Behind him, his troops spread out unimpeded over the plateau. Victory was sure. Aspe’s savage face was flushed and happy, and he had taken off his helmet, and his long white hair blew around. It was this mood that Thanakar found it most difficult to penetrate as he rode up. The circle of officers gave way before his horse. But the colonel barely looked at him. He walked back and forth with his cheeks puffed up with fruit. But when the first guns sounded from the monastery a mile away, he turned towards the noise, quizzically, and Thanakar could see him stop his chewing. The bombardment was gentle at first, a few rockets taking range, but then the great field guns opened up, and then the murderous screaming of the grape. Thanakar shouted above the noise, and this time the colonel understood, for his hand stole up around his neck, searching for his scarf, and then he ran up the small slope behind him, to seize his flag and throw it down. He stood looking out over the river, and then he opened his throat and let out a roar so terrific, it drowned out the pounding artillery. At the sound, his horse pulled its bridle loose from the hands of a soldier, and Aspe ran down to meet it and vaulted onto its back, creaking and swaying in the saddle, shouting guttural commands in a language Thanakar didn’t know. Then he was gone, galloping over the open ground towards the monastery and the sound of the guns, his hair streaming out behind him.

The officers followed, and the soldiers too, and in a little while Thanakar was alone on the hillside. From where he was, he could look down and see where he had spent the night, though the upper valley was still hidden. But he could see the deserted camp where the antinomials had left it, never planning to return.

And he could see the river flashing in the afternoon. He dismounted near where the colonel’s black standard lay among the rocks, and he sat down with his head in his hands, to listen to the music of the guns.

* * *

North of Charn, in winter and the first phases of spring, the land is empty and cruel, striated hills of petrified mud, eroded into strange shapes and strange colors, burnt ochre, dark red. Even close to the city, the land is empty during that part of the year. But later, when the wind abates, and the air grows hot and sweet, and the trees grow tall in sweet new soil, then villages come up, and huts of bridalweed, and naked sunburned people. But in spring before the Paradise rain, life is bare and stark. The people have grown up in the coldest times, and these questions of belief seem desperate to them. Among the twenty thousand days of spring, men are willing to die for trifles. The ancient cult of loving kindness withers and exposes harsher, more austere beliefs, like flowers withering on a rock.