The Legend of Broken

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