by Caleb Carr
It came to pass, one evening, that she had difficulty tracking a stag that she had wounded; and that, when she finally did find the creature, the proud beast managed to pierce the skin of her chest with the point of an antler before she finished him. When she returned with the carcass, the old man proved more interested in the wound than the meat, releasing exclamations of concern in one of the several languages that he was prone to speak, none of which were entirely comprehensible to her, and at least one of which she suspected of being sheer gibberish, so guttural were its sounds. From out of his now-thriving garden, as well as from his stores of prepared ingredients, the old man produced newly blended medicines, balms that had seemed strange and disturbing, to her—until they reduced the pain and sped the healing of her wound.
To the old man, of course, such cures were comparatively rudimentary, especially in comparison to what he might have achieved, were he in possession of his proper instruments, as well as the exotic and far more potent ingredients that he had been accustomed to cultivating in his storied garden in the Inner City of Broken. But in order for him to proceed past such basic preparations and aspire to the creation of what he was certain would be dramatically new treatments—medicines that would blend the forest remedies of which he had learned during his exile with those he had grown and formulated in Broken—he would need to create a new sort of laboratorium in the cave, one that would be unlike anything that any scholar, even in Alexandria, had ever seen or imagined.
He would require his instruments, and seeds and cuttings from his garden in Broken, along with his vials of tinctures and jars of crystals, minerals, and drugs, all of which, he was certain, remained in his former sanctum high in the tower of Broken’s royal palace. The God-King Izairn, whose life the old man had more than once saved and extended, had not only raised the foreign-born healer to the rank of Second Minister, at the same time granting him leave to come and go as he pleased from the Inner City through those hidden passageways formerly known only to the priests and priestesses of Kafra, but had bestowed rooms in which to live and work, grounds in which to grow his garden, and two royal children to tutor. Surely Izairn’s son, Saylal, when he was persuaded by his own Grand Layzin and the then-newly-invested Merchant Lord that his father’s Second Minister sought supreme power for himself and ought to be ritually banished to the Wood, had been clever enough to realize that he must preserve the “sorcerer’s” materials and books, and had ordered the accused traitor’s acolytes to gain mastery over those countless ingredients and concoctions, rather than disposing of it all. And if the minister’s acolytes had complied, then the things that the old man needed to create his forest laboratorium were yet being cultivated and maintained. But how to secure them?
Their Separate Torments, Their Consolation Together
THERE WAS BUT ONE WAY: Although the old man’s most trusted students had not reached the edge of Davon Wood on the evening of the Halapstahla before he had received salvation from an entirely unexpected quarter, he had many good reasons—rooted in years of loyal service—to believe that they had eventually arrived: after all, during the affront to justice that the Kafrans had called his trial, the old man had never so much as hinted that they were complicit in his activities. He even insisted that he had carried out his “sorcerous” experiments without the assistance of the first among his followers, the man known in Broken as Visimar. (And, although this had been a far more difficult claim to uphold, uphold it the old man did.)
Yet, in the event, the acolytes had apparently been unable to repay the old man’s protection by coming to the Wood as soon as the members of the ritual party were well on their way back to the gates of Broken. If they had simply been delayed by caution, as the old man believed, they must have conjectured, on their eventual arrival, that their master had somehow frustrated the desires of the Grand Layzin, the Temple priests, and Kafra himself by surviving the Halap-stahla without them. And, if they had so conjectured, then the old man might now allow himself to hope that, if he could somehow contact them, they would be all the more willing to bring many of the things that he required out of the Inner City and the metropolis and down the mountain to the edge of Davon Wood. But how to get word to them?
It was a measure of the old man’s essential decency that he finally decided that, where once he would have employed only guile, now he would attempt trust: trust, not in the power of his own mind, but, rather, in the loyalty, first, of his companion, and, second, of those young people who had sworn allegiance to him. These risks paled in comparison, however, to the last exercise in trust he would have to undertake: he must hazard the return of his instruments and medicines, his cuttings, seeds, and plants, as well as the safe obscurity of the far more precious life he had made for himself with his warrior queen, on the integrity of the tribe of exiles that he knew lived far to the northeast of the cave that was now his home.
That the role of those strange people would be crucial to his plan troubled the old man more than he preferred to acknowledge; and yet, in the event, finding a way to build that trust proved far less difficult than he had supposed. To begin with, he composed a message in the cipher that he had devised and commonly used when, as Second Minister of Broken, he wished to communicate with his acolytes without being spied upon by Kafran priests or the Merchant Lord’s Guard. This code had been cited, during the convocation of the corrupt that had presided over the old man’s trial, as evidence of his own and his followers’ ability to speak in demons’ tongues; in reply, the old man had arranged a demonstration that purported to show that none of his assistants understood so much as their own names, when they were spelt out in the cipher. This ruse had only helped to ensure the accused minister’s condemnation as a lone sorcerer; but that had been a foregone conclusion, whereas his deception had protected the lives of the loyal, as well as the secret of his shielded set of symbols and letters.
