Fools Errand

by Robin Hobb

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  My story hung unfinished in the air between us.

  I sighed. “There was little I could do about what they knew or didn't know, save deny it. Nighteyes and I needed what they knew. They alone could teach us what we had to learn. ”

  He nodded, and stacked cheese atop bread before biting into it. He waited for me to continue.

  The words came to me slowly. I did not like to recall that year. Nonetheless, I learned much, not just from Rolf's deliberate teaching, but by simple exposure to the Old Blood community. “Rolf was not the best of teachers. He was shorttempered and impatient, especially around mealtimes, much inclined to cuff and growl, and sometimes roar his frustration at a slow student. He simply could not grasp how completely ignorant I was of Old Blood ways and customs. I suppose by his lights I was as illmannered as a deliberately rude child. My 'loud' Witconversations with Nighteyes spoiled hunting for other bonded predators. I had never known that we must announce our presence through the Wit if we shifted territory. In my days at Buckkeep, I had never even known that community existed among the Witted ones, let alone that they had customs of their own. ”

  “Wait,” the Fool interrupted me. “Then you are saying that Witted ones can share thoughts with each other, just as thoughts can be exchanged through the Skill. ” He seemed very excited at the idea.

  “No. ” I shook my head. “It's not like that. I can sense if another Witted one is speaking with his bondbeast . . . if they are careless and free in their conversing, as Nighteyes and I used to be. Then I will be aware of the Wit being used, even though I am not privy to the thoughts they share. It's like the humming of a harp string. ” I smiled ruefully. “That was how Burrich kept guard on me, to be sure I was not indulging in the Wit, once he was aware I had it. He kept his own walls firm against it. He did not use it, and he tried to screen himself from the beasts that reached toward him with it. For a long time, that kept him ignorant of my use of it. He had set Witwalls, similar to the Skillwalls that Verity taught me to set. But once he realized I was Witted, I think he lowered them, to oversee me. ” I paused at the Fool's puzzled gaze. “Do you understand?”

  “Not completely. But enough to take your meaning. But . . . can you overhear another Witted one's beast speaking to that Witted one, then?”

  I shook my head again, then nearly laughed at his baffled look. “It seems so natural to me, it is difficult to put it into words. ” I pondered a bit. “Imagine that you and I shared a personal language, one that only we two could interpret,”

  “Perhaps we do,” he offered with a smile.

  I continued doggedly. “The thoughts that Nighteyes and I share are our thoughts, and largely incomprehensible to anyone who overhears us using the Wit. That language has always been our own, but Rolf taught us to direct our thoughts specifically to one another, rather than flinging our Wit wide to the world. Another Witted one might be aware of us if he were specifically listening for us, but generally, our communication now blends with all the Witwhispering of the rest of the world. ”

  The Fool's brow was furrowed. “So only Nighteyes can speak to you?”

  “Nighteyes speaks most clearly to me. Sometimes, another creature, not bonded to me, will share thoughts with me, but the meaning is usually hard to follow; rather like trying to communicate with someone who speaks a foreign but similar language. There can be much hand waving and raised voices repeating words and gesturing. One catches the gist of the meaning with none of the niceties. ” I paused and pondered. "I think it is easier if the animal is bonded to another Witted one. Rolf's bear spoke to me once. And a ferret. And between Nighteyes and Burrich . . . it must have been oddly humiliating to Burrich, but he let Nighteyes speak to him when I was in Regal's dungeons.

