I said I had not.
“One of our patrols reported him, and when the chiliarch heard of it he sent them back to bring him, seeing we were sure to need one in a day or so. They swear they didn’t touch him, but they had to bring him back on a litter. I don’t know if he’s one of your comrades, but you might want to take a look.” I promised I would, and after thanking the soldiers for their hospitality, left them. I was worried about Dorcas, and their questioning, though it was clearly well meant, had made me uneasy. There were too many things I could not explain—how I had come to be injured, for example, if I had admitted I was the man who had been carried in the night before, and where Dorcas had come from. Not really understanding those things myself bothered me at least as much, and I felt, as we always feel when there is a whole sector of our lives that cannot bear light, that no matter how far the last question had been from one of the forbidden subjects, the next would pierce to the heart of it.
Dorcas was awake and standing by my bed, where someone had left a cup of steaming broth. She was so delighted to see me that I felt happy myself, as though joy were as contagious as a pestilence. “I thought you were dead,” she told me. “You were gone, and your clothes were gone, and I thought they had taken them to bury you in.”
“I’m all right,” I said. “What happened last night?”
Dorcas became serious at once. I made her sit on the bed with me and eat the bread I had brought and drink the broth while she answered. “You remember fighting with the man who wore that strange helmet, I’m sure. You put on a mask and went into the arena with him, although I begged you not to. Almost at once he hit you in the chest, and you fell. I remember seeing the leaf, a horrible thing like a flatworm made of iron, half in your body and turning red as it drank your blood.
“Then it fell away. I don’t know how to describe it. It was as though everything I had seen had been wrong. But it wasn’t wrong—I remember what I saw. You got up again, and you looked… I don’t know. As if you were lost, or some part of you was far away. I thought he was going to kill you at once, but the ephor protected you, saying he had to allow you to get your avern. His was quiet, the way yours bad been when you pulled it up in that awful place, but yours had begun to writhe and open its flower—I thought it had been open before, the white thing with the swirl of petals, only now I believe I was thinking too much of roses, and it had not been open at all. There was something underneath, something else, a face like the face poison would have, if poison had a face. “You didn’t notice. You picked it up and it began to curl toward you, slowly, as though it were only half awake. But the other man, the hipparch, couldn’t believe what he had seen. He was staring at you, and that woman Agia was shouting to him. And all at once he tumed and ran away. The people who were watching didn’t want him to, they wanted to see someone killed. So they tried to stop him, and he…”
Her eyes were brimming with tears; she tumed her head to keep me from seeing them. I said, “He struck several of them with his avern, and I suppose killed them. Then what happened?”
“It wasn’t just that he struck them. It struck at them, after the first two, like a snake. The ones who were cut with the leaves didn’t die at once, they screamed, and some of them ran and fell and got up and ran again, as if they were blind, knocking other people down. And at last a big man struck him from behind and a woman who had been fighting somewhere else came with a braquemar. She cut the avern—not sidewise but down the stem so it split. Then some of the men held the hipparch and I heard her blade clash on his helmet. “You were just standing there. I wasn’t sure you even knew he was gone, and your avern was bending back toward your face. I thought of what the woman had done and hit at it with your sword. It was heavy, so very heavy at first, and then it was hardly heavy at all. But when I slashed down with it I felt as if I could have struck the head from a bison. Only I had forgotten to take off the sheath. But it knocked the avern out of your hand, and I took you and led you away . …”
“Where?” I asked.
She shivered and dipped a piece of bread in the steaming broth. “I don’t know. I didn’t care. It was just so good to be walking with you, to know I was taking care of you the way you had taken care of me before we got the avern. But I was cold, terribly cold, when night came. I put your cloak all around you and fastened it in front, and you didn’t seem to be cold, so I took this mantle and wrapped myself in it. My dress was falling to pieces. It still is.” I said, “I wanted to buy you another one when we were at the inn.” She shook her head, chewing the tough crust. “Do you know, I think this is the first food I’ve had in a long, long time. I have pains in my stomach—that’s why I drank the wine there—but this makes it feel better. I hadn’t realized how weak I was getting.
“But I didn’t want a new dress from there because I would have had to wear it for a long time, and it would always have reminded me of that day. You can buy me a dress now, if you like, because it will remind me of this day, when I thought you were dead when you were really well.
“Anyway, we got back into the city somehow. I was hoping to find a place to stop where you could lie down, but there were only big houses with terraces and balustrades. That sort of thing. Some soldiers came galloping up and asked if you were a carnifex. I didn’t know the word, but I remembered what you had told me and so I told them you were a torturer, because soldiers have always seemed to me to be a kind of torturer and I knew they would help us. They tried to get you to ride, but you fell off. So some of them tied their capes between two lances and laid you on that, and put the ends of the lances in the stirrup straps of two destriers. One of them wanted to take me up into his saddle, but I wouldn’t do it. I walked beside you all the way and sometimes I talked to you, but I don’t think you heard me.”
She drained the last of the broth. “Now I want to ask you a question. When I was washing myself behind the screen, I could hear you and Agia whispering about a note. Later you were looking for someone in the inn. Will you tell me about that?”
“Why didn’t you ask before?”
“Because Agia was with us. If you had found out anything, I didn’t want her to hear what it was.”
“I’m sure Agia could discover anything I discovered,” I said. “I don’t know her well, and in fact I don’t feel I know her as well as I know you. But I know her well enough to realize that she’s much cleverer than I am.” Dorcas shook her head again. “She’s the sort of woman who’s good at making puzzles for other people, but not at solving ones she didn’t make herself. I think she thinks—I don’t know—side-wise. So no one else can follow it. She’s the kind of woman people say thinks like a man, but those women don’t think like real men at all, in fact, they think less like real men than most women do. They just don’t think like women. The way they do think is hard to follow, but that doesn’t mean it’s clear, or deep.”
I told her about the note, and what it said, and mentioned that although it had been destroyed I had copied it out on the inn’s paper and found it to be the same paper, and the same ink.
“So someone wrote it there,” she said pensively. “Probably one of the inn servants, because he called the ostler by name. But what does it mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can tell you why it was put where it was. I sat there, on that horn settee, before you sat down. It made me happy, I recall, because you sat beside me. Do you remember if the waiter—he must have carried the note, whether he wrote it or not—put the tray there before I got up to bathe?”