by Robin Hobb
“No,” I said, and then added, “Well, perhaps once.”
She focused those kitten eyes on me. “Really? What did you dream, Nevare?” She leaned toward me, as if such things were truly important.
“Well.” As I pondered where to begin the telling of the dream, I felt a strange sensation. The scar on the top of my head burned, and from there the hot pain shot down through me, once more running along my spine. I shut my eyes and I turned hastily away from Yaril. I felt faint. The reality of the pain brought my dream back in shattering detail. The smell of the tree woman was in my nostrils and my hands clutched the slicing blade again. I took a shuddering breath and tried to speak. At first, no sounds came out until I said, “It was a disturbing dream, Yaril. I do not think I will speak of it.” The pain ceased as suddenly as it had begun. It still took me a moment to catch my breath and force my hands to open. I turned back toward Yaril; she was regarding me with alarm.
“Whatever could you have dreamed that would frighten a man so?” she asked me.
Her childish naïveté that saw me, only a few years her senior, as a grown man, silenced me more effectively than the burst of pain had. For I deemed my sudden pain to be a sort of hallucination, a terrible reexperiencing of the dream that had been my downfall. Despite how badly that brief experience had rattled me, my sister had referred to me as a man, and I would not do or say anything to lessen her opinion of me at that moment. So I merely shook my head and added, “It would not be a fit topic to discuss in front of a lady anyway.”
Her eyes widened in surprise that her brother Nevare might have dreams not fit to discuss with a lady, but I also saw her pleasure that I had referred to her as a “lady” rather than as a “child.” She sat back in her seat and said, “Well, if it is so, Nevare, then I will not ask you any more about it.”
Such innocents we both were then.
Days piled on days to become months, like dead leaves heaping atop one another to become loam. I set my dream experience aside and forgot it as much as I could. My burns healed, the stitched ear healed more slowly, and the notches became scars I lived with. I kept a small bald spot on the crown of my head, scar tissue where once-healthy scalp had been. I moved on with my life and my lessons and training. I carried inside me, small and sharp, the knowledge that my father, despite his encouraging words to me, doubted me. His doubt became my own, a competitor I could never quite conquer.
I made only one other concession to that experience. Late in the fall, I told my father that I wished to go hunting alone, to test my prowess. He told me it was foolish, but I persevered in my stubborn request, and eventually he granted me six days to myself. I told him I would be hunting along the high banks of the river, and I did begin my journey in that direction. I first visited the spot where Dewara and his women had been camped when I first met him. The ashes and stones of a cook fire and the disturbances where he had pegged his tent were almost the only marks of his passage. The sheath of my old cavalry sword lay on the ground, the leather slowly rotting in the weather. Of the sword itself, there was no sign. Perhaps a passing traveler had discovered it. But it seemed unlikely that someone would come across a sword and its sheath and carry off only the bare blade. I didn’t think so. I tossed the sheath back onto the ground and walked away from it. A man could not summon a weapon to come to him. Not in my world. I felt a touch of pain in the scar on my head. I rubbed at it, and then turned away from the campsite. I didn’t want to think about it just now.
I turned Sirlofty’s head inland. The prairie had changed with the season, but I allowed for that, and roughly calculated how long it would take Sirlofty’s gentle, long-legged lope to travel the distance the taldi mare had covered in that mad gallop. For the first two days I rode steadily, pushing Sirlofty in the morning and taking it more gently in the afternoon. The autumn rains had made watering spots more plentiful than they had been when last I crossed this terrain. Tiny rivulets had resumed their task of shaping the plateaus and the gorges. I had expected this lonely journey to bring my memories back and let me put them to rest, but it only made the events of the spring stranger and more incomprehensible.
