The Soldier Son Trilogy Bundle

by Robin Hobb

  The prisoners lived in conditions far more crowded and unsanitary than the military barracks. The plague burned through the place like wildfire. In the second day of the fever and fluxes, those of the prisoners who could offer resistance had rioted, believing that plague was only in their prison and that their guards were deliberately confining them in a death hole. They’d overcome their guards and almost a hundred had escaped. Several dozen had attacked the town, looting supplies from untended businesses, but most had simply gone to the stables, stolen horses, and ridden off. A lieutenant had rallied a small force of mixed soldiers to reestablish order. The prisoners who had been foolish enough to remain in the town were shot down in the streets, and summarily consigned to the lime pits behind the prison barracks. The ones who had fled were pursued, not for themselves but for the horses they had taken. The pursuit had been successful.

  The upper echelons of our command had been devastated by the plague. Ebrooks told me one day that Major Morson was now in charge, but didn’t know it, as he had sunk into his fever before death bestowed command on him. “But having an unconscious commander isn’t much different from what we’re accustomed to anyway,” he added with sour humor, and I was forced to agree.

  I lost track of time, not just hours but days. The plague season ran together into a time of endless work for me. By the third day, I had become so accustomed to the stench of death and decay that I scarcely needed the vinegar and rag mask, not that it had worked very well in the first place. There came a day when we ran out of both ready graves and materials to make coffins. We did what was expedient, which was to put one body in each coffin and another on top of the coffin in each grave in the final row of waiting holes. I logged their names as best I could, and told the coffin makers to join me in digging a ditch for mass burial. I was surprised when they grudgingly complied. That night, before I closed my eyes for sleep, I took a small moment of pride in how they, as well as Ebrooks and Kesey, had accepted my leadership. I had no stripe on my sleeve and less seniority than any of them. I recalled with regret how I had angered Colonel Haren. Had he truly considered me for promotion? Well, I thought grimly, the plague was forcing a change in command; I’d have a second chance to impress my superiors when all this was over and I once more knew who they were.

  Nights brought me no rest. The row of unburied dead outside my small cottage was not even contained in coffins anymore, but only in coarse white sacking. The scavengers of the forest ventured forth to feast. I did what I could. I set pitch torches in a protective ring around the bodies. That seemed to keep most of the larger predators away, but nothing seemed to discourage the rats. Often it was only when we went to move the bodies to their grave that the rodents would scamper away, bellies bulging with human flesh. I hated them and killed them when I could.

  The carrion birds had become a constant. Red-wattled croaker birds skirmished with crows over the open-pit graves. They followed the corpse carts and gathered in the trees, watching while we placed the bodies in the pit graves and covered them with a thin layer of quicklime and earth. As soon as we stepped away, the croakers would descend. Kesey brought out a shotgun and killed a dozen of them one day. He tied the bodies to tall stakes and set them around the pit grave. The bird bodies served as a deterrent to the rest of the flock, but they quickly rotted and stank in the hot sun, attracting both buzzing flies and wasps. Worse, they reminded me of the horrible little bird carousel at Rosse’s wedding. The croaker birds seemed especially incensed by Kesey’s murder of their fellows. They recognized him and would dive on him when he was driving the corpse cart, stabbing at his hat and croaking loudly. Every evening, other creatures ventured out of the forest to dig in the newly covered graves. Not even the quicklime we used in the pit graves deterred them completely. Every morning, I made a brief tour of our most recent graves to fill in little tunnels and holes dug during the night. I felt as if I were under siege. My growing hedge, lovely as it was, would never keep out such creatures, and I reluctantly concluded that Colonel Haren had been right; a stone wall was needed.

  I had not slept well any night since Olikea and I had quarreled. I still dreamed of her, and dreamed too of the wondrous foods from that “other side.” But I couldn’t quite reach them. I walked there, but I walked there knowing it was a dream. The food I ate in those dreams was substanceless and unsatisfying. I would see Olikea, but always at a distance. If I called to her, she did not turn her head. If I followed her, as I inevitably did in those dreams, I could never catch up with her.

  The days became weeks, and then a month. We toiled on, barely able to keep ahead of the dead. The stink of decay and the burning of lye in my nostrils became one sensation in my mind. Even when I heated water and washed with soap, I could not cleanse the smells of my profession away. The lime we sprinkled in the ditch graves drifted and made raw patches on my skin. Worst of all was the terrible hunger that burned in me constantly now that I no longer had the forest foods that Olikea had brought me. The food I ate should have been enough to sustain me; instead it was not even a taunt to the deeper hunger that devoured me from within.

  And in the midst of death and stench and plague, summer blossomed around us. The days were lovely, long and bright under blue skies. Butterflies danced above the flowers I had moved into the graveyard, and songbirds sang in the trees at the edge of the forest. My “hedge” flourished, and smaller bushes sprang up in the shade my little trees provided.

  The bony hands of the plague respected neither age nor rank. We filled one ditch grave and started another. We buried tiny babies and old men, delicate little girls and brawny men. That long hot day had brought the body of Dale Hardy. He was the rowdy who had put himself forth as the man to give me a beating the day that Carsina had said such foul things about me. The plague had taken him down swiftly, Ebrooks told me. He hadn’t lingered to die of the fever but had choked to death on his own vomit the first day he sickened. I thought of how he had stood in the street and threatened me that day. I could have taken satisfaction in his death. Instead I only pitied him, felled in his prime so ignominiously.

  It was late afternoon when we finished filling the second ditch. In an obscene way, it reminded me of watching the cook in my father’s kitchen layer ingredients into a casserole. Instead of meat and gravy and potatoes and carrots, we layered bodies and lime and earth and bodies and lime and earth until we finally mounded earth over the whole of it.

  “That’s it,” I decided when the mound was patted smooth as a pie crust. I took my vinegar mask from my face and wiped my brow with it. With the last bodies covered, the air smelled almost clean. “That’s enough for today, boys. Tomorrow we’ll dig a fresh ditch and begin again.”

  “Pray the good god that it’s the last pit this season,” Kesey suggested, and “Amen,” both of my carpenters-turned-gravediggers responded.

  “It has to stop soon. Doesn’t it?” I asked them.

  “It’ll stop when it stops,” Kesey replied. “The rains always end it. But sometimes it stops sooner. I heard a rumor in town about some special water that might cure it. Some spring water that a doctor back west has been trying on people. The courier that brought the news said he’d heard from the courier before him that they were trying to get some to us here, before the end of the plague season, to see if it really worked or not.”

  “Did you hear the doctor’s name?” I asked, wondering if Spink had written to Amicas and if he had acted on it.

  Kesey shrugged and shook his head. We had shouldered our shovels and were making our way back to the tool shed when we heard a sound we all dreaded: the clop and creak of a team pulling a laden wagon up the hill to the cemetery. “Can’t they just stop dying for one day?” Kesey asked me pathetically.

  “I think they would if they could,” I replied, and one of my diggers smiled grimly.

  “Those poor devils will just have to lie bare under the moonlight for tonight,” Kesey observed, and I shrugged. It would not be the first time that shrouded bodies h
ad had to wait for a fresh grave. But like Kesey, I prayed it might be the last.

  Ebrooks was the driver. He got down stiffly from the cart. “You boys had better help me unload if you want to ride back to town,” he suggested, and we began our grim task. There were seven of them. Ebrooks, knowing my insistence, handed me a list of names. I thrust them into my pocket and helped the other men drag the corpses from the cart. Three men, a boy, and three women we laid out side by side. Kesey had brought a fresh supply of pitch torches from town. Ebrooks helped me set up a circle of them around the unburied bodies. Then the others climbed up on the wagon, bade me farewell, and headed back to town as the long-awaited night began to flow across the land. I hoped it would bring a little coolness with it. I kindled the torches. They burned straight, nearly unwavering, in the calm summer evening.

  I went back to my cabin, washed my face and hands, drank deeply, and then turned to the cold meal Kesey had brought me. There was bread and meat and cheese. It was good enough food, and I devoured it hungrily but as usual felt no satisfaction in it. It was only food, and I’d learned that the hunger that burned me most was not a hunger for food. I forced myself to set aside a portion to break my fast the next day, and left my table as hungry as when I’d sat down.

  I washed up my few dishes and set them aside. With a sigh, I took out what had become a ledger. I opened it to the current page, and unfolded the scrap of paper that Ebrooks had given me. He was not a lettered man; most often he depended on the family of the dead or whoever was on duty at the infirmary to write down the names for him. Sometimes there was only a tally mark on the page. I entered the names as he had given them to me. They’d go into a ditch grave tomorrow; there was little point any more in worrying about the order in which I wrote them down. And so I logged Eldafleur Sims, Coby Tarn, Rufus Lear, Joffra Keel, A Retired Soldier, Carsina Thayer—

  I set down my pen. I looked at the name on the list, and the name my hand had so obligingly written. Hadn’t my Carsina been betrothed to a Captain Thayer? My nervous fingers scrabbled lightly against the tabletop. Carsina Grenalter. Carsina Thayer. Many couples wed hastily in the face of the plague. My friend at the academy, Gord, had done so. It seemed likely that Carsina had wed her handsome captain. No matter how foolish or shallow the attraction had been, Carsina had meant something to me. My first romance, and my first heartbreak. And today her body had been unloaded from a corpse cart and somehow I hadn’t even noticed. I rubbed my face and took up my pen again. Reddik Koverton was the last name, and I carefully entered it into the ledger. I blew on the ink to dry it and then closed it.

  Did I want to look on her again, dead?

  No. Of course not.

  Yes.

  However we had parted, whatever I had discovered about her, she had been my sister’s friend, a longtime friend of my family, and the first girl I’d ever kissed. Her love letters to me at the academy were still bundled in with my soldier son’s journal. Tears found their way to my weary eyes. I wouldn’t bury her in a ditch, with strangers tumbled beside her and lime eating away her flesh. I’d dig her a separate grave myself; she would not lie in a common hole.

  I put my face in my hands and sat like that at my table for a time. I knew that I was going to go out to look at her tonight. I could not decide if I was motivated by sentiment or morbid curiosity. It probably didn’t matter. I took my lantern and went out into the darkness.

  The circle of torches still burned. Nonetheless, I heard a squeak of alarm and then a rustling as I approached. Rats. I held my lantern high as I entered my torch circle. The seven bodies lay as we had left them. Of the three women, only one could be Carsina. I knew her by a single blonde curl that had escaped her shroud. Unlike the others, she was not wrapped in coarse white sacking. A fine fabric enveloped her, white linen with white lace worked along the edge of it, and someone had wound the sheet around her with care. I went down on one knee beside her and reached a hand toward her face. Then I drew my hand back. It wasn’t that I feared to see how the disease had ravaged her. I suddenly felt that I intruded. Someone had lovingly prepared her for the grave; who was I to loosen that cloth and look into a dead face that no longer belonged to me? Her name on the papers indicated that she had been a married woman at her death. I should respect that. I bowed my head and asked the good god to guide her into peace. Then I said simply, “Good night, Carsina.” I went back to my cabin.

  It was a warm night. The little cook fire in my hearth was down to a few coals. I gave it another two sticks of wood, more for the company of its light than for any other reason, sat down at my table again, and made my day’s entry in my journal. I closed it and put it away. Too tired to change, I lay down on my bed in my earth-stained clothes. For a time, I watched the shadows mirror the dance of my little fire in the corners of my ceiling. I thought of the women I’d loved in my life, not just Carsina and Tree Woman, but my mother and sisters and Epiny, even Amzil. I tried to work out why I’d loved each one and which sorts of love were real, but came to no solid conclusions. I’d been born to love my mother and sisters, and perhaps I had to include Epiny on that list as well. Tree Woman I’d loved; I knew that without knowing the details of how my other self had bonded to her. I loved her still, in that other place. Amzil I loved perhaps for no better reason than that I thought she needed someone to love her. I even thought of poor, unfortunate Fala. We’d shared no more than an evening of closeness. Did the brevity of that relationship mean that I couldn’t call it love? It had certainly been something beyond lust.

