by Robin Hobb
“Yaril?” I asked him when he took a breath and seemed to be easing.
“I don’t know!” He cried out the words as if I had inflicted a fresh wound on him. “When Elisi sickened, I feared I would lose all my children. I sent Yaril and Cecile away. I told them to ride to Poronte’s holdings. I sent my little girl away, all but alone. There were no servants left who would come to the bell. I had to send them off alone. The good god alone knows what has become of her. All sorts of folk are on the road. I pray she reached there safely, I pray the Porontes took them in.” He burst into open sobs, and then, to my horror, he sank slowly to the floor and collapsed there.
When I first tried to raise him up, he slapped at me feebly as if he could not abide my loathsome touch. I exchanged glances with Duril, and gave my father time to keen and moan. When he had exhausted his hoarded strength, I again stooped to take him up. I had to go down awkwardly on one knee, and my own belly was a barrier to picking him up. I was surprised to find myself strong enough to lift him easily.
Duril followed me as I carried him to the parlor. I put him on a cushioned settee there, and told the sergeant, “Go to the kitchen. Get the cook fire started and put on a big pot of porridge. My father needs food, as do you, and simple food will do him best at first, if my own experience of the plague is any guide.”
“What are you going to do?” Duril asked me. My father had closed his eyes and sunk into stillness. I think Duril already knew the answer.
“I have to go to my mother’s chamber. And Elisi’s.”
Duril looked guiltily relieved. We parted there.
The rest of that day comes back to me sometimes in my nightmares. That house had always been my home, a refuge to me. The large pleasant rooms, decorated to my mother’s tastes, had always seemed an oasis of calm and respite from the larger world. Now it was filled with death.
My family had been dead for days. Rosse was stiff in his bed, and I suspected he had been the last to die. My father had tried to tend him. A heap of soiled linens was at the foot of his bed. A clean blanket had been tucked around his body, and a napkin covered his face. My elder brother who had always gone before me in life had also gone before me into death. My father’s heir son was dead. I refused to consider the full magnitude of that loss. I left his room quietly.
Someone, probably Elisi, had sewn a hasty shroud for my mother. I had thought to bid her farewell with a last kiss, but the smell was so thick in the stuffy room that I could barely force myself to enter. Fat flies were bumping and buzzing against the window glass. I resolved to leave her covered and keep my last memory of her strong beauty intact. I thought of how I had nodded to her and then turned away, as if she were already a ghost. I regretted it as I regret few things in my life. I left her swaddled body without touching it and went on to Elisi’s bedchamber.
She and I had never been close. When I was born, I was not only the new baby in the family, but a son and a soldier son. I had displaced her in many ways, and that had always colored our relationship. Now she was gone, and that gap would never be mended. The last time I had been in her room, it had been a little girl’s room, with dolls on shelves next to expensive picture books with tinted illustrations. The years had changed it. Some of Elisi’s own watercolors of wildflowers were framed on the walls. The dolls were long gone. The fresh flowers had rotted in their graceful vases, and Elisi herself was a contorted corpse on the bed. A lovely comforter embroidered with birds was rucked all around her as if she had struggled free of it. She lay on her side, mouth gaping horribly, her clawlike hands reaching toward an empty pitcher on her nightstand. The fragments of a broken cup crunched under my feet. I left her room, unable at that moment to deal with her horrid death.
I forced myself to check every other bedchamber in the house. In the newly redone servants’ wing, I found two more bodies, and one thin, frail maidservant. “They all ran off,” she told me in a shaky voice. “The master ordered them to stay, but they crept away in the dark. I stayed, and I did my best, sir. I helped Mistress Elisi tend her mother to the end. We were sewing her shroud when the fever come over me. Mistress Elisi told me to get to bed, she’d finish it herself and then come to me. She said to just take care of myself. So I did. And she never came.”
