In the evening I brought him food, a mush of corn in a bowl, and for a while I stood without knowing what to say as he rocked and prayed, one hand clamped on his genitals, the other on an amulet around his neck. It was unusual just to watch someone so closely. Barbarians took no offense. This one sat cross-legged, rocking. He was an old man, his skin pale and spotted, loose and shrunken at the same time. His hair was gray, streaked with white, tied in a black rag at the nape of his neck. It hung long down his back. He had no beard, and I could see his skinny face. There was no meat on it, or on his bone-white arms. His belly was soft and fat.

I didn’t know how to talk to him. Old man? Barbarian? Coward dwarf? But he didn’t look afraid anymore; he seemed happy, in fact, smiling at intervals, as if at inner jokes. He showed his teeth; they were dirty, but looked strong. “Old man,” I said.

He started, and his eyes flickered open, as if I had just woken him. And when he turned to me, I saw in his face and in his eyes an expression I had not looked for, something you see in the faces of small children, a mixture of delight and fear. He put his hand out towards me, and I could see the amulet around his neck. It was molded from heavy plastic in the shape of a man’s genitals.

“Old man,” I said, holding out the bowl I had brought. “Here is food for pigs.”

He smiled up at me, looking into my face but not my eyes. “Is it . . . flesh?” he asked, almost reverently.

“I cannot eat . . . flesh.”

“It is not,” I said. He looked both disappointed and relieved, but he made no motion, and so I squatted down and pushed the bowl into his face.

“Thank you,” he said, words I’d never heard, and the tone made me think he was refusing. But when I tried to pull my hand away, he grabbed the bowl and held it in his lap without looking at it.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I am God’s soldier. And I am happy here. Happy to be here.” He looked around. “Very glad to have seen it, at the end of my life.”

The sun was down, the sky darkening. Someone had started to play music in the hall behind us. Children came to stand in the bright doorway. One raised his hands and twirled a child’s pirouette. “Listen,” said the soldier, as if I had no ears. “How beautiful!” I squatted down beside him. I could hear the sound of a wooden flute, played in a difficult and obscure key called “waterbird.” In that particular tempo you could see a bird rising from the surface of a pool, fanning the water into ripples with its wings. Usually the bird is small and white, with a long straight bill; the pool is crisp on a bright day, but tonight the musician—a very young girl, I knew her tone—had chosen the luminous dark of early evening, a great bird of prey, its wings outstretched, the feathers of its wingtips stretching wide like fingers, circling exhausted over an endless sea. In the alien water it will sink without a trace. The music changed, the bird disappeared into the dark, and you could see the stars coming out one by one, a song we called “first stars.”