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 souclass="underline" 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.