I found, eventually, the same spot where Dewara had built the final fire we had shared. I was certain of it. I came to it in early afternoon. I stood on the edge of the cliffs and looked out over the vista. The scorched rocks from that last fire were still there, tufts of grass sprouting up around them. I found the burned ends of the Kidona fire-bow I had made under Dewara’s tutelage and the leather cup of the sling he had given me to use. It looked to me as if everything Kidona that he had given to me or had me make had been deliberately consigned to the flames. I thought about that for a time, and also about how he had shot the mare I had ridden. Did it mean that I had somehow tainted Keeksha, made her unfit for use by a Kidona warrior? Dewara had left me no answers, and I knew that the ones I made up for myself would always remain theories.
Then, risking life and limb, I climbed down and along the face of the cliffs, looking for the entrance to the cave. I had thought it through and decided that there must be a cave down there, and a ledge, a place we had jumped down to and entered, and that there the frog had made me hallucinate. I was certain of that explanation.
I found nothing. I did not find a ledge that I could comfortably stand on, let alone the place I had jumped down to and the cave I had entered. They didn’t exist. I climbed back up and sat on the edge of the bluff, looking off to the distant river. All of it had been a dream, then, or a hallucination brought on by the fumes of whatever Dewara had burned on the fire. All of it, every bit of it. I made a fire on the site of our old one, with good flint and steel, and spent the night at the site, but did not sleep. Rolled in my blanket, I stared up at the night sky and wondered about the things savages believed and if the good god had somehow given them a different truth than he had given us. Or did the good god reign over them at all? Did their old fading gods linger, and had I visited one of the worlds of those pagan deities? That thought sent a shiver up my spine in the dark. Were those dark and cruel worlds true places that existed, but a dream step away?
The good god can do all and anything, the Writ says. He can make a square circle and create justice from men’s tyranny and grow hope from withered seed in the desert. If he could do all those things for his people, did the old gods possess a similar power for theirs? Had I glimpsed a reality that was not meant for my kind?
A boy on the edge of manhood ponders such questions, and so I did that night. My meditations were not conducive to sleep. The next morning, sleepless but unwearied, I rose with the sun. As the first light touched my campsite, the good god seemed to answer a prayer, for the light played briefly on a rough outcropping of stone. For a moment the dawn sparkled on trapped flecks of mica, and then the angle changed, and it became only a dusty outcropping. I walked to it, crouched by it, and touched it, feeling its hard reality. This, I was sure, was the mother of the small stone I’d carried in my flesh. That cruel souvenir, at least, had definitely come from this world. I mounted Sirlofty and rode toward home.
The very next night, as if to reward me for my deception of my father, a rustling in the brush at the wet end of a gully where I had decided to camp proved to be a small Plainsbuck. I brought him down with a single shot. I cut his throat to bleed him out, slit his hind legs between the tendon and the bone, and hoisted him up into a stunted tree. I gutted him as he hung there and propped the chest cavity open with a stick to let the meat cool. He wasn’t large and his rack was no more than a set of spikes, but he was sufficient excuse for my expedition.
I don’t think I was exceptionally surprised when Sergeant Duril rode into camp while I was cooking the liver. “Nothing better than fresh liver,” he observed as he dismounted. I didn’t ask if he had been following me for long, or why he was there. Our hobbled horses grazed together and we shared the meat as the stars came out. Autumn was advanced enough that we welcomed the fire’s warmth.
We had been in our bla
nkets for some time, silent and pretending to sleep, when he asked me, “Do you want to talk about it?”
I nearly said, “I can’t.” That would have been the honest answer. And it would have led to all sorts of other questions and probing and worries. I would have had to lie to him. Duril wasn’t a man to lie to. So I simply said, “No, Sergeant. I don’t think I do.”
And that was what I learned from Dewara.
CHAPTER SIX
SWORD AND PEN
I have spoken to men who have suffered sudden severe injuries, or endured torture or extreme loss. They speak of those events distantly, as if they have set them out of their lives. So I attempted to do with my experience with Dewara. Having proven to myself that none of my encounter with the tree woman had even the most tenuous tie to reality, I moved on with my life. I resolutely left that nightmare vision behind, along with childish fears of hobgoblins under my bed or making wishes on falling stars.
