by Robin Hobb
“Easy, Burvelle. Easy. Orderly! More water, here, right away. Drink this, Burvelle. Drink it down.”
My teeth chattered against the rim of a glass. Cold water spilled and dripped on my chest. I pried open my gummy eyes. Dr. Amicas was easing me back onto my pillows. He had two days’ growth of gray and black stubble on his chin and his eyes were bloodshot. I tried to make him understand. “I didn’t give Caulder liquor, Doctor. All I did was bring him home. You have to talk to Colonel Stiet. Or it’s all over for me.”
He stared at me distractedly, then said, “It’s the least of your worries, Cadet. But men seldom lie in fevers. I’ll put in a word for you with the colonel. If he survives. Rest now. Get some rest.”
“The dust!” I blurted. “Did he tell you about the dust? The dung. Dung from a sick child.”
The doctor was pushing me back into my bed. I caught at his hands. “I betrayed us, Doctor. I made the ‘loose’ sign, and by it the Specks knew it was me. They knew they had reached the place where cavalla officers are taught. They loosed the dust and the death upon us. They were waiting for me, waiting for the sign. I’m a traitor, Doctor. Don’t let him become me. He means to kill everyone here, every soldier’s son. And everyone in Old Thares, even the king and queen.” I struggled to push his hands away, to escape the bed.
“Easy, Nevare. Rest. You aren’t yourself. Orderly! I need some straps here.”
An old man in a spattered smock hurried to my bedside. As the doctor held me, he tied a strip of linen around my wrist. “Not too tight,” the doctor rebuked him. “I just want him kept in his bed until the delirium passes.”
“Loose!” I said, and made the sign. The strip fell away from my wrist.
“Not that loose!” the doctor chided him.
“I tied it, sir. Swear I did.” The orderly was indignant.
“Just do it again.”
“Loose,” I said, but I was losing my strength rapidly. I let the doctor push me back into my blankets. I did not try to sit up again.
“That’s better,” he said. “We may not need the restraints after all.”
I tried to hold on to his words, but they were slippery. I slid back into ordinary nightmares. When I awoke, midmorning, I felt relief at escaping them, and exhausted as if I had battled all night long. An orderly brought me water and I drank, relieved to find it pure water with no medicines fouling its clean taste. Dr. Amicas was nowhere to be seen. The bed to my right was empty and an old woman, her face ravaged by drink, was stripping off the linens. I rolled my head the other way. Spink was there, but he slept on, oblivious to the day’s light or the muted bustle around us. Several times I asked after Nate and Oron, but the nurses seemed to know no names.
“They come and go too fast,” one man told me. He scratched his whiskery cheek. “The beds aren’t even cold before we’re moving someone else into them. Everyone who went to that pagan Dark Evening festival is sick. Whole city has it now, I’ve heard. ’Cept for me. I’ve always had a strong constitution, I have. And I’m a good man, blessed by the good god. I stayed at home with my own wife that night, yes I did. Let this be a lesson to you, young fellow. Those that give credence to the dark gods get paid in the dark gods’ coin.”
His words rattled me. The feverish mind is susceptible to suggestion. The words danced around in my brain, eventually colliding with something Epiny had said. Or was it something I had dreamed? Something about not being able to use the magic of an older god without making ourselves vulnerable to it. I wondered if I had sinned by going to Dark Evening, and if this was the good god’s punishment of me. Weak as I was, I became maudlin and tried to say my prayers, only to keep losing my place in the verses.
Later I realized that I never saw that man again. My fever-fuddled mind noticed that the people dumping the slop buckets and bringing water to the moaning cadets no longer moved with the precise air of those trained in the military. There were more women working in the infirmary than I would have expected, and some seemed of less than sterling character. At one point I saw one going through the pockets of a cadet’s jacket as he lay unconscious and groaning in his bed. I had not the strength to lift my hand or voice. When next I opened my eyes, the cadet was covered head to toe with a soiled sheet. The altercation between the doctor and two old men in earth-stained clothes had awakened me.
“But he’s dead!” one of the old men was insisting. “Ain’t right to let him lie there till he stinks, you know. Bad enough stink in here already.”
“Leave him!” Dr. Amicas spoke forcefully but without strength. He looked years older and far more frail. “No bodies are to be removed from this room unless I personally give the order. Cover them, if you feel you must, but let them be. I want at least twelve hours to pass between the time of death and the removal of the body.”
“But it’s not right! It’s not respectful!”
“I have my reasons. Leave it at that!”
The other man abruptly asked, “Is it true what I heard? That a woman was put alive in her coffin, and by the time they heard her pounding on the lid, it was too late? She died on the dead cart, there in the cemetery?”
The doctor looked haggard. “No body is to be removed from this ward without my consent,” he said quietly.
“Doctor,” I said hoarsely. When he did not turn to my voice, I tried to clear my throat. It did little good, but the next time I rasped out “Doctor!” he turned toward me.
“What is it, lad?” he asked, almost kindly.
“Did you speak to the colonel for me? Does he know that Caulder lied about me?”
He looked at me in a vague way that told me he had forgotten the matter that still obsessed me. He patted my shoulder absently. “Caulder is very ill, lad, and the colonel is not well himself. He fears he will lose his only son. This is not a good time to talk to him about anything.”
Then down the ward a man moaned loudly, and I heard a gush of fluid hit the floor. The doctor hurried away from me, taking all hope with him. Caulder would die. No one would ever be able to prove he had lied about me. Live or die, I was disgraced. If I died, my father could bury his shame. If I died, there could be no further dishonor for my father or me.
This time, as I sank into fever, I sank with a will. I turned my mouth determinedly from the cool cup that someone pressed to my lips. I would not drink.
I died.
I came to a place of blowing darkness and emptiness. I peered about me into a dull and perpetual evening. I wasn’t alone. Others milled there, as fortuneless and disinterested as I. It was hard to make out individual features. Faces were blurred and clothing merely shadows, but here and there a detail stood out. A woman recalled her wedding ring, and it shone golden still on an ethereal hand. A carpenter clutched his hammer. A soldier moved past me, the medals for bravery glinting on his chest. But most possessed no distinguishing features, no treasured memento of a life abandoned. I moved among them, with no destination or ambition other than to move. After an indeterminate time, I felt drawn in a certain direction and so I went, giving in to the summoning.
Like water seeking the path of least resistance, I joined the slow river of departing spirits. Eventually I became aware that we were approaching a precipice. Most of the spirits drifted to the edge, lingered, and then simply flowed over, vanishing from sight. I reached the perimeter and looked down. A pool of contained light, glimmering with rainbows, like oil floating on water, waited below. As I watched, a woman drew near. She looked down for a time and then stepped into the emptiness. She drifted slowly away from me, dwindling and losing substance like ink dispersing in water. I could not see if she ever reached the placid pool or not. I contemplated the pool for a time, but was overcome by a strong feeling that it was not for me. No. For me, there was something else.
I drifted along the cliff’s edge, vaguely aware that I was leaving the swirling tide of spirits behind me. Eventually I joined a separate trickle of disembodied folk. We did not speak or look at one another. The bare cliff jutted
over another ravine, this one bottomless and empty. A single dead tree loomed over the gathering souls. And a primitive rope bridge, a narrow web of pale twine and twisting green vines spanned the gap. A swanneck driven into the earth secured the end of the fine yellow footrope closest to me. The handrails were of a twisting vine that culminated in the great tree that overshadowed the cliff. A shiver both of recognition and premonition ran through me.
Soldiers had gathered to cross her. Cavalla soldiers. Cadets from the Academy, limping veterans, retired officers. They patiently waited their turns to cross. Cold wind blew past us, and brought to us the distant cries of the living. “Papa, Papa!” someone called, faint and far away. The aged man next to me bowed his head, ethereal tears streaming down his pallid face. It was his turn. He trudged onto the bridge, head bent as if to a wind I did not feel.
