“No. I’ll go back to the city.”

“You see?” cried Aspe. “And you, a doctor. Yet you wouldn’t ride a mile to save such a worthless life.”

“No,” said Thanakar. “It’s not that. I have things I must do. Dependents.”

“Barbarian! Your tail hangs down your leg. I give you freedom, and you think about your slaves.

Barbarian. It will mean your life.”

“Perhaps. But what did the letter say—‘adultery’?”

“Ah,” replied the colonel, softening his tone. “Does every man have some face that keeps him from himself? Even you?” He reached down to the table, to finger his childish drawing of the bishop’s face.

* * *

Among the antinomials in Thanakar’s hospital, there were two whose urge to live had been sustained, in one case by love, in the other by hatred. When that fierce creature, the antinomial army, had rolled upon its belly and expired under Argon Starbridge’s guns, it had spit up some survivors. After the battle, Thanakar had sent men through to shoot the horses and dogs, and the desperate cases. The survivors he had gathered into a section of the field hospital, over the objections of his superiors. They claimed that such a sewer of pollution would bathe any attempts at sterilization within the radius of a mile, would infect the other patients and the staff. After several acts of semi-official sabotage, Thanakar had withdrawn across the valley, and had injected special antibodies into some strong-stomached orderlies, and employed them out of his own pocket to erect some tents. There the antinomials were dying, one by one.

It was discouraging to see them, their wounds bandaged and their bleeding stopped, turn their faces into their pillows and die without a word, or perhaps just whispering the whisper of a melody as light as breath. Unable to sleep, Thanakar had wandered through the tents at night, listening to that muttered music, his lantern catching reflections from the eyes of children.

But two had kept the will to live—the heavy, white-faced antinomial who with his trumpet and his sunglasses and his shaved head had led the charge, and one other. The first healed quickly of appalling wounds, though the blood he had lost increased his pallor to a corpselike hue. Like his brothers and sisters, he never spoke, but his eyes gleamed with a fever their eyes lacked. Under the glasses they were the palest blue, the color of water over snow.

From time to time, sitting on his cot, he would take from the breast of his shirt a bloodstained scarf. And by the intensity with which he studied it, as if the pattern of the bloodstains could tell him something, Thanakar could guess the obsession that was keeping him alive. He hated Aspe. When his wounds were partly healed, he had crept out from the tent one night to prowl around the colonel’s pickets. He had come back with his face bruised, his nose broken. In the morning, Thanakar tried to tell him something of the scarf’s true story, but he hadn’t listened.