“They would not have been fit to lead, if they had followed me,” muttered Aspe, grabbing back his scarf.

“Remember that,” said the commissar, “and you may do some good.”

Aspe grinned. “Tomorrow you’ll see me on the ridge.” He pointed with his knife. “Watch for my standard. Tomorrow I’ll break him, by God I will. I’ll take him on the flank. I’ll have King Argon’s head upon a pole. And his guns won’t shoot one shell.” He got to his feet, and took his scarf and his bottle down the slope into the dark.

“What does he mean, ‘by God’?” asked Thanakar.

“He’s caught between two worlds. He is the saddest man I ever saw, to talk to us like that. His own people are beyond his comprehension.” The commissar shivered. “I feel a presentiment of death,” he said.

It rained all night, without managing to launder morning, which was neither crisp, nor fresh, nor clean. The sun peered dubiously through a damp mist, and the sky seemed full of illusions—clouds in the shape of continents and monsters as the commissar looked out, and once his mother’s profile drifted by. An expression of sternness changed to surprise as the clouds lifted her eyebrows, and then she blew apart.

Commissar Micum sniffed the air. “Sugar rain,” he said.

“People have been saying that for weeks,” yawned Thanakar behind him.

“It’ll come.” The commissar stooped and picked up a stone from the ground, and tested it between his fingers. Perhaps it was his imagination, but it seemed a little slippery, and it seemed as if some residue was left on his fingers. When the rain came, these stones would shine like mica, and it would be hard to stand upright.

The camp was hidden by a tattered mist, but through its rents they could see parts of the river, and antinomials washing horses. And in one place they could see a gathering of people, standing gray and dispirited, and curiously still. The sight depressed them, though they caught no shreds of talk. So they packed quickly, leaving most of what they had. Skirting the camp and meeting no one, they set out on foot, back through the Keyhole towards where the regular army had camped the night before. Doubtless the army was gone by now, thought Thanakar, up with Aspe before daybreak, circling round out of the valley to attack the monastery along the ridge, but the camp would still be there, and the hospital.

The rocks looked ghostly in the mist, along the road where they had passed on elephantback. Leaving the antinomials they had met no one, and there was no one on the road, yet still they were always turning to look behind them, and peering around boulders and up along the cliffs that closed in on either side. For random sounds seemed to metamorphose into footsteps, and the hissing of the river seemed like voices calling. Once they saw someone, an antinomial woman standing motionless by the water’s edge, barefoot in the water. And in the misty morning she looked dark and hard as a tall pile of rocks, her pack of muscles and her small hard breasts, her hair cut short around her broken face; she was not young. She looked at them as they passed. They mumbled and bowed their heads, and hugged their cloaks around them, for her expression was at once scornful, thoughtful, and immeasurably sad, and it made them feel nervous and unclean.