The Tawny Man 1 - Fool's Errand

by Robin Hobb

  In those years, attempted to write a history of the Six Duchies, and an accounting of my own life. In that time, I also obtained and studied various scrolls and writings on a wide variety of topics. The disparity of these pursuits was actually a concerted effort on my part to track down the truth. strove to find and examine the pieces and forces that had determined why my life had gone as it had. Yet the more I studied and the more Ientrusted my thoughts to paper, the more truth eluded me. What life showed me, in my years apart from the world, was that no man ever gets to know the whole of a truth. All had once believed of all my experiences and myself, time alone illuminated anew. What had seemed clearly lit plunged into shadow, and details had considered trivial leapt into prominence .

  Burrich the Stablemaster, the man who raised me, once warned me, "When you cut pieces from the truth to avoid sounding like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead." I have discovered that to be true, from firsthand experience. Yet even without deliberately attempting to cut and discard pieces of a story, years after giving a full and just accounting of an event, a man may discover himself aliar. Such lies happen not by intent, but purely by virtue of the facts he was not privy to at the time he wrote, or by being ignorant of the significance of trivial events. No one is pleased to discover himself in such a strait, but any man who claims never to have experienced it is but stacking one lie on top of another.

  My efforts at writing a history of the Six Duchies were based on oral accounts and the old scrolls that I had had access to. Even as I set pen to paper, I knew I might be perpetuating another man's error. had not realized that my efforts to recount my own life might be subject to the same flaw. The truth, I discovered, is a tree that grows as a man gains, access to experience. A child sees the acorn of his daily life, but a man looks back on the oak.

  No man can return to being a boy. But there are interludes in a man's life when, for a time, he can recapture the feeling that the world is a forgiving place and that he is immortal. I have always believed that was the essence of boyhood: believing that mistakes could not be fatal. The Fool brought that old optimism out in me again, and even the wolf seemed puppyish and fey for the days he was with us.

  The Fool did not intrude into our lives. I made no c-av, adaptations or adjustments. He simply joined us, setting his schedule to ours and making my work his own. He was invariably stirring before I was. I would awake to find the door of my study and my bedroom door open, and like as not the outside door open as well. From my bed, I would see him sitting cross-legged like a tailor on my chair before my desk. He was always washed and dressed to face the day. His elegant clothes disappeared after that first day, replaced with simple jerkins and trousers, or the evening comfort of a robe. The moment I was awake, he was aware of my presence, and would lift his eyes to mine before I spoke. He was always reading, either the scrolls or documents that I had painstakingly acquired, or those composed by me. Some of those scrolls were my failed attempts at a history of the Six Duchies. Others were my disjointed efforts to make sense of my own life by setting it onto paper. He would lift an eyebrow to my wakefulness, and then carefully restore the scroll to precisely where it had been. Had he chosen to do so, he could have left me ignorant of his perusal of my journals. Instead, he showed his respect by never questioning me about what he had read. The private thoughts that I had committed to paper remained private, my secrets sealed behind the Fool's lips.

  He dropped effortlessly into my life, filling a place that I had not perceived was vacant. While he stayed with me, I almost forgot to miss Hap, save that I hungered so to show the boy off to him. I know I spoke often of him. Sometimes the Fool worked alongside me in the garden or as I repaired the stone and log paddock. When it was a task for one man, such as digging the new pestholes, he perched nearby and watched. Our talk at such times was simple, relating to the task at hand, or the easy banter of men who have shared a boyhood. If ever I tried to turn our talk to serious matters, he deflected my questions with his drollery. We took turns on Malta, for the Fool bragged she could jump anything, and a series of makeshift barriers across my lane soon proved this was so. The spirited little horse seemed to enjoy it as much as we did.

  After our evening meal, we sometimes walked the cliffs, or clambered down to stroll the beaches as the tide retreated. In the changing of the light, we hunted rabbits with the wolf, and came home to set a hearth fire more for cheer than warmth. The Fool had brought more than one bottle of the apricot brandy, and his voice was as fine as ever. Evenings were his turn to sing, and talk, and tell stories, both amazing and amusing. Some seemed to be drawn from his own adventures; others were obviously folklore acquired along the way. His graceful hands were more articulate than the puppets he once had fashioned, and his mobile face could portray every character in the tales he told.

