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  THE GIFT

  The First Book of Pellinor

  Alison Croggon

  One is the singer, hidden from sunlight

  Two is the seeker, fleeing from shadows

  Three is the journey, taken in danger

  Four are the riddles, answered in treesong:

  Earth, fire, water, air Spells you OUT!

  Traditional Annaren nursery rhyme Annaren Scrolls, Library of Busk

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  THE Naraudh Lar-Chane (or Riddle of the Treesong), one of the key legends of the lost civilization of Edil-Amarandh, is here translated in full for the first time. This great classic of Annaren literature deserves, it seems to me, a much wider audience than the academics it has so far attracted.

  This is therefore a book directed toward the general reader rather than the scholar. Up until now the Naraudh Lar-Chane has been primarily valued for the illumination it throws on the culture of Edil-Amarandh, but what struck me when I first encountered it were its virtues as a romance. I was overcome by a desire at once humbler and more ambitious than my original intention of writing a dissertation on Annaren society: I wished to capture its vivid drama and unique magic in contemporary English. If my labors have captured a tenth of the enchantment of the original, I shall be well pleased.

  To this end I have eschewed explanatory footnotes, which would have interrupted the flow of the story. Instead, as a courtesy to the reader, I have included some general information on the society and history of Edil-Amarandh, as well as notes on the pronunciation of Annaren names. However, I hope that the tale stands without these notes, and that the reader who seeks primarily the pleasures of adventure will be satisfied by the narrative alone.

  Much has been written elsewhere of the sensational discovery of the Annaren Scripts in a cave revealed by an earthquake in the Atlas Mountains of central Morocco. Since that event in 1991, much more has been said of the dismaying implications for contemporary archaeology, of the riddles of dating that still remain stubbornly unsolved, and of the laborious and ongoing task of decipherment and translation. For the curious amateur, the most useful sources to begin looking for background on the Naraudh Lar-Chane are Uncategorical Knowledge: The Three Arts of the Starpeople, by Claudia J. Armstrong, and Christiane Armongath's indispensable L'Histoire de l'Arbre-chant d'Annar.

  The Naming consists of the first two books of the Naraudh Lar-Chane. The original text, of which there exists a single complete copy, is written in Annaren, the principal language spoken in Annar. In translating from the Annaren, I have attempted as my first concern to convey its vitality: if this has led to some unscholarly, or even controversial, decisions, I at once plead the conventional excuse of the translator—that it is sometimes impossible to keep both to the letter and the spirit of another language. Where I have struck an intractable problem, I have chosen to serve the latter rather than the former. Many decisions perhaps require a little explanation, but here I wish to be brief and will examine only the most important, my choice of the word Bard.

  I have used Bard to translate Dhillareare from the Speech. It means, literally, Starpeople. With its particular resonance of artistic mastery and spiritual authority, Dhillareare has no real equivalent in our language. I also considered the fact that in the Annaren language, dhille was the verb "to sing" or "to chant," and this bilingual pun led to the popular designation of the Dhillareare as Singers of the Gift. Bard seemed the most transparent and useful word available to me in English for imputing political, social, and cultural status to those it describes.

  The danger of using the term is, as has been pointed out, its inevitable associations with Irish and Welsh traditions. Bards in Edil-Amarandh held a very different political place and power from the bards in these later societies; there is however an intriguing foreshadow of their later decadent status as courtly chroniclers and flatterers in Gilman's employment of the Bard Mirlad at the beginning of the story. In Annaren society this position would have been considered well beneath the dignity of a Dhillarearen, and the present-day eclipse of poets, whom we presume to be their contemporary descendants, would have been well nigh unthinkable.

