by Robin Hobb
He dropped his hand to his side. He bowed his bird’s head, expressing a sorrow beyond words, and stared with longing across the divide.
“What befell your people?” I asked at last, when it was plain he intended to say no more.
He heaved a great sigh. “In those days, we lived far to the west, in the foothills of what Gernians call the Barrier Mountains. A foolish name. They are not a barrier, but a bridge. The mountains are full of game and rich with trees bearing flowers, fruit, and running with sweet sap. Their thick forests are shady and cool in the heat of summer. When the storms of winter blow, the tree canopies are shelter from deep snow and the sweep of the wind. The forests gave us everything we needed. The streams that run down from the high snows teem with fish, frogs, and turtles. Once they were ours, our land to hunt and forage, and we were a wealthy people. In the forests, we hunted and harvested the same lands as the Dappled Folk. But we also ventured out onto the Plains, standing out in the full sun, as they did not dare to do, for their eyes and skin cannot tolerate the full brightness of day. They are creatures of the shadows and twilight times. On the Plains at the foot of the mountains, the Kidona kept our herds and flocks in the summer. There we built our towns and cities, our monuments and roads. In the winters, our herdsmen took our beasts up into the shelter of the forest. We prospered. Our herds increased. Our women were thriving, our men full of vigor, and so many children were born to us that yearly we had to build new rearing temples to house them.
“All would have been well, save for the Dappled Folk who infested the mountain forests above us. They resented the increase of our herds, and strove to prevent our expansion of our grazing lands and our taking of timber for our towns. They said that our sheep and our kine ate too much, and that our taldi trampled the winding forest paths into wide roads. They complained of the land that we cleared for fields and mourned every tree that fell to our axes. They claimed the forest as their own, and wanted it to remain as if no man had ever trod there. We wished only to be allowed to have our children, and to hunt and harvest as our fathers and grandfathers had done before us. We argued with the Dappled Folk. And eventually we fought with them.
“The Dappled Folk are a loathsome race, sly and slick as yellow and black salamanders under a rotting log. We did not seek a grievance with them. We were willing to exchange goods with them, but when we traded with them, they cheated us. Their women are lustful as war chiefs, but will not keep to one man’s bed nor acquire cattle and manage wealth as befits a woman. They ruined our young warriors with random bedding and children they could not know were truly theirs. They set our warriors to fighting among themselves. The Dappled men are worse than their women. They would not fight warrior to warrior with swannecks and spears, but struck from a distance, with arrows and stones, so that the souls of the warriors they killed did not reach the territory of the gods, but fell unaware, disgraced as slain prey, like rabbits and grouse, no more than meat. We did not seek grievance with the Dappled Folk, but when they forced it upon us, we did not shrink from it. When we rode through their villages and slew all those who did not flee, they vowed revenge on us. The winds of death they sent to us, so that men died coughing, huddled in their own filth. They orphaned our children and left them to die instead of taking them into their families. They set disease on us like dogs on wounded deer. Such deaths end a man completely; there is no afterlife for men who are betrayed by their own bodies.”
Dewara fell silent, but his feathered chest surged with his emotion. It was the brooding, seething silence of a man who hates and hates without hope of satisfaction. Then he spoke softly, saying, “The warriors of your people are on the edges of the mountain forests claimed by the Dappled Folk. Your warriors are strong. They defeated the Kidona when no other Plainspeople could stand against us. I speak to you of our ancient defeat by the Dappled Folk. I reveal to you this shame of my people so that you may understand that the Dappled Ones deserve none of your good god’s mercy. You should show them the same sword’s edge you showed us. Use your iron weapons to slay them from a distance, and never go near their people or their homes, or they will work their sorcery upon you. They should be trampled underfoot like dung worms. No humiliation is undeserved by them, no atrocity too vicious to inflict on them. Do not ever regret anything your folk do to them, for behold what they did to my people. They severed our bridge to the dream world.” His hands fell to his sides. “When I die, my being will end. There is no passage for me to the birth lands of the spirits of my people.
