‘No.’ I shook my head slowly. ‘I think it’s foolish and wonderful.’
‘Ah. Well. Will you stay and have another cup of tea, then? Or must you hurry back to the keep and your own duties?’
‘I have no duties tonight. I won’t be missed.’
‘Well, then.’ She poured another cup of tea for me with an alacrity that was flattering. ‘You’ll stay a while here. Where you have been missed.’ She sipped from her cup, smiling at me over the rim of it.
Fennel drew breath and began a deep, rumbling purr.
EPILOGUE
There was a time when I thought that my life’s significant work would be to write a history of the Six Duchies. I made a start on it any number of times, but always seemed to slide sideways from that grand tale into a recounting of the days and details of my own small life. The more I studied the accounts of others, both written and told, the more it seemed to me that we attempt such histories not to preserve knowledge, but to fix the past in a settled way. Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colours fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever.
I wrote my histories and observations. I captured my thoughts and ideas and memories in words on vellum and paper. So much I stored, and thought it was mine. I believed that by fixing it down in words, I could force sense from all that had happened, that effect would follow cause, and the reason for each event come clear to me. Perhaps I sought to justify myself, not just all I had done, but who I had become. For years, I wrote faithfully nearly every evening, carefully explaining my world and my life to myself. I put my scrolls on a shelf, trusting that I had captured the meaning of my days.
But then I returned one day, to find all my careful scribing gone to fragments of vellum lying in a trampled yard with wet snow blowing over them. I sat my horse, looking down on them, and knew that, as it always would, the past had broken free of my effort to define and understand it. History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.
Copyright
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2002
Copyright ? Robin Hobb 2002
Cover layout design ? HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014
Illustration ? Jackie Morris. Calligraphy by Stephen Raw.
Robin Hobb asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007585908
Ebook Edition ? July 2014 ISBN: 9780007370481
Version: 2017-10-13
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter One: Piebalds
Chapter Two: Chade’s Servant
Chapter Three: Echoes
Buy the complete The Golden Fool
PROLOGUE
Losses Sustained
The loss of a bond beast is a difficult event to explain to the non-Witted. Those who can speak of the death of an animal as ‘It was only a dog’ will never grasp it. Others, more sympathetic, perceive it as the death of a beloved pet. Even those who say, ‘It must be like losing a child, or a wife’ are still seeing only one facet of the toll. To lose the living creature that one has been linked with is more than the loss of a companion or loved one. It was the sudden amputation of half my physical body. My vision was dimmed, my appetite diminished by the insipid flavour of food. My hearing was dulled and
The manuscript, begun so many years ago, ends in a flurry of blots and angry stabbings from my pen. I can recall the moment at which I realized I had slipped from writing in generalities into my own intimate rendering of pain. There are creases on the scroll where I flung it to the floor and stamped on it. The wonder is that I only kicked it aside rather than committing it to the flames. I do not know who took pity on the wretched thing and shelved it on my scroll rack. Perhaps it was Thick, doing his tasks in his methodical, unthinking way. Certainly I find nothing there that I would have saved.
So it has often been with my writing efforts. My various attempts at a history of the Six Duchies too often meandered into a history of myself. From a treatise on herbs my pen would wander to the various treatments for Skill-ailments. My studies of the White Prophets delve too deeply into their relationships with their Catalysts. I do not know if it is conceit that always turns my thoughts to my own life, or if my writing is my pathetic effort to explain my life to myself. The years have come and gone in their scores of turnings, and night after night I still take pen in hand and write. Still I strive to understand who I am. Still I promise myself, ‘Next time I will do better’ in the all-too-human conceit that I will always be offered a ‘next time’.