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,
