Shaman's Crossing by Hobb Robin Page B

how Yaril had employed her day, she spoke only of mounting three new butterflies in her collection and of tatting enough lace to trim her summer shawl. Then, looking at her plate, she timorously asked, “Why must they guard the cemetery at Gettys?”
    My father narrowed his eyes at her circling back to a topic he had dismissed. He answered curtly, “Because the Specks do not respect our burial customs and have been known to profane the dead.”
    Yaril’s little intake of breath was so slight that I am sure I was the only one who heard it. My interest was more piqued than satisfied by my father’s reply, but as he immediately asked my mother how her day had progressed, I knew it was hopeless even to wonder.
    And so that dinner came to a close, with coffee and a sweet, as all our dinners did. I wondered more about the Specks than I did about the mysterious plague. None of us could know then that the plague was not a onetime blight of disease, but would return to the outposts, summer after summer, and would gradually strike deeper and deeper into the western Plains country.
    During that first summer of contagion, awareness of the Speck plague slowly seeped into my life and colored my concept of the borderlands. I had known that the farthest outposts of the king’s cavalry were now at the foothills of the Barrier Mountains. I knew that his ambitious King’s Road being built across the Plains pushed ever closer to the mountains, but that it was expected to take four more years before it was completed. Since I was small I had heard tales of the mysterious and elusive Specks, the dappled people who could only live happily in the shadows of their native forest. Tales of them were, to my childish ears, little different from the tales of pixies and sprites that my sisters so loved. The very name of the people had crept into our language as a synonym for inattentive: to do a Speck’s day of work meant to do almost nothing at all. If I was caught daydreaming over my books, my tutor might ask me if I was Speck-touched. I had grown up in the belief that the distant Specks were a harmless and rather silly folk who inhabited the glens and vales of the thickly forested mountains that, to my prairie-raised imagination, were almost as fantastic as the dappled folk who dwelt there.
    But in that summer, my image of the Specks changed. They came to represent insidious disease, a killing plague that came, perhaps, simply from wearing a fur bought from a Speck trader or wafting one of the decorative fans they wove from the lace vines that grew in their forest. I wondered what they did to our graveyards, how they “profaned” the dead. Instead of elusive, I now thought of them as furtive. Their mystery became ominous rather than enchanting, their lifestyle grubby and pest-ridden rather than primitively idyllic. A sickness that merely meant a night or two of fever for a Speck child devastated our outposts and outlying settlements, slaughtering by the score hearty young men in the prime of their youth.
    Yet horrifying as the rumors of widespread death were to us, it was still a distant disaster. The stories we heard were like the tales of the violent windstorms that sometimes struck coastal cities far to the south of Gernia. We did not doubt the truth of them but we did not feel a dread of them. Like the occasional uprisings among the conquered Plainspeople, we knew they brought death and disaster, yet it was something that happened only on the new borders of the wild lands, out where our king’s horse still struggled to man the outposts, manage the more savage Plainspeople, and push back the wilderness to make way for civilization. It did not threaten our croplands and flocks in Widevale. Deaths from violence and privation and disease and mishap were the lot of the soldier. They entered that service well aware that many would not live to retire from it. The plague seemed but another enemy that they must face stoutheartedly. I had faith that