I, too, went searching shortly, destructive and covetous as any of them, with a sense of I knew not what gnawing at my spirits.

I walked right through the empty tent homes, and reached the last pavilion, and realized I had selected well.

This pavilion was the largest, set a little back, half hidden, around an angle of the eastern wall, and ten black horses were penned there. By the pen one of the dark-haired slave men was squatting. He was like those I had seen earlier, though this one was wide awake. I had met with none in the fight, and supposed they had run off, so I glared at him, and shook the sword, anticipating a prompt view of his heels.

His face remained blank and wooden as a slat, and sluggish as muddy water, he stepped aside to let me by. I did not trust his docility and that made me reconsider.

We had dealt with around sixty men in this camp, but the force that had come on the valley had been stronger—seventy or eighty. Likely some had ridden ahead to another destination, but here were ten horses by a large tent. Might there be ten men inside, prepared for me?

I spun about on the dark slave, and caught him by his gray-fleshed neck. I asked him questions, but I had lost the magic speech, and either he did not understand the tribal tongue or had no wish to. Finally I fisted him asleep, having had enough killing and foreseeing more, and went to the pavilion timidly as a bride.

Before it a golden banner, real gold beaten thin as a wafer and painted with a crested bird in white enamel, whistled softly in the wind on its pole. The pavilion was crimson velvet, almost black with age. Tassels of green-tarnished gold cascaded across the drapery of a hidden entrance, artfully showing where the opening might be discovered. I went to another side and stuck the sharp city sword straight in the velvet and tore it up like rotten flax. Then I dashed into the tent, alert to deal instant death on either hand.

No need. He had been there before me, the skull-headed gentleman.

A lamp of amber glass depended from the roof frame, showing the scene in perfect detail.

There were but three of them, after all. They had pulled aside the elegant rugs with which the floor of the tent was strewn, and fixed their own blades in the craggy floor of the ruin beneath, point uppermost, then neatly fallen on them.

I had often heard the tale of men who preferred suicide to this or that shame or deprivation or terror. However, hearing the tale and seeing the evidence are not the same. It shook me, though. It made me think at once, rationally and with an abject, instinctive loathing, what would be my test, my ultimate unbearable burden, that I would choose my own iron in my belly rather than endure?