Thanakar knelt beside him, but again he shook his head. “No time. No. Damn you,” he said gently. “No matter. Done for. Find Aspe.”

“Don’t talk,” said Thanakar, and put his hand out, but the old man pushed it away. “Nothing to say. Do it. Please. I’ll be fine. Just sit here.” His features were set in an expression of piglike obstinacy, a caricature of stubbornness. But the melancholy in his eyes was already a little unreal, a little glazed, as if the secret fire which had always burned behind them was now hardening them from within.

“No talk,” said the commissar finally. “They’ll be cut to pieces. God’s soldiers. Women, too.”

Then he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Thanakar was gone. “Damn you,” said the old man, very gently, with the last of his breath. He looked down over his chest, where the doctor had drawn on the flap of his white shirt over his heart, in blood, the mark of Paradise. “Damn you,” said the old man.

“Go.”

The doctor stumbled down the road, and he found the refuse of the army still sprawled in camp: wounded, unfit, noncombatant; men sitting, drunk already, playing cards with insufficient fingers; two hundred men with dysentery from drinking river water; priests cavorting around a collapsible battlefield temple. Some people called to him and stretched out their hands, but he ignored them, and with the breath already hot and rasping in his throat, he found a horse, and pitched into the saddle, and kicked it up along the army’s track. A narrow defile led up from the valley onto the eastern ridge. The way was hard, and at the top it was choked with figures of the dead and dying, and the mist had lessened too, so that when he reached the ridge he could look out east and north over the plain, and in sudden gaps of light and sunlight he could see huge masses of men and horses clashing underneath the monastery walls.

He heard the noise, too, a roaring like the sea, and he could hear the voices of the drowning in it, for wounded men recognized him and called out to him as he rode past. He saw the hospital, and files of wounded men and stretcherbearers converging on it from all over the field, like tentacles to bring it food.

He saw Creston Bile in his shirtsleeves, for the sun was burning through the mist, and it was hot. “My God, Doctor, where have you been?” the man called out, his forehead badged with blood where he had tried to wipe the sweat away. Thanakar didn’t stop.

Amid endlesly repeating scenes, he searched for Aspe. And up to the very instant, he thought he might not be too late, until, through a break in the mist, he saw the black flag fluttering at the topmost pinnacle of the ridge overlooking the river, and the colonel standing in a group of officers. Yet still the guns hadn’t spoken. Thanakar spurred his horse up the slope, shouting and yelling. He could see the colonel striding back and forth, eating an orange and giving dispatches with his mouth full.