“It’s all right,” I said dully. “You couldn’t have saved her. You did all you could, and the family is grateful to you. You will be rewarded for your faithfulness. Go to the kitchen. Sergeant Duril is cooking food there. Eat something, and then do whatever you can to restore the household.” I hesitated and then added, “Care for Lord Burvelle as best you can. He is overcome by grief.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” She seemed pathetically relieved that I had not condemned her as she shuffled off to the task I had given her. The rest of the bedchambers showed the signs of hasty departure. I wondered if those who had fled had saved their lives or only spread the plague further.
My father himself had laid out our mansion and estate. He had forgotten nothing in plotting out a home that he intended would serve the family for generations. Thus there was even a stone-walled cemetery with an adjacent chapel with shade trees, and beds of flowers. Niches in the stone wall held symbols of the good god: the pomegranate tree, the ever-pouring pitcher, and the ring of keys. I had seen them so often that I no longer noticed them. The walled cemetery was a very pleasant place, really, as carefully maintained as my mother’s garden. There, my father had once told me, “All of our bones will someday rest.”
He had never expected that day to come so soon, nor that his children would die before him. For most of my life, there had been only five graves in it, simply marked with stone, markers for the retainers who had followed my father, serving him first as soldiers and later as servants, and finally dying in his employ.
All the rest of that day, I dug graves. Nine graves. Four for the poor souls who’d been left in the courtyard. Two for the bodies I’d found in the servants’ quarters. Three for my family.
It was not easy work. I was surprised I could do it, given the privation I had endured. The top layer of soil was cultivated turf, but only a few inches below it I struck the rocky soil that was more characteristic of our lands. I set aside my spade and took up a pickax to break through that layer, and eventually into the claylike soil beneath it. It was a relief to focus my mind on this simple task. I made the sides of each grave straight, and threw the soil where it could not slide back onto me. The holes were wider, perhaps, than another digger would have made; I had to accommodate my own girth. My arms and back were stiff at first, but soon warmed to my work. My body complained far less than I had expected. It was good to be out in the fresh air and sunlight again. After a time, I stripped off my shirt and worked more freely, though not without some worry that someone might see me.
The hard physical labor kept my thoughts at bay. I toiled like the muddy-boots engineer I had once planned to be. I aligned my graves precisely, leaving uniform walking spaces between them. When my mind began to work again, I walked the edges of my grief, pushing away the full realization of what had befallen me. I did not think of my dead, but wondered where the servants had fled to and if they would return, or if they had carried their own deaths with them and perished alongside the road. From there, I had to wonder how Burvelle’s Landing had fared. That small community on the other side of the road was my father’s pride and joy. He had laid out the streets and persuaded an innkeeper and a smith and a mercantile owner to come there long before anyone else had seen potential for a settlement there. His men operated the ferry to it, and the little town council reported directly to my father for his final say on all their decisions. The existence of that town and our comfortable life in the manor house were tightly linked. I wondered if the streets of Burvelle’s Landing were still and quiet, if the dead lay rotting in their homes.
I shied away from that image, but then found myself thinking about our landed neighbors and how they had fared. Some lived in relative isolation. I hoped that our folk
fleeing the plague had not visited it upon them.
Then, like a willful horse on a lunge line, I came round at last to wondering if Cecile and Yaril had safely reached the Poronte manor, and if they had escaped the plague or borne it thither.
I had been so angered with and distanced from my little sister. Now, when I thought of her, I could only recall how wide and trusting her eyes had always seemed when she was a child. I discovered an odd thing. I had only been able to be so angry with her because I had believed that one day we would apologize to one another and resume our close relationship. It had felt safe to be furious with her, because in my deepest soul, I had been utterly confident that she still loved me, as I did her. Now I wondered with a terrible lurch of sorrow if she had gone to her death neither forgiving me nor knowing that I would forgive her. And with that last terrible thought in my mind, I flung the final shovel full of earth out of the ninth grave. Alone, I carried the bodies of the servants, one by one, to their resting places, setting them beside the holes where they would lie. I put my shirt on over my dirty body, and went quietly to the kitchens. The wonderful smell of simmering porridge and baking bread filled the air. I found Sergeant Duril and the maidservant there, talking quietly. Her name, I discovered, was Nita. Nita had set out salt and molasses on the table alongside a slab of butter from a cold cellar I’d been unaware existed. She had put several loaves of bread to bake in the reawakened ovens. She told me that they had given my father food and several very strong drinks before steering him into a clean bed in one of the guest rooms. They’d left him there, sleeping the sleep of exhaustion.
