The taste of the whiskey and the drunken singing of the amputees. Most wouldn’t know till morning that they had lost a limb. In the meantime, it would be hard to sleep.

Things you could imagine but you never saw, you could make perfect in your mind. You could control them. Yet as a child he hadn’t predicted there would be opportunities for pleasure here too—the smell of his dirty uniform, slept in, worked in. The anaesthetizing taste of whiskey. Being too tired to think of consequences lining up like policemen. The coals settling down. Life seemed precious when you saw so many ways to lose it.

The doctor stretched his leg out towards the campfire and leaned back. What made him happy was another image, one he carried with him like a snapshot. Charity Starbridge lay asleep, curled up away from him, her mouth open a little. As he watched, she turned over onto her back.

“Think there’ll be trouble?” asked a man.

Thanakar shrugged. It felt good not to care.

“It’s no good taking that line,” said the man. “You could have fucked this whole thing up.”

True enough, once again, thought the doctor wearily. That afternoon he had gotten into a fight.

“Not that I blame you,” said the man. “It’s just that things with the bishop are touchy enough.”

That afternoon they had been busy. Men had been stretched out all over the rocks. There had been no time for foolishness, but one of the surgeons was the bishop’s spy. He had put up an altar on the ridge and performed unproductive magic most of the morning, waving a feather fan. Thanakar had gotten tired of seeing him up there, his red robes flapping underneath his apron. So he had sent word for him to stop, to go work in a shallow cave where some of the most hopeless cases had been laid out of the wind.

There were three Starbridges, whose names and obligations had driven them to acts of crazy heroism.

And two others, general infantry, but when Thanakar came in later to see, he found the surgeon fussing with the corpse of an officer, while right beside him lay a common soldier with the most appalling injuries.

Thanakar had heard him crying from across the field. But when he knelt down over him, the surgeon stopped his hand, saying, “Don’t touch him. Don’t pollute yourself.” He showed Thanakar the boy’s forearm and the tattoos of his horoscope. “Glass miner,” he said. “Human filth. He deserves this. It’ll teach him. Look at his complexion. Look how pale.” And he had stooped down to mark the boy’s shoulder with his scalpel, and cut the symbol for the ninth planet into his flesh.

But as he made the incision, Thanakar had grabbed his wrist and slapped his hand away. He had stood and kicked him as he went down, and hurt his leg, so that later he could barely stand. Then he had wasted more time than he should have on the boy, who died anyway. He had given him the last of the morphine, and stopped him from crying out so loud.