by Robin Hobb
Soldier’s Boy spoke to him. “I’m not who you think I am. ”
Buel grinned. He didn’t look quite as I remembered him. He was taller, more muscled, and his hair was combed. I suddenly realized that I was seeing his own idealized version of himself. That was a breathtaking insight into Lisana. I might have startled Soldier’s Boy by sharing that thought, except that what Buel said next shocked me even more. He shook his head and the ghost’s grin grew wider.
“Oh, no, old son. Now you’re exactly who I think you are. Maybe even more so. ” He cocked his head and then craned it down to look into my eyes, smiling all the while. And I suddenly knew that he saw me, as I was now, but that all that time, he’d been seeing Soldier’s Boy as well. He shook his head in sympathy. “Well, you’re still in a fix and no mistake, my friend. Maybe a worse fix than when last I saw you, though that’s hard to believe. You forgave me, didn’t you? Don’t you?” His smile had faded to an earnest look.
I was at a loss. Had I forgiven him? How could I? He’d killed a woman and made it look as if I had done it. He’d spread the whispers that had turned public feeling against me to the point where a mob had tried to murder me. He’d done it under the duress of the magic. Yet even knowing that—
Soldier’s Boy answered for both of us. “I understand you. Sometimes, when you understand a man that deeply, forgiveness becomes a moot point. You did what you were supposed to do, Buel Hitch. You did the magic’s bidding. ”
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Buel continued to stare at us. No. At me. Waiting. I spoke within Soldier’s Boy. “I don’t have to forgive Buel Hitch. He wasn’t who betrayed me. The magic did that. ”
I felt Soldier’s Boy scowl and knew he had heard me. When Buel grinned again, I knew he had, too. “No matter who did it, Nevare, I’m sorry it happened. But I can’t be sorry for what it bought me. This. ”
“You enjoy being a tree?” Behind me, the others were finishing their task. Dasie’s body was encased in the freezing blanket and covered now with a shroud of snow. Her feeders were caressing the snow as if they were smoothing a delicate coverlet over a sleeping child.
“Being a tree. ” He smiled. “I suppose that’s one way of seeing it. ” He sighed then, not the sigh of a man who is discouraged but rather as a man sighs with satisfaction at the completeness of his life.
“Nevare!” Jodoli called him. Soldier’s Boy turned to look at him, and the Great Man gestured. The others were gathering in a circle about Dasie and her tree. He was expected to join them.
As he walked away, Buel spoke after us, his words intended for me. He was not yet strong in his tree. His voice faded as we moved away from him, but the words he spoke reached me still.
“It’s worth it, Nevare. No matter what it takes from you. No matter what you have to give up. No matter what you have to do. It’s worth it. Relax into it, old son. Give way to the magic. You won’t be sorry. I promise. ”
Soldier’s Boy gave a short nod. I held myself still and stubborn inside him. No.
He turned away from the tree and the huddle of snow that still, now that he looked at it, echoed the shape of a man’s seated body trussed to the tree’s trunk. The others were gathering around Dasie’s tree where a similar but much larger mound of snow marked her “grave. ” Soldier’s Boy went over to them. As he plodded through the snow, Jodoli joined him. He spoke as if their quarrel had never been, or as if he had dismissed it as insignificant. “It is good that the tree took her in. She chose the tree years ago, when first she knew she would be a Great One, and has visited it yearly, giving it offerings of her blood to awaken it to her and claim it. Still, in very cold weather, it has sometimes happened that a tree does not accept the Great One’s body. Then there is little that anyone can do. ”
“What happens now?”
“Now we will sing a farewell to her. Our songs will remind her of who she was, so that as she is taken into the tree, her memories remain strong. Of course, it should be her entire kin-clan here to sing her into her tree, rather than just two of her feeders and a handful of her guard. But we are here. Nevare, we would be very wise to honor her with very long songs, as long as we can sing, of everything that we know about her. Do you understand?”