With his new message thus encoded, the old man proceeded to tightly fold and then address the note in the plain language of Broken; at the same time, however, he sealed the document with wax composed of a melted honeycomb tainted by the juice of dozens of belladonna berries, boiled down, and further mixed with the venom of the Davon tree frog: if anyone save the old man’s former assistants (who knew of this trick of their master’s) attempted to steal a look at the letter, and then touched their fingers to their mouths or eyes, they would die quickly and painfully. He then imprinted the wax with the ring bearing his seal that he had kept hidden in his undergarments throughout the Halap-stahla; and finally, he had asked her, in the pieces of simplistic language that they had, by then, begun to share, to carry the packet to the race of small men, of whose existence, he had divined, she had long been aware. He also knew, however, that the Bane had always seemed to treat both her and her children (when the latter were still alive and in the Wood) with an almost religious deference, and this fact had given the old man reason to hope that she might not fear bringing the message to and leaving it with the exile race, and that they might, in turn, actually deliver it. With that end in mind, he tucked the epistle into a carefully stitched deerskin pouch, and suspended the pouch around her neck. All that remained was to send her off, stressing the importance of his request, and expecting her journey to last a few days, at the very least.
He had therefore been very surprised when she’d returned the following evening: after only one night away. She encountered and delivered the note to some especially daring Bane foragers, he had immediately conjectured, when he saw her coming home bare-necked; she is far swifter and more clever than even I imagined—
It was not fear of discovery by any such foragers that gave the old man sudden pause: for he knew (or at least, he believed) that the Bane were—with the exception of the infamous Outragers—a people who adhered to a crude but strict code of honor. But he had been in the Wood long enough to comprehend that these two traits—curiosity and integrity—were not always easy to reconcile. Even Bane foragers, the old man knew, might well (
while respecting the note’s integrity) have been fascinated and puzzled as to why a message such as his would have been transmitted by a courier such as the warrior queen; and their curiosity might very well have been too great to prevent them from tracking her, at a safe distance, back to the cave, before they returned home to carry out the request in the pouch.
But, even if they have tracked you, the old man murmured to her, as darkness fell on their home and they both continued to watch the forest around them carefully, will they yet bear out my claim that they possess integrity by answering our plea, and taking the message into the city?
With these battling hopes and fears in mind, the old man had kept watch for hours, that night; and, although both he and his companion had sensed a human presence, lurking in the forest around and above the ever-expanding grounds of his burgeoning garden, they never saw or found any true sign of visitors; but then, he knew that no one, not even a foreign-born master of scientific arts such as himself, would be able to uncover any trail left by Bane foragers. In the end, catching sight of them (or of evidence that they had been nearby) had not mattered, for the essentially principled nature that the old man had always suspected the Bane of possessing had been demonstrated: a party of foragers had paid an unexpected call on those of the old man’s acolytes to whom the packet had been addressed late one night, within the walls of Broken. In return, the foragers received a hoped for but not wholly expected reward; and a small band of the acolytes immediately began to scheme to meet their former master at the spot along the upper Cat’s Paw that he named to them.
The old man’s companion had carried him there; and, after that first meeting, several more had taken place, each of which saw the acolytes bring more and more of their former master’s books, scrolls, plant cuttings, and instruments to the edge of the Wood, until nearly his entire collection had made the journey. Then, each time, he climbed back onto her back, much to the never-ending astonishment of the acolytes, and the two, bearing as many of the supplies as they could, would begin the first of many trips up and down the mountain to fetch their bounty home.
There was but one reason for the old man to worry, during the transfer of so much equipment and so many precious goods from the city: each time the acolytes made their trips, fewer and fewer of them appeared, revealing that their ranks were being thinned, not by cowardice, but by imprisonments—and discreet (rather than publicly announced ritual) executions. The God-King Saylal (once the young prince that the old man had tutored from boyhood through youth) had raised up his new Grand Layzin and Merchant Lord; and this young, powerful pair, as the old man knew from his own ordeal, were more than capable of first suspecting and then discovering what the acolytes were up to. Through the use of torture, carried out in the secret dungeons of the Merchants’ Hall, the truth—horrifying for the Layzin and the new Lord Baster-kin to hear—of the old man’s survival and, far worse, of his companionship with the warrior queen, had been heard. Each time an acolyte was broken, he or she revealed some new detail of the story; but, thankfully, when only one such detail remained—the most important detail of all—it was Visimar who was brought to the dungeon; yet even Visimar could not reveal what he did not know, that is, where the old man and the warrior queen’s cave was. Such was the Merchant Lord’s wrath, however, that he demanded (with the Layzin’s less vicious support) some greater punishment than quiet death for Visimar; and, when that last and most faithful of the old man’s acolytes failed to appear at the appointed hour and place along the Cat’s Paw, his erstwhile teacher suspected that some typically horrifying Kafran ritual had taken place; yet he dared hope—because the extent of Visimar’s knowledge was, if not as great as the old man’s own, nonetheless considerable—that his most brilliant acolyte had somehow survived what he rightly suspected would be the Denep-stahla; and, because he and his companion never discovered, during several dangerous trips downriver, any evidence of the outrage, the old man’s faith was redoubled.
