Riddle-Master

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She was silent; one shoulder gave a little shrug. “Where else could I go? I don’t belong anywhere else. But it’s different for you,” she added, as he opened his mouth. “You do have another name, another place. You are the Star-Bearer.”

  “I would rather be a pigherder in Hel,” he said tartly. He dropped his head back wearily, one hand massaging his shoulder. Rain began then, thin, tentative; the plants in the Morgol’s garden bowed under it. He closed his eyes, smelled, unexpectedly, the autumn rains falling over three-quarters of Hed. There was a sound of fresh wood falling on the fire, and the eager snap of flame. The voices of the flames tangled together, turned familiar after a while; he heard Tristan and Eliard arguing comfortably, pointlessly, beside the hearth at Akren, with Snog Nutt, a handful of bones and cobweb, snoring like rain in the background. He half-listened to the argument woven into the soft whispers of the fire, until the voices began to fade and he had to strain to hear them; they finally died away, and he opened his eyes to the cold, grey rain of Herun.

  Deth was sitting opposite him, speaking softly to the Morgol, uncoiling broken strings from his harp. Their faces turned as Morgon straightened. El, her long hair unbound, brushing her tired face, said, “I sent Lyra to bed. I have set guards at every crack and crevice of this house, but it’s difficult to suspect the ground-mist, or the spider wandering in from the rain. How do you feel?”

  “All right.” Then, his eyes on Deth’s harp, he whispered, “I remember. I heard strings break, when I struck the shape-changer. That was your harp.”

  “Only five strings,” Deth said. “A small price to pay Corrig for your life. El gave me strings from Tirunedeth’s harp to match them.” He put the harp down.

  “Corrig.” Morgon drew breath; the Morgol was gazing at Deth wonderingly. “Deth, how of all things do you know that shape-changer’s name.”

  “I harped with him once, years ago. I met him even before I entered the High One’s service.”

  “Where?” the Morgol asked.

  “I was riding alone down the northern coast from Isig, in the far reaches belonging neither to Isig nor Osterland. I camped one night on the beach, sat late in the night beside my fire, harping . . . and out of the darkness came an answering harping, beautiful, wild, flawless. . . . He came into the circle of my firelight, glistening with tide, his harp of shell and bone and mother of pearl, and demanded songs of me. I played as well for him as for the kings I had played to; I dared not do less. He gave me songs in return; he stayed with me until dawn, until the sun rose, and his song as the red northern sun flamed across the sea burned in my heart for days after I heard it. He melted like mist into the morning sea-mist, but first he gave me his name. He asked for mine. I told him, and he laughed.”

  “He laughed at me last night,” Morgon whispered.

  “He played for you, too, from what you told us, then.”

  “He played my death. The death of Hed.” His eyes lifted from the core of the fire. “What kind of power could do that? Was it truth? Or illusion?”

  “Did it matter?”

  He shook his head. “No. He was a very great harpist. . . . Does the High One know what he was.”

  “The High One said nothing to me, beyond instructing me to leave Herun with you as quickly as possible.”

  Morgon was silent. He got to his feet awkwardly, went to the window. Through the glistening air, as though he had the Morgol’s vision, he could see the wide, wet plains of Caithnard where trade-ships were setting sail for An, Isig, Hed. He said softly, “Deth, tomorrow, if I can ride, I am going east to the trade-port Hlurle, to take a ship home. I should be safe; no one will expect that. But even if they find me again at sea, I would rather die a land-ruler returning home than a nameless, placeless man being forced into a life I can’t understand or control.”

  There was no answer but the rain pounding with impersonal fury against the glass. Then, as the sound tapered away, he heard the harpist rise, felt a hand on his shoulder, turning him. He met the dark, dispassionate gaze silently; the harpist said softly, “It’s more than the killing of Corrig. Will you tell me what is troubling you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want me to accompany you to Hed?”

  “No. There’s no reason for you to risk your life again.”

  “How will you reconcile turning back with what you held true at Caithnard?”

  “I have made a choice,” Morgon said steadily, and the hand fell from his shoulder. He felt the tooth of an odd sorrow bite into him, the sorrow of an ending, and he added, “I’ll miss you.”

