A boy falling out of the sky—the image seemed to mean something to them, for down below the soldiers left off their work to gather round his body. They were doing something to him, pulling at him, arranging his limbs in some way. I was too far away to tell. A priest in red robes knelt to cut that mark into his cheeks, but I wasn’t paying much attention. I was watching my brothers and my sisters on the walls and rooftops, because the image of the falling boy had captured their minds too, had seized and shaken them, so that they had put their instruments aside. I heard a shout, chaotic and unmusical, and they began to open fire on the soldiers with the guns that I had brought down from the mountain, with bricks and rocks, with a drizzle of arrows. We are a peaceful race, and it amazed me to see the soldiers below scuttle back like insects, out of range. One was wounded, and I heard him yell, a high-pitched screaming, full of unconscious music. He expected to be left behind. But another soldier came running back. Above, the sky was cloudless with no wind, and on the tower top I tried to clear my mind. But I was distracted by the noise outside the gate—the wounded soldier and his friend, one kicking and crying, one scurrying around him in a kind of dance. The man bent down to take his hurt companion on his back. They made slow progress, and I watched them a long time as they labored out of range.

One we captured alive. A boy had opened up the gate to go out scavenging for weapons, and just outside, in a litter of sledgehammers and iron bars, we found a man. At first I thought he had been wounded in the stomach, because he was curled up like a baby. He would not look us in the face. And he was praying with fanatic speed; he would not stop, even when my brother lost patience and tried to pull him to his feet. “Holy beloved, deliver me. I have done no harm, by the hair of your head, deliver me, by the power of your thighs, by the strength of your love. Hold me in your arms, so that I may say,

‘Sweeter than sugar is your taste in my mouth, sweeter than sugar is the taste of your ministers . . .’ ” He went on and on. He wouldn’t shut up. So we dragged him up into the town by his shirt, up to the dancing hall, and left him outside, where he lay in a heap.

My brothers and my sisters had no interest in him, for the barbarians did not come back that day. But I was interested. He pulled himself upright, and in a little while I saw him sitting upright, supported in the angle of a wall, crooning to himself, his eyes closed whenever I looked at him, open when I didn’t.