The Riddle - Alison Croggon [94]
As she tasted the full bitterness of her self-accusation, Maerad considered whether to throw herself off the side of the mountain. It would be a just punishment, she thought coldly. Such a creature as she had no reason to live. Such a creature as she deserved no friends, if she failed to protect them.
Gradually the darkness became less absolute, and she could see the outlines of the road glimmering against the lighter darkness of the sky, and the huge black mass of rocks close beside her that entombed Cadvan and Darsor. She looked up and saw a blur of silver above the black blades of the mountain range where the moon, now at her full, hid behind a bank of clouds.
Maerad’s face itched with blood, and she clumsily tried to wipe her eyes with her gloves, which were rimed with frost. I need something to drink, she thought, and some of the generalized pain in her body identified itself as an overpowering thirst. Her lips were parched and cracked. Oh, I’m so thirsty and so hungry, she thought. But there’s nothing to drink and no food. . . .
She sat unmoving, sunk in hopelessness, and it was only when she shifted to ease the aches in her body that she remembered that she still wore her pack. In a sudden panic of haste, she fumbled it off her shoulders and started trying to open it, but her fingers were so numb they kept slipping off the fastenings. Eventually she got the pack open and found a water bottle, of which she took a long draft, and the medhyl, which brought a little fire into her chilled veins, and then she unwrapped some of the dried biscuit. She ate only a little of that, because it hurt to chew. Her lips felt as if they were on fire.
She felt restored enough to make a tiny magelight, and with its help searched through the bag until she found some balm, which she put on her lips and then smeared over her face, slightly easing the stinging pain. Briefly she touched the reed pipes the Elidhu had given her. For an instant, the light greens of early spring woodlands filled her mind, and she remembered Ardina as she had first appeared to her, in the forests of the Weywood, long, long ago it seemed, in another life. A bar of a song floated into Maerad’s mind.
Maerad picked up the pipes awkwardly in her gloved hands, studying them as if she had never seen them before. She had never played them. They were simple cut pipes such as a child might make, fashioned of a dark purplish reed bound with woven grasses. She wondered what they sounded like.
She ought to make a lament for Cadvan and Darsor and Imi. That was what Bards did. And she was still a Bard, even if she had betrayed her calling. She thought briefly of her lyre, but she knew her hands were too numb to play it. And some other part of her thought she was unworthy to touch her lyre, as if she had renounced her right to that most precious of her possessions.
She sat for a long time while the night grew colder, holding the pipes loosely in her hands. At last, reaching a decision, she drank some more of the medhyl. Then she painfully pulled off her gloves and rubbed some of the medhyl and some balm into her fingers. Her fingers burned unmercifully, but, at last, she managed to make them flex and curl enough to hold the pipes properly. She held the instrument to her lips and blew experimentally. Her lips were so cracked that at first she could not make any sound at all, but she persisted, and with a small feeling of triumph managed to get a tiny sound. It made a thin, high fluting, like the wind over rocks.
She played up and down some scales, becoming, despite her extremity, absorbed by her fascination for music. Maerad had played similar instruments as a child and she had some virtuosity with them. These had an unusual richness of tone, and she found she could bend the notes expressively. When she had tested the pipes to her satisfaction, she stood up. This took some time, as on her first attempt her legs simply buckled beneath her, but she continued with a single-minded stubbornness until she was able to stand