At my request, they went out to the four bodies I’d moved, to look on them a last time and to tell me what their names had been. The moment they left the kitchen, I could restrain myself no longer. I dished myself an immense tureen of porridge. I put several hunks of butter to melt in it, and then poured molasses over the top of it. I sat down and devoured it in huge spoonfuls. It was hot to the point of scalding, but that did not discourage me. I stirred it to cool it, melting the glorious yellow butter into the oaty porridge and mingling the rich brown threads of molasses in swirls. As fast as it cooled, I ate it, savoring the subtle flavors and the sensation of swallowing large bites of nourishing food. I served myself another bowlful from the pot, scraping it clean. I was generous with both butter and molasses. I devoured it.
They’d left a pot of tea on the table. I poured myself a cup, sweetened it to soupiness with more of the molasses, and drank it down. I could feel life and strength resurging in me with the consumption of the sweet stuff. I poured another cup, draining the pot. I put more water in the kettle and set it to boil again. The smell of the baking bread almost made me wild.
I was startled when Duril and Nita came back. In glorying in the food, I’d almost forgotten them and my grisly task. I hastily drained off the last of my cup of tea. Duril was looking at me in a sort of frozen dismay. I suddenly realized how I must appear, my face and shirt smudged with dirt and sweat, my nails and hands filthy, and supporting it all, my immense body. The sticky tureen was still on the table before me, the ewer of molasses almost empty beside it. I bowed my shoulders reflexively, trying to seem smaller.
“I have their names, if you want to write them down,” Duril said heavily.
“Yes. Thank you. I do. We will have to have stones carved for them later, but for now, well, it is best that I put them in the earth.”
Duril nodded solemnly. I went to my father’s study for paper and a pencil. When I returned, Nita was washing up the porridge pot. “I’ll go with you,” Duril announced, and followed me out of the kitchen.
He said little, but I could feel his disapproval hovering over me. When we reached the bodies, he listed their names for me and I wrote them down carefully, along with whatever he knew about each of them. Then, as if I were planting tulip bulbs, I set one man and three women into the earth. Duril helped me as much as he could, but his strength was gone, and I fear we were not as gentle with those mortal remains as we would have been in better times. When they were in their graves, we returned to the house, and one at a time, I carried out the two dead servants I had discovered in their rooms. Their soiled bedding became their shrouds. Flies had found the one, and the hatching maggots worked in his nostrils and at the corners of his mouth. Even hardened old Sergeant Duril turned aside from that sight, and I repressed a gag as I covered the dead man with his bedding and wrapped it firmly around him. As I carried him out of the house, I wondered if we would ever get the stench of death out of the place.
Duril had known them both. I noted down their names and set them each in a grave. Then we covered them, with me doing the lion’s share of the work, and Duril manning a shovel more for the sake of his self-respect than for any real help he could give me. The long summer day had found dusk before we were through. We stood by the six mounds of pale soil, and Duril, who had buried many a comrade, offered a simple soldier’s prayer to the good god.
When we were finished, he looked askance at me.
“Tomorrow is soon enough,” I said quietly. “They’ve lain in their rooms this long. One more day will not hurt. And perhaps by tomorrow my father will be recovered enough to help me give them a more formal burial.” I sighed. “I’m going down to the river to wash.”
He nodded, and I left him there.
