by Robin Hobb
“Fever! Damnation! I’m too late then. Unless…” The doctor paused, and knit his brow. I managed to get my shirt off. I let it fall to the floor beside my boots. I went to work on my belt.
“I want you to come to my son’s bedside immediately. That is an order.” Colonel Stiet’s voice shook with passion.
“I want the Academy quarantined.” The doctor spoke as if he had pondered all his options and reached a decision. I do not think he had even heard the colonel’s words. “It is essential, sir. Essential. I fear that what we have here is the first outbreak of the Speck plague to reach the west. It matches every symptom I saw in Fort Gettys two years ago. If we’re lucky, we can stop it here before it spreads to the whole city.”
“Speck plague? It can’t be. There’s never been a case of the Speck plague this far west.” The colonel was shocked; the hard tone of command had gone out of his voice.
“And now there is.” The doctor spoke with angry resignation.
I spoke without thinking. My own voice seemed to come from a great distance. “There were Specks there last night. At Dark Evening. In the freak tent. They did the Dust Dance.”
“Specks?” the colonel exclaimed, appalled. “Here? In Old Thares?”
The doctor spoke over him, demanding of me, “Were they ill? Sickly at all?”
I shook my head. The room was swaying slowly around me. “They danced,” I said. “They danced. The woman was beautiful.” I tried to lean back slowly into my bed. Instead the room spun suddenly, and I fell. Darkness closed in around me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
PLAGUE
My memories of those days are distorted, like images seen through a badly ground magnifying lens. Faces came too close, sound was shocking, and light pierced my eyes. I didn’t recognize the room. There was a window opposite my bed and bright winter light shone directly in my face. There were other beds in the room, and all of them were occupied. I heard coughing, retching, and feverish moaning. My own life had vanished. I did not know where I was.
“Please. Pay attention.”
There was an orderly by my bed with an open notebook in his hand. His pencil was poised over it. “Concentrate, Cadet. The doctor demands that every patient answer these questions, no matter what condition he is in. It may be the last important thing you can do with your life. Did you touch a Speck?”
I didn’t care. I just wanted him to go away. Nevertheless, I tried. “They threw dust at us. Right at us.”
“Did you touch a Speck or did a Speck touch you?”
“Rory stroked her leg.” I thought of that, and my memories spun me back to the sideshow tent. I saw the woman’s mouth soften as he caressed her. I opened my own mouth, longing to kiss her.
A voice shattered the image. “So you’ve told me. Six times. You, Cadet. You…” He flipped over a page and likely found my name, “Nevare Burvelle. Did you touch a Speck or allow a Speck to touch you?”
“Not…really.” Did I? In a dream, I had done far more than touch a Speck. She had been lush and beautiful. No. Fat and disgusting. “It wasn’t real. It didn’t count.”
“That won’t do. Yes or no, Cadet. Did you have carnal contact with a Speck? Don’t be ashamed. It’s too late for shame now. We know that several other cadets bought time with the Speck woman. Did you? Answer me, yes or no.”
“Yes or no.” I echoed the words obediently.
An exasperated sigh. “Yes, then. I’m putting down yes.”
Dr. Amicas’s guess had been correct. It was Speck plague. It went against all we knew of that disease for it to strike so far west and during winter. Conventional wisdom at the time said that it flared up in the hot dusty days of summer and died down during the cool wet days of fall. But all the other symptoms matched, and Dr. Amicas, who had seen the disease firsthand, was adamant from the beginning about his diagnosis. It was Speck plague.
Those of us who fell to the first wave of illness were fortunate in a sense, for in the early days of the plague, we got good care. The first circle of cadets to sicken was composed only of those who had visited the freak tent. I have a hazy recollection of a rumpled and unshaven Colonel Stiet striding up and down past our beds, loudly denouncing us as perverts and saying we would all be dishonorably discharged for having unnatural relations. I remember Dr. Amicas pointing out that “Numerically, it simply isn’t feasible that all these lads had relations with the same female on the same night. Even if she’d lined them up like ducks, there simply wasn’t enough time. I’m including your Caulder in that line, of course. For him to become infected so swiftly, he, too, would have had to have congress with her.”
“How dare you think my son could be involved in something like this? How dare you even suggest it? One of the cadets who dirtied himself with that striped whore passed the illness on to my boy. It’s the only possible explanation.”
The doctor’s voice was tired but insistent. “Then, unless you are saying that your son had abnormal relations with one of these cadets, we have to admit the plague can be spread by means other than sexual contact. In which case, perhaps only a few of the cadets had intercourse with the whore.”
“They’ve admitted it! Half a dozen of those new noble vermin have admitted it!”
“And as many of your fine old noble sons have owned up to it also. Stop haranguing me, Colonel. How the disease got started is no longer a priority. Stopping it is.”
The colonel’s voice was low and determined. “We never had Speck plague in Old Thares before. Is it a coincidence that the first time we have young men patronizing a Speck whore, we get an outbreak? I don’t think so. The city officials who banished the freak show don’t think so either. Those who patronized the diseased whore are as guilty as the circus that brought her to town. And they should be punished for what they have loosed upon all of us.”
“Very well,” the doctor conceded wearily. “You occupy yourself with thinking about how to punish them. I’ll try to keep them alive so you’ll have someone to punish. Would you please remove yourself from my infirmary now?”
“You haven’t heard the last of this!” the colonel promised angrily. I heard him storm out, and then drifted off into my fever again.
Dr. Amicas’s plan to quarantine the Academy and confine the plague there was doomed to defeat. No walls or gates could contain or hold out the enemy that had descended upon us. The reports of sickness in the city were multiplying before the first day of lengthening daylight was over. As it was with the Academy, so it was with the city. Those who had visited the freak show tent were the first to fall ill. But it spread rapidly to their relatives and caretakers, and outward to others. Families such as Gord’s who had left the city for the holiday heard the tidings and did not return. Families trapped within the city closed the doors to their houses and waited inside, hoping against hope that the contagion had not already infiltrated their homes. The circus and the freak show were rousted from the city, but the Specks had inexplicably vanished by then. Their keeper was found dead, choked on his prod, which had been forced down his throat.
Two days after I fell ill, the second wave of plague swept through the Academy. The infirmary was overwhelmed. There were not enough beds to hold the afflicted, not enough linens and medicines and orderlies. The doctor and his assistants did what they could to take care of the cadets suffering in their various dormitories. There was little outside help to be had, for the Speck plague was raging through the city by then, and all the doctors who dared to treat the ill had far more work than they could handle.
At the time, I knew nothing of that, of course. On the second day of my sickness, I was moved to a bed in the infirmary, and remained there. “Lots of water and sleep,” was Dr. Amicas’s first advice. I’ll give him this; he was an old soldier and knew well how to take action even before the command came down. He recognized the plague and treated it as such from the first outbreak.
He’d seen Speck plague before, and had even contracted a mild case of it when he was stati
oned at Gettys. Knowing what he knew, Dr. Amicas did the best he could. His first recommendation, that we drink lots of water, had not been a bad one. No medicine had ever proven efficacious against Speck plague. A man’s own constitution was his best resource. The symptoms were simple and exhausting: vomiting, diarrhea, and a fever that came and went. Day would seem to bring a slight recovery, but with night our fevers rose again. None of us could keep food or water down. I lay on my narrow cot, drifting in and out of awareness of the ward around me.
My cognizance of those days was an intermittent thing. Sometimes when I was awake the room was brightly lit and other times it was dim. I lost all sense of the passage of time. Every muscle in my body ached, and my head pounded with pain. I was hot, then shaking with cold. I was constantly thirsty, no matter how much I drank. If I opened my eyes, I felt as if too much light were in them; if I closed them, I feared to slip off into fever dreams. My lips and nostrils were chapped raw. I could find no comfort anywhere.
