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 such pains, save the certainty 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 piteous cries that cause his companion to do her best to gently caress the sites of the wounds—attempts that are yet another phenomenon more powerful than logic might lead one to suspect.
Because of all this, the old man moves with particular caution this morning, 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 the 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 actions 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, every creature in the forest had learned to leave the site be. Which is not to say that she did not appreciate the old man’s painfully laborious gesture; and certainly she came 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 brave 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 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, however, he has become one: at an exorbitant price he has been transformed into a man whose passions, when sparked, are apparent yet 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, like the rest of Davon Wood, is 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 that initial 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 successive pulsations come, they are so torturous 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 suddenly 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 of intriguing, that she seemed ready—even pleased—to have it bestowed upon her. Perhaps she had always comprehended far more of what he said than her silence inside the cave indicated; whatever the case, she accepted the name, and it quickly became the one infallible means that he possessed of attracting her attention.
Would that she were close enough now, he thinks, to hear him: for his mind turns desperately to the notion of her carrying him down to the small feeder stream, and placing him in its icy waters just as she did when they first met, and has done so many times since. Indeed, whenever he has injured himself within her hearing, they have made this pilgrimage; but she is likely far away by now. And so he must, with only his arms to rely upon, try to free himself of his walking apparatus, and then pull himself across the cave floor to the tree stump by his bed, and to the medicines that lie atop it.
But no matter the effort, no matter his screams and denunciations of whatever god or gods have reduced him to this pitiable condition, it is of no use; and finally, after a timeless, numberless series of attempts, and with his body long past exhaustion, he realizes his defeat, and allows his perspiring brow to fall, finally, upon the cool stone beneath him. He exhales a terrible moan, his truncated body following his head in utter collapse. “I submit to you, cursèd divinities …,” he begins to whisper, trying to catch his breath; but regular breathing brings only a sudden return of pulsating pain, pain that had been temporarily masked by effort. The return of such agony makes his predicament, for a moment, too great to bear, and he abandons himself to despair: “I submit to you—where is the godliness in thus amusing yourselves …?”
And—not for the first time, when he is in such a desperate state of distress—the old man begins to quietly weep, too exhausted, finally, to either scream or to carry on an angry indictment of the Heavens.
How long does he lie there before fear replaces his distress? He has neither knowledge nor interest; for the fear, when it comes, is pronounced. It is sparked by a rustling, some twenty yards from the cave, and the slight vibration of a heavy step through the stone floor that reaches the neura of his face; and it is deepened by the fact that he is utterly vulnerable, now, bereft of either weapons or further strength. And yet, when he quickly confirms the vibrations as being a hasty step that belongs to a creature too large for him to dismiss, the old man’s fear is mitigated by a sudden thought:
Perhaps it is time, he muses through the pain. Perhaps he has defied Fate for long enough, and ought to finally allow the great forest outside the cave to claim him. It will do so one day, no matter how many times he may succeed in staving that moment off; why not today? This very morning? In the midst of Davon Wood’s great renewal, why not allow some creature to make of him food for itself or its young? It will likely be a far more useful end than that which he has flattered himself he may one day enjoy, should he finally return to human society. He is saddened by the thought of leaving her, of course; but will she not be better off, as well, without him to continually fret over …?
