Alison Croggon - Pellinor 01 - The Naming

THE NAMING

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

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 mountain 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."

"Who are you to ask me?" said Maerad pugnaciously. It occurred to her, with a pang of surprise,

that she didn't feel afraid—although, she thought in that split second, she ought to be.

The man looked hard at her, searching her face. He staggered slightly and corrected himself, and

then smiled again, as if in apology.

"I am Cadvan, of the School of Lirigon," he said. "Now, mistress, how do they name you?"

"Maerad," she said, almost whispering. She felt suddenly at a complete loss, confused by his

politeness.

"Maerad of the Mountains?" the stranger said with a wry smile.

"Of... of Gilman's fastness," she said haltingly. And then with a rush: "I'm a slave here...."

"A slave?"

Steps sounded outside and Lothar's bulk darkened the door. "Where's that milk? What are you

doing there; have you lost your wits? Are you looking for the whip? If the butter doesn't turn, we'll know

who to blame."

He was not pleased with her, after her rebuff that morning. But again Maerad caught her breath in

shock. Although the stranger stood plain in his sight, Lothar seemed to look right through him.

"I'm—I'm sorry," she stammered. "The cattle are restless—"

She sat on her stool and leaned forward to the cow again, who now stood patiently. Lothar watched

her while she milked. She willed him to go away. After a short time, she heard his steps leaving and she

relaxed a little. She kept milking, because she needed time to gather her thoughts. The stranger still stood

there, watching her.

"Maerad," said the stranger quietly. "I wish you no harm. I am tired, and I need to sleep. That's why

I'm here." He passed his hand over his brow, and then leaned against the wall of the byre.

"He didn't see you," she said blankly, still milking steadily to cover her amazement.

"No, it is a small thing .. ." he said, almost abstractedly. "A mere glimmerspell. What is interesting is

that you saw me." He stared at her again, with that searching, disturbing gaze. Maerad felt suddenly shy

before him, as if she were naked, and turned her face aside. She felt his eyes upon her, and then a kind of

release as he looked away. Involuntarily she shook herself. She heard him shift and sit down.

"I wish I were not so tired," he said at last, and then asked, "You were not always a slave?"

"My mother wasn't a slave," Maerad answered, speaking reluctantly, as if against her will. "Gilman

bought her and kept her here, when I was very little. I think he wanted to ransom her, but none came to

ransom." She paused, and added flatly, "And then she died." She coiled around to face him, with a flash

of anger. "What business is it of yours?" she demanded. "Who are you to ask me?"

The stranger seemed unperturbed, meeting her gaze calmly.

"What was your mother's name?"

"Milana. Milana of Pellinor, Singer of the Gift, Daughter of the First Circle. My father. . ." She

stopped milking, and her hands flew to her mouth in astonishment. "Oh!"

"Oh, indeed," said Cadvan.

"I mean, my mother was called Milana, that's all I remember. . .." Maerad trailed off in confusion.

"She, she died when I was seven years old.... I don't know anything about... about the rest. Did you

make me say that?"

"Make? No, I can't make you say anything. I asked, and the doors of your mind flew open. There is

more in that treasury than most people realize. The School of Pellinor," he said, as if to himself. "That was

sacked, oh, years ago. It was thought all were killed." He fell silent, and Maerad, shaken, continued

milking. What was this man talking about? Was he mazing her, as wild spirits were said to do,

bewildering her senses before snaring her? But he did not seem evil.

"By what right do you come in here and say... and say such things? I could call the Thane's men...."

She stuttered to a halt. Somehow she knew she wouldn't call the guards.

The stranger put his face in his hands and didn't answer her. Maerad glanced at him angrily. She

finished milking the cow and turned her loose, bringing in the next one. Cadvan was still sitting, unmoving,

in the same position.

"You can't stay here, if you are of Pellinor," he said at last.

Maerad looked across at the stranger with a sudden wild hope. Did he mean that he knew some

way to free her? But no one could escape from the cot....

