The Guardian Who Forgot Its Riddles
TaleA stone-and-bronze guardian of the desert, and the riddles it used to ask.
Long before anyone in the valley can remember, clever builders lived in the Sunscorch Desert. They made cisterns that caught every drop of rain, and towers that caught the wind to cool their houses, and in the middle of the dunes they built a guardian.
It had the body of a lion, made of sandstone, and a face of polished bronze that gleamed like a second sun. Inside, it was all gears and springs and cleverness. The builders called it the Sun Guardian, and they gave it one job: to sit beside the road to their city and ask every traveller a riddle.
Not to keep people out. The builders liked visitors. The riddles were a welcome. If you answered, the Sun Guardian would bow its bronze head and tell you where the nearest well was. If you didn't, it would tell you the answer, laugh a clanking laugh, and tell you where the nearest well was anyway.
Zahra the Fennec Fox, who keeps the trading posts in the desert towns, still knows some of its riddles. Here is one of her favourites:
I have a mouth but never eat, I have a bed but never sleep, I run all day but have no feet. What am I?
(The answer is at the bottom of this page. No peeking.)
The builders left the desert long ago, but the Sun Guardian kept on asking its riddles for hundreds of years, to lizards and beetles and the occasional lost camel. Then the Gloom blew in on a dusty wind and got into its gears. It clogged the little wheels that held the riddles. Bit by bit, the Sun Guardian forgot them all, until only its claws remembered what to do.
Now it prowls the ruins, swinging those great bronze claws at anyone who comes close.
Fire won't help against it: it was built in the hottest place in the world, and it doesn't mind heat at all. But energy jangles its gears, and ice makes the metal stiff. Stay behind it when it winds up its claw sweep, and back away when you hear the steam hiss.
Calm it, and for a moment the old light comes back into its bronze eyes. Sometimes it drops a sunstone from its chest, and sometimes an old fossil it kept tucked away, the way people keep pebbles in their pockets. Zahra says that one day, if enough travellers calm it, it might even remember a riddle again.
The builders made one more guardian, Zahra says, much bigger than the rest: the Great Sun Guardian, left on the far side of the desert to watch over a tomb that nobody remembers any more. It sleeps under the dunes. When sand pours down the slopes for no reason, it is waking up.
Answer: a river. Of course.
Tale: a bronze guardian that asks riddles.
True: the Great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt is a real giant statue with a lion's body and a human head. It was carved out of the rock of the desert floor about 4,500 years ago, and it is longer than six buses parked end to end. In old Greek stories, a sphinx asked travellers riddles too — the shape this desert guardian borrows without the riddle-asking myth's darker turns. And fennec foxes have the biggest ears for their size of any fox: the ears help them lose heat in the desert and hear insects moving under the sand.