by Robin Hobb
There was a special cabinet with one hundred small drawers, each holding a different scent of incense. I stood before the intricately carved front, considering all my choices, and then asked, “Why are you sacrificing for health? Who is ill?”
She looked surprised. “Why—I burn it for you, of course. That you may recover from what you have—what has befallen you.”
I stared at her, torn between being touched by her concern and being annoyed that she thought her prayers and silly scented offerings could help me. An instant later I recognized that I did think her incense sacrifices were silly. They were playacting, religion by rote, an offering that cost us so little as to be insignificant. How, I suddenly wanted to know, did burning a brick of leaves and oil benefit the good god? What sort of a foolish merchant god did we worship, that he dispensed blessings in exchange for smoke? I felt suddenly that my life teetered on an eroded foundation. I did not even know when I had stopped having confidence in such things. I only knew it was gone. The protection of the good god had once stood between all darkness and me. I had thought it a fortress wall; it had been a lace curtain.
The elaborately carved, gilded, and lacquered cabinet before me had once seemed a gleaming casket of mystery. “It’s just furniture,” I said aloud. “A chest of drawers full of incense blocks. Mother, nothing in here is going to save me. I don’t know what will. If I did, I wouldn’t hesitate to do it. I’d even be willing to offer blood sacrifice to the old gods if I thought it would work. Cecile Poronte’s family does.” It was the first time I’d mentioned that to anyone. In the days since the wedding, I’d felt no inclination to share any conversation at all with my father.
My mother paled at my words. Then she carefully corrected me. “Cecile is a Burvelle now, Nevare. Cecile Burvelle.” She stepped past me and opened the sage drawer of the cabinet. Sage for wisdom. She took out a fist-sized greenish brick of incense and carried it to the worship brazier. With gilded tongs, she held it to the slumbering coals, stooping to blow through pursed lips to wake their ashed red to glowing scarlet. A slender tendril of smoke rose to scent the room, and one corner of the sage brick caught the charcoal’s red kiss. She did not look at me as she bore the sage incense to the alcove for health and tucked it safely inside.
She stood for a moment in silent prayer. Habit urged me to join her there and I suddenly wished I could. But my soul felt dry and bereft of faith. No words of praise or entreaty welled in me, only hopelessness. When my mother turned aside from the mural, I said, “You knew the Porontes worship the old gods, didn’t you? Does Father know?”
She shook her head impatiently. I don’t know if she was answering my question or dismissing it. “Cecile is a Burvelle now,” she insisted. “It no longer matters what she did in the past. She will worship the good god alongside us every Sixday, and her children will be raised to do the same.”
“Did you see the dead birds?” I asked her abruptly. “Did you see that ghastly little carousel in their garden?”
She pursed her lips as she came to take a seat on the bench. She patted a space beside her and I sat down reluctantly. She spoke softly. “They invited me to witness it. Cecile’s mother sent an invitation to your sisters and me. The words were cloaked but I understood what it was about. We arrived too late. Deliberately.” She paused for a moment and then advised me sincerely, “Nevare, let this go. I don’t think that they truly worship the old gods. It is more a tradition, a form to be observed, rather than any true belief. The women of their family have always made such offerings. Cecile made the Bride’s Gift to Orandula, the old god of balances. The slain birds are a gift to the carrion bird incarnation of Orandula. His own creatures are killed and then offered back to him to feed his own. It’s a balance. The hope is that the woman offering the sacrifice will not lose any children to stillbirth or cradle death.”
“Does trading dead birds for live children make any sense to you?” I demanded. And then, rudely, I added, “Do you really find any sense in burning a block of leaves to make the good god give us what we ask?”
