“He sang a song to us,” said the man. “I saw a picture in the air. A ring of mountains, and women riding in the tall grass. It was a lie.”

After that, Thanakar was reluctant to make him understand, to rob him of a delusion that was keeping him alive.

The other convalescent was the white-eyed antinomial, who had sung his memories of his childhood above Rang-river to Thanakar and Abu in the warehouse by the river. Though his wounds were superficial, he had been in danger of dying of morbid melancholia like the rest, until the doctor found a remedy. Thanakar had carried in his baggage, as a token of the hopelessness of love, the bracelet he had gotten on the Mountain of Redemption, the payment for a night’s work there. The antinomial woman with the yellow hair had taken it from her wrist to give to him. It fitted neatly just above his elbow; unlike most officers, he never wore jewelry, but he had kept it as a souvenir. One day, changing the bandages on the dying man’s chest, all the coincidences of the story came back to him, and the next time he made his rounds, Thanakar brought the bracelet and gave it to him with his pills. The man rubbed his thumb along the carved silver, the pattern of animals devouring one another. Thanakar waited for some sign of recollection in his white eyes, some softening of his cruel face, but there was nothing. In the morning when he came again, the man had thrown the bracelet into a corner of the tent and was nearer death than ever.

Once the bracelet had meant something to him. Not anymore. Time had closed its fist.

The man lay back, his eyes pulsing and expanding, and drifting in and out of focus. Discouraged, Thanakar bent over him and touched his hair, but the man was too weak even to turn away.

“Remember,” began Thanakar. “Remember . . . ,” but he wasn’t sure the man could hear. And as he faltered for a way of telling him his own story, the man’s mouth opened and he began to sing, a song as insubstantial as a ghost, the antinomial’s last song of himself, which comes with death. Thanakar bent low to listen, and as he did so, he thought he heard some last hostility creep into the tone, until the man closed his eyes and the melody ran pure again.

Thanakar waited for the part he knew would come, the sweet, despairing leitmotif of love, a dozen notes, and when he heard them, he memorized them. He waited, and when the song was interrupted by some last coughing grunts, he took it up himself, note by careful note. Memorized symbols in an unknown language, and doubtless his pronunciation was poor, because he had to repeat it twice before the antinomial opened his eyes and looked at him with an expression so miserable and sad, it made him stumble into silence. But for this moment, Thanakar had retrieved the silver bracelet from the floor, and he pushed it into the man’s palm, lying open on the coverlet. His fingers curled around its rim. For several long minutes, his face held a look as if he were making a decision, and when he had made it, his mouth contorted in a snarl of anger. He had been bitten and betrayed. His eyes filled up with water, and Thanakar slunk away. But as early as the next evening, the patient was taking solid food.