“I think I do. ” He meant it would be politically wise. “I will watch you and then I will do my best. ”
“Very well. Let us join them. ”
It was as unlike a Gernian burial as I could imagine. We formed a circle around the tree and held hands. This required baring our hands to the cold, as the skin-to-skin contact was deemed very important. A few moments after we had joined hands, I understood why. I could feel the magic flowing through the circle of linked hands with the same sensation of moving current as if we all held on to a pipe with water flowing through it, through us.
Her feeders began the songs, as was their right. It was not a song so much as a chant; it had no melody and it did not rhyme. The first man recounted everything he could recall of her, from the moment he had first met her to his days of being her feeder right up to her death. He chanted until his voice gave out and then on until he could barely croak out the words. When he finally could say no more, his fellow feeder took up the tale, again recounting how he had met Dasie and on through all the days and ways he had served her. He avoided repetition of events that the first feeder had covered. Even so, before her feeders were finished the brief day was ending.
But the cover of night brought no respite. The chant went on, passed from guard to guard to guard, with each fondling his memories of Dasie and trying to recall for the dead woman how she had looked and spoken, what she had eaten or worn, how she had laughed at a humorous event or mourned a sad one. Not all the memories were kind. Some spoke of her when she was a small girl and prone to cruelty to smaller children. Others spoke of her temper as a grown woman. Some wept as they spoke of Dasie and losing her, but as often they laughed or shouted as they recalled memories of her. One spoke in detail of her activities on the day of the battle. I cringed as he spoke of the deaths they had witnessed, and of those she had killed with her own hand. But the guard spared us no detail. All, all must be spoken to preserve it in the dead woman’s memory.
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I learned far more of Dasie’s life than I had ever known before. When the telling finally reached Jodoli, Soldier’s Boy was already racking his brain for what he could add. Jodoli spoke of how he had met her when she was a Great One, and told in detail of the night when she had freed the dancers from Kinrove. He spoke of meals they had shared and gifts they had exchanged as Great Ones of the People. He drew his material out by adding details.
Soldier’s Boy’s feet and legs felt swollen, and he ached with cold. Only the magic flowing from hand to hand to hand made the experience tolerable at all. He felt his energy feed it but felt also how it drew strength from every person and circulated it back to him.
It was full dark when Jodoli finally fell silent. Cold had crept and flowed to surround them; Soldier’s Boy felt it was cracking the skin of his face. The hair inside his nostrils had grown stiff and prickly and he could barely feel his feet at all. Worse, he felt that there was nothing left for him to say, yet Jodoli had warned him that he must at least attempt to speak at length of Dasie.
It seemed they had left him little enough to speak of, and yet he acquitted himself well. He spoke of when he had first seen her at Kinrove’s encampment, and what she had said and how she had looked to him. He spoke of her freeing the dancers from Kinrove’s dance, and when he sensed how her guards and feeders loved to hear of her as a hero, he embroidered that moment. He also spoke of how she had hated him on first sight and threatened him, and this, I suddenly knew, was news to many of those gathered there. But as others had done before him, he did not skip or soften any details, not of that first encounter nor even when he was telling of how little sympathy she had shown when Likari had been summoned to be a dancer.
He spoke of how they had prepared for the battle, and the moments before they had each parted to their assigned tasks and then how he had seen her, injured and staring, when they met again. He spoke of leaving her with her loyal feeders while he went to fetch a healer, and also of quick-walking her back to the pass where she had died.
And when he came to the end of his telling, the darkness was deep around all of us. Tiny sparkling stars showed overhead in the opening in the forest canopy, and an errant night wind blew snow against our faces. As he fell silent, the greater silence of the forest all around us swallowed us up and held us inside it. The magic still circled through our clasped hands but it could no longer distract Soldier’s Boy from his discomfort. His back and legs were stiff and sore, he was cold, and he was hungry. Worse, he knew that a long quick-walk awaited him before he could hope that any of those discomforts would be alleviated. But the others still stood in silence, holding hands, and so he kept company with them. He sensed they were all waiting but had no idea for what.
