their very flesh. Unless they are lucky enough to be tended by a great healer—a healer like Nelac—they will be blind for the rest of their lives. If they live at all."

  There was a sober silence. "I wonder what she meant by children being stolen for the armies," said Maerad. "Orphanages are just where people put children who have nowhere else to go, aren't they?"

  "I don't know," said Cadvan grimly. "I haven't heard of child thieves, either. But children are cheap labor; perhaps they are stolen to be slaves. I can barely credit that they are kidnapped to be soldiers, but times are so evil that perhaps even that is possible. The orphanages are bad enough—squalid, stinking prisons of despair. Well, you heard Hem speak of them. Such is the legacy of the retreat of Barding. Once such children were valued and cared for. It would not be surprising, in this diseased land, if there were a trade in children." He spoke as if the words tasted bad in his mouth. "But enough of that: all the more reason for haste. Esterine ne, Darsor!"

  Darsor threw up his head, and then plunged forward in a full gallop. Imi followed at his flank, as if the horses, too, sought to shake off the horror they had glimpsed in the desolate hamlet behind them.

  For the rest of the day, they rode through Edinur, through town and hamlet and past lone farmhouses. Some places were as devastated as the first they had seen, while others seemed untouched. But over everything was a pall: they frequently saw harvests lying blighted in the fields, already gray with a fungus growth that meant the corn or wheat would never be gathered and eaten, and they passed orchards in which the leaves were withered and the trees bore none of the fruit that should have been ripening there, ready to be gathered in. Everywhere were signs of coming famine, and in every town there were many beggars, turning sightless eyes toward them in a plea for alms.

  As they pressed deeper into Edinur, they began to pass entire families who were heading for the towns, perhaps Aldern, with all their possessions piled on wagons drawn by horses or bullocks. Children sat at the back, their feet dangling, looking emptily toward their former homes, or shrilly bickering. The men and women stared hungrily ahead, as if they already despaired of the hope that had brought them onto the road, the hope that somewhere there might be a home for them that would be less cruel than the one they had left. Equally as often they saw single travelers, on horseback or on foot, loaded down by heavy packs. Sometimes they were barefoot, and their feet were bleeding.

  These were hard sights to bear, and Maerad and Cadvan spoke less and less as the day wore on, tacitly agreeing to get out of Edinur altogether before they made camp that night. As dusk deepened, they reached the junction where the Bard Road from Ileadh met the North Road and turned toward the Valverras.

  Maerad remembered this stretch of the road, which cut through copses of beech and larch trees before it ran up a high ridge. Now, as day was retreating, they saw no one else on the road; this was a relief, as those they had met had been so desperate. On the other side of the ridge fell a wide valley of bare turf, with the Aldern River threading through its center. The North Road plunged down the steep slope, leaped over the river on an arched stone bridge, and then turned sharply west, running alongside the river to skirt the Valverras Waste, a wide expanse of tumbled hills and bogs topped with granite tumuli.

  However dour the landscape before them, Maerad felt a vast relief as they
left Edinur behind. They cantered down the valley and crossed the Edinur Bridge, turning west along the North Road. They trotted on while the full moon rose, swollen and yellow, until they found a grove of old willows in which they would be hidden. As she tiredly dismounted and unsaddled Imi, leaving her to graze while Cadvan prepared a meal, Maerad felt so depressed she could hardly speak. The memory of her foredream of Turbansk rose inside her, and she couldn't push away its horror, nor the trembling in her heart when she thought of Hem. She had not told Cadvan of her dream, because she couldn't bear to give it voice. This is our future, she thought blackly, this ruined world, in which everything we love is poisoned or slaughtered.

  Cadvan glanced at her across the fire. "It is hard, seeing people in such straits, and being unable to help," he said as he stirred a hot porridge of oats and dried meat.

  Maerad paused. "It reminds me of Gilman's Cot," she said. "Those faces. I thought I had left that behind. But it seems to be everywhere."

  They ate their dinner in silence. When they had cleaned up, Maerad stared moodily up at the sky. The moon was an ominous orange glare between dark bars of cloud. There were no stars tonight. Her body was chill and would not warm no matter how close she sat to the fire. Her period had begun that day, but she felt more drained than even that could explain.

  "We are unlucky," said Cadvan. "I think the weather is going to break."

  "Just as soon as we enter the wild. Luck is in short supply around here," Maerad said, and then, to her surprise, found herself crumpling into tears. She turned away, but Cadvan had already moved close to her, and he took her hand.

  "Maerad, our world is full of sorrow and evil," he said. "But there is also beauty and light and love. You must remember that." He looked earnestly into her face, but Maerad couldn't meet his eyes. She turned aside, thrusting away his hand.