by Robin Hobb
So now what?
By evening, I was back on my hilltop, scrunched down between two of the boulders. I had decided it was as good a place to wait as any. Despite my doubts, I would stay where I had been left until the contact time was up. I ate bread and salt-fish, and drank sparingly of my water. My change of clothes included an extra cloak. I wrapped myself in this and sternly rejected all thoughts of making a fire. However small, it would have been a beacon to anyone on the dirt road that passed the hill.
I don’t think there is anything more cruelly tedious than unremitting nervousness. I tried to meditate, to open myself up to Galen’s Skill, all the while shivering with cold and refusing to admit that I was scared. The child in me kept imagining dark, ragged figures creeping soundlessly up the hillside around me, Forged folk who would beat and kill me for the cloak I wore and the food in my bag. I had cut myself a stick as I made my way back to my hillside, and I gripped it in both hands, but it seemed a poor weapon. Sometimes I dozed despite my fears, but my dreams were always of Galen gloating over my failure as Forged ones closed in on me, and I always woke with a start, to peer wildly about to see if my nightmares were true.
I watched the sunrise through the trees, and then dozed fitfully through morning. Afternoon brought me a weary sort of peace. I amused myself by questing out toward the wildlife on the hillside. Mice and songbirds were little more than bright sparks of hunger in my mind, and rabbits little more, but a fox was full of lust to find a mate and further off a buck battered the velvet off his antlers as purposefully as any smith at his anvil. Evening was very long. It was surprising just how hard it was for me to accept, as night fell, that I had felt nothing, not the slightest pressure of the Skill. Either he hadn’t called or I hadn’t heard him. I ate bread and fish in the dark and told myself it didn’t matter. For a time, I tried to bolster myself with anger, but my despair was too clammy and dark a thing for anger’s flames to overcome. I felt sure Galen had cheated me, but I would never be able to prove it, not even to myself. I would always have to wonder if his contempt for me had been justified. In full darkness, I settled my back against a rock, my stick across my knees, and resolved to sleep.
My dreams were muddled and sour. Regal stood over me, and I was a child sleeping in straw again. He laughed and held a knife. Verity shrugged, and smiled apologetically at me. Chade turned aside from me, disappointed. Molly smiled at Jade, past me, forgetting I was there. Burrich held me by the shirt-front and shook me, telling me to behave like a man, not a beast. But I lay down on straw and an old shirt, chewing at a bone. The meat was very good, and I could think of nothing else.
I was very comfortable until someone opened a stable door and left it ajar. A nasty little wind came creeping across the stable floor to chill me, and I looked up with a growl. I smelled Burrich and ale. Burrich came slowly through the dark, with a muttered, ‘It’s all right, Smithy,’ as he passed me. I put my head down as he began to climb his stairs.
Suddenly there was a shout and men falling down the stairs. They struggled as they fell. I leaped to my feet, growling and barking. They landed half on top of me. A boot kicked at me, and I seized the leg above it in my teeth and clamped my jaws. I caught more boot and trouser than flesh, but he hissed in anger and pain, and struck at me.
A knife went into my side.
I set my teeth harder and held on, snarling around my mouthful. Other dogs had awakened and were barking, the horses were stamping in their stalls. Boy! Boy! I called for help. I felt him with me, but he didn’t come. The intruder kicked me, but I wouldn’t let go. Burrich lay in the straw and I smelled his blood. He did not move. I heard old Vixen flinging herself against the door upstairs, trying vainly to get to her master. Again and then again the knife plunged into me. I cried out to my Boy a last time, and then I could no longer hold on. I was flung off the kicking leg, to strike the side of a stall. I was drowning, blood in my mouth and nostrils. Running feet. Pain in the dark. I hitched closer to Burrich. I pushed my nose under his hand. He did not move. Voices and light coming, coming, coming …
I awoke on a dark hillside, gripping my stick so tightly my hands were numb. Not for a moment did I think it a dream. I couldn’t stop feeling the knife between my ribs, and tasting the blood in my mouth. Like the refrain of a ghastly song, the memories came again and again, the draught of cold air, the knife, the boot, the taste of my enemy’s blood in my mouth, and the taste of my own. I struggled to make sense of what Smithy had seen. Someone had been at the top of Burrich’s stairs, waiting for him. Someone with a knife. And Burrich had fallen, and Smithy had smelled blood …
I stood and gathered my things. Thin and faint was Smithy’s warm little presence in my mind. Weak, but there. I quested carefully, and then stopped when I felt how much it cost him to acknowledge me. Still. Be still. I’m coming. I was cold and my knees shook beneath me, but sweat was slick on my back. Not once did I question what I must do. I strode down the hill to the dirt road. It was a little trade road, a pedlars’ track, and I knew that if I followed it, it must intersect eventually with the coast-road. I would follow it, I would find the coast-road, I would get myself home. And if Eda favoured me, I would be in time to help Smithy. And Burrich.