Everyone took a step closer to the tree and he lurched forward with them. And another, and another, until they were huddled close to the trunk of the tree and Dasie’s snow-shrouded body. The magic suddenly coursed more strongly through their clasped hands, pulling them close, binding them into one. Darkness vanished, to be replaced with a peculiar light; everyone there glowed with it, and the living trees of the forest were vertical columns of soft light. Every living thing gave off its own measure of it. He felt Dasie, felt her strongly centered in the tree. She was there, every bit of her, every moment of her life, every memory they had shared with her. She was newborn there, laughing with the growing awareness of this new life. Complete and at peace, she dimly gave thanks to us as she vanished into the satisfaction of her joining with her tree.
But there was more. Soldier’s Boy felt everyone there through the clasp of their hands, felt the life in the trees that surrounded them, and even the slow surge of the great earth life beneath his feet. It warmed him and filled him, and eased the sense of loss he had felt. For the time that it lasted, he was one with the forest of the ancestor trees, one with the Specks, one with the People. Tears stung his eyes. He did belong here. These were his people, and when his time came, his tree would be here waiting for him. It would be the second sapling that had grown from Lisana’s fallen trunk. There he would take root among this wisdom and shared life. As if his thought had summoned her, he felt a thread of Lisana in her connectedness to the greater whole, distant in the crowd, glowing with her own special light. He yearned toward her, but a different voice spoke to me.
“You see what I mean, old son? It’s worth it. This is what I can feel, all the time now. ”
Soldier’s Boy paid no heed to Buel Hitch’s disembodied voice. Instead, he stretched and reached for Lisana and she toward him. For a long moment, their awarenesses brushed against each other, mingled, and then, like ember logs that fall apart from one another as the fire consumes them, crashed into separateness again. We all stood once more in icy darkness in a black forest. The distant stars could neither light nor warm us, and a cold wind was sweeping through the trees overhead, dusting us with secondhand snow.
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“Her tree has taken her. It is time for us to go and leave her to it,” Jodoli announced.
And we did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
TIDINGS
When we finally reached Lisana’s old lodge, Soldier’s Boy ate like a starved dog. He spoke not a word to the feeders who had awaited him there, keeping the food ready and the lodge fire burning. He left Olikea to deal with them, went to bed and slept for most of a day. He woke late in the night, got up to piss and drink some water, and then went right back to bed. The second time he awoke, it was daylight and his feeders were astir. They spoke softly to one another as they worked. He thought it might be late afternoon. He lay as still as a fox that has gone to earth and hopes to escape the hounds. He kept his eyes closed and listened to the sounds of the lodge around him, but gave no sign to anyone that he was awake. Every muscle and joint in his body ached. His back was a column of pain.
He did not move at all and breathed as slowly as if he were still sleeping. The bed was warm. His belly was still digesting. He turned his face into the pillow, his special pillow. It was stuffed with down but also contained sachets of cedar bark, dried forest flowers, and leaves. It smelled, I suddenly realized, like Lisana. He lay in her bed, in her lodge, breathing the fragrances that reminded him of her. He was trying to pretend that the sounds he heard were made by her as she moved about the lodge.
“Pretend as much as you like,” I said derisively. “She is gone, dead for all these many years. And you cannot reach her. ”
My words shredded his dream of her. He could not regain it. He still did not move.
