by Robin Hobb
With that road, my king hoped to restore Gernia to greatness. And I looked on its delay and destruction with pleasure. Who was I?
I gazed down on the aborted road again. It pointed straight toward me. Well, not precisely straight. It would cross the valley and then climb the hill I was standing on…Slowly I turned my head to the left, to look back the way I had come. Tree Woman. Lisana. Her stump and fallen trunk were exactly in the path of the road. If the tree cutting continued, she would fall to the axe. I looked back at the road, cold flowing through my veins. At the end of the construction, two freshly fallen giants sprawled in a welter of broken limbs. They’d taken other, smaller trees down with them as they fell. From my vantage point, the new rent in the forest canopy looked like a disease eroding the green flesh of the living forest below me. And the gash was heading directly toward my lover’s tree.
I watched the men toiling below. The sounds of their cursing and shouted commands could not reach me here. But I could smell the smoke of last night’s fire and see the steady procession of wagons and teams and road crews as they toiled like ants mending a nest. How long would it take them to fix the broken culvert and patch the road? A few days, if they were industrious. How long to build new wagons and scrapers, how long to build new sheds? A few weeks at most. And then the work would press on. The magical fear that the Specks had created still oozed down from the forest to deter the workers and sap their wills. But, fool that I was, I’d given the commander the means to overcome even that. I’d been the one to suggest that men half drunk on liquor or drugged with laudanum would not feel the fear as keenly and could work despite it. I’d even heard that some of the penal workers now craved the intoxicants so much that they clamored to be on the work details at the road’s end. The drugged and desensitized men would push the road on into the forest. I’d enabled that. It had almost earned me a promotion.
I recognized uncomfortably that my heart was turning more and more toward a forest way of thinking. The divide in me ran deep now. I was still a Gernian, but that was no longer sufficient reason to believe that the King’s Road must be pushed through at all costs. I glanced back toward Tree Woman’s stump. No. The cost to me alone was too high. It had to be stopped.
How?
I stood for a long time as the afternoon waned, watching the men and teams flailing away at their tasks. Even at this distance, I could see that the workers were impaired. No one moved briskly and mishaps abounded. A wagon trying to turn too tightly with a load of rock tipped over and dumped its cargo. An hour later, another wagon mired, and a third driver, trying to get past the mired wagon, drove his team into the ditch and overset his load there.
Yet for all that, the work was progressing. It might be tomorrow before they had replaced the culverts, and perhaps even another day before they had a drivable surface on the road there. But eventually, like patient insects, they would get it done. And then they would push on once more, cutting inexorably into the forest. Did it matter to me if they cut down her tree next week or three years from now? I needed to stop them.
Yet no matter how I racked my brain, I could not come up with a plan. I’d gone to the Colonel before the plague descended on us and begged him to stop the road. I’d explained to him that the kaembra trees were sacred to the Specks, and that if we cut them, we could expect an all-out war with the forest people. He’d dismissed me and my concerns. Silly superstitions, he’d told me. Once the trees were cut and the Specks discovered that no great calamity befell them, he believed they could more readily adapt to the civilization we offered them. Not even for an instant did he pause to wonder if there might be a grain of truth in what the Specks believed about their trees.
When I asked if the road could not go around the kaembra trees, he pointed out that engineers had mapped out the best route, and it went past Gettys and through the mountain pass that traders had once used. For years, the resources of Gernia had been committed to building the road on that route. An alternate path had once been considered, one that would have gone past Mendy and the Fort to cut through the Barrier Mountains there. But to redirect the road-building effort to that route would mean adding years to the King’s project, not to mention absorbing the waste of all that had gone into pushing the road as far as Gettys and beyond it. No. Nothing so trivial as a stand of ancestral trees would halt the King of Gernia’s grand vision.
The Colonel was dead now, a victim of the Speck plague. The Specks had struck back at the tree cutters in the only way they had. They’d done the Dust Dance for the visiting officials from Old Thares and the inspection team, and in the process had infected everyone with the plague. I’d warned him of that, too. If the Colonel had ever reconsidered my words, he’d taken all such thoughts to the grave with him. Even if I’d been able to go into Gettys and talk to the new commander, my words would make no impression on him. The two realities, Gernian and Speck, simply did not meet. The Colonel had not even been able to grasp that the Specks were at war with us. He had thought that because they came yearly to trade with us, we’d reached an accord of sorts, and that they would slowly adopt our ways. I knew better. Each year, in the course of that “trading” time, they attacked us, deliberately spreading Speck plague among us.
Our peoples couldn’t even agree on what constituted a war.
I doubted the Specks knew of the magnitude of the blow they’d dealt us with the latest outbreak of plague. The Speck plague had struck down every visiting officer on the reviewing stand. General Brodg, our Commander in the East, had fallen, as well as his predecessor, the venerable General Prode. Those losses would echo throughout all of Gernia. And within the fort at Gettys most of our resident officers had fallen sick, drastically reducing the ratio of officers to enlisted men. The command at Gettys had been passed down three times in the space of a month. The man who had it now, Major Belford, had never commanded a post before. I wondered if the King would bother to replace him, and who would assume the position of Commander in the East. I wondered who would want it. Then I decided that such decisions no longer concerned me. I was a soldier no more. I wasn’t even sure I was a Gernian.
A resolve formed in me slowly. I needed to stop the road, not just to preserve Tree Woman, but for the sake of both peoples. I needed to make building the road an impossible task so that King Troven would either give up the idea or completely reroute his road far to the north, through Mendy and the Fort. Once the King had diverted his energies to that route and pass, Gettys as a military encampment would lose much of its value. It might be abandoned altogether. And that might be the end of the clash between Gernians and Specks. Perhaps we could go back to peaceful and sporadic trading; or perhaps it would be even better if all interaction between my peoples ceased.
I felt like a curtain was rising in my mind. The time for trying to reason with either people was gone; it was time for me to simply destroy the road. It was a very rudimentary strategy, but I still felt a lift in my spirits to have devised it. I felt a bit foolish as well. Why had I not found this determination before now? The answer to that was easy. Even if I now knew what I wished to do, I had very few ideas of how to implement my plans. There was small sense in planning to do a task that seemed impossible. Impossible for any ordinary man with ordinary means. But I was no longer an ordinary man, was I? I’d given way to the magic and accepted this task. I, Nevare Burvelle, was going to destroy the King’s Road.
It was why I’d been given the magic. Lisana and Jodoli, the Speck Great Man I’d met, had both insisted that my task was to turn back the intruders, the Gernians. They had told me that the magic had chosen me, had made me a Great One for that very task. The conclusion was inescapable. I was to use the magic to stop the road.
The only thing I still didn’t know was how.
The magic had been growing in me, like a fungus overtaking a piece of fruit, since I was fifteen years old. For several years, it had skulked beneath my awareness. Only when I left home to go to the Academy had I become aware that something s
trange lurked within me. And only after I’d contracted Speck plague and survived it did the magic begin to change my body so radically. It had cloaked me in the fat that had made me an object of ridicule and disdain and hampered not just my physical life but my military career. Yet in all the years that it had possessed me and changed me, I’d only managed to use it for my own ends a few times. For the most part, it used me.
It had used me to spy on my people, to better understand “the intruders” and how they might be fought. It had used me to spread the Speck plague in our capital city and all through our Cavalla Academy, destroying a whole generation of young officers. It had used me again to know when best to strike in Gettys, so that the entire inspection team of officers and nobles from the West might be wiped out.
Every time I had managed to use the magic, even with the best of intentions, the magic had found a way to turn it back on me. Both Lisana and Scout Hitch had warned me against trying to use the magic for my own ends. About the only thing I’d learned about how the magic was actually wielded was that it flamed in response to my emotions. Logic could not wield it, nor could wishful thinking ignite it. It only boiled through my blood when my heart was completely involved. When I was angry or frightened or seething with hate, then the magic came to me without effort, and the urge to use it became well nigh irresistible. At any other time, attempting to bend it to my will was impossible. It bothered me, and not a little, that logic rather than emotion was prompting me to turn the magic against the road itself. Was not that a very Gernian reaction to a Speck problem? But perhaps that was why the magic had chosen me. Still, if I was going to use magic to stop the road being built, I would first have to find the heart to do it.
I turned my head and looked toward Lisana’s stump. I thought of how I had nearly killed her, and what it had meant to me to discover that she was still alive. I thought of the sapling that had once been a branch, and how it rose from the fallen trunk of her tree. I’d seen that happen before. Nursery logs, they were called, when a row of branches on a fallen tree took to growing as if they were trees. But in Lisana’s case, only one tree was rising from her fallen trunk. And if the road came through here, there would soon be none at all.
I held that thought as I walked down the hill toward the end of the road. It was steep going until I found the deer trail that cut across the face of the hill. I followed it down and the canopy of the forest closed over me once more, creating an early twilight. I walked in that gentle dimness, smelling the sweetness of the living earth. Life surrounded me. I had slowly come to understand that in my months of living by the eaves of the forest, but only today did the thought form itself clearly in my mind. All my life, I’d been accustomed to thinking of life as things that moved: rabbits, dogs, fish, other people. Life that mattered had been life like me, life that breathed and bled, life that ate and slept. I’d been aware of that other layer of life, of the still but living things that supported it all, but I’d thought of it as the lower layer, as the less important stratum of life.
Empty prairie was for plowing or grazing; land that was too poor for farming or cattle was wasteland. I’d never lived near a forest like this, but when I’d come to one, I’d understood why it existed. The trees were to be taken for lumber. The land had to be cleared to become useful. The idea that forest or prairie or even wasteland should be left as it was had never occurred to me. What good was land until it was tamed? What good was a piece of earth that did not grow wheat or fruit trees or grass for cattle? The value of every bit of land I’d ever trodden, I’d reckoned in terms of how it could benefit a man. Now I saw it with the eyes of a forest mage. Here life balanced as it had for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Sunlight and water were all that was required for the trees to grow. The trees made the food that fed not only whatever moving creatures might venture through this territory, but also became the food that replenished the soil when their leaves fell to rot back into earth. This working system was as refined and precise as any piece of clockwork ever engineered by man. It worked perfectly.
But the road would break the clockwork of the forest system just as surely as an axe blow could shatter a fine watch. I’d seen the damage from the ridge and I’d seen it up close when I’d visited the road’s end. It wasn’t just the trees they cut to make a clear path. It was how the road builders made all the same in their path. Every dip in the earth was filled level, every rise cut to grade. The different layers of rock and gravel that made up the roadbed were inimical to the flow of the forest life. The road was a barrier of deadness bisecting the forest heart.
The swath of death was wider than the road itself. Streams were diverted into culverts or blocked off. Brooks pooled and swamped land they had once drained and fed. The cut of the road severed roots beneath the earth, crippling the trees to either side of it. The construction slashed a great gash in the forest roof, admitting light where all had lived in gentle dimness for generations. The edges of the road were a crusty scab, and the road itself was like blood poisoning creeping up a man’s veins toward his heart. Once the road had cut its way through the forest and across the mountains, the forest would never be the same. It would be an entity divided, and from that division, other roads and trails and byways would spread out into the forest as if the road had its own anti-life network of roots and tendrils.
Men would make more paths, with trails and byways branching out from them. Beneath that ever-spreading network of roads and paths and trails, nothing lived. Could death grow? I suddenly perceived that it could. Its spreading network could cut the living world into smaller and smaller sections, until no section was large enough to survive.
I’d reached the bottom of the hill. There was a stream there, and I paused to drink long of its cool, sweet water. The last time I’d been here, I’d come only in spirit, and Epiny had been with me. Epiny. For a moment, I thought of her, and for the moment, I was Nevare again. I hoped she would not mourn me too deeply or too long. I hoped her sorrow over my supposed death would not affect her pregnancy. And then I blinked, and those feelings and thoughts receded from the forefront of my mind. I became once more the forest mage, intent on my task.
I had to stop the road. I had to be ruthless. I had the power if first I could bring it up to strength.
It seemed weeks, no, months ago that I had hovered by this stream as a disembodied entity and Epiny had picked and sampled some of the scarlet drupes. In real time, it had been but a few days, and the heavily laden berry bush still offered me a plenitude of fruit. After I had slaked my thirst, I sat down beside it and methodically began to strip it of berries. They were potent food for the magic, and as I ate them, I felt my reserves filling. I replenished the magic I had burned to escape the Gernian prison and the sustenance that Lisana’s tree had drawn from me. The wounds in my hands healed and the ache in the wrists quieted and then faded to nothing. I felt the sagging skin of my belly tighten as I consumed it. I filled myself with magic more than I did with food.
Large and heavy as I was, the magic lent me stealth. I moved through the woods with the same lumbering grace that bear and elk possess. In the lost sky above me, the sun was foundering to the west. The dimness in the forest deepened toward full darkness. I felt no weariness, even though I could not recall the last time I had slept a full and comfortable night. I was charged with both magic and purpose. Like a heavy shadow, I slipped through the forest toward the road’s end.
I reached it as the crews were finishing their day’s labor. Epiny’s sabotage had been effective in its limited way. Today, the crews had not cut into any new trees or finished hauling away the bodies of the trees they had felled. Instead, all their time had been taken up with salvaging wagons and equipment and repairing the destroyed culverts to make the road passable once more. I stood in the gloomy shelter of the forest and watched them leave. Prisoners did the heavy labor of the road building, the backbreaking shovel, axe, and saw work. The prisoners had their overseers, and in turn, the overseers were backed up by
the soldiers. Now, as the day ended, the last load of ragged, sweating prisoners shuffled to the remaining wagons. Some of the crew wore leg irons and were shackled into teams. Others enjoyed relative freedom in manacles. A manacled man can still use a shovel or an axe. Their chains clanked loudly as they climbed awkwardly into the heavy wagons that would carry them back to Gettys and their confinement for the night.
I waited until night was full before I moved. I ghosted along in the shelter of the trees, surveying the work that had been done today. I was not pleased to see that they had set a guard. Epiny’s sabotage had alarmed them, I supposed. A lantern burned in one of the surviving equipment sheds. I slunk closer, and perceived that four men had been left on watch there. They sat sullenly around the tail of a wagon, their lantern in the middle of it, and passed round a bottle of rum. I did not envy them their lonely vigil. If I opened my awareness, I could feel the insistent itching of the fear, the prickling sensation that evil watched them and waited its opportunity to pick them off, one by one. Their loaded long guns leaned upright against the wagon’s open bed, one beside each man. I frowned at that. Drunken fearful men would be quick to lunge for their weapons. The magic could heal me very quickly, but did not make me proof against instantaneous death.
I resolved I would give them no cause for alarm. Not yet.
I took in a deep breath of night and held it. I turned my eyes away from the yellow lantern light of the watchmen. I breathed out slowly, expelling the darkness I had held within me. The blackness of night hovered round me in a cloud. Cloaked in darkness, I stepped softly forward. Deep moss cushioned my footfalls as I moved away from the watchmen. Tree branches drew aside from me; bushes swayed from my path silently lest they betray me with a rustle. I had no light but I did not need it. I was a part of the forest around me and I came into full awareness of it.