Robin Hobb - Soldier Son 02 - Forest Mage

FOREST MAGE

BOOK TWO OF

THE SOLDIER SON TRILOGY

ROBIN HOBB

ISBN-13: 978-0-06-075763-2

ISBN-10: 0-06-075763-9

CHAPTER ONE

FOREST DREAMS

There is a fragrance in the forest. It does not come from a single flower or

leaf. It is not the rich aroma of dark crumbly earth or the sweetness of

fruit that has passed from merely ripe to mellow and rich. The scent I

recalled was a combination of all these things, and of sunlight touching

and awakening their essences and of a very slight wind that blended them

perfectly. She smelled like that.

We lay together in a bower. Above us, the distant top of the canopy

swayed gently, and the beaming rays of sunlight danced over our bodies in

time with them. Vines and creepers that draped from the stretching

branches above our heads formed the sheltering walls of our forest

pavilion. Deep moss cushioned my bare back, and her soft arm was my

pillow. The vines curtained our trysting place with their foliage and large,

pale green flowers. The sepals pushed past the fleshy lips of the blossoms

and were heavy with yellow pollen. Large butterflies with wings of deep

orange traced with black were investigating the flowers. One insect left a

drooping blossom, alighted on my lover’s shoulder, and walked over her

soft dappled flesh. I watched it unfurl a coiled black tongue to taste the

perspiration that dewed the forest woman’s skin, and envied it. I lay in

indescribable comfort, content beyond passion. I lifted a lazy hand to

impede the butterfly’s progress. Fearlessly, it stepped onto my fingers. I

raised it to be an ornament in my lover’s thick and tousled hair. She

opened her eyes at my touch. She had hazel eyes, green mingling with soft

brown. She smiled. I leaned up on my elbow and kissed her. Her ample

breasts pressed against me, startling in their softness.

“I’m sorry,” I said softly, tilting back from the kiss. “I’m so sorry I had to

kill you.”

Her eyes were sad but still fond. “I know,” she replied. There was no

rancor in her voice. “Be at peace with it, soldier’s boy. All will come true as

it was meant to be. You belong to the magic now, and whatever it must

have you do, you will do.”

“But I killed you. I loved you and I killed you.”

She smiled gently. “Such as we do not die as others do.” “Do you yet live

then?” I asked her. I pulled my body back from hers and looked down

between us at the mound of her belly. It gave the lie to her words. My

cavalla saber had slashed her wide open. Her entrails spilled from that

gash and rested on the moss between us. They were pink and liverish-gray,

coiling like fat worms. They had piled up against my bare legs, warm and

slick. Her blood smeared my genitals. I tried to scream and could not. I

struggled to push away from her, but we had grown fast together.

“Nevare!”

I woke with a shudder and sat up in my bunk, panting silently through my

open mouth. A tall pale wraith stood over me. I gave a muted yelp before I

recognized Trist. “You were whimpering in your sleep,” Trist told me. I

compulsively brushed at my thighs, and then lifted my hands close to my

face. In the dim moonlight through the window, they were clean of blood.

“It was only a dream,” Trist assured me.

“Sorry,” I muttered, ashamed. “Sorry I was noisy.”

“It’s not like you’re the only one to have nightmares.” The thin cadet sat

down on the foot of my bed. Once he had been whiplash-lean and limber.

Now he was skeletal and moved like a stiff old man. He coughed twice and

then caught his breath. “Know what I dream?” He didn’t wait for my

reply. “I dream I died of Speck plague. Because I did, you know. I was one

of the ones who died, and then revived. But I dream that instead of

holding my body in the infirmary, Dr. Amicas let them put me out with

the corpses. In my dream, they toss me in the pit grave, and they throw

the quicklime down on me. I dream I wake up down there, under all those

bodies that stink of piss and vomit, with the lime burning into me. I try to

climb out, but they just keep throwing more bodies down on top of me.

