The Riddle - Alison Croggon [123]
“The world is not fair,” said Sirkana. “And there is nothing that can make its injustices easier to bear.”
They were silent for a while, and for that time Maerad felt closer to her than she had felt to any human being for a long time: she felt that someone saw her for who she was, and simply accepted her, in all her rightness and wrongness, as bone of her bone. Once, perhaps, her mother had looked at her like that. But she could barely remember it.
Finally Sirkana kissed her forehead and stood up. Her gentleness vanished behind her usual austere expression. “Well, I have a dispute that I must sort out between two clans, and they are awaiting me in the Hall,” she said. “I am already late.”
Maerad looked up, her lashes still wet with tears, and smiled. “Thank you, Sirkana,” she said.
“There is nothing to thank me for,” she said. “You will have what you need for your journey. If your quest succeeds, perhaps I will have to thank you.”
“Not for that. For —”
Sirkana’s face briefly softened again. “I know. Remember that my love will also go with you, and may it guard you well. For your sake, as well as your father’s.”
Dharin insisted that Maerad help him with gathering supplies and packing the sled for their journey. He said she should know what they were taking and where it was kept, and that she needed to be familiar with the sled before they left. She gladly assented; it gave her something to do.
Dharin had made the sled himself, and he knew every knot of it backward. The long runners were made from single lengths of ash that he had cut and carefully warped upward at one end so that the sled would ride easily over rocks and other obstacles. The runners were each about as thick as his thumb, and he had covered them beneath with a mixture of mud, moss, and (he told Maerad later, when they knew each other a little better) urine, which froze hard and slick, and protected the wood. Up from the runners ran six stanchions, also of ash, each one higher than the last, which were joined by two parallel rails. At the back end, behind the hindmost stanchion, was a little platform where Dharin stood to drive the sled. He told Maerad that she would be sitting in front of him, and he carefully made her a comfortable seat well padded with furs, which she could simply slip into, like a foot into a shoe.
The base of the sled was fashioned of thick wooden slats. At the front was a curved bow to protect the sled; it was made of stout wood and covered with rawhide. When he had taken the sled out of summer storage, Dharin had dismantled it entirely and freshly lashed it together, to ensure maximum strength and because mice had nibbled the hide. The hide kept the structure flexible and strong. Over the whole he had lashed two layers of cured skins.
Dharin explained every detail of the sled patiently, running his hands lovingly over each part of it, feeling for flaws and warpings in the wood that might have occurred during the summer. Maerad couldn’t imagine herself driving it, but then, she thought, there were a lot of things she had done that she wouldn’t have thought possible. Very slightly, her apprehension of the coming journey abated.
Together they packed onto the sled what seemed to Maerad an enormous number of supplies. There were extra furs to keep them warm at night and a sort of tent made of oiled hide and springy willow wood. They stowed a lot of a tough honey biscuit baked especially for long journeys through the cold. There were also bags of the usual traveling food — nuts, dried fruits, cured meat — and several large leather bags of drinking water. They took a supply of peat and fire-making tools, and a small traveling stove, of a kind Maerad had never seen: it was made of iron, with a stone base to prevent it burning the wood of the sled.
Maerad’s pack, which had often seemed so heavy in her travels,