The Legend of Broken

[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,

November 3, 1790

I: 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 had 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: the secret of 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 visions 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 the fitful sleep of his exile in the most remote corner of Davon Wood, the presence of his legs in his nightly visions 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 of the universality of dreams to 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 have 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 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.

In this way did all citizens of Broken eventually become the warrior queen’s enemies, to be attacked and killed; and thus did she, in turn, become one of the most terrible of the many legends concerning Davon Wood with which those same citizens unnerved one another and attempted to curb any wayward behavior on the part of their children.

Yet on that night, she had approached the site of the old man’s mutilation carefully, and therefore too late to take the lives of the latest band of priests, attendants, and soldiers who had come to the edge of Davon Wood from the mountain. Why? It did not seem to the old man that she was motivated by fear, but rather by some larger purpose: what, then? To finish his suffering for him? Could she truly display such sympathy? He did not doubt it was possible: it was of a piece with his studies of all creatures to know that even inhabitants of the Wood could be moved by such sentiments. And his theory was confirmed yet again as she drew closer, and the old man detected with certainty the full complexity of her aspect: as she studied his mutilated half-legs, dangling awkwardly in the gap between the two trees from which he remained painfully suspended, her expression lost much of the vengefulness with which she had watched the retreating ritual party, and she eyed the old man instead with something very like compassionate curiosity. She detected something unusual in him, he could plainly see that much; and she heard, as well, something noteworthy in the forlorn, agonized sounds that continued to emerge weakly from deep within him.

The old man could not, at that moment, bend his mind to further speculation about her motives; he could only hope that she would end his suffering. That torment was rapidly mounting, in proportion to the steady decline of the effect of such powerful drugs as his acolytes had managed to place inside his cell in the dungeons of the Merchants’ Hall, prior to his being taken to the edge of the Wood. In the one loaf of coarse bread apportioned to the condemned by the dictates of the Halap-stahla, those brave, loyal adherents had concealed half a dozen small, compressed balls of highly potent drugs derived from both unusually pure opium and the resin of Cannabis indica;† but the old man had only consumed two doses, while hiding the others on his person, along with other crucial items: long cotton strips that could later serve as bandages were wrapped tight by the old man to hide medical needles and cotton thread soaked in spirits and oil, as well as the remaining doses of his medication, all against the slender possibility that he might survive the ordeal with the help of his acolytes. In the event that they were unable to secure more drugs before coming to his aid, he would need the remaining doses to tolerate his removal from the ritual site, as well as to endure the closure of his wounds with the needles and thread, a necessary means of preventing further bleeding during his no doubt hasty escape. (Later, of course, he would reopen the wounds, allowing all pus to drain from them as they healed, assisted by cleaning and treatment with honey, strong spirits, and the juices of whatever wild fruits he could find.)

This innocent little bundle he folded inside a longer cotton sheet, which could be strapped around his groin to serve as an undergarment, keeping his secret supplies safely tucked behind his scrotum where no priest would be anxious to search. Yet, despite these preparations, the deliverance that he had hoped might appear did not; or, rather, it did not take the form he had expected. Before his faithful students could effect the old man’s liberation, the silent, thoroughly wild, but still wise and regal queen had emerged from the Wood; yet, instead of delivering the dauthu-bleith† that the old man thought inevitable, she had extended her unusually long and supple body, like some feral child, so that she could bite through the thongs that bound the prisoner. In her subsequent gentle actions, the old man had indeed been able to detect compassion; and when he took the time to consume one dose of his medicines and then, after the drugs had taken effect, to meticulously stitch up his wounds, she exhibited great patience, as well. Only when he was ready had she helped him onto her back, and carried him to the cave in the mountains that had been her home long before it became his.

Yet why had she done it? the old man had wondered, all the years since that day — for on this as almost all subjects, she remained mute: the silence of those whose hearts have been rent almost past repair, and whose souls have thereby lost their voices. The old man had eventually formed notions about her reasons, and these had grown more detailed and accurate, during their time together; but whatever her past, the old man had never doubted that the agonies of flesh and spirit that had been inflicted on him when he had been cast out of the city of Broken would have utterly consumed him — would have driven him, eventually, to himself finish the job that the axe-wielding priests of Kafra had started — if his exile had not been graced by her sublime example.

But it had been so graced: she had not only rescued and nursed him, but taught him, as well — taught him the ways of survival in the Wood, both physical and spiritual. And perhaps the greatest miracle of their long forest idyll had been that her every lesson had continued to be embodied in example: brave, silent, instructive example. No member of any of the academies or museums in which the old man had studied and taught throughout the known world and beyond — great talkers, all — would ever have believed it possible; indeed, they would have called it sorcery, as the learned classes and the holy men of Broken had branded so much of the old man’s work. But if sorcery it was, he had long since concluded, then the moralizing of priests and the investigations of philosophers since the beginning of time had been incorrect; indeed, the entire development of human ethics had been absolutely wrong-headed, and so-called sorcery was, in fact, the most profound good that any creature could embody …

Yet we ought not think that the old man did not experience his own doubts, concerning both his sanity and the circumstances of his survival, during the first few of his ten years with the warrior queen; but the proofs and the reality of her care and her tutelage had quickly become so constant that such doubts, even had they persisted, would also have been speedily rendered moot. In the event, they had not persisted; still essentially a creature of adventurous curiosity, the old man had quickly taken all of her lessons and proofs to heart, learning their thousand vital details fairly quickly (especially given the many and considerable factors that could reasonably have been expected, in such a place as Davon Wood, to slow a legless and aging man’s progress), but above all paying heed to that initial quality he had seen in her: the bravery with which she tended to the business of her own life, as well as to the needs of his, while always plainly bearing a hurt that never healed, a tragedy that not only underlay the imperfectly mended wound in her right thigh (which caused a slight, imperfectly disguised limp when she walked, though never when she ran), but that kept the deeper wound to her spirit open and apparent. Even at its mildest, the old man could detect this inner pain tugging at the corners of her watchful eyes, and occasionally causing her shoulders to slacken. Slacken — but never submit. She labored through her grief to meet her new life’s demands, their new life’s demands, knowing (and, as always, demonstrating to the old man) that while some suffering could be instructive, a surfeit of heartsickness could kill; that such excess was far from the most profound manner in which to honor either the souls of the belovèd dead or the memory of a life of wisdom destroyed by ignorance and spite; and that, even when apportioned its proper place, such sorrow, such repudiation of the world and one’s fellow creatures in it, was a thing not to be superficially indulged, as the old man had seen so many poets play at doing, but was one to be respected, and, finally, transcended …

II: Within and Without the Cave

Such transcendence filled the pair’s life together, as the years grew to many; and as they so grew, the old man determined to ever more assiduously embody the skills of brave survival and defiant achievement that he saw her practice. It was a regimen that, for her, was not simply a testament to the depth of her injuries and her loss, but that kept the spirits of those treasures that she had lost — those four spirited and precious children, murdered or taken as they were bursting from childhood into the first full, daring flushes of youth — alive in her mind; and without the spark of those exquisitely painful memories, the old man came to see, she would not only have quite likely left him to die, on that evening of the Halap-stahla, but would probably have laid herself down to quietly await death on the forest floor.

