The Riddle - Alison Croggon [118]
Some more than others, thought Maerad, for a moment lapsing into self-pity. But it made her few moments of pleasure all the more precious.
By the following day, the storm had blown out, leaving an unfamiliar white world with strange lights and glints. Pilanel children tumbled into the snow, bundled in brightly embroidered jerkins and scarves and hats, and threw snowballs at each other. Across the wide, empty turf in the middle of the Howe the snow lay knee deep, with a thin deceptive crust that broke into icy sludge. The sky was swagged with heavy, yellowish clouds, presaging more snow.
Maerad breathed in the icy air, feeling the tingle of blood rushing to her cheeks; she liked this weather. Sirkana had offered to show her around Murask, and Maerad met again some of the Pilanel she had dined with the previous evening.
When the clans came to Murask for the winter, they returned to their traditional quarters. These were — apart from Sirkana’s house, which was the central meeting hall — tunneled into the thick wall of the Howe, but to Maerad’s surprise, they were far from the gloomy, airless caves she had expected. They were pleasant dwellings, with bright murals and comfortable, warm furnishings. Typically, the animals — dogs, deer, horses — were kept in large, barnlike rooms downstairs, while upstairs were the living quarters. Pilanel clans varied enormously in size; they could range from five to a hundred people, and did not necessarily comprise people from the same family. They were often practical groupings arranged according to need and custom — where a clan traveled, for instance, during the summer, or how they made their living. Some worked as minstrels or sold handcrafts, some were horse breeders and traders, some were traveling tinkers and cobblers, some herded deer. When they arrived at Murask, they tended to arrange their living quarters likewise. Mostly this was established by tradition, and the same clan occupied certain dwellings for generations without count.
The more Maerad saw of Murask, the more intrigued she became. The settlement was a complex and efficient structure, like a hive, and those who had built it had been very ingenious. It had a piping system, like the Schools, and very effective drainage, and it never ran out of water, which was supplied from a spring with outlets inside the Howe itself and in Sirkana’s house. Slow, peat-burning furnaces kept the Howe from freezing even in the most savage weather, and all of it was warm. Maerad asked Sirkana how old it was, but she answered that no one knew; Murask had been there from time immemorial, and was far older than the Schools of Annar.
About half of the tunnels through the Howe were used for storage. Each year the clans would bring back supplies for the long winter — grains, oils, nuts, strings of onions, dried bunches of herbs, preserved fruits — traded over the summer. Or if they were not traders, they would lay aside hard cheeses made from milking their herds of shaggy deer, or slaughter the young animals in the autumn and smoke the carcasses in the huge smoke rooms in the Howe. Each clan brought all that they could, and the food was held in common. “We are fat together, or we starve together,” said Sirkana. “And this year is a thin year. This is why it will be such a blow if the Pilani who spend the summer in Annar cannot come home for winter; we were hoping that they might be able to make up the deficit. From what you say, they will have to turn back.”
Maerad thought of the blocked road in the Gwalhain Pass. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe someone determined could dig their way through. If they had a lot of people with them.”
“It is late in the year for such digging,” said Sirkana, and sighed. “Well, they may yet come. We will not close the gates against them. But it bodes ill for us.”
It was not until that afternoon that Maerad