The Riddle - Alison Croggon [169]
Maerad began to read the poem silently, moving her lips as she did, and as she read, she heard in her mind the cadence of Dernhil’s voice reading it to her, in another age of her life, in his rooms in Innail:
The breath of heaven teases my lips
With a single petal dislodged from the sky:
My love you are that single petal.
The gazelle looks up from the pool
Blinded by one spark of Light’s radiance:
My love you are that single spark.
The peacock cries in the empty garden
For the memory of a tear outshining him:
My love you are that single tear.
O petal that is my garden of delight!
O spark that is my heart’s conflagration!
O tear that is my swelling ocean of sorrow!
An icy splinter seemed to melt in Maerad’s heart as she read, and she looked up blindly from the page, her eyes full of tears. Dernhil would never read that poem to anyone again, would never sit gravely in his study with his cloak thrown carelessly on a chair nearby, surrounded by crooked towers of books, oblivious to everything but the scratching of his pen on parchment. Yes, we are frail, thought Maerad, but within that frailty is such strength and such beauty, such love. . . . Surely it is not all for nothing? Surely it means something, even should the dark overwhelm us utterly?
Sorrow flooded through her, and she hid her face in her hands. She couldn’t remember the last time she had cried. She had not been able to weep for Dharin’s death. Her despair had shriveled her soul: she had been too hurt for such a generosity as tears. At last she mourned him, his gentleness, his courage, his friendship, the wound his absence left within her. She wept for Dernhil and Cadvan, for Darsor, for Imi, for Hem and his broken childhood, for her mother and father, so cruelly killed, and last she wept for herself. And as she wept, she felt as if all those she loved and missed, the dead and the living, were somehow present, and in her sorrow was a painful comfort.
At last, her tears ceased. She blinked, rubbing her eyes, and saw that she was in the dungeon, not the enchanted room. It was cold, and she wrapped her robes tightly around herself, and looked back down at the book. Its colors seemed brighter still in the dim, flickering light of the oil lamp.
I am free, Maerad thought. I am here, imprisoned, but at last I am free.
MAERAD decided to take Arkan at his word, and since Gima did not come to her chamber again that day, she began to explore the Ice Palace. Her moonstone chamber was back, but it had now a sense of unreality, as if it were slightly less stable than it had been. She took care to remember her route; she didn’t want to get lost. She decided to use a system of counting, as if she were remembering a complex piece of music, so she could find her way back. No one stopped her; no one was there to stop her. She didn’t see anyone else at all.
Arkan-da was eerie and deserted. It seemed to be a busy place, where people lived and made things and ate, but wherever Maerad walked it was as if they had abandoned their tasks and left just before she got there. There were endless corridors with scores of doorways, and when she lifted the hangings that covered the doors, she saw a bewildering variety of rooms. Some seemed to be bedchambers, furnished simply but beautifully, with personal belongings scattered on the bed or the floor, as if someone had just walked out. She saw a place that seemed to be a kitchen, with black iron implements hanging from the ceiling and an iron cauldron suspended on a tripod over a fire, bubbling, but no one was there.
There were many grand halls with pillars of iron and stone, so big that the columns marched off into long distances, and storerooms with shelves full of dried or smoked foods, sides of meats or long sausages or onions, and she saw armories, with rows of pikes and maces and strange leather helms.
She looked always for an exit or a window, but she didn’t find any until she entered a high, wide passageway