by Robin Hobb
Clove had had a couple of days’ rest and some grazing. The days were getting cold and the nights even colder. It was stupid to linger here. The sooner I reached my journey’s end at Gettys, the sooner I would know what awaited me there. There was a danger to waiting too long. If the commander there didn’t accept me for enlistment, I’d probably have to winter there, and then ride out in spring to try my luck at other citadels and forts. There was no guarantee that any regiment would have me. My thoughts spiraled into darker speculation. If no regiment would have me, what then? What if I had to face being a soldier son who could not be a soldier, a noble’s son who had been disowned? A brother who had not kept his word to send for his sister? A fat man who begged shelter and food of strangers? A man who looked at a woman with interest, only to have her turn away in disgust?
I didn’t much like any of my possible new identities. I made an abrupt decision. I would leave at first light tomorrow.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BUEL HITCH
I stayed with Amzil nearly a month. I think that almost every night I made a resolution to leave in the morning. But every morning brought some small task that I thought I could do before I left. And somehow each of those tasks led to others. It was always the task of the day that I stayed for; I never allowed myself to think how pleasant it was to have the company of this woman, how enjoyable I found it to be the one who could provide. My father had rubbed my nose in my failures for so long that even I was astonished at how much I could do for this orphaned and destitute family. It felt good.
It began with keeping my promise to show her how to snare rabbits. I convinced myself that I had to stay an extra day to be sure that the snares were working and that she knew how to reset them. I spent the afternoon of that day cutting more wood and mending the roof of the shed that Clove had been using as a stable. Midway through that task, the man who had turned me away from his door only a few days before came to ask if he could barter with us for a few days of Clove’s labor. The man had devised a sort of plow and hoped that with the use of Clove’s strength, he could plow a much larger garden area for the next spring. I pointed out to him that it was the wrong season for plowing. He retorted that he was not stupid, but that breaking the soil now might make it easier for him to plant a larger area next spring.
Fabricating a harness for Clove proved to be the trickiest part of the project. Yet by evening’s end, and with a lot of sweat, Merkus and I had managed to break the sod on a quarter-acre of land. It was rocky soil, threaded through with old roots. A good part of our toil went to chopping side roots so that Clove could jerk old stumps free of the earth. Merkus traded us a sack of potatoes and half a day of his labor the next day.
So I had little choice but to decide to stay for another day. Our evening repast seemed very rich, for in a surge of optimism, Amzil had used the meat from two rabbits and five whole potatoes to make the meal. We had caught a total of three rabbits, so I showed her how to hang the extra meat in the chimney to smoke it and preserve it. The three rabbitskins joined the first one to dry.
The extra food seemed to give the children more energy. They were not as willing to go to bed that night, so we sat up for some time by the fire. Amzil surprised me by telling the children several stories to pass the time. Then, after she had settled them into bed, we sat up a short time longer talking about what projects were most crucial for the coming winter.
When Merkus arrived the next morning to work off his debt, he and I tightened the roof and door of Amzil’s house before moving on to make the roof of the shed sound. Long before noon, I had earned his grudging respect. Over the next few days, Clove’s great strength made short work of tugging down several ramshackle structures so that we could reduce them to usable timbers. Once I had stockpiled the lumber that I thought I could use for Amzil’s dwelling and the adjacent shed, I put Merkus in our debt once more by using Clove to haul a number of heavy timbers down to where he wished to use them.
All this activity roused the curiosity of the other scattered dwellers. The old man and his nagging wife came to the door of their hut to watch Clove pass. I discovered there was one other family in the otherwise deserted town, a man and a woman of middle years with two half-grown children and a baby. They watched us from afar, but did not speak to us that day.
Amzil and I checked the snares together that evening. We had only caught one rabbit, but she still seemed very pleased with it. Under my guidance, she moved the snares to fresh locations on some of the many rabbit trails throughout the stump field.
“If the game becomes scarce here, then you can always set snares along the river, especially in the wintertime.” I told her. “Watch for the paths where animals go to water. Set them there.”
“The river freezes along its bank in winter,” she told me.
“There will still be tracks to it. You’ll see.”
Kara had tagged along with us, and to my surprise Amzil had the child set the final snare. She seemed very young to me to be doing such a task. Nonetheless, I held my tongue, suspecting that in this, Amzil probably knew best. Small as she was, the sooner Kara stepped up to help provide for her family, the better they would do.
The cottage became a snugger place as each day passed. We mixed grass, moss, and mud, and chinked the gaps between the logs. With our salvaged wood, we put a floor in the cabin. I hunted each morning with my sling. My best day was when a lucky shot brought down a goose that I’d startled off the river. It was fat. Grease had never tasted so good to me. Amzil caught every drop of it before it could drip into the fire and saved it to flavor the lean rabbit that made up most of our meals.
Our days began to have a pattern. Each morning I hunted. I brought my kills home to Amzil, and she cooked them. In the afternoons, I did whatever I thought best to improve her cottage. It was rough, crude work for the most part, but even so, it made a difference. A slab of wood and three stick legs made a stool. I longed for an awl, but managed to bore and whittle the leg holes with my knife. I made a low table so that the children could sit on the floor in front of the fire and have their meals more comfortably. Every day, Amzil set aside a part of my catch to either smoke or dry as jerked meat. It pleased me to watch her little larder grow full. I built her another shelf.
Three times in that period, I saw travelers pass. The couriers who served the king passed every day, but other than them there was little traffic on the road this time of year. Once it was a train of wagons pulled by oxen, heading toward Gettys. The men driving them were hard-eyed, and both the first and the last wagon had guards perched on the wagon seats, long guns slung across their knees. Plainly they wanted nothing to do with anyone. We stared at one another, but no one called out a greeting. Another day, it was a man riding a horse and leading two mules laden with furs. He was headed west on the road. He nodded to my “Good day” but kept on his way. And the other traveler I saw was a tinker with a wagon pulled by a mismatched team. The wagon was painted with pictures of his wares, but the bright panels were thick with dust and the tall yellow wheels of his wagon were crusted with mud. I was on the edge of the stump field. I waved my arms at him, hoping he’d stop. I wanted to see what tools he had for sale. He waved back at me, but then stirred up his team to a trot, plainly disinclined to pause. I shouted after him, but he was gone, leaving only dust hanging over the road in his wake.
Often the children would come out to watch me at my tasks. I began to teach them the nursery rhymes I knew, the counting songs and memory games. They liked the one about the farmer calling his five goats. Kara wanted to learn how my sling worked. I made her a smaller one, and set her targets. She became a fair shot, but Amzil seemed reluctant to let me take her out to hunt. I could not decide if she did not trust me alone with the child or did not think it a proper task for her.
I cut firewood every day. It became a wall between Amzil’s cottage and the hut where the old man lived. At night, our fire was more generous and it filled the small space with both warmth and light.
One night I took it upon myself to be the storyteller, and it flattered me that Amzil listened as attentively as her three small children. I told them two tales that my mother had told me when I was a boy, and then I found myself telling a story that I did not remember hearing, yet I knew I was not making up. It was the tale of a young man who sought to avoid doing a task that his mother had given him, and of all the misfortunes that befell him as a result of his attempt to ignore his duty. The ending was, in a way, quite comical, for when the boy finally surrendered and went to do his task, he found that his mother had already done it. The children seemed to enjoy the story, but after Amzil had put them to bed she said to me, “That was a rather strange story.” Her tone made it clear that she did not quite approve of it.
“It’s a story that the Speck tell to their children,” I said, and then wondered how I had come by such knowledge. “I think it’s to teach them that some tasks are so important, they cannot be ignored. Someone will do them.”
Amzil raised her eyebrows me. “And your telling it makes it all the stranger,” she said with even greater disapproval. A short time later, she sought her bed with the children, and I rolled myself in my blankets to sleep before the fire.