He looked up at her. "Could you—perhaps—spare some milk?"

Wordlessly she offered him the milk pail. After a long drink, he wiped his mouth and smiled. "A

blessing on you, and on your house," he said. Maerad nodded impatiently, brushing off the courtesy.

"Will you have to come to the byre again?" he asked. "Today, I mean."

She examined his face suspiciously. "Yes, I am sectioned here today," she said at last. "I'll be milking

again in the evening. Why?"

"Good." He stretched and yawned. "I'll sleep now. We'll talk later—yes, when I am less tired."

He cast himself down on the hay and was asleep almost instantly. Maerad looked down at him,

considering whether to kick him awake and make him answer her questions, or to call the guards after

all. But for reasons she couldn't trace, she did neither. Instead, she finished the milking and left him there.

She was beaten for the missing milk.

That day Maerad was so absent-minded, she was lucky to escape a second beating. At her tasks in

the milchyard—churning butter or setting the milk in bowls for soured drinks—she scarcely saw what she

was doing. At first she didn't know what she felt about the man in the byre. Her mind, practiced at the

evasions necessary for survival, skipped over the thought of him; he was, in a way, unthinkable. But

every now and then an image of his dark face rose unbidden in her mind, and with it an unsettling feeling

she couldn't name: a skin-prickling premonition, not exactly unpleasant, but not quite comfortable either.

If she had been a child used to name-day celebrations, she might have likened it to the feeling of

anticipating a present, but she knew no such celebrations. At the same time, the blank, impassive mask

under which she survived seemed to have disappeared, leaving her exposed and a little frightened. It was

as if the stranger had opened a door, long shut in her mind, and a cold fresh wind blew in, waking her

from a stupor. Who am I? she wondered, and the question hurt.

She was used to her own strangeness. It had often been a protection as much as a curse. Because

of her blue eyes and black hair, the fair-haired Northerners called her a witch, and she had played the

part from an early age, making a virtue of what set her apart. And Maerad did possess the power of

cursing: if she glared at someone, they might trip over and fall for no reason, or a beaker might fall from a

shelf and break on their head, and once she had blinded a man for three days. She was also especially

good with animals, another sign of witchcraft; those she tended grew fat and yielded twice the milk of the

others. Most of the slaves feared and avoided her, and Gilman's men. . . well, the Thane's men had also

learned to leave her alone.

Gilman was deeply superstitious and, like all bullies, a devout coward. He believed that if Maerad

were murdered, her ghost would drive him to a grisly death: madden him until he ran out into the

wolfhunt, perhaps, or skewer him slowly with invisible knives of fire. So Maerad escaped the worst

details, which caused comment and petty malice among many of her fellow slaves. Recently this

resentment had flared into open violence: a month ago six women had attacked her and tried to drown

her in the duck pond. They had almost succeeded, but Gilman had rushed out of the hall, red-faced with

panic, and hauled her out of the water. Though Maerad was cuffed for the trouble she had caused, the

slaves who tormented her were whipped and given no food for three days. Saved by Gilman! She

grinned without humor at the irony. It had stopped the persecution, for the moment—but now no one

spoke to her at all, apart from idiots like Lothar.

If it hadn't been for her music, she might have killed herself, or let the demons in her head taunt her

into madness. Or she might have just turned into stone and become like the rest of them, brutalized of all

feeling. Her lyre was her one possession, the only thing she still had of her mother. It was small, fitting into

the crook of her arms like a baby, a bare wooden instrument with no decoration except some

indecipherable carvings, but its tone was pure and true. One of her earliest memories was of her mother

playing it, plucking the strings and singing to Maerad; she guessed she must have been very young,

because her mother had not been sad.

Maerad could play like a true minstrel; her ear was accurate, and she only had to hear a tune once

to repeat it. Mirlad, Gilman's Bard, discovered her talent after her mother died. She was only seven years

old then, and he somehow persuaded Gilman to relieve Maerad from morning duties so he could teach

Alison Croggon - Pellinor 01 - The Naming

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: