In these few hours I see the soldiers are changing and becoming hostile to the natives, brutal and domineering. That I know the language seems to make me a lesser being myself. They are becoming machines. I saw one of my unit dash a local man to the ground with the butt of his rifle to the face. The more heavy-handed my comrades get, the more deferential and even fawning the natives get. Will that last?

From the attendant, appointed by me, I learn Nardac had dragged herself from her bed during the fighting. He frankly admits he abandoned her and fled toward the harbor; he left her unconscious, near death, and on his return saw the traces—he points to the sheet trailing on the floor where she’d left it, the crablike drag marks written in the dust. How did she pull herself out through the window?

“Did you find her?” I ask.

The attendant waves at the doorway and a compact woman with red-brown skin steps in seriously from outside. He points to her, and she talks to me.

“I was up on the slopes gathering casings. I saw the woman crawl out toward the bodies. The flies began landing on her leg. More and more came, and covered her all over. She took no notice of them but kept on crawling to the battlefield. There were so many flies I couldn’t make out her arms and legs. Even more came, and she was like a hill of flies. But she kept going. Then I didn’t see her any more.”

I quit them and walk a little way to a place overlooking some of the battlefield. The flies still inundate it like a pitching mat, dense on the ground, undisturbed and busy in windless day under an egg shell blue sky, a phrase I’ve never understood.

I have heard that there are blue eggs, but I’ve never seen one.

Makemin even now is in his tent, still sending back punctual bulletins to his lawyers, full of meticulous instructions as to precisely how he wishes the most recent phases of the suit and the divorce to be conducted. I stare at him, through the mosquito screen. I think of the enormity this man, who now sits before me, efficiently writing documents, committed in my sight, and a spur of detestation drives itself into me.

Getting away from the battlefield I see Saskia lying asleep in her tent. The peace that hovers over her sleeping face is so strange, and the streaming, flat hair, like silky brown straw, that I’ve never seen undone from its braid, draping over her shoulder, and across the bed to the edge, looks somehow impossible.

Later I lie down and look into the fire.

I tremble with hatred.