by Robin Hobb
I had seen no reason to be there at all, but again, I smothered my opinion. I had been riding since I was a small child, but I ached in unexpected muscles from his beast’s odd shape. Nevertheless, I dutifully mounted up and followed him, still wondering what it was this man was supposed to be teaching me. I worried that my father was getting a very poor exchange for his trade goods.
Dewara led and I rode beside him. By noon my need for water had surpassed thirst and was venturing toward privation. My sturdy taldi followed Dewara’s gamely, but I knew that she, too, needed water. I had employed every trick I knew to stave off my thirst. The smooth pebble in my mouth had become more annoying than helpful. I had picked it up when I had dismounted to strip the fleshy leaves from a mule’s-ear plant. I chewed the thick leaves to fibers and then spat them out. They did little more than moisten my mouth. My lips and the inside of my nose were dry and cracking. My tongue felt like a piece of thick leather in my mouth. Dewara rode on without speaking to me or betraying any sign of thirst. Hunger returned to pester me, but thirst retained my attention. I watched anxiously for the water signs Sergeant Duril had taught me. A line of trees, a depression where the plants were thick and greener than usual, or animal tracks converging, but I saw only that the land was becoming more barren and even stonier.
There was little I could do other than follow Dewara and trust that he must have some end in mind. When shadows began to lengthen again with still no water in sight, I spoke up. My lips cracked as I formed my words. “Will we reach water soon?”
He glanced at me, and then made a show of looking all around us. “It does not seem so. ” He smiled at me, showing no effects from our water privation. Without words, we rode on. I could feel the little mare’s flagging energy, but she seemed as willing as ever. Evening had begun to ooze across the Plains when Dewara reined his mount and looked around. “We’ll sleep here,” he announced.
The location was worse than the previous one. There was not even a rock to sleep against, and only dry browse for the horses, no grass at all.
“You’re daft!” I croaked out before I recalled that I was to show this man respect. It was hard to recall anything just then except how thirsty I was.
He was already off his horse. He looked up at me, his face impassive. “You are to obey me, soldier’s boy. Your father said so. ”
At the time it seemed that I had no choice except to do as he said. I dismounted from the tubby little mare and looked around. There was nothing to see. If this was some sort of test, I feared I was failing it. As he had the evening before, Dewara sat down cross-legged on the dry earth. He seemed perfectly content to sit there and watch evening turn to full night.
My head ached and I felt my stomach clench with the nausea of unanswered hunger. Well, it would go away soon enough, I told myself. I decided I would make my bed a bit more comfortable than it had been the night before. I picked a place that looked more sandy than stony, at a good distance from Dewara. I had not forgotten his sneaking approach that morning. With my hands, I dug a slight depression in the sand about the size of my body. Curled in it, I could trap my body warmth during the chill of night. I was picking the larger rocks out of the bottom when Dewara stood and stretched. He walked over to my hole and looked at it disdainfully. “Planning to lay your eggs soon? It’s a fine nest for a sage hen. ”
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Replying would have required moving my cracked lips, so I let his jibe pass. I could not understand how thirst and hunger affected me so strongly and left him untouched. As if in answer to my thought, he muttered, “Weakling. ” He turned and walked back to his post and squatted down again. Feeling childish, I curled into my hole and closed my gritty eyes. I said my evening prayers silently, asking the good god to grant me strength and help me to discern what my father thought this man could teach me. Perhaps this endurance of privation was how he wished to measure me. Or perhaps this old enemy of my father planned to break his bargain with my father and torment me to my death.
Perhaps my father had been wrong to trust him.
Perhaps Iwas a weakling and a traitor to my father to doubt his judgment. “Make me proud, son,” he had said. I prayed again for strength and courage, and sought sleep.
In the dark of night, I came awake. I smelled sausages. No. I smelled smoked meat. Foolishness. Then I heard a very small sound: the gurgle of a water skin. My mind was playing tricks on me. Then I heard it again, and the slosh as it was lowered from Dewara’s mouth. It occurred to me that his loose robes could easily conceal such things as a water skin and a wallet of dried meat. My sticky eyelids clung together as I opened my eyes. There is nothing darker than full night on the Midlands. The stars were distant and uninterested. Dewara was completely invisible to me.
