However, the wine had medicine in it, and soon after I had drunk it, the floor tilted and the light of the window went out.

I recovered my senses when the five physicians were still present.

The chamber was scattered with their anomalous and eccentric instruments. They themselves were of the bronze order, and wore Erran’s dark ocher. They were muttering over their philosophies like five elderly hens, one of whom has laid a square egg.

The dazzle in the apricot window was still golden. At first this puzzled me. Then I realized it was the opposite casement, and that the dawn was long past and the day had descended to sunset as I lay drugged on my couch, naked as a babe under their dissections.

I felt no apathy or weakness now, rather a towering mad rage.

I came off the couch in one great jump, and the five yellow hens retreated before me, clucking.

“Sir, sir, be calm,” one cried. “We are Lord Erran’s ministers. We have done you no harm. Merely examined your body in order to ascertain the source of its wondrous healing—”

They had left, alas, no handy surgeon’s knife for me to grasp.

I shouted: “Well, then, what you have discovered? Am I a sorcerer? Or a god, maybe?” I was thinking that if I panicked them, they would fly out of the door, leaving it wide for me to follow. Then I, presumably clad only in my skin, would make for freedom, unhampered by guard or sentry. At length, however, I regained some of my wits, abandoned the scheme, and sat down on the couch, at which the physicians gathered their paraphernalia and crept to the door. This, after they had tapped on it, was opened and the gentlemen departed.

Then the lethargy came, turgid as the sludge of some river.

I lay back on the couch and the sunset died gloriously in the window glass. I was a fool. A dog, kept in an opulent kennel. And this reality mated with a heritage eternally lost, and an abnormality that made me cringe when I remembered it. For I was sobering now, in the way every drunkard must, recalling my abilities with fear and amazement. My whole life I had accepted the unacceptable. But the chase had caught me up. It seemed to me at that moment that I might as well serve Erran, for all the use I had or ever could make of myself.

There came eventually another, more gentle whisper of the curtain at the door. I did not raise my head to see who had added themselves this time to the concourse in and out.

“Whoever you are,” I said, “the pet slave is in a killing mood. You had better take your leave.”

A couple of soft little cries went up like two pigeons disturbed on a roof. At that I looked.

They were two girls, ambered in the last of the afterglow, their faces bared, pretty as flowers, their bodies almost bare under thin dresses of what seemed pleated cobweb. They were not really afraid of me, for they knew men, or thought they did, and had been sent to pleasure one. But, finding me naked and angry, they had acted, as any schooled whore will do.