Kitabı oku: «Forest Mage»

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 stamen 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.’

Here eyes were sad but still fond. ‘I know,’ she replied. There was no rancour 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 sabre had slashed her wide open. Her entrails spilled from that gash and rested on the moss between us. They were pink and liverish grey, 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 that 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 finished as a soldier. Finished 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 any more. 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 capital city, for the precise purpose of sowing their disease amongst 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 towards 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 the Kidona. He’d told me I could win honour 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 signalled 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 you betrayed your own people, I begged myself. Think instead of how you 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 sabre. I severed her connection to our world. Her reign over me was over. 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 Natred acutely. He bowed under his grief, and though he had recovered his health, he was so sombre 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 maths 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 know that Colonel Rebin had summoned him once to discuss his future. He had taken Gord out of the first-year maths 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 plough-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 had 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 plainspeoples 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 ploughs 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 windwizards who remained are solitary creatures, seldom glimpsed. Accounts 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 windwizard 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 easily reclaimed and re-manufactured 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 sombre 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 morning classes. The day’s mail awaited me on my bunk. There was a fat envelope from Epiny. The other cadets left me sitting on my bunk. As they hurried off to the noon meal, I opened her letter.

Her letter began with her usual queries about my health and schooling. I quickly skimmed past that part. She had arrived safely in Bitter Springs. Epiny’s first letter about reaching her new home was determinedly optimistic, but I sensed the gap between her expectations and the reality she now confronted. I sat on my bunk and read it with sympathy and bemusement.

‘The women of the household work as hard as the men, right alongside the servants. Truly, the saying that “men but work from sun to sun, woman’s work is never done!” is true of Lady Kester’s household. In the hours after dinner, when the light is dim and you might think some rest was due us, one of us will read or make music for the others, allowing our minds to drift a bit, but our ever-busy hands go on with such mundane tasks as shelling dried peas or using a drop-spindle to make thread of wool (I am proud to say I have become quite good at this chore!) or unravelling old sweaters and blankets so that the yarn can be re-used to make useful items. Lady Kester wastes nothing, not a scrap of fabric nor a minute of time.