by Robin Hobb
“I am dead,” he told me bitterly. “Swift or slow as the end may come, it certainly comes now. They cut me with cold iron, with many, many blows of cold, sharp iron.”
I shuddered, imagining the pain. Could it have been worse than a thousand lashes? He had been unable to flee his fate as I had done. His life had depended on me, and my paltry efforts to save him had failed.
“I’m sorry,” I said with great sincerity. “I did try. I was too late for you. But what I have done tonight should frighten the road builders. If they find the courage to try again, I have created a chaos they will not quickly undo. Even if they start tomorrow, it will be months before they undo my destruction. Winter is coming and work will stop when the snow flies. I have bought us some time in which we can seek a permanent solution.”
“Months,” he said with scorn. “Part of a year? What is that to me? Nothing, now! I am dead, Jhernian. My death will be a slow fading to you, but I will be gone before the spring comes. And to me, it will seem but a wink of the eye. Once we have our trees, we do not count time in hours or days or even seasons as you do. I am dead. But while there is still enough of me left to speak, I will tell you again. Delaying them is not enough. You must drive these intruders out, so that they never come back. Kill them all, if you must. For years now we have refrained from that, but perhaps it is the only thing that will stop them. Kill them all. A delay? What good does that do? You have been just like any other Jhernian, bidding living things die to please your ends, and then claiming you have benefited us all! What a fool you have been, throwing magic like dust, wasting a hoard such as has not been seen for many years!”
I had scarcely the strength to answer him, but so stung was I that I rallied what little remained to me. “As the magic wished me to do, I have done.”
He laughed bitterly. “I did not feel the magic speak at your act. Instead, I witnessed you bending your will to force trees to their deaths, to push plants to spread where they cannot sustain themselves, to push life just as unnaturally as the intruders have pushed death. Any of us could have told you that it would not work. Tomorrow, half your magic will be undone by the rising sun as the plants wither and fade. What a waste!”
I felt childish and everything seemed unfair. The magic had never told me clearly what it wanted of me. The ancestor trees had never offered me advice. “I did not know I could seek your advice,” I said stiffly. I was so tired. It was hard to make the words form in my mind.
“Why do you think we exist, if not to answer questions and give advice? What other value could the ancestor trees have? A silly, selfish continuation of life and pride? No. We exist to guide the People. We exist to protect the People.”
“And the People are failing to protect you.” I felt a deep sadness and shame.
“The magic is given to you to protect us. Use it as you are supposed to use it, and we will not fall.”
“But—the magic showed me the forest, alive and complete. The road is the death that cuts through it. If I can remove the death, if I can stitch the halves of the forest back together—”
“You are like a little child, who sees the nut but does not comprehend that it came from a tree, let alone that it holds another tree. Look larger. See it all.”
He lifted me or perhaps he released me to rise. What he showed me is hard to put into words. I saw the forest again, as the magic had shown it to me, as a perfectly balanced dance of lives. And the road still intruded into it, a skewer of death. But the forest elder lifted me higher still, and I saw the road not as a single stripe of death, but as a feeler reaching out from a foreign organism. The road was to that system, not a stripe of death but a root, securing it in new soil. And just as I had imagined the pathways and byways that would spread out from it as small rootlets, so they were. And if I followed that root back to its source, I saw the Kingdom of Gernia, growing and spreading just as organically as a vine crawling up a tree. The vine that used a tree to reach the sunlight did not intend evil to the tree; it was incidental that it sucked all life from the tree as it climbed and spread, shading the tree’s leaves with its own tendrils and foliage. The roads fed Gernia, and were focused only on sustaining their own organism. For Gernia to live, the road must grow. It could not survive without its growing, spreading roots. My civilization and the forest were two organisms, competing for resources. One would shade out the other.
Then, just as quickly as I had risen over all, I was in my own flesh again, leaning against the severed tree, bereft of strength and hope.