As a result of all this patient study, the old man came eventually to know of what the warrior queen dreamed, when her own sleep turned restless: her mind re-created, he was certain, her family’s battle with the deathly party of powerful horsemen from Broken. She did so, not as a means of further tormenting herself, but out of the plaintive hope of a different result to that day; and yet, as was evident in the spasms of her legs, she failed each time to achieve that happier outcome. Seeing as much, the old man began, with care, to comfort her as she did him: with soothing sounds and innocent caresses, balm-like contact that was a reminder both of lost joy and of the fact that joy need not be utterly lost, so long as they both lived to dream and to remember.

Among the several effects that this mutual (to say nothing of magnificent) defiance and embrace of tragedy had on the old man, one was preeminent: he set himself, mind and body, to rebuild what he could of his own life and work, both to prove worthy of her greatness of heart and to make her life, if not happier, at least easier; and he started, as soon as his legs had healed sufficiently for simple movements, by improving their primitive dwelling. While she was in the Wood securing their food, he dragged his mutilated body, with supreme endurance, about the rocky, half-lit sanctuary, creating first fire, and then, in the fire, tools: tools wrought from the iron that ran in thick veins through cave and that, more accessibly, bled from the loose rocks that fell from the mountain ledges. With these tools he could fabricate for himself a new way to walk, as well as carve into the cave’s stone ledges more comfortable nooks on which they both could sleep, once those surfaces had been lined with Earth and softened with goose down that the old man stuffed into wide sacks fashioned from animal hides. He even built a crude, protective door for the mouth of the cave, one that kept the curious as well as the threatening out, while keeping in the heat of that first fire: a fire that became perpetual, fed by the stacks of dead limbs that were every night snapped from the trees atop the ridgeline by the infamous mountaintop winds.

Basking nightly in the warmth of that first fire, he thought he saw his companion allow something akin to a smile to enter her features: a relaxation of the mouth that, while not necessarily an expression of joy, was nonetheless one of contentment — contentment that, if momentary and even superficial, was a precious commodity for two such wounded bodies and souls, in so merciless a wilderness as Davon Wood. But when sleep came, that smile vanished, and the torment returned. Ever mindful of this ongoing fitfulness, the old man developed an increasingly accurate conception of her mind’s activity, which continued to be mirrored in the physical mannerisms that accompanied her various dream states; and as he did, he began to wonder if he might not yet find some way to heal the essential torment of her life.

He began to observe her as often as he was able, and often spent long periods of time sketching, on parchment fashioned from the skins of her kills, the expressions that filled her dreaming features, when those terrible visions of battle and murder passed through her slumbering mind; and he did so skillfully, for he had once been an accomplished illustrator of anatomical treatises. Soon, by way of these attempts to understand her dream state, he unexpectedly came to recognize an entirely different aspect that quietly filled her face when she awoke and, without moving her body, lifted the lids of her eyes: her bright, alert eyes, which were of a green like to the bright shade of spring’s earliest flora. This expression, he soon understood, was not simply bitter disappointment at the reassertion of her heartsick reality; no, in addition, her face at such moments was a countenance of guilt.

The old man was reasonably sure whence such guilt emanated, for studying the moods and minds, along with the dreams, of royalty had long been a preoccupation of his. And he could state with confidence that what he recognized in her features, at such moments, was her realization — all the more powerful, in its silence — that her own careful instruction in those habits of headlong bravery peculiar to champions of unforgiving battlegrounds (habits that she had learned from her own mother, in her youth, and that she had known, when she bore her own young ones, that they must learn from her), had contributed in no small measure to those children’s deaths. What mother — what father, for that matter — could bear such knowledge without deathly guilt? After only a few moments of this contrition, she who had survived to rule her region of the great forest alone would half-rise to locate the old man, who would quickly pretend to be at some other activity. Reassured by his presence, she would set off again tirelessly: back into Davon Wood, to walk the boundaries of her domain, to hunt, and to protect and provide, the only wakeful activities that seemed to give her any calm, or to temper her shame and her sorrow.

And that dedication had useful results: venison, fowl, and boar — some cooked, some hanging to age, some above the fire and being cured by its smoke, and some absorbing the preservative salts that the old man eventually discovered in deeper caverns — all hung about the cave’s walls, the more so when the regal huntress observed that the old man did not eat the smallest animals that she brought to him, and so stopped hunting them. As to the other needs of diet, the wild plants and trees that grew along the ridgeline outside the cave and in the dales below it, along with the beehives that appeared to fill every hollow tree limb, provided fruit, roots, nuts, berries, and honey more than sufficient for a prudent subsistence; and soon, having mastered the system of supports for walking that he had fabricated for himself, the old man could reach these necessities without aid, and thus free more of her time for hunting and keeping the eternal watch for more riders from Broken …

A nearby feeder stream that fell down the mountainside on its way to the Cat’s Paw provided water, as well as the icy, swift balm that, in their early days together, had been the old man’s speediest relief from pain — although behind this seemingly trivial fact lay another revealing detail of the formation of their bond. It had been she who had originally revealed the merciful stream to him, quite without his cooperation. Alarmed by his howls and screams on the very first of the mornings that she shared her shelter with him, she had done all that she knew how to help; all that she had ever been able to do to ease her own or her children’s physical distress, if they were injured while learning to hunt or while playing with each other in too rough a manner. She went to him, and attempted to caress his wounds; and, when he would not allow this, she tried to pull him upright by his tunic, with surprising tenderness. When this attempt, too, failed, she leaned down to show that she only wished him to throw his trembling arms around her neck, as he had done on the evening before, following the Halap-stahla, so that she could carry him to the beneficial waters. But he, bereft of drugs and frantic in his agony (and still not certain of her ultimate intentions with regard to him, at that early point in their association), had at first become more panicked. Still weak from their journey up the mountain, he at length lost consciousness altogether. She had then lifted him, very tenderly, onto her back (for, in his new, insulted† form, he weighed scarcely more than her children had, when young), and carried him down to the stream, where the stitched flesh that had once been his knees began to be soothed.