That night I dreamed of the Tree Woman’s forest. I walked alone down paths where once we had walked as a couple. It was autumn in the forest and the leaves on the deciduous trees were turning. I had never seen such a spectacle. In the area of the plains where I had grown up, there were groves of trees along the river or following the streambeds. In autumn, their leaves turned a soggy brown and hung on the branches until the frost and falls of snow took them down. Never before had I experienced walking in a forest where the leaves had gone yellow and gold and scarlet. When I lifted my eyes, the brilliance of their color against the bright blue autumn sky was shocking. The leaves had already begun to forsake the trees; there were drifts of them across the path, and as I waded through them they rustled around my feet. There was an incredible smell in the air, a rich odor of decomposing leaves and fresh rain and the promise of a sharp frost in the night to come. I felt alive, and in the strange clarity of that dream I felt that this life was larger and brighter and sharper-edged than in my waking world. I was going somewhere. I could not have said where, and yet I was hurrying to get there, eager to arrive. I went down a hillside through a forest of white-trunked birches with golden leaves fluttering in the autumn breeze. At the bottom, I came to a swampy place where high-bush cranberries dandled their translucent scarlet fruit below palm-sized leaves that had gone red with the frost. Willows grew there, and their long narrow leaves had gone a different shade of red. I cupped a scant handful of the fruit and tasted it. The berries burst in my mouth with the sweet of summer ending and the sharp tang of winter yet to come. I chewed the seeds as I walked on, deeper into her world.
Her world it was. I came to her at last, supine on the earth. My sword had bitten deep into her trunk, and she had fallen, just as a tree would have crashed to earth if most of the trunk had been severed. The stump of her body stood and her torso had fallen beside it, but that torso was still connected to the stump by a thick bend of bark. By that, she lived. She was somehow a great tree and she was an immense woman, with all the attributes of both. She had stretched her length out on the forest floor when she fell, a glorious statue toppled from its pedestal. Her torso and head melded with the fallen portion of the tree. The mass of her hair ranged from glossy curls around her face to flowing tresses that merged with the rough bark of the trunk beyond her head. Like a nursery log, a sapling was sprouting from her, a slender tree growing up from between her breasts. The felling of her tree had created a clearing in the forest canopy. Light spilled from above to warm the earth. A host of plant life had sprung up around her. I knelt beside her, knees cushioned by moss and leaves. I took her hand. “So I didn’t kill you. You didn’t die,” I said with gladness.
She smiled up at me. “I told you. Such as I do not die in that way. We go on.”
Cautiously, I set a hand to the smooth bark of the slender sapling. “This is you?” I asked her.
She put her hand over mine, closing my fingers around the growing trunk. “It is me.”
Wonder caught me. Life pulsed in the sapling. Skin to bark, I could feel her magic at work as she transferred her power into the new life springing up from her bosom. Even in that place, a shiver of awe ran over me.
She had shifted her gaze to speak to me. Now she looked up at the infinite blue sky above us. Her long hair coiled and looped around her head like a corona. “Soldier’s Boy, you know you have a task. It was given to you by the magic. I know what the task is. You are to save us. But only you know how you are to accomplish that. That was why the magic was given to you. Not so that you might amuse yourself, but because you are the one who would know what you must do to accomplish your task. With power comes responsibility. You understand this.” Her voice was gentle but her words were absolute.
“Of course I do,” I said readily, though until that moment, I do not think that I had.
“You must come to where the destruction is. See it for yourself. Then tell me how you will defeat it. It is my weakness that I hunger to know these things. When I walked in the world that you now tread, I was a curious woman. Even here, even now, that curiosity remains. I know the magic, I trust the magic, and still I want to know. Will not you tell me?”
“When I know for myself what it is that I must do to defeat the end of our world, then I will tell you. I promise you that.”
