The Riddle - Alison Croggon [97]
Slowly she turned around, holding a bowl in two hands, and shuffled back, carrying the bowl with infinite care so she might not spill its contents. She sat down next to Maerad on a sawn-off log, which passed for a stool, and offered her a spoonful of something. It was where the smell of fish was coming from, and it made Maerad feel slightly nauseous.
“Eat,” said the old woman. “Eat. Good.”
Maerad struggled to sit upright, but her muscles would not obey her. The old woman nodded to herself and pushed the spoon against Maerad’s lips until she opened her mouth to protest. Before she could speak, the old woman had slipped the spoon between her teeth. Maerad choked and involuntarily swallowed. It was a thin fish soup, and despite the smell, very good indeed. The nausea she had felt identified itself as ravenous hunger. The woman waited patiently while Maerad coped with her first mouthful and then gave her another spoonful, feeding her like a very small child until she had finished the bowl.
“Good, good,” she said. Her face cracked into a smile again. “Sleep now.”
Maerad’s eyes were already shut.
She didn’t know how long she lay there in that tiny hut, drifting between sleep and brief waking. The old woman fed her soup, cleaned her and changed the furs when she was incontinent, and stroked her forehead wordlessly when, as sometimes happened, she woke from terrible nightmares of the mountainside falling, and slow, weak tears ran down her face. Sometimes daylight showed through tiny cracks in the walls like impossibly bright stars, and sometimes it was night; Maerad had no sense of continuity and didn’t know if it was one day and one night or many. The wind wailed sometimes and died down, the rain beat sometimes and went away, and through it all she heard the old woman’s voice, talking to herself in her own tongue or singing or humming, a ceaseless gentle monologue like the running of a river. Time simply vanished. Maerad accepted her ministrations passively; she felt like a baby, incapable of the simplest things, of feeding herself, walking, or even of speech.
But one day — a day later? a week? a month? — she could sit up and take the bowl in her hands and feed herself. And this time, when she handed the bowl back, wiping her mouth, she said, “Thank you.”
“Good?” said the old woman. “Na, na, good.” She carried the bowl back to the fire and wiped it carefully with an old cloth before she put it away on a stone shelf beside the fireplace. Maerad didn’t go straight back to sleep, as she had before, but instead looked around curiously. She had never seen such a hovel, a ramshackle hut built of bits of stone and wood with rags stuffed into holes to keep out the wind, barely high enough to stand up in. For the first time, she noticed a yellow dog curled up asleep in the corner on a pile of ragged blankets, where she supposed the woman was sleeping, for Maerad had the only bed: a simple pallet piled with blankets and furs.
“Where am I?” she asked.
The old woman looked up and stared at her with rheumy blue eyes. “You Annaren?”
Maerad nodded.
The old woman pointed to the ground. “Here, Zmarkan.” She pointed behind her, using the Pilanel name for the Osidh Elanor. “Idrom Uakin.” Then she slapped herself on the chest with both her hands. “Me, Mirka.” She grinned, showing her blackened teeth again. “You?”
“I’m Maerad.”
The old woman came up to her and squinted into her face. “You good?”
“A bit better.”
Mirka nodded, satisfied, and went back to her business of tending the fire and stirring the soup. Maerad sat in silence and watched her.
“How did I get here?” she asked at last.
“You come to my