  Something came into the harpist’s face, breaking through the calm agelessness of it until Morgon sensed for the first time the concern, the uncertainty, the endless experience that ran through his mind like water beneath ice. Deth did not answer; his head bent slightly as to a king or an inevitability.

  Morgon left the city of circles before dawn two days later. He wore against the thin, icy mists a heavy, richly lined coat the Morgol had given him. A hunting bow that Lyra had made for him hung with his saddlebags. He had left the packhorse with Deth, since Hlurle lay scarcely three days away, a small port the traders used to unload goods bound for Herun. Deth had given Morgon what money he had had left in case he had to wait, for in late autumn, in the heavy seas, ships grew scarce on the northern coast.

  Morgon’s harp lay at his back, encased against the damp air; his horse’s hooves made soft rhythmic whispers through the long grass of the pastures. The sky was clear before dawn; the stars, huge, cold, gave him light. In the distance tiny lights from farmhouses winked alive, golden eyes in the darkness. The fields of the city gave way to a plain where huge stones rose origin-less as wizards around him. He felt their shadows as he rode beneath them. Mists fell then, rolling down from the hills; following Lyra’s advice he stopped, found shelter under a rare tree, and waited.

  He spent the first night at the foot of the eastern hills. That night, among the silent trees, alone for the first time in many weeks, he watched the smoke-colored dusk fade gently into night, and, in the light of his small, solitary fire, he took out the starred harp and began to play. The sound was rich and true under his fingers, made for a delicate, expert skill. After an hour his playing slowed. He sat examining the harp as he had never done before, tracing every curve of gold, marvelling at the white moons untarnished by age, sea, use. He touched the stars softly, as though he were touching flame.

  The next day he spent picking a path through the low, empty hills. He found a stream lancing between them and followed it, winding through groves of pale ash and oak trees with their beautiful, endless weavings of dark, bare branches. The stream, quickening, bouncing over tree roots and green rocks, led him out of the trees to the bald, whistling eastern slopes where he could see unexpectedly, the flat no-man’s-land of the eastern coast running between Ymris and Osterland, the faint white heads of mountains rising in the farthest point of the High One’s realm, and the broad, endless eastern sea.

  The stream joined a wide river that had curled around north Herun; struggling with a mental map, he realized it was the Cwill that took its roaring white waters from White Lady Lake, the enormous lake deep in the wastelands that fed also the seven Lungold Lakes. Hlurle, he remembered, lay just north of its mouth. He camped that night on the joint of land between the stream and the river, his thoughts lulled by their two voices: one deep, secret, swift; the other light, high, hospitable. He lay quietly by the fire, his head resting on his saddle, reaching out now and then to add a branch or a pinecone to the flames. Gently as small birds landing in his mind came questions he no longer had to answer; he looked at each one curiously, as though it had never occurred to him before, dispassionately, as though the answers had nothing to do with him, or with the white-haired, half-blind Ymris land-heir, or with the King of Ymris struggling with a strange war growing on his coasts, or with the Morgol, the peace of her house shattered by a hint of power that had no origins, no definition. He saw in his mind�
�s eye the stars on his face, the stars on the harp, the stars on the sword. He looked at himself as though he were a figure in some ancient tale: a Prince of Hed reared to harvest bare-backed in the sun, to puzzle over the varied diseases of trees and animals, to read the weather from the color of a cloud, or a tension in a breathless afternoon, to the simple, hard-headed, uncurious life of Hed. He saw that same figure in the voluminous robe of a Caithnard student poring late at night over ancient books, his lips shaping, soundlessly, riddle, answer, stricture, riddle, answer, stricture; walking, from pure choice, one morning into a cold tower in Aum, finding himself, in the face of death, with no name, no way of life, no birthright to save him but his mind. He saw a Prince of Hed with three stars on his face leave his land, find a starred harp in Ymris, a sword, a name, and a hint of doom in Herun. And those two figures out of the ancient tale: the Prince of Hed and the Star-Bearer, stood apart from each other; he could find nothing that reconciled them.