Defeat soured even my brief memory of the triumph I’d felt. I spoke softly. “Magic can’t change it, Tree Man. It isn’t the road or the fortification at Gettys. It isn’t even the people who have come here. It’s so big, it can’t be stopped. You know that even if I could kill all the intruders, I would not. But if I did, if we killed every last man, woman, and child in Gettys, it would be only like clipping off the end of a tree’s branch. Other branches grow. Next summer would see more people here, and the road building would start again. For the Gernians to come here is as inevitable as water flowing downhill. Now that some have come, others will follow, seeking land to farm or routes to trade and wealth. Killing them will not stop them from coming or building this road.”
I drew a breath. It took so much effort. I thought again of the vine, climbing and choking and overshadowing the tree. “I see only one possible path. What we must do is find a way to persuade the intruders to take their road elsewhere. Show them a route that does not come through the groves of the ancestor trees. Then both our peoples can live alongside one another in peace.”
It was getting harder and harder to organize my thoughts. Speaking seemed a great effort. My words were slurring, but I couldn’t find the energy to sit up and speak clearly. I closed my eyes. A final thought jabbed at me and I made a vast effort to voice it. “If I can stop the road builders, if I can divert them, cannot you send up a new sprout and live? Tree Woman has.”
“Lisana’s trunk was not completely severed. Although her crown and trunk fell, enough of a connection was left that her leaves could go on making food and one of her branches was positioned well to become a new sapling. But I am cut off short, and have no leaves left. Even if I could, I would have to send up a sapling from my roots, beginning as no more than a sprout. I would be greatly diminished for scores of years.”
“But you would be alive. You would not be lost to us.”
He was silent.
All my exhilaration at spending my magic was suddenly gone. We had come full circle back to my great failure. Everyone insisted that the magic had given me the task of making all the Gernians leave and putting an end to their road building. It was impossible. I’d told them that, endlessly, but no one listened. Even the tree elders know that the intruders could not be stopped. Not even with magic.
I managed to lift my hand and placed it against his bark. Something was very wrong with me. I could not feel my legs and my vision suddenly faded. Had I closed my eyes? I could not tell. I forced out sluggish words. “I have used too much magic. I do not have a feeder to revive me. If you wish, take whatever nourishment you can from my body. Use me up. Perhaps you can live that way. Perhaps someone else will find a way to stop the road and let the Gernians and Specks live in peace. It is beyond me.”
Silence greeted my offer. Perhaps I had offended him. As strength fled my body, I decided it no longer mattered. I pushed my fingers into a fissure in his bark; my hand would stay in place even if I lost consciousness. My whole body was clamoring for sustenance and rest. I suspected it was too late. I’d passed the redemption point. “Use me up,” I offered him again and let go.
“You have no feeder? You are a Great One and no one attends you? This is intolerable!” His words reached me from a great distance. I sensed he felt insulted more on his own behalf than concerned for me. “This is not how a Great One dies, untended and treeless. What have the People come to, to allow such a thing to happen?”
My hearing was
fading. I was distant from his dismay and alarm. I wondered, dispassionately, what the penal workers would think when they found my deflated body here. It would certainly be a mystery for them. A great mystery.
Everything stopped.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE OTHER SIDE
Lisana,” I said.
She did not hear me. I saw her more clearly than I had in many days; she was as she had been in my dreams when I was at the Cavalla Academy in Old Thares. The Tree Woman was sitting with her back to her tree trunk. Her glossy hair was tangled on the bark. She was naked, a fleshy woman of indeterminate years. The day’s early sunlight dappled her flesh as it streamed through the canopy foliage, and I could not tell the real dappling of her skin from that which the sunlight created. Her eyelids were half closed, her breathing heavy and slow. I smiled down at her, my gaze fondly tracing the lines of her plump lips, the small furrow in her brow that deepened when she was annoyed at me. I came closer to her and whispered by her ear, “Lisana! I’m here.”
