by Robin Hobb
“So I thought she was trying to tell me something, about how the stream separated us, about how different we were. But then she went over and grabbed the plant that was me and she pulled it up out of the ground. But its tough little roots came with it. And she started following that root, lifting it up out of the ground, and that root went from my plant to another to another and to another and finally it went right under the stream and come up on the other side and she pulled it up and it went to the plant she said was her. And she stood there, holding up all this network of roots, and she said, ‘See. There isn’t one little plant growing alone. It’s all of us.’”
He fell silent, palm up and empty, reached out toward me, waiting for a response. He seemed terribly moved by what he had told me. “It’s a nice story,” I said at last. “But I don’t see how it helps me understand whatever it is you’re trying to say.”
He shook his head at me in disgust and went back to sit in his chair. “For her, it’s not a metaphor. It’s reality. She truly believes that we are connected to one another and that in some way we are all part of one big…something.”
“Some big what?”
“We don’t have a word for it. She’s told me about it a hundred times, but her truth is in a place where our words don’t reach. It’s like disease. Our children get sick, we try to find out why, and we try to make them better. We cover them up with blankets to try to sweat the fever out or we give them willow bark tea. Because we think sickness means something is wrong with a child.”
“And Specks don’t think something is wrong when a child gets sick?”
“No. Do you think something is wrong when a boy’s voice changes or he sprouts whiskers out of his face? They think children are supposed to get sick. Some get better and live, and that’s fine with them. And some die, and that’s fine with them in a different way.”
“Do you see her often?”
“Who?
“Your Speck woman!”
“Yes. In a way.”
“I’d like to meet her,” I said quietly.
He seemed to think about that for a long time. “Maybe you can, if she wants. In spring.”
“Why not sooner?”
“Because it’s winter. No one sees Specks in the winter.”
“Why not?”
“Are you playing with me, Never? You are so damn frustrating. How can you have Speck magic all through you and not know a thing about them? Specks don’t come around in winter. They just don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Well—I don’t know. They just don’t. They’re gone in winter.”
“Where? Do they migrate? Do they hibernate?” I was getting as impatient with Hitch as he was with me. He’d come here, full of mystical hints and warnings, and told me next to nothing.
“I just told you, I don’t know. They keep to themselves in winter. No one will see a Speck around here until spring.”
“I saw a Speck woman here, but it was only a dream.” I think I threw the words out just to see what he would say.
He gave a huff of displeasure. “I like how you say ‘only,’ Never. Are you that comfortable with it? Speck comes walking around in my dreams, it still puts the wind up my back. Of course, to them it’s nothing; they go journeying by dream all the time. Noselaca, she can’t understand why I make such a fuss about it.”
“So you dream of your woman—Noselaca?”
“She’s not my woman, Never.” He spoke quietly, as if sharing a dangerous secret with me. “Never talk about a Speck woman that way. She could put you in a bad way over something like that. And I don’t dream about her. She comes into my dreams.”
“What’s the difference?”
“In the world you and I grew up in, nothing at all. In her world, well, in her world she walks into a dream like you walk into a different room.”
I’d almost forgotten the apple in my hand. I took another bite of it and chewed it slowly, thinking. “She believes that she can visit you in your dreams.”
“She not only believes it, she does it.”
“How?”
“Are you asking how I experience what she does, or how she does it? The answer to the first is that I fall asleep, and I think I’m having an ordinary dream, and then Noselaca comes into it. As to how she does it, I’ve no idea. Maybe you should be telling me. You seem to be the one using a lot of magic.”
The apple was down to a stem and the core. I looked at it for a few moments, then put the core in my mouth and chewed it up. I tossed the stem in the fire. “A year ago, I would have thought this whole conversation was utter nonsense. Now half the time I don’t know what I think. A dream is just something that happens in your mind at night. Except when a Speck woman walks into it and starts teaching you things. Hitch, I can’t make sense of my life anymore. Once, it was all laid out for me so clearly. I’d go to the academy, graduate with honors, and I’d get a good commission with a top-notch regiment. I’d move up fast as an officer, I’d marry Carsina, the girl my father had chosen for me, and we’d have children, and eventually, when I was old, I’d retire from the military and go back to Widevale and live under my brother’s roof until I died.”
“Well, who wouldn’t dream of such a life?” Hitch asked with false enthusiasm.
“You can mock me if you like,” I replied grumpily. “It wasn’t a bad dream. If I’d been posted to the right regiment, I’d have had a chance for adventure and glory. And I don’t see anything wrong with looking forward to a well-bred wife, and quiet waters and a snug home at the end of one’s days. What do I have to look forward to now? If I get really good at burying bodies, perhaps I’ll earn a corporal’s stripes. And when I’m too old to dig graves, what then? What then?”
“You can’t really believe that you’re stuck here the rest of your life?”