The steps come nearer and faster: evidently the creature—moving at something between a walk and a run—has no fear of the scent of humankind. The old man faces away from the cave door, thinking, in his agonized resignation, that he will not even turn. Rather, he will offer up the back of his neck, the most vulnerable part of his spine, to be crushed in the jaws of what most probably—given its lack of stealth, indeed its behaving as if it already owned the den—is a brown bear of Broken, the same beast whose rampant image was chosen by that kingdom’s founder, Oxmontrot, to serve as the emblem of all his line and realm. The animal will have recently woken from the long winter sleep, and is doubtless emboldened by the hunger that comes with burning away all the stored sustenance in its body. Such a creature will be more than capable of crushing the frail bones of the old man …
But then he hears it: a heavy yet hushed trill of the throat. And when he does, he recognizes the peculiarity of the step: each leg moving independently as they trot. Only two creatures, the old man knows, possess such coordination of movement: cats, both great and small, and horses. Thus, it must be his companion returning unexpectedly, he dares hope for a moment …
His head lifts without his consciously willing it, and his agonized face turns toward the sunlight; then, instantly, his expression changes completely, as the newcomer enters into view …
The Specter of Salvation
ON ITS WAY INTO THE CAVE is the most dreaded animal in all the Wood, a Davon panther: not any panther, but the one known for many years as a legend throughout Broken, not only for the unusual lust it possesses for the blood of certain men, but for the extraordinary beauty of its coat: fur that should, at best, be a gold akin to ripe wheat, is almost a ghostly white, and where the slightly darker striping and spotting should be, there are only the faintest traces of those markings, rendered in a shade that nearly matches the beautiful but mysterious jewelry that the old man was fond of crafting for the God-King Izairn’s daughter: an alloy of pure gold, silver, and nickel, all readily available in the mountains along Broken’s frontiers. A mature female, and one with the scars to prove her age and experience, the panther is fearless, that much is evident from her quick step and lack of concern with the smell of human flesh and waste that she must have detected long before reaching the cave. The massive paws (for she is at least ten years of age, as well as over five hundred pounds in weight, some nine feet in length, and half that in height, when measured at the lowest point of the long, dipping spine) make a sound too careless for the hunt, however: they pad along the forest floor before the cave regally, the great and noble head never turning to remark upon the old man’s extraordinary garden, or his forge, or any other detail of this miraculous habitation. The large ears, which come to unusually pointed tufts, are turned purposefully forward; and yet, although the tongue is out and panting, there is no bloodlust in the extraordinary brilliance of the light green eyes, eyes that mirror the shade of the newest leaves on the youngest trees surrounding the camp …
The old man holds his breath, his eyes filling with tears; but these are not the tears of a man about to leave this world—they are those of a man who has found salvation where he thought there could be none.
“Stasi!” he manages to say, in cracks and cries. “But—you were …”
But she was not, in fact, so far away, after all. And, now that she is close, the white panther pays the old man’s voice no heed; instead, she trots into the cave as quickly as she approached it, and, standing with her head over his prostrate body, glances about, noting his disordered table and the scattered pieces of his walking apparatus as if she comprehends their meaning. And, indeed, in her eyes, as she looks down at him, is a gaze that could be interpreted—if one had the talent to see it, as the old man can—as embodying both concern and admonishment.
“I know it, Stasi, I know it,” the old man groans in contrition, still wincing with the cutting waves of pain. “But for now—”
He need not finish his sentence. With loving compassion, the panther lowers her head to rub her nose and muzzle gently against his nose and face, and then places her neck over his arms, extending her forelegs, so that her shoulders and che
st also descend. This allows the old man to reach up and lock his arms around her graceful yet enormously powerful neck, which she then twists, with equal ease and agility, in such a way that he can, as effortlessly as his throbbing scars will allow, pull himself atop her shoulders, with each of his thighs resting between her shoulders and ribs. The panther then lifts the hundred or so pounds of mortal flesh with which the priests of Kafra left the old man, so long ago, exerting no more effort than she would if rising unencumbered; and, although the movements cause the old man some additional pains, his relief is sufficient to make these seem slight.
He reaches up, running one hand down the top of her impressive head to her moist, brick-red nose, the lone spot of deep color on her body: apart, that is, from the black lines that frame the remarkably tinted eyes, deepening their effect in such a way that the lines might have been applied with cosmetic paint by one of the women of the old man’s homeland on the Northeastern Sea. Then the panther, consolingly, moves her face to greet the hand, and to allow his fingernails to scratch lightly, first at the long crest of the nose, then across the brow atop those strangely exotic eyes, and finally to the crown of her proud head. With tears, not of further anguish, but of the very deepest joy and relief streaming freely and silently down his face, the old man places his mouth by one of her enormous ears.