by Robin Hobb
“But—”
“Leave it. I am of the People, but I do not wish any of them to ever forget that I came to them from outside the People. Leave my face as it is.”
She puffed her cheeks, her disapproval very evident. Then she handed him back the crystal. “The food will be cold, and our fire dying,” she observed, and turned and left him there.
He stood by the muck-filled pond, turning the crystal slowly in his hands. He remembered something then, something of mine. When I was just a boy and Sergeant Duril was training me to be a soldier, he always carried a sling and a pouch of small rocks. Whenever he caught me unwary, I could expect the thud of a rock against my ribs or back or even my head. “And you’re dead,” he’d always tell me afterward. “Because you weren’t paying attention.”
After a time, I’d begun to save the different rocks he used to “kill” me. I’d had a box full of them before I’d left home.
He held up the crystal for Likari to see. “I want to keep this. Do you have room in your pouch for it?”
“I can put it with your sling.”
There was a small surprise. “You have my sling.”
“I found it in your old clothes. I thought you might want it again.”
“You were right. Good boy. Put the crystal with it.”
The boy nodded, pleased at the praise, and reached to take it from me. “Careful. It’s sharp,” Soldier’s Boy warned him, and he took it gingerly. He stowed it away in one of the pouches on his belt, and then looked up, a serious question in his eyes. “Let’s go eat,” Soldier’s Boy told him, forestalling it, and led the way back to the dwindling fire and the food.
The fish was very good, but there wasn’t enough of it. I could feel that Soldier’s Boy had used too much magic making light and warmth. He was wearied. At this stopping place, there were alcoves hollowed into the lower walls of the chamber. He chose a large one and clambered into it, and was unsurprised when Olikea and then Likari joined him there. The moisture in the air made the chill more noticeable, as if the cold were settling on us like dew. Our combined body heat warmed the alcove, but the single blanket did little to confine our warmth. It leaked away and cold crept in. He decided that he could not afford to use any more magic that night; we’d simply have to get by.
Soldier’s Boy fell asleep. I did not. I hovered inside him in the darkness and pondered everything I’d witnessed. I am not a fool. I immediately connected the many tiny injuries he’d dealt himself and the inky slime he’d rubbed into them to the dapples on any Speck’s skin. Was it some sort of a tattoo that they inflicted even on the smallest child? Olikea’s specks had never seemed like tattoos to me. They’d even seemed to have a slightly different texture from the rest of her skin. I’d always assumed that all Speck babies were born with, well, specks on them. Was it possible that the Specks were not Specks when they were born?
Because I was aware, I think I was more conscious of Soldier’s Boy’s rising temperature. His flesh flushed warm and the tiny stinging wounds that he had dealt himself began to itch. He muttered in his sleep and shifted uncomfortably. Without waking, he scratched first one arm and then the other. He shifted again, causing the others to murmur in protest, and then dropped into a deeper sleep. Almost as soon as he did, I felt his fever rise higher.
He was ill. Very ill. He’d sickened my body and I was trapped inside it, voiceless and helpless. Every place where the crystal had pierced his skin now itched abominably, far worse than any insect bite or sting that I’d ever endured. When he sleepily scratched at the sores, I could feel how puffy and swollen each one was. I felt something pop like a blister and then the wetness of blood or pus on my skin. I longed to get up and go to the water, to wash myself and clean the injuries, but I could not rouse him at all.
He was deep into dreams now, and as his fever climbed, his dreams became brighter and sharper edged and harder to ignore. He dreamed of a forest that was impossibly green, and a wind that swept through it like the waves on an ocean, and somehow there were ships on those waves, ships with brightly colored sails that floated and spun through the forest treetops. It was a bizarre dream of bright colors and giddy shapes, and it completely fascinated me. I wondered if my rationality would give way to his fever.
Then I felt him leave the body.
It was a strange sensation. For a moment, I felt I was alone in the fever-racked shell. Desperately I reached out to try to regain control of my physical being. Then, as if the current of a river had seized me, I felt myself pulled away from my body and out into an otherness. It was like being dropped down a shaft. I felt shapeless and unanchored; then I became aware of the part of me that was Soldier’s Boy and held tight to him. It was like gripping the mane of a runaway horse.
He was dream-walking. I knew that right away, but it was as unlike my experience of dream-walking as a rushing river is unlike a quiet pool. It was a wandering fever dream, energized by the heat that tormented his body. He snapped from one awareness to the next, without pause or purpose, like a captured fish darting about in a bucket of water. We brushed wildly against Olikea’s dreams, a memory of shared lust, and then rushed toward Lisana. He beat furiously about her, like a bird trying to break through a window, but could not sense, as I did, how she reached toward him, trying to catch and hold the connection. She gave a lonely cry as he darted away again.
I was disconcerted that the next dreamer I glimpsed was my father. Why would Soldier’s Boy seek him out, I wondered, and then knew that he was Soldier’s Boy’s father just as much as he was mine. My father was sleeping the shallow sleep of an old man. The Speck plague and his stroke had aged him beyond his years. He dreamed of being clad once more in brave green and leading a flanking movement that would close off the enemy’s retreat. In his dream, he battled Plainsmen who rode leggy white horses and brandished battle-axes at him, but I saw him as an ailing old man, his age-dappled hands twitching against the blankets of his bed. We burst into his dream, and I rode by his side, as brave as he was, astride Sirlofty once again. My father looked over at me, and for one wild instant, he was glad and proud of me. I knew then I had broken into a cherished dream, one in which I had fulfilled all his plans for me. But just as my heart warmed toward him, I grew fat, bursting my buttons and spilling out of my shirt, my flesh obscenely pale and jiggling.
“Why, Nevare? Why? You were supposed to be me, all over again! Why couldn’t you be a good soldier for me? If I was only allowed one son to follow after me, why couldn’t you have fulfilled the task? Why? Why?”
The old man’s muffled dream shouts woke him, and he broke free of our dream touch. For a second, I saw his room at Widevale, glimpsed the fireplace and his bedstead and a bedside tray laden with all sorts of medicine bottles and thick heavy spoons.
“Yaril! Yaril, where are you? Have you abandoned me, too? Yaril!” He shouted for my sister like a frightened baby calling for his nursemaid. We left him there, sitting up in his bed and calling. It tore at my heart and that surprised me. I’d been able to be angry with my father, even hate him so long as he seemed like a man and my equal. To see him frail and afraid stole my anger from me. Guilt racked me suddenly, that I’d caused him so much pain and then left him alone. For that moment, it mattered not at all that he’d disowned me and cast me out. When I had been a child, I had always felt protected by his sternness. Now he wailed for the sole child fate had left him, alone and forlorn, sonless in a world that valued only sons.
Even as my awareness reached toward him, longing to protect him from the doom he had brought down on himself, Soldier’s Boy swept on, snatching me away from him. I caught glimpses of other people’s dreams, splashes of color against the fantastic canvas of Soldier’s Boy’s own dreaming mind. I could not focus on any one sensation: it was like trying to read the riffled pages of a book. I saw a word here, a paragraph there. He had no memories of his own; the connections that called him were mine. Trist dreamed of a girl in a yellow velvet dress. Gord was not asleep. He looked up
from the thick book he was studying, startled, saying, “Nevare?”
Sergeant Duril was sleeping the sleep of exhaustion, dreamless. No images floated in his mind, only the gratitude that for a time, his aching body could be still, his painful back flat on his mattress. My presence in his mind was like a drop of oil falling on a calm pool. “Watch your back, boy,” he muttered, and sighed heavily. Soldier’s Boy swept on.
I do not think he was aware of his burning body, but I was. Someone trickled cool water past his lips. His mouth moved ineffectually. I sensed how tight and hot his skin felt. Distance and fever distorted Olikea’s words. They seemed sharp, yet I could hardly hear them. “He makes a fever journey,” I thought I heard her say, and Likari piped up with a question that ended in the word “name.”
Olikea’s response faded in and out of my hearing. “Not a baby,” she said disdainfully, but I wasn’t sure I had heard her correctly. My attention was caught by a fantastic landscape. Never had I seen colors so intense. Very large objects came into my view, things so big that I could not see what they were until we had swept past them. Then I wondered if the butterfly had seemed so large because we were close to it, or if it truly had been so immense that it covered half the sky and it seemed small only as we retreated from it.
“Fever dream,” I told myself, but it was hard to believe that it was only a dream and that I had not been transported into some other world.
Then, most tantalizing of all, we crashed into Epiny’s dream. Her dream was sweet and simple; she was sitting by the fireside in the sitting room in her father’s house in Old Thares. Next to her was a beautiful carved wooden cradle mounted on a rocking stand. A curtain of fine lace, all worked with pink rosebuds, draped the cradle. She sat next to it, reading a book and gently rocking the cradle. She looked up as I crashed into the room.
“Nevare? What have you done to yourself?”
I looked down. I was immensely fat again, and mottled with specks. I wore a garment like a wide belt, and from it hung a number of pouches. My neck was ringed with necklaces of leather strung through beads of polished stone. My wrists were likewise decorated. Soldier’s Boy opened his mouth to speak. With frantic energy, I fought him for control of the mouth and words. Here, I suddenly discovered, we were much more equally matched. I could not force out the words I wanted to say, but neither could he. We stood before Epiny, two battling spirits in one body, voiceless as the mouth worked and only nonsense sounds came out.
Epiny’s image of herself suddenly brightened and firmed, as if she had come closer to me without moving. “Nevare. You are here, aren’t you? This is that ‘dream-walking’ you wrote about in your journal! Why have you come to me? Is there something important I must know? Are you in danger? Are you hurt? Where are you, Nevare? What do you need of me?”
Epiny in the flesh could be overwhelming. Epiny on this dream plane exceeded that. As she focused herself on me, she seemed to grow larger. The room disappeared; only the cradle remained at her side, and despite her frantic questions, she continued to rock it in a calm and calming manner. I thought I finally understood what the “aura” she told me about was. Epiny radiated her self like a fire radiates heat. In this place, nothing was concealed. Her intensity, her curiosity, her burning sense of justice, and her equally hot indignation at injustice; it all flowed out of her, a corona of Epiny-ness. It was humbling to stand there and feel the waves of her love for me beat against me.
I wanted so badly to stay and speak with her. Soldier’s Boy’s desire to stay mute and flee was equally strong. Caught in that tug-of-war, we were a silent presence full of conflict.
“If you cannot speak to me here, at least hear what news I have. It may comfort you to know that both Spink and Amzil believed me when I told them that you lived. It was such a relief to them. Neither had wanted to admit to the other that the memories of that night were truncated and contradictory. Still, there have been repercussions. Spink can go about his daily tasks, knowing that he did not fail you. But it has still changed his heart toward the men he rode with that night. He cannot abide the sight of them. He knows how capable of evil they are. He avoids Captain Thayer, Carsina’s husband, but the man knows that Spink despises him. I fear he will take umbrage against Spink someday. I fear for him, Nevare. He cannot hide what he knows about those men; it shows in his face and his eyes whenever we encounter any of them. And they, I think they feel they must be rid of him; perhaps it is the only way in which they will be able to forget that night. They believe they beat you to death, or at the least, witnessed their comrades doing so. But their memories are not clear on exactly how it happened. So when Spink looks at them with disgust, well, I do not think they know what to believe about themselves.
“And Amzil does not make it better. I do not know what you said to her that night, but it has made her fearless. And when I gave her your message, that you loved her but had to leave her, it hardened something in her. Now she is worse than fearless whenever she encounters one of those men. She torments them. When she sees one of them on the streets or in the mercantile, she does not turn her eyes away or avoid him. Instead, she stalks him like a cat, meeting his gaze, walking up on him and staring him straight in the face. They flinch from her, Nevare. They look away, they try to avoid her, but she is making them hate her. The one who tried to stand up to her, who would not leave the store when she glared at him? When he looked at her with disdain, she returned his gaze and said aloud, loud enough for other customers to hear her, ‘Perhaps he has forgotten what happened the night a mob beat the grave digger to death. I have not. You think you know what I am; I’ve heard you call me the Dead Town Whore. But I know what you are. I remember every detail. And I would far rather be a whore than a sniveling coward.’ He fled from her then, convinced that what she recalls is what others recall of him as well.
