The Riddle - Alison Croggon [131]
The dogs all leaped forward. With a certain smugness, Maerad could feel their surprise, and she opened her hearing; as they ran they were complaining to one another. Who is she? And You never told me she was a wolf tongue! and Shut your jaws, wooden teeth, and keep running. Maerad laughed out loud, and Dharin looked up at her, impressed.
“That made them take notice,” he said. “Well, maybe I do not have to teach you anything. All the commands are by voice: you say, ‘right,’ ‘left,’ ‘stop,’ as you wish.”
“I know nothing of this land,” said Maerad. “Or where I am going. It’s no use being able to tell them to go if you do not know where you are going.”
Despite the team’s sudden obedience, Maerad found driving unnerving; she felt out of control. When it came time to disentangle their leads again, she handed the reins back to Dharin. “If you want a rest, and can tell me which way to go, then I am happy to drive,” she said. “But I don’t want to cause an accident.”
“I’ll take that offer,” said Dharin. “It’s easy through the Arkiadera; it’s just flat and there are no rivers in this part of the plains. All you have to do is keep driving straight.”
After that, Maerad took the reins at least once a day. The more she drove the sled, feeling the team’s responsiveness to her voice and hands, the more her fear of the dogs subsided, although she was always careful to remain respectful. In a few days, she was helping to feed them and could watch the dogs with equanimity as they snarled and snapped at each other and tore apart the frozen joints of meat.
The journey to Tlon was less than one hundred and twenty leagues northwest as the crow flies. Their route was slightly longer, as Dharin was skirting the river that curved north of Murask. They reached Tlon in five days, and it was only then that Maerad appreciated how fast they were traveling.
From the outside, Tlon looked very like Murask, a huge snow-covered hill in the otherwise flat plains, but Maerad never had a chance to look inside. Dharin had packed enough supplies in the sled for four weeks’ travel, and here he merely stopped to chat with the door warden to find news of conditions farther north. As he rang the bell, Maerad stood behind him, stamping her boots on the snow, her breath making ice on the fur of her hood. She thought that with such clothes, she had no need for disguise; no one could have told whether she was a man or a woman.
The door warden answered quickly, greeting Dharin enthusiastically by name. Unlike those at Murask, the door warden of Tlon was a fount of information. He whiled away his boring job by talking to anyone he could, trading tidbits of gossip, weatherlore, rumors, and news. Dharin clearly knew him well, and they chatted for a long time. Maerad couldn’t understand what they were saying, as they spoke in Pilanel, and she was getting colder and colder standing in the wind, so she walked around in circles, kicking at the snow.
Unlike the snow surrounding Murask, which had been soft and powdery, this was deeply packed and harder than earth; it had been snowing here for much longer than it had been down south. Dharin confirmed this when he stopped talking to the door warden and came back to the sled, where the dogs were lying down in their traces, snapping idly at the snow as it circled their heads.
“Nok was saying that they’ve never had a winter this early. Nearly ten clans are not home yet, and they have short supplies. And those that have come from the north talk of treacherous conditions, and Jussack raids, many more than in other years.”
“Jussacks?” said Maerad. “Mirka spoke of them.”
“The Pilani Howes were built long ago, long before Jussacks appeared in the north. But they have served us well,” said Dharin. “There were other enemies then, who have now passed beyond knowledge. The Pilani have always returned to the Howes — to tell our stories, to share, to court, and for the midwinter festivals. But for many years now, they also return for safety.”
“But Mirka