The Riddle - Alison Croggon [99]
Mirka told Maerad that she had lain in her pallet, barely alive, for seven days. She had simply appeared on her doorstep, and unquestioningly Mirka had taken her in, tending her and bringing her back to life. Maerad had no memory of anything after seeing Ardina, and supposed that Ardina had brought her down the pass to the old woman to be healed. She counted on her fingers; seven days made it well into autumn, about seven weeks since they had left Ossin.
“I’ll have to leave soon,” she said. “I’ve lost so much time.”
“How can you lose time?” asked Mirka. “Time doesn’t belong to anybody.” She grinned. “You can’t go anywhere while your legs are like cloth. And you need fattening.” She pinched Maerad’s forearm so hard that she cried out. “You are scrawny as a sick chicken.”
“No, I suppose not,” Maerad answered sadly. She couldn’t walk across Mirka’s clearing without her legs trembling; a hard journey was beyond imagining. She realized she had already decided to pursue her quest for the Treesong; it was the only way she might redeem herself in her own eyes. She met the thought without quailing. After that terrible night on the mountain, the thought of dying no longer frightened her.
“Where do you wish to go, anyway?” Mirka looked at her, her head cocked to the side like a bird.
“I have to go to Murask.”
“To Murask?” A shadow fell over Mirka’s face and she walked away mumbling to herself, as if Maerad were not there, and would not answer any of Maerad’s questions.
Finally, Maerad said, “I thought you were Pilanel. Murask’s a Pilanel town, isn’t it?”
“The young, they are always impatient,” said Mirka crossly, waving her hands at Maerad as if to shoo her away. She fell into her own language. “Na, na, im Pilani.” To Maerad’s surprise, the old woman’s eyes filled with tears, and then she sat down on a log and began to bawl, as unselfconsciously as if she were a three-year-old child.
Maerad was discomfited; she did not know how to respond or why Mirka was crying. In the end, she just held the woman’s hand until she stopped and wiped her nose on her sleeve.
“Yes, I am Pilani,” she said. “I and my family. But I have no family anymore. I no longer wish to go to Murask for the winter gathering and the stories and the dances. My family is dead.”
“Dead? How?” asked Mearad, and then instantly regretted asking, because Mirka started crying again. But finally she stopped, hiccupping, and looked at Maerad.
“It does good to weep for the dead,” she said. “They need their tithe of tears. And I thought I was all dried up and couldn’t weep anymore. Well, perhaps you have opened a new spring in me, my young chicken. I had daughters once.” She chucked Maerad under the chin and went back to splitting wood, as if nothing had happened. But she talked between the ax strokes.
“I had daughters and sons and a husband, and I thought it was good. I knew, because I was one with the Voice, that I would outlive them, but I thought to see them grow and bear their own children. But one day the Jussacks came and killed them all. And that was that.”
Maerad waited in silence for her to continue. Mirka stopped to wipe her brow and then started swinging the ax again. “I was the only one left. They said I was mad after that. Maybe I was. The sun darkened and the night was full of horror. If I could have saved my darlings by lifting the mountains with my naked hands, I would have done it. But I could not.”
“Who are the Jussacks?” ventured Maerad uncertainly, afraid that she would reactivate Mirka’s grief. Mirka didn’t reply at first but chopped the wood with a new viciousness, as if she were splitting the heads of her enemies. When she had finished, she sat down next to Maerad.
“The Jussacks are bad, savage men,” she said.