  The understanding was imperfect, but it was good enough that Burrich and he could plot together to save me. "

  I wandered for a time in that memory, then pulled myself back to my tale. "Rolf taught me the basic courtesy of the Old Blood folk but he did not teach us gently; he was as prone to chastise before we were aware of our errors as afterward. Nighteyes was more tolerant of him than I was, perhaps because he was more amenable to a pack hierarchy. I think it was more difficult for me to learn from him, for I had grown accustomed to a certain amount of adult dignity. Had I come to him younger, I might have accepted more blindly the roughness of his teaching. My experiences of the preceding years had left me violent toward any person who showed aggression toward me. I think the first time I snarled back at him after he shouted at me for some error, it shocked him. He was cold and distant with me for the remainder of the day, and I perceived I must bow my head to his rough ways if I were to learn from him. And so I did, but it was like learning to control my temper all over again. As it was, I was often hardpressed to quell my anger toward him. His impatience with my slowness frustrated me as much as my 'human thinking' baffled him. On his worst days, he reminded me of the Skillmaster Galen, and he seemed as narrowminded and cruel as he spoke spitefully of how badly educated I had been amongst the unBlooded. I resented that he should speak so of folk that I regarded as my own. I knew too that he thought me a suspicious and distrustful man who never completely lowered all my barriers to him. I held back much from him, that is true. He demanded to know of my upbringing, of what I could recall of my parents, of when I had first felt my Old Blood stir in me. None of the sparse answers I gave him pleased him, and yet I could not go into detail without betraying too much of whom and what I had been. The little I did tell him provoked him so much that I am sure a fuller tale would have disgusted him. He approved that Burrich had prevented me JtrÊ

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  from bonding young, and yet condemned all his reasons for doing so. That I had still managed to form a bond with Smithy despite Burrich's watchfulness convinced him of my deceitful nature. Repeatedly, he came back to my wayward childhood as the root of all my problems in finding my Old Blood magic. Again, he reminded me of Galen disparaging the Bastard for trying to master the Skill, the magic of kings. Among a folk where I had thought finally to find acceptance, I discovered that yet again I was neither fish nor fowl. If I complained to Nighteyes at how he treated us, Rolf would snarl at me to stop whimpering to my wolf and apply myself to learning better ways. "

  Nighteyes learned more easily and often the wolf was the one to convey finally to me what Rolf had failed to rattle into me. Nighteyes also sensed more strongly than I did how much Rolf pitied him. The wolf did not react well to that, for Rolf's pity was based on the notion that I did not treat Nighteyes as well as I should. He took it amiss that I had been almost a grown man and Nighteyes little more than a cub at the time of our bonding. Over and over, Rolf rebuked me for treating Nighteyes as less than an equal, a distinction that both of us disputed.

  The first time Rolf and I butted heads over it was in the fashioning of our winter home. We selected a site convenient to Rolf and Holly's home, yet isolated enough that we would not intrude on one another. That first day, I began to build a cabin, while Nighteyes went hunting. When Rolf dropped by, he rebuked me for forcing Nighteyes to live in a dwelling that was entirely human. The structure of his own home incorporated a natural cave in the hillside, and was designed to be as much bear den as man house. He insisted that Nighteyes should dig a den into the hill face, and that I must then build my hut to incorporate it. When I conferred on this with Nighteyes, he replied that he had been accustomed to human dwellings since he was a pup, and he saw no reason why I should not do all the work to make a - , comfortable place for both of us. When I conveyed this to Rolf, he vented his temper at both of us explosively, telling Nighteyes he found nothing humorous in his surrendering his nature for the selfish comfort of his partner. It was so far from what either of us felt about the situation that we very nearly left Crowsneck right then. Nighteyes was the one who decided we must stay and learn. We followed Rolf's directions, and Nighteyes laboriously excavated a den fo
r himself and I built my hut around the mouth of it. The wolf spent very little time in the den, preferring the warmth of my fireside, but Rolf never discovered that.

  Many of my disagreements with Rolf shared those same roots. He saw Nighteyes as too humanized, and shook his head at how little of wolf there was in me. Yet at the same time he warned us both that we had twined ourselves too tightly together, that he could find no place where he could sense one of us and not the other. Perhaps the most valuable thing Rolf taught us was how to separate from one another. Through me, he conveyed to Nighteyes the need that each of us had for privacy in matters such as mating or grieving. I had never been able to convince the wolf that the need for such a sundering existed. Again, Nighteyes learned it more swiftly and better than I did. When he so desired, he could vanish completely from my senses. I did not enjoy the sensation of being isolated from him. I felt halved by it, and sometimes as less than a half, and yet we both saw the wisdom of it, and strove to perfect our abilities in that area. Yet no matter how satisfied we were with our progress, Rolf remained adamant that even in our separations, we still shared a unity so basic that neither of us were even aware of it anymore. When I tried to shrug it off as inconsequential, he became almost incensed.

