Робин Хобб – Forest Mage (страница 29)

I snatched my thoughts back from that precipice. It was too terrifying to consider. Why had this befallen me? As logically as a mathematical proof, I perceived the beginning of these changes in me, the place where my path had diverged from the future I had been promised and into this nightmarish present. I knew when my life had been snatched out of my control. An instant later, I knew whom to blame for it.

My father.

At that thought, I felt the milling guilt in me stop just as the Dancing Spindle had ground to a halt. That single thought, that pinning of blame made all events since my experience with Dewara fall into a new order. ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ I said quietly, and the words were like cool balm on a burning wound. I looked at the door to the parlour. It was closed, my father no longer there. Childishly, I still addressed him. ‘It was never my fault. You did it. You put me on this path, Father.’

My satisfaction in finding someone to blame was very shortlived. Blaming him solved nothing. Dejected, I leaned back in my chair. It didn’t matter who had put me in this situation. Here I was. I looked down at my ungainly body. I filled the chair. The waistband of my trousers dug into me. With a grunt and a sigh, I shoved at it, easing it down under my belly. I’d seen fat old soldiers hang their beer guts out over their trouser tops this way. Now I understood why. It was more comfortable.

I sat up in my chair and gathered my papers together. When I tried to fit them all back into the envelope I discovered another letter among them. I tugged it out.

This last enclosure was addressed to me in the doctor’s hand. I threw it on the floor in childish pique. What worse thing could he send to me than what he already had?

But after a few moments of looking at it there, I bent down laboriously, picked it up and opened it.

‘Dear Nevare,’ he had written. Not Cadet Nevare. Simply Nevare. I clenched my teeth for a moment and then read on.

‘‘With great regret, I have done what was necessary. Please remember that your discharge from the Academy is an honourable one, without stigma. Nonetheless, I imagine you hate me at this moment. Or perhaps, in the weeks since I have seen you, you have finally come to accept that something is terribly wrong with your body, and that it is a crippling flaw that you will have to learn to manage. It is unfortunately a flaw that renders you completely unfit for the military.

‘You were able to accept that those of your fellows whose health was broken by the plague had to give up their hopes of being active cavalla officers. I now ask you to see your own affliction in the same light. You are just as physically unfit for duty as Spinrek Kester.

‘You may feel that your life is over at this moment, or no longer worth living. I pray to the good god that you will have the strength to see that there are other worthwhile paths that you can tread. I have seen that you have a bright mind. The exercise of that intelligence does not always demand a fit body to support it. Turn your thoughts to how you can still lead a useful life, and focus your will towards it.

‘It has not been easy for me to reach this decision. I hope you appreciate that I delayed it as long as I possibly could, hoping against hope that I was wrong. My research and reading has led me to discover at least three other cases, which, although poorly documented, indicate that your reaction to the plague is a rare but not unique phenomenon.

‘Although I am sure you are little inclined to do so at this time, I urge you to remain in contact with me. You have the opportunity to turn your misfortune into a benefit for the medical profession. If you will continue to chart weekly your increases in weight and girth, while keeping a record of your consumption of food, and if you will send me that information every two months, it would be of great benefit to my study of the plague and its manifestations after the disease stage has passed. In this, you could serve your king and the military, for I am certain that every bit of information we gather about this pestilence will eventually become the ammunition we use to defeat it.

In the good god’s light,

Dr Jakib Amicas’

I folded his letter carefully, though my strongest impulse was to rip it to pieces. The gall of the man, to dash my hopes and then suggest that I pass my idle time in helping him to further his ambitions by graphing and charting my misfortune! I moved very slowly as I put all the documents and letters back in meticulous order and slid them back in the envelope. When it was done, I looked at it. A coffin for my dreams.

I could not finish reading Epiny’s letter. I tried, but it was all prattle about her new life with Spink. She liked taking care of the chickens and gathering the eggs warm from the nests. Good. I was glad for her. At least someone was still contemplating a future, even if it was one that involved chickens. I gathered my papers, left the parlour and slowly climbed the stairs to my room.

In the days that followed, I moved like a ghost in my old home. I had entered an endless tunnel of black despair. This day-to-day existence of meaningless tasks was my future. I had nothing beyond this to anticipate. I hid from my father, and my sisters scrupulously aided me in avoiding them. Once, when I encountered Yaril in the hallway, an expression of disgust contorted her face and anger filled her eyes. Never before had she looked so much like my father. I stared at her, horrified. She made a great show of holding her skirts away from me as she hurried past me and into the music room. She closed the door loudly.

I considered cornering her and demanding to know when she had become such a foul little chit. Growing up, I had indulged her, and often shielded her from my father’s wrath. Her betrayal stung me as no other. I took two strides after her.

‘Nevare.’

My mother’s soft voice came from behind me. Surprised, I spun around.

‘Let her go, Nevare,’ my mother suggested softly.

Irrationally, I turned my anger on her. ‘She behaves as if my weight is a personal insult to her, with no thought of how it affects my life or what I’ve lost as a consequence of what has befallen me. Does she think I did this deliberately? Do you think I want to look like this?’

My voice had risen to a shout. Nevertheless, my mother answered me softly. ‘No, Nevare. I don’t think you do.’ Her grey eyes met mine steadily. She stood before me, small and arrow straight, just as she stood when confronting my father. At that thought, my anger trickled out of me like liquid from a punctured water skin. I felt worse than emptied. Impotent. Humiliated by my show of temper. I hung my head and shame washed through me.

I think my mother knew it.

‘Come, Nevare. Let us find a quiet place and talk for a bit.’

I nodded heavily and followed her.

We avoided the music room, and the parlour where Elisi sat reading poetry. Instead, she led me down the hall to a small prayer room adjacent to the women’s portion of our household chapel. I remembered the room well, though I had not entered it since I was a child and in my mother’s daily care.

The room had not changed. A half-circle of stone bench faced the meditation wall. At one end of the bench a small, well-tended brazier burned smokelessly. At the other end, a stone bowl held a pool of placid water. A mural of the good god’s blessings covered the meditation wall, with niches in the art where offerings of incense could be set. Two alcoves already held glowing bars of incense. A dark green mint-scented bar burned low in a niche painted like a harvest basket, an offering for good crops. A fat black wedge released the scent of anise into the air as it glimmered, nearly spent, in the niche for good health that hovered over a cherubic child’s head.

With housewifely efficiency, my mother removed the anise incense with a pair of black tongs reserved for that task. She carried it to the small worship pool; it hissed as she dunked it in, and she stood a moment in reverent silence as the remains of the anise brick settled to the bottom. She took a clean white cloth from a stack of carefully folded linens and carefully wiped the alcove clean.

‘Choose the next offering, Nevare,’ she invited me over her shoulder. She smiled as she said those words and I almost smiled back. As a child, I had always vied with my sisters for the privilege of choosing. I had forgotten how important that had once been to me.

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 play-acting, 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.