The big guard, Uk — what a name! — came back and took her arm. As he pulled her into the wedge of lamplight that was the tent opening, she started to look away so that he might not recognize her. Then something made her stare straight at him.
His heavy-featured face was looking directly ahead, neither to the right nor left. A soldier, she realized, following orders — doing nothing more, nothing less. For all his brutality to Rimgia and Abrid, that’s all he was. A pig, a dog, a worm; and yet as much without will, she thought, as without sensitivity. He really doesn’t see me at all, Naä reflected. Do any of them —
“Thank you, Uk. Dismiss the others and return to duty.”
And the big soldier, with a fist flung high, backed through the flap.
The lieutenant stood by the desk against the tent’s striped wall. There was a smell in the tent that made her recall both the smell in Qualt’s yard and the stronger smell in the malodorous basket from the afternoon — without its being exactly like either. Was it the mildewed canvas itself? But no, it was a spoiled scent far closer to animal than vegetable.
Like a black-draped statue, the lieutenant turned in the light of the lamps, one of which — a shallow tripod brazier on a low table by the cot, where a puma skin, the skull still in it, had been thrown across the dark wool blanket (was that what smelled? she wondered) — had a yellow hue: the lamp hanging from the tent’s center by its several brass chains and the lamp on the desk’s corner both burned with the harshest white fire.
Outside the tent, Uk stepped to the left of the entrance, breathed deeply in the darkness, spread his legs, put his hands behind his back, taking the at-ease guard position, and thought: There, that’s done, however little it was. What am I? A man following orders, nothing more, nothing less. I’m a soldier. Forget this sensitivity. It doesn’t become me. Though the night had grown chill around him, there was almost a warmth in the realization, so that, for the first time that day, it seemed he could let his mind drift, let his eyes fix on a bit of light from the tent flaps that fell on a grass tuft and a flat stone while he remembered a stream somewhere, with broken mud, dragonflies, frogs…
When the lieutenant looked at Naä, she lowered her eyes, to let the edge of Rimgia’s shawl fall as low across her face as it could, even as she thought: but he doesn’t know what I’m supposed to look like at all!
The lieutenant walked over to her and pulled at the rope. It was tied so loosely that its two coils dropped down around her feet even as he tugged them once. (There had been three coils when Rimgia had first been tied….) Naä held the shawl closed at her neck. But he did not seem to think it particularly odd. The feeling that none of them, none of them at all, actually saw her became for a moment a dazzling conviction. I could be anyone here, and it would make no difference —
The lieutenant stepped toward the desk again and turned, his black-gloved fingers on some parchments there. A day’s beard peppered his cheek.
“Thou lookest to be hard worked,” she said shortly, assuming the Çironian idiolect. Her own voice sounded breathless and faint to her. But the words would not stop. “Has doing injury worn thee down?”
He glanced up at her with a smile, which, she realized, looked simply tired. In the brazier’s light, his eyes were a smoky hue, as if the irises were circles cut from the undersides of oak leaves, around black pupils.
He said, “I haven’t slept much — or well, recently.” The oddly hoarse voice, with the carrion odor all around, made her feel as if she’d entered some place more primitive, primordial, and basically lawless than any she recalled from her travels.
“Bad dreams?” Bitterness whetted her voice to a greater sharpness than she’d intended.
Kire walked across the rug, reaching up to push a black pom through a black loop. His hood slipped from bronze hair. It and his cloak dropped to the ground to make a motionless puddle of night, frozen in the moment of its fall. Turning to sit on the cot’s edge, absently he felt the prairie lion’s skull with black-gloved fingers. Kire’s green eyes strayed back to Naä’s.
She pulled the shawl tighter and felt her body tingling with impatience for him to make the move, say a word, give her one reason to lunge with the knife — at his neck. Yes, certainly in the neck. Could she slip beneath the back of the tent? And the stabbing itself — could she do it so quickly, so deftly, that there would be no noise? Should she wait for him to turn from her? Or should she move closer now —
“You’re not a very tall woman,” he said, looking up at her. “See over there?” He nodded toward the back of the tent. “One of the ground cords”—and she had the momentarily uncanny feeling that he had heard her thoughts — “at the rear wall has come untied. You can easily slip under the canvas there if you like — yes, you can go. I have no reason to frighten you any more than you’ve already been frightened.” He gestured to the tent wall. “Go on.”
“You want me to go?” she said, dropping the Çironian inflection, but realizing that she had only when he glanced back with raised eyebrow. “Suppose I don’t want to. Suppose I want to stay and find out what kind of man you are.”
“You’re not of Çiron,” he said after a moment. “Who are you?”
“You’re called Kire,” she said. “My name is…Naä. I’m a wanderer, a singer; I’m someone who’s come very much to love this place, over which you wreak fire, slaughter, and misery.”
What he did next rather surprised her. He lifted the puma pelt from the bed and swung it over his back. She caught a glimpse of its underside, where bits of red and things rolled into black fibers and filaments, only just dried, still clung to the uncured hide. With the motion came a heightened smell — it was the source of the stench! The catch under one set of claws, sewn there clumsily with a thong, he hooked to a fastening on the other side of the pelt. Affixed to the Myetran that way, the puma head leered from his shoulder, beside his own.
“Why do you wear that?” she asked.
“This?” He spoke as though the dropping of the cloak and the donning of the hide had been the most unconscious and happenstance of acts. “It was a gift. From a friend. I like it. Cloaks are supposed to blow and ride out behind you on the wind, but ours are too heavy. It takes the glory out of soldiering. This, at least, looks like what it is.” With a black glove, he caressed the face beside his own, with its sealed lids, its bared fangs. “And it will remind you, no matter how pleasant I seem really, I have teeth.” (That he might call this odd and smelly space pleasant almost drew a surprised comment from her. But she held it in.) “Come — if you’re going to stay, sit here, in the chair”—he indicated the seat at his desk — “where we can talk more easily. Won’t you take off your shawl?”
She only held it tighter. But being closer to him would be good. Yes, get closer. She sat in the chair, her knees inches from his.
Yellow fires ran round within the copper rim of the small brazier by his elbow. “You know these people well,” Kire said. “Tell me, are they really as gentle as they appear?”
“Yes,” she said, unable to keep the challenge out of her voice. “They are.”
He smiled. “Couldn’t you tell me something small-minded, mean, and nasty you’ve found among them; or maybe even some overt and active eviclass="underline" a crippled child teased and made fun of? An old woman’s milk stolen from her goat so that she must go hungry, once again? Something that might ease my dreams just a little? Certainly the ordinary pettiness, jealousies, the envy and ire that hold any little town together, beneath the polite greetings and pleasantries in the market square about last week’s rain and today’s fine weather, must be as common here as they are in any other village. You’re a well-traveled woman. You’ve seen none of the provincial nastiness here that makes the children of such places so frequently loathe their home and yearn to flee somewhere with breathing room, intelligent conversation, and fine music?”