I’m clawing and pushing my way past them, trying to get out of the pit

through all that rotting flesh and bones. And then I realize that the body

I’m climbing over is Nate. He’s all dead and decaying, but he opens his

eyes and he asks, ‘Why me, Trist? Why me and not you?’” Trist gave a

sudden shudder and huddled his shoulders.

“They’re only dreams, Trist,” I whispered. All around us, the other

first-years who had survived the plague slumbered on. Someone coughed

in his sleep. Someone else muttered, yipped like a puppy, and then grew

still. Trist was right. Few of us slept well anymore. “They’re only bad

dreams. It’s all over. The plague passed us by. We survived.”

“Easy for you to say. You recovered. You’re fit and hearty.” He stood up.

His nightshirt hung on his lanky frame. In the dim dormitory, his eyes

were dark holes. “Maybe I survived, but the plague didn’t pass me by. I’ll

live with what it did to me to the end of my days. You think I’ll ever lead a

charge, Nevare? I can barely manage to keep standing through morning

assembly. I’m done as a soldier. Done before I started. I’ll never live the life

I expected to lead.” Trist stood up. He shuffled away from my bed and

back to his. He was breathing noisily by the time he sat down on his bunk.

Slowly I lay back down. I heard Trist cough again, wheeze, and then lie

down. It was no comfort to me that he, too, was tormented with

nightmares. I thought of Tree Woman and shuddered again. She is dead, I

assured myself. She can no longer reach into my life. I killed her. I killed

her and I took back into myself the part of my spirit that she’d stolen and

seduced. She can’t control me anymore. It was only a dream. I took a

deeper, steadying breath, turned my pillow to the cool side, and burrowed

into it. I dared not close my eyes lest I fall back into that nightmare. I

deliberately focused my mind on the present, and pushed my night terror

away from me.

All around me in the darkness, my fellow survivors slept. Bringham

House’s dormitory was a long open room, with a large window at each

end. Two neat rows of bunks lined the long walls. There were forty beds,

but only thirty-one were full. Colonel Rebin, the King’s Cavalla Academy

commander, had combined the sons of old nobles with the sons of battle

lords, and recalled the cadets who had been culled earlier in the year, but

even that measure had not completely replenished our depleted ranks. The

colonel might have declared us equals, but I suspected that only time and

familiarity would erase the social gulf between the sons of established

noble families and those of us whose fathers could claim a title only

because the king had elevated them in recognition of their wartime

service.

Rebin mingled us out of necessity. The Speck plague that had roared

through the academy had devastated us. Our class of first-years had been

halved. The second- and third-years had taken almost as heavy a loss.

Instructors as well as students had perished in that unnatural onslaught.

Colonel Rebin was doing the best he could to reorganize the academy and

put it back on a regular schedule, but we were still licking our wounds.

Speck plague had culled a full generation of future officers. Gernia’s

military would feel that loss keenly in the years to come. And that had

been what the Specks intended when they used their magic to send their

disease against us.

Morale at the academy was subdued as we staggered forward into the new

year. It wasn’t just the number of deaths the plague had visited on us,

though that was bad enough. The plague had come among us and

slaughtered us at will, an enemy that all of our training could not prevail

against. Strong, brave young men who had hoped to distinguish

themselves on battlefields had instead died in their beds, soiled with vomit

and urine and whimpering feebly for their mothers. It is never good to

remind soldiers of their own mortality. We had believed ourselves young

heroes, full of energy, courage, and lust for life. The plague had revealed to

us that we were mortals, and just as vulnerable as the weakest babe in

arms.

The first time Colonel Rebin had assembled us on the parade ground in

our old formations, he had ordered us all “at ease” and then commanded

us to look around us and see how many of our fellows had fallen. He then

gave a speech, telling us that the plague was the first battle we had passed

through, and that just as the plague had not discriminated between old

nobility and new nobility, neither would a blade or a bullet. As he formed

us up into our new condensed companies, I pondered his words. I doubted

that he truly realized that the Speck plague had not been a random

contagion but a true strike against us, as telling as any military attack.