She looked at me strangely. “That’s an odd question to be troubling a soldier son, Nevare. But perhaps it is because you were born to be a soldier that you ask it. You are applying the logic of man to a god. The good god is not bound by our human logic or measurements, son. On the contrary, we are bound by his. We are not gods, to know what pleases a god. We were given the Holy Writ so that we might worship the good god as will please him, rather than offering him things that might please a man. I, for one, am very grateful. Imagine a god who dealt as men do: what would he demand of a bride in exchange for future children? What might such a god ask of you as recompense to restore your lost beauty? Would you want to pay it?”
She was trying to make me think, but her last words stung me. “Beauty? Lost beauty? This is not a matter of vanity, Mother! I am trapped in this bulky body and nothing I do seems to change it. I cannot put on my boots or get out of bed without being bound by it. How can you assume you can even imagine what it is like for me to be a prisoner in my own flesh?”
She looked at me silently for a few moments. Than a small smile passed her lips. “You were too small to remember my pregnancies with Vanze and Yaril. Perhaps you cannot even remember what I looked like before my last two children were born.” She lifted her arms as if inviting me to consider it. I glanced at her and away. Time and childbearing had thickened her body, but she was my mother. She was supposed to look that way. I could, vaguely, recall a younger, slender mother who had chased me laughing through the freshly planted garden in our early years at Widevale. And I did recall her last pregnancy with Yaril. I most recalled how she had lumbered through the rooms of the house on her painfully swollen feet.
“But that’s not the same thing at all,” I retorted. “The changes then and now, those are natural changes. What has befallen me is completely unnatural. I feel as if I am trapped in some Dark Evening costume that I cannot shed. You are so caught up in looking at my body that all of you, Father, Yaril, and even you, cannot perceive that within I am still Nevare! The only thing that has changed is my body. But I am treated as if I am these walls of fat rather than the person trapped behind them.”
My mother allowed a small silence to settle between us before she observed, “You seem very angry at us, Nevare.”
“Well, of course I am! Who would not be, in these circumstances?”
Again she made that quiet space before suggesting in a reasonable voice, “Perhaps you should direct that anger against your real enemy, to add greater strength to your will to change yourself.”
“My will?” My anger surged again. “Mother, it has nothing to do with my will. My discipline has not failed. I work from dawn to dusk. I eat less than I did as a child. And still, I continue to grow heavier. Did not Father speak to you about Dr. Amicas’s letter? The doctor thinks that this unnatural weight gain is a result of the plague. If it is, what can I do about it? If I had survived a pox, no one would fault me for a scarred face. If the Speck plague had left me trembling and thin, people would offer me sympathy. This is exactly the same, yet I am despised for it.” It was horribly depressing to know that not even my mother understood what I was going through. I had hoped that my father would have explained my fat as a medical condition to my family and to Carsina’s parents. But he had told no one. No wonder Yaril had no sympathy for me. If my mother, my oldest and staunchest ally, deserted me, I would be completely alone in facing my fate.
She pulled out the last block of support, speaking to me as if I were seven and caught in an obvious falsehood.
“Nevare. I watched you eat at Rosse’s wedding. How can you say that you eat less than you did as a child? You devoured enough food to sustain a man for a week.”
“But—” I felt as if she had knocked the breath from my lungs. Her calm eyes so gently pierced me as she met my gaze.
“I don’t know what happened to you at the academy, my son. But you cannot hide from it behind a wall of fat. I
know nothing of the doctor’s letter to your father. But I do know that what I have seen of how you eat now would cause this change in any man.”
“You can’t believe I eat like that at every meal!”
She kept her calm. “Do not shout at me, Nevare. I am still your mother. And why else would you hide from your family at every meal if not because your gluttony shamed you? As it should. That shame is a positive sign. But instead of concealing your weakness, you must control it, my dear.”
I rose abruptly. I towered over her, and for the first time in my life, I saw alarm cross my mother’s face as she looked up at me. She knew that I could have crushed her.
I spoke carefully, biting off each word. “I am not a glutton, Mother. I did nothing to deserve this fate. It’s a medical condition. You wrong me to think so poorly of me. I am insulted.”
With what dignity I could muster, I turned and walked away from her.
“Nevare.”
It had been years since I had heard her speak my name in that tone. It was to my anger as iron was to magic. Despite my inclination, I turned back to her. Her eyes were bright with both tears and anger.
“A moment ago, you said that nothing in this room could save you. You are wrong. You are my son, and I will save you. Whatever it is that has caused such a change in you, I will oppose it. I will not back down, I will not flee, and I will not give up on you. I am your mother, and for as long as we both live, that is so. Believe in me, son. I believe in you. And I will not let you ruin your life. No matter how often you turn away from me, I will still be here. I will not fail you. Believe that, son.”
I looked at her. She held herself straight as a sword, and despite the tears that now tracked down her cheeks, her strength radiated from her. I wanted to believe that she could save me. So often when I was small, she had swept in and stood between my father’s wrath and me. So often she had been the steadying influence, the true compass for me. There was only one answer I could give her. “I will try, Mother.” I turned and left her there, with her incense and her smoke and her good god.
As I left the room, I knew I was as alone as I had ever been. Regardless of my mother’s good intentions, my battle to regain my life would be a solitary one. She was my mother and she was strong, but the magic was like an infection in my blood. Oppose it however she might, she could not cure me. The magic had taken me, and I would have to battle it alone. I sought my room.
I found no solace there. The neglected letters still rested on the desk. I longed to sit down at my desk and immerse myself in them, but I had no heart to answer them just now. My bed complained as I lay down on it. I stared around at the bare walls and simple furnishings and the single window. It had always been a severe room, a place of minimal comfort, a room that would train a boy to embrace a soldier’s life. Now it was a bare cell. In this room, I would live out the rest of my days. Every night I would lie down here alone to sleep. Every morning, I would rise to do my father’s bidding, and when he was gone, I would have to accept Rosse’s authority over me. What else was there for me? For a flashing moment, I thought of running away. I had a childish image of myself galloping away on Sirlofty, going east toward the end of the King’s Road and the mountains beyond. The thought lifted me, and for an instant, I actually considered rising from my bed and leaving that night. My heart raced at the wild plan. Then I came to my senses and marveled at my foolish impulse. No. I was not going to give up my dream just yet. As long as I had my mother’s belief to sustain me, I would stay here. I would resist the magic and try to reclaim my life. I closed my eyes to that thought and, without intending to, drifted off into a deep sleep.
I did not dream. The awareness that flowed through me was as unlike dreaming as waking is to sleeping. Magic worked in me, like yeast working in bread dough. I felt it quicken and grow, swelling in my veins. It gathered strength from my body, roiling through my flesh, drawing on the resources it had gathered against this necessity. With growing trepidation, I recognized that I had felt this sensation before. The magic had moved in me before, and it had acted. What had it done, without my knowledge or consent? I recalled the young man on the jankship, and how he had fallen after my angry words with him. That was one time, but there had been others.
The massed magic did something.
The languages I knew did not have words to express it. Could my flesh shout out a word, voicelessly, soundlessly? Could the magic, a thing that resided elsewhere than the physical world, speak a command through me, so that somewhere, something it desired happened? That was what it felt like. Dimly I sensed that something had begun. The first event that would trigger a chain reaction of responses had occurred. Finished, the magic pooled to stillness in me. Weariness washed through my body. I sank into an exhausted sleep.
When I awoke, the sun had gone down. I’d slept the rest of the day away. I got up quietly and crept down the stairs. At the bottom, I paused to listen. I heard my father’s strident voice in his study. Rosse was gone; I wondered whom he was lecturing. After a moment, I heard my mother’s soft response. Ah. I walked quickly past that door, and past the music room where Elisi drew a melancholy melody from her harp. The young fellow at Rosse’s wedding had made no offer for her. Was that my fault? The house was a pool of unhappiness and I was the source of it. I reached the door and strode out into the night.
