"And I was that soldier?"
I nodded, looking into his honest blue eyes.
"May I see the talisman?"
I took it out and held it in the palm of my hand. He took it from me, examined both sides carefully, and tested the point against the ball of his finger. "It doesn't look magical,"
he said.
"I'm not sure magical is the right term for it. I've met magicians, and nothing they did reminded me of this or the way it acts. Sometimes it glows with light it's very faint now, and I doubt if you can see it."
"I can't. There doesn't seem to be any writing on it."
"You mean spells or prayers. No, I've never noticed any, and I've carried it a long way. I don't really know anything about it except that it acts at times; but I think it is probably the kind of thing spells and prayers are made with, and not the kind that is made with them."
"You said it didn't belong to you."
I nodded again. "It belongs to the priestesses here, the Pelerines."
"You just came here. Two nights ago, when I did."
"I came looking for them, to give it back. It was taken from them not by me some time ago, in Nessus."
"And you're going to return it?" He looked at me as though he somehow doubted it.
"Yes, eventually."
He stood up, smoothing his robe with his hands.
I said, "You don't believe me, do you? Not about any of it."
"When I came here, you introduced me to the others nearby, the ones you'd talked with while you lay here on your cot." He spoke slowly, seeming to ponder every word. "Of course I've met some people too, where they put me. There's one who isn't really wounded very badly. He's just a boy, a youngster off some small holding a long way from here, and he mostly sits on his cot and looks at the floor."
"Homesick?" I asked.
The soldier shook his head. "He had an energy weapon. A korseke that's what somebody told me. Are you familiar with them?"
"Not very."
"They project a beam straight forward, and at the same time two quartering beams, forward left and forward right. Their range isn't great, but they say they're very good for dealing with mass attacks, and I suppose they are."
He looked about for a moment to see if anyone was listening, but it is a point of honor in the lazaret to disregard completely any conversation not intended for oneself. If it were not so, the patients would soon be at each other's throats.
"His hundred was the target of one of those attacks. Most of the others broke and ran. He didn't, and they didn't get him. Another man told me there were three walls of bodies in front of him. He had dropped them until the Ascians were climbing up to the top and jumping down at him. Then he had backed away and piled them up again."
I said, "I suppose he got a medal and a promotion." I could not be sure if it was my fever returning or merely the heat of the day, but I felt sticky and somehow suffocated.
"No, they sent him here. I told you he was only a boy from the country. He had killed more people that day than he had ever seen up to the time a few months before when he went into the army. He still hasn't gotten over it, and maybe he never will."
"Yes?"
"It seems to me you might be like that."
"I don't understand you," I said.
"You talk as if you've just come here from the south, and I suppose that if you've left your legion that's the safest way to talk. Just the same, anybody can see it isn't true people don't get cut up the way you are except where the fighting is. You were hit by rock splinters. That's what happened to you, and the Pelerine who spoke to us the first night we were here saw that right away.
So I think you've been north longer than you'll admit, and maybe longer than you think yourself. If you've killed a lot of people, it might be nice for you to believe you have a way to bring them back."
I tried to grin at him. "And where does that leave you?"
"Where I am now. I'm not trying to say I owe you nothing. I had fever, and you found me. Maybe I was delirious. I think it's more likely I was unconscious, and that let you think I was dead. If you hadn't brought me here, I probably would have died."
He started to stand up; I stopped him with a hand on his arm. "There are some things I should tell you before you go," I said. "About yourself."
"You said you didn't know who I was."
I shook my head. "I didn't say that, not really. I said I found you in a wood two days ago. In the sense you mean, I don't know who you are but in another sense I think I may. I think you're two people, and that I know one of them."
"Nobody is two people."
"I am. I'm two people already. Perhaps more people are two than we know. The first thing I want to tell you is much simpler, though. Now listen." I gave him detailed directions for finding the wood again, and when I was certain he understood them, I said, "Your pack is probably still there, witthe straps cut, so if you find the place you won't mistake it. There was a letter in your pack.
I pulled it out and read a part of it. It didn't carry the name of the person you were writing to, but if you had finished it and were just waiting for a chance to send it off, it should have at least a part of your name at the end. I put it on the ground and it blew a little and caught against a tree. It may still be possible for you to find it."
His face had tightened. "You shouldn't have read it, and you shouldn't have thrown it away."
"I thought you were dead, remember? Anyway, a good deal was going on at the time, mostly inside my head. Perhaps I was getting feverish I don't know. Now here's the other part. You won't believe me, but it may be important that you listen. Will you hear me out?"
He nodded.
"Good. Have you heard of the mirrors of Father Inire? Do you know how they work?"
"I've heard of Father Inire's Mirror, but I couldn't tell you where I heard about it. You're supposed to be able to step into it, like you'd step into a doorway, and step out on a star. I don't think it's real."
"The mirrors are real. I've seen them. Up until now I always thought of them in much the same way you did as if they were a ship, but much faster. Now I'm not nearly so sure. Anyway, a certain friend of mine stepped between those mirrors and vanished. I was watching him. It was no trick and no superstition; he went wherever the mirrors take you. He went because he loved a certain woman, and he wasn't a whole man. Do you understand?"
"He'd had an accident?"
"An accident had had him, but never mind that. He told me he would come back. He said, 'I will come back for her when I have been repaired, when I am sane and whole.' I didn't quite know what to think when he said that, but now I believe he has come. It was I who revived you, and I had been wishing for his return perhaps that had something to do with it."
There was a pause. The soldier looked down at the trampled soil on which the cots had been set, then up again at me. "Possibly whenever a man loses his friend and gets another, he feels the old friend is with him again."
"Jonas that was his name had a habit of speech. Whenever he had to say something unpleasant, he softened it, made a joke of it, by attributing what he said to some comic situation. The first night we were here, when I asked you your name, you said, 'I lost it somewhere along the way. That's what the jaguar said, who had promised to guide the goat.' Do you recall that?"
He shook his head. "I say a lot of foolish things."
"It struck me as strange; because it was the kind of thing Jonas said, but he wouldn't have said it in that way unless he meant more by it than you seemed to.
I think he would have said, 'That was the basket's story, that had been filled with water.' Something like that."