This ritual was repeated every day for weeks to come, the old man having quickly realized her benevolent intent; and it soon proved so effective that he was able to turn his attention to the task of locating wild ingredients that might be blended into a remedy more powerful than cold water. With his well-practiced eye, he had immediately noted several: mountain hops, the bitter juices of wild fruits, willow bark, flowers and roots that often proved poisonous, in other men’s less educated hands, and those same limitless sources of honey; all these did he gather, in order to produce medicines that would not only reduce pain, but prevent festering and control fever.† Eventually, this humble regimen — in the forms of both poultices and infusions — would bring the old man back to something that resembled, if not his former self, at least a welcome companion, and even a watchman when she slumbered through the daylight hours. This duty would prove especially important, the old man knew, should the rulers of Broken ever discover, not only that he had survived the ordeal of the Halap-stahla, but that he had taken up residence in her cave, and that the two now had what the priests of Kafra would have denounced as an “unholy alliance,” a demoniacal threat whose whole was more dangerous than the sum of its brutalized parts.

Yet there seemed little chance of such discovery: no Broken cartographers, and only a few Bane, had ever reached the remote mountains that were now home to the old man and his protector. His anxiousness relieved by this knowledge, and his wounds in the last stages of closing (his poultices, medicines, and cotton bandages, boiled first in stone and then iron cauldrons, having done their work), the old man soon cleared and established a garden outside the cave. Here, he cultivated the wild plants and herbs that he collected along the ridgeline; and the collections of dried medicinal flowers, roots, barks, and leaves that he amassed in the cave, along with the generally pleasing stenches of the various concoctions that he created from them, indicated even to his companion that he was not only returning to something like full health, but was also imagining a new way of life for the pair, the details of which she could not guess at, but the effects of which she soon learned to appreciate fully:

It came to pass, one evening, that she had difficulty tracking a stag that she had wounded; and that, when she finally did find the creature, the proud beast managed to pierce the skin of her chest with the point of an antler before she finished him. When she returned with the carcass, the old man proved more interested in the wound than the meat, releasing exclamations of concern in one of the several languages that he was prone to speak, none of which were entirely comprehensible to her, and at least one of which she suspected of being sheer gibberish, so guttural were its sounds.† From out of his now-thriving garden, as well as from his stores of prepared ingredients, the old man produced newly blended medicines, balms that had seemed strange and disturbing, to her — until they reduced the pain and sped the healing of her wound.

To the old man, of course, such cures were comparatively rudimentary, especially in comparison to what he might have achieved, were he in possession of his proper instruments, as well as the far more potent ingredients that he had been accustomed to cultivating in and harvesting from his storied garden in the Inner City of Broken, where he grew strange and precious plants brought by foreign traders. But in order for him to proceed past such rudimentary preparations and aspire to the creation of what he was certain would be dramatically new treatments — medicines that would blend the forest remedies of which he had learned during his exile with those he had grown and formulated in Broken — he would need to create a new sort of laboratorium‡ in the cave, one that would be unlike anything that any scholar, even in Alexandria, had ever seen or imagined.

He would require his instruments, and plant seeds and cuttings, of course, along with his vials of tinctures and jars of crystals, minerals, and drugs, all of which, he was certain, remained in his former sanctum high in the tower of Broken’s royal palace. The God-King Izairn, whose life the old man had more than once saved and extended, had not only raised the foreign-born healer to the rank of Second Minister, but had given him leave to come and go as he pleased from the Inner City through those hidden passageways formerly known only to the priests and priestesses of Kafra, as well as rooms in which to live and work, grounds in which to grow his garden, and his two royal children to tutor. Surely Izairn’s son, Saylal, when he was persuaded by his own jealous Grand Layzin and the then-newly-invested Merchant Lord that his father’s Second Minister sought supreme power for himself and ought to be ritually banished to the Wood, had been clever enough to realize that he must preserve the “sorcerer’s” materials and books, and had ordered the accused traitor’s acolytes to gain mastery over those countless ingredients and concoctions, rather than disposing of it all. And if the minister’s acolytes had complied, then the things that the old man needed to create his forest laboratorium were yet, if plants, still being cultivated, and, if devices, being kept in good working order. But how to secure them?

III: Their Separate Torments, Their Consolation Together

There was but one way:

Although the old man’s most trusted students had not reached the edge of Davon Wood on the evening of the Halap-stahla before he had received salvation from an entirely unexpected quarter, he had many good reasons — rooted in years of loyal service — to believe that they had eventually arrived: after all, during the affront to justice that the Kafrans had called his trial, the old man had never so much as hinted that they were complicit in his activities. He even insisted that he had carried out his “sorcerous” experiments without the assistance of the first among his followers, the man known in Broken as Visimar. (And, although this had been a far more difficult claim to uphold, uphold it the old man did.)

And yet, in the event, the acolytes had apparently been unable to repay the old man’s protection by coming to the Wood as soon as the members of the ritual party were well on their way back to the gates of Broken. If they had simply been delayed by caution, as the old man believed, they must have conjectured, on their eventual arrival, that their master had somehow frustrated the desires of the Grand Layzin, the temple priests, and Kafra himself by surviving the Halap-stahla without them. And, if they had so conjectured, then the old man might now allow himself to hope that, if he could somehow contact them, they might be all the more willing to bring many of the things that he required out of the Inner City and the metropolis and down the mountain to the edge of Davon Wood. But how to get word to them?

It was a measure of the old man’s essential decency that he finally decided that, where once he would have employed only guile, now he would attempt trust — not in the power of his own mind, but, rather, in the loyalty, first, of his companion, and, then, of those young people who had sworn allegiance to him. Yet the risks of these gambles paled in comparison to the last exercise in trust he would have to undertake: he would be forced to hazard the return of those instruments, medicines, and plants that he had left behind in Broken, as well as the safe obscurity of the far more precious life he had made for himself with his warrior queen, on the integrity of the tribe of exiles that he knew lived far to the northeast of the cave that was now his home.