  He broke a branch, fed it to the fire; his thoughts turned to the High One whose home lay in the heart of one of the distant mountains to the north. The High One, from the beginning, had left men free to find their own destinies. His sole law was land-law, the law that passed like a breath of life from land-heir to land-heir; if the High One died, or withdrew his immense and intricate power, he could turn his realm into a wasteland. The evidences of his powers were subtle and unexpected; he was thought of, when at all, with both awe and trust; his dealings with rulers, generally through his harpist, were invariably courteous. His one concern was the land; his one law, the law instilled deeper than thought, deeper than dreaming, in his land-rulers. Morgon thought of the terrible tale of Awn of An, who, trying to discourage an army from Hel, had set fire to An, sending flames billowing over half the land, burning harvests, orchards, shearing the hillsides and river-banks. Safe at last, he had awakened out of a sleep of exhaustion to realize he had lost the wordless, gentle awareness of things beyond eyesight that had been with him, like a hidden eye, since the death of his father. His land-heir, running grief-stricken into the room, had stopped, astonished, to find him still alive. . . .

  The fire sank low, like a beast curling to sleep. Morgon tossed a handful of twigs and dry acorns on it, and it started awake. Awn had killed himself. The wizard Talies, methodical and sharp-tongued, who had hated Awn’s warring, recorded the incident with relish, mentioned it to a passing trader, and within three months, precarious as trading was in those years of turmoil, all battling had ceased abruptly in the High One’s realm. Peace did not last long; the battles over boundary and kingship had not ended yet, but they grew less frequent, and less devastating. Then the ports and the great cities had begun to grow: Anuin, Caithnard, Caerweddin, Kraal, Kyrth. . . .

  And now, some strange, dark power, unsuspected by most lands, unchecked by the High One, was building along the coasts. Not since the wizards lived had there been people of such power; the wizards, themselves skilled, restless and arbitrary, would never have dreamed of trying to kill a land-ruler. There had been scarcely a hint of their existence in the tales and histories of the land until breaking a silence of centuries, they had roused to meet the Star-Bearer at Caithnard. A face floated into the fire before Morgon’s eyes: foam-white, blurred, eyes luminous like wet kelp, wet shell . . . they held a smile, knowing what he was thinking, knowing. . . .

  He touched the heart of the questioning; his lips moved, whispering it, “Why?”

  A little cold breeze moved across the river; his fire shivered under it. He realized then how tiny that fire was against the enormous darkness. A fear prickled over him; he froze, straining to hear above the water the soft breaking of a twig, the stirring of leaves around him. But the chattering stream distorted sounds, and the wind rose, tuneless in the bare branches. He lay back. His fire sank into itself; the stars clinging to the black oak limbs seemed to shake and sway in the winds. A few drops of rain fell, hard as acorns, to the earth. As though the wind carried an echo of the vast emptiness about him, his fear died away. He turned on his side, slept without dreaming.

  The next day, following the Cwill, he reached the sea. Hlurle, little more than a dock, a scattering of warehouses, inns, and small, worn houses, lay hunched under a mist of rain beating in from the sea. There were two ships moored among the fishing boats, their furled sails were blue. There seemed to be no one around. He rode, drenched and shivering, down the wharf, hearing beneath the rain, the rattle of chain, the musing creak of timber, the occasional nudge of a boat against the dock. Ahead of him, light from a small tavern spilled into the wet air. He stopped there, dismounted under its broad eaves.

  Inside, the rough tables and benches, lit by smokey torches and an enormous fire, were full of sailors, traders with jewels on their hands, in their caps, disgruntled fishermen who had come in with the rain. Morgon, enduring a brief, casual scrutiny as he walked dripping to the fire, unbuttoned his coat with numb fingers and hung it to dry. He sat down on the bench in front of the fire; the tavern keeper paused at his elbow.

  “Lord?” he said questioningly, and then, with a glance at the coat, “You are far from home.”

  Morgon nodded tiredly. “Beer,” he said. “And what is that I smell?”

  “A fine, thick stew, with tender lamb, mushrooms, and wine—I’ll bring you a bowl.”

  He ate and drank in weary silence, the smoke and heat and tangle of voices lulling as the river’s voice. He sat sipping his beer, which he realized probably came from Hed, when the smell of wet wool and a chill of rain and wind disturbed him. A trader, the fur trim on his cloak beaded with water, sat down beside him. Morgon felt eyes on his face.

  The man rose after a moment, divested himself of his cloak with a sprinkle of rain, and said apologetically, “Your pardon, Lord. You’re wet enough without my help.”

