Later, Zanja put Karis’s clothing back on her so she wouldn’t get chilled. When she finished doing up shirt buttons, she discovered that Karis’s face was silvered with wet starlight. “What?” Zanja said gently. Karis put her arms around her, but was too weak to hold on for long. Resting on Karis’s breast, Zanja said, “I thought the cards told me you would die. I should know better than to ask them a personal question.”

Karis rubbed a sleeve across her face. The Juras were still singing, but softly. Perhaps it was a lullaby for their children and their goats. Karis said, in a rush of ragged words, “Just before I fell ill, Mabin apologized for her wrongs, and asked me to sit in the G’deon’s chair. Norina says she was sincere. But I did not accept.”

Zanja thought, I must not flinch. But she already had.

“I could not accept!” Karis’s voice was raw–not just fatigued, but fearful, agonized.

Zanja rested her forehead against Karis’s shoulder. After such sweet intimacy, to confront the fact of their increasing estrangement seemed unendurable. “Karis, if I’ve made you feel like you have to justify yourself to me …”

“Fighting the plague has been a joy to you,” said Karis. “Now the fight is over, you’ll be aggrieved again.”

Zanja wanted to contradict her, and could not do so. She said painfully, “If I could choose not to be angry or disappointed, I would make that choice with all my heart.”

“And if I could choose to make you happy–”

“My happiness is not your responsibility.”

“Oh, but your unhappiness is.”

“Dear gods, is that what you think? That I blame you for my own failure to be contented?”

Karis’s big hand had lifted to clasp Zanja’s shoulder, but now it slipped down again and she said fretfully, “I can’t hold you.”

“You don’t have to,” Zanja said. She raised her head. “For five years I’ve shaped my life by waiting, though you never said that you would ever say yes to Shaftal. So my impatience is my own fault.”

Karis’s hand lifted again, and again it fell weakly to the sand.

She said hoarsely, “The plague is over. But the land still cries out to me for healing. Do you–does everyone–think I am deaf to that? I know I must do something. But I cannot act. It’s not a choice. I have no choices. I have no choices.” Her voice was blurry with fatigue.

Because she could not say she understood, Zanja said, “You need to rest.” Then she lay beside Karis, silent.

Then Juras sang–such an astonishing song!–and the stars whirled wildly in the sky. Karis had fallen asleep. The goats slept around them, a field of goats that spread as far as could be seen. Zanja blinked–she had been dozing, and in her sleep she heard Medric warning her not to put too much importance on the plague. “Nothing changes,” he whispered in her ear. “Nothing changes.”

The cards had not been wrong. Zanja had asked if she and Karis would be separated forever–and the dreadful answer was that they would not separate at all. They were bound together on the side of the cliff, trapped there, each of them unable to choose to let the other one fall. And there they were destined to remain.

Chapter Seven

“I’m weary of looking at your glum faces,” said Cadmar one evening at the peak of the spring bloom, and he dug the whisky from his footlocker and started pouring drinks. Gilly, who had already taken his evening draught of opiates, perched like a hunched crow upon his stool, sipping from his glass and uttering grave witticisms that no one would remember in the morning. After downing three glasses, Cadmar turned garrulous and started reminiscing, though there was nothing Gilly and Clement didn’t already know about his illustrious life.

“Drink,” he urged. “Drink and be cheerful.”

Clement drank, and pretended to be cheerful.

“Those were good days,” Cadmar concluded with a sigh. Gilly, as though to contradict him, dropped his glass and, slowly at first but with increasing speed, slithered off his stool. Cadmar caught him and dragged him across the floor to the bed. “The man can’t hold his drink.” He fumbled with Gilly’s shoes. “How do these come off?”

Clement helped Cadmar put Gilly to bed, and checked that he was still breathing, for the medics had warned that combining his drugs with liquor could kill him. As she stood looking down at her misshapen, sardonic friend, her heart hurt in a way that no soldier could ever admit to. Without him, her life would certainly be unendurable.

“Are we drunk yet?” Cadmar asked.

“Drunk enough,” she said unenthusiastically.

“Well then, let’s find ourselves a trull. Like we used to do.”

“General–”

He held up a hand. “You are notdrunk enough.” He filled her glass and supervised until she had emptied it. Her eyes watered; her stomach protested; she felt more ill than drunk. But it seemed apparent that Cadmar would keep filling her glass until she either passed out like Gilly or began feigning a cheerful mood more convincingly.

As they made their way to the garrison gate, she couldn’t help but ask, “Aren’t we too old for this?” She certainly felt too old.

“Not too old. Too dignified, maybe.”

“Well then–”

“But we are soldiers, by the gods! And who else are we to lie with, eh? We’ve got no bunkmates and we outrank everybody!”

She said, “But you’ve got Gilly.” She realized only then that she was truly drunk, though not pleasantly. That Cadmar still sometimes made his way to Gilly’s bed was something she was not supposed to have noticed.

“Gilly’s getting old too.” Cadmar patted her with clumsy affection. “But you’ve got no one at all, old or young. How long has it been?”

“More than five years,” she admitted.

“Five years! No wonder you are so glum.”

The gate captain coped so calmly and expertly with the phenomenon of the general setting forth in search of a prostitute that Clement realized this could not be the first time. The captain summoned a detail of a half dozen soldiers and included herself in the impromptu escort. It was a very quiet night. After spring mud came the short summer season in which the year’s food was planted, grown and harvested, while the bulk of the business and commerce was also done. From now until autumn mud, the Shaftali would work every moment of the rapidly lengthening days. Now, the shop shutters were closed, the windows were dark, the streets echoed with the guards’ hobnailed footsteps, and Cadmar’s cheerful voice seemed very loud.

They would go to a woman who did not call herself a prostitute, and made her services available only to officers. Clement felt a certain relief: prostitutes were usually smoke addicts, and she did not enjoy their company.

“I understand the whore isn’t pregnant,” said the captain. “Not at the moment, anyway. But she makes some officer a father almost every year.”

“She sells them her children, you mean,” muttered Clement.

“She claims the officer is the baby’s father.”

“Of course she does. If she’s paid enough.”

Cadmar gave Clement a reprimanding push. The captain said with strained cheer, “This is the place. I’ll ring the bell and see if you can be accommodated.”

They had reached a modest townhouse, the only building on the street with lamps still lit. A stout, plainly dressed woman answered the door, and soon the escorting soldiers had been shooed down a narrow hall toward the kitchen. Meanwhile, the stout woman left Clement in a tasteful drawing room while she showed Cadmar up the stairs.

At least there had been no unseemly argument over who would go first. On the small room’s delicate side table, a sweating wedge of cheese and a dry loaf of bread reminded Clement that she had drunk her supper. She ate, which did not settle her rebellious stomach, and then began to be bored. She shuffled a deck of cards that lay on the table, trying to remember the solitary card games she had not played in years. But then she noticed that the backs of the cards were decorated with a variety of pornographic pictures, and she leafed through them. She had never seen such a subject portrayed both explicitly and artfully before.