“When I was a young man, before our war with your people, I vowed I would reopen this passage. I made my vow before my people and my gods. I captured and shed the blood of a hawk to bind me to it. And so I am bound.” He gestured at his bird form. “Twice I attempted this passage. I crossed and did battle with the terrible guardian they have set upon our way. Twice I was defeated. But I did not surrender, nor did I give up. Not until your father shot me with his iron, not until he sank the magic of your people deep into my chest, crippling my Kidona magic, did I know that I could not do this myself. I thought I had failed.”
He paused in his account and shook his beaked head. “I had no hope. I knew I was condemned to the torment of the oath-breaker when I died. But then the gods revealed to me their way. This is why they allowed your people to make war upon us and conquer us. This is why they showed us the power of your iron magic. This is why your father sought me out and gave you to me. The gods sent me my weapon. I have trained you and taught you. The iron magic belongs to you, and you belong to me. I send you to open the way for the Kidona. It has taken all the strength of the feeble magic that remains in me to bring you this far. I can go no further. I redeem my oath in you and bring great glory to my name forever. You will slay their guardian with the cold iron magic. Go now. Open the way.”
“I have no weapon,” I said. My own words made me a coward in my eyes.
“I will show you how, now. This is how you summon your weapon to you.”
He stooped impatiently and dragged his finger in a crescent in the dust. It left a line. He stooped and blew upon the dusty stone, and as the dust flew away from his breath, a shining bronze swanneck was revealed. He gestured at it proudly. Then he lifted it from the ground; its outline remained in the stone of the cliffs, like the imprint of an animal’s hoof near a stream bed. With a powerful blow, he drove the gleaming blade into the blue stone at our feet. “There. That will hold this end of the bridge for the Kidona people. Now, you must summon your own weapon, to use against the guardian. I cannot call iron.”
I pushed my doubts away. I stooped, and in the dust I drew an image I knew well. It was an image I had idly drawn a thousand times in my boyhood. I drew a cavalla sword, proud and straight, with a sturdy haft and dangling tassel. As my fingers traced it against the stone, I suddenly hungered for the weapon to be within my hand again. And when I stooped and blew my breath across the dusty stone, the sword I had left at Dewara’s campsite was suddenly there at my feet. Triumphant yet wondering, I lifted the blade from the earth. Its imprint remained behind beside the swanneck’s. When I proudly flourished it aloft, Dewara shrank from it, lifting his arm-wing to shield himself from the steel in my hand.
“Take it and go!” he hissed, his arms lifted to mimic the aggressive stance of a bird. “Slay the guardian. But bear it away from me before it can weaken the magic that holds us here. Go. My swanneck anchors this end. Your iron will hold the other.”
I had become so much his creature that I could not think of any alternative to doing what he had commanded. In that time and place and uncertain light, there was no room for me to think of disobeying him. So I turned from him and walked along the stone ledge to the cliff’s edge. The rocky chasm gaped bottomlessly before me. The standing hoodoos of stone and the flimsy bridges that connected them were my only possible passage to the other side. My destination was faded by distance, as if smoke or fog hung in the air and curtained it. I could see no detail of it. The sculpted pinnacles v
aried in size; the tops of some were no bigger than tables, while others could have supported a mansion. The capstones of each spire were a slightly different gray-blue, a harder stone than that of the softer columns that the wind had eroded away beneath them. There was no bridge between the cliff edge and the first hoodoo. I would have to leap to it. It was not an impossible distance, and my landing place was large, as big as the beds of two wagons. If I had been leaping over solid ground, it would not have been so daunting. But below me gaped the seemingly bottomless ravine. I gathered my courage and my strength for the leap.
Then, as I watched, a bronze path, no wider than the blade of the swanneck, flowed from the embedded weapon to the top of the first hoodoo. Like an unfurling ribbon, the tongue of shimmering metal reached out across the void until it touched the first hoodoo. It was not a wide bridge, but it spanned it. I thrust my cavalla saber into my belt, spread my arms for balance, and stepped out onto the bronze path.
Almost immediately I lost my footing. The sword in my belt suddenly seemed to weigh as much as an anvil. I wrenched my whole body against the drag, started to topple the other way, and responded by sprinting forward along the length toward the hoodoo. Its top was slightly rounded, like a very large bedknob. A gritty layer of sand coated the capstone and I skidded in it and fell to my knees as I tried to stop, halting less than an arm’s length from the edge. For an instant I crouched there, catching my breath and calming my heart. Grinning foolishly at my near mishap, I glanced back at Dewara. He was unimpressed. Impatiently, he gestured me on.
The scant layer of sand crunched under my feet as I stood. I looked down at the footbridge that awaited me. It was narrow and insubstantial. Bits of brightly painted pottery floated in a net of spiderweb. At my feet, three hawk feathers stood upright, their shafts wedged in tiny heaps of sand. The wind stirred them and they swayed. Gossamer threads reached from these foolish anchors to the footbridge that spanned the gap. I did not think a mouse could safely cross such a frail construction, let alone a man. I looked again to Dewara for guidance. He opened one wing wide and pointed at a gap in his flight feathers. This magic belonged to him, then. He obviously had full faith in it, for he flapped his arms at me, shooing me on. Later it would seem foolhardy to me, but at the moment I felt I had no choice. I stepped out onto the bridge. It gave beneath me, sagging so that my foot sank, just as if I had stepped out onto netting. It was the weight of my iron, I knew, that burdened the bridge. On my next step, it sagged even more, and swayed. It was like trying to walk across an insubstantial hammock that was decorated with shards of ceramic and stretched beneath my weight. Yet even that does not describe it at all. I suppose it was an experience of that world, and thus untranslatable to this one.
There was nothing certain about my footing. The bits of pottery sank unevenly beneath me and the bridge swayed with every step I took. Sometimes I sank so deeply that I had to lift my foot unnaturally high to step to the next stone, as if I were climbing a very steep stair. The pottery fragments that floored the path were marked with distinctive patterns I had never seen before. Some of them were fire-blackened, as if from much use. Sometimes I sank almost waist-deep in the netted path so that I had to wallow onto the next section of trail, which in turn sank under me. It was more exhausting than breaking trail in deep wet snow, and yet I pushed on, for I could not turn around and go back. It was a narrow way, and to either side the bottomless chasm yawned. Once, panting, I rested and looked down. I had thought to see a river carving its way among those natural monuments. Instead, the spiral stone pillars seemed to descend endlessly into a shadowy distance. If I fell, I might die of starvation before my bones were ever shattered by the impact. I shook my head at that thought and forced myself to go on.
After a long struggle, I reached the second hoodoo of turned blue stone. I dragged myself up from the path onto the rounded top of the spire and lay there, catching my breath. When I looked back, I was shocked to find I had come a very short way. Dewara stood on the cliffs, staring at me, his hawk’s beak ajar. He shifted from foot to foot uncertainly.
“The path seems difficult but sound.” I said the words first and the air swallowed them. Then I shouted them and saw Dewara cock his head, as if he knew I had spoken but could not hear my voice. And yet it did not seem he was that far away from me.
Slowly I got to my feet. I was not rested, yet I felt driven to go on, as if I only had a certain amount of time in which to accomplish my task. I eyed the new section of trail before me. Fine threads, braided and interwoven, made a softly gleaming trail. I knelt and touched it. Hair. Human hair, I judged, in every shade from blackest ebony to pale gold. I patted it with my hand. It seemed sound. I rose, and again stepped from the dome of stone onto the strange floating pathway. I stepped out feeling relieved at the sturdiness of this new path. But three steps from the rock, it swayed beneath me as if I were standing in a swing.
My sisters used to play a game with tops, trying to make one walk the length of a tautly strung ribbon. I was the top, and the ribbon I traversed was not taut. The farther I went from the rock spire, the more it sagged beneath my weight. I drew my sword and gripped it, holding it horizontally with both hands as if it were a balance pole. Briefly it made a small improvement. Then the bridge began to swing, like the lazy swinging of a girl’s jump rope. I felt sick with dizziness but pressed on, now edging upward on the sag of matted hair. Behind me, Dewara shouted something, but his words seemed distant and I dared not look back at him.
When I reached the second pinnacle of stone, I clawed my way onto it and sat down to catch my breath. I glanced back at Dewara then, but he had sunk his hawk’s head down upon his hunched shoulders and perched motionless on the edge of the chasm. I could read nothing in his bird’s eyes, and his arms were clapped to his sides. There was no help or advice for me there.
I looked to the next hoodoo. A longer path separated it than the two I had trod. That next resting place looked smaller, too, and even more rounded. The path to it was an interlocking web of plants. Tiny white flowers, smaller than my smallest fingernail, blossomed thickly on the matted vines. Suspicious, I pushed hard on it with my hand before venturing forth. The tough roots held. When I poked at them with my sword, they browned and shriveled away. That would not do. I had no desire to weaken the path by killing the plants. I placed my saber once again through my belt. This path was wider, also, and the roots of the plants seemed anchored to the pillar on which I stood, reminding me of ivy climbing up the trunks of trees and the walls of houses.
I set out across the path more boldly than I had the previous two. It bore me up firmly, and although the plants and their tough vines crunched underfoot as I stepped on them, it did not sway or give beneath my stride. The fragrance of the crushed flowers and foliage was oddly pungent, but surely a smell could not harm me. I was halfway across before my hands burst into tiny white blisters. They itched painfully and I longed to scratch them. Even clutching my hands into fists caused the tiny blisters to burst. The liquid that flowed from them seared my skin and left a second crop of white blisters in its wake. I held my hands away from my body and tried to ignore the searing pain. How grateful I was that I wore boots and not the low, soft shoes of a Plainsman. If the plants had affected my feet, I do not think I could have gone on. As it was, my eyes began to burn and my nose to run. It took stern discipline to keep my hands away from my face. I stumbled on, and when I reached the next stone support, I found it as small as it had appeared. I stepped away from the loathsome plants and perched on a hoodoo cap no larger than a dinner platter.
Almost as soon as I had stepped onto the stone cap, my agonies ceased. The sores on my hands ceased burning. I still dared not touch my face, but when I turned my face to my shoulder and rubbed my streaming eyes on my upper arm, my symptoms began to clear. I would have felt much better had I not been perched on such a tiny island. There was not room enough to sit down and rest, and so I moved on.
The next bridge was made of bird bones,
cleverly bored and bound together with fine thread ligaments. Occasional beads of shell or polished stone glittered in the network. Perhaps they had been bracelets or necklaces before they had been rewrought into a suspension bridge. The tiny bones clicked together as I ventured over them. Despite the fragility of the fine white bones, none of them gave way beneath me, nor did the bridge sway or sag under my weight. Only the rising wind gave me pause as it tugged at my clothing and whispered past my ears. The wind carried a strange and distant music. I paused to listen to it. The distant whistling of flutes and rattle of bone castanets marked it as Kidona music. It was foreign to me and yet I sensed its significance. I looked down at the bridge beneath my feet and suddenly knew the bird bones were parts of a musical instrument. The music sang to me in a language I almost knew. I stood still, trying to comprehend its meaning. I think if I had truly been a Plainsman, it would have been more compelling in its efforts to lull me. As it was, I was able to shake off its influence and walk on. I completed that leg of the journey, reaching a much larger pinnacle of stone.
This refuge was as generous as the last one had been mean; I could have stretched out and slept upon it with no fear of tumbling off. The very temptation to do so warned me against it. I had finally sensed something about the bridges that I should have suspected all along. This pathway was not for me. Dewara had done all he could to make me think like a Kidona, but I was not truly Kidona. I traversed stretches of meaning that eluded me. I suspected there was great significance to each crossing, symbolism and subtext that did not reach my Gernian soul. For some reason, that made me feel diminished and ashamed, like an uneducated man unable to comprehend the cultural significance of a lovely poem. I did not even understand the full significance of the challenges I faced, and thus they did not truly challenge me. Chastened, I did not even glance back at Dewara, but crossed the capstone to where the next bridge began.