But the next morning, my father was little better than he had been. He made no response when I tried to speak to him. Unshaven, his hair wild, dressed in his nightshirt, he would not even sit up in his bed. Several times I told him that I had to bury Mother, Rosse, and Elisi, that it was not fitting to leave them dead in their beds. He did not even turn his eyes to look at me, and at last I despaired of his help, and took on the mournful task myself. Duril helped me, but still it was a sad and messy duty. I found rope in the stable, and at least we were able to lower them into their graves with a bit more dignity. I wished for fine caskets or even simple boxes, but the stench and the rot persuaded me that it was best to act quickly instead. The trees surrounding our little graveyard were full of hopeful croaker birds before I was through. They sat watching me, jaunty in their black-and-white feathers, the wattles around their greedy beaks red as blood. I knew that the smell of carrion had attracted them. They were only animals, and they did not care whether it was beast flesh or human that they scented. Even so, I could not look at them without recalling the Porontes’ wedding sacrifice to Orandula, the old god of balances. I wondered grimly what all these deaths balanced, and if it pleased him.
I put my family in the earth, and covered them, and said the prayers that I could summon to my mind. They were the childish prayers of comfort that my mother had taught me when I was just a boy. Sergeant Duril came out to stand beside me and witness that feeble ceremony. Afterward, I took my shovel and pickax back to the toolshed and hung them on the wall before I went to wash the grave dirt from my hands.
And that was how my old life ended forever.
CHAPTER TEN
FLIGHT
My father’s recovery was agonizingly slow. In the first week that followed the burials, he was almost completely unresponsive to me. I went daily to his bedside, to speak to him and report what was going on, but he looked away from me. After several experiences of moving to try to meet his gaze and having him simply turn his head away, I gave up. I stood at the foot of his bed each morning and each evening and gave him a report of all I’d done, as well as presenting the problems that awaited me on the morrow. Each time, I stood quietly when I finished speaking and waited for a response. Silence was always his reply. I tried to take it in stride and keep on functioning. The terrible tragedy that had befallen our family had ended, I felt, our battle of wills. There were more immediate things to worry about than why I was fat or if I would ever be a soldier.
Nita fared better with my father than I did. She took his meals to him, persuaded him to shave and bathe, and eventually moved him back into his own chambers. In retrospect, I believe he was sufferin
g not just from his grief but also from a mild form of the plague. In later years, I would come to find that most people seldom fell victim to severe bouts of the plague twice, but that some sufferers would catch a milder form and then endure recurrent bouts in the years that followed.
Whatever the cause, my father was incapacitated for a month, and despite my own burden of grief, the tasks of running the estate fell upon me. What a whirlwind of work that time was. Everything demanded my attention at once, and I had few resources at first to apply to them. The servants had not fled far. Some had gone to neighboring landowners, who had either taken them in or afforded them refuge in rudimentary shelters on the outskirts of their holdings. Others had been living rough. They trickled back, shamefaced, a few each day, until we had about three-quarters of our former staff. What had become of the rest of them, death or simply that they had abandoned us, I was never to know.
I wrote to Dr. Amicas about my experience, for I knew he was still gathering all information he could on the disease. I speculated that the people scattering had perhaps cut down on the spread of the disease, but also that the swifter deaths we had experienced were due to the sick being left without caretakers. I could not tell if that had led to a lower percentage of deaths, and added that I did not suggest it as a routine response to the disease, as it seemed likely to me that if the servants had had other towns to flee to the chance of spreading the plague to large population centers would have been much greater.
It was not just people that I had to care for. At the same time, there were cattle, sheep, pigs, and chickens to be thought of. Most of our livestock had done well enough foraging, thanks to Sergeant Duril’s foresight in turning them loose, but some of our crops had suffered from their attentions. Every creature had to be gathered up and restored to its proper pen or paddock.
Yaril was foremost in my thoughts in those harried days. I longed to ride to Lord Poronte’s manor myself to see what had become of Cecile and my dear little sister, but I dared not leave my father. In the end, I dispatched Sergeant Duril as soon as he could ride. He took a messenger bird with him, and before the day was out, it returned with a green band on its leg to let me know my sister was alive.