It was more than the tree woman I attempted to vanquish from my thoughts. I also banished my father’s secret doubt of me from my ruminations. Dewara had been a test to see if I could, when circumstance demanded it, question my father’s wisdom and resist the old Plains warrior and become my own leader. I had only briefly defied Dewara before becoming submissive again to his guidance. I had never defied my father. But I had lied to him. I had lied to try to make him think I’d found the backbone to stand up to the Kidona. If I had thought that lie would buy me new respect from my father, it hadn’t. His attitude toward me had not changed at all that I could detect.
For a short time I strove desperately to win his regard. I redoubled my effort, not just at the fencing and cavalla techniques that I loved, but also on the academic studies that were my demons. My scores soared, and when he discussed the monthly reports of my progress, he praised me for my efforts. But the words were the same ones I had always heard from him. Having never suspected he doubted me, when obviously he had, I now found I could no longer believe in his praise. And when he rebuked me, I felt it doubly hard, and in private my own disgust with myself magnified his disappointment in me.
Some part of me realized that I could never do anything that would guarantee my father’s approval. So I made a conscious decision to set those experiences aside. Spirit journeys to tree women and lying to my father did not fit with the day-to-day understanding of my existence, and so I discarded them. I think it is how most men get from one day to the next: they set aside all experiences that do not mesh with their perception of themselves.
How different would our perception of reality be if, instead, we discarded the mundane events that cannot coexist with our dreams?
Yet that was a thought that only came to me many years later. What remained of my fifteenth year demanded the full focus of my mind. My recovery from my injuries was followed by a growth spurt that astonished even my father. I ate like a starved beast at every meal. It all went to height and muscle. In my sixteenth year, I went through three pairs of boots and four jackets in eight months. My mother declared proudly to her friends that if I did not soon reach my man’s height and stop growing, she would have to hire a seamstress just to keep me decently clad.
Like almost all youths at that age, I and my own concerns seemed of the utmost importance to me. I scarcely noticed my younger brother being packed off for his first indoctrination into the priesthood, or my sister Yaril graduating to long skirts and pinned-up hair. I was too intent on whether I could ever make first touch on my fencing master, or improve my target scores with a long gun. I consider those years to be the most selfish of my life, and yet I think such selfishness and self-focus is necessary for a young man as deluged with lessons and information as I was.
Even the events of the greater world seldom touched me, so involved was I in my own learning and growing. The news that reached my ears was filtered through my vision of my future. I was aware that the king and the so-called old nobles wrestled for power and tax money. My father sometimes discussed politics with my elder brother Rosse after dinner, and even though I knew that politics were not the proper concern of a soldier, I listened. My father had a right to be heard in the King’s Council of Lords, and he regularly dispatched messages that contained his views. He always sided with King Troven. The old nobles needed to lift their heads and see the king’s new vision of a realm that extended east across the Plains rather than west to the sea. The old nobles would have cheerfully renewed our ancient strife with Landsing, all in the name of trying to win back the coastal provinces that we had lost to them. My father’s attitude was that the king’s way was wiser; all his new nobles backed him in his eastward expansion. I gave little attention to the details of the strife. It might have to do with us, but all the debating and posturing occurred in the capital, Old Thares to the west. It was easy and fitting that, as a solider son, I nod my head and adopt my father’s opinion as my own.
