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 alclass="underline" 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.