by Robin Hobb
I had primed Soldier’s Boy to let me escape to her, and I had. Somehow I had brought shreds of his awareness with me. If he knew I was present, he did not struggle against me. Perhaps he thought he merely dreamed of his beloved. I know that the smell and taste and warmth of her drowned the question I had been so desperate to ask her. I was here with her, and now was the only time that mattered.
We were both large people. This was no frantic and athletic coupling. Between two such as we, lovemaking was a stately and regal dance, a slow process of give-and-take. Neither of us was coy nor were we shy. The size of our bodies did not permit those types of hesitation. We accommodated each other without awkwardness, and if flesh was sometimes a barrier, it was erotic as well. It forced us to move slowly; every contact was well considered. Her thighs were thick and soft as I pressed myself against her. The bounty of her breasts was a soft cushion between us. Each guided the other to what was most pleasurable, and I enjoyed Lisana’s arousal as fully as my own. In those moments, I could recall in flashes that she had been his teacher in these matters, and he had delighted in learning his lessons well. As I held her and loved her, I could glory in the soft wealth of her skin. Her fingers walked the dappling on my skin, and in her touch, I rejoiced that I had marked myself as one of her own kind.
All wonders must have an end. A drift of leaves had been our bed. Now we lay sprawled among them. Lisana’s eyes were closed but the smile on her face told me she was not even close to sleep. She was savoring our enjoyment of each other, and the touch of the weakened autumn sun and even the teasing wind that now chased a shiver across her. I laughed to see her shudder like a tickled cat and she opened her eyes. She sighed and lifted my hand to her lips, to kiss my palm again. With my hand still against her lips, she said softly, “I had a fancy the other day. Would you like to hear it?”
“Of course.”
“My trunk has fallen, you know. But I rise again as a sapling from the trunk.”
“I know that. Oh, my love, I am so sorry that I—”
“Hush. Enough of that. It has been said enough already. Listen. The tip of the tree that once was me thrust into the earth when I fell. And now I have felt a stirring there. A second tree will rise from the nursery that my trunk has become. I can feel it growing there, connected to me. Me and yet not me.”
“Just as I am,” I said. I already knew the direction of her thought and liked it.
“When you die,” she said carefully, without malice, for death did not mean to her or to Soldier’s Boy what it might have meant to a Gernian.
I seized the words from her. “When I die, I will be brought to that tree. I will see that it is so, Lisana. That tree, and no other. And we shall always be together. Oh, would that it would happen soon.”
“Oh, not too soon,” she chided me. “You have the task of your magic to complete. Now that you are one, surely you will succeed. But if you died before you complete it—” She paused and her smile faltered a little at the dread thought that followed it. “If you die before the intruders are driven away and the Vale of the Ancestor Trees secured against them, then I fear that our reunion will be short-lived.” She paused, and then sighed, knowing she was letting the concerns of the world intrude on our brief time together.
“I have felt the changes,” she said. “Felt them, but no one has come to tell me what is happening. Kinrove’s power has faded, I think. When his dance stopped, it was like the sudden cessation of a great wind. I had almost forgotten what it was like when only peace filled our valley. For a time, a very short time, I drank it in as one drinks cool water after drought. I told myself it meant that you had solved the riddle of your magic and knew what you would do with your power. I dared to savor the peace that returned to the valley of our ancestors. But it was not for long.”
“The dance started again,” I responded.
“Did it?” She looked surprised. “I have not felt it here if it did. No. There were disturbances of another sort.” She looked down at the hand I still clasped and sighed again. “They are tough, those Jhernians, like plants that when chopped and mangled still send down roots and push up leaves again. Two days after Kinrove’s dance failed, I felt them at the edges of the forest. The next day, they were hunting there. Two days after that, they had mustered their slaves and put them to work, despite the snow on the ground. The poor creatures are near naked as frogs in the cold. I suppose their work warms them. Already, they have undone some of the barrier your magic raised against them.”
“Not my doing, for the most part,” I said, and again I felt it was Soldier’s Boy speaking through me. I let him. I was hearing what I most wished to know. I didn’t like what I was learning, but it was what I needed to know. In the next moment, I liked it even less. “Nevare spent the magic we had so painstakingly gathered. All the magic I had harvested from the Spindle, gone in three short breaths. I still cannot believe it.”
She was quiet for a time. Then she concurred with, “Neither can I. Oh, Soldier’s Boy, are we any closer to a solution? Is your task nearly done?”
He let go of her soft hand and made angry fists of his hands. “That is precisely the problem, Lisana. All that I must do for the magic, I did. Everything that it asked me to do, I accomplished. I gave the rock. I stopped the Spindle. I kept and left the book. All these things I have done, yet the magic has not worked. I do not know any more what it wants of me. Only those three things were clear to me, and I have done them. When I do my tasks and the magic does nothing, what am I to do?”
For a long time, there was silence between them. They reclined together in the loose leaves, and her touch against him was sweet, but it could not free him from his torment. Finally she asked in a soft, low voice, “What will you do?”
He had picked up a red leaf and been considering it. Now he crushed it in his hand and let the pieces fall. “I had thought to gather a great deal of magic, and use it to unite all of the People under one Great One. I had thought that then I would move against the Gernians in a way they would understand. I went to their schools. I know how the Landsingers drove the Gernians from their territory and claimed it back from them. What has worked once, I thought, might well work again. Let them see us as a mighty people with weapons they cannot copy or prevail against.”
“A mighty people?”
He rubbed his face with both hands. “Do you remember the story you told me of the children and the bear? The bear wished to have the fish the children had caught. They knew if they ran, the bear would chase them down.”
“So they spread their cloak between them, to make themselves appear as if they were a single creature larger than the bear. And they shouted and threw stones and ran at the bear. And he fled.”
“Exactly,” Soldier’s Boy told her. “If we can perhaps appear to be a greater force than we are, if we can confront them with a size and a power they don’t expect, then perhaps they will turn and run.”
“That would take time. For years, Kinrove has tried to gather the People into a single unit. With all of his magic, he could not.”
“And I do not have time. This young Great One, Dasie, has forced my hand. She is the one who destroyed Kinrove’s dance, in the name of freeing our own people. Lisana, she brought iron among the People, used iron against a Great One to get her way. She has threatened me with iron if I try to oppose her. All I can do is take my plan and try to make her a part of it. She is the one, the ‘queen’ that the intruders will see opposing them. And I have told her that we must allow Kinrove to restore his dance. Without it, we have no hope of success in our attack against the intruders.”
She had been watching his face as he spoke, and now her eyes were wide with alarm. “You will attack them?”
“Yes.” He spoke the word in a harsh voice that made it plain it was not his desire but that he would do it. “As soon as we are ready. Kinrove is going to make a summons to restore his dance. I do not know how swiftly the dance magic will be restored. But it must work against the Gernian
s for some time before we attack; men do not fight well when their morale is damaged.”
She turned her head, looking at him, but I felt she was actually looking for me in his eyes. She confirmed it when she spoke. “This is not something you learned from me, Soldier’s Boy. This comes from Nevare, and the school in the west. Almost I wish you had not taken him into you.”
He gave a harsh laugh. “Yes. It does. We will turn their own tactics against them.”
She looked stricken. “How can you defeat the enemy when you have become the enemy? Soldier’s Boy, this is not our way. And it is not the magic’s way. You cannot say the magic prompts you to do this.”
He looked at her, and then away. I could feel something building in him. His voice was hard when he spoke. “No. I’ve told you. It isn’t the magic’s way. It’s my way. It’s what I am forced to do when I have done all the magic has commanded me, and none of it has worked. Many a night have I lain awake, thinking and thinking, until my brain pounds inside my skull. If the magic will not tell me what it wants, it must be because I already know what I must do. Why, then, did the magic choose me? Because it knew I would go to that school and learn these things, and that I could then turn their own teachings against them.”
“What will you do?” she asked him in a voice full of dread.
He shifted away from her. Some part of him was shamed. “Whatever I must,” he replied in a determined voice.
“Tell me,” she demanded.
“You will not like it.”
“You do not like it! I can feel that. But you will do it. And if you can do it, then you can tell me what it is you plan to do.”
Now he sat up, pulling his body away from hers. I suddenly knew that was a fair measure of how distasteful he found the task he had planned. He could not speak of it while cradling the body of the woman he loved. “I will attack them, just as they have attacked so many others.”
“Without warning?”
“They have had years of warning. They have not heeded it. Besides, my force is not so great that I can afford to give them warning. Alarmed, they could stand against us, perhaps even best us. So, yes, we will attack them without warning.”
“Where?” she demanded. She was determined to hear the worst of it. “Will you attack them while they are working on their road? Will you attack the slaves, poor creatures with no weapons and scarcely a thread to their backs?”
He turned away from her and looked across the valley. “No,” he said, and all life was gone from his voice. It held only death. “We will attack the town and the fort. At night. When they are sleeping in their beds.” He turned back to her before she could ask her next question. “All of them. Any of them we can kill. I do not have a large enough force that I can begin by being merciful.”
A very long silence passed. “And when will you do this?” she asked at last.
“As soon as we are ready,” he replied coldly. “I hope that will be before the end of winter. Dark and cold can be our allies.”
“She will still be heavy with child. Or perhaps recovering from birth, with a newborn at her breast.”
Soldier’s Boy grew so still at her words that his stillness held me as well. Slowly, slowly it came to me that Lisana spoke of Epiny. I tried to reckon the time backward and could not. Was she a mother already?
Soldier’s Boy answered a question that Lisana had not asked. “I cannot care about such things. He did not care about such things among my people, when he had the upper hand.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Look at what he did to you!” Soldier’s Boy exclaimed with long-banked anger.
“He didn’t kill me,” she pointed out quietly.
“He nearly did.”
“But he didn’t. And he tried to stop the cutting of the ancestor trees.”
“He was feeble at it.”
“But he tried.”
“That isn’t enough.”
“And he brings you to me now, when you could not come by yourself.”
“What?”
She cocked her head at him. “You did not know this? You do not feel him, holding you here? I thought you had made your truce with each other. But for Nevare reaching toward me, we could not touch now.”
“I—he is here? He spies on us! He spies on my plans!”
He made a swipe at my presence, and for an instant, all was silence and blackness.
“No!” I cried out voicelessly and fought back. I fought back with a savagery far beyond any physical confrontation I had ever been in. It is impossible to convey how much I abhorred the idea of being boxed once more. “I would rather be dead. I would rather not exist. I would rather we both ceased to exist!” I clung to his awareness, refusing to let him shed me. He tried to pull his consciousness free of me. I responded by turning abruptly away from Lisana and sealing him off from her. Suddenly, he was sitting up in his bed, staring wildly into darkness, bereft of her.
“No!” he shouted in his turn, rousing feeders. Beside him, Olikea sat up in alarm. “Nevare? What is it? Are you ill?”
“No. Leave me alone! All of you! Leave me alone!” Olikea’s gentle touch was the last thing he wanted, and he could not bear the concerned scrutiny of the feeders who had rushed to his side.
“Shall I light lamps?”
“Is he hungry?”
“Does he have a fever?”
“A nightmare. Perhaps it was just a nightmare?”
I suddenly glimpsed just how little privacy was left to him in his wonderful life as a Great Man. Intruding hands touched his face and neck, seeking for signs of fever or chill. Lamps were already being lit. I took advantage of their distracting him and made more secure my grip on his awareness. “You cannot banish me,” I told him. “I will not let you. And while you fight me and try to box me, I promise you, I will not let you see Lisana at all. I will keep her from you. This was my body and I will not be pushed out of it. You and I will come to terms now.”
“Leave me alone!” he bellowed again, and I was not sure if he spoke to his clustering feeders or to me. They fell back from him in dismay. Olikea seemed affronted, but she turned her temper on the others.
“Get back from him. Leave him alone. All he did was to shout in his sleep. Let him go back to sleep and stop bothering him!” She literally slapped at hands until the confused and still-sleepy feeders moved away from him and back to their pallets. He was relieved until Olikea put comforting arms around him. “Let’s just go back to sleep,” she suggested.
Her warm embrace felt completely wrong. He shrugged free of it. “No. You sleep. I need to sit up and think for a time. Alone.” He swung his feet over the side of the bed. I was still firmly attached to his awareness and thus knew how out of character this was for a Great One. He rose from his bed and walked to the hearth. To the feeder there, he said brusquely but not unkindly, “Go to sleep. I will tend the fire for a time.”
The poor confused man rose, not sure if he had displeased the Great One somehow. Obediently, he retreated to an empty pallet at the far end of the room. Soldier’s Boy pushed his big chair closer to the hearth and then sat down in it. Olikea lay on her side in the bed, staring at him. He looked into the flames.
“What do you want?” He didn’t speak the words aloud, only to me.
“Not to be crushed.” That was only the barest tip of what I wanted, but we had to start there.
He scratched his head as if he could reach inside and tear me out. It felt foreign to me; my hair had grown long, longer than I’d ever worn it. “I want to see Lisana,” he countered.
“We might find an agreement there. But only if I am allowed to visit Epiny, too.”
“No. You would warn her of my plans.”
“Of course I would! Your plans are evil.”
“No more evil than the road,” he retorted.
“The road is evil,” I agreed, surprising myself. I think it shocked him. He was silent for a moment. “I tried to stop the road,” I pointed out to him.
“Perhaps. But you failed.”
“That doesn’t mean that slaughter is the only option left to you.”
“Tell me another one, then.”
“Talk. Negotiate.”
“You tried that already. Until there is a slaughter, no one will seriously negotiate with us.”
When I could not think of an immediate response, he pushed his advantage. “You know it’s true. It’s the only thing that will work.”
“There has to be another way.”
“Tell me what it is, and I’ll try it. Your feeble negotiations didn’t work. Kinrove’s dance held them at bay but it only buys us time. The magic hasn’t worked. What else am I to do, Nevare? Let the road come through? Let the ancestor trees fall, including Lisana’s? Let the Gernians destroy everything that we are? Would you like that? To see Olikea working as a whore, to see Likari a beggar addicted to tobacco?”
“No. That’s not what I want.”
He took a long, deep breath. “Well. At least there seems to be a few things we agree on.”
“And many that we do not.”
He did not respond to that. And when his silence stretched longer, I knew that he had no more idea of what would become of us than I did.
We spent the rest of that long night staring into the fire, looking for answers that were not there.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE SUMMONING
By dawn, I think we were resigned to what should have been obvious from the start. We were bound together. One might dominate over the other for a time, but neither of us would ever willingly surrender to the other. Our loyalties conflicted, but at least Soldier’s Boy could take comfort in the fact that I did not wish to see the end of his people and their way of life.
I had no such consolation to fall back on. In this, I felt he was more my father’s son than I was. He saw his plan as a military necessity, the lone remaining solution to driving the intruders away from the ancestral trees. My sole weapon to hold him back was that without me, he could not reach Lisana. That seemed a feeble weapon to me, but it was all I had. So we sat together, two men confined to one body, each possessing an ability the other desperately wanted.