I was more enthusiastic about news from the eastern borders. Tales of the Speck plague dominated. The awareness of plague had slowly permeated all our lives during the years I grew toward manhood. Yet, dreadful as the tales of decimation were, they remained stories of a distant disaster. Sometimes it reached in among us, as when old Percy came to my father to ask for time to travel east to visit his sons’ graves. He was a soldier himself, and both his boys had gone for troopers and died of plague before they could sire sons to carry on Percy’s line and his calling. His daughter’s sons would be shoemakers like their father. He confided this to my father as if it grieved him. His personal loss made the ravages of the plague a bit more real to me. I had known Kifer and Rawly. They had been but four and five years older than I, and now they rested in distant graves near the border. But for the most part the plague stayed where it belonged, confined to the military outposts and settlements in the foothills of the Barrier Mountains. It was but one of the many dangers of the border: snakes and poisonous insects, the erratic and irrational attacks by the Specks, the great cats and savagely aggressive humpdeer. Wariness of the disease surged in the hot summers when it flared up, consuming men like kindling. It ebbed only when the gentler days of winter arrived.
My seventeenth summer was filled with marching troops. Weekly we saw them moving past our holdings along the river road. These were solid ranks of replacements for men fallen to disease during the summer rather than the steady trickle of new soldiers off to their first assignments on the border. Westward-bound funeral processions, black-draped wagons full of coffins drawn by sweating black horses, clopped and creaked past our homes on their mournful journey back to the civilized west, bearing the bodies of men from families sufficiently wealthy or noble to require that they be returned home for burial. Those we watched from a distance. My father made little noise about them, but my mother feared contagion and strictly forbade any of us to loiter along the river road when such sad processions were moving along it.
Each summer when the plague returned, wave after wave of it consumed our soldiers. My father estimated the mortality rate at between 23 and 46 percent among able-bodied soldiers, given the information he had access to. Among the elderly, the women, and the very young, the scythe of death swung even more efficiently, leaving few standing in its wake. It wasted a healthy man to skin and bone in a matter of days. Of those who survived, some recovered to lead nearly normal lives, though most were unfit for the heavy duty of a horse soldier. Some suffered an impaired sense of balance, a terrible loss for a cavalryman. The survivors I met were unnaturally thin. The soldier sons of my father’s friends, they stopped in to visit and dine with us on their long journeys back to Old Thares. They ate and drank as any men did, and some even pushed themselves to consume more than a normal amount of victuals. Yet they could not seem to regain the strength and vitality they had once possessed. Broken bones and torn muscles seemed to befall them easily. It was a terrible thing to see young officers, once hale and hearty, now thin and listless and retiring from the military just when they should have been rising to command. They seemed
weary beyond the stress of a long day in the saddle. They spoke of frontier towns full of widows and children, their common-soldier husbands fallen not to war, but to plague.
Fall came, and the wet winds of winter quenched the plague fires. The end of the year brought both my eighteenth birthday and the Dark Evening holiday. The latter was not much observed in our household. My father regarded Dark Evening as a pagan holiday, a superstitious holdover from the days of the old gods. Some still called it Dark Woman’s Night. The ways of the old gods said that a married woman could be unfaithful to her husband on that one night of the year and not be held accountable for it, for on the night of the Dark Woman, a woman must obey no will save her own. My mother and sisters did not hold with any such nonsense, of course, but I knew that they envied some of the other households in our area that still celebrated Dark Evening with masked balls and opulent feasts and gifts of pearl or opal jewelry wrapped in starry paper. In our home, the longest, darkest night of winter passed with little fanfare. My mother and sisters would set tiny boats afloat on our pond with candles on them, and my father always gave each of his women a small envelope containing a gift of money, but that was the extent of it.
I had always suspected that my birthday was so well celebrated simply because my father had forbidden a lavish Dark Evening in our household, and so my birthday became the midwinter celebration by default. Often my mother gave a special dinner in my honor and invited guests from neighboring holdings. But that year, my eighteenth year, my birthday marked my entrance into manhood, and so the party was more solemn and restricted to our immediate family.
I felt it made the occasion more formal and portentous rather than less. My father had brought Vanze home from his studies in the western monastery to preside. His voice had not even changed yet, but still he was so proud to hold the family book and wear his priest’s vest while he read aloud my verses from the Writ: