Charity’s breathing settled down, and she rolled over onto her back. The bones of her pelvis and the bottom of her rib cage stood out in a stark circle, filling with shadows as her belly sank down. Her skin along the ridge seemed stretched almost to breaking. Again he put his hand out to her, and again he hesitated.

* * *

In the morning, Thanakar went off to war. And in a little while he came to think: happiness, like most things, increases in value with its rarity. At first, hitching up his mules and looking at the glum faces around him, he had felt arrogant and alive, a rich man among poor. But as the weeks went by, and the wagons filled with wounded men, and the tents went up in villages of starving people, then Thanakar’s happiness made him uneasy, and he guarded it like a man carrying money through an alleyway, afraid that some skinny hand might snatch it. He held it in a secret place, and only took it out from time to time when he was alone.

He had dreamed of war ever since he was a child, and been ashamed he couldn’t go. God had made the Starbridges the wardens of Earth, of all the nine planets, and the two keys he had put upon their ring were the army and the church. A man not part of either found it hard to justify himself, because prison wardens have a job to do to earn their keep. And even though he had never believed much in the myth, it didn’t matter. He found it hard not to see himself through other people’s eyes, through the shrewd, assessing glances of windows, and superannuated officers who had known his father.

But you had to be well rested, to care what people thought of you. It was strange how quickly you lost the habit of imagining. Dreaming of war, his mind had made beautiful pictures, and because he had been a realistic child, even the most beautiful were also horrifying and grotesque. Still, they were pictures, because the mind’s eye is more developed than its hand or tongue or ear. But at the war itself, sitting at nightfall near the fire, drinking out of a tin can, he found that sounds, tastes, smells made up most of what he knew. Visual images were drowned in them. Coming up from the city, long black lines of soldiers had writhed like snakes over the rocks, and at first he had twisted backward in his saddle and sat gazing, trying to impress the image in his mind. But after a day he had stopped looking, and when, in camp after six weeks, he looked back on that trip, all that really came to mind was the dust at midday and the wind licking his face with its tongue coarse and dry.

Perhaps, he thought, stretching out his sore leg towards the campfire, if he were ever really in a battle, it would be different. Then there would be lots to see. But he was always where a battle had just been, and sometimes he could hear it going on over the next hill. Stretching out his leg, he turned and watched the canvas tents behind him and the shadows of the surgeons still at work, made huge by the lamps inside, made grotesque by the bellying wind. Still, he thought, all he felt like remembering from this night would be the taste of the whiskey in the can, the same episcopal whiskey they were using as anaesthetic now.