It sounded like something heshould say, after all, all done up in ancient armor and carrying a sword. "You've been dead a long time," she said.
"Almost the longest of all. Superbia, we said. That's the wrong kind of pride; that's being puffed up and too important and not really seeing things right. And there's exemplum. That's a thing you do because the world needs it, like setting up something for people to look at, a little marker, to say Marcus Regulus stood here."
"And what if no one sees it? What good is it then, if I never get out of here? There's being brave and being stupid."
He shook his head very calmly. "An exemplum is an exemplum even if no one sees it. They're just markers, where someone was."
"Look outside, old ghost. The sun's going out and the world's dying."
"Still," he said, "exempla last. . . because there's nothing anyone can do to erase them."
"What, like old stones?"
"No. Just moments. Moments are the important thing. Not every moment, but more than some think."
"Well," she said, perplexed and bothered. "Well, that's all very well for men who go around fighting ancient wars, but I don't fight anyone. I don't like violence at all, and I'll do what I can for Tom but I'm not brave and there's a limit."
"Where, Bettine?"
"The next time Richard asks me, that's where. I want out of here." He looked sad.
"Stop that," she snapped. "I suppose you think you're superior."
"No."
"I'm just a girl who has to live and they can take my job away and I can end up outside the walls starving, that's what could happen to me."
"Yes, sometimes exempla just aren't quick. Mine would have been. And I failed it."
"You're a soldier. I'm a woman."
"Don't you think about honor at all, Bettine?"
"You're out of date. I stopped being a virgin when I was thirteen."
"No. Honor, Bettine."
"I'll bet you were some kind of hero, weren't you, some old war hero?"
"Oh no, Bettine. I wasn't. I ran away. That's why I'm the psychopomp. Because the old Tower's a terrible place; and a good many of the dead do break down as they die. There were others who could have taken the job: the children come first, usually, just to get the prisoners used to the idea of ghosts, but I come at the last. . . because I know what it is to be afraid, and what it is to want to run. I'm an Atilius Regulus, and there were heroes in my house, oh, there was a great one. . . I could tell you the story. I will, someday. But in the same family there was myself, and they were never so noble after me. exemplum had something to do with it. I wish I could have left a better one. It came on me so quickly. . . a moment; one lives all one's life to be ready for moments when they come. I used to tell myself, you know, that if mine had just—crept up slowly, then I should have thought it out; I always did think. But I've seen so much, so very much, and I know human beings, and do you know. . . quick or slow in coming, it was what I wasthat made the difference, thinking or not; and I just wasn't then what I am now."
"Dead," she said vengefully.
He laughed silently. "And eons wiser." Then his face went sober. "O Bettine, courage comes from being ready whenever the moment comes, not with the mind. . . I don't think anyone ever is. But what you are. .. can be ready."
"What happened to you?"
"I was an officer, you understand. . ." He gestured at the armor he wore. "And when the Britons got over the rampart. . . I ran, and took all my unit with me—I didn't think what I was doing; I was getting clear. But a wise old centurion met me coming his way and ran me through right there. The men stopped running then and put the enemy back over the wall, indeed they did. And a lot of men were saved and discipline held. So I was an exemplum, after all; even if I was someone else's. It hurt. I don't mean the wound—those never do quite the way you think, I can tell you that—but I mean really hurt, so that it was a long long time before I came out in the open again—after the Tower got to be a prison. After I saw so many lives pass here. Then I decided I should come out. May I touch you?"
She drew back, bumped the chair, shivered. "That's not how you. . . ?"
"Oh no. I don't take lives. May I touch you?"
She nodded mistrustingly, kept her eyes wide open as he drifted nearer and a braceletted hand came toward her face, beringed and masculine and only slightly transparent. It was like a breath of cool wind, and his young face grew wistful. Because she was beautiful, she thought, with a little rush of pride, and he was young and very handsome and very long dead.
She wondered. . . .
"Warmth," he said, his face very near and his dark eyes very beautiful. "I had gone into my melancholy again. . . in all these last long centuries, that there was no more for me to do, no souls for me to meet, no special one who believed, no one at all. I thought it was all done. Are there more who still believe?"
"Yes," she said. And started, for there were Anne and Essex holding hands within the brickwork or behind it or somewhere; and other shadowy figures. The children were there, and a man who looked very wet, with a slight reek of alcohol, and more and more and more, shadows which went from brocades to metals to leather to furs and strange helmets.
"Go away," she cried at that flood, and fled back, overturning the tray and crowding into the corner. "Get out of here. I'm not going to die. I'm not brave and I'm not going to. Let someone else do the dying. I don't want to die."
They murmured softly and faded; and there came a touch at her cheek like a cool breeze.
"Go away!" she shrieked, and she was left with only the echoes. "I'm going mad," she said then to herself, and dropped into the chair and bowed her head into her hands. When she finally went to bed she sat fully dressed in the corner and kept the lights on.
Breakfast came, and she bathed and dressed, and read her book, which began to come to its empty and happy ending. She threw it aside, because her life was not coming out that way, and she kept thinking of Tom, and crying, not sobs, just a patient slow leaking of tears, which made her makeup run and kept her eyes swollen. She was not powerful. She had lost all illusion of that. She just wanted out of this alive, and to live and to forget it. She tried again to use the phone and she could not figure out the keyboard which she thought might give her access to someone, if she knew anything about such systems, and she did not.
For the first time she became convinced that she was in danger of dying here, and that instead, Tom was going to, and she would be in a way responsible. She was no one, no one against all the anger that swirled about her. She was quite, quite helpless; and not brave at all, and nothing in her life had ever prepared her to be. She thought back to days when she was a child, and in school, and all kinds of knowledge had been laid out in front of her. She had found it useless. . . which it was, to a ten-year-old girl who thought she had the world all neatly wrapped around her finger. Who thought at that age that she knew all the things that were important, that if she went on pleasing others that the world would always be all right.
Besides, the past was about dead people and she liked living ones; and learning about science was learning that the world was in the process of ending, and there was no cheer in that. She wanted to be Bettine Maunfry who had all that she would ever need. Never think, never think about days too far ahead, or things too far to either side, or understand things, which made it necessary to decide, and prepare.
Moments. She had never wanted to imagine such moments would come. There was no time she could have looked down the long currents of her life, which had notbeen so long after all, and when she could have predicted that Bettine Maunfry would have gotten herself into a situation like this. People were supposed to take care of her. There had always been someone to take care of her. That was what it was being female and beautiful and young. It was just not supposed to happen this way.