Some lie in exhaustion, chins and chests spattered. Others sit among the rocks, many convulsively kneading at their heads from time to time. The noise of the trees is back, and it seems to grating on their nerves. It takes me a long time to realize that an arresting object—it looks like a brown leather sack, glossy and hard as lacquer, with many odd ridges and an angularly kinked set of straps—is the shrivelled corpse of a woman lying on her stomach not ten feet from where I stand.

Moving quietly, I make my way around inside the tree line to a higher piece of ground, where there’s a confined space bordered by stones and bracken I can use as a blind. A harsh rasp of breath from my right makes me lunge to the left, turning my face toward the sound. A tattered man in a black uniform is staring at me from the other side.

Simultaneously our eyes fly to each other’s holsters. His is empty. I hear his frightened breathing. Reflexively I put out my hand and address him in Laschlache. His eyes open wider and he leans toward me. I see the insignia on his armband. It’s the same. A narrator, like me.

*

He was cut off from his unit a few days ago. He says he hasn’t kept the time attentively, and he seems wilder and farther gone than he should be after only a few days. The qualifiers he uses are strange, and make me second guess my grasp of the grammar. The details of his account seem to flash up at me randomly; he describes closely things that seem incidental to me, and omits what I would have assumed were crucially important points, but I can’t strictly make out what his criteria of importance is.

There was a fight further in, past the end of the abutment; howling men flew at them out of the trees.

“Do you know who attacked first?” I ask.

He shakes his head, clutching at the front of his uniform where the buttons have all been ripped away, leaving ragged, angular holes. I can’t understand the expression on his face, but it suggests he thinks this is not an important question.

“There all of a sudden was just corrupt noise, and then they were on all sides of us ... My friend right next to me was killed; we all started, only just started, running doggedly back toward the marble-semiprecious abutment. I was the only one who was reaching it. They purposefully didn’t follow me.”

I pat my pockets, looking for something to give him, but I have no food on me. I offer him water from my canteen. He eyes it glassily, but won’t drink. With blue fingers dry as twigs he pinches at the rock in front of him.