“No,” Heldo-Bah answers. “If I know Ashkatar, he will wait. Give the Groba and the healers time to control the plague by inviting the Tall to enter the Wood. Destroy all the bridges, save the Fallen. And if they are foolish enough to come in by that route …” He spits at the ground with force. “The odds may not be even, but they will certainly improve.”
“But why should the Tall come into the Wood?” Keera asks quietly, leaning on a fresh maple staff and staring at the village with eyes bereft of anything but heartache. “When the plague does their work for them?”
“The pride of the Tall,” Heldo-Bah answers scornfully, but with truth born of his many raids into the city and kingdom that once tried to kill him. “They will want a fight, even if the plague has weakened us.”
“And,” Veloc adds, “they’ll want to see for themselves that their vile work is completed.”
Keera keeps her eyes fixed on the distant flames. “For Tayo, it has already been completed. As for so many others …”
“Completed?” Heldo-Bah echoes bitterly. “No, Keera. Not while there is yet breath in you, in all of us, and revenge to be had.” His grey eyes burn more wildly in their sockets than any mere reflection of the distant pyres and conflagrations among the huts could cause. “And with us goes the hope of that revenge. We shall have it. All of them—” He points toward Okot. “They shall all have it. We shall find Caliphestros, and by the Moon, the Tall will know the grief that you have felt this day.” Heldo-Bah spits again, as if to seal his compact with the demons that lurk beneath the Earth. “The faster we move, the faster their suffering begins. Follow your trail, Keera, and we follow you. We rest only when we must.” The grey eyes narrow, and the filed teeth grind painfully. “And from the Moon’s realm, the dead shall see that they have been avenged.”
Starting southwest, the three Bane disappear into the Wood; and soon they are cutting masterfully through the darkened vastness, at a faster pace than even they have ever achieved …
NOVEMBER 3, 1790
Lausanne
[But] what are we to make of the legend’s more apparently fantastic aspects? I do not speak, here, of the several references to sorcery and the like, which are addressed in the text itself, and may be dispensed with by noting, as at least two characters will do later in the tale, that the greatest “sorcery” has always been science, while the darkest “magic” has just as consistently been madness. Rather, I allude to such only marginally less outlandish notions as civilized or even partially civilized men scheming to use wasting diseases as weapons of war, as well as to the fact that so relatively advanced a society as Broken’s was capable of mutilating and exiling a not inconsiderable number of its own members, out of no loftier motives than to purge the national stock of its physically and mentally defective elements (including, among many others, agents of knowledge and especially scientific progress, which they equated with sedition), as well as to ensure that particular air of divine secrecy, which, almost universally, results in unchecked power and excesses on the parts of some or all agencies of government.
And what, by contrast, of the assertion that animals other than men are graced by the Deity with consciousness, and therefore souls, and so must logically be accorded the same respect that we, who flatter ourselves as having been made in the Almighty’s image, demand be paid us alone? Doubtless, such beliefs will appeal to those increasing numbers of young poets and artists in our own time, who claim to seek the dubious enlightenment of the unrefined, untamèd world of Nature, while allowing themselves to flirt dangerously with ideas akin to those that are driving the forces of revolutionary destruction; yet can we, who detect the dangers of those same rebellious forces in precisely the manner that you have detailed so completely in your “Reflections,” look beyond such youthful superficiality, and ourselves find deeper meaning in such tales as this “idyll”?
But, pace: I run ahead of myself, and assume airs akin to those displayed by the most mysterious and peculiar character to inhabit this account, one whose acquaintance, I confess, I am most anxious for you to make; for he did indeed bridge that chasm between Reason and a kind of reverence for the souls and aspirations, not only of men, but especially of beings other than human, finding, between the two, little if any contradiction at all.…
—EDWARD GIBBON TO EDMUND BURKE
The Old Man and the Warrior Queen
IT MATTERS LITTLE how much the settings of the old man’s dreams change, from night to night, for their most important aspects remain consistent: he is forever among friends—or, more correctly, persons he somehow knows to be friends, even if their faces are strange to him—and, whether they gather in a remote village or in the palace of a prince, the congenial group soon find themselves caught up in some entertaining and important business. This activity invariably occasions praise for the old man, who is rarely old, in the dreams, but young and handsome, with the golden hair, slate grey eyes, pronounced bones and thin mouth that once marked him clearly as having come, originally, from a land far to the northeast of both Broken and Davon Wood. And, amid the indistinct but delighted audience, there is always the clear image of a young woman’s face. It may be a girl he in fact knew, once, or it may be a stranger; but always, her eyes light with fascination when the old man picks her out from among the busy, talkative group. She blushes and looks to the ground, but soon brings her gaze back up to meet his in silent invitation. He then moves to either acquaint or reacquaint himself with her, and to engage in conversation of the type that leads inevitably to a touch or even a kiss: soft and brief, but still exciting enough to cause soothing tremors throughout his body’s web of neura, and, ultimately, to create the feeling that the old man’s ancestors on the steppes had called the thirl: an excitement so deep and so potent that some crave it as the drunkard craves wine, or as the eaters and smokers of opium lust after their drug.
Lastly, and most importantly, there are the old man’s legs: he yet dreams, without exception, that he still has his legs, and can do all that he was once was able to in life. He can run, through palace halls and gardens, up and down castle stairways, and about the world’s great forests; he can cavort and dance at festivals and royal receptions; he can brace his body to make love to a woman—and he can boldly ride a horse, whether through the streets of the great ports his grandfathers and father built, after they were pushed by wave after wave of brutal marauders off the endless steppes and onto the coast of the sea to the north, or along the caravan routes that his own generation of his clan—and he himself—played no small part in extending into the strange, dangerous lands of the far south and distant east. He had traveled these routes on horseback, on camelback, on elephant and ox: astride, that is, nearly any beast that could bear his weight, and in this way, from boyhood on, he had gained a deep affection for and ability to communicate with forms of life other than his own. In this way, too, he had been brought into contact with more peoples of the Earth by his early manhood than most men ever heard so much as stories of, in all their years. Such had been a heady life, one full of adventure, riches, and, soon enough, women. But, despite such diversions, it had been the great centers of learning that he saw on his travels that had fascinated him most. And so, when he reached full manhood, he defied his father’s wishes, abandoned the life of a merchant, and chose to do scholarly combat with that most magnificent question of all: what animates the bodies and minds of the men and creatures who inhabit this world?
It was as a man of science and medicine, then, rather than of commerce, that he had made his mark in any and all lands that he visited, and particularly in those few places where scholarship and the great advances it could bring were still understood and respected; and it is to those days of glory that his mind now turns, during long nights of sleep plagued by often bitter physical agony. Sometimes, if the need is great enough, his mind will go still further, fancifully elaborating upon those memories of the fame brought by wisdom (memories no less pleasurable, in their way, than are his vision
s of lovely young women), by allowing him to dream that he debates the great scholars who ennobled the towns and cities to which he traveled, whether they be such masters as lived long before his own time—the physicians Herophilus of Alexandria and Galen of Pergamum, for example—or those scholars who, like the historian Bede of the monastery at Wearmouth across the Seksent Straits, he was once fortunate enough to have called his colleagues.
