Golden Fool

Everything portable and useful had been taken. The blankets from the beds, the smoked and preserved foods from the rafters, the pots from the cooking hearth; all were gone. Some scrolls had been used to kindle a fire in the hearth. Someone had eaten here, probably enjoying the supplies Hap and I had laid in for the winter. There was a scatter of fish bones still on the hearth. I felt I knew who had come here. The pig tracks were my best clue.

My desk still remained; my unlettered neighbor would have little use for a writing desk. In my little study, inkpots had been overset, scrolls opened and then tossed aside. This gave me concern. In the current disorder, it was impossible for me to tell if any scrolls had been carried off. I could not tell if Piebalds had scavenged here as well as my pigkeeper neighbor. Verity’s map still hung crookedly on the wall; I was shocked at how my heart leapt with relief to find it intact. I had not realized I valued it so. I took it down and rolled it up, carrying it about with me as I explored the plundering of my home. I forced myself to make a careful survey of each room, and the stable and chicken house as well, before I allowed myself to gather what I would take away with me.

The small store of grain and all the tools had been taken from the stable shed. My workshed was a jumble of rejected plunder. It seemed unlikely that was the work of Piebalds. My suspicion of an unpleasant neighbor who lived in the next valley was all but certain now. He kept pigs, and had once accused me of stealing piglets from him. When I had so hastily left here, I had directed Hap to take our chickens to the man, not out of kindness to the neighbor but knowing that he would feed and keep them for the sake of the eggs. That had seemed a better course than letting predators slaughter them. But, of course, it would have let him know that we expected to be gone for an extended period. I stood with my fists clenched, looking about the small stable. I doubted that I would ever return here. Even if the tools had been here still, I would have left without them. What use had I now for a mattock or a hoe? But the theft was a violation that was hard to ignore. I ached for revenge even as I told myself that I had no time for it, that the thief had perhaps done me a favor in ransacking my home before Piebalds could.

I put Myblack in the stable and gave her what poor hay had been left. I hauled a bucket of water for her as well. Then I began my salvage and destruction.

The heap of possessions under the snow proved to be a bedstead, my table and chairs, and several shelves. Probably he intended to come back with a cart for them. I’d burn them. I knocked some of the snow from the heap, gazed regretfully on the charging buck that the Fool had carved into my table for me, and then went into the cabin for tinder to start the fire. The straw-stuffed mattress from my bed, discarded inside, worked admirably. In a very short time, I had a nice blaze going.

I tried to be methodical. While daylight served me, I painstakingly gathered every scattered scroll that had been flung into the yard. Some were hopelessly ruined with damp, others torn and trampled with muddy hooves, and some were no more than fragments. Mindful of Chade’s words, some I tried to smooth and roll up, even when they were but fragments, but most I ruthlessly consigned to the fire. I kicked through the snow until I was as certain as I could possibly be that no writing of mine remained in the yard.

Dusk was deep by then. Inside the cabin, I kindled a fire in the hearth, for light as well as heat. I began on the inside of the cabin. Most of my possessions went straight into the fire. Old work clothes, my writing tools, my bootjack, and other clutter and possessions burned in the hearth. I was kinder to Hap’s things, knowing that a spinning top, long outgrown as a plaything, could still have meaning to him. I made a sack of an old cloak and filled it with those sorts of items. Then I sat down by the flames and painstakingly went through the scrolls from my rack. There were far more of them than I had expected, and far more than I could have carried back with me.

I chose first to save those I had not written myself. Verity’s map went into the case, of course, and was soon joined by scrolls I had acquired in my travels and some brought to me by Starling. A few of these were quite old and rare. I was grateful to find them intact and resolved to make copies of them when I returned to Buckkeep. But aside from those, my culling was fierce. Nothing that was the work of my pen was immune to my scrutiny. Scrolls of herbal knowledge with my meticulous illustrations fed the fire. That information was still in my head; if it was that important, I could write it down again. I kept only a few of those. Into the bag, against my better judgment, went those scrolls that dealt not only with my time in the mountains, but with my personal musings on my own life. A swift perusal of some of those left my cheeks burning. Juvenile and mawkish, self-pitying and full of grand assumptions about my own significance and declarations of things that I would never do again were these treatises. I wondered who I had been when I wrote them.