The Specks had sent “Dust Dancers” from the far eastern frontiers of

Gernia all the way to our capitol city, for the precise purpose of sowing

their disease among our nobility and our future military leaders. They had

succeeded in thinning our ranks. If not for me, their success would have

been complete. Sometimes I took pride in that.

At other times, I recalled that if not for me, they never would have been

able to attack us as they had.

I had tried, without success, to shrug off the guilt I felt. I’d been the

unwilling and unwitting partner of the Specks and Tree Woman. It was

not my fault, I told myself, that I’d fallen into her power. Years ago, my

father had entrusted me to a Plainsman warrior for training. Dewara had

nearly killed me with his “instruction.” And toward the end of my time

with him, he’d decided to “make me Kidona” by inducting me into the

magic of his people. Foolishly, I’d allowed him to drug me and take me

into the supernatural world of his people. He’d told me I could win honor

and glory by doing battle with the ancient enemy of his people. But what

confronted me at the end of a series of trials had been a fat old woman

sitting in the shade of a huge tree. I was my father’s soldier son, trained in

the chivalry of the cavalla. I could not draw sword against an old woman.

Due to that misplaced gallantry, I had fallen to her. She had “stolen” me

from Dewara and made me her pawn. A part of me had remained with her

in that spirit world. While I had grown and gone off to the academy and

begun my education to be an officer in my king’s cavalla, he had become

her acolyte. Tree Woman had made that part of me into a Speck in all

things but having speckled skin. Through him, she spied on my people,

and hatched her terrible plan to destroy us with the Speck plague.

Masquerading as captive dancers, her emissaries came to Old Thares as

part of the Dark Evening carnival and unleashed their disease upon us.

My Speck self had seized control of me. I’d signaled the Dust Dancers to let

them know they had reached their goal. The carnivalgoers who

surrounded them thought they had come to witness an exhibition of

primitive dance. Instead, they’d breathed in the disease with the flung

dust. When my fellow cadets and I left the carnival, we were infected. And

the disease had spread throughout all of Old Thares.

In my bed in the darkened dormitory, I rolled over and thumped my pillow

back into shape. Stop thinking about how I betrayed my own people, I

begged myself. Think instead of how I saved them.

And I had. In a terrible encounter born of my Speck plague fever, I had

finally been able to cross back into her world and challenge her. Not only

had I won back the piece of my soul she had stolen, but I had also slain

her, slashing her belly wide open with the cold iron of my cavalla saber. I

severed her connection to our world. Her reign over me was finished. I

attributed my complete recovery from the Speck plague to my reclaiming

the piece of my spirit she had stolen. I had regained my health and

vitality, and even put on flesh. In a word, I had become whole again.

In the days and nights that followed my return to the academy and the

resumption of a military routine, I discovered that as I reintegrated that

other, foreign self, I absorbed his memories as well. His recollections of the

Tree Woman and her world were the source of my beautiful dreams of

walking in untouched forest in the company of an amazing woman. I felt

as if the twin halves of my being had parted, followed differing roads, and

now had converged once more into a single self. The very fact that I

accepted this was so, and tried to absorb those alien emotions and

opinions, was a fair indicator that my other self was having a substantial

impact on who I was becoming. The old Nevare, the self I knew so well,

would have rejected such a melding as blasphemous and impossible. I

had killed the Tree Woman, and I did not regret doing it. She had

extinguished lives for the sake of the “magic” she could draw from their

foundering souls. My best friend, Spink, and my Cousin Epiny had been

among her intended victims. I had killed Tree Woman to save them. I

knew that I had also saved myself, and dozens of others. By daylight, I did

not think of my deed at all, or if I did, I took satisfaction in knowing that I

had triumphed and saved my friends. Yet my night thoughts were a

different matter. When I hovered between wakefulness and sleep, a

terrible sorrow and guilt would fill me. I mourned the creature I had slain,

and missed her with a sorrow that hollowed me. My Speck self had been

her lover and regretted that I’d slain her. But that was he, not me. In my

dreams, he might briefly rule my thoughts. But by day, I was still Nevare

Burvelle, my father’s son and a future officer in the king’s cavalla. I had

prevailed. I would continue to prevail. And I would do all I could, every day

of my life, to make up for the traitorous deeds of my other self.