I strode, refusing to let myself run. A steady march would carry me further faster than a mad sprint through the dark. The night was clear, the trail straight. I considered, once, that I was putting an end to any chance of proving I could Skill. All I had put into it – time, effort, pain – all wasted. But there was no way I could have sat down and waited another full day for Galen to try and reach me. To open my mind to Galen’s possible Skill touch, I would have had to clear it of Smithy’s tenuous thread. I would not. When it was all put in the balances, the Skill was far outweighed by Smithy. And Burrich.
Why Burrich, I wondered. Who could hate him enough to ambush him? And right outside his own quarters. As clearly as if I were reporting to Chade, I began to assemble my facts. Someone who knew him well enough to know where he lived; that ruled out some chance offence committed in a Buckkeep town tavern. Someone who had brought a knife; that ruled out someone who just wanted to give him a beating. The knife had been sharp, and the wielder had known how to use it. I winced again from the memory.
Those were the facts. Cautiously, I began to build assumptions upon them. Someone who knew Burrich’s habits and had a serious grievance against him, serious enough to kill over. My steps slowed suddenly. Why hadn’t Smithy been aware of the man up there waiting? Why hadn’t Vixen been barking through the door? Slipping past dogs in their own territory bespoke someone well practised at stealth.
Galen.
No. I only wanted it to be Galen. I refused to leap to the conclusion. Physically, Galen was no match for Burrich and he knew it. Not even with a knife, in the dark, with Burrich half-drunk and surprised. No. Galen might want to, but he wouldn’t do it. Not himself.
Would he send another? I pondered it, and decided I didn’t know. Think some more. Burrich was not a patient man. Galen was the most recent enemy he’d made, but not the only one. Over and over I re-stacked my facts, trying to reach a solid conclusion. But there simply wasn’t enough to build on.
Eventually I came to a stream, and drank sparingly. Then I walked again. The woods grew thicker, and the moon was mostly obscured by the trees lining the road. I didn’t turn back. I pushed on, until my trail flowed into the coast-road like a stream feeding a river. I followed it south, and the wider highway gleamed like silver in the moonlight.
I walked and pondered the night away. As the first creeping tendrils of dawn began to put colour back into the landscape, I felt incredibly weary, but no less driven. My worry was a burden I couldn’t put down. I clutched at the thin thread of warmth that told me Smithy was still alive, and wondered about Burrich. I had no way of knowing how badly he’d been injured. Smithy had smelled his blood, so the knife had scored at least once. And the fall down the staircase? I tried to set the worry aside. I had never considered
that Burrich could be injured in such a way, let alone what I would feel about it. I could come up with no name for the feeling. Just hollow, I thought to myself. Hollow. And weary.
I ate a bit as I walked and refilled my waterskin from a stream. Midmorning clouded up and rained on me for a bit, only to clear as abruptly by early afternoon. I strode on. I had expected to find some sort of traffic on the coast-road, but saw nothing. By late afternoon, the road had veered close to the cliffs. I could look across a small cove and down onto what had been Forge. The peacefulness of it was chilling. No smoke rose from the cottages, no boats rode in the harbour. I knew my route would take me right through it. I did not relish the idea, but the warm thread of Smithy’s life tugged me on.
