Basnurmon, in his way, set BarIbithni on its feet. Indeed, I had seen few scars, as I well recalled. Quick-healing wonder of a city, as if the sorcerer had touched it with his hands. For the rest, Sorem’s rebel comrades were courteously offered suicide, Masrian honor and the sword in private, or public disgrace. Only tough Bailgar and five of his Shield captains refused this gloss, daring Basnurmon to show his true colors, and were subsequently tortured for a list of nonexistent crimes, and finally hanged before Winged Horse Gate on the west side of the wall. Denades escaped to Tinsen, so it was said. He had some lover, a rich citizen, who saw to matters. The jerds themselves turned, as any wheel must in the prevailing wind, and swore allegiance to Basnurmon.

  Nasmet was imprisoned one day, seduced her jailer, and fled south, where tattle would have it she became a bandit’s doxy in a fort above a lake there, and drove the devil to drown himself in its waters from despair at her loving demands. Isep, meanwhile, hearing of Malmiranet’s death, pried open the lattice of her tower window and threw herself out upon the paving sixty feet below. She did not die at once, and there were tales of this, too, of certain activities among the guards, who disliked her sexual preference. If any of these tales were true, no doubt her curse at least clings firm to the jerds of the Crimson Palace.

  Thus they ended, those people, among whom I had moved: the loved, the loving, and the scarcely known. Masrian gossip had always been a marvel, and I had long ago ceased to wonder at its breadth and swiftness. As for its cruelty, its accuracy, they did not wound me then.

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  Concerning Gyest’s people, none had died of the flies or of Yellow Mantle. It was as if their god preserved them, or else their sheer trust in immunity made them immune. At length, some of the wagons departed. Gyest and his half-brothers (half since only the mother was clearly known, in accordance with their custom) had remained. Waiting for me, he said, for he had understood I should come, as mundanely as a man with aching joints understands the rain is near. He believed his fate had elected him my helper. I did not even experience shame, but thanked him, and forgot.

  That night, in some moment of sleep, I dreamed of Sorem in his own place of death, some princely dome. I regarded his face through the sun-hole, graven as an image, not unlike my own.

  Even in the dream, I thought, There is my life, and no more to come.

  But the sun rose. It was another day.

  2

  It was our third day in the Wilderness before I glimpsed our first bandit.

  He came bumping along from the south, out of a low line of rock hills there, on the back of a mangy shaggy black pony, and with five of his court bumping after. I saw, with a memory of old nerves, now anesthetized, that they were of obscure Hessek ancestry, though not BitHessian stock, pale skinned and with a clotted wool of hair hanging around them to their backsides, hair which also, in un-Hessek style, sprouted in a scrubby pasture on their entire bodies, as their haphazard garments revealed. I had the impression, that their forebears had sometime mated with some indigenous hairy animal of the wild and here was the result. Still, they were in cheery mood, the leader clapping me on the shoulder as he went by, and yelling-actually in the Sri tongue, though with atrocious accent-for the wagon master.

  Gyest, Jebbo, and Ossif emerged, and handed him a crock of meal and a jar of koois. The bandit demanded nothing else, seemed pleased, nodded and bowed repeatedly, and shook Gyest’s hand. Ossif’s white dog, well trained, barked

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  and wagged its tail. Then Jebbo’s woman’s daughter came up with fresh firewood for the morning hearth.

  Here’s trouble, I thought, for the girl was the child of the wagons, a lissome fourteen, and deer eyed to boot. Sure enough the bandit leader trotted over to her-they appeared hardly ever to get off their horses, save to obey nature in one way or another-lifted her one armed, and was about to nuzzle her, when the girl smilingly produced a little green snake from the fellow’s mouth. I had already learned that Sri women were also adept conjurers, and the little snake was none other than the girl’s pet, but it took the bandit by surprise. He shouted with uneasy laughter, and put her gingerly on the ground. When she slipped the snake between her breasts, his face was a study. The Wildermen fear serpents, and have never discovered which kinds do no harm. He ordered his men to carry her wood for her, bowed and smiled to Gyest, and soon all six rode off again.

  After this, visitations came regularly, with variations.

