Robin Hobb - The Complete Soldier Son Trilogy - Shaman’s Crossing, Forest Mage, Renegade’s Magic

I nodded at his words, scarcely comprehending them. The end of breakfast could not come too soon for me, and as soon as I politely could, I left the table, foolishly thinking to find fresher air outside.

As I stepped out onto the deck, an inconceivable sight met my eyes. The day was dimmed by wood smoke hanging low in the air. The lower half of the hillside on the port side of the boat was stripped of life. Every tree of decent size had been cut. The raw stumps were jagged and pale against the scored earth. The remaining saplings and undergrowth were crushed and matted into the earth where the giants had fallen and been dragged over them to the river. Smoke was rising from heaped and smouldering branches; the hearts of the fires burned a dull red. The hillside scene reminded me of a large dead animal overcome by maggots. Men swarmed everywhere on the hillside. Some cut the limbs from the fallen giants. Teamsters guided the harnessed draught horses that dragged the stripped logs down to the river’s edge. The track of their repeated passage had cut a deep muddy furrow in the hill’s flank, and the rainfall of the last few days had made it a stream, dumping into the river that here ran thick with muck. The brown curl of it wavered out into the river’s current like a rivulet of clotting blood. Stripped logs like gnawed bones rested in piles at the river’s edge, or bobbed in the shallows. Men scuttled about on the floating logs with peevees and lengths of chain and rope, corralling the logs into crude rafts. It was carnage, the desecration of a god’s body.

On the upper half of the hill logging teams ate into the remaining forest like mange spreading on a dog’s back. As I watched, men in the distance shouted triumphantly as an immense tree fell. As it went down, other, smaller trees gave way to its fall, their roots tearing free of the mountain’s flesh as they collapsed under its mammoth weight. Moments after the swaying of branches ceased, men crawled over the fallen tree, bright axes rising and falling as they chopped away the branches.

I turned aside from the sight, sickened and cold. A terrible premonition washed over me. This was how the whole world would end. No matter how much of the forest’s skin they flayed, it would never be enough for these men. They would continue over the face of the earth, leaving desecration and devastation behind them. They would devour the forest and excrete piles of buildings made of stone wrenched from the earth or from dead trees. They would hammer paths of bare stone between their dwellings, and dirty the rivers and subdue the land until it could recall only the will of man. They could not stop themselves from what they did. They did not see what they did, and even if they saw, they did not know how to stop. They no longer knew what was enough. Men could no longer stop man; it would take the force of a god himself to halt them. But they were mindlessly butchering the only god who might have had the strength to stop them.

In the distance I heard the shouts of warning and triumph as another forest giant fell. As it went down, a huge flock of birds flew up, cawing in distress and circling the carnage as crows circle a battlefield. My knees buckled and I fell to the deck, clutching at the railing. I coughed in the thick air, gagged on it, and coughed some more. I could not catch my breath, but I do not think it was the smoke alone that choked me. It was grief that tightened my throat.

One of the deckhands saw me go down. A moment later, there was a rough hand on my shoulder, shaking me and asking me what ailed me. I shook my head, unable to find words to express my distress. A short time later, my father was at my side, and the captain, his napkin still clenched in his hands.

‘Nevare? Are you ill?’ my father asked solemnly.

‘They’re destroying the world,’ I said vaguely. I closed my eyes at the terrible sight, and forced myself to my feet. ‘I … I don’t feel well,’ I said. Some part of me didn’t wish to shame myself before my father and the captain and crew. Some other part of me didn’t care; the enormity of what I had glimpsed was too monstrous, and suddenly too certain. ‘I think I’ll go back to bed for a while.’

‘Prob’ly the stink from all those fires,’ Captain Rhosher said sagely. ‘That smoke’s enough to make anyone sick. You’ll get used to it, lad, in a few hours. Stinks a lot less than Old Thares on an early morning, believe me. We’ll be past it in a day or so, if all those damn log-rafts don’t block our way. A menace to navigation, they are. Time was, good stone was the only thing a rich man would build with. Now they want wood, wood, and more wood. ’Spect they’ll go back to honest stone when this last strip is gone. Then we’ll see the quarries bustle again. Men will do whatever brings in the coin. I’ll be glad when they’ve cut the last timber on that hill and the river can run clear again.’

I lied to my father again that day. I told him that something I had eaten had disagreed with me. That excuse let me keep to my bed for three days. I could not bear to look out the window. The stink of burning branches, the particle-laden air and the cursing of the deckhands as they yelled warnings to the sweepsman and fended us away from the floating log rafts with long poles told me all that I did not wish to know. I felt as aggrieved as I had when the hunters had shot the wind wizard. I had glimpsed something immense and wonderful, and in the next instance had seen its destruction. I felt like a child, shown a most desirable plaything that is then whisked away. I could not discard the feeling that I had been cheated. The world I had expected to live in was vanishing before I could explore it.

At Canby, we disembarked and bid Captain Rhosher farewell. Trade goods and waters converged here where the rushing Ister River met the languid Tefa. The joined rivers flowed west as the mighty Soudana River. Wide and deep and swift, the Soudana was a major trade artery, as well as our boundary with Landsing. The Soudana would make its swift way past Old Thares, our destination, and continue without us to Mouth City and the sea. Mouth City had once been a Gernian town and our best seaport; it had been ceded to the Landsingers at the end of the war and was still a bitter loss for any loyal Gernian to contemplate.

I felt overwhelmed by the masses of people in the street, and walked at my father’s heels as if I were a cowed puppy. People thronged the walkways, hurrying to and fro and dressed in stylish city clothes. Vehicles of every imaginable sort fought for space in the crowded streets. I was impressed with how my father threaded confidently through the crowds to the booking office, and made arrangements for our tickets on the jankship, the conveyance of our luggage and our evening stay at a hotel. It felt strange to be jostled by strangers, and to take a meal in a large room full of people talking and laughing as they dined. Music played and the black-aproned waiters hurried from table to table, behaving in such a grand and proud manner that I felt shabby and rustic and out of place, as if some mistake had been made and I should have been serving them . I was glad to retire to our room for the evening, and gladder still to take ship on the morrow.

Once our horses and luggage were aboard the immense jankship, I reassured my father that I had recovered from my illness. The jankship’s passage down the swift currented river felt much different from our flatboat’s placid journeying, for the wind in our square sails encouraged the ship to outstrip the current’s pace. The horses did not like the creak and rock of the hastening vessel and neither did I, when it was time to sleep. But during my waking hours, I scarcely noticed it, for there was so much else to claim my attention.