  “And when one of you dies, what then? Death comes to all of us, sooner or later, and it cannot be cheated. Two souls can not long abide in one body before one takes control and the other becomes but a shadow. It is a cruelty, no matter which becomes the stronger. Hence, all Old Blood traditions shun such greedy snatching at life. ” Here Rolf frowned at me most severely. Did he suspect I had already sidestepped my death once by such a ruse? He could not, I promised myself. I returned his gaze guilelessly.

  He knit his dark brows ominously. “When a creature's life is over, it is over. It perverts all nature to extend it. Yet Old Blood alone knows the true depth of agony when two souls that have been joined are parted by death. So it must be. You must be able to separate into yourselves when that time comes. ” He beetled his heavy brows at us as he spoke. Nighteyes and I both grew still of thought, considering it. Even Rolf finally seemed to sense how much it distressed us. His voice grew gruffer, yet kinder. “Our custom is not cruel, at least no crueler than it must be. There is a way to keep a remembrance of all that has been shared. A way to keep the voice of the other's wisdom and the love of the other's heart. ”

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  “So one partner could go on living within the other?” I asked, confused.

  Rolf shot me a disgusted look. “No. I have just told you, we do not do that. When your time comes to die, you should separate yourself from your partner and die, not seek to leech onto his life. ”

  Nighteyes made a brief whistle of whine. He was as confused as I was. Rolf seemed to concede that he was teaching a difficult concept, for he stopped and scratched his beard noisily. “It's like this. My mother is long dead and gone. But I can recall still the sound of her voice singing me a lullaby, and hear the warnings she would give when I tried to do something foolish. Right?”

  “I suppose so,” I conceded. This was another sore spot between Rolf and me. He had never accepted that I had no memories of my natural mother, although I had spent the first six years of my life with her. At my lukewarm response, he narrowed his eyes. cav, “As can most folks,” he went on more loudly, as if sound alone could persuade me. “And that is what you can have when Nighteyes is gone. Or what he can keep of you. ”

  “Memories,” I agreed quietly, nodding. Even discussing Nighteyes' death was unsettling.

  “No!” Rolf exclaimed. “Not just memories. Anyone can have memories. But what a bonded one leaves behind for his partner is deeper and richer than memories. It's a presence. Not living on in the other's mind, not sharing thoughts, decisions, and experiences. But just Êbeing there. Standing by. So now you understand,” he informed me heavily.

  No, I started to say, but Nighteyes leaned heavily against my leg, so I simply made a sound that might have been agreement. And over the next month, Rolf instructed us in his dogged way, bidding us separate, and then allowing us to come back together, but only in a thin, insubstantial way. I found it completely unsatisfactory. I was convinced we were doing something wrong, that this could not be the comfort and “being” that Rolf had spoken about. When I expressed my doubts to Rolf, he surprised me by agreeing with me, but then went on to declare that we were still far too intertwined, that the wolf and I must separate even more. And we gave heed to him and sincerely tried, but held our own counsel as to what we would actually do when death came for one of us.

  We never voiced our obstinacy, but I am sure Rolf was aware of it. He took great pains to “prove” to us the error of our ways, and the examples he showed us were truly wrenching. A careless Old Blood family had let swallows nest in their eaves where their infant son could not only hear their familial twitterings but watch their comings and goings. And that was all he did, even now as a grown man of about thirty. In Buckkeep Town, folk would have called him simple, and so he was, but when Rolf bade us reach toward him more discriminatingly with the Wit, the reason was clear to us both. The boy had bonded, not just to a swallow, but to all swallows. In his mind he was a bird, and his dabbling in mud and fluttering hands and snapping after insects were the work of his bird's mind.