  And Olikea? Yes. I loved her. Not as a good Gernian loves his good Gernian wife, not with romance and vows and a shared hearth until the end of my days. I loved her as I had come to love her forest, as a thing that gave me delight but never offered me mastery or any degree of control. I had no partnership with Olikea. She did not want me to provide for her or protect her. On the contrary, she had seen herself in the role of provider. I wondered if we could ever truly know one another, and concluded the opportunity for that was gone. I’d forsaken her in this world, and she’d turned away from me in that other world. We knew remarkably little of one another. But did I really know any more of Amzil than I did of her? I knew Amzil better only in that we shared a culture. She was still as great a mystery to me as Olikea was.

  The shadows were fading as my fire died. I repeated my prayer for Carsina, and added one for my mother and Elisi as well. I thought of the women who had passed beyond my reach and the women who remained to me, and resolved that I would treat Epiny, Amzil, and Yaril better while I had the opportunity to do so. On that thought, I turned my lamp wick down as low as it would go and closed my eyes for sleep.

  Perhaps my evening thoughts had paved the way to her. I dreamwalked strongly that night, and my footsteps led me not in pursuit of Olikea, but to a stump in the old forest. The tree that had grown up from the fallen trunk of Tree Woman’s tree stood straight and tall. I now recognized that my hedge trees were of the same kind, and that they were growing very well indeed; I touched it fondly, and felt an echo of Tree Woman’s presence. I walked slowly to the stump and sat down with my back to it. “I miss you, Lisana. I miss you terribly.”

  “Oh, you are a cruel one,” she rebuked me, but still she reached to take my hand. “To call me at last by my name at such a time. Did you know how hearing that from your lips would wring my heart? But it is too late, Soldier’s Boy. I can do nothing to spare you from what is to come. You’ve brought it on yourself. Still, if I could, I would save you somehow.”

  She was not there in the old way she had once been. She was a dream within a dream. I could feel the warmth of her hands around mine, but I could not enfold them. When I turned to embrace her, I felt only the rough bark of her fallen tree’s trunk. I drew back from her. If I could not touch her, at least I could see her. She was in the first guise in which I’d ever seen her. She was an immensely fat woman in her middle years. Her streaky hair tangled against the bark of her tree as if it were tendrils uniting her w
ith it. And, of course, they were. Her eyes smiled at me; they remained unchanged regardless of what guise she showed me. And I discovered that truly her body no longer mattered to me. She was as dear to me in this form as she had been in those unremembered times when we had first come together. She had folded her hands on top of her ample belly. Her hands reminded me of little cat’s feet. They were small, and the skin on the back of them was sooty dark, fading to a lighter speckling on her forearms. I wanted to kiss them; the most I could do was hover my hand over hers, feeling a ghost warmth. “Why aren’t you here?” I demanded.

  She smiled in a bittersweet way. “Someone used iron magic here, and cut down my tree. It fell in both worlds; you have noticed this, perhaps?”

  I lowered my eyes in shame. “But it did not kill you.”

  “No. But it weakened me. A hundred years from now, perhaps I shall have a quarter of the strength I once had. Then, perhaps, we can kiss and touch as we used to.”

  “It seems a very long time to wait.”

  She nodded, not in agreement but confirming her own thoughts. “And that is where our worlds do not align, Soldier’s Boy. A hundred years from now, if our people prevail, the soil here will be a bit deeper, the girth of the trees will be greater, and little else will have changed. The same flowers will bloom, the same pollen will drift, and the same butterflies will float among the foliage. I am happy to wait a hundred years for that. What will be here if the intruders prevail, Soldier’s Boy? What will you wait a hundred years to see?”

  I thought of the Gernian answer to that. A wide road up into and through the Barrier Mountains would lead to the land beyond and eventually the sea. The king was open about his ambition. Those lands were largely unsettled. Gernia could have a new seacoast with access to trade. Goods would flow from the eastern seaboard into Gernia. There would be growth and prosperity. New farms, burgeoning towns. None of that was bad. But I could no longer say with certainty that it was better than what was here now.