  There are many people to whom I owe thanks, and I can mention only a few here. Nicholas, Veryan, Jan, Richard, and Celeste Croggon read the manuscript at an early stage, and their generous responses encouraged me greatly. Thanks are also due to Dan Spielman for his enthusiastic advocacy of the project, and to Sophie Levy of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, for illuminating some of the more obscure aspects of Bardic social life during many fascinating conversations. I am grateful also to Alphonse Calorge, of the Department of Comparative Literature, Universite Paris IV—Sorbonne, for invaluable advice on some nuances of translation, and to Rebecca Seiferle for suggestions on the prosody of the poems, which was often very difficult to render in English. Lastly, but by no means least, I would like to thank my husband, Daniel Keene, for his unfailing support, his acute comments on some tricky questions of Annaren syntax, and also for proofreading the manuscript, and my editor, Suzanne Wilson, for her excellent and painstaking counsel on all aspects of this book. Any remaining faults and mistakes are, naturally, solely my own.

  Alison Croggon Melbourne, Australia

  A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION

  MOST Annaren proper nouns derive from the Speech, and generally share its pronunciation. In words of three or more syllables, the stress is usually laid on the second syllable; in words of two syllables such as (Lemuel, invisible) stress is always on the first. There are some exceptions in proper names; the names Pellinor and Annar, for example, are pronounced with the stress on the first syllable.

  Spellings are mainly phonetic.

  a—as in flat; ar rhymes with bar.

  ae—a long i sound, as in ice. Maerad is pronounced MY-rad.

  ae—two syllables pronounced separately, to sound eye-ee. Maninae would be pronounced man-IN-eye-ee.

  ai—rhymes with hay. Innail rhymes with nail.

  au—ow. Raur rhymes with sour.

  e—as in get. Always pronounced at the end of a word: for example, remane, to walk, has three syllables. Sometimes this is indicated with e, which also indicates that the stress of the word lies on the e (for example, ile, we, is sometimes pronounced almost with the i sound lost).

  ea—the two vowel sounds are pronounced separately, to make the sound ay-uh. Inasfrea, to walk, thus sounds: in-ASS-fray-uh.

  eu—oi sound, as in boy.

  i—as in hit.

  ia—two vowels pronounced separately, as in the name Ian.

  y—uh sound, as in much.

  c—always a hard c, as in crust, not as in circle.

  ch—soft, as in the German ach or loch, not as in church.

  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: Den Raven does not derive from the Speech, but from the southern tongues. It is pronounced don RAH-ven.

  Gilman's Cot

  Speak to me, fair maid!

  Speak and do not go!

  What sorrows have your eyes inlaid

  With such black woe?

  My dam is buried deep

  Dark are my father's halls

  And carrion fowl and wolves now keep

  Their ruined walls.

  From The Lay of Andomian and Beruldh

  Chapter I

  ESCAPE

  FOR almost as long as she could remember, Maerad had been imprisoned behind walls. She was a slave in Gilman's Cot, and hers was the barest of existences: an endless cycle of drudgery and exhaustion and dull fear.

  Gilman's Cot was a small mount ain hamlet beyond the borders of the wide lands of the Inner Kingdom of Annar. It nestled at the nape of a bleak valley on the eastern side of the mountains of Annova, where the range split briefly and ran out, like two claws, from near the northern end. Its virtue, as far as the Thane Gilman was concerned, was its isolation; here he could be tyrant of his domain, with nothing to check him.

  It was a well-defended fortress, though no one came to attack. At the cot's back was the stone cliff of the Outwall, the precipice cutting sheer some thousand feet from the Landrost, the highest peak in that part of the range. Around the cot were walls of roughly dressed stone, rising to a height of thirty feet from a base twenty feet wide. They tapered to four feet at the top, enough room for two men to walk abreast. At the front were stout wooden gates, which eight men or a wagon could enter with ease. The gates were barred at night and most days, except for hunts and when the hillmen came in their big wagons to trade goods, salted meat, cheeses, and dried apples for swords and arrows and buckets and nails.

  About a hundred and fifty souls lived there: the Thane Gilman and his wife, who had been beaten to a shadow after bearing him twelve children, of which five still lived, and his henchmen and their women and bastards. The rest were slaves like Maerad, captured in raids in Gilman's youth, or bargained for at the gate, or simply born there. They lived in dormitories, long huts under the shadows of the walls.