Her eyes opened slowly, sleepily, without alarm. The little line on her forehead deepened in puzzlement. Her eyes moved past me and looked through me. Her rounded shoulder twitched in a small shrug. She started to close her eyes again.
“Lisana!” I said more urgently.
She caught her breath, sat up, and looked around. “Soldier’s Boy?” she asked in confusion.
“Yes. I’ve come back to you. I’ve done my best to stop the road building. I failed. But I’m finished. Finished with all of it. So here I am, come to be with you.”
She scanned the forest all around her twice before her eyes settled on me. Then she reached out a plump hand to me. Her fingers passed through me, a sensation rather like sparkling wine spilling on my flesh. Tears welled in her eyes. “Oh, no. No! What has happened? This cannot be. This cannot be!”
“It’s all right,” I reassured her. “I used up all the magic in me to try to stop the road. My body is dying, but I’m here with you. So that’s not so bad, is it? I’m content.”
“Soldier’s Boy, no! No, it’s not bad, it’s terrible. You are a Great One! The magic made you a Great One. And now you are dying, treeless and untended. You are already fading from my eyes. And soon you will be gone, gone forever.”
“I know. But once that body is gone, I will be here with you. And I do not think that is a bad thing.”
“No. No, you fool! You are vanishing. You have no tree. And you have fallen—” She closed her eyes for a moment, and when she did, tears spilled from them. She opened them wide and her gaze was full of anguish. “You have fallen far from any sapling. You are untended and unprepared and still divided against yourself. Oh, Soldier’s Boy, how did this happen? You will fade away. And when you do, I will never see you again. Never.”
The wind blew softly through me. I felt oddly diminished. “I didn’t know that,” I said lamely. Stupidly. “I’m sorry.” As I apologized to her, a flicker of panic raced through me and then faded away. There wasn’t enough life left in me to panic. I’d made a mistake and I was dying. Apparently not even a Speck afterlife was available to me. I’d simply stop being. Apparently, I hadn’t died correctly. Oops.
I knew I should be devastated. An emotion washed through me, too pale for me to recognize. “I’m sorry,” I said again, as much to myself as to her.
She stretched her arms wide and gathered into her bosom what was left of me. I felt her embrace only as a faint warmth. It was not even a skin-to-skin sensation, but was perhaps my memory of warmth. My awareness was trickling away. Soon there would not even be enough left to be concerned. I’d be nothing. No. Nothing would be me. That was a better way to express it. I vaguely remembered how I would have smiled.
The water was sweet. Not just sweet as fresh water is sweet, but sweet as in flavored with honey or nectar. I choked on the gush of it into my mouth, coughed and felt the coolness spatter down my chest. Then I drew a breath through my nose, closed my lips around the mouth of the water skin, and sucked it in. I drank in long gulping drafts, pulling in as much liquid as my mouth would hold, swallowing it down and then sucking in more. I sucked the water skin flat. Nonetheless, I kept my mouth firmly clamped to it, sucking fruitlessly at it. Someone pinched my nose shut, and when I had to open my mouth to breathe, the water skin was snatched away. I moaned a protest.
Another one was offered to me. This one was even better; it was not just sweet water. The liquid was thicker. Meat and salt and garlic were blended in a thick broth with other flavors I did not know. I didn’t really care. I sucked it down.
The disorganized sounds around me suddenly evolved into language. “Be careful. Don’t let him have that much that fast.” A man’s voice.
“Would you like to be his feeder, Jodoli?” That was a voice I recognized. Olikea sounded just as angry as she had been when last we parted. She was a powerful woman, as tall as I was and well muscled. Her anger was not a thing to dismiss. I suddenly felt exposed. I tried to draw my arms and legs up to protect myself, but felt them only twitch in response to me.
“Look. He’s trying to move!” Jodoli sounded both surprised and relieved.
Olikea muttered some sour response. I did not make out her words, but someone else did. A woman spoke. I did not know her voice.