When I first arrived at the infirmary, Oron had lain in the bed to my left. The next time I awoke, he was gone and Spink was there. Nate was in the bed to my right. We were too miserable to talk; I could not even tell them of my dishonorable discharge or that they were soon to be culled as well. I drifted between dreams that were too sharply real to give me any rest and a nightmarish reality of foul smells, groaning cadets, and misery. I dreamed that I stood before my father and that he did not believe I was innocent of the false charges against me. I dreamed that my uncle and Epiny came to visit me, but Epiny had the deformed feet of the chicken woman. When she blew her little whistle, it made cackling sounds.
But the most unsettling moments were neither fever dreams nor sickroom glimpses. For me, there was another world, deeper than the fever dreams and far more real. My body lay in the bed and burned with fever, but my spirit walked in Tree Woman’s world. I watched my other self there, and recalled clearly the years I had spent with her since first she had seized my hair and pulled me up and into her keeping. My true self was a pale ghost floating in their world, a party to their thoughts, but nothing that they feared or considered at all. In that world, my topknotted self had been her student for many years, and now I was her lover. Daily, she had taught me the magic of the People, and daily she had strengthened me in that magic and made me more real in her world. We had walked in her forest and I had learned the irreplaceable value of her trees and wilderness. Her world had become mine, and I had come to see that no measure was too extreme in the war to protect it.
And in her world, I loved her with deep and real passion. I loved the voluptuousness of her flesh, and the deep earthiness of her magic. I admired her loyalty and determination to preserve the People and their ways. I shared her dedication to that cause. In those dreams, I walked beside her, and lay beside her, and in the sweet dimness of the forest night, we made the plans that would save our folk. When I was with her, all was clear. I knew that I had pleased her when I had made the sign to the Speck dancers to “loose” the magic. I knew the performers had not been captives at all, but the most powerful dancers of the magic who could be spared from the People. They had come seeking my soldier’s boy self. They had used that “me” as a compass heading, to find the place where the intruders raised their warriors. And when they had found me, my other self had taken my hand and made the sign, and they had let fly the dust of the disease.
Powdered dung. That was what it was. It was a disgusting magic to my Gernian self, and as natural as breath to Tree Woman’s assistant. It was well known to the People that a tiny measure of powdered dung from a sick person ingested by a healthy child would make the child sick, but only in the mildest way, and never again would the child fall prey to the deadly flux. But in quantity, as they had discovered, the dust could sicken an entire outpost of intruders, cutting down their warriors and women alike and exterminating the workers who slashed the road through the forest’s flesh.
In her world I accepted, without question, the further mission I would fulfill. I would enter the flesh of the soldier’s son. I would undergo a change and become him. And I would spread the dust of death, not just through the great house where they raised their warriors, but also throughout their stonewalled hives, and even to the crowned ones who ruled them. Thus would I be the magic that turned the intruders back and saved the People.
All this I knew so clearly when I wandered outside my feverish body. Each time I came back to my tortured flesh as my true self, I was weaker. Each time, vestiges of that other life and the knowledge of that world ghosted through my fevered brain.
On my third day of sickness, I rallied briefly during the day. Dr. Amicas seemed pleased to see me awake, but I did not share his optimism. My eyelids were crusted and raw, as were my nostrils. The lingering illness made all my senses preternaturally sharp. The coarse sheets and wool blankets were a torment. I rolled my head toward Spink. I wanted to ask him if Oron had recovered, but Spink’s eyes were closed and he was breathing hoarsely. Nate was still in the bed to my right. He looked terrible. In a few short days the illness had sucked the flesh from his bones and the fever appeared to be devouring him from within. His mouth hung open as he breathed and mucus rattled in his throat. It was a terrible thing to hear, and I could not escape it. The day droned past me. I tried to be manly. I drank the bitter herbal water that they brought me, vomited it up, and then drank the next draft they gave me. There was nothing to do except lie in bed and be sick. I hadn’t the strength to hold a book, and could not have focused my eyes if I did. No one came to visit me. Neither Spink nor Nate was well enough to talk. I felt that there was something important I had to tell someone, but I could not remember what it was or whom I was to tell.