  On the eighth day, ten bandit men took another jar of koois and some dried meat and a bronze chain, which they would melt and re-forge as a spear-head. When they had gone, Jebbo’s woman found two of her bracelets missing. She went off muttering, and that night I saw a green fire burning behind their wagon. Next day one of the bandits caught up to us and returned the bracelets, saying that his comrade, not he naturally, had stolen them, and begging us to release him from the spell that had given him such nightmares. Jebbo’s woman looked smug, though if it was her sending or just the bandit’s superstition I was unsure.

  On the nineteenth day, the right foremost wheel of the sister wagon came loose. We made an early camp at one of the rare watering places of the desert. Before dusk, another group of bandits had arrived, exacted their little tribute, bartered new rivets for the wheel, helped fix it, then stayed to share supper, even providing most of their own nourishment from a fat pony-skin of tasteless gummy drink. This horrible substance, which they ferment from rock grasses and probably less happy ingredients, is highly potent. Since they were generous in passing it around, Ossif and Jebbo were soon as drunk as they were, while I, who swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, felt somewhat better than I had. In the end the bandits rolled back on their horses, having taken no advantage of the celebration, and I, for my part, somehow ended in a copse of fig trees, lying over Jebbo’s woman’s daughter. The pleasure

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  brought no burden, not being spoken of after either for good or ill. She was knowing for her years, that I remember, but later on we had to find the snake, which had slipped away during our dialogue. When she got it back she covered it with feverish kisses, presumably so I should be cognizant of my place in her world.

  Our guests that night had questioned if we would seek the camp of Darg Sih. This miscreant, apparently a robber-overlord of the region hereabouts, had organized, in the grand manner, a tiger hunt to catch a beast that had been eating his horses-thieved in the first instance. In fact, Sri do not hunt as other men. They mesmerize their prey, as the serpent often does, by means of gesture and a curious vocal whining, then kill quickly while the animal is tranced. I have never seen it done, and speak from hearsay among bandits and Sri alike. Also they eat meat rarely, for their creed resists slaughter of any kind except when unavoidable. Still, I never once saw a man of them set out for game and come back empty-handed, and my own offers of hunting for the pot they politely put aside.

  In the morning, Gyest told me we should be stopping a night or so at Darg Sih’s camp, not to slay tigers, but to ask use of his smithy, the best in the Wilderness. The bandit clans have become canny at smithing, and can turn anything to anything from long practice. I had already seen a couple of murky but credible alcum knives brewed up from their forges.

  I did not inquire, however, what Gyest wanted with a forge, considering it his own business.

  Darg Sih obviously had Masrian blood. He towered over his men, ruddy brown of skin, shaved bald on the scalp and heavily bearded below, and with a pair of skew eyes, only one of which looked at you, while the other went about its own affairs.

  We got to his camp, using some invisible track quite plain to the Sri, and arrived at sunset. The place was crowded with extra thieves, most yet mounted. They had been hunting the tiger with a couple of mares as bait, and a pack of dogs as prone to growl, snap, and fight as were their masters. Nevertheless, they had got the beast, an old one, that had no doubt reckoned a corral of horses as good as a banqueting table laid out for aged tigers. It had died cleanly, a spear-head lodged between its round ears, but by now the dog pack had

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  savaged it, and some of the bravos had tapped its vitals, believing tiger blood a magic draft strengthening to heart and muscles. Remembering the beautiful slinking shape of a tiger seen days back at dusk, heading its prints away across the dunes, this rent and pilfered corpse stirred me to a confused, half-felt pity. How many aeons ago it seemed when I had been fourteen and stood above the two shot deer in the winter valley, pitying their death because I had grown aware of my own mortality.

  Darg Sih, still astride his pony, bowed almost to his own belly before Gyest, and accepted koois and a bag of silver cash.

  “You are welcome to me as my own life, Gyest. We have need of magicians.”

  As they spoke, courteous bandits relieved the Sri of their cleaver-blade weapons. As far as I could see, they never had recourse to them in any case, and now made no objection. There was a lot of bowing and shaking of hands, and the gummy drink offered around, and even a cup of tiger’s blood (refused).

  “