  It was only in the late evening hours, when the fire had burned to coals and his face was more shadow than shape, that he led my talk where he would go. That first evening, in a quiet voice mellowed by brandy, he observed, "Have you any idea how hard it was for me to let Girl-on-a-Dragon carry me off and leave you behind? I had to believe that the wheels were in motion, and you would live. It taxed my faith in myself to the utmost to fly off and leave you there."

  "Your faith in yourself?" I demanded, feigning insult. "Had you no faith in me?" The Fool had spread Hap's bedding on the floor before the hearth, and we had abandoned our chairs to sprawl in the dubious comfort there. The wolf, his nose on his paws, dozed on my left side while on my right, the Fool leaned on his elbows, chin propped in his hands. He gazed into the fire, his lifted feet waving vaguely.

  The last flames of the fire danced merrily in his eyes. "In you? Well. I shall say only that I took great comfort in the wolf at your side."

  In that, his confidence was not misplaced, the wolf observed wryly.

  I thought you were asleep. I'm trying to be.

  The Fool's voice was almost dreamy as he went on, "You had survived every cataclysmic event that I had ever glimpsed for you. So I left you, forcing myself to believe that there was a period of quiet in store for you. Perhaps, even, a time of peace."

  "There was. After a fashion." I took a breath. I nearly told him of my death watch by Will. Almost, I told him of how I had reached through Will with the Skill magic, finally to seize control of Regal's mind and work my will on him. I let the breath out. He didn't need to hear that; I didn't need to relive it. "I found peace. A bit at a time. In pieces." I grinned foolishly to myself. Odd, the small things that are amusing when one has had enough to drink.

  I found myself speaking of my year in the Mountains. I told him how we had returned to the valley where the hot springs flowed, and of the simple hut I had built against the coming of winter. The seasons turn more quickly in the high country. One morning the leaves of birch trees are veined in yellow, and the alder has gone red in the night. A few more nights, and they are bare-fingered branches reaching toward a cold blue sky. The evergreens hunch themselves against the oncoming winter. Then the snow comes, to cloak the world in forgiving white.

  I told him of hunting the days away with Nighteyes as my sole companion. Healing and peace were the most elusive of the prey I stalked. We lived simply, as predators with no loyalties save to one another. That absolute solitude was the best balm for the wounds I had taken to both my body and my soul. Such injuries do not truly heal but I learned to live with my scars, much as Burrich once learned to tolerate his game leg. We hunted deer and rabbit. I came to accept that I had died, that I had lost my life in every way that mattered. Winter winds blew around our small shelter, and I understood that Molly was no longer mine. Brief things were those winter days, pauses of sunlight on glitteringwhite snow before the long, blue-fingered dusks returned to draw the deep nights close to us. I learned to cushion my loss with the knowledge that my little daughter would grow up in the shelter of Burrich's good right arm, much as myself had.

  I had tried to rid myself of my memories of Molly.
The stabbing pain of recalling her abused trust of me was the brightest gem in a glittering necklace of painful memories. As much as had always longed to be freed of my duties and obligations, being released from such bonds was as much a severing as an emancipation. As the brief days of winter alternated with the long, cold nights, I numbered to myself those I had lost. Those who still knew I lived did not even take up the fingers of one hand. The Fool, Queen Kettricken, the minstrel Starling, and through those three, Chade: those were the four who knew of my existence. A few others had seen me alive, amongst them Hands the Sta-blemaster and one Tag Reaverson, a guardsman, but the circumstances of those brief meetings were such that any tales of my survival were unlikely to be believed.

