by Robin Hobb
And in that moment, I knew my decision. It came to me so clearly that I am not sure it was solely my own. Did some long dead artist reach out and tug at my sleeve, begging to be heard and seen one last time before we tumbled into the dark and silence that had consumed her city?
I put my hand on Retyo’s arm. “I’m going to the wall now,” I said simply. To his credit, he immediately knew what I meant.
“You would leave us?” he asked me piteously. “Not just me, but little Carlmin? You would drown yourself in dreams and leave me to face death alone?”
I stood on tiptoe to kiss his whiskery cheek and to press my lips briefly against my son’s downy head. “I won’t drown,” I promised him. It suddenly seemed so simple. “I know how to swim in those waters. I have swum in them since my birth, and like a fish, I will follow them upstream to their source. And you will follow me. All of you.”
“Carillion, I don’t understand. Are you mad?”
“No. But I cannot explain. Only follow me, and trust, as I followed you when I walked out on the tree limb. I will feel the path surely; I won’t let you fall.”
Then I did the most scandalous thing I’ve ever done in my life. I took hold of my weary skirts, long tattered halfway up my calf, and tore them free of my stained waistband, leaving only my pantaloons. I bundled them up and pushed them into his shocked hands. Around us, others had halted in their shadowy trudging to watch my strange performance. “Feed these to the torch, a bit at a time, to keep it alive. And follow me.”
“You will walk near naked before all of us?” he asked me in horror, as if it were of great concern.
I had to smile. “While my skirts burn, no one will notice the nakedness of her who stripped to give them light. And after they have burned, we will all be hidden in the darkness. Much like the art of these people.”
Then I walked away from him, into the engulfing darkness that framed us. I heard him shout to our torchbearer to halt, and I heard others say that I had gone mad. But I felt as if I had finally plunged myself into the river that all my life had tantalized my thirst. I went to the city’s wall willingly, opening my mind and heart to their art as I approached it, so that by the time I touched the cold stone, I was already walking among them, hearing their gossip and corner musicians and haggling.
It was a market square. As I touched the stone, it roared to life around me. Suddenly my mind perceived light where my closed eyes did not, and I smelled the cooking river fish on the smoky little braziers and saw the skewers of dripping honeyed-fruit on the tray of a street hawker. Glazed lizards smoked on a low brazier. Children chased one another past me. People paraded the streets, dressed in gleaming fabrics that rippled color at their every step. And such people, people that befitted such a grand city! Some might have been Jamaillian, but among them moved others, tall and narrow, scaled like fish or with skin as bronzed as polished metal. Their eyes gleamed too, silver and copper and gold. The ordinary folk made way for these exalted ones with joy rather than cold respect. Merchants stepped out from their stalls to offer them their best, and gawking children peeped from around their mothers’ trousered legs to glimpse their royalty passing. For such I was sure they were.
With an effort, I turned my eyes and my thoughts from this rich pageantry. I groped to recall whom and where I truly was. I dragged Carlmin and Retyo back into my awareness. Then, I deliberately looked around myself. Up and sky, I told myself. Up and sky, into the air. Blue sky. Trees.
Fingers lightly touching the wall, I moved forward.
Art is immersion, and good art is total immersion. Retyo was right. It sought to drown me. But Carlmin was right, too. There was no malice in the drowning, only the engulfing that art seeks. And I was an artist, and as a practitioner of that magic, I was accustomed to keeping my head even when the current ran strongest and swiftest.
Even so, it was all I could do to cling to my two words. Up and sky. I could not tell if my companions followed me or if they had abandoned me to my madness. Surely, Retyo would not. Surely, he would come behind me, bringing my son with him. Then, a moment later, the struggle to remember their names became too great. Such names and such people had never existed in this city, and I was a citizen of the city now.
I strode through its busy market time. Around me people bought and sold exotic and fascinating merchandise. The colors, the sounds, even the smells tempted me to linger, but Up and Sky were what I clung to.
They were not a folk who cherished the outside world. Here they had built a hive, much of it underground, lit and warm, clean and immune to wind and storm and rain. They had brought inside it such creatures as appealed to them, flowering trees and caged songbirds and little glittering lizards tethered to potted bushes. Fish leaped and flashed in the fountains, but no dogs ran and barked, no birds flew overhead. Nothing was allowed that might make a mess. All was orderly and controlled, save for the flamboyant people who shouted and laughed and whistled in their precisely arranged streets.
Up and Sky, I told them. They did not hear me, of course. Their conversations buzzed uselessly around me, and even once I began to understand them, the things they spoke of did not concern me. What could I care about the politics of a queen a thousand years gone, for society weddings and clandestine affairs noisily gossiped about? Up and Sky I breathed to myself, and slowly, slowly, the memories I sought began to flow to me. For there were others in this city for whom art was Up and Sky. There was a tower, an observatory. It rose above the river mists on foggy nights, and there learned men and women could study the stars and predict what effect they might have on mortals. I focused my mind on it, and soon “remembered” where it was. Sa blessed us all, in that it was not far from their marketplace.
I was halted once, for though my eyes told me that the way ahead of me was well lit and smoothly paved, my groping hands found a cold tumble of fallen stone and earth seeping water. A man shouted by my ear and restrained my hands. Dimly I recalled my other life. How strange to open my eyes to blackness and Retyo gripping my hands in his. Around me in the darkness, I heard people weeping or muttering despairingly that they followed a dreamer to their deaths. I could see nothing at all. The darkness was absolute. I had no idea how much time had passed, but I was suddenly aware of thirst that near choked me. Retyo’s hand still clutched at mine, and I knew then of the long chain of people, hands clasped, that trustingly followed me.
I croaked at them. “Don’t give up. I know the way. I do. Follow me.”
Later, Retyo would tell me that the words I uttered were in no tongue he had ever known, but my emphatic shout swayed him. I closed my eyes, and once more the city surged to life around me. Another way, there had to be another way to the observatory. I turned back to the populous corridors, but now as I passed the leaping fountains, they taunted me with their remembered water. The tantalizing memories of food smells lingered in the air, and I felt my belly clench on itself in longing. But Up and Sky were my words, and I walked on, even as I became aware that moving my body was becoming more and more taxing to me. In another place, my tongue was leather in my mouth, my belly a cramped ball of pain. But here, I moved with the city, immersed in it. I understood now the words that flowed past me, I smelled familiar foods, even knew all the words to the songs the corner minstrels were singing. I was home, and as the city as art flowed through me; I was home in a deeper way than ever Jamaillia had been home to me.
I found the other stairs that led to the observatory, the back stairs for the servants and cleaners. Up these stairs, humble folk carried couches and trays of wineglasses for nobles who wished to recline and gaze up at the stars. It was a humble wooden door. It swung open at my push. I heard a murmured gasp behind me, and then words of shouted praise that opened my eyes.
Daylight, thin and feeble, crept down to us. The winding stair was wooden, and rickety, but I decided we would trust it. “Up and Sky,” I told my company as I set my foot to the first creaking step. It was a struggle to recall my precious words and speak the
m aloud. “Up and Sky.” And they followed me.
As we ascended, the light came stronger, and we blinked like moles in that sweet dimness. When at last I reached the stone-floored upper chamber, I smiled so that my dry lips split.
The thick glass panels of the observatory windows had given way to cracks, followed by questing vines that faded to pale writhing things as they left the daylight behind. The light through the windows was greenish and thick, but it was light. The vines became our ladder to freedom. Many of us were weeping dry tears as we made that last painful climb. Unconscious children and dazed people were passed up and out to us. I took a limp Carlmin in my arms and held him in the light and fresh air.
There were rain flowers awaiting us, as if Sa wished us to know it was her will we survive here, enough rain flowers for each of us to wet our mouths and gather our senses. The wind seemed chill, and we laughed joyfully to shiver in it. We stood on top of what had been the observatory, and I looked out with love over a land I had once known. My beautiful wide river valley was swamp now, but it was still mine. The tower that had stood so high above all was only a mound now, but around us were the hunched and mossy remains of other structures, making the land firm and dry beneath our feet. There was not much dry land, less than a leffer, and yet after our months in the swamp, it seemed a grand estate. From atop it, we could look out over the slowly moving river where slanting sunlight fell on the chalky waters. My home had changed, but it was still mine.
Every one of us who left the dragon chamber emerged alive and intact. The city had swallowed us, taken us down and made us hers, and then released us, changed, in this kindlier place. Here, by virtue of the city buried beneath us, the ground is firmer. There are great, strong branched trees nearby, in which we can build a new platform. There is even food here, a plenitude by Rain Wild standards. A sort of climbing vine festoons the trunks of the trees and is heavy with pulpy fruit. I recall the same fruit sold in the vendor stalls of my city. It will sustain us. For now, we have all we need to survive this night. Tomorrow will be soon enough to think on the rest of it.
Day the 7th of Light and Air
Year the 1st of the Rain Wilds
It took us a full six days to hike downriver to our original settlement. Time in the light and air have restored most of us to our ordinary senses, though all of the children have a more detached air than they used to have. Nor do I think I am alone in my vivid dreams of life in the city. I welcome them now. The land here has changed vastly since the days of the city; once all was solid ground, and the river a silver shining thread. The land was restless in those days, too, and sometimes the river ran milky and acid. Now the trees have taken back the meadows and croplands, but still, I recognize some features of the land. I recognize, too, which trees are good for timber, which leaves make a pleasantly stimulating tea, which reeds can yield both paper and fabric when beaten to thread and pulp, and oh, so many other things. We will survive here. It will not be lush or easy living, but if we accept what the land offers us, it may be enough.
And that is well. I found my tree city mostly deserted. After the disaster that sealed us in the city, most of the folk here gave up all for lost and fled. Of the treasure they collected and mounded on the platform, they took only a pittance. Only a few people remained. Marthi and her husband and her son are among them. Marthi wept with joy at my return.
When I expressed my anger that the others could go on without her, she told me, quite seriously, that they had promised to send back help, and she was quite sure that they would keep their word, as their treasure is still here.
As for me, I found my own treasure. Petrus had remained here, after all. Jathan, stonyhearted man that he is, went on without the boy when Petrus had a last-moment change of heart and declared that he would wait here for his mother to return. I am glad that he did not wait for me in vain.
I was shocked that Marthi and her husband had remained, until she put in my arms her reason. Her child was born, and for his sake, they will dwell here. He is a lithe and lively little thing, but he is as scaled as a snake. In Jamaillia, he would be a freak. The Rain Wilds are where he belongs.
As we all do, now.
I think I was as shocked at the changes in Marthi as she was in the change in me. Around her neck and wrists where she had worn the jewelry from the city, tiny growths have erupted. When she stared at me, I thought it was because she could see how much the city memories had changed my soul. In reality, it was the beginning of feathery scales on my eyelids and round my lips that caught her eye. I have no looking glass, so I cannot say how pronounced they are. And I have only Retyo’s word that the line of scarlet scaling down my spine is more attractive than repellent.
I see the scaling that has begun to show on the children, and in truth, I do not find it abhorrent. Almost all of us who went down into the city bear some sign of it, either a look behind the eyes, or a delicate tracing of scales, or perhaps a line of pebbled flesh along the jaw. The Rain Wilds have marked us as their own, and welcome us home.
The Inheritance
My parents both lived through the Great Depression and World War II. My father met my mother when he was stationed near Norwich with the Eighth Air Force. She married him and followed him to the United States. Both of them had known affluence in their lives, and also knew how quickly wealth and easy lives could disappear.
As I grew up, they let me know that education and experiences were to be valued high above material things. These things were the riches that one could not easily be stripped of. And when they died, first my mother and then my father, there was very little in the way of physical goods for any of us to claim. Some photo albums, some books. A rocking chair, a wooden salad bowl, a chiming clock my uncle had made for them. That was my inheritance.
And on the surface, such an inheritance can seem trivial, even pathetic. Unless one recalls that an inheritance isn’t about material wealth, but about the experiences that came with it.
It was in my grandmother’s jewel box. I found it after she died. Perhaps jewel box is too fine a name to give to the plain wooden cask that held so little. There was a silver ring with the stone long prized from the setting, sold to pay family debts no doubt. I wondered why she had not sold it whole. There were two necklaces, one of garnets and another of polished jasper. In the bottom, wrapped in layer upon layer of linen, was the pendant.
It was a lovely carving of a woman’s face. She looked both aristocratic and yet merry, and I recognized in her features some of my own. I wondered which of my female ancestors she was, and why someone had taken such care to make so delicate a carving from such an ugly piece of wood. It was gray and checked with age and weighed unnaturally heavy in my hand as I examined it. The chain it was fixed to was fine silver, however. I thought it might be worn alone if the pendant could be removed. I heard a footstep in the hall outside her bedroom and hastily slipped the chain about my neck. The cameo hung heavy between my breasts, concealed by my blouse. My cousin Tetlia stood suddenly in the doorway. “What do you have there?” she demanded.
“Nothing,” I told her and hastily set the box back on grandmother’s chest.
She quickly came into the room and snatched it up. She opened it and dumped the necklaces into her hand. “Nice,” she said, holding up the jasper one. My heart sank, for I had liked it best of the three. “I’m eldest of the granddaughters,” she pointed out smugly and slipped it over her head. She weighed the garnets in her hand. “And my sister, Coreth, comes next. This for her.” Her lips twisted in a smile as she tossed me the robbed ring. “For you, Cerise. Not much of an inheritance, but she did feed and clothe you for the last two years and kept you in a house that long ago should have come to my father. That is more than she ever did for my sister and me.”
“I lived here with her. I looked after her. When her hands twisted so that she couldn’t use them anymore, I bathed her and dressed her and fed her . . .” My hidden anger pushed the words stiffly out.
Tetlia
waved my words away contemptuously. “And we all warned you that you’d get nothing for it. She burned through her own family fortune when she was a girl, Cerise. Everyone knows that if my grandfather had not married her, she’d have starved in the streets. And my father has been good enough to let her live out her life in a house that should have come to him when his father died. Now she’s gone, and the house and land revert to my father. That’s life.” She tossed the plundered casket onto my grandmother’s stripped bed and left the room.
“I loved her,” I said quietly into the stillness. Rage burned bright in me for an instant. It was an old family dispute. Tetlia’s father was the son of Grandfather’s first wife, and the rightful heir to all, as they so constantly reminded me. It counted for nothing with them that my grandmother had raised their father as if he were her own child. It scalded me that Tetlia would claim my grandmother as kin for the sake of being entitled to her jewelry, but deny that I had any right to share the family wealth. For a second I clutched that anger to me. Then, as if I could feel my grandmother’s gentle hand on my shoulder, I let the strength of my just wrath leak away from me. “Useless to argue,” I told myself. In my grandmother’s looking glass I saw the same defeated resignation I had so often seen in her eyes. “It’s not worth fighting for,” she had told me so often. “Scandal and strife serve no purpose. Let it go, Cerise. Let it go.” I looked at the gaping ring in my hand, and then slipped it onto my finger. It fit as if made for me. Somehow, it seemed an appropriate inheritance.