I sighed. I knew I would not sleep again that night. I tried to salve my

conscience. The plague we had endured together had strengthened us in

some ways. It had united us as cadets. There had been little opposition to

Colonel Rebin’s insistence on ending the segregation of old nobles’ and

new nobles’ sons. In the last few weeks I’d come to know better the “old

noble” first-years and found that, generally speaking, they were little

different from my old patrol. The vicious rivalry that had separated us for

the first part of the year had foundered and died. Now that we were truly

one academy and could socialize freely, I wondered what had made me

loathe them so. They were perhaps more sophisticated and polished than

their frontier brethren, but at the end of the day they were first-years just

like us, groaning under the same demerits and duty. Colonel Rebin had

taken care to mix us well in our new patrols. Nonetheless, my closest

friends were still the four surviving members of my old patrol.

Rory had stepped up to fill the position of best friend to me when Spink’s

broken health had forced him to withdraw from the academy. His

devil-may-care attitude and frontier roughness were, I felt, a good

counterweight to stiffness and rules. Whenever I lapsed into moodiness or

became too pensive, Rory would rowdy me past it. He was the least

changed of my old patrol mates. Trist was no longer the tall, handsome

cadet he’d been. His brush with death had stolen his physical confidence.

When he laughed now, it always had a bitter edge. Kort missed Nate

acutely. He bowed under his grief, and though he had recovered his

health, he was so somber and dull without his friend that he seemed to be

living but half a life. Fat Gord was still as heavy as ever, but he seemed

more content with his lot and also more dignified. When it looked as if the

plague would doom everyone, Gord’s parents and his fiancée’s parents had

allowed their offspring to wed early and taste what little of life they might

be allowed. Fortune had smiled on them, and they had come through the

plague unscathed. Although Gord was still teased by all and despised by

some for his fat, his new status as a married man agreed with him. He

seemed to possess an inner contentment and sense of worth that childish

taunts could not disturb. He spent every day of his liberty with his wife,

and she sometimes came to visit him during the week. Cilima was a quiet

little thing with huge black eyes and tumbling black curls. She was

completely infatuated with “my dear Gordy,” as she always called him, and

he was devoted to her. His marriage separated him from the rest of us; he

now seemed much older than his fellow first-years. He went after his

studies with a savage determination. I had always known that he was good

at math and engineering. He now revealed that in fact he was brilliant,

and had till now merely been marking time. He no longer concealed his

keen mind. I knew that Colonel Rebin had summoned him once to discuss

his future. He had taken Gord out of the first-year math course and given

him texts to study independently. We were still friends, but without Spink

and his need for tutoring, we did not spend much time together. Our only

long conversations seemed to occur when one or the other of us would

receive a letter from Spink. He wrote to both of us, more or less regularly.

Spink himself had survived the plague, but his military career had not. His

handwriting wavered more than it had before his illness, and his letters

were not long. He did not whine or bitterly protest his fate, but the brevity

of his missives spoke to me of dashed hopes. He had constant pain in his

joints now, and headaches if he read or wrote for too long. Dr. Amicas had

given Spink a medical discharge from the academy. Spink had married

my Cousin Epiny, who had nursed him through his illness.

