The Riddle - Alison Croggon [2]
dh — a consonantal sound halfway between a hard d and a hard th, as in the, not thought. There is no equivalent in English; it is best approximated by hard th. Medhyl can be said METH’l.
s — always soft, as in soft, not as in noise.
Note: Dén Raven does not derive from the Speech, but from the southern tongues. It is pronounced don RAH-ven.
THOROLD
I Pursuit
II Busk
III The Broken Promise
IV Midsummer
V Goats and Cheese
VI The Lion of Stone
ANNAR
VII The Idoiravis
VIII The Stormdog
IX Ossin
X The White Sickness
XI Encounter with Bards
XII The Gwalhain Pass
ZMARKAN
XIII The Pipes of the Elidhu
XIV Mirka
XV Alone
XVI Murask
XVII The Pilanel
XVIII White
XIX The North Glacier
XX Inka-Reb
XXI The Jussacks
ARKAN-DA
XXII Delirium
XXIII The Ice Palace
XXIV The Game
XXV The Song
XXVI Wolfskin
XXVII Pellinor
APPENDICES
The Peoples of Edil-Amarandh
The Elidhu
The Treesong
Notes for the Appendices
MAERAD was a being of the upper regions of air, bodiless and free, without self or memory or name. She gazed at the landscape beneath her, fascinated. For a long time she didn’t even recognize it as a landscape; it looked like a strange and awesome painting. For as far as she could see, there stretched a huge red expanse covered with ripples, like sand under water, but these ripples, she began to understand, must be enormous. She was very high up and she could see very far, and there were no clouds at all, only a tiny shadow moving over the earth, which she realized after a while was her own. She seemed to be flying with some purpose in a particular direction, although she couldn’t remember what the purpose was.
After a while, the land changed: the red ripples ran up against a ridge of purple rock and stopped, and she was passing over mountains whose shadows stretched long and sharp behind them. On the other side of the range ran tracks like rivers, lighter veins spreading in delicate fans, but she could see no water in them. The colors of the earth changed to subtle purples and dull greens that signaled vegetation. In the far distance she could see a whiteness that seemed to gather light to itself: it looked like a lake. But a lake of salt, she thought with surprise, not water. . . .
Then everything shifted. She was no longer in the sky, but standing on what seemed to be the spine of a high ridge of bare rock that dropped sheer before her. She looked over a wide plain that stretched to the horizon. The soil was still a strange red orange, but this land was nothing like the one she had flown over: it seemed blasted, poisoned, although she could not say how. As far as she could see, there were rows and rows of tents, interspersed with large open spaces where masses of figures performed some kind of drill. A red sun sent low, level rays over the plain, casting black shadows back from the tents. Somehow the figures didn’t seem human: they marched with a strange unchanging rhythm that cast a chill over her heart.
Maerad had never seen an army before, and the sight shocked her: so many thousands, uncountable thousands, anonymous as ants, gathered for the sole aim of injury and death. She turned away, suddenly sickened with dread, and saw behind her, on the other side of the ridge, a white, bare expanse. The sun struck up from it, hurting her eyes as savagely as if someone had stabbed her. She cried out, clutching her face, and stumbled and fell. Her body, now heavy and corporeal, fell with the ominous slowness of a dream: down, down, down, toward the cruel rocks below.
Maerad woke, gasping for breath, and sat bolt upright. This was an unwise thing to do, as she was sleeping in a hammock slung below the deck of a small fishing smack called the White Owl. The hammock swung dangerously and then, as she flailed for balance in the pitch dark, tipped her out onto the floor. Still trapped in her dream, Maerad screamed, putting out her hands to break her fall, and hit the wooden floorboards.
She lay still, breathing hard, as above her a trapdoor was flung open and