“Well, I don’t really see what else there is for me!” I retorted. Saying it aloud made it more real. Maybe I’d be promoted. Maybe I’d get a few stripes on my sleeve, but I’d still be fat and alone and digging graves. And when I couldn’t do that anymore, when my body gave out under the strain of carrying all this extra flesh, then I’d be one of those ex-soldier beggars in some dingy town. I sat back in my chair. I couldn’t catch my breath.
“Take it easy, Never. You’ve got all this magic running through you. And you’re worried that you’ll have a boring life. Actually, you should be praying for that. Boredom is vastly underrated. Boredom means that nothing is trying to kill you every day.” He smiled grimly at his own wit.
“I almost wish—” I began, but stopped at a sharp motion from Hitch.
“You, of all people, should be very careful what you wish for. If you haven’t heard a word I’ve said all evening, then listen to me now. Your wishes have an uncanny habit of coming true. Be careful where you bend your will. Magic seems to go with it.”
“Perhaps once or twice,” I began, but again he cut me off impatiently.
“You wished to enlist here. And because it served the magic’s purpose, you were allowed to. This duty you’ve been given—do you think this was a random choice by our colonel? I venture to say there is Speckish benefit somewhere here.”
“How could my guarding the cemetery be of any benefit to the Specks?”
“I don’t know,” he finally retorted in a low voice. “But it’s something you’d best think about, Never. Why would they want you here? What do they want you to do?”
“I don’t know. But whatever it is, I won’t do it. I won’t betray my people.” I thought I knew what he feared. “I won’t be lax at my guardianship. I won’t allow them to mock and desecrate our dead.”
“Mocking the dead would be very un-Speck-like.” Hitch said quietly. “They show their own dead vast respect. They claim that wisdom gained never passes away, not even with death. Did you know that?”
I shook my head. “This part of me that is here and speaks to you knows very little about the Specks. But there is another part of me that I fear knows too much and to
o well.”
He allowed himself a smile. “That you know that part exists and that you admit it to me shows me that you are gaining wisdom, Never.” He heaved a sudden sigh and stood up. “It’s late. I’m going back to town. There’s a new whore at Sarla Moggam’s brothel. I plan to sample her before she’s worn out.”
“But you said you had a Speck woman.”
He lifted one shoulder and gave a smile both sheepish and defiant. “Once in a while, a man likes to be in charge of things. Speck women don’t give you much chance of that. They do things their own way and expect you to follow meekly along.”
For some reason, that put me in mind of Amzil. “You’ve reminded me. I’ve still got Amzil’s carry sack. Next time you go by Dead Town, would you take it back for me?”
“I could,” he conceded. “If you think you must. Nevare, it’s just a rucksack. Don’t put too much importance on it.”
“I promised her that I’d return it. My promise is worth more to me than the rucksack. Besides, I’ve put in a few gifts. For the children.”
He shook his head at me. “I’ve warned you, old son. Amzil’s a hard nut to crack. I don’t think you’ll get to her through the children. Save your time and effort. Come to Sarla Moggam’s with me.”
The invitation was more tempting that I wanted to admit. “Another time,” I said regretfully. “When I’ve got more money. Will you take the carry sack to Amzil?”
“I said I would,” he agreed. “And will you be more careful in how you spend your magic?”
“I would if I knew how. I wish I could undo what I did to the men at the courier station. It was only their sergeant who was so hard-hearted to me. I’d no wish to curse them all.”
“All the more reason for you to be careful. If that’s what you do when you don’t mean to harm anyone, what would happen if you really intended it?”
It was a sobering thought. “I’d undo it if I could. I don’t know how.”
He was standing by the door, the laden rucksack in his hand. “That’s a feeble excuse, Never, and you know it. You said you did it without knowing how. If I were you, I’d be trying to undo it.” He shook his head at my expression. “Don’t be stubborn. This isn’t something you want connected to you. You’re a dangerous man, Never. The fewer people who know that, the safer you are. Good night.”
And so he left me to what was not a good night at all. I didn’t like that he thought I was “dangerous,” and I liked it even less that, on consideration, I concluded that I was. I was like a foolish boy with a loaded gun. It didn’t matter if I knew how the gun worked; I’d fired it, and someone had suffered the consequences. Was I so different from the two young fools on the riverboat who had felled a wind wizard with iron shot? They’d probably had no real notion of the harm iron could do him. I’d despised them for it. But here I was, spraying magic out just as carelessly. According to Hitch.
I lay in my bed and stared up at my shadowed ceiling. I wanted so desperately to be able to go back to where magic was the stuff of tales, not something that affected my life every day. I didn’t want it to be a power I had, with no concept of how it worked or was controlled. The light danced with the flames in my hearth and I decided I should try to undo whatever I had done to the courier station. It wasn’t easy. In the moment I’d said those words, I’d wholeheartedly desired that they suffer exactly as I did from their lack of charity. There was still a hard part of me that thought they deserved what had happened. I discovered that I would need to forgive them before I could truly wish to undo what I had done to them. That forgiveness was an easy thing to say, but a harder thing to feel in my heart.
