Read the previous entry in the series here.
Read the next entry in the series soon.

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The twenty-second chapter of Shaman’s Crossing, “Disgrace,” begins with Nevare feeling isolated. Having given up on attempting to find Spink and Epiny, he determines to accompany other cadets on illicit escapades if they are having them. He finds, however, a number of senior cadets urging Caulder to drink to excess, leaving him when he collapses; Nevare tends to the thoroughly drunk boy.

Nevare maneuvers Caulder through the crowds with difficulty, eventually encountering Dr. Amicas, who pays cab fare for the pair to return to the Academy and issues orders for Nevare to see to Caulder’s return home. The trip back to the Academy is unpleasant, with Caulder rebuking Nevare no less than do Colonel Stiet’s servants when Nevare delivers him home. Thus it is in a dark mood that Nevare returns to his dormitory to find it largely empty, and he dreams unpleasantly before falling into an erotic dream of Tree Woman.

Nevare starts awake from the dream, to his disgust, and finds himself surrounded by the suffering figures of his cohort. At length, he reports to the Academy mess hall, where Spink joins him, and the two confer about the previous night’s events. They are joined by yet others, but conversation soon dies down and the cadets return to their rooms. Sergeant Rufet finds Nevare in them and escorts him, under orders, to report to Colonel Stiet. The commandant berates him for his treatment of Caulder the night before, relying on his son’s false reports, and issuing him discharge papers. Nevare protests, to little avail.

Nevare also begins to fall ill and withdraws. Rufet, awaiting him, learns of the discharge and its origins and inveighs at length about them. He also bids Nevare to silence about the discharge as he returns the cadet to his quarters. There, Nevare struggles to make sense of things as illness breaks upon him. He learns he is not alone in his illness; the other members of his cohort present are similarly afflicted. He dozes and wakes to find Amicas in attendance on him; the physician asks him about what he had had to eat the night before and learns of the Dust Dance that the Specks had performed as Colonel Stiet demands treatment for Caulder. Amicas calls for a quarantine of the whole Academy, citing it as an outbreak of the Speck plague, and Nevare falls unconscious.

To address the chapter-length issue: the present chapter, in the edition of the novel I’m rereading, runs 20 pages in length, approximately 3.47% of the novel. It also seems to put Nevare into a particularly bad position, socially and physically, setting up matters more for future work than for the present novel, given that only two chapters remain. There is simply not enough space left in the text to do much of anything.

Also, for indexing purposes, the following: Captain Maw, Carneston House, Cates, Caulder Stiet, Cecile, Colonel Stiet, Dark Evening, Dr. Amicas, Dust Dance, Epiny Burvelle, Fort Gettys, General Scoren, Gord Lading, Great Square, Jaris, King’s Cavalla Academy, Kort Braxan, Lady Parra’s, Morray, Natred Verlaney, Nevare Burvelle, Old Thares, Ordo, Oron, Plague, Rory, Scout, Sefert Burvelle, Sergeant Rufet, Specks, Spinrek “Spink” Kester, Tree Woman, Trist Wissom. Even so close to the end of the novel, there are new names to point out, even if only in passing; the glimpses of outside life deepen the impression of the milieu as a living thing in which stories can take place.

Less mechanically, the horror of the proposition of dishonorable discharge comes across in the present chapter. In the United States which Gernia echoes, such an action is an emphatically adverse one. For Hobb’s expected primary readership, presumably people in the United States in the early twenty-first century, such a discharge is a result of a trial and conviction for substantial crimes and is accompanied not only by prison time prior to discharge but also a loss of rights and privileges afterward. In Gernia, it seems worse yet, not only because it can seemingly be unilaterally assigned–Colonel Stiet issues the paperwork without Nevare having been availed of proceedings–but also because it represents a loss of identity. In Gernia, after all, social roles and professions are determined by birth (see “Harbinger” for details, among others). The discharge represents expulsion from that order; worse than being merely criminal, it makes the recipient something of an outlaw–in the older sense of being outside the law and its protections. Nevare is right to be emotionally battered by it, particularly since it is assigned to him based upon lies.

I note, too, and with some interest the repetition of the injunction to “be a man” in the chapter. Caulder and Nevare both hear it from others, and Nevare comments on at least one version of it with some derision. Given the gender politics at work in the novel (see “Magic and Iron,” “Letters from Home,” and “Séance” for notable examples; there are others), it seems overdue that manhood and its definitions come in for interrogation at all, even if the present chapter offers only a little of that kind of thing. Still, for all that the novel has made much of what women “ought to do” and questioning it, there is some good in seeing at least some asking after “what does it take to be a man?“

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