been fighting somewhere else came with a braquemar. She cut the avern — not sidewise but down the stem so it split. Then some of the men held the hipparch and I heard her blade clash on his helmet.
“You were just standing there. I wasn't sure you even knew he was gone, and your avern was bending back toward your face. I thought of what the woman had done and hit at it with your sword. It was heavy, so very heavy at first, and then it was hardly heavy at all. But when I slashed down with it I felt as if I could have struck the head from a bison. Only I had forgotten to take off the sheath. But it knocked the avern out of your hand, and I took you and led you away...”
“Where?” I asked.
She shivered and dipped a piece of bread in the steaming broth. “I don't know. I didn't care. It was just so good to be walking with you, to know I was taking care of you the way you had taken care of me before we got the avern. But I was cold, terribly cold, when night came. I put your cloak all around you and fastened it in front, and you didn't seem to be cold, so I took this mantle and wrapped myself in it. My dress was falling to pieces. It still is.” I said, “I wanted to buy you another one when we were at the inn.” She shook her head, chewing the tough crust. “Do you know, I think this is the first food I've had in a long, long time. I have pains in my stomach — that's why I drank the wine there — but this makes it feel better. I hadn't realized how weak I was getting.
“But I didn't want a new dress from there because I would have had to wear it for a long time, and it would always have reminded me of that day. You can buy me a dress now, if you like, because it will remind me of this day, when I thought you were dead when you were really well.
“Anyway, we got back into the city somehow. I was hoping to find a place to stop where you could lie down, but there were only big houses with terraces and balustrades. That sort of thing. Some soldiers came galloping up and asked if you were a carnifex. I didn't know the word, but I remembered what you had told me and so I told them you were a torturer, because soldiers have always seemed to me to be a kind of torturer and I knew they would help us. They tried to get you to ride, but you fell off. So some of them tied their capes between two lances and laid you on that, and put the ends of the lances in the stirrup straps of two destriers. One of them wanted to take me up into his saddle, but I wouldn't do it. I walked beside you all the way and sometimes I talked to you, but I don't think you heard me.”
She drained the last of the broth. “Now I want to ask you a question. When I was washing myself behind the screen, I could hear you and Agia whispering about a note. Later you were looking for someone in the inn. Will you tell me about that?”
“Why didn't you ask before?”
“Because Agia was with us. If you had found out anything, I didn't want her to hear what it was.”
“I'm sure Agia could discover anything I discovered,” I said. “I don't know her well, and in fact I don't feel I know her as well as I know you. But I know her well enough to realize that she's much cleverer than I am.” Dorcas shook her head again. “She's the sort of woman who's good at making puzzles for other people, but not at solving ones she didn't make herself. I think she thinks — I don't know — side-wise. So no one else can follow it. She's the kind of woman people say thinks like a man, but those women don't think like real men at all, in fact, they think less like real men than most women do. They just don't think like women. The way they do think is hard to follow, but that doesn't mean it's clear, or deep.”
I told her about the note, and what it said, and mentioned that although it had been destroyed I had copied it out on the inn's paper and found it to be the same paper, and the same ink.
“So someone wrote it there,” she said pensively. “Probably one of the inn servants, because he called the ostler by name. But what does it mean?”
“I don't know.”
“I can tell you why it was put where it was. I sat there, on that horn settee, before you sat down. It made me happy, I recall, because you sat beside me. Do you remember if the waiter — he must have carried the note, whether he wrote it or not — put the tray there before I got up to bathe?”
“I can remember everything,” I said, “except last night. Agia sat in a folding canvas chair, you sat on the couch, that's right, and I sat down beside you. I had been carrying the avern on the pole as well as my sword, and I laid the avern flat behind the couch. The kitchen girl came in with water and towels for you, then she went out and got oil and rags for me.”
Dorcas said, “We ought to have given her something.”
“I gave her an orichalk to bring the screen. That's probably as much as she's paid for a week. Anyway, you went behind it, and a moment later the host led the waiter in with the tray and wine.
“That's why I didn't see it, then. But the waiter must have known where I was sitting, because there was no place else. So he left it under the tray, hoping I'd see it when I came out. What was the first part again?”
“ ‘
“It must have been for me. If it had been for you, it would have distinguished between Agia and me, probably by hair color. And if it had been meant for Agia, it would have been out on the other side of the table where she would have seen it instead.”
“So you reminded someone of his mother.”
“Yes.” Once more there were tears in her eyes.
“You're not old enough to have had a child who could have written that note.”
“I don't remember,” she said, and buried her face in the loose folds of the brown mantle.
Agilus
When the physician in charge had examined me and found I had no need of treatment, he asked us to leave the lazaret, where my cloak and sword were, as he said, upsetting to his patients.
On the opposite side of the building in which I had eaten with the troopers, we found a shop that catered to their needs. Together with false jewelry and trinkets of the sort such men give their paramours, it carried a certain amount of women's clothing; and though my money had been much depleted by the dinner we had never returned to the Inn of Lost Loves to enjoy, I was able to buy Dorcas a simar.
