“He’s a great commander.”

“He’s a lunatic. Sir.”

Micum laughed. “Perhaps. I’d think you’d be obliged to him, getting you into uniform. Without him, you’d still be delivering babies.”

“I’m not complaining, sir,” said the man. “But it was bound to happen. My great-great-grandfather was a doctor in this war.”

“How long ago was that?”

The man squinted. “One full year.”

“There, you see? You’re the first doctors this season. In my time, we never had such luxuries. Officers, of course, but all the rest, we just had to shoot them in rows and send them back for the priests to sort out. They’d be having parties just behind the lines. Funeral rites. You could hear them every night, and see the fireworks. It was cold, back then. This whole area was under snow, the first time I came out. Of course, we were never this close in. We were winning, that season. At one point, we almost thought we’d won.”

They were sitting around a fire, in a hollow in the rocks out of the wind: Micum and Thanakar, and the man. He was a Starbridge halfbreed on his father’s side, but unlike most, he had been acknowledged by his father and sent to school. That accounted for his easy manners with all classes, and he was not likely to be punished for them either, because he was a good doctor, and in the city he had been licensed to treat Starbridges, though only with his right hand. He was a big man, and his hair was red, not one of the criminal shades, but too bright for comfort, and if he had gotten into other kinds of trouble, it might have been held against him. In the city he had dyed it, as many did.

Now it was beginning to grow out. His name was Patan Bloodstar. His mother had been a nurse.

“Got a letter from Charity,” said the commissar. “She sends her love.”

Thanakar frowned, wondering what a letter from Charity would look like. “I am well. I hope you are well. I saw something today that made me happy, thinking of you . . .” There were form books for all types of letters, prepared by the bishop’s council for the use of wives, and if the letters varied depending on the horoscope, the season, the date, their tone never varied. Charity would follow them scrupulously, Thanakar imagined, and if she allowed in any bitterness or substance, it would take a clearer eye than the commissar’s to see it. Or if there was any bitterness, perhaps she would express it in the sarcastic beauty of her calligraphy, the complicated ideographs which proclaimed her education and housed her foolish sentiments as a palace would a slave.

“Charity is my wife,” explained the commissar.

Bloodstar stared at him, and made a little circle with his lips. “You’re a liberal man, sir,” he said after a pause.

“Not at all. Thanakar is like a son to me.”

“Well, sir,” said Bloodstar. “Here’s to the end of stupidness.” He toasted with the can. “My grandmother told me that in summer married women used to walk out in the streets. I guess it was too hot to stay inside. I’d like to live to see it.”