He sat down at the table, and set the revolver in front of him with a click. It looked like a child’s western toy. I thought of the mare nosing off Cort’s blankets in a panic, trying to get to her baby.

“Does that thing work?” I asked.

“If you stand close enough.” He turned it to point away. The chair creaked beneath his weight.

“Is there another way to put her down?”

“I wish she could die on her own,” he said. “But she’d just be hurting.”

I took his hand off the revolver, leaving the gun on the table. His skin was clean from tap water, chapped from lifting the baby outside without gloves. I raised the hand to my face to feel it rough and cold on my skin, and he moved to let me sit on his knee.

He made a noise that sounded like a sob but couldn’t be; I’d never seen him cry. The baby was outside waiting, and Cort’s hair against my face smelled like shampoo and hay. He put his arms around me and pulled me closer, and we sat there a long time, not saying anything, so the filly could stay.

LAST OF THE
WHITE SLAVES

WE MOVED TO THE stone terrace after dinner, to coffees laid out on the low table. The men had resigned themselves to not being offered brandy; they would pirate the bottle when Eugénie went to bed. The wind was down and the sea flat all the way to the dark island of Poros, with its cluster of village lights; on the low table, a candle in a glass shield burned still and straight. I watched through the mounted telescope as the young Greek couple across the bay drew their blinds for the night. North in the Balkans, NATO was bombing, but here it was quiet.

“It’s terrible,” Eugénie said. “You don’t know what it’s like to be in a city with bombs coming down.”

It was true, we didn’t. There were five of us, all younger than Eugénie. My husband and I, Americans, were counted the most ignorant and most at fault. The new arrivals were an English couple, too young to have known war. The extra man was French and even younger; he sat at Eugénie’s side at dinner and flattered her. Eugénie claimed Greece, though her accent was British, and her passport could have been anything, with all her husbands.

“I don’t know if I should stay here,” she said. “The Turks will take Cyprus now, with everything in chaos.”