The Riddle - Alison Croggon [38]
Maerad dropped her pack on the porch and sat down gratefully, rubbing her legs. Before long, Ankil was back with a tray on which he had placed a carafe of rich Thoroldian wine, another of cool water, four cups, and fresh bread and cheese. They sat and ate, their appetites sharpened by the mountain air and their long walk.
By herder standards, Ankil’s house was luxurious; it was smaller than most houses Maerad had passed in the villages on their way, but much more substantial than the plain wooden huts she had seen dotted around the mountain pastures. She found out later that unlike other herders, who moved to the mountain pastures only in summer, Ankil lived there all year round. The house was clearly very old, and had been built with thick granite walls through which were punched small, shuttered windows. The roof, made of clay tiles, was steeply raked to prevent a buildup of snow, and the whole was built on high foundations, so the porch was several steps up.
Unusual for a Thoroldian house, it was built on three levels: there was a cellar, used for storage and work; above that a kitchen and living area; and on the top, above the stove, two bedrooms, with sloping ceilings and shuttered dormer windows that poked out through the tiles. In the rooms were fragrant mattresses stuffed with dried mountain grasses and covered with soft sheepskins. During their stay, Ankil moved out to one of the ancillary huts, where he slept on a mattress in the empty stalls, for the goats slept in the meadows during the summertime. Maerad felt guilty when she saw this, but Ankil just laughed and said it was no punishment for him to sleep like a proper goatherd.
She soon found out why Ankil had the puzzling Bardic glow. He and Elenxi were, indeed, brothers.
“I went down to the School, like Elenxi, when I was a boy,” he told them over the midday meal. “But, you know, I just didn’t want to be a Bard. Not like Elenxi here,” and he poked him with affection. “He is the clever one. But me, I got bored with all that.”
“He was in love,” said Elenxi, smiling.
“Well, that too,” Ankil said. “My Kiranta was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Her eyes were as gray and stormy as the sea and her hair was black as olives, and her skin was like the pale golden silk they make in the valleys. Yes, I was in love. But it was more than that: I could never learn how to read and write. No matter what my mentors tried, I couldn’t make any sense of those squiggles they call letters.”
“So what happened?” asked Maerad, fascinated.
“Well, when my teachers had all thrown their arms into the air and declared that there was nothing they could do, I came back to Velissos and married my Kiranta. I didn’t want to be a Bard; I just wanted to tend my goats and trees and garden and grow my children. I was very happy for a long time. But then” — he shrugged — “as is the way of things, my children grew up and my Kiranta grew old. And that’s when Barding caught up with me, you see, because I did not grow old. I was little different from the way I had been when I had come back from the School, and Kiranta’s hair grew gray, and then white. But my Kiranta looked no different to me, because I loved her; for me she was always the same beautiful girl who looked for me in the pass, with her eyes shining.”
Ankil sighed heavily, and Maerad felt tears start in her eyes. Cadvan was looking at Ankil with a quick empathy. “That is hard,” he said.
“Yes, it was hard when she died,” said Ankil. “It is always difficult to have Bards in a family, and we have so many in ours. . . . Well, I buried my Kiranta, and wept for her, and I still miss her; every day I miss her. So I made sure my children had what they needed, and I came up here. And here I’ve been ever since.”
In the silence that followed his story, Maerad wondered how long Ankil had lived here, in this beautiful, isolated meadow. One hundred years? Two hundred?
“Did you not want to go back to the School?” she asked.
“Ah, no, young Bard,