I saw Trist in that gathering, and Natred, and Oron. They slowly milled with the others. They did not speak to me or to one another. Silent and gray, they edged forward, interested in nothing except their own slow progress toward death. I calmly realized that was our destination. Like me, they were dying, and here our spirits waited, on the teetering point between death and life. Some lingered here a long time and seemed to resist the draw. Others seemed to decide swiftly, stepping boldly onto the bridge. It was a bridge, I suddenly knew, that did not belong here. Prior to my alliance with the tree woman, it had not existed. She and I had wrought this crossing, twisting its lines from our very beings. I had taken the magic of her people into me and yielded to her the magic of mine. Of these things was this traverse made that lured the spirits of other soldiers like myself to cross. They, too, I suddenly perceived, had touched the magic of her people. “Keep fast,” they had signed over cinches, not knowing that when the time came, the magic would hold them fast as well. Yet as the line of people shuffled forward, I flowed with them, unthinking and unresisting. I, too, would cross. When it came my time, I stepped past the Kidona swanneck that secured the footrope of the bridge and out onto it. I shuffled forward with the rest.
I reached the middle of the bridge before I lifted my eyes to see my destination. A dismal hell awaited us. It reminded me of the logged-off hillside I had passed on my river journey toward Old Thares, but it was not the same place. A massacred landscape of rolling hills lay before me. The sheared stumps before me dwarfed me and reordered my concept of the word “tree.” Giants had flourished here, and were no more. The realm of the forest god had been ransacked and robbed. Cold rain was falling on it, cutting rivulets in its bare flanks. The still-smoldering mounds of slashed underbrush and branches glowed a dark, evil red. Steam and smoke rose from them. The passage of boots and teams of horses had trampled what plant growth and underbrush remained into the muddy earth. The crushed vegetation sprawled like slaughtered children. Only on the tops of the hills did trees still stand, and I knew that their reign was soon to end. A crude roadbed snaked toward them.
“Nevare!” a girl called from somewhere far behind me. “Come back, Nevare!”
Once I had known someone named Nevare. I turned my head slowly and looked back the way I had come. Whoever had called me was not there; she had no power to reach me. Other drifting souls were crossing the bridge behind me. Oron was on the bridge, and Natred. Still others milled on the far side. I glanced back the way I had come. I recognized Caulder and then Spink in the waiting crowd. Oh. So they, too, were dying. And they, too, were called to cross the bridge. I turned forward and walked on.
As the spirits ahead of me reached the stripped and barren hillside, they drifted aimlessly. Their purposelessness seemed a form of torment, as if they had had some important destination they now could not recall. Some went toward the jagged stumps of the dead trees and touched them, pressing against them as if they were doors that would not yield. Slowly those ones sank down beside the stumps, liquefying into a thick white soup of fog at the base of the chopped trees. A wisp of vapor rose from each as they vanished. I saw Sergeant Rufet go that way. He melted at the base of a stump, leaving a larger puddle than most of the others.
I saw Tree Woman then, and my other self. She stood at the crest of the hill where a line of unharvested trees remained, her back close to one of the towering giants, and looked down on us. She judged us from that vantage point, but I also knew she could not go far from the living forest. My other self did that for her. He hunted deliberately across the bare hillside among the drifting spirits, his concentration making him far more real than the wandering wraiths. He moved purposefully, a predator among prey.
Tree Woman called encouragement down to him. “Oh, yes, get that one, hurry before he is gone. He had far more power than he knew, far more wisdom. But he had no tree to put it in; the fools never learned to save a place to store their magic. Go, hurry, and consume his magic before it disperses. Your people have little magic to them. You will have to devour many more before you are full. Eat!”
That other self that was somehow still me in spite of the antipathy I felt toward him hurried to obey her. He had grown, and in that place of ghosts, he seemed substantial. He was round of belly, heavy of arm and leg. Leaves were his only garments. His scalp-lock had been smeared with pine pitch and plaited down his back and interwoven with green vines. He rushed to the puddle that had been Sergeant Rufet and dropped to his knees beside it. He scooped up the white liquid before it was sucked into the earth. He used no leaf cup now. Instead, my other self lowered his mouth to his cupped hands, eagerly lapping the thick porridge of what had been Rufet’s soul. For a moment, I was he. I felt the stickiness on my hands and chin, and I felt myself grow stronger for having consumed his essence.