During the first few years that such dreams had come to dominate his fitful exile’s sleep in the most remote corner of Davon Wood, the presence of his legs in his nightly visions had puzzled the old man deeply. After all, he had spent no small portion of his life as a scholar and a physician weighing the value of dreams as a means to measure the health of his patients, a skill that he had initially learned through careful study of the brief but vital “On Diagnosis from Dreams,” a work written nearly five hundred years before the old man’s time by that same master of medicine whom he often dreamed of debating, Galen the Greek. But the old man expanded upon Galen’s preliminary work, to such an extent that he had eventually attained the ability to divine the true natures of the illnesses of his patients, as well as many details of their private lives and vices, from their dreams. Such diagnoses were uniformly startling to those patients, and not always welcome. But the old man plunged forward with his experiments in this area, eventually determining to his own satisfaction—as well as to the profound shock and disbelief, not only of his patients, but of the various holy men with whom he had cause to discuss such matters—that humans are not the only animals who dream. And with this determination came an even more profound insight into how extensive were the sensibilities, not only of those horses, camels, oxen, and elephants who had once carried both him and his clan’s goods, but of a far wider range of creatures.
This discovery that dreams were universal among all types and breeds of men and animals, and of the purposes that those dreams served, should have had a practical use, especially during his exile, the old man believed. When the continuing pain of the imperfectly healed wounds inflicted on him by the priests of Kafra during the Halap-stahla made vivid dreams of his own a nightly occurrence, they ought to have been dreams (given the loss of his legs) of falling: short tumbles, such as to the ground from standing, if the pain of his wounds was light, and longer ones—terrifying plummets from high walls or cliffs—if the pain was severe. Of course, his suffering was always severe when he slept, if not during the first hours, then certainly when the dose of opium blended with a judicious amount of mandrake that it was his habit to smoke before retiring lost its hold over his neura, and the stabbing sensations returned to rouse him. Such drugs were not a cure, and could even become a sickness that he had often observed and treated; yet his dreams, far from offering him any hint of a more fundamental treatment, only grew more pleasant and consoling, as his pain returned. It was as though his mind, rather than rationally applying itself to the problem of a more fundamental course of treatment, became instead an agent of escape from the reality of his condition—became, indeed, an agent of ministration, determining its own remedies, whether he bid it do so or not.
In keeping with this strange counterargument to both Galen’s and his own principles, which occurred even on the worst of mornings—if he had stumbled the night before, for example, against the rocky walls of the cave that had been his home ever since the first night of his exile, causing his mutilated legs to throb mercilessly—the old man often awoke smiling, sometimes even laughing, with small tears of simple joy moistening his pale, vexed features. The pain would soon claim his conscious thoughts, of course, particularly during the first months of his exile, when he possessed none but a few drugs with which to mitigate it; and his smiles and laughter would then quickly dissolve into cries of rage and agony, caused not only by the pain itself, but by its relentless reminder of how very much the circumstances of his once wondrous existence had been altered; had, indeed, been stolen.
Over time the oaths of bitter frustration and the conscious lust for vengeance that initially characterized his morning hours had been tempered by acceptance of life as it had been remade for him; and the change in his outlook was in part the result, the old man readily admitted, of his cultivation of a pharmacopoeia that would have roused the jealousy of Galen himself, or even of that supreme expert of old Roma, the Cilician Dioscorides (who, like the old man, studied in the library, museum, and academies of Alexandria, when that city was still, despite its conquest and reconquest by the warrior zealots of faiths hostile to true knowledge, the greatest center of learning in all the world). And with this acceptance, the old man gradually came to think less of mutilating his tormentors in the brutal manner that they had employed against him, and to treat his woodland life as a unique opportunity to achieve a greater form of justice. But this was not an attitude born of his own wisdom: for he knew that few if any men, even among those possessed of their legs, could have achieved so seemingly brave an outlook—particularly among the southwestern mountains of Davon Wood, by far the most remote and forbidding portion of the wilderness—without aid in the form of an example. And so, even as he recognized that the work that he was carrying out during his exile was the most impressive, and in many ways the most important, of his life, he rarely congratulated himself on it; because he recognized that there was an even more important reason for his remarkable disposition and achievements:
She had made it possible. She had taught him a fundamental philosophical lesson, one that—through a lifetime of journeys, of scholarly study, and dangerous intrigue among kings, holy men, and warriors—had never truly penetrated his soul: she had taught him what true courage comprised. And, even more effectively, she had shown him the practical meaning of that quality, and made it plain to the old man that we reveal ourselves as most brave when there is no admiring audience to applaud us. She had imparted this wisdom in the way that all great philosophers have ever acknowledged most superior—by example. For she herself had long lived with as much suffering, of the heart as well as of the body, as he had ever seen any gregarious member of human society endure, much less a solitary forest-dweller such as herself, even given her royal heritage. That much became clear to the old man upon the very first evening of their acquaintance: the night of the Halap-stahla.