I groped toward an understanding of the magic I had done. It had gone beyond what I’d said to what I’d felt toward them. Feelings, I discovered, did not yield to logic or even to ethics. Why should everyone at the relay station suffer because their sergeant had been so stiff-necked? Why should any of them suffer at all, at my say-so? Who was I to judge them?
I chased my morality in circles that night, trying to find it. When it came to actually living as an upright man, I discovered that I was no more truly tolerant and forgiving than any worshipper of the old gods.
The moment that I realized I was no better than the men who had turned me away when I begged their help, I was able to forgive. I felt something move through me, a prickling in my blood, followed by a stillness and a sense of effort expended. Had I worked magic? I couldn’t tell. I had no way of knowing, no way of proving that I had or had not. Perhaps all of this was a silly illusion, a game that Hitch and I played, pretending to powers that didn’t exist.
My refusal to surrender and completely believe in magic was my final defense that enabled me to live in a world that made sense to me. The early morning was a pearly darkness of falling snow. I burrowed deeper into my blankets and finally slept.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
VISITOR
I tried to find the rhythm of my days again, but it was broken. The snow was too deep and the ground too frozen for me to dig graves, and there was very little else for me to do. I missed my schoolbooks. Writing in my journal almost made things worse. I had far too much time to think. Magic, my father’s opinion of me, Spink’s knowledge that I was in Gettys, Colonel Haren asking my opinion on the road dilemma: I had too much to ponder.
I tempted myself to go into town, thinking that any sort of company might be a welcome distraction, but I felt an almost irrational fear that I would encounter someone who knew me from my academy days. I isolated myself at the graveyard until a rider came out one day to fetch me. An old man had died. I hitched Clove to the wagon and went to town for the coffin and corpse. The old man had been an ex-soldier and a drunk who had died in debt to everyone who had tried to befriend him. The poor fellow had no mourners to follow me out to the grave site.
Once I had him loaded, I steeled my heart to my own callousness and completed my own necessary errands. I picked up hay and grain for Clove and some basic food supplies for myself. I forced myself to take my noon meal in the mess hall. Ebrooks was at table, shoveling his food into his mouth as if it were a competitive sport. From him I learned that Kesey was sick in bed with a toothache, but hadn’t the courage to have the molar pulled.
“That side of his face is swollen like a melon, and so tender he can’t eat a bite. Even drinking water hurts him. I told him, go have it pulled and be done with it. How could the pain be any worse? He still hopes it will go down by itself. But he almost counts himself lucky to have been sick in bed last night after what happened in the streets.”
“Why? What happened?”
He shook his head and then lowered his face to his plate to shovel in another large spoonful of beans. He spoke around them, muffled. “Ain’t sposed to talk about it. Gonna be hushed up and smoothed over, like they allus do.”
“What?”
He swallowed noisily and gulped coffee to be sure the food had gone down. He glanced around the mess and then leaned closer to me. “Murder last night. I heard something ’bout a whore, an officer, and some soldiers. What I heard was the officer fancied the bit and got mad when the soldiers had her first. He shot one of the boys. Something like that.”
“That’s ugly,” I said, leaning away from his breath.
“Life’s ugly,” he agreed, and went back to his food.
I turned my attention to my own plate, and a short time after that, Ebrooks pushed back from the table and left. My meal was four rashers of bacon and a steaming sea of brown beans with biscuits. I enjoyed it more than the food merited, until I noticed Sergeant Hoster at a nearby table with a couple of his cronies. His friends were grinning broadly as they watched me eat, but Hoster was regarding me with a stare of flat dislike. One of Hoster’s friends rolled his eyes and muttered something to Hoster. The other man snorted wildly into his cup of coffee, spattering liquid all over their table while the first one leaned back, choking with juvenile laughter. Hoster’s expression didn’t change. He rose slowly and approached
my table. I kept my eyes on my plate, pretending I didn’t know he was coming. I refused to look up until he addressed me directly.
“You look tired, Burv. Keeping some late hours?”
I had to swallow before I could reply. “No, Sergeant.”
“You sure about that? You didn’t come to town last night for a bit of fun?”
“No, Sergeant. I stayed home last night.”
“Did you?” He didn’t wait for a response. “Must get lonely out there. A man lives alone all the time, he can get real hungry for the company of a woman. Isn’t that so?”
“I suppose.” I suspected he was setting me up for mockery. I was trying not to rise to the bait.
He leaned very close to me and spoke softly. “Did you hear the news, Burv? She didn’t die. In a few days, the doctors think she’ll feel well enough to talk. She’ll be able to describe who attacked her. And I’d say you’re a hard man to mistake.”
He was accusing me of being one of the rapists. Outrage vied with shock. I kept calm with difficulty. “I was at my cabin all last night, Sergeant. I’ve heard about the attack on the woman. It’s a terrible thing. But I had nothing to do with it.”
He straightened up. “Well. We’ll see, won’t we? Don’t think about running off. You wouldn’t get far.”
All around the mess hall, men had stopped eating to stare at us. They continued to stare even when Hoster sauntered away to rejoin his friends. I glanced around at the speculation on their faces and then back at my food.
