“They must be faring well at the front to spare you here,”—ugh. Just because I’m good at it doesn’t make buttering him up feel any better. I want his story, for my own sake.

He practically spits.

“They’re miserable at the front! They’re pitiful! Men who graduated at half my standing are giving orders at the front while I’m pissing away my life on this assignment!”

His gaze takes hold of me and I realize I’m in for the story.

“When I was twenty. I was arrested. For stealing dirt.”

He says this levelly.

“My cousin needed fill earth to build a new post office in a town it doesn’t matter the name. For years there had been an enormous mound of displaced earth standing in a lot by the river; they had built a footbridge there to connect some islands in the river. When I was a boy we would visit my cousin and together we used to play in it. Only because people constantly were walking through the lot was it clear of vines, and that’s the only reason the mound wasn’t overgrown. No one touched it—it was like a feature of nature. So when my cousin needed the fill earth I said to him, ‘let’s go take some.’

“We went at night and started to load the cart. I looked up and saw the footbridge sway, and the handcar rolling towards us in the rust lights, so we tried to hide in the shadow of the bridge—then there were bullseyes shining. A fine and a reprimand—that’s all.”

He shrugs, sets his lower lip angrily.

“But it went on the record.”

Now we are sitting around in the evening, digesting and resting. I can see Makemin through the transparent front of his tent, sitting at his desk with a bale of papers, writing frenetically. From time to time, Nikhinoch will come to attend him. Once I see Makemin take up a small container, slide the lid aside, pull out a pinch of some peach-colored snuff, and sniff it vigorously first in one and then the other nostril. I refer my querying eyebrows to Silichieh, who smiles, his voice muffled by a mouthful of smoke.

“Oh, that stuff. Keeps him alert, I think. I don’t know exactly what it is but it fits him. I wouldn’t touch it myself.”

I sit and listen as the breeze blows through my ears, and the sunset lights go colors down over my scalp.

I pass on the dirt story, and Silichieh snorts a little, lying back against a stump with his hands in the pockets of his sweater.

“That’s typical.”

After a moment he says, thoughtfully, “But that’s good for us, I think, because it means he’s not going to stick to nice little points of decorum too much. That’s best kind of commander.”