The Riddle - Alison Croggon [100]
Maerad had never heard of the Jussacks and looked at Mirka blankly. “Do they live in Zmarkan?” she asked.
“Aye, sometimes, sometimes. They are like Pilani; they do not stay in one place, but they do not use caravans. They ride with little leather houses rolled up on the backs of their saddles, and where they want to stop, they put them up. They ride very fast, and you never know that a Jussack band is coming until it is too late.”
“But why do they kill people?” asked Maerad.
“I told you.” Mirka began to look as if she might start bawling again. “They worship death, the Great Ungiver. It is said they eat the hearts of their enemies. They believe that anyone who is not a Jussack has no right to be on this earth. They kill us and they steal our horses.”
Maerad was silent after that. Mirka sat beside her, mumbling to herself in Pilanel, lost in some other reality; she smiled and nodded, as if she were speaking to someone who was not there. She was, Maerad thought to herself, more than half mad, but there was something about her that forbade pity. She did not pity herself.
Maerad’s strength returned quickly. She had not told Mirka who she was, apart from her name, or anything of her story, and Mirka did not ask; she accepted Maerad as if she were an injured bird, sent by the heavens for her to care for, who would one day recover and fly away. She no longer needed to sleep so much, and as the weather continued fine, she washed her clothes in the stream, scrubbing them with some hard soap Mirka gave her, and bathed briefly in the freezing waters. She had been absolutely filthy, grimed in sweat and blood, and it was a relief to be clean again. After the first shock, which made even her teeth numb, she stood under a tiny waterfall and washed her hair, and when she stepped out of the water, her skin felt as if it were burning with life.
But as Maerad’s body revived, she began to feel her grief more keenly. More than ever before, she missed her brother; she wanted the closeness of kin, the wordless understanding that she and Hem had enjoyed for all too brief a time. She thought now that Hem was not dead, but she wondered if he had been captured. Or perhaps Turbansk still stood. She had no way of knowing. Not knowing was almost worse than anything.
Sometimes she thought she held his restless, bony body when she slept, as she had so often when they traveled together and his nightmares had troubled him, and she was surprised when she awoke to find her arms were empty. At such times, his absence was a physical ache; she missed him with her skin, in the marrow of her bones.
But, most of all, Maerad was tormented by regrets about her breach with Cadvan. Again and again she went over their conversations, wondering how things might have been different if she had been less angry, if Cadvan had been even a little less stern; perhaps if their minds had been able to join (and why could they not? why did Cadvan feel it as an attack?) they could have destroyed the frost creatures. She saw the final conflict as her failure, and her failure only.
She was also troubled by the death of Ilar. She could no longer hide from herself that she had intended to kill the Bard; and she wondered what Cadvan had meant by the new darkness he had perceived in her. She knew something within her was changing, but it wasn’t something she could easily perceive: she simply suffered it. It was as if, at some level below speech, there were two Maerads, and she could recognize neither of them, and worse, they were at war. The only way she could resolve this inner conflict was to think of continuing her journey.
She sorted through the few scraps of knowledge she had about the Treesong: the foredream that had told her to look to the north; the idea that the Split Song and the Treesong were somehow linked, that the Treesong was of the Knowing of the Elidhu, that a poison at the root of the Speech had to do