“Did Dasie’s death teach you nothing?” he thought at me. “When I die, they will take me to a tree. I will become one with the forest of ancients. And once again, Lisana and I will walk side by side. ”
I laughed at him. “After all the ways you have failed, do you think the Specks will still honor you with a tree? You are a fool. You are as big a failure to your people as I was to mine. Look at the wreckage strewn behind you. Dasie is dead. Of the handsome young warriors who bravely followed you off to battle, a third did not return. And many of those who did come back are injured and demoralized. Likari has been taken for the dance and Olikea has lost her spirit. Kinrove sees you as his enemy, Jodoli as his incompetent rival for power. The fort at Gettys still stands and you have raised the hatred of the Gernians against the Specks to a boiling point. You have not only failed to improve things, you have made them worse. Next spring, when we return to the forests on the other side of the mountains, there will be no fur traders, but only soldiers waiting to kill you. No trade goods, Soldier’s Boy. No honey, no bright beads, no woven fabric. No tobacco. None for the People to smoke, and none for them to carry to the Trading Place. The long guns will point at the Specks, and all they will trade you are iron bullets for your lives. ”
“Silence!” he hissed and struck at me. I made myself small and avoided the blow. I was getting better at dodging his attacks. Like a mosquito, I buzzed and sang in his ears, only to vanish when he angrily slapped the side of his head.
From my silent concealment, I watched in satisfaction. I had shredded his dream of Lisana and left him only cold reality to consider. I’d seeded his thoughts with all his failures. His stillness became a morose silence. For the first time since the raid on Gettys, he had stillness and time to think. He could no longer hide from his musings. Time and silence gave him nothing else to think about.
He reviewed the night of the battle over and over. He considered what he had done wrong, the situations he had failed to plan for, the instructions he had not given to his troops. Whenever I could impinge on his thoughts, I pushed my own memories at him: the sentry falling, his throat sliced. The wounded Specks squirming and crying out on the snowy earth after the ambush, and how he had ridden away. The soldiers who had died as they tried to escape the flaming barracks, slaughtered like cattle in a chute. I slid my thought across his like a knife blade across skin. “It was a cowardly way to kill soldiers. They had no chance to fight at all. ”
He shouldered my thoughts aside. His tone was mocking as he said, “Do you still think war is a game, with rules and limits? No. War is killing the enemy. It wasn’t about a ‘fair fight’ or any of your strange ideas of honor and glory. Honor and glory! War is blood and death. It was about killing as many Gernians as we could and losing as few of our own as we could. It was about destroying a nest of vermin. Don’t try to make me feel guilty over exterminating the intruders. If you want to saw on my nerves, think instead about how I failed my troops. Chide me for what I should have done to save the warriors of the People. Rebuke me that the walls of Gettys still stand, not that fewer long guns would peer over the palisade at us. ”
I kept silent. He would not bait me into discussing his failures. I could taunt him over what he had done and what he had neglected, but that would only be instructing him in how to improve the next time. I ignored him and sank into my own retreat. It was abhorrent to think that this ruthless butcher was actually a part of me—the dominant part right now. I did not want to acknowledge my attachment to him at all. I retreated into my own darkness, to mull over the things that “I” had done that horrified me still. The murdered sentry, the slaughtered troops—The worst, I think, was recalling Spink’s face in that moment of recognition. What must he think of me? And if he had known me, had others? It ate at me that I could know nothing of the aftermath of our attack on the fort.
Had Amzil and her children survived? Had Epiny and her babe? And if they had survived the fires and the attacking Specks, then what was their life now? Cold and starvation?
My thoughts turned over and over to the night I had dream-walked to Epiny. I worried that she was taking the laudanum, and tried to make sense of her rambling confessions to me that night. She had sent my soldier-son journal to my uncle, but it had fallen into my aunt’s hands and she had done something with it that related to the Queen, something that threatened the reputation of the Burvelle name. I put that unsettling thought together with the idea that it had been Soldier’s Boy prompting me to write so much in that journal, far beyond the diary that a soldier’s son would be expected to pen. He believed he had been obeying the dictates of the magic when he did so. If that were true, what did it mean to me? Had I written more in there than I knew? How could my journal and what it contained be a part of the magic’s plan to drive the Gernians away from the Speck lands? The rock he had mentioned was almost certainly the one I had given to Caulder. How could that matter to the magic? I could make no sense of that and there was no one I could ask. Soldier’s Boy himself did not know why the magic had prompted him to write so much, nor why it was imperative that he leave the journal behind when he fled to the mountains. There was no one I could ask.