The commissar was studying the enemy through his field glasses. “Incredible,” he said. “They are weeping. You can see the tears.”

Thanakar looked back towards the Keyhole. From a gap in the rocks the first of the antinomials rode out, men and women riding on horseback, jumping over boulders. They rode and turned and mixed in a whirling pattern every moment more complex, because at every moment there were more of them. They wheeled and changed direction, spreading out around them in a spinning circle, the dying elephant at its hub, and then they turned and circled Aspe as he stood with his bugle to his lips. They carried rifles and machetes in scabbards on their saddles, but they never touched them, and if the adventists had opened fire, they could have killed great numbers. But all this time the enemy stood as if paralyzed as the antinomials spun and circled closer and closer, and it got dark. Soon light touched only the topmost towers of the monastery, and the rest of the valley filled with shadows, like a bowl filling up with ashes under the burning sky.

In time, the enemy lit torches and retreated up the road. Then the guns talked from the mountains and spat long streamers of green fire, trying to find the antinomials in their range, but they couldn’t spit far enough. Up the road, they lathered the whole valley with green fire, as if to show that there was no part of it they couldn’t reach. By the light of those unearthly flames, the antinomials dismounted and made camp.

* * *

“He’s not an officer commanding troops. He conjures them, like a magician conjuring demons,” said Thanakar.

“Or angels,” replied the commissar.

“There’s no difference,” said Thanakar airily. “They’re just as difficult to control.”

The two men were sitting outside their own careful tent, at the top of a small slope. They sat in deckchairs, looking down towards the riverside where the antinomials were camped around some bonfires. Tents stood scattered as if at random along the bottom of the valley, half erected, fallen down.

A few seemed to have been lit on fire, and people squatted around them warming their hands. From the river came a constant noise of splashing and yelling as men and women, naked in the cooling wind, washed themselves and splashed each other like children. Dogs ran everywhere, little barking dogs from the city temples and huge shaggy brutes picked up along the line of march. They had slunk down from the empty hills wherever the army passed, to run with the antinomials: silent beasts, slinking with their heads close to the ground, stealing food, and boys and girls ran after them, slapping at their shaggy heads and laughing when they tried to bite. There was food enough for everyone that night. As the two Starbridges had looked on, appalled, the antinomials had butchered the dead elephant, gutted it, stripped off its skin, sliced long slabs of meat from its bones, broken the skeleton apart. Thanakar was a good cook, and he had made an excellent meal for the two of them over the primus, white rice and pickled figs, served in lacquer bowls with sprigs of mint. But as they sat in deck chairs looking out over the camp, it was impossible to eat. The smell of roasting flesh rose up everywhere around them, and everywhere people yelled and reeled as if drunk with blood.