I wandered through the dark familiar garden and sat down on a bench. I tried to grasp that my future was gone. I could think of nowhere to go tonight and nothing to do. The ferry stopped at night, so I couldn’t cross the river to Burvelle’s Landing. I’d long ago read most of the books in our family library. I had no projects. I had no friends to visit. This was a foretaste of the rest of my life. I could do manual labor on the holdings and then wander aimlessly about at night. I’d be a shadow in my old home, a useless extra son and nothing more.
I gave myself a shake to rid my head of melancholy foolishness. I hitched up my trousers, left the garden, and walked over to the menservants’ quarters. My father had built them as a structure separate from the house, and my mother still complained that it looked more like a military barracks than servants’ quarters. She was right, and I was sure that it was deliberately so. One door led into a long open bunkroom for seasonal workers. At the other end of the structure, there were private apartments for married servants and rooms for our permanent help. I went to Sergeant Duril’s door. Strange to say, in all the years he’d taught me, I’d only rapped on it half a dozen times.
For a moment I hesitated before it. For all I knew of the man who had taught me, there was much I didn’t know. I wondered if he was even awake or if he was off at the Landing. At last I damned myself for a foolish coward, and knocked firmly on the door.
Silence from within. Then I heard the scrape of a chair and footsteps. The door opened to me, spilling lamplight into the night. Duril’s eyebrows shot up at the sight of me. “Nevare, is it? What brings you here?”
He was in his undershirt and trousers, with no boots on. I’d caught him getting ready for bed. I realized that I’d grown taller than Sergeant Duril. I was so accustomed to him in his boots or on horseback. He had no hat on; the substantial bald spot on his pate surprised me. I tried not to stare at it while he tried not to stare at my stomach. I groped for something to say other than that I was horribly lonely and would never be able to go back to the academy.
“Has your saddle cinch been coming loose lately?” I asked him.
He squinted at me for a second, and then I saw his jaw loosen, as if he’d just realized something. “Come in, Nevare,” he invited me, and stood back from the door.
His room revealed him. There was a potbellied stove in one corner of the room, but no fire at this time of year. A disassembled long gun dominated the table in the room. He had shelves, but instead of books they held the clutter of his life. Interesting rocks were mixed with cheap medical remedies for backache and sore feet, a good-luck carving of a frog jostled up against a large seashell and a stuffed
owl, and a wadded shirt awaited mending next to a spool of thread. Through an open door, I glimpsed his neatly made-up bed in the next room. A bare room for a bare life, I thought to myself, and then grimaced as I realized that his room had more character than mine did. I imagined myself as Sergeant Duril years from now, no wife or children of my own, teaching a soldier son not mine, a solitary man.
The two of us filled the small room, and I felt more uncomfortable with my bulk than ever. “Sit down,” he invited me, drawing out one of his chairs. I placed myself carefully on it, testing my weight against it. He pulled out the other chair and sat down. With no awkwardness at all, he launched into talk.
“My cinch has come loose three times in the last month. And yesterday, when I was helping the crew jerk some big rocks out, a line I knew I’d tied and made the ‘hold fast’ sign over came loose. Now, I can’t remember that ever happening to me before. I’m getting old, and thought maybe I wasn’t making the sign or maybe I was making it sloppy. Not a big thing to worry about, I told myself. But you seem to think it is. Why? Has your cinch been coming loose lately?”
I nodded. “Ever since the Dancing Spindle stopped dancing. I think the Plains magic is failing, Sergeant. But I also think that,” and here I stopped, to slap my chest and then gestured at my belly, “that somehow this is a result of it.”
He knit his brow. “You’re fat because of magic.” He enunciated the words as if to be sure that he hadn’t mistaken what I’d said.
Stated baldly, it sounded worse than silly. It sounded like a child’s feeble excuse, a cry of “look what you made me do!” when a stack of blocks toppled. I looked down at the edge of his table and wished I hadn’t come and asked my foolish question. “Never mind,” I said quickly, and stood to go.