Magic. I was filling myself with magic. I would be a great man if I gained enough magic. If I filled myself with the magic, I could turn back the intruders and save the People. For that moment, his ambition was mine, and I understood it in a profound way. I was essential. I was the crossroads. In me, the magic of the People and the magic of the intruders would be combined and joined. From that combination would come the answer. Tree Woman knew that her magic alone could never stop the destroyers. It would have to be mingled with the magic of the intruders, for only a people’s own magic understood that people’s weaknesses well enough to defeat them. The magic of the People could hold the intruders, but it would take their own magic, the magic that lived in their bones and flesh but never truly died, to defeat them completely and send them back whence they had come.
That was Tree Woman’s ambition.
And it was mine, too, while I shared that other self’s awareness. For he loved the People as I had never loved my own kind.
That thought jolted me, and in my distant body, I felt a twitch and a gasp. I think that tiny vestige of life attracted Tree Woman’s attention to me. She had been watching approvingly as my other self devoured Sergeant Rufet. Her eyes scanned the mournful crowd that pushed slowly across the bridge, cattle in a slaughter chute. Then she saw me, still standing upon the bridge. I had nearly reached her side of the crevasse, where, I now saw, that the end of the bridge was secured by a cavalla saber thrust into the stony ground. I knew the weapon. It had been mine. Dewara had shown me how to summon it to his world, and I had. Now it held the bridge fast, anchored my world to hers.
When she saw me, Tree Woman suddenly flung her arms up to the sky. She grew taller until she stood great as any live oak, and then larger still. She soared in size, to fill half the sky over the stripped hill. She pointed toward me, her fingers long as branches. “Go back!” she commanded me in fury. “You are not to be in this place. Go back! Inhabit the body until we are ready!”
What gave her such power over me? She seized me by my hair, jerking me from the trudging queue of spirits and hurling me back across the chasm. I landed on my back, and my eyes flew open and I gasped. Wan daylight filled the room around me, pressing painfully into my eyes. Someone seized my wasted hand and gripped it so tightly the bones rubbed together. “He’s not dead! Doctor, come here! Nevare is not de
ad!”
The doctor’s voice was more distant than Epiny’s. “I told you he wasn’t dead. This plague sometimes mimes death. It’s one of the dangers. We give up on people too soon. Get some broth into him. That’s about all you can do for him. Then change the sheets on the empty cots. We’ll have them filled again before evening, I fear.”
My fever dreams had been so vivid and strange that for a brief time I simply accepted that Epiny was sitting on a stool between my bed and Spink’s. She wore a stained smock over one of her ridiculous dresses. Her cheeks were red and her lips chapped. Her careworn face and bundled-back hair made her look more womanly than I’d ever seen her before. I stared at her and forgot to resist her as she spooned broth into my mouth. When I began to shiver violently, she set the cup and spoon aside and tucked my blankets more securely around me. “Finishing school?” I said to her. My cracked lips had difficulty shaping the words.
She frowned at me momentarily, and then a sour smile came to her pinched mouth. “Finished with that!” she said, and managed a small laugh. She leaned closer to me. “I ran away. And I went to Dark Evening and had a wonderful time with Spink. And then I went home and told my parents where I’d been. I knew full well my mother would tell me that I was a ruined woman, and ‘damaged goods,’ and all those other quaint phrases powerful women apply to women who don’t fall under their control. But I also knew, because I’d filched the letter, that Spink’s family had already made an offer for me. When she told me no decent man would ever have me now, I set it on the table before both of them, and told them that as it was the only offer they would ever get for me, it was therefore the best and they’d be wise to take it. Oh, what a terrible scene she made.” Her voice went suddenly thick and for an instant she fell silent. I knew her triumph was not free of pain. When she went on, her voice was tighter. “My parents will have no choice except to take it. No one else will have me now. I made sure of it.”
I was puzzled. “Spink said…he never met with you.”
