The Legend of Broken (82 page)

“Perhaps, Visimar,” Caliphestros replies, “but one thing I said was simply and unarguably truthful; we must know what change in the mountain’s weather this strange mist portends, if any change at all.”

“We shall, would be my guess,” Visimar says. “Akillus has a shrewd eye for details, as well as the ability to gather them quickly.”

“Precisely my impression,” Caliphestros rejoins. “We shall not have long to wait, then.”

“No, not long,” Keera adds softly, from her seat beside Caliphestros’s former acolyte. “But, perhaps, time enough—and distance enough from any ears save your own and ours, my lord—for you to explain, without fear of rancorous interruption, what took place in the Wood, just before the slaughter of the First
Khotor
of Lord Baster-kin’s Guard …?” The statement apparently comes as no surprise to Visimar, making Keera realize that Visimar and Caliphestros must already have discussed the latter’s encounter with the First Wife of Kafra. Keera is taken aback when Visimar turns to face the cart behind them and calls:

“Ho! Heldo-Bah! Veloc! Come help me down, that I may be certain your containers are properly secured. Not that I distrust your assistants—but neither they nor you have ever handled such materials as you now bear.”

“What makes you think we need the help of a man with one leg and half a mind?” Heldo-Bah replies. “Worry about your own cart, acolyte!” Stasi turns to Heldo-Bah and gives him an admonishing look, which, although a brief one, is sufficient to its purpose: “Oh, all right, go get the one old lunatic, Veloc …”

Veloc trots forward briskly, and, as the two wagons halt briefly, gives Visimar a shoulder and two good legs to lean upon, so that he can take his weight from the worn piece of wood and leather that has for so many years been strapped to his once-whole body.

“Let us get back under way as quickly as we can,” Caliphestros commands, at which Keera gets her horses moving once more and he speaks to her privately. “For I would be finished with this tale, ere we reach the meadow Sentek Arnem and I spoke of, when Akillus and his scouts will return …”

Heldo-Bah is soon preoccupied enough with the business of getting Visimar up and onto his cart’s bench that he cannot so much as try to listen to the conversation that unfolds in the conveyance ahead. Once his horses are pulling again, however, the gap-toothed Bane leans to his side and says to his new passenger:

“All right, acolyte—I will make my friendship easy for you: tell me what those two are talking about.”

“Why should you wish to know, Heldo-Bah?” Visimar says, in a congenial but firm fashion. “Even if I told you, it would be as a language deeply foreign to you: mere nonsense-speak that would only conflict with your outlook upon the world.”

Heldo-Bah’s eyes widen. “You know me so well that you can say this with certainty?”

“I believe so,” Visimar answers. Then he turns to the third forager, who walks beside the wagon. “Am I wrong, Veloc?”

Veloc laughs. “You are not, Visimar.” He looks to his gap-toothed friend, and says proudly, “They speak of love, Heldo-Bah, if I am right.”

“Oh,” Heldo-Bah answers. “And so I know nothing of love? Or of loss?”

“I did not say that,” Visimar answers. “Simply not of the type of love that they are discussing.”

“Believe what you like, you two,” Heldo-Bah says, attempting to rise above the insult with rather absurd pride. “But at the same time, return to our story—I want to know how our that clever relic we’ve been traveling with”—he points to Caliphestros—“ever coaxed that supreme beauty into his bed.”

“And why need he have been the one who did the coaxing, Heldo-Bah?” Visimar demands.

“
That
argument again,” the sharp-toothed forager grunts. “Leave such ideas to fools like Veloc, old man—they are beneath you, if you are half the mystical scholar the Tall once believed you.”

His predicament obvious, Visimar shakes his head once. “Not so—and if Veloc will aid me in the occasional translation into your own unique language, Heldo-Bah, I shall relate it.” Immediately, Heldo-Bah nods in firm agreement, not realizing he has been roundly insulted; and the tale continues. “Well,” says Visimar, “I warn you, Heldo-Bah, what I have to say will not be what you have in mind, in
any
way. You desire a story rife with lasciviousness, but the truth runs in quite the other direction.”

“Whatever the direction,” Heldo-Bah, replies, “I desire to know how that old man achieved such a feat as taking that beauteous creature to bed.”