I told myself that I was growing stronger, but as the sun faded into night, my fever returned. I plunged back into a sleep that was neither rest nor true sleep. My dreams swirled like winged demons round my bed, and I could not escape them. I woke from a dream in which I was trapped in the freak tent to find myself in the dimmed ward. I sat up and discovered that Spink had no hands or arms, only flippers. When I tried to get out of my bed, I found that I had no legs. “I’m dreaming!” I shouted at the orderly who came to hold me down. “I’m dreaming. My legs are fine. I’m dreaming.”
I woke from that nightmare, shivering with cold, to find that my head was resting on a pillow full of snow. I tried to throw it off my bed, but Dr. Amicas came and scolded me, saying, “It will cool your hot head. It may break the fever. Lie back, Burvelle, lie back.”
“I didn’t give liquor to Caulder. I didn’t! You have to make the colonel understand. It wasn’t me.”
“Of course not, of course not. Lie back. Cool your head. Your fever is burning your brain. Lie still.”
The doctor pushed me back into the cold softness of the fat man’s embrace. “I used to be in the cavalla!” he told me. “Too bad you can’t be a ranker like me. You can’t be anything now. Not even a scout. Maybe you can be a fat man in a sideshow. All you have to do is eat. You like to eat, don’t you?”
I sat up suddenly. The softness of the cold pillow had wakened a brief connection of memory. It was night in the ward. Dim lanterns burned, and in the beds, shadowy figures tossed. I held tight to what I knew, desperate to share it, to avert my future betrayal of my people. “Doctor!” I shouted. “Dr. Amicas.”
Someone in a doctor’s apron hurried to my bedside. It wasn’t Amicas. “What is it? Are you thirsty?”
“Yes. No. It was the dust, Doctor. The dust they used. Dried and powdered shit from a sick man. To make us all sick. To kill us all.”
“Drink some water, Cadet. You’re raving.”
“Tell Dr. Amicas,” I insisted.
“Of course. Drink this.”
He held a cup to my mouth. It was pure, cool water and I gulped it down. It soothed my mouth and throat. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.” And I fell back, through fever dreams of an endless carriage ride into that other world.
Tree Woma
n shook her head at me. We were seated together in a little bower of flowering bushes, not far from the edge of the world. She smiled kindly at me as she warned me, “You are not strong enough yet. Be patient. You need to consume more of their magic to walk with strength in their world. If you try too soon to cross back with him, you cannot master him. He will betray you.”
We were sitting together in the eaves of a forest. A soft rain was falling. She had brought me a leaf, folded like a cup. In it was a thick, sweet soup, warm and delicious. I drank it and licked the residue from the leaf as she looked on approvingly.
She had a leaf of her own, laden with the same gooey substance. She lapped it slowly from the cup, licking her lips and smiling. Watching her eat made me hungry for her. There was such plenitude to her, such completeness. She was generosity and richness, indulgence and luxury. In her, nothing was denied. I wanted her again. I wanted to be her, full and rich with magic. She saw me watching her and smiled coquettishly.
“Eat more!” she urged me. “Soon I will show you how to get it for yourself.” She handed me another leaf of the stuff. “Let it fill you. It’s their magic. Isn’t it delicious? Fill yourself with it. Eat and grow full of magic.” She leaned closer to me, offering it, and suddenly it was not sweet. It was foul and thick, congealed like blood, sweet in the rotten way of carrion that draws flies. I jerked back from it.
“I don’t want to be full of magic! I want to be an officer in the king’s cavalla. I want to serve my king, and marry Carsina, and send my journals home to my family. Please. Let me just be what I am supposed to be. Let me go.”