  He was richly dressed in black leather and velvet, his hair and his eyes in a rough, kindly face as dark as blackbird’s wings. Morgon, drowsy in the warmth, stirred himself and put his mind to practical matters. There was no way of knowing whether he spoke to a man or the illusion of a man; he accepted the risk and said, “Do you know where those ships are going?”

  “Yes. They are bound back to Kraal, to go into dry dock for the winter.” He paused, his shrewd eyes on Morgon’s face. “You don’t want to go north? What do you need?”

  “Passage to Caithnard. I’m supposed to be at the college.”

  The man shook his head, his brow wrinkling. “It’s late in the season. . . . Let me think. We just came from Anuin, stopping at Caithnard, Tol, and Caerweddin.”

  “Tol,” Morgon said involuntarily. “For what?”

  “To take Rood of An from Caithnard to Hed.” He caught the tavern maid’s attention and got wine. Morgon settled back against the bench, his brows drawn, hoping Rood had contented himself with going only as far as Hed in search of him. The trader took a long swallow of wine, sat back himself. He said moodily, “It was a depressing journey. There was a storm around Hed that blew us down the coast, and we were in living fear of losing both the ship and Rood of An. . . . He’s got a sharp tongue when he’s seasick,” he added thoughtfully, and Morgon almost laughed. “At Tol, there was Eliard of Hed, and the young one—Tristan—pleading for news of their brother. All I could tell them was that he’d been seen in Caerweddin, but I couldn’t tell them what he was doing there. We lost sail in that storm, but we found we couldn’t land in Meremont; there were king’s warships in the harbor there, so we limped to Caerweddin. I heard then, for the first time, that his young wife had vanished, and his brother was home again, half-blind. No one knows what to make of it.” He sipped wine. Morgon, his eyes on the fire, felt his mind fill with faces: Astrin’s, white-eyed, twisted with pain; the Lady Eriel’s, shy, beautiful, merciless; Heureu’s face, realizing slowly what kind of woman he had married. . . . He shivered. The trader glanced at him.

  “You’re wet through. That was a long ride from Herun. I wonder if I know your father.”

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p; Morgan smiled at the hint. “Probably. But he’s got a name so long even I can’t pronounce it for you.”

  “Ah.” There was an answering smile in the dark eyes. “Your pardon. I wouldn’t pry for the world. But I need some idle chatter to warm my bones. I’ve got a wife waiting for me in Kraal, if we make it there, and two little sons I haven’t seen for two months. Passage to Caithnard. . . . The only ships would be coming down from Kraal, and I can’t remember who’s up there. Wait.” He turned, shouted into the din behind them. “Joss! Who’s left in Kraal?”

  “Three of Rustin Kor’s ships, waiting for a cargo of timber from Isig,” a voice boomed back in answer. “We didn’t pass them; they must be still up there. Why?”

  “The Herun lordling needs to get back to the College. Will they stop here, do you think?”

  “Rustin Kor has half a warehouse full of Herun wine here; he’ll pay winter storage fees if he doesn’t stop.”

  “He’ll stop,” the trader said, turning back to Morgon. “I remember. It’s Mathom of An who wants the wine. Do you like riddling, then? Do you know who’s a great riddler? The wolf of Osterland. I was in his court last summer at Yrye, trying to interest him in a pair of amber cups, when a man came in from Lungold to challenge him to a game. Har has a standing wager that any man who wins a game with him can have the first thing he asks for when the game is done. It’s a tricky prize: there’s a tale of one man, long ago, who won the game after a day and a night, and he was so dry the first thing he asked for was a cup of water. I don’t know if that’s true. Anyway, this man—he was a little, wizened, arrogant one, looked as if he’d been sucked dry by riddles—kept Har at it two days, and the old wolf loved it. Everyone got drunk listening, and I sold more cloth and jewels there than I had all year. It was wonderful. Finally the wolf-king asked a riddle the little man couldn’t answer—he’d never heard of it. He got angry and challenged the riddle. Har told him to go take the riddle to the Masters at Caithnard, and then he asked ten riddles in a row the man couldn’t answer, one right after another—I thought the little one was going to burst with choler. But Har soothed him and said he hadn’t played such a great game in years.”