“You will be disappointed,” Visimar repeats. “For, as I expect my master, or former master, is now telling Keera, it was Alandra who took
him
 … And the results were—devastation. For both of them …”

2.

The large cavalry training ground of which Sentek Arnem spoke is bounded by short, cliff-like faces on its western and southern edges, so that the trail from below enters on its eastern edge and then continues upward from its northern. The last length of pathway that the two carts must cover to reach it is not long, but because of the plateau-like formation of the field the approach is steep, and special attention must be paid to the heavily laden carts; yet even such care for calm and quiet cannot prevent the horses from announcing their approach, for they are familiar with the place, having spent much time upon it training for battle; and they find the experience of dragging heavily laden carts toward it confusing and irritating. The remainder of trip, then, is a tricky one, which only gives Heldo-Bah more time to harry Visimar with questions about the romance between Caliphestros and the First Wife of Kafra called Alandra. Not that Heldo-Bah has any difficulty understanding the basic facts of the tale: it is perfectly easy to see how a man like Caliphestros—then ten or more years younger, his body whole and fit, his experience, wisdom, and manner worldly, and his prestige with the God-King Izairn and the latter’s retinue so great that he was given chambers and a laboratory within the high tower of the Inner City’s royal palace itself, and the unprecedented position of Second Minister—could be seduced by the charms of a young woman such as the First Wife of Kafra, given her entrancing green eyes and her shimmering, straight lengths of coal-black hair, to say nothing of a form that to this day embodies all the attributes that the Tall admire. Caliphestros had indeed been tutor to Izairn’s royal offspring, from shortly after he arrived in Broken: throughout the period, that is, that he was also murmured to be the leader of a group (chief among them Visimar) who snatched dead bodies, performed profane experiments upon them, and dabbled in black arts of all kinds, while at the same time performing their royal duties. Which of the offenses was the greater, his accusers eventually asked, sorcery or the supposèd “guidance” of a young girl into becoming his lover? The last was certainly an odd question, to be put by a society whose god and priests called for physical indulgences of all varieties, and between all sexes and ages (and in some cases species). And so the second indictment might never have carried any weight, without the first, which was why Caliphestros’s enemies in the Kafran priesthood—who first suborned the young Prince Saylal—knew that they must also gain the backing of the Royal Princess, if their dream of expelling the influential but no less blasphemous foreigner and his followers was ever to take shape.

And yet, the problem presented itself again and again: in a world where priests not only allowed but ritualized every physical excess, how could a romance (and, Visimar emphasized to Heldo-Bah, it was first and foremost a romance) between two people of merely differing ages, even greatly differing ages, be considered some sort of “perversion”? The only way to convince Alandra that she had been taken, rather than had given herself to Caliphestros, was for the priests to convince her that sorcery had allowed him to enter her very mind when she had been his pupil rather than his lover, and had filled it, not with sacred teachings, but with blasphemous science—and desires.

“Great Moon,” Heldo-Bah breathes when he hears this: for he is, as he has protested, not so unversed in the ways of both love and lust that he cannot comprehend such ideas. “I knew that those priests were scheming devils, and the people who followed them no more than shorn sheep, but … So you have no doubt that she
did
truly love him, once, Visimar?”

“I saw it in her,” Veloc answers, before the old cripple can speak.

“Oh,” Heldo-Bah groans. “Of course
you
saw it, historian. You see all, that you may one day sing of it to our children …”

“I did not say that I
understood
it, Heldo-Bah,” Veloc whispers in protest. “But I saw
something.
And Keera saw it, as well, and
she
understood it, and explained it to me, later. The pain in his eyes, and in the priestess’s, too, if only for brief instants. Intermingled with all their bitter statements …”