Barely conscious, he watched her emerge from the Wood, as soon as the ritual party of priests and soldiers left. He was without his lower legs, yet he was bleeding slowly: for it was part of the fiendishness of the Halap-stahla that the priests first cut away the principal ligaments within the knees and then removed the patella, in order to permit a clean stroke of their axes at the joints, which were opened to such sectioning by the victim’s painful suspension between two trees. This positioning, like the crucifixion inflicted on prisoners by the soldiers of old Roma, pulled nearly every joint of the body open to the verge of dislocation, bringing on eventual gangraena, as well as wretchedness of almost every other variety imaginable. But the Kafrans had gone beyond their Roman predecessors, who are sometimes thought the masters of inventive torment, but who showed at least a trace of pity by ending the misery of the crucifixion with the hard mercy of the crurifragium. The Kafran priests, by sickening contrast, cauterized and tied off the flesh and vessels about the middle leg (but only those parts of the wound) after their severing blows had been struck, to prevent the prisoner’s bleeding to death too quickly—robbing their own victims of the sudden end which was granted even those wretches upon the crosses of Lumun-jan.
Despite the priests’ intention that the anguish of the Halap-stahla go on as long as possible, the old man had in fact been near death when the warrior queen approached. When he first detected her, having fallen into a state of agonized delirium, he thought the rustling in the undergrowth of the forest’s edge was one of his acolytes, more than a few of whom had pledged to come to the edge of the Wood at nightfall and, if they found him alive, to either save him, if they could, or end his misery, if they could not. (Should the latter hav
e proved the case, the acolytes had pledged further, they would respectfully inter his remains in some anonymous spot, one that no Kafran priests could find and violate.) But when the old man had finally been able to make out who was approaching him—when he saw that she was a female from an infamously warlike forest breed, one about whom he had heard fearful, fantastic tales—he had conjectured that she intended to finish him: a death that he would have welcomed, so great had his suffering grown.
Perhaps, the old man had thought, studying her eyes as closely as the roaring agony permitted, she means to kill me out of compassion; for, behind the sharp defiance in those eyes, there is a softer knowledge of suffering …
What the old man could not yet know was that the initial bloodlust in the warrior queen’s remarkable eyes had been put there, not by his own sanguinary scent, nor by his helplessness, but rather by the mere sight of his tormentors: the priests of Kafra, and still more the soldiers who accompanied them. It had of late become her way to kill any man of Broken with whom she came into contact: for it had been such men who, not quite a year earlier, had slaughtered three of her four children, enslaving the youngest and making the queen herself the last of her royal clan and, more importantly, shattering her spirit so thoroughly that, over the near-dozen Moon cycles that followed, she had scarcely been able to reassemble enough of it to go on living. As a consequence, she did not much care, now, when she happened upon riders who sat tall in ornate saddles atop mighty horses, if they were soldiers, merchants, or priests, like those who had committed this latest act of near-murder: all such men (easily distinguished from the smaller tribe who inhabited the forest, and who had always shown deference to herself and her children, before their deaths and abduction) were representatives of the city that she had so often observed atop the lonely mountain to the northeast, the city that was outlined, at night, by flickering lights, and into which her last living offspring, along with the body of her eldest, had been taken that terrible day, as she, wounded by a spear to the thigh, tenaciously defended the only thing that she yet could: the two lifeless bodies of her other departed yet no less belovèd young ones.