Dead soldiers and their wives and children were all rotting back into soil, and the soil grew the grass, and these two men would cut it to make the cemetery look tidy, and then more grass would grow and they would cut that, and more folk would die and we would bury them. I thought of the body that had been stolen and how outraged I’d been, and all the effort I’d put into recovering it. What if I’d left him there, a soldier whose name I didn’t now recall, and the tree roots had penetrated his body and the beetles and ants had carried off his flesh? How was that any different from burying him in a hole and marking the spot by writing his name on a plank of wood? I thought about what I’d claimed as my life, that I would call myself a soldier and guard the place where bodies were buried. And I would do this because I was the second son my mother bore, and therefore I must wear the king’s uniform on my back and, at least ostensibly, serve him.

It was all so meaningless when I looked at it that way. It was meaningless in the same way as when I stood up from a game and then looked down on the scatter of playing pieces, and realized that they all were just bits of polished stone on a wooden board marked with squares. All the meaning they’d had moments before when I’d been trying to win a game were meanings that I’d imbued them with. Of themselves, neither they nor the board had any significance. I could not decide if I were just a playing piece, or if I’d finally stepped far enough away from the game someone else had made of my life to discover that I no longer wished to be a playing piece. I shook my head as if I could rattle my own brain, trying to find my way back to my own world where all these things were accepted and important and mattered.

“Something wrong, Nevare?” Ebrooks asked me abruptly. I realized that both he and Kesey were looking at me oddly. I’d been staring sightlessly out the window. Now I looked at them. Their faces were damp with sweat and smudged with dirt, but their eyes seemed genuinely concerned.

“You know what they’re saying about me in town?” I asked them.

Ebrooks looked away and said nothing. Kesey looked stricken. It was enough.

“Why didn’t you say something to me?” I demanded.

“Aw, Nevare,” Kesey exclaimed, “We know that ain’t true. You ain’t got that kind of mean in you.”

“I hope not,” I said. “I just don’t understand how a rumor like that could get started, or why so many people would be willing to believe it.”

“Well, it’s how you are, you know,” Kesey said ponderously. “Living out here, all alone, near the forest. And being, you know, big like you are. And no one knowing much about you. It just, well, maybe it makes it easier for them to make up something about you. You ought to come to town more often, drink with the boys, let ’em see you aren’t so strange.”