The role of that strange people would be crucial to his plan, and this fact troubled the old man more than he preferred to acknowledge; and yet, in the event, finding a way to achieve that trust proved far less difficult than he had supposed: To begin with, he composed a message in the cipher that he had devised and commonly used when he wished to communicate with his acolytes during his years as Second Minister of Broken without being spied upon by Kafran priests or the Merchant Lord’s Guard. This code had been cited, during the convocation of the corrupt that had presided over the old man’s trial, as evidence of his own and his followers’ ability to speak in demons’ tongues; in reply, the old man had arranged a demonstration that purported to show that none of his assistants understood so much as their own names, when they were spelt out in the cipher. This ruse had only helped to ensure the accused minister’s condemnation as a lone sorcerer; but that had been a foregone conclusion, whereas his deception had protected the lives of the loyal and the secret of his shielded set of symbols and letters.

With his new message thus encoded, the old man proceeded to tightly fold and then address the note in the plain language of Broken; at the same time, however, he sealed the document with wax composed of a melted honeycomb tainted by the juice of a dozens of belladonna berries, boiled down, and further mixed with the venom of the Davon tree frog: if anyone save the old man’s former assistants (who knew of this trick of their master’s) attempted to steal a look at the letter, and then touched their fingers to their mouths or eyes, they would die quickly and painfully. He then imprinted the wax with the ring of office he had kept hidden in his undergarments throughout the Halap-stahla; and finally, he had asked her, in the pieces of simplistic language that they had, by then, begun to share, to carry the packet to the race of small men, of whose existence, he had divined, she had long been aware. He also knew, however, that the Bane had always seemed to treat both her and her children (when the latter were still alive and in the Wood) with some sort of quasi-religious deference, and this fact had given the old man reason to hope that she might not fear bringing the message to and leaving it with the exile race, and that they might, in turn, actually deliver it. With that end in mind, he tucked the epistle into a carefully stitched deerskin pouch, and suspended the pouch around her neck. All that remained was to send her off, stressing the importance of his request, and expecting her journey to last a few days, at the very least.

He had therefore been very surprised when she’d returned the following evening: after only one night away. She encountered and delivered the note to some especially daring Bane foragers, he had immediately conjectured, when he saw her coming home bare-necked; she is far swifter and more clever than even I imagined—

It was not fear of discovery by any such foragers that gave the old man sudden pause: for he knew (or at least, he believed) that the Bane were — with the exception of the infamous Outragers — a people who adhered to a crude but strict code of honor. But he had been in the Wood long enough to comprehend that these two traits — curiosity and integrity — were not always easy to reconcile. Even Bane foragers, the old man knew, might well (while respecting the note’s integrity) have been fascinated and puzzled as to why a message such as his would have been transmitted by a courier such as the warrior queen; and their curiosity might very well have been too great to prevent them from tracking her, at a safe distance, back to the cave, before they returned home to carry out the request in the pouch.

But, even if they have tracked you, the old man murmured to her, as darkness fell on their home and they both continued to watch the forest around them carefully, will they yet bear out my claim that they possess integrity by answering our plea, and taking the message into the city?

With these battling hopes and fears in mind, the old man had kept watch for hours, that night; and, although both he and his companion had sensed a human presence, lurking in the forest around and above the ever-expanding grounds of his burgeoning garden, they never saw or found any true sign of visitors; but then, he knew that no one, not even a foreign-born master of scientific arts such as himself, would be able to uncover any trail left by Bane foragers. In the end, catching sight of them (or of evidence that they had been nearby) had not mattered, for the essentially principled nature that the old man had always suspected the Bane of possessing had been demonstrated: a party of foragers had paid an unexpected call on those of the old man’s acolytes to whom the packet had been addressed late one night, within the walls of Broken. In return, the foragers received a hoped for but not wholly expected reward; and a small band of the acolytes immediately began to scheme to meet their former master at the spot along the upper Cat’s Paw that he named to them.

The old man’s companion had carried him there; and, after that first meeting, several more had taken place, each of which saw the acolytes bring more and more of their former master’s books, scrolls, plant cuttings, and instruments to the edge of the Wood, until nearly his entire collection had made the journey. Then, each time, he climbed back onto her back, much to the never-ending astonishment of the acolytes, and the two, bearing as many of the supplies as they could, would begin the first of many trips up and down the mountain to fetch their bounty home.

There was but one worry involved in the transfer of so much equipment and so many precious goods from the city: each time the acolytes made their trips, fewer and fewer of them appeared, revealing that their ranks were being thinned, not by cowardice, but by imprisonments — and discreet (rather than publicly announced ritual) executions. The God-King Saylal (once the young prince that the old man had tutored from boyhood through youth) had raised up his new Grand Layzin and Merchant Lord; and this young, powerful pair, as the old man knew from his own ordeal, were more than capable of first suspecting and then discovering what the acolytes were up to. Through the use of torture, carried out in the secret dungeons of the Merchants’ Hall, the truth — horrifying for the Layzin and the new Lord Baster-kin to hear — of the old man’s survival and, far worse, of his companionship with the warrior queen, had been heard. Each time an acolyte was broken, he or she revealed some new detail of the story; but, thankfully, when only one meeting with the old man remained to take place, none save Visimar knew where and when it would occur; and even Visimar could not reveal what he did not know, that is, where the old man’s and the warrior queen’s cave was. Such was the Merchant Lord’s wrath, however, that he demanded (with the Layzin’s less vicious support) some greater punishment than quiet death for Visimar; and, when even that last and most faithful of his acolytes failed to appear at the appointed hour and place along the Cat’s Paw, the old man suspected that some typically horrifying Kafran ritual had taken place; yet he dared hope — because the extent of Visimar’s knowledge was, if not as great as his own, nonetheless considerable — that his most brilliant acolyte had somehow survived what he rightly suspected would be the Denep-stahla; and, because he and his companion never discovered, during several dangerous trips downriver, any evidence of the outrage, the old man’s faith was redoubled.

The sacrifice of his acolytes had only made the old man more certain that he must set aside his deep sadness at the loss of the students, friends, and the ultimately scornful lover he had left behind in Broken, and make certain that his new work in the Wood would be remarkable: worthy enough, at the very least, to vindicate the loss that had made it possible, to say nothing of the dangers that his new companion undertook every day. With so many modern tools now at his disposal — pieces of delicate equipment, books by the masters he most admired, and seeds of those exotic plants that he had been the first man to bring west from the far eastern mountains of Bactria, and from India beyond†—his work proceeded at a pace so increased as to be startling.