She relaxed more deeply into her mossy couch. Ferns had sprouted around her where she had fallen. The fallen leaves of autumn had drifted around her supine form, cushioning her curves with their gold. I cannot describe how glorious she was. When I looked on her, I saw her as a Speck would. She was not fleshy, but lush; her rounded belly, her voluptuous breasts, the softness of her face all spoke of a time of plenty, of fruition and harvest. “I hold you to your promise, Soldier’s Boy. Do not tarry. There are others, less patient than I, who think that a swifter solution must be reached. I have told them of you, in dreams and visions. Nonetheless, they will soon take steps of their own to rid our lands of the invaders. They say that the dance has failed. They say it is time to use the intruders’ own ways against them.”
A deep foreboding rose in me, tainting my dream. I smelled smoke, and the fallen leaves suddenly became sodden and black and rotting. I sank into them. All around me, the forest became a cemetery of snaggled stumps and bare, oozing earth. The tree woman sagged into a rotting corpse. Her lips, mottled with mold, tore as she spoke her last words to me. “The magic was not given to you to use for yourself. Be wary of that temptation. Tarry no longer, but come to us. Our need is great.”
And then she was gone, flesh and bones sinking into a swamp of rot that was not the healthy compost of a living forest but the stink of too many dead things left heaped in a pile. I tried to get away, but my feet and legs sank into the muck. I struggled wildly, wallowing deeper. It reached my thighs, and with infinite loathing I felt it close around my loins and lap against my belly. I tried to open my eyes, knowing that I dreamed, but no matter how I contorted my face, I could not waken myself. I gave a sudden wild cry of absolute despair.
I think my own shout awakened me. It was small comfort at first, for I was sprawled in mud and leaves and surrounded by ghostly stumps. Rain was falling all around me. I was wet, cold, and completely disoriented. How had I got here? The moon glided briefly from the shelter of the clouds and granted me a gray wash of light. I staggered to my feet and wrapped my arms around myself, shivering. I was barefoot, and my clothes were coated with mud and dead leaves. My hair, long grown out of a soldier’s cut, dangled wet on my brow and dripped into my eyes. When I pushed it back from my face, I smeared my forehead with muck from my wet, gritty hands. I cursed myself for an idiot for making it worse. I stumbled back through the storm and the treacherous stump field to Amzil’s door. It was closed tight, with the latch string pulled inside;
I wondered if I’d shut it behind me when I went sleep walking, or if Amzil had wakened to a draft and closed it.
I wanted to pound on it and gain swift admission to the dry fireside. The thought of waking not only Amzil but also her children dissuaded me. Reluctantly, I sought the shed. I was glad we’d tightened up the roof. It was dry inside, and Clove’s huge body radiated warmth into the small space. In the darkness, I found the saddle blanket and made a rough bed for myself until dawn. Then I rose, cold and stiff. I took Clove out and hobbled him in deep grass near the river’s edge so he could graze. I went for a walk along the riverbank until I was sure that Amzil would be awake. Then I returned to her cottage.
“You’re up early,” she observed softly. The children were still sleeping.
“Fish are jumping after mosquitoes in the shallows of the river. If we had fishing tackle, you could have a nice breakfast on mornings like this.”
She smiled sourly. “If I had fishing tackle. If I had a net. If I had seed, or a loom, or yarn, or fabric. There are so many ways I could better our lot, if I had even the most basic tools to begin. But I don’t, and I’ve nothing to trade or sell, and even if I had something to trade, it would take me days to walk to a marketplace, and I’d have to take the children with me. I’ve had months to think my situation through, over and over. There’s no reason for a town to be here. There’s nothing to make people come here. It’s just a place to pass by on your way to somewhere else. I have no way to acquire even the most basic things I’d need to make a life here. Perhaps if my husband had lived, we could have managed, for one of us could make the long trip to Gettys while the other stayed here with the children. But I cannot take them so far alone. Sometimes I think that was what the king intended. He took all the poor folk who broke the laws to live, and sent us out here to die.”