I lifted my head to the scuff of feet against stone. Only the reflexes of Hod’s long training saved me. I came about, staff at the ready, and swept around me in a defensive circle that cracked the jaw of the one that was behind me. The others fell back. Three others. All Forged, empty as stone. The one I had struck was rolling and yelling on the ground. No one paid him any mind except me. I dealt him another quick jolt to his back. He yelled louder and thrashed about. Even in that situation, my action surprised me. I knew it was wise to make sure a disabled enemy stayed disabled, but I knew I could never have kicked at a howling dog as I did at that man. But fighting these Forged ones was like fighting ghosts: I felt no presence from any of them; I had no sense of the pain I’d dealt the injured man, no echoes of his anger or fear. It was like slamming a door, violence without a victim, as I cracked him again, to be sure he would not snatch at me as I leaped over him to a clear space in the road.
I danced my staff around me, keeping the others at bay. They looked ragged and hungry, but I still felt they could outrun me if I fled. I was already tired, and they were like starving wolves. They’d pursue me until I dropped. One reached too close and I struck him a glancing blow to the wrist. He dropped a rusty fish-knife and clutched his hand to his heart, shrieking over it. Again, the other two paid no attention to the injured one. I danced back.
‘What do you want?’ I demanded of them.
‘What do you have,’ one of them said. His voice was rusty and hesitant, as if long unused, and his words lacked any inflection. He moved slowly around me, in a wide circle that kept me turning. Dead men talking, I thought to myself, and couldn’t stop the thought from echoing through my mind.
‘Nothing,’ I panted, jabbing to keep one from moving any closer. ‘I don’t have anything for you. No money, no food, nothing. I lost all my things, back down the road.’
‘Nothing,’ said the other, and for the first time I realized she had been a woman, once. Now she was this empty malevolent puppet, whose dull eyes suddenly lit with avarice as she said, ‘Cloak. I want your cloak.’
She seemed pleased to have formulated this thought, and it made her careless enough to let me crack her on the shin. She glanced down at the injury as if puzzled, and then continued to limp after me.
‘Cloak,’ echoed the other. For a moment they glared at one another in dull realization of their rivalry. ‘Me. Mine,’ he added.
‘No. Kill you,’ she offered calmly. ‘Kill you, too,’ she reminded me, and came close again. I swung my staff at her, but she leaped back, and then made a snatch at it as it went by. I turned, just in time to whack the one whose wrist I had already damaged. Then I leaped past him and raced down the road. I ran awkwardly, holding onto my staff with one hand as I fought the fastening of my cloak with the other. At last it came undone and I let it fall from me as I continued to run. The rubberiness in my legs warned me that this was my last gambit. But a few moments later, they must have reached it, for I heard angry cries and screams as they quarrelled over it. I prayed it would be enough to occupy all four of them and kept running. There was a bend in the road, not much but enough to take me out of their sight. I continued to run and then trotted for as long as I could before daring to look back. The road shone wide and empty behind me. I pushed myself on, and when I saw a likely spot, I left the road.
I found a savagely nasty thicket of brambles and forced my way into the heart of it. Shaking and exhausted, I crouched down on my heels in the thick of the spiny bushes and strained my ears for any sound of pursuit. I took short sips from my water-skin, and tried to calm myself. I had no time for this delay; I had to get back to Buckkeep; but I dared not emerge.
It is still inconceivable to me that I fell asleep there, but I did.
I came awake gradually. Groggy, I felt sure I was recovering from a severe injury or long illness. My eyes were gummy, my mouth thick and sour. I forced my eyelids open and looked around me in bewilderment. The light was ebbing, and an overcast defeated the moon.
My exhaustion had been such that I had leaned over into the thorn bushes and slept despite a multitude of jabbing prickles. I extricated myself with much difficulty, leaving bits of cloth, hair and skin behind. I emerged from my hiding-place as cautiously as any hunted animal, not only questing as far as my sense would reach, but also snuffing the air and peering all about me. I knew that my questing would not reveal to me any Forged ones, and hoped that if any were nearby, the forest animals would have seen them and reacted. But all was quiet.
I cautiously emerged onto the road. It was wide and empty. I looked once at the sky, and then set out for Forge, staying close to the edge of the road, where the shadows of the trees were thickest. I tried to move both swiftly and silently, and did neither as well as I wanted. I had stopped thinking of anything except vigilance and my need to get back to Buckkeep. Smithy’s life was the barest tendril in my mind. I think the only emotion still active in me was the fear that kept me looking over my shoulder and scanning the woods to either side as I walked.