Together, they had set out for his brother’s holdings at distant Bitter

Springs. The sedate life of a dutiful younger son was a far cry from Spink’s

previous dreams of military glory and swift advancement through the

ranks. Epiny’s letters to me were naively revealing. Her inked words

prattled as verbosely as her tongue did. I knew the names of the flowers,

trees, and plants she had encountered on her way to Bitter Springs, every

day’s weather, and each tiny event on her tedious journey there. Epiny had

traded my uncle’s wealth and sophisticated home in Old Thares for the life

of a frontier wife. She had once told me she thought she could be a good

soldier’s wife, but it looked as if her final vocation would be caretaker for

her invalid husband. Spink would have no career of his own. They would

live on his brother’s estate, and at his brother’s sufferance. Fond as his

elder brother was of Spink, it would still be difficult for him to stretch his

paltry resources to care for his soldier brother and his wife.

In the darkness, I shifted in my bunk. Trist was right, I decided. None of

us would have the lives we’d expected. I muttered a prayer to the good god

for all of us, and closed my eyes to get what sleep I could before dawn

commanded us to rise.

I was weary when I rose the next morning with my fellows. Rory tried to

jolly me into conversation at breakfast, but my answers were brief, and no

one else at our table took up his banter. Our first class of the day was

Engineering and Drafting. I’d enjoyed the course when Captain Maw

instructed it, despite his prejudice against new noble sons like me. But the

plague had carried Maw off, and a third-year cadet had been pressed into

duty as our temporary instructor. Cadet Sergeant Vredo seemed to think

that discipline was more important than information, and frequently

issued demerits to cadets who dared to ask questions. Captain Maw’s

untidy room full of maps and models had been gutted. Rows of desks and

interminable lectures had replaced our experimentation. I kept my head

down, did my work, and learned little that was new to me. In contrast,

Cadet Lieutenant Bailey was doing rather well instructing Military

History, for he plainly loved his topic and had read widely beyond his

course materials. His lecture that day was one that engaged me. He spoke

about the impact of Gernian civilization on the Plainspeople. In my

father’s lifetime, Landsing, our traditional enemy, had finally dealt Gernia

a sound defeat. Gernia had had to surrender our territory along the

western seacoast. King Troven had had no choice but to turn his eyes to

the east and the unclaimed territories there. Nomadic folk had long

roamed the wide prairies and high plateaus of the interior lands, but they

were primitive folk with no central government, no king, and few

permanent settlements. When Gernia had begun to expand east, they had

fought us, but their arrows and spears were no match for our modern

weaponry. We had defeated them. There was no question in anyone’s

mind that it was for their own good.

“Since Gernia took charge of the Plainsmen and their lands, they have

begun to put down roots, to build real towns rather than their seasonal

settlements, to pen their cattle and grow food rather than forage for it.

The swift horses of great stamina that sustained the largely nomadic

peoples have been replaced with sturdy oxen and plow horses. For the first

time, their children are experiencing the benefits of schooling and written

language. Knowledge of the good god is being imparted to them, replacing

the fickle magic they once relied on.” Lofert waved a hand and then spoke

before the instructor could acknowledge him. “But what about them, uh,

Preservationists, sir? I heard my father telling one of his friends that

they’d like to give all our land back to the Plainsfolk and let them go back

to living like wild animals.”

“Wait to be acknowledged before you ask a question, Cadet. And your

comment wasn’t phrased as a question. But I’ll answer it. There are people

who feel that we have made radical changes to the lifestyles of the

Plainsmen too swiftly for them to adapt to them. In some instances, they

are probably correct. In many others, they are, in my opinion, ignorant of

the reality of what they suggest. But what we have to ask ourselves is,

would it be better for them if we delayed offering them the benefits of

civilization? Or would we simply be neglecting our duty to them?