After building a proper stone and mortar fireplace within the cave, one that was capable, during winter months, of performing threefold service (as cookstove, forge, and furnace, the last of which could throw enough heat to operate an adjoining kiln), Davon Wood’s most illustrious exile proceeded, with all the energy afforded by the more powerful palliative medications that he could now concoct, to fabricate still more implements of comfort. First, a simple system of spindle, hand-driven wheel, and loom, with which he wove fleece that had been harvested from wild Davon sheep‡ (which often herded near the cave on their way to the sweet grass in the valleys below) and produced simple woolen cloth, to be used first for the creation of new, warmer garments, and soon sleeping sacks that he filled with the downy feathers of the warrior queen’s wingèd kills. After the loom, he set about building a proper forge outside the cave entrance, one in which he could not only fashion more complex tools and instruments, but create rudimentary glass and blow it into the shapes necessary both for his scientific experiments and for domestic use.

He could also now continue his investigations into metallourgos,†† a science that had, in part, been responsible for his gaining a reputation among Broken’s Kafran priests as a “sorcerer”—for who could so tamper with the minerals and metals pulled from the ground, all to create steel of unheard-of strength, save an alchemical sorcerer?† Freed, now, from the constant meddling of those priests, he could again envision a day when he would create the particular variety of steel that had long been his object, and other metals, as well; save that now he would place them at the service of all who sought, not mere vengeance against Broken’s rulers, but a grand correction of all that had gone wrong in the remarkable city-kingdom: wrong, not only for himself and for she who had saved him, but for thousands of others, as well — wrong within the very soul of the state, itself …

And yet, as he slowly wakes on this particular morning, and observes the especially bright beams of spring sunlight that reach through the open cave door (she having long ago departed on her morning hunt), and as he finds, too, that his half-legs are not quite so painful as is usually the case upon waking, the old man realizes that it is difficult to fix his thoughts on these momentous concerns. He looks toward the fireplace, which still sends small wisps of smoke up from the white ashes that cover the few bits of wood not yet burned, and turns his mind toward the quiet, one might almost say contented, contemplation of all that he has been able to achieve; and he wonders, for a moment, if any of the past masters that he admires could have done as much, in a similar predicament, even with the aid of so formidable (if academically unschooled) an ally. This thought leads him to look beyond the fire, to the shelf that he long ago chiseled out of a deeper part the cave’s stone wall to accommodate his most precious books:‡ his volumes, not only of the original giants, Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Plato, but of the Egyptian Plotinus, who had furthered Plato’s work concerning the soul, and so helped to order the old man’s instinctive insights into the minds and spirits of beasts; of the Byzantine emperor Maurice, who had assembled (and largely authored) the Strategikon, the greatest volume of military principles to have appeared in any age, which the old man had used to ingratiate himself with many a ruler during his travels (not least the God-King Izairn of Broken); of Dioscorides and Galen; of Procopius and Evagrius, the Byzantines who had done much good by correctly chronicling the first years of the latest appearance of the old man’s onetime obsession, the Death, when it had broken out in that Eastern Empire, and who had determined that the disease had originated, like all pestilences of its kind, in Ethiopia; of Praxagoras and Herophilus, the anatomists and discoverers of the pneuma and neura; of Erasistratus, Herophilus’s colleague, who defined the workings of the four chambers and the valves of the human heart and followed the neura into the brain during the golden age of Alexandria, when dissections of the human body were neither illegal nor immoral; and, finally, of Vagbhata, the ancient Indian who assembled so impressive a pharmacopoeia of potent drugs.

Truly, the old man muses, there is now life, love, and scholarship in his life in Davon Wood, a life achieved through enormous effort and sacrifice: particularly on the part of his acolytes, of course, but also through his own determined defiance of all difficulties, and, of course, through the extraordinary partnership of his companion. Yet now — as he struggles to pull himself up, and notes that the full chorus of songbirds has returned to Davon Wood — he wonders if his life is not something other than merely remarkable; if it is not something that he, as a man of science, once argued was a useless term that described a nonexistent set of phenomena, a term that sprang from man’s still-vast ignorance: he wonders if it is not a miracle …

He does not wonder for long. Perhaps encouraged by her example — her early rising to tend to her share of their pragmatic needs — he, having dragged himself upright with his arms, looks habitually to the desiccated tree stump that serves him for a bedside table, noting that the several moderate doses of the same opium and Cannabis indica that allowed him to sleep, last night as every night, are in their usual places, ready to make his portion of the morning’s tasks in and about the cave easier. Yet, perhaps because of the early hour, with its glare of spring sunlight, or perhaps inspired by the regenerative nature of the season itself, he pauses, and soon decides that he will brave the pain in his half-legs for as long as he can, and enjoy the comparative normalcy of mind that such forbearance brings. He pulls himself to the edge of his cushioned stone bed, and — ever mindful of the painful scars left by the imperfect healing of his knees, and making sure that they do not drag or knock against any bit of his wool and goose-down bedding or, worse, the stone beneath it — he makes ready to first clothe himself and then to strap his thighs to the walking device that was the very first of his exile inventions.

As he does so, his mind wonders at the pain he yet feels, seemingly strangely, in the missing portions of his lower limbs: wonders, because during all his years in the Wood, he has been able to add little to his understanding of those peculiar pains,† save that he must ever avoid the contacts that bring them on, and have his medicines always at hand: for, whatever their cause, the pains themselves are as real to him as they were for the soldiers he once treated who suffered similarly from the loss of limbs; so real, indeed, that the old man sometimes issues such piteous cries that even his companion does her best to gently caress the sites of the wounds directly — attempts that are yet another phenomenon more powerful than logic might lead one to suspect.‡

Because of this, the old man moves with the greatest caution, as he pulls his wool nightshirt up and off, then reaches for one of his now-faded robes of office: more thoughtful gifts from his acolytes, brought during their risky visits long ago. After urinating into a glass jar that he crafted with his own hands, he pulls that rich but simple garment over his head, and then reaches down to the cave floor, from which he carefully takes a well-worn, flat piece of wood, some two feet to a side, which has a section of the sturdy, well-aged trunk of a young maple firmly attached to its underside, and leather thongs affixed to its surface. Lifting his two thighs, he places the platform beneath them, then sets about strapping the thongs tightly to the remnants of his legs. His discomfort grows, as he goes through these motions, but his slow deliberateness limits his distress. Then, when he has finished the careful job of strapping and has started to ease the maple pole, the platform, and the remains of his legs over the side of his bed, he jerks his head up — in a quick, alarmed motion that is most out of keeping with the cautious movements that have preceded it — and looks out the cave door when he hears:

Her. She is not far away, and she is crying out a lamentation in a voice as resonant, rare, and beautiful as it is tragic and heartrending. It is often this way with her, the old man knows, on fine spring mornings, when countless forms of life are being renewed and regenerated in the Wood, and she is forced to realize, yet again, that her own contribution to that Natural display — her extraordinary children — are yet lost, and can never be restored by something so simple as the passing of the seasons. Several times each year she cries out — nay, calls out — in this manner, as if to say that, if she cannot summon her murdered children home to her, she will rouse their spirits from the same forest floor upon which she, pierced and bleeding, fought so madly and valiantly to save them.

She attended to the two bodies that the attackers left that day with care: cleaning their wounds and their entire forms, as if they were alive; or if the full truth be known, as if she might nurse them back to life. Indeed, bones they became, before she would as much as think of removing them from the clearing where they fell, much less permit their being laid within the Earth. The old man had himself finally gathered those bones, brought them farther up the mountain, and interred them closer to their cave beneath both Earth and rock mounds as best he could, in a desperate attempt to console her; yet consolation was so slow in coming as to seem, at times, impossible. Rage and sorrow burned on within her, long enough for the two mounds of stone to become accustomed features of this part of the Wood, so much so that, in time, there was not a creature in the forest who had not learned to leave the site be. None of which is not to say that she did not appreciate the old man’s painfully laborious gesture, and did not come to know periods of calmer sorrow in his company; but to this day she will climb atop some mighty tree that has been torn from the ground by the mightiest of the furious winds that lash the mountains in winter, or to one of the many rock formations that protrude from the mountainside, at this high elevation, and call out to the dead as she does today, summoning them home as if the graves and the thefts had no meaning — as if the four valiant young ones have merely strayed too far, or but momentarily lost their way, and require only her voice to bring them back.

The old man stays on the edge of his stony bed, and listens once again to the same lonely song (and how uncharacteristic it is, for one of her breed to sing at all!) that he has heard many times. And as he sits, he scarcely notices the tears that begin to tumble down his wrinkled face and long grey beard: a peculiar reaction, for the old man, who was not, before his exile, one who easily showed such depth of feeling. Over the years of his woodland existence, he has become so: at an exorbitant price he has been transformed into a man whose passions, when sparked, are obvious and deep; and no living creature can stir those passions as immediately or as deeply as can she …

Her song stops, after a time; but only when the full chorus of birds has resumed its chattering does the old man resume his morning’s routine. He reaches out for a pair of rough-hewn crutches — aged and worn to match the single leg beneath the square of wood that serves the purpose of the two he once possessed — and pulls himself up, with great but practiced effort, onto the three points that have for these many years provided him with independent movement, compromised as it may be. He takes a few steps across the cave, each time planting the crutches a short distance before him, allowing his weight to be supported by them, and then swinging his body and the third support ahead. It has become, over time, a routine movement, although he tries never to treat it casually — for missteps can bring catastrophic pain, even if, as is usually the case, no new injury results from them.

But his caution fails him this day: as he approaches the stone shelf on which rest his precious books, he suddenly notices the tears on his face; and while so doing, he fails to notice a patch of morning dew that has formed on the cave floor, far enough from both the sun’s rays and the fire to have not yet evaporated. Worse still, he plants one of his crutches firmly — or what seems, at first, to be firmly — upon it; but when that crutch starts to slide away from him on the stony slickness with terrible speed, he realizes his error; and realizes, too, that his initial reaction to the sudden instability that follows — an attempt to brace himself on his other crutch and his single wooden leg — will not succeed. It is all happening too fast — indeed, in an instant, it has happened.

The sole flaw in his system of supports has ever been that, while it spares the stumps of his thighs contact with aught save air, it exposes them to whatever surface he strikes when he falls. On almost every occasion, such falls have taken place on the forest floor, which is, like the rest of Davon Wood, kept moist and (for the most part) soft by the vast pavilion of tree limbs that form its ceiling. As for the stone of the cave, he has never before fallen upon it, he realizes, just before he does so; and the first rush of pain reminds him why he has been so careful.

When the first wave of agony gives way to many more in quick succession, the old man knows that his inattentiveness to the perils of shuffling about the cave has only been the first of his terrible mistakes, this morning; the second was not to consume his usual medicines. As matters stand, even if he is able to reach those ready doses on his bedside tree-stump table, he will be unable to do anything but chew and swallow the bitter substance: the slowest way to commence the action of the drugs. But this problem may be academic; for when the first agonizing pulsations come, they are so terrible that he doubts he will be able to move at all, for some time; to move, to breathe, to do anything but scream, terribly and forlornly.

They are not pleas for help, these cries; not at first. They are nothing so rational: his thrashing and screaming is pure madness, and his reason returns only after moments that his mind has made into hours have passed. The first indication that time has begun to elapse are his hands, which clutch his thighs in an attempt to cut off the pain along with the motion of the blood through his arteries and veins. “Arteries and veins!” he hisses between still more wordless shouting, as if concentrating on the discoveries of those great Alexandrians who first described how blood moves through the body, pumped by the heart and carrying the pneuma to all organs, will somehow take his mind from his predicament. And it does begin to do so; but it is no more than a beginning. Many more moments are required before he realizes that he is no longer simply shouting indistinctly. He is calling out a name:

“Stasi!”†

It is her name; or rather, it is the affectionate name that he gave her, long ago. He tried his best, in the beginning, to learn if such a wild forest creature even had a name of her own; but elaborate verbal communication had never been something in which she took particular interest, and he was forced to conclude that he would have to provide a name for her himself. He considered the matter carefully, and tried several possibilities before striking on one to which she responded: Stasi, the diminutive form of an ancient name—Anastasiya‡—given to female children among his people. It had first occurred to him because it was a name implying a return from the dead; thus it seemed fitting, to say nothing of intriguing, that she responded to it. Perhaps she had always comprehended far more of what he said than her silence inside the cave indicated; whatever the case, she accepted the name, and it quickly became the one infallible means that he possessed of attracting her attention.

Would that she were close enough now, he thinks, to hear him: for his mind turns desperately to the notion of her carrying him down to the small feeder stream, and placing him in its icy waters just as she did when they first met, and so many times since. Indeed, whenever he has injured himself in her hearing, they have made this pilgrimage; but she is likely far away by now. And so he must, with only his arms to rely upon, try to free himself of his walking apparatus, and then pull himself across the cave floor to the tree stump by his bed, and to the medicines that lie atop it.

But no matter the effort, no matter his screams and denunciations of whatever god or gods have reduced him to this pitiable condition, it is of no use; and finally, after a timeless, numberless series of attempts, and with his body long past exhaustion, he realizes his defeat, and allows his perspiring brow to fall, finally, upon the cool stone beneath him. He exhales a terrible moan, his truncated body following his head in utter collapse. “I submit to you, cursèd divinities …,” he begins to whisper, trying to catch his breath; but regular breathing brings only a sudden return of pulsating pain, pain that had been temporarily masked by effort. The return of such agony makes his predicament, for a moment, too great to bear, and he abandons himself to despair: “I submit to you—where is the godliness in thus amusing yourselves …?”

And — not for the first time, when he is in such a desperate state of distress — the old man begins to quietly weep, too exhausted, finally, to either scream or to carry on an angry indictment of the Heavens.

How long does he lie there before fear replaces his distress? He has neither knowledge nor interest; for the fear, when it comes, is pronounced. It is sparked by a rustling, some twenty yards from the cave, and the slight vibration of a heavy step through the stone floor that reaches the neura of his face; and it is deepened by the fact that he is utterly vulnerable, now, bereft of either weapons or further strength. And yet, when he quickly confirms the vibrations as being a hasty step that belongs to a creature too large for him to dismiss, the old man’s fear is mitigated by a sudden thought:

Perhaps it is time, he muses through the pain. Perhaps he has defied Fate for long enough, and ought to finally allow the great forest outside the cave to claim him. It will do so one day, no matter how many times he may succeed in staving that moment off; why not today? This very morning? In the midst of Davon Wood’s great renewal, why not allow some creature to make of him food for itself or its young? It will likely be a far more useful end than the one that he has flattered himself he may one day enjoy, should he finally return to human society. He is saddened by the thought of leaving her, of course; but will she not be better off, as well, without him to continually fret over …?

The steps come nearer and faster: evidently the creature — moving at something between a walk and a run — has no fear of the scent of humankind. The old man faces away from the cave door, thinking, in his agonized resignation, that he will not even turn. Rather, he will offer up the back of his neck, the most vulnerable part of his spine, to be crushed in the jaws of what most probably — given its lack of stealth, indeed its behaving as if it already owned the den — is a brown bear of Broken, the same beast whose rampant image figured prominently on the crest of that kingdom’s founder, Oxmontrot, as it has since done on that of his royal descendants. The animal will have recently woken from the long winter sleep, and is doubtless emboldened by the hunger that comes with burning away all the stored sustenance in its body. Such a creature will be more than capable of crushing the frail bones of the old man …

But then he hears it: a heavy yet hushed trill of the throat. And when he does, he recognizes the peculiarity of the step: each leg moving independently as they trot. Only two creatures, the old man knows, possess such coordination of movement: cats, both great and small, and horses. Thus, it must be his companion† returning unexpectedly, he dares hope for a moment …

His head lifts without his consciously willing it, and his agonized face turns toward the sunlight; then, instantly, his expression changes completely, as the newcomer enters into view …

IV: The Specter of Salvation

On its way into the cave is the most dreaded animal in all the Wood, a Davon panther. Nor is this any panther, but the one known for many years as a legend throughout Broken, not only for the unusual lust it possesses for the blood of certain men, but for the extraordinary beauty of its coat: fur that should, at best, be a gold akin to ripe wheat, is almost a ghostly white, and where the slightly darker striping and spotting should be, there are only the faintest traces of those markings,† rendered in a shade that nearly matches the beautiful but mysterious jewelry that the old man was fond of crafting for the God-King Izairn’s daughter: an alloy of pure gold, silver, and nickel, all readily available in the mountains along Broken’s frontiers. A mature female, and one with the scars to prove her age and experience, the panther is fearless, that much is evident from her quick step and lack of concern with the smell of human flesh and waste that she must have detected long before reaching the cave. The massive paws (for she is at least ten years of age, as well as over five hundred pounds in weight, some nine feet in length, and half that in height, when measured at the lowest point of the long, dipping spine‡) make a sound too careless for the hunt, however: they pad along the forest floor before the cave regally, the great and noble head never turning to remark upon the old man’s extraordinary garden, or his forge, or any other detail of this miraculous habitation. The large ears, which come to unusually pointed tufts, are turned purposefully forward; and yet, although the tongue is out and panting, there is no bloodlust in the extraordinary brilliance of the light green eyes, eyes that mirror the shade of the newest leaves on the youngest trees surrounding the camp …

The old man holds his breath, his eyes filling with tears; but these are not the tears of a man about to leave this world — they are those of a man who has found salvation where he thought there could be none.

“Stasi!” he manages to say, in cracks and cries. “But — you were …”

But she was not, in fact, so far away, after all. And, now that she is close, the white panther pays the old man’s voice no heed; instead, she trots into the cave as quickly as she approached it, and, standing with her head over his prostrate body, glances about, noting his disordered table and the scattered pieces of his walking apparatus as if she comprehends their meaning. And, indeed, in her eyes, as she looks down at him, is a gaze that could be interpreted — if one had the talent to see it, as the old man does — as embodying both concern and admonishment.

“I know it, Stasi, I know it,” the old man groans in contrition, wincing still with the cutting waves of pain. “But for now—”

He need not finish his sentence. With loving compassion, the panther lowers her head to rub her nose and muzzle gently against his nose and face,†† and then places her neck over his arms, extending her forelegs, so that her shoulders and chest also descend. This allows the old man to reach up and lock his arms around her graceful yet enormously powerful neck, which she then twists, with equal ease and agility, in such a way that he can, as effortlessly as his throbbing scars will allow, pull himself atop her shoulders, with each of his thighs resting between her shoulders and ribs. The panther then lifts the hundred or so pounds of mortal flesh with which the priests of Kafra left the old man, so long ago, exerting no more effort than if she were rising unencumbered; and, although the movements cause the old man some additional pains, his relief is sufficient to make these slight.