“Winter will close around us soon, Nevare, and winter is not a good season here in Gettys. It is a time when every injury festers, and the cold and the dark promise to hide every evil thing that is done. I am afraid. I bar the door at night, and Spink sleeps with his pistol cocked and ready on the bedside table. He has talked of resigning his commission; he no longer wishes to serve with these men. I think that if winter were not so close, he would do it, and we would flee, for the sake of the baby. Such cowardice would scald him and leave a scar that would never heal. Yet, when spring comes, if nothing has improved here, what else can he do? Better that he take us away from here than that he is shot in the back and I am left at the mercy of these wolves. So he has told me himself.”
Her words cut me like razors. I had thought I had been saving them all when I cut myself adrift. Instead I had not only plunged them into danger and torment, but then abandoned them all to take care of themselves. I did not deceive myself that I could have been of great use to them, but it seemed cowardly that I was not there at all. Most troubling to me was Amzil’s anger and the behavior it prompted. I could not blame her for it. How must it be for her, to see walking on the streets the men who would have raped her, even to death? I wished she would flee to a safer place, but not if it meant leaving Epiny pregnant and without the comfort of another woman near. It was all too horrible to contemplate. I tried to reach my hands toward Epiny, but they were not mine to control, not even in a dream. I focused all my will on trying to say even one word to her.
That was a mistake. For while I devoted my strength to that, Soldier’s Boy tore us free of Epiny’s dream and fled with me. I looked back as we took flight, and saw Epiny looking up after us. She dwindled in the distance until she was gone.
“They should just go away.” Soldier’s Boy was speaking to me, but the words echoed and I knew that in the other world, he raved in his fever. If I reached, I could be aware of that body, burning inside and yet shivering with cold in the dank cave. I heard people whispering. Perhaps it was Olikea and Likari. Their voices sounded wavery and frightening.
“A death. Or a life. Which do you owe me, Nevare? Which will you give m
e, Nevare?”
An immense croaker bird confronted us. The carrion bird was black and white, with brilliant red wattles around his beak. The wattles were thick and fat and somehow disgusting and threatening at the same time. He opened his beak wide and I saw how strangely his tongue was fastened into it, and how sharp his tongue looked.
“I am not Nevare! I am Soldier’s Boy of the People. I owe you nothing.”
The bird opened his beak wide with amusement. He rattled his wing plumes, resettling them, and a sickening wave of carrion stench wafted against me. “Neither debts nor names are so easily shed, Nevare. You are who you are and you owe me what you owe me. Denying it does not change it.”
“Nevare is not my name.”
Could a bird grin? “Nevare is a soldier’s boy, a soldier’s son. The name that you use was given to you only because you are Nevare, and the son of a soldier. And a soldier son. And that is as true as that you owe me a death. Or a life. However you wish to name it, it is what you owe to me.”
“I owe you nothing!” Soldier’s Boy shouted at him and his words echoed in a distant cave. He was braver than I was. His hands darted out to seize two great handfuls of the croaker bird’s plumage. He gripped the bird and shook him, shouting, “I owe you nothing! Not a life, not a death! I owe you nothing!”
Far away, someone shrieked and then the croaker bird took flight, laughing like a mad thing.
Cold water splashed Soldier’s Boy’s face. It was a shock, and with a shudder he opened our shared eyes. He blinked, trying to focus, and lifted a shaky hand to wipe at his eyes. Olikea was angrily untangling her hair from his fingers. A water skin on the ground beside him gurgled out its contents. It took a moment for him to make sense of it, and then the unjustness of it broke his heart. “You threw water on me,” he wailed accusingly, and he sounded like a weepy child. His voice shook with weakness.
“You ripped out my hair when I was trying to give you a drink! And if you think you owe me nothing, then consider that I owe you less than nothing!”