“Remember that the Plainspeople used to rely on their primitive magic

and spells for survival. They can no longer do that. And having taken their

magic from them, is it not our duty to replace it with modern tools for

living? Iron, the backbone of our modernizing world, is anathema to their

magic. The iron plows we gave them to till the land negate the “finding

magic” of their foragers. Flint and steel have become a requirement, for

their mages can no longer call forth flame from wood. The Plainsmen are

settled now and can draw water from wells. The water mages who used to

lead the people to drinking places along their long migratory routes are no

longer needed. The few wind wizards who remain are solitary creatures,

seldom glimpsed. Reports of their flying rugs and their little boats that

moved of themselves across calm water are already scoffed at as tales. I

have no doubt that in another generation, they’ll be the stuff of legend.”

Cadet Lieutenant Bailey’s words saddened me. My mind wandered briefly.

I recalled my own brief glimpse of a wind wizard on the river during my

journey to Old Thares. He had held his small sail wide to catch the wind

he had summoned. His little craft had moved swiftly against the current.

The sight had been both moving and mystical to me. Yet I also recalled

with wrenching regret how it had ended. Some drunken fools on our

riverboat had shot his sail full of holes. The iron shot they had used had

disrupted the wizard’s spell as well. He’d been flung off his little vessel into

the river. I believed he had drowned there, victim of the young noblemen’s

jest.

“Lead can kill a man, but it takes cold iron to defeat magic.” My

instructor’s words jolted me from my daydream.

“That our superior civilization replaces the primitive order of the

Plainsmen is a part of the natural order,” he lectured. “And lest you feel

too superior, be mindful that we Gernians have been victims of advanced

technology ourselves. When Landsing made their discovery that allowed

their cannon and long guns to shoot farther and more accurately than

ours, they were able to defeat us and take from us our seacoast provinces.

Much as we resent that, it was natural that once they had achieved a

military technology that was superior to our own, they would take what

they wished from us. Keep that in mind, cadets. We are entering an age of

technology.

“The same principle applies to our conquest of the Plains. Shooting lead

bullets at Plains warriors, we were able to maintain our borders by force

of arms, but we could not expand them. It was only when some

forward-thinking man realized that iron shot would destroy their magic as

well as cause injury that we were able to push back their boundaries and

impose our will on them. The disadvantages of iron shot, that it cannot be

as easily reclaimed and remanufactured in the field as lead ball can, were

offset by the military advantage it gave us in defeating their warriors. The

Plainsmen had relied on their magic to turn aside our shot, to scare our

horses, and generally to confound our troops. Our advance into their

lands, gentlemen, is as inevitable as a rising tide, just as was our defeat by

the Landsingers. And, just like us, the Plainsmen will either be swept away

before new technology, or they will learn to live with it.”

“Then you think it is our right, sir, to just run over them?” Lofert asked in

his earnest way.

“Raise your hand and wait to be acknowledged before you speak, Cadet.

You’ve been warned before. Three demerits. Yes. I think it is our right. The

good god has given us the means to defeat the Plainsmen, and to prosper

where once only goatherds or wild beasts dwelt. We will bring civilization

to the Midlands, to the benefit of all.”

I caught myself wondering how much the fallen from both sides had

benefited. Then I shook my head angrily, and resolutely set aside such

cynical musings. I was a cadet in the King’s Cavalla Academy. Like any

second son of a nobleman, I was my father’s soldier son, and I would follow

in his footsteps. I had not been born to question the ways of the world. If

the good god had wanted me to ponder fate or question the morality of

our eastward expansion, he would have made me a third son, born to be a

priest.

At the end of the lecture, I blew on my notes to dry them, closed up my

books, and joined the rest of my patrol to march in formation back to the

dormitory. Spring was trying to gain a hold on the academy grounds and

not completely succeeding. There was a sharp nip of chill in the wind, yet

it was pleasant to be out in the fresh air again. I tried to push aside my

somber musings on the fate of the Plainsmen. It was, as our instructor had

said, the natural order of things. Who was I to dispute it? I followed my

friends up the stairs to our dormitory, and shelved my textbooks from my

Robin Hobb - Soldier Son 02 - Forest Mage

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: