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 in their sockets, more wildly than any distant pyre or conflagration among the huts. “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 …
Interlude:
A Forest Idyll†
[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, untamed 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,
— EDWARD GIBBON TO EDMUND BURKE,
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
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