  “And that's what comes of bonding too young,” Rolf told us darkly.

  There was one other pair he showed us, but only from a distance. On an early morning when mist lay heavy in the vales, we lay on our bellies on the lip of a dell and made no sound or thought amongst ourselves. A white hind drifted through the fog toward a pond, walking not with a deer's true caution but with a woman's languid grace. I knew her partner must be close by, concealed in the mist. The deer lowered her muzzle to the water and drank long slow draughts of the coolness. Then she slowly lifted her head. Her large ears swiveled forward. I felt the tentative brush of her questing. I blinked, trying to focus on her, while the wolf made a small, questioning whine in the back of his throat.

  Rolf rose abruptly, showing himself disdainfully. He coldly refused the contact. I sensed his disgust as he strode away, but we remained, staring down at her. Perhaps she sensed ambivalence, for she watched us with a very undeerlike boldness. An odd moment of vertigo washed over me. I squinted, trying to make the shape before me resolve into the two that my Wit told me were there.

  When I was Chade's apprentice, he used several exercises to teach me to see what my eyes truly beheld, not what my mind expected to see. Most were simple drills, to look at a tangle of line and decide if it were knotted or merely flung down, or to glance at a jumble of gloves and know which ones lacked mates. A more peculiar trick he showed me was to write the name of a color in a mismatched ink, the word red painted in bright blue letters. To read a list of such colors, correctly saying the printed word rather than the color of the inked letters, took more concentration than I had expected it would.

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  And so I rubbed my eyes and looked again and saw only a deer. The woman had been an expectation of my mind, based on my Wit. Physically, she was not there. Her presence inside the hind distorted my Witsense of the deer. I shuddered away from the wrongness of it. Rolf had left us behind. In confusion, Nighteyes and I hastened after Rolf as he strode away from the sheltered dell and the quiet pool. Some time and distance later, “What was that?” I asked him.

  He rounded on me, affronted by my ignorance. “What was that? That was you, a dozen years hence, if you do not mend your ways. You saw her eyes! That was no deer down there, but a woman in the skin of a hind. It's what I wanted you to see. The wrongness of it. The complete perversion of what should have been shared trust. ”, I looked at him quietly, waiting. I think he had expected me to concur with his judgment, for he made a deep noise in his throat. “That was Delayna, who slipped through the ice into Marple Pond and drowned two winters ago. She ought to have died right then,
but no, she clung to Parela. The hind either hadn't the heart or the strength to oppose her. Now there they are, a deer with the mind and heart of a woman, and Parela with scarcely a thought to call her own. It goes against all nature, it does. Ones like Delayna are at the root of all the evil talk the unBlooded wag on about us. She's what makes them want to hang us and burn us over water. She deserves such treatment. ”

  I looked away from his vehemence. I'd come too close to that fate myself to believe anyone could deserve it. My body had lain cold in my grave for days while I'd shared Nighteyes' flesh and life. I was certain then that Rolf suspected as much of me. I wondered then, if he so despised me, why he taught me at all. As if he had caught some whiff of my thought, he added gruffly, “Anyone untaught can do a wrong thing. But after he's been taught, there's no excuse to repeat it. None at all. ”

  He turned and strode off down the path. We trailed after him. Nighteyes' tail stuck out straight behind him. Rolf muttered to himself as he stumped along. “Delayna's greed destroyed them both. Parela's got no life as a deer. No mate, no young, when she dies, she'll just stop, and Delayna with her. Delayna couldn't accept death as a woman, but she won't accept life as a deer, either. When the bucks call, she won't let Parela answer them. She probably thinks she's being faithful to her husband or some such nonsense. When Parela dies and Delayna with her, what will either of them have gained, save a few years of existence that neither of them could call complete?”