  The buildings were ancient, older even than Gilman guessed, the walls raised in forgotten times by grim northern men to keep out wolves, and worse. Under Gilman, the walls were mostly used to keep people in. The small enclosed meadows were tilled and harvested by slave labor, his tables and cloths and cheeses and sour drinks were all made by slaves, and Gilman wanted none running away. His many guards served to reinforce his tyranny, and, not inconsequentially, gratified his own opinion of his authority. Like many who ruled far vaster territories, Gilman was not above the pettiness of vanity.

  If anyone did escape, there was nowhere to run to; their most likely fate was to be hunted down by untamed beasts in the forests that stretched below the mountains. And even to this isolated cot came rumors of stirrings in the outside world: whispers of unnamed shadows that haunted the forest deeps, or of forgotten evils that now woke and walked in the day-lit world. Grim though Gilman's Cot was, these vague stories of horror worked as well as any wall, gainsaying any attempt to leave.

  Maerad was still too young to have given up hope of escape, although as she approached adulthood and began better to understand her own limitations, she understood it to be a childish dream. Freedom was a fantasy she gnawed obsessively in her few moments of leisure, like an old bone with just a trace of meat, and like all illusions, it left her hungrier than before, only more keenly aware of how her soul starved within her, its wings wasting with the despair of disuse.

  The Springturn began like every other day of Maerad's life, with the iron clang of the dawn bell wrenching her from sleep. It dumped her on the rim of consciousness, sore and heavy and blind, and her dreams sank into the darkness of her mind, as if they had never been.

  Yawning, she staggered out of the slaves' quarters to the courtyard well, her skin wincing at the icy air. She hunched her cloak around her shoulders and, scarcely glancing at the dim shapes of the buildings around her, pumped some water and splashed it over her head. Gasping, she shook the water off her heavy hair, and her breath plumed in white swirls out of her nostrils and through her chattering teeth. Her limbs still felt like lead, her face was numb as a brick, but at least she was awake.

  She was drying herself with her cloak when she heard a heavy step behind her. Maerad turned, quick as a wild dog, her hackles bristling—but it was only Lothar, the huge, doltish man in charge of the buttery.

  "Late night?" asked Lothar, sniggering.

  Maerad turned contemptuously back to the well.

  "You could hear the lords until cockcrow," he said. "And who took you last night?"

  "Shut your muddy mouth, pea-brain," she said curtly. "Or I'll put the evil eye on you." She turned to face him, glaring, and began to raise her arms. Lothar went pale and crossed his hands before his eyes. "Ward! Ward!" he cried. "I meant no harm, Maerad."

  "Then keep your mouth from evil gossip," she hissed. "Get! Go!"

  Lothar scuttled off, and Maerad permitted herself a grim smile before she savored a precious minute to herself. The cot was only just stirring; it was before cockcrow, and there were still a few moments before the summons bell. Most of the slaves huddled greedily into their little patches of sleep-warmth, reluctant to leave until the very last second.

  Maerad leaned back and breathed in hard, gazing up at the distant stars, tiny points of frosty fire high over the mountains. She searched as she always did for the dawn star, Ilion, burning brightly over the eastern horizon, and sniffed a new freshness in the early air. It's the beginning of spring, she thought. Despite her tiredness, her spirits lifted. Then she looked down at her callused hands and sighed. But not for me; I'm already withering. What will become of me?

  She stared at the miserable dwellings around her with a dull hatred. Apart from the Thane's quarters and the Great Hall, which were better maintained than most, the cot consisted of dirt-floored stone hovels, roofed with rotting wooden shingles. Many were crumbling under their age and had been badly patched with clay and straw poultices, giving them an odd, diseased appearance. They stank of rotting middens and human filth. From inside the dormitory Maerad could hear the high, thin cry of a sick child, and someone else shouting angrily, and then the dry sob of a woman. What will become of me? she asked herself again, uselessly, and then the clang of the summons bell broke into her thoughts and she shook herself and tramped to the common room for her meager breakfast of thin gray porridge, and to be assigned her tasks for the day.

  That morning Maerad was sent to the milchyard, Lothar's section. She grimaced at her bad luck. She would have to deal with him all day after she had slighted him, and today she was especially tired. Last night had been one of the Thane Gilman's riots, a special gathering to mark the first spring hunt, and his men had come back hungry, wild-haired, spattered with blood, quarrelsome, shouting for beer and voka and roast meats and music. For Gilman it was one of the high points of the year, and the work of all the slaves was doubled for the day. Maerad had worked an extra shift in the kitchen, turning and basting the deer carcasses on the iron spits. Then, because she was the only musician in the cot, she had sat in the Great Hall all night playing the ballads she found so tedious: tales of the slaughter of deer and the valor of men and dogs—and later, drinking songs, and the bawdies, which Maerad hated most of all.

  The Great Hall was a grand name for what was really a large barn, roughly crossbeamed, with a blackened hole in the roof to let out the smoke from the great fire that always burned in the middle of the floor. Maerad sat in a corner with her lyre, blank-faced to hide her contempt, while twenty men seated at a long, roughly hewn wooden table set against the wall tore meat from bones with their bare hands and drank themselves insensible on the voka, a harsh, eye-stinging spirit distilled from turnips and rutabagas. They hadn't bothered to wash, and their acrid smell and the wood smoke made her eyes water. No one tried to paw her, to her infinite relief, but even so, the hot red eyes of the men made her feel filthy. As the night wore on, the hall grew hotter and stuffier, and Maerad felt dizzy with the reek and her tiredness. She played badly, something that seldom happened even under such circumstances, but nobody noticed.

  The riot finished shortly before dawn, when the last drunken thug crashed facedown on the long table and snored among the rest, who lay dribbling on their hands or fallen in their own vomit. Then at last, trembling with weariness, Maerad picked up her lyre and left the hall, stumbling between sleeping dogs, tossed bones and filth, spilled voka, and snoring bodies to the sweet air outside. She stank, but she was so exhausted, she had simply made her way to the women's slave quarters and slipped onto her meager straw pallet for a bare hour of sleep.

  In the cowbyre she leaned her forehead into the warm flanks of a dark-eyed cow, who stood patiently chewing cud as she kneaded its full udder. The milk splashed rhythmically into the pail. Maerad was on the brink of sleep when suddenly the cow almost kicked her and then tried to rear. Maerad started awake, rescuing the pail—spilled milk would mean a beating—and tried to calm the animal. Normally a word would do, but the creature kept snorting and stamping, pulling the chains that held her hind leg and head as if she were distressed or frightened.

  The hair on the back of Maerad's neck prickled. She had a strange, taut feeling, as if there were about to be a storm and the air was crackling with imminent lightning. She looked around the byre.

  A man stood there, not ten feet away, a man she had never seen before. For a moment, shock stopped her breath. The man was tall, and his stern face was shadowed by a dark, roughly woven woolen hood. She stood up and reached for a rushlight, uncertain whether to shout for help.

  "Who are you?" she said sharply.

  The man was silent.

  She began to feel afraid. "Who are you?" she asked again. Was it a wer out of the mountains? A ghost? "Avaunt, black spirit!"

  "Nay," he said at last. "Nay, I am no black spirit. No wer in a man's skin. No. Forgive me." He sighed heavily. "I am tired, and I am wounded. I am not quite—myself."

  He smiled, but it was more like a wince, and as the rushlight fell past his hood and illuminated his features, Maerad saw that he was gray with exhaustion. His face was arresting: it seemed neither young nor old, the countenance of a man of perhaps thirty-five years, but somehow with the authority of age. He was high-cheekboned, with a firm mouth and large, deep-set eyes. He held her gaze. "And who are you, young witch-maiden? It takes sharp eyes to see the likes of me, although perhaps my art fails me. Name yourself."