Ship of Magic. Робин Хобб

was a bag made of red and blue leather stitched together, half-buried in the wet sand. The leather was stout, the bag meant to last. Saltwater had soaked and stained it, bleeding the colours into one another. The brine had seized up the brass buckles that had secured it and stiffened the leather straps that went through them. He used his knife to rip open a seam. Inside was a litter of kittens, perfectly formed with long claws and iridescent patches behind their ears. They were dead, all six of them. Quelling his distaste, he picked up the smallest. He turned the limp body over in his hands. It was blue-furred, a deep periwinkle blue with pink-lidded eyes. Small. The runt most likely. It was sodden and cold and disgusting. A ruby earring like a fat tick decorated one of the wet ears. He longed to simply drop it. Ridiculous. He plucked the earring free and dropped it in his pocket. Then, moved by an impulse he did not understand, he returned the small blue bodies to the bag and left it beside the tide line. Kennit walked on.

      Awe flowed through him with his blood. Tree. Bark and sap, the scent of the wood and the leaves fluttering overhead. Tree. But also the soil and the water, the air and the light, all was coming and going through the being known as tree. He moved with them, sliding in and out of an existence of bark and leaf and root, air and water.

      ‘Wintrow.’

      The boy lifted his eyes slowly from the tree before him. With an effort of will, he focused his gaze on the smiling face of the young priest. Berandol nodded in encouragement. Wintrow closed his eyes for an instant, held his breath, and pulled himself free of his task. When he opened his eyes, he took a sudden breath as if breaking clear of deep water. Dappling light, sweet water, soft wind all faded abruptly. He was in the monastery work room, a cool hall walled and floored with stone. His bare feet were chill against the floor. There were a dozen other slab tables in the big room. At three others, boys like himself worked slowly, their dreamlike movements indicative of their tranced state. One wove a basket and two others shaped clay with wet grey hands.

      He looked down at the pieces of gleaming glass and lead on the table before him. The beauty of the stained-glass image he had pieced together astonished even him, yet it still could not touch the wonder of having been the tree. He touched it with his fingers, tracing the trunk and the graceful branches. Caressing the image was like touching his own body; he knew it that well. Behind him he heard the soft intake of Berandol’s breath. In his state of still-heightened awareness, he could feel the priest’s awe flowing with his own, and for a time they stood quietly, glorying together in the wonder of Sa.

      ‘Wintrow,’ the priest repeated softly. He reached out and traced with a finger the tiny dragon that peered from the tree’s upper branches, then touched the glistening curve of a serpent’s body, all but hidden in the twisting roots. He put a hand on the boy’s shoulders and turned him gently away from his worktable. As he steered him from the work room, he rebuked him gently. ‘You are too young to sustain such a state for the whole morning. You must learn to pace yourself.’

      Wintrow lifted his hands to knuckle at eyes that were suddenly sandy. ‘I’ve been in there all morning?’ he asked dazedly. ‘It did not seem like it, Berandol.’

      ‘I am sure it did not. Yet I am sure the weariness you feel now will convince you it is so. One must be careful, Wintrow. Tomorrow, ask a watcher to stir you at mid-morning. Talent such as you possess is too precious to allow you to burn it out.’

      ‘I do ache, now,’ Wintrow conceded. He ran his hand over his brow, pushing fine black hair from his eyes and smiled. ‘But the tree was worth it, Berandol.’

      Berandol nodded slowly. ‘In more ways than one. The sale of such a window will yield enough coin to re-roof the noviciates’ hall. If Mother Dellity can bring herself to let the monastery part with such a thing of wonder.’ He hesitated a moment, then added, ‘I see they appeared again. The dragon and the serpent. You still have no idea…’ he let his voice trail away questioningly.

      ‘I do not even have a recollection of putting them there,’ Wintrow said.

      ‘Well.’ There was no trace of judgement in Berandol’s voice. Only patience.

      For a time they walked in companionable silence through the cool stone hallways of the monastery. Slowly Wintrow’s senses lost their edge and faded to a normal level. He could no longer taste the scents of the salts trapped in the stone walls, nor hear the minute settling of the ancient blocks of stone. The rough brown bure of his novice robes became bearable against his skin. By the time they reached the great wooden door and stepped out into the monastery gardens, he was safely back in his body. He felt groggy as if he had just awakened from a long sleep, yet as bone-weary as if he had hoed potatoes all day. He walked silently beside Berandol as monastery custom dictated. They passed others, some men and women robed in the green of full priesthood and others dressed in white as acolytes. Greetings were exchanged as nods.

      As they neared the tool shed, he felt a sudden unsettling certainty that they were going there and that he would spend the rest of the afternoon working in the sunny garden. At any other time, it might have been a pleasant thing to look forward to, but his recent efforts in the dim work room had left his eyes sensitive to light. Berandol glanced back at his lagging step.

      ‘Wintrow,’ he chided softly. ‘Refuse the anxiety. When you borrow trouble against what might be, you neglect the moment you have now to enjoy. The man who worries about what will next be happening to him loses this moment in dread of the next, and poisons the next with pre-judgement.’ Berandol’s voice took on an edge of hardness. ‘You indulge in pre-judgement too often. If you are refused the priesthood, it will most like be for that.’

      Wintrow’s eyes flashed to Berandol’s in horror. For a moment stark desolation dominated his face. Then he saw the trap. His face broke into a grin, and Berandol’s answered it when the boy said, ‘But if I fret about it, I shall have pre-judged myself to failure.’

      Berandol gave the slender boy a good-natured shove with his elbow. ‘Exactly. Ah, you grow and learn so fast. I was much older than you, twenty at least, before I learned to apply that Contradiction to daily life.’

      Wintrow shrugged sheepishly. ‘I was meditating on it last night before I fell asleep. “One must plan for the future and anticipate the future without fearing the future.” The Twenty-Seventh Contradiction of Sa.’

      ‘Thirteen years old is very young to have reached the Twenty-Seventh Contradiction,’ Berandol observed.

      ‘What one are you on?’ Wintrow asked artlessly.

      ‘The Thirty-Third. The same one I’ve been on for the last two years.’

      Wintrow gave a small shrug of his shoulders. ‘I haven’t studied that far yet.’ They walked in the shade of apple trees, under leaves hanging limp in the heat of the day. Ripening fruit weighted the boughs. At the other end of the orchard, acolytes moved in patterns through the trees, bearing buckets of water from the stream.

      ‘“A priest should not presume to judge unless he can judge as Sa does; with absolute justice and absolute mercy”.’ Berandol shook his head. ‘I confess, I do not see how that is possible.’

      The boy’s eyes were already turned inward, with only the slightest line to his brow. ‘As long as you believe it is impossible, you close your mind to understanding it.’ His voice seemed far away. ‘Unless, of course, that is what we are meant to discover. That as priests we cannot judge, for we have not the absolute mercy and absolute justice to do so. Perhaps we are only meant to forgive and give solace.’

      Berandol shook his head. ‘In the space of a few moments, you slice through as much of the knot as I had done in six months. But then I look about me, and I see many priests who do judge. The Wanderers of our order do little except resolve differences for folk. So they must have somehow mastered the Thirty-Third Contradiction.’

      The boy looked up at him curiously. He opened his mouth to speak and then blushed and shut it again.

      Berandol glanced down at his charge. ‘Whatever it is, go ahead and say it. I will not rebuke you.’

      ‘The problem is, I was about to rebuke you,’ Wintrow confessed.