He reaches up, running one hand down the top of her impressive head to her moist, brick-red nose, the lone spot of deep color on her body: apart, that is, from the black lines that outline the remarkably tinted eyes, deepening their effect in such a way that they might have been applied with cosmetic paint by one of the women of the old man’s homeland on the Northeastern Sea.† Then the panther, consolingly, moves her face to greet the hand, and to allow his fingernails to scratch lightly, first at the long crest of the nose, then across the brow atop those strangely exotic eyes, and finally to the crown of her proud head. With tears, not of further anguish, but of the very deepest joy and relief streaming freely and silently down his face, the old man places his mouth by one of her enormous ears.

“The stream, Stasi,” he murmurs, although he need not; she has known since entering the cave that this is to be their destination. As she turns to go, she immediately slows her former quick pace to an easy, rhythmic gait, one that she knows the old man has always found soothing: her shoulders ripple, her spine undulates just perceptibly, and her chest rises and falls with her heavy panting. Most of all, she continues the throaty purr that she long ago determined to be of such entrancing comfort to the old man, never more so than when he is in distress and astride her, where he can put one ear to the back of her neck and listen to the steady vibration.

And in this manner is the great sorcerer Caliphestros once again brought back from the brink of despair and death by the legendary white panther of Davon Wood. They are the two most infamous beings of their generation, to the people of Broken, the stuff of more than mere parents’ warnings to unruly children, or of those children’s nightmares; for their existence, especially together, strikes fear into the very royal and sacred clique of the Kafran kingdom. Yet one would be hard-put to find greater tenderness and compassion among any two creatures in the kingdom of the golden god, or, indeed, anywhere on this Earth, than exists between the seemingly very different — yet, in their hearts, not at all dissimilar — enemies of the realm of the Tall …

The panther had been relentlessly hunted by men of Broken even before she rescued the old man from the inexplicable evil to which she had watched his own kind subject him. The panther hunt more generally had, for generations, been the definitive rite of passage into manhood for eldest sons from such Broken families as possessed the wealth and position (to say nothing of the additional male offspring) to allow them the leisure, the horses, and the servants to engage in so vicious, dangerous, and foolhardy a blood sport. And, because exceptional purity and uniformity in the coloration of panthers was believed by Broken hunters as well as by the Bane to imply great mystical powers (despite the teachings of Kafran priests that such was a mischievous remnant of pagan beliefs), a high value was from the first placed on this uniquely hued female. But when it became clear that no human would likely ever prove brave or clever enough to track and kill her, an only slightly diminished value had been placed upon the heads and hides of the four golden cubs she soon mothered.

The family had never been tracked: the unspoken truth among those who survived the encounter that terrible day was that a Broken hunting party, led by the son of the kingdom’s then-Merchant Lord himself, had stumbled upon the young cats at play, under their mother’s watchful eye, in an open dale too close to the Cat’s Paw. The hunters quickly found themselves faced with a far more desperate struggle than they would have expected from one female and four juvenile panthers: the white mother had been able to kill several of the humans, before being wounded herself by a spear that pierced her thigh and glanced off the bone beneath. Thus slowed, she had been forced to watch and lunge desperately, as three of her brave children had been killed, one after another. The body of her eldest male had been taken off toward the city atop the mountain, along with her surviving daughter, who was painfully herded, terrified, into an iron cage; and then all the intruders and their captives disappeared, off toward that mountain, the walls and lights atop which the white panther now often studies, of a night, in a seeming attempt to try to comprehend what those distant, glittering movements may signify …

Since that fateful battle, sightings of the white panther by hunters of Broken have been few; and she has made certain that fewer still of those brash pursuers have returned to the mountain of lights, and that none have tracked her to her high cave-den. In this way, she has kept secret the location of the sanctuary to which she brought the damaged old man, and in which she has helped him to recover, just as he has warmed her winters, preserved her kills, and healed the wounds of her hunts. And so the old man’s name for her — Stasi, Anastasiya, “She of the Resurrection”—is apt in its description of her, and of their life together.

If this tale of dual tragedy and redemption should stir disbelief† in any who read it, they may comfort themselves that they are not alone: for, on the very day in question, when the white panther he calls Stasi carries the suffering Caliphestros once again to the cold stream near their cave to soothe him, two observing eyes — hard, tough eyes that have watched from the safety of a tall ash — also widen with incredulity. They are the eyes of a man who, if the white panther had the time, she would gladly dispatch: for she detected his stink, despite the aromas of the old man’s herb garden (newly revived by spring), as well as the “hidden” observer’s attempts to disguise his own scent, well before she reached the clearing outside the cave. Although the intruder is clearly of the small tribe in Davon Wood (who have always respected her), the panther liked and yet likes nothing about the blended stenches of fear and filth, as well as the stolen scents of other creatures, that mark him. Yes, she would steal upon and finish him, had she not another mission of mercy to perform for long-suffering Caliphestros …

High in that ash tree, meanwhile, the man who creates that scent of fear knows full well that the panther would indeed kill him, had she the chance; and he waits a long while, after the beast and her strange rider have disappeared, before he even thinks of returning to the forest floor. He continues to wait, in truth, until long after they vanish, letting the unnatural pair put as much of the Wood between themselves and his solitary form (which has never felt so small) as possible, before he silently makes his way down the ash trunk, and lightly drops to the ground.

Heldo-Bah stands gazing toward the trees and undergrowth through which the panther and the sorcerer Caliphestros have disappeared: for “sorcerer” he must be, thinks the forager, if he not only survived the Halap-stahla, but lives with the most dangerous animal in the Wood! Only after several moments have passed without Heldo-Bah’s wide, amazed eyes catching any further movement does he dare even murmur, in his sourest tone:

“Perfection …” But Heldo-Bah’s sarcasm lacks its usual conviction. “Most supreme perfection!” he tries again; and then (although he knows he could offer that beast nothing approaching a fight) he clutches his gutting blade at the ready as he dashes back east, toward the camp that he made with Keera and her brother a few hours earlier.

“Let that fool Veloc explain this to me!” Heldo-Bah says aloud, when he deems such volume safe. “The sorcerer lives — but with the most feared panther in Davon Wood, a creature that most think a phantasm! Oh, this has been well worth three days’ run — we can’t even approach him, with that monster in his thrall!”

More astounded and merely senseless expressions of bewilderment at the ongoing perversity of his life echo about Heldo-Bah, as he runs — and yet his last statement was nothing if not true:

Although he does not yet know it, the strange vision he has witnessed has been more than worth his own and his friends’ desperate dash through Davon Wood over the last several days and nights …