It was full dark when I arrived on the hillside overlooking Forge. For some time I stood looking down on it, seeking for any signs of life, then I forced myself to walk on. The wind had come up, and fitfully granted me moonlight. It was a treacherous boon, as much deceiver as revealer. It made shadows move at the corners of abandoned houses, and cast sudden reflections that glinted like knives from puddles in the street. But no one walked in Forge. The normal inhabitants had abandoned it not long after that fateful raid, and evidently the Forged ones had as well, once there were no more sources of food or comfort there. The town had never really rebuilt itself after the raid, and a long season of winter storms and tides had nearly completed what the Red Ships had begun. Only the harbour looked almost normal, save for the empty slips. The sea-walls still curved out into the bay like protective hands cupping the docks. But there was nothing left to protect.
I threaded my way through the desolation that was Forge. My skin prickled as I crept past sagging doors on splintered frames in half-burnt buildings. It was a relief to get away from the mouldy smell of the empty cottages and to stand on the wharves overlooking the water. The road went right down to the docks and curved along the cove. A shoulder of roughly-worked stone had once protected the road from the greedy sea, but a winter of tides and storms without the intervention of man was breaking it down. Stones were working loose, and the sea’s driftwood battering rams, abandoned now by the tide, cluttered the beach below. Once carts of iron ingots had been hauled down this road to waiting vessels. I walked along the sea-wall, and saw that what had appeared so permanent from the hill above would withstand perhaps one or two more winter seasons without maintenance before the sea reclaimed it.
Overhead, stars shone intermittently through scudding clouds. The evasive moon cloaked and revealed herself as well, occasionally granting me glimpses of the harbour. The shushing of the waves was like the breathing of a drugged giant. It was a night from a dream, and when I looked out over the water, the ghost of a Red Ship cut across the moonpath as it put into Forge harbour. Her hull was long and sleek, her masts bare of canvas as she came slipping into port. The red of her hull and prow was shiny as fresh-spilled blood, as if she cut through runnels of gore instead of saltwater. In the dead t
own behind me, no one raised a shout of warning.
I stood like a fool, limned on the sea-wall, shivering at the apparition, until the creak of oars and the silver of dripping water off an oar’s edge made the Red Ship real.
I flung myself flat to the causeway, then slithered off the smooth road surface into the boulders and driftwood cluttered along the sea-wall. I could not breathe for terror. All my blood was in my head, pounding, and no air was in my lungs. I had to set my head down between my arms and close my eyes to regain control of myself. By then the small sounds even a stealthy vessel must make came faint but distinct across the water to me. A man cleared his throat, an oar rattled in its lock, something heavy thudded to the deck. I waited for a shout or command to betray that I had been seen. But there was nothing. I lifted my head cautiously, peering through the whitened roots of a driftwood log. All was still save the ship coming closer and closer as the rowers brought her into harbour. Her oars rose and fell in near-silent unison.
Soon I could hear them talking in a language like to ours, but so harshly spoken I could barely get the meaning of the words. A man sprang over the side with a line and floundered ashore. He made the ship fast no more than two shiplengths away from where I lay hidden among the boulders and logs. Two others sprang out, knives in hands, and scrambled up the sea-wall. They ran along the road in opposite directions, to take up positions as sentries. One was on the road almost directly above me. I made myself small and still. I held onto Smithy in my mind the way a child grips a beloved toy as protection against nightmares. I had to get home to him, therefore I must not be discovered. The knowledge that I must do the first somehow made the second seem more possible.
Men scrabbled hastily from the ship. Everything about them bespoke familiarity. I could not fathom why they had put in here until I saw them unloading empty water casks. The casks were sent hollowly rolling down the causeway, and I remembered the well I had passed. The part of my mind that belonged to Chade noted how well they knew Forge, to put in almost exactly opposite that well. This was not the first time this ship had stopped here for water. ‘Poison the well before you leave,’ that corner of my mind suggested. But I had no supplies for anything like that, and no courage to do anything except remain hidden.