'Did you see something odd here last night?' he asked when he'd settled himself more comfortably.
'Odd?' Long paused, a piece of cornbread in his hand. 'What do you mean by that?'
'A woman was here. I saw her last night and one night before.'
Long shook his head. 'Didn't see no woman. You must be dreaming.' He smiled. 'Wish I had those dreams.'
Foster grinned back. 'No, brother, I tell you; I saw a woman. Down there.' He pointed with his chin where the red-haired Irishman lay.
'No; didn't see it.' Long popped the last of the cornbread in his mouth, then brushed the crumbs from his moustache. 'Was she purty?'
'Beautiful.'
'Tell me,' Long said as he leaned back against the wall.
Foster proceeded to describe the woman in great detail; it was true that after a moment or so he began to embellish the description. It was the look in Long's remaining eye that made him do it. Long wanted something out of the ordinary, something to keep him from thinking of his condition, and Foster decided he would give it to the other man.
'An angel,' Long breathed.
'I would think so,' Foster said. It was true he had never seen a woman as lovely as this one. His Sarah was right comely, but not the way this other woman was. Sarah, too, worked the farm with him and she had red, roughened hands and skin darkened by the sun. She was just as lovely, he thought, as the day he'd first married her three years before.
At that moment one of the nurses, a husky man — they had to be, Foster knew, strapping and strong so that they could hold down the screaming men whose arms or legs were being sawn off without the benefit of anaesthesia — entered the tent. He was here to check each convalescing man; he began at Foster's and Long's end, and then when he reached the other end he shouted for another nurse, who rushed in.
'This man's dead,' and the first nurse pointed at the red-haired Irishman.
Foster had thought the man was simply sleeping.
The two nurses managed to take the corpse out; Foster and Long looked at one another, but said nothing. An hour later another man, freshly injured in the fighting that continued, had claimed the vacant cot.
Foster spoke a little more with Long and several others who were that day more alert; and when nightfall came, and their last meal was being served, he knew he was ready to sleep.
Still, it puzzled him that Long hadn't seen the woman; and neither had the two other men Foster questioned. He could see that Long might not have seen her because of the bandages across that side of his face. Still
Foster ate his cornbread, slightly greasy but still tasting the best he'd ever had, and quickly slurped up his broth and called for more. It was the first time he'd ever wanted more than the one bowlful.
After using the chamberpot held by one of the nurses, a great ugly fellow who looked as if he much preferred to kill each one of the wounded men rather than wait upon them, Foster eased himself down on to his cot, pulled up the coarse sheet. The sun had long ago set and a light chill had set in. From outside he could smell newly mown hay, the last of the year, and he wondered if the hospital lay close to a farm still being worked. There were so few left intact since the war had begun.
He missed his own farm and wondered how it fared. He had men to work it, but had they left for the war as he had? What had his wife done, left with only her old infirm father and the handful of slaves they owned?
He caught a scent of something else now, a smell almost of spice, some exotic fragrance that seemed to have no place in this hell that reeked of urine and loosened bowels and unwashed bodies, and he opened his eyes and saw that the woman had returned. She was sitting primly in a chair alongside the bed of Patrick DeLance, a lieutenant in Foster's own company. DeLance had been injured a day or two before Foster, but his wounds were healing rather nicely. DeLance was talking intently with the woman, his eyes never once straying from her face. Their voices were low, so Foster couldn't make out too many words, but once he thought he heard the name 'Ariadne'.
Foster was a man of some education, having gone two years to college before returning home to the farm where he was needed, and he knew the name was classical in origin. The daughter of King Minos, as he recalled, the woman who had loved Theseus and had helped him find his way out of the labyrinth.
Ariadne. A beautiful name. He murmured it aloud. It set right on his tongue and lips.
Ariadne. It fitted her. A beautiful name for a beautiful woman. He glanced once more at her, and like that one other time she seemed to have crawled atop the other man. He blinked; surely he could not be seeing what he saw, and yet even though the light in the tent was dim he could make out the outline of the woman straddling the prone DeLance, the skirts of her gown spread out. She rocked back and forth, and murmured all the while, and he could hear DeLance groan.
Embarrassed, Foster still watched; he couldn't look away. DeLance cried out in release, and the woman whispered, and bent down over DeLance's lips and kissed him long.
Foster felt a warmth suffusing through his body and he closed his eyes tightly and thought of Sarah, good- hearted Sarah. Sarah who was just a little too thin because of their hard times; not with a voluptuous body like this woman this Ariadne here in the tent.
A woman in the hospital. Impossible, he told himself, and he looked once more, and Ariadne was rising from DeLance, straightening her skirts. Foster watched as she ran a hand down DeLance's chest to his groin, and DeLance shuddered.
He glanced across at Long, but the man was asleep. Foster looked up and down the double rows and saw that of the other men he was the only one awake, the only one to see what he had seen. But what was that?
The woman — Ariadne — had done something to DeLance. She had climbed atop — no, Foster decided, climbed wasn't quite the proper word. Slithered? No.