The sacrifice of his acolytes had only made the old man more certain that he must set aside his deep sadness at the loss of the students, friends, and the ultimately scornful lover he had left behind in Broken, and make certain that his new work in the Wood would be remarkable: worthy enough, at the very least, to vindicate the loss that had made it possible, to say nothing of the dangers that his new companion undertook every day to protect both it and him. With so many modern tools now at his disposal—pieces of delicate equipment, books by the masters he most admired, and seeds of those exotic plants that he had been the first man to bring west from the far eastern mountains of Bactria, and from India beyond—his work proceeded at a pace so increased as to be startling.
After building a proper stone and mortar fireplace within the cave, one that was capable, during winter months, of performing threefold service (as cookstove, forge, and furnace, the last of which could throw enough heat to operate an adjoining kiln), Davon Wood’s most illustrious exile proceeded, with all the energy afforded by the more powerful palliative medications that he could now concoct, to fabricate still more implements of comfort. First, a simple system of spindle, hand-driven wheel, and loom, with which he wove fleece that had been harvested from wild Davon sheep (often found herding near the cave on their way to the sweet grass in the valleys below) and produced simple woolen cloth, to be used first for the creation of new, warmer garments, and soon sleeping sacks that he filled with the downy feathers of the warrior queen’s wingèd kills. After the loom, he set about building a proper forge outside the cave entrance, one in which he could not only fashion more complex tools and instruments, but create rudimentary glass and blow it into the shapes necessary both for his scientific experiments and for domestic use.
He could also now continue his investigations into metallourgos, a science that had, in part, been responsible for his gaining a reputation among Broken’s Kafran priests as a “sorcerer”—for who could so tamper with the minerals and metals pulled from the ground, all to create steel of unheard-of strength, save an alchemical sorcerer? Freed, now, from the constant meddling of those priests, he could again envision a day when he would create the particular variety of steel that had long been his object, and other metals, as well; save that now he would place them at the service of all who sought, not mere vengeance against Broken’s rulers, but a grand correction of all that had gone wrong in the remarkable city-kingdom: wrong, not only for himself and for she who had saved him, but for thousands of others, as well—wrong within the very soul of the state, itself …
And yet, as he slowly wakes on this particular morning, and observes the especially bright beams of spring sunlight that reach through the open cave door (she having long ago departed on her morning hunt), and as he finds, too, that his half-legs are not quite so painful as is usually the case upon waking, the old man realizes that it is difficult to keep his thoughts fixed on such momentous concerns. He looks toward the fireplace, which still sends small wisps of smoke up from the white ashes that cover the few bits of wood not yet burned, and turns his mind toward the quiet, one might almost say contented, contemplation of all that he has been able to achieve; and he wonders, for a moment, if any of the past masters that he admires could have done as much, in a similar predicament, even with the aid of so formidable (if academically unschooled) an ally. This thought leads him to look beyond the fire, to the shelf that he long ago chiseled out of a deeper part the cave’s stone wall to accommodate his most precious books: his volumes, not only of the original giants, Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Plato, but of the Egyptian Plotinus, who had furthered Plato’s work concerning the soul, and so helped to order the old man’s instinctive insights into the minds and spirits of beasts; of the Byzantine emperor Maurice, who had assembled (and largely authored) the Strategikon, the greatest volume of military principles to have appeared in any age, which the old man had used to ingratiate himself with many a ruler during his travels (not least the God-King Izairn of Broken); of Dioscorides and Galen; of Procopius and Eva
grius, the Byzantines who had done much good by correctly chronicling the first years of the latest appearance of the old man’s onetime obsession, the Death, when it had broken out in that Eastern Empire, and who had determined that the disease had originated, like all pestilences of its kind, in Ethiopia; of Praxagoras and Herophilus, the anatomists and discoverers of the pneuma and neura; of Erasistratus, Herophilus’s colleague, who defined the workings of the four chambers and the valves of the human heart and followed the neura into the brain during the golden age of Alexandria, when dissections of the human body were considered neither illegal nor immoral; and, finally, of Vagbhata, the ancient Indian who assembled so impressive a pharmacopoeia of potent Eastern plants.
Truly, the old man muses, there is now life, love, and scholarship in his life in Davon Wood, a life achieved through enormous effort and sacrifice: particularly on the part of his acolytes, of course, but also through his own determined defiance of all difficulties, and, of course, through the extraordinary partnership of his companion. Yet now—as he struggles to pull himself up, and notes that the full chorus of songbirds has returned to Davon Wood—he wonders if his life is not something other than merely remarkable; if it is not something that he, as a man of science, once argued was a useless term that described a nonexistent set of phenomena, a term that sprang from man’s still-vast ignorance: he wonders if it is not a miracle …
He does not wonder for long. Perhaps encouraged by her example—her early rising to tend to her share of their pragmatic needs—he, having dragged himself upright with his arms, looks habitually to the desiccated tree stump that serves him for a bedside table, noting that the several moderate doses of the same opium and Cannabis indica that allowed him to sleep, last night as every night, are in their usual places, ready to make his portion of the morning’s tasks in and about the cave easier. Yet, perhaps because of the early hour, with its glare of spring sunlight, or perhaps inspired by the regenerative nature of the season itself, he 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.