“Well, that is what it means to be a feeder of a Great One. If you did not wish to have the work of it, you should not have taken it on, little sister. It is not a task to take up lightly. Nor should it be seized merely as an opportunity to advance yourself. If you are weary of the honor of tending to him, say so plainly. I am sure there are other women of our kin who would be glad to take him on. And they, perhaps, would not have let him fall into such a state. What if he had died? Think of the shame you would have brought down on our kin-clan! Such a thing has never befallen one of our Great Ones.”
“Jodoli has extended himself into such a state! I have heard you complain of it. He often tells the story of nearly dying from using too much magic.”
Olikea’s sister stiffened with fury. I became aware I’d opened my eyes to slits. I recognized her. Oh. Yes. Firada looked very like her younger sister, yet their features bore very different expressions at that moment. Firada’s hazel eyes were narrowed with displeasure. She had crossed her arms over her chest and stared at her younger sister contemptuously.
Olikea was crouched over me. She held an empty leather skin in her hands and her lips were drawn tight with fury. Her eyes were green. She had a dark streak from her brow to the tip of her nose and the speckles on her face were more generous than her sister’s. On the rest of her body, her specks were a dappling that became streaks on her ribs and legs, almost like the striping on a cat. The striping was repeated in her hair. I had thought she was about my age but now she seemed younger. Her skin blushed a hot pink today around her dapples. She wore the most clothing I’d ever seen her don. It consisted of a leather belt slung on her hips, with several pouches attached to it, and some loops that held simple tools. Although it was decorated with beads, feathers, and small charms made from fired pottery or beaten copper, its function was to allow her to carry her supplies with ease rather than to cover her body.
Jodoli stood well back from both of the sisters. My fellow Great Man and sometime rival was not nearly as large as I was, but his size would have turned heads in any Gernian setting. He wore his black hair in plaits. His blue eyes were surprising in the dark mask of pigment on his face. “Stop your quarreling. He’s awake. He needs food now, if he can stomach it.”
“Likari! Give me that basket of berries and then go and get more. Don’t stand about staring. Be useful.”
For the first time, I noticed a small boy just behind Olikea. He had green eyes like hers and the same stripe down his nose. Probably their younger brother. In response to her words, he jerked as if poked with a stick. He thrust a heavily laden basket at her. The moment she took it, he turned and scampered off. His reddened bare buttocks were dappled like a horse’s; I almost smiled to se
e him run.
But Olikea’s scowl bored into me. “Well, Soldier’s Boy. Are you going to eat, or just stare about you like a frog on a lily leaf?”
“I’ll eat,” I said. Her offer of food drove all else from my mind. I would do nothing to offend her, lest she change her mind about feeding me.
Slowly it broke through my foggy brain that I was going to live. I felt a pang of regret at that, strange to say. I had not planned to die nor especially enjoyed the prospect, but it had been invitingly simple. All my worries would have been over: no more wondering if I was doing the right thing. Now I was back in a world where people had expectations of me.
I reclined in a natural shelter formed by a vine that had climbed up a sagging branch of a great tree. Its drapery made a thicker shade for me in the muted light of the forest. The moss beneath me was deep and soft. I suspected that Jodoli had used his magic to form such a comfortable couch for me. In the same moment that I knew I should thank him, Olikea dropped the basket of berries beside me. My attention was riveted upon it. It took all the strength I had to command my wasted hand and arm to move. The emptied flesh hung from my bones in a flaccid curtain of skin. I dug a handful of berries from the basket, heedless of how I crushed the ripe fruit and shoved them into my mouth. The flavor blossomed in my mouth, life-giving, sweet, tangy, redolent of flowers. I chewed it twice, swallowed, licked the dripping juice from my hand and scooped up another handful. I pushed them into my mouth, as much as my mouth could hold. I chewed with my lips pursed tight, afraid some morsel would escape them.