“Yes, bitter,” Visimar says. “For, as has often been observed, there is no bitterness like that which results from love willfully destroyed. And the happiness that my master and Alandra knew
was
willfully destroyed; its death was plotted, just as surely as was the murder of Oxmontrot, and carried out just as cruelly. And if she had any doubts, all the priests needed do was use her own ambition to exploit them: after all, they said, had he shared his
deepest
secrets, his greatest knowledge, with her, even if such sorcery was blasphemous? Was that love, to give less than all he knew to her? In truth, my master was only protecting Alandra, for he knew the role she had been born to play in Broken: had he involved her fully in his work, she might well have been mutilated and almost certainly murdered on the edge of Davon Wood, as well. Yet from the moment that she began to believe he was keeping powerful forces and knowledge from her—secrets that she saw, not as ‘sorcerous,’ but as magical—his indictment was only a matter of time. We could all see it, and begged him to leave the city. But he would not go. You see, he never acknowledged that Alandra craved power more than she loved him; and, as I say, if denied the full range of
his
power, she would take the more vulgar form (however ‘sacred’ it might be portrayed as being) offered by the priests, and view him, not as protecting her, but as ever more determined to hold the position of superiority between them. Thus did he seal his own fate, first with the priests, and then with her; and even more painfully, for him, she began to see him more and more as simply a wicked, even blasphemous old man, who had tainted rather than adored her.”

“Hak …,”
Heldo-Bah whispers; but there is sympathy in the oath, now, something like what he displayed to the white panther when he discovered that it was the young Rendulic Baster-kin who had killed her cubs. “The poor old fool … Well, it only demonstrates that you can travel the world and learn the ways of the great philosophers, and still make the mistakes of a Moonstruck village boy who has never seen so much as the next town, where women are involved …”

Visimar turns for a moment, to study the filthy, foul driver of the cart with some surprise. “That is a remarkably apt statement, Heldo-Bah.”

“Do not expect them at regular intervals,” Veloc comments with a smile. “But he
does
make them …”

Heldo-Bah quickly moves for one of his knives, but Visimar, just as quickly, stays his hand, with the same surprising strength of one who has had to manipulate a staff and crude wooden leg over many years. “None of such foolishness,” Visimar says. “Heed me closely, both of you, for we are only now arriving at the most interesting part of the story.”

“We are?” Heldo-Bah replies, relaxing his arm and urging his horses on. “There is something of greater interest than bedding the First Wife of Kafra?”

“Indeed there is, Heldo-Bah,” Visimar says quietly. “For the last time I met my master in the Wood to bring him supplies, shortly before the priests took me away for the ordeal of my
Denep-stahla,
his mind was still in pieces, great as his affection for the white panther obviously was. He knew that, once Alandra had taken the decision to condemn him as a monster and a demon, she would only cultivate the feeling. And that cut into him deeply. Yet now, that wound has been almost wholly healed. In some way, that great beast has lived up to the name he gave her—
Anastasiya
—in that she brought him back to life, when resignation to death would have been the easiest path. Not only brought him back, but changed him, somehow: she has taken away much of the arrogance he once possessed, and that led him to his ultimate crisis concerning the priests and Alandra. How does an animal, however powerful, accomplish this? Can neither of you tell me, after so many years in the Wood?”

Both Heldo-Bah and Veloc appear somewhat embarrassed by their inability to give Visimar the answer he seeks; and finally Veloc says simply, “It is my sister who knows of these things, far better than do we.”

“Well,” Visimar sighs, slightly dumbfounded. “There must be
some
explanation.”

“There is,” Heldo-Bah mutters, almost seeming, for a moment, self-reproachful for speaking of such things. “And, while Veloc is correct, and we cannot supply you with the details, old man, there is one basic fact of which I have become aware, and from which, I suspect, the details spring.” He points ahead, to the figures of Caliphestros and Stasi: two beings who seem, in the approaching twilight, to combine into one creature. “There are times when one’s own race of beings is the last sort of creature that can or will help or care if you live or die. But if a great heart, like that cat,
does
so care,
chooses
to so care—chooses, in short,
you
—it fills a place that no human can occupy. No mere human, no potion, no powder, no drug—and believe me, I’ve tried the ones he creates to ease his pain, and they’re very effective. But not effective enough. Nothing is, save another great heart. And the reverse is true, as well: Stasi’s soul has been mended by a human’s. I have seen it between them.” Spitting over the mountainside, Heldo-Bah shakes his head. “And so, if that old man is still sane and still capable of doing what he now seems to be doing—seeking knowledge and justice—that is the only reason why. Don’t ask me to tell you
how
it happens—talk to Keera, as Veloc says, for that. I know only that it does …”