Sergeant Duril had often counseled me that thirst, hunger, and sleeplessness can lead to a man making poor decisions. He said I could add lust to that list when I was a few years closer to full manhood. So now I pondered and then pondered again. Was this a test of my perseverance and endurance? Or had my father been deceived by his old enemy? Should I obey Dewara even if he was leading me to my death? Should I trust my father’s judgment or my own? My father was older and wiser than I. But he was not here and I was. I was too weary and too thirsty to think coherently. Yet I must make the decision. Obey or disobey. Trust or distrust.
I closed my eyes. I prayed to the good god for guidance, but heard only the sweep of wind across the Plains. I slept fitfully. I dreamed that my father said that if I was worthy to be his son, I could endure this. Then the dream changed, and Sergeant Duril was saying that he’d always known I was stupid, that even the youngest child knew better than to venture out on the Plains without water and food. Idiots deserved to die. How many times had he told me that? If a man couldn’t figure out how to take care of himself, then let him get himself killed and get out of the way before he brought down his whole regiment. I wandered out of my dream to sleeplessness. I was in the control of a savage who disliked me. I had no food or water. I doubted that there was water within a day’s walk of here, or that I could walk a full day without water. Grimness settled on me. I decided to sleep on my decision.
In the creep of dawn, I arose from my hollow in the sand. I went to where Dewara slept. He did not sleep. His eyes were open and watching me. It hurt even to try to speak but I croaked out the words. “I know you have water. Please give me some. ”
He sat up slowly. “No. ” His hand was already on the haft of his swanneck. I had no weapon at all. He grinned at me. “Why don’t you try to take it?”
I stood there, anger, hatred, and fear fighting for control of me. I decided I wanted to live. “I’m not stupid,” I said. I turned away from him and walked toward the taldi.
He called after me, “You say you are ‘not stupid. ’ Is that another way to say ‘coward’?”
The words were like a knife in my back. I tried to ignore them. “Keeksha. Stand. ” The mare came to me.
“Sometimes a man has to fight for what he needs to live. He has to fight, no matter what the odds. ” Dewara stood up, pulling his swanneck from its sheath. The bronze blade was gold in the rising sun. His face darkened with anger. “Get away from my animal. I forbid you to touch her. ”
I grasped the mane at the base of her neck and heaved myself onto her.
“Your father said you would obey me. You said you would obey me. I said that if you disobeyed me, I would notch your ear. ”
“I am going to find water. ” I don’t know why I even said those words.
“You are not a man of your word. Neither is your father. But I am!” he shouted after me as I rode off. “Dedem. Stand!” At that, I kicked Keeksha into a run. Deprivation had weakened her as much as it had me, but she seemed to share my mind. We fled. I heard Dedem’s strong hoofbeats behind us. It can’t be helped, I thought to myself. I leaned into Keeksha’s gallop and hung on.
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The stallion was bigger and hardier than the mare. They were gaining on us. I had two objectives: to get away from Dewara and to find water before the mare’s strength gave out. I knew I would need her to get home. To those ends, I leaned forward, urging her to speed while guiding her back the way we had come. My somewhat rattled assessment of my situation was that by going back the way we had come, I knew that water was only two days away. A man can survive four days without food or water. Sergeant Duril had told me so. Yet he had added, kindly, that such survival was made more unlikely by exposure and exertion, and that a man who trusted his judgment after two days without food and water was as likely to die of foolishness as deprivation. I knew the horse could not run for two days straight, nor could I ride for that long. Yet my thinking was badly disordered by the fact that I was fleeing for my life, a new experience for me, and defying my father’s authority as I did so. The one seemed as terrifying as the other.
I did not get far. I had only a small lead over the Kidona. Urging the mare as I might, Dewara gained steadily on us until he was riding beside us. I clung grimly to Keeksha’s back and mane, for there was little else I could do. I saw him draw his swanneck and slapped the mare frantically, but she had no more speed to give. The deadly curved blade swiped the air over my head. I risked a kick at him, hoping more to distract him than unseat him. I nearly unseated myself as well, and I felt the mare’s pace falter. The shining metal swept past me again, and such was Dewara’s skill that, true to his threat, I felt the harsh bite of the blade as it passed through my ear. The act dealt me a scalp wound as well, one that immediately began to pour blood down the side of my neck. I screamed as the blade sliced through my flesh, both in pain and in absolute terror for my life. The shameful memory of that girlish shriek has never left me. Pain and the warm seep of thick blood down my neck became one sensation, making it impossible for me to assess how badly I was injured. I could only cling tighter to Keeksha and ride, ride for my life. I knew I had no chance of survival. The next pass of Dewara’s swanneck would finish me.
Astonishingly, he let me go.
It took a short time for me to realize that. Or perhaps a long time. I rode, my wound burning and my heart hammering so that I thought it would burst from my body. At any moment I expected the swish of the blade and the quenching of light. The drumming of my own blood in my ears was such that at first I did not realize that his hoofbeats were fading. I ventured a glance to the side and then back. He was pulling his stallion in. As I fled, he sat, unmoving on his horse, watching me go. He laughed at me. I did not hear it, could not see his smile, and yet I knew it. He flourished his golden blade over his head and flapped his free arm derisively at me. The knowledge of his mockery seared me.
Shamed and bleeding, I fled like a kicked cur. I did not have the water in my body to weep, or I probably would have. My scalp wound bled thickly for a short time, and then crusted over with dust. I rode on. Keeksha’s pace slowed, and I lacked the will or energy to urge her to go faster. For a time, I tried to guide her, hoping to go back the way we had come, but we were already off course, and the little taldi was determined to have her own way. I gave in to her, excusing myself on the grounds that Sergeant Duril had often urged me to trust my horse when I had no better guide.
Afternoon found me slumping on Keeksha’s back, letting her pick her way where she would. Our pace was little more than an amble. I felt dizzy. The sky was a clear blue and the sun was bright and warm. My hunger that had abated for a time had returned, and with it a retching nausea very painful to my dry throat. I felt completely adrift. When I had followed Dewara, I had believed there was some destination that we sought, and despite my doubts, I’d felt safer with him. Now I was as good as lost until nightfall and the stars came out. Worse, I was lost in my life. I’d disobeyed my father and Dewara. I’d put my inexperienced judgment above theirs, and if I died out here, I’d have only myself to blame. Perhaps it had been a test of endurance, and I’d fled it too soon. Perhaps if I’d tried to take the water from him, he would have been impressed with my courage and rewarded me with a drink. Perhaps my fleeing had earned me a coward’s death. My body would rot out here, insect and bird bait until my bones turned to sand. My father would be ashamed of me when Dewara told him how I had run away. I rode hopelessly on.
Midmorning of the next day, Keeksha found water. I claim no credit for helping her.
People who say our Plains are arid are only partially correct. There is water, but for the most part it moves beneath the surface, and breaks through to the top only when rock or terrain force it there. Keeksha found such a sike. The rocky watercourse she followed was dry as a bone that spring, but she kept with it until we reached a place where an outcropping of rock had forced the hidden flow up, to briefly break above ground as a marshy little pond, not much bigger than two box stalls. The sike stank of life and was the virulent green of desperation. She walked into it and began sucking up the thick water.
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I slid from her back, walked two steps from her, and lay down on my belly in the muck. I put my face in the thin layer of water and sucked it in, straining it through my teeth. After I had drunk, I lay there still, my mouth open to the liquid, trying to soak my leather tongue and frayed lips back to a semblance of normalcy. Above me, Keeksha drank and then breathed and then drank some more. Finally I heard the heavy splashes of her hooves as she moved out of the shallow pond and to the cracked earth at the muddy edge of it. She began grazing greedily on the ring of grass that surrounded the sink. I envied her.
I stood slowly and wiped a scum of slime from my chin and then shook it from my hands. I could feel the water in my belly, and felt almost sickened by the sudden plenitude of it. I waded out of the muck and inspected our tiny sanctuary. The cut of the watercourse meant that we were below the windswept plain. I could hear the constant mutter of the never-still air above us. Our tiny hollow cupped silence. Then, as I stood still, the chorus of life slowly took up its song again. Insects spoke to one another. A dragonfly hovered over the water. The gore frogs that had gone into hiding during our splashing began to emerge once more. Bright as gobbets of spilled blood, they were blots of scarlet on the floating scum and stubby reeds of our pond. I knew a moment’s relief that they had gone into hiding at our arrival. They were toxic little creatures. When I was small, one of our dogs had died from picking a gore frog up in his mouth. Even to touch one caused a tingling on the skin.
I picked and ate some water plants that I recognized. They were something in my belly, but hunger growled around them. I found nothing that I could fashion into a vessel for carrying water. I dreaded the thought of the hunger and thirst I’d have to endure during my journey home, but not as deeply as I dreaded my confrontation with my father when I returned. I’d failed him. The thought made me return to the water’s edge. I washed the thick blood from my neck and ear. Notched. My ear would never be whole again. I’d carry the reminder of my broken promise to the end of my days. For the rest of my life, whenever anyone asked me about it, I’d have to admit that I’d disobeyed my father and gone back on my own word.
The mucky edges of the pond gave way to plates of roughly cracked earth that showed how the pond had shrunk since winter. I studied the tracks in them. When the ground had been moist, a little shrub-deer had visited the water. One blurry set of tracks could have been a big cat or the slopped prints of a wild dog. Beyond the cracked edge of the bare ground, dry grass stood in the skeletal shade of a dead sapling. I picked several double handfuls of the grass and then approached Keeksha. She seemed apprehensive when I started rubbing the dust and sweat from her back and flanks, but soon decided she enjoyed it. It was not just that she’d found water for us. I did it to remind myself that the wisdom of my early training was to take good care of my mount. I should never have listened to Dewara about anything.
Afterward, I made my bed among the grass tussocks, resolving to sleep the afte
rnoon away, then awaken, drink as much water as I could hold, and then ride as the stars pointed me. I broke the dead sapling down and broke the skinny branches away from it. It was a feeble weapon, but anything might come to water in the night. It was better than nothing. I placed it by my side as I lay down to sleep. As much as I dreaded confessing to my father, I also longed to be home again. I closed my eyes to the chirring of the insects and the peeping of the gore frogs.
CHAPTER 4
Crossing the Bridge
I opened my eyes. The dark had not yet thickened into the full blackness of a night on the Plains. I remained motionless, pushing my senses to their limits to discover what had awakened me. Then I knew. The silence. I had dozed off to the relentless chorus of insects and frogs. Now they were still, concealing themselves from something.
My stick was still beneath my hand. I tightened my grip on it and rolled my eyes to find Keeksha. The mare stood, ears pitched forward, intently aware. I shifted my gaze to follow hers. There was nothing to see, and then there was. Dewara stood outlined against the darkening sky. I instantly rolled to my feet to face him, bringing my stick up into the guard position as if it were a proper pike instead of a brittle pole. The surge of hatred and fear that I felt surprised me. Dewara’s swanneck was sheathed at his side. I suspected it was still slick with my blood. I had only the stick, and I was suddenly painfully aware of my gangly fifteen years pitted against the mature and solidly muscled warrior.
He did not make a sound, but stalked slowly down the incline to my pond. I held myself ready, and felt suddenly very calm as I knew I would die here. He met my gaze as he advanced and then a slow smile bared his pointed teeth. “You learn the lesson I teach, I think,” he said.
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I kept my silence.
“Nice ear notch,” he said. “I marked you like a woman marks a goat. ” He laughed aloud. I hated him then with a hate that boiled my blood. He knew it, and didn’t care. He hunkered down as if I were no threat to him at all. He scratched his shoulder, and then reached inside his loose robe. He pulled out a packet and opened it, and shook out a stick. My nose told me it was smoked meat. He made a show of holding it up for me to see. My deprived belly growled loudly at the smell of it. He stuffed it into his mouth and chewed noisily, smacking his lips. “You hungry, soldier’s boy?” He waved the packet of jerky at me.