The Living
Soldier
I put aside the half-read letter and stared at
the man who had written it. Death’s shot had not flown wide for
him; now he stared at the sun with lusterless blue eyes, one nearly
winking, the other fully open.
Long before that moment I should have
recalled the Claw, but I had not. Or perhaps I had only suppressed
the thought in my eagerness to steal the rations in the dead man’s
pack, never reasoning that I might have trusted him to share his
food with the rescuer who had recalled him from death. Now, at the
mention of Vodalus and his followers (who I felt would surely
assist me if only I were able to find them), I remembered it at
once and took it out. It seemed to sparkle in the summer sunlight,
brighter indeed than I had ever seen it without its sapphire case.
I touched him with it, then, urged by I cannot say what impulse,
put it into his mouth.
When this, too, effected nothing, I
took it between my thumb and first finger and pushed its point into
the soft skin of his forehead. He did not move or breathe, but a
drop of blood, fresh and sticky as that of a living man, welled
forth and stained my fingers.
I withdrew them, wiped my hand with
some leaves, and would have gone back to his letter if I had not
thought I heard a stick snap some distance away. For a moment I
could not choose among hiding, fleeing, and fighting; but there was
little chance of successfully doing the first, and I had already
had enough of the second. I picked up the dead man’s falchion,
wrapped myself in my cloak, and stood waiting.
No one came—or at least, no one visible
to me. The wind made a slight sighing among the treetops. The fly
seemed to have gone. Perhaps I had heard nothing more than a deer
bounding through the shadows. I had traveled so far without any
weapon that would permit me to hunt that I had almost forgotten the
possibility. Now I examined the falchion and found myself wishing
it had been a bow.
Something behind me stirred, and I
turned to look.
It was the soldier. A tremor seemed to
have seized him—if I had not seen his corpse, I would have thought
him dying. His hands shook, and there was a rattling in his throat.
I bent and touched his face; it was as cold as ever, and I had the
impulsive need to kindle a fire.
There had been no fire-making gear in
his pack, but I knew every soldier must carry such things. I
searched his pockets and found a few aes, a hanging dial with which
to tell time, and a flint and striking bar. Tinder lay in plenty
under the trees–the danger was that I might set fire to all of it.
I swept a space clear with my hands, piling the sweepings in the
center, set them ablaze, then gathered a few rotten boughs, broke
them, and laid them on the fire.
Its light was brighter than I had
expected—day was almost done, and it would soon be dark. I looked
at the dead man. His hands no longer shook; he was silent. The
flesh of his face seemed warmer. But that was, no doubt, no more
than the heat of the fire. The spot of blood on his forehead had
nearly dried, yet it seemed to catch the light of the dying sun,
shining as some crimson gem might, some pigeon’s blood ruby spilled
from a treasure hoard. Though our fire gave little smoke, what
there was seemed to me fragrant as incense, and like incense it
rose straight until it was lost in the gathering dark, suggesting
something I could not quite recall. I shook myself and found more
wood, breaking and stacking it until I had a pile I thought large
enough to last the night.
Evenings were not nearly so cold here
in Orithyia as they had been in the mountains, or even in the
region about Lake Diuturna, so that although I recalled the blanket
I had found in the dead man’s pack, I felt no need of it. My task
had warmed me, the food I had eaten had invigorated me, and for a
time I strode up and down in the twilight, brandishing the falchion
when such warlike gestures accorded with my thoughts but taking
care to keep the fire between the dead man and myself.
My memories have always appeared with
the intensity, almost, of hallucinations, as I have said often in
this chronicle. That night I felt I might lose myself forever in
them, making of my life a loop instead of a line; and for once I
did not resist the temptation but reveled in it. Everything I have
described to you came crowding back to me, and a thousand things
more. I saw Eata’s face and his freckled hand when he sought to
slip between the bars of the gate of the necropolis, and the storm
I had once watched impaled on the towers of the Citadel, writhing
and lashing out with its lightnings; I felt its rain, colder and
fresher far than the morning cup in our refectory, trickle down my
face. Dorcas’s voice whispered in my ears: “Sitting in a window …
trays and a rood. What will you do, summon up some Erinys to
destroy me?”
Yes. Yes, indeed, I would have if I
could. If I had been Hethor, I would have drawn them from some
horror behind the world, birds with the heads of hags and the
tongues of vipers. At my order they would have threshed the forests
like wheat and beaten cities flat with their great wings … and yet,
if I could, I would have appeared at the final moment to save
her—not walking coldly off afterward in the way we all wish to do
when, as children, we imagine ourselves rescuing and humiliating
the loved one who has given us some supposed slight, but raising
her in my arms.
Then for the first time, I think, I
knew how terrible it must have been for
her, who had been hardly more than a child when death had come, and
who had been dead so long, to have been called back.
And thinking of that, I remembered the
dead soldier whose food I had eaten and whose sword I held, and I
paused and listened to hear if he drew breath or stirred. Yet I was
so lost in the worlds of memory that it seemed to me the soft
forest earth under my feet had come from the grave Hildegrin the
Badger had despoiled for Vodalus, and the whisper of the leaves was
the soughing of the cypresses in our necropolis and the rustle of
the purpleflowered roses, and that I listened, listened in vain for
breath from the dead woman Vodalus had lifted with the rope beneath
her arms, lifted in her white shroud.
At last, the croaking of a nightjar
brought me to myself. I seemed to see the soldier’s white face
staring at me, and went around the fire and searched until I found
the blanket, and draped his corpse with it.
Dorcas belonged, as I now realized, to
that vast group of women (which may, indeed, include all women) who
betray us—and to that special type who betray us not for some
present rival but for their own pasts. Just as Morwenna, whom I had
executed at Saltus, must have poisoned her husband and her child
because she recalled a time in which she was free and, perhaps,
virginal, so Dorcas had left me because I had not existed (had, as
she must unconsciously have seen it, failed to exist) in that time
before her doom fell upon her.
(For me, also, that is the golden time. I
think I must have treasured the memory of the crude, kindly boy who
fetched books and blossoms to my cell largely because I knew him to
be the last love before the doom, the doom that was not, as I
learned in that prison, the moment at which the tapestry was cast
over me to muffle my outcry, nor my arrival at the Old Citadel in
Nessus, nor the slam of the cell door behind me, nor even the
moment when, bathed in such a light as never shines on Urth, I felt
my body rise in rebellion against me—but that instant in which I
drew the blade of the greasy paring knife he had brought, cold and
mercifully sharp, across my own neck. Possibly we all come to such
a time, and it is the will of the Caitanya that each damn herself
for what she has done. Yet can we be hated so much? Can we be hated
at all? Not when I can still remember his kisses on my breasts,
given, not breathing to taste the perfume of my flesh—as
Aphrodisius’s were, and that young man’s, the nephew of the
chiliarch of the Companions—but as though he were truly hungry for
my flesh. Was something watching us? He has eaten of me now.
Awakened by the memory, I lift my hand and run fingers through his
hair.)
I slept late, wrapped in my cloak. There is a
payment made by Nature to those who undergo hardships; it is that
the lesser ones, at which people whose lives have been easier would
complain, seem almost comfortable. Several times before I actually
rose, I woke and congratulated myself to
think how easily I had spent this night compared to those I had
endured in the mountains.
At last the sunlight and the singing
birds brought me to myself. On the other side of our dead fire, the
soldier shifted and, I think, murmured something. I sat up. He had
thrown the blanket aside and lay with his face to the sky. It was a
pale face with sunken cheeks; there were dark shadows beneath the
eyes and deeply cut lines running from the mouth; but it was a
living face. The eyes were truly closed, and breath sighed in the
nostrils.
For a moment I was tempted to run
before he woke. I had his falchion still—I started to replace it,
then took it back for fear he would attack me with it. His coutel
still protruded from the tree, making me think of Agia’s crooked
dagger in the shutter of Casdoe’s house. I thrust it back into the
sheath at his belt, mostly because I was ashamed to think that I,
armed with a sword, should fear any man with a knife.
His eyelids fluttered, and I drew away,
remembering a time when Dorcas had been frightened to find me
bending over her when she woke. So that I should not appear a dark
figure, I pushed back my cloak to show my bare arms and chest,
browned now by so many days’ suns. I could hear the sighing of his
breath; and when it changed from sleep to waking, it seemed to me a
thing almost as miraculous as the passage from death to
life.
Empty-eyed as a child, he sat up and
looked about him. His lips moved, but only sound without sense came
forth. I spoke to him, trying to make my tone friendly. He listened
but did not seem to understand, and I recalled how dazed the uhlan
had been, whom I had revived on the road to the House
Absolute.
I wished that I had water to offer him,
but I had none. I drew out a piece of the salt meat I had taken
from his pack, broke it into two, and shared that with him
instead.
He chewed and seemed to feel a little
better. “Stand up,” I said. “We must find something to drink.” He
took my hand and allowed me to pull him erect, but he could hardly
stand. His eyes, which had been so calm at first, grew wilder as
they became more alert. I had the feeling that he feared the trees
might rush upon us like a pride of lions, yet he did not draw his
coutel or attempt to reclaim the falchion.
When we had taken three or four steps,
he tottered and nearly fell. I let him lean upon my arm, and
together we made our way through the wood to the road.