  All others who had known me, including those who had loved me best, believed me dead. Nor could return to prove them wrong. I had been executed once for practicing Wit magic. I would not chance a more thorough death. Yet even if that taint could be lifted from my name, I could not return to Burrich and Molly. To do so would destroy all of us. Even if Molly had been able to tolerate my Beast Magic and my many deceptions of her, how could any of us untangle her subsequent marriage to Burrich? To confront Burrich with his usurpation of my wife and my child would destroy him. Could I found future happiness on that? Could Molly?

  "I tried to comfort myself with the thought that they were safe and happy."

  "Could not you reach out with the Skill, to assure yourself of that?"

  The shadows of the room had deepened and the Fool's .-av, eyes were fixed on the fire. It was as if I recounted my history to myself.

  "I could claim I learned the discipline to leave them to their privacy. In truth, I think I feared it would drive me mad, to witness love shared between them."

  I watched the fire as I spoke of those days, yet I felt the Fool's eyes turn to me. I did not turn toward him. I did not want to see pity there. I had grown past the need for anyone's pity.

  "I found peace," I told him. "A bit at a time, but it came to me. There was a morning when Nighteyes and I were returning from a dawn hunt. We'd had a good hunt, and taken a mountain goat that the heavy snows of winter had pushed down from the heights. The hill was steep as we worked our way down, the gutted carcass was heavy, and the skin of my face was stiff as a mask from the cold burning down from the clear blue sky. I could see a thin tendril of smoke rising from my chimney, and just beyond my hut, the foggy steam rose off the nearby hot springs. At the top of the last hill, I paused to catch my breath and stretch my back."

  It all came back so clearly to me. Nighteyes had halted beside me, panting clouds. I'd swathed my lower face in the edge of my cloak; now it was half-frozen to my beard. I looked down, and knew that we had meat for days, our small cabin was tight against winter's cold clench, and we were nearly home. Cold and weary as I was, satisfaction was still uppermost in my mind. I hefted my kill to my shoulders. Almost home, I told Nighteyes.

  Almost home, he had echoed. And in the sharing of that thought, I sensed a meaning that no man's voice could have put into it. Home. A finality. A place to belong. The humble cottage was home now, a comforting destination where I expected to find all I needed. As I stood staring down at it, I felt a twinge of conscience as for some forgotten obligation. It took rne a moment to grasp what was missing. The whole of a night had passed and I had not once thought of Molly. Where had my yearning and sense of loss gone? What sort of shallow fellow was I, to let go of that mourning and think only of the dawn's hunting? Deliberately I turned my thoughts to the place and the people who were once encompassed in the word HOME.

  When I wallow in something dead to reawaken the savor of it, you rebuke me.

  I turned to look at Nighteyes but he refused the eye contact. He sat in the snow, ears pricked forward toward our hut. The unpleasant little winter wind stirred his thick ruff, but could not penetrate to his skin.

  Meaning? I pressed him, though his meaning was perfectly clear.

  You should leave off sniffing the carcass of your old life, my brother. You may enjoy unending pain. I do not. There is no shame in walking away from bones, Changer. He finally swiveled his head to stare at me from his deep-set eyes. Nor is there any special wisdom in injuring oneself over and over. What is your loyalty to that pain? To abandon it will not lessen you.

  Then he had stood, shaken his coat free of snow, and trotted resolutely down the snowy hillside. I had followed him more slowly.

  I finally glanced over at the Fool. He looked at me but his eyes were unreadable in the darkness. "I think that was the first bit of peace I found. Not that I take any credit for discovering it. Nighteyes had to point it out to me. Perhaps to another man it would have been obvious. Leave old pains alone. When they cease coming to call, do not invite them back."

  His voice was very soft in the dim room. "There is nothing dishonorable about abandoning pain. Sometimes peace is most quickly found when a man simply stops avoiding it." He shifted slightly in the dark. "And you never again lay awake all night, staring at darkness and thinking of them."

  I snorted softly. "I wish. But the most I can say is that I stopped deliberately provoking that melancholy. When summer finally came and we moved on, it was like leaving a cast-off skin." I let a silence follow my words.

  "So you left the Mountains and came back to Buck." He knew I had not; it was just his little prod to get me, talking again.

  "Not right away. Nighteyes didn't approve, but I felt I i could not leave the Mountains until I had retraced some of our journey there. I went back to the quarry, back to where Verity had carved his dragon. I stood on the spot. It was just a flat, bare place hemmed in by the towering quarry walls under a slate-gray sky. There was no sign of all that had happened there, just the piles of chips and a few worn tools. I walked through our campsite. I knew the flattened tents and the possessions scattered about had once been ours, but j most of them had lost their significance. They were graying rags, sodden and slumped. I found a few things I took with I me ... the pieces for Kettle's stone game, I took those." I took a breath. "And I walked down to where Carrod had died. His body was as we had left it, gone to bones and bits of moldering cloth. No animals had disturbed it. They don't like the Skill-road, you know."

  "I know," he admitted quietly. I felt he had walked with me through that abandoned quarry.

  "I stood a long time looking at those bones. I tried to remember Carrod as he had been when I first met him, but I couldn't. But looking at his bones was like a confirmation. It all had truly happened, and it all was truly finished. The events and the place, I could walk away from. I could leave it behind now and it could not get up and follow me."

  Nighteyes groaned in his sleep. I set a hand on his side, glad to feel him so near in both touch and mind. He had not approved of me visiting the quarry. He had disliked journeying along the Skill-road, even though my ability to retain my sense of self against its siren call had increased. He was even more disgruntled when I insisted I must return to the Stone Garden, as well.

  There was a small sound, the chink of the bottle against the cup's lip as the Fool replenished our brandy. His silence was an invitation for me to speak on.

  "The dragons had gone back to where we first found them. I visited them there. The forest was gradually taking them back again, grass sprouting tall around them and vines creeping over them. They were just as beautiful and just as haunting as when we first discovered them there. And just as still."

  They had broken holes in the forest canopy when they had left their slumbers and arisen to fight for Buck. Their return had been no gentler, and thus sunlight fell in shafts, penetrating the lush growth to gild each gleaming dragon. I walked amongst them, and as before, I felt the ghostly stir of Wit-life within the deeply slumbering statues. I found King Wisdom's antlered dragon; I dared to set my bare hand to his shoulder. I felt only the finely carved scales, cold and hard as the stone they had been fashioned from. They were all there: the boar dragon, the winged cat, all the widely divergent forms
carved by both Elderlings and Skill coteries.

  "I saw Girl-on-a-Dragon there." I smiled at the flames. "She sleeps well. The human figure is sprawled forward now, her arms twined lovingly around the neck of the dragon she bestrides still." Her I had feared to touch; I recalled too clearly her hunger for memories, and how I had fed her with mine. Perhaps I feared as much to regain what I once had willingly given her. I slipped past her silently, but Nighteyes stalked past her, hackles abristle, showing every white tooth he possessed in a snarl. The wolf had known what I truly sought.

  "Verity," the Fool said softly, as if confirming my unspoken thought.

  "Verity," I agreed. "My King." I sighed and took up my tale.

  I had found him there. When I saw Verity's turquoise hide gleaming in the dappling summer shade, Nighteyes sat down and curled his tail tidily around his forefeet. He would come no closer. I felt the silence of his thoughts as he carefully granted me the privacy of my mind. I approached Verity-as-dragon slowly, my heart thundering in my throat. There, in a body carved of Skill and stone, slept the man who had been my King. For his sake, I had taken hurts so grievous that both my mind and my body would bear the scars until the day I died. Yet as I drew near to the still form, I felt tears prick my eyes, and knew only longing for his familiar voice.

  "Verity?" I asked hoarsely. My soul strained toward him, word, Wit, and Skill seeking for my King. I did not find him. I set my hands flat to his cold shoulder, pressed my brow against that hard form, and reached again, recklessly. I sensed him then, but it was a far and thin glimpse of what he had been. As well to say one touches the sun when one cups a dapple of forest light in the palm of a hand. "Verity, please," I begged him, and reached yet again with every drop of the Skill that was in me.