my way. The shadow of one of the majestic oaks that graced the campus stretched across my path. I walked into it, and in that instant, felt a shiver up my spine, as if someone had strolled over my grave. I blinked, and for a moment, a remnant of my other self looked out through my eyes at the precisely groomed landscape, and found it very strange indeed. The straight paths and careful greens suddenly looked stripped and barren to me, the few remaining trees a sad remnant of a forest that had been. The landscape was devoid of the true randomness of natural life. In true freedom, life sprawled. This vista was as lifeless and as unlovely as a glass-eyed animal stuffed for a display case. I was suddenly acutely homesick for the forest.
In the weeks following my recovery, I had dreamed of the Tree Woman, and in my dreams I was my other self, and she was beautiful. We strolled in the dappling light that fell through the leafy shade of her immense trees. We scrambled over fallen logs and pushed our way through curtains of vines. Fallen leaves and forest detritus were thick and soft beneath our bare feet. In the stray beams of sunlight that touched us, we both had speckled skin. She walked with the ponderous grace of a heavy woman long accustomed to managing her weight. She did not seem awkward, but majestic in her studied progress. Just as an antlered deer turns his head to manoeuvre a narrow path, so did she sidle past a network of spider webs that barred our way. The untidy, unmastered, lovely sprawl of the forest put her in context. Here, she was large, lush, and beautiful as the luxuriant life that surrounded us.
In my first vision of her, when the plainsman Dewara had told me she was my enemy, I had perceived her as very old and repulsively fat. But in the dreams I’d had following my recovery from the Speck plague, she seemed ageless, and the pillowed roundness of her flesh was abundant and inviting.
I had told Dr Amicas about the occasional vivid nightmares I had. I had not mentioned to him that my erotic dreams of the forest goddess far outnumbered the horrid ones. I always awoke from those dreams flushed with arousal that quickly became shame. It was not just that I lustfully dreamed of a Speck woman, and one of voluptuous fleshiness, but that I knew that some part of me had consorted with her, in passion and even love. I felt guilt for that bestial coupling, even if it had occurred in a dream world and was without my consent. It was treasonous as well as unnatural to mate outside my race. She had made me her lover and tried to turn me against my own people. A dark and twisted magic had been used to convert me to her uses. The threads of it still clung to my thoughts, and that was what pulled my soul down to those dark places where I still desired her flesh.
In my dreams of her, she often cautioned me that the magic now owned me. ‘It will use you as it sees fit. Do not resist it. Put nothing you care about between you and the magic’s calling, for like a flood, it will sweep away all that opposes it. Ride with it, my love, or it will destroy you. You will learn to use it, but not for yourself. When you use the magic to achieve the ends of the magic, then its power will be at your command. But at all other times,’ and here she had smiled at me and run a soft hand down my cheek, ‘we are the tools of the power.’ In that dream, I caught her hand and kissed the palm of it and then nodded my head and accepted both her wisdom and my fate. I wanted to flow with the magic that coursed through me. It was only natural. What else could I possibly want to do with my life? The magic coursed through me, as essential to me as my blood. Does a man oppose the beating of his own heart? Of course I would do what it willed.
Then, I would wake and, like plunging into a cold river, my reality would drench me and shock me into awareness of my true self. Occasionally, as had happened when I passed through the shade of the oak, the stranger inside me could still take control of my mind and show me his warped view of my world. Then, in a blink of my eyes, a truer perspective would prevail, and the illusion would fade back to nothingness.
And occasionally, there were moments when I felt that perhaps both views of the world were equally true and equally false. At such times, I felt torn as to who I truly was. I tried to tell myself that my conflicting emotions were no different from how my father felt about some of his vanquished plainsmen foes. He had fought them, killed them or defeated them, yet he still respected them, and in some ways regretted his role in ending their unbound existence. At least I had finally accepted that the magic was real. I had stopped trying to deny to myself that something arcane and strange had happened to me.
I’d reached my dormitory. I took the steps two at a time. Bringham House had its own small library and study area on the second floor. Most of my fellows were gathered there, heads bent over their books. I ascended the last flight of stairs, and allowed myself to pause and breathe. Rory was just coming out of our bunkroom. He grinned at me as I stood panting. ‘Good to see you sweating a bit, Nevare. Better drop a few pounds or you’ll have to borrow Gord’s old shirts.’
‘Funny,’ I gasped, and straightened. I was puffing, but having him needle me about it didn’t improve my temper at all.
He pointed a finger at my belly. ‘You popped a button there already, my friend!’
‘That happened at the doctor’s office, when he was poking and prodding at me.’
‘Course it did!’ he exclaimed with false enthusiasm. ‘But you’d better sew it on tonight, all the same, or you’ll be marching demerits off tomorrow.’
‘I know, I know.’
‘Can I borrow your drafting notes?’
‘I’ll get them for you.’
Rory grinned his wide froggy smile. ‘Actually, I already have them. They’re what I came upstairs to get. See you in the study room. Oh! I found a letter for you mixed in with mine. I’ve left it on your bunk.’
‘Don’t smear my notes!’ I warned him as he clattered off down the stairs. Shaking my head, I went into our dormitory room.
I took off my jacket and tossed it on my bunk. I picked up the envelope. I didn’t recognize the handwriting, then smiled as the mystery came clear. The return address was a letter-writer’s shop in Burvelle’s Landing, but the name on it was Sergeant Erib Duril. I opened it quickly, wondering what he could be writing to me about. Or rather, having someone else write to me about. Most reading and all writing were outside the old cavalla man’s field of expertise. Sergeant Duril had come to my father when his soldiering days were over, seeking a home for his declining years. He’d become my tutor, my mentor, and towards the end of our years together, my friend. From him, I’d learned all my basic cavalla and horsemanship skills, and a great deal about being a man.
I read the curiously formal letter through twice. Obviously, the letter-writer had chosen to put the old soldier’s words in more elegant form than Duril himself would have chosen. It did not sound at all like him as he sympathized with my illness and expressed fond wishes that I would recover well. Only the sentiment at the end, graciously phrased as it was, sounded like advice my old mentor would have given me:
‘Even after you have recovered from this dread epidemic, I fear that you will find yourself changed. I have witnessed, with my own eyes and often, what this devastating plague can do to a young man’s physique. The body that you so carefully sculpted for years under my tutelage may dwindle and serve you less well than it has in the past. Nonetheless, I counsel you that it is the soul of a military man that makes him what he is, and I have faith that your soul will remain true to the calling of the good god.’
I glanced back at the date on the envelope, and saw that the letter had taken its time to reach me. I wondered if Duril had held it for some days, debating as to whether or not to send it, or if the letter-writer had simply overlooked the missive and not sent it on its way. Well, soon enough I’d see Sergeant Duril. I smiled to myself, touched that he’d taken the time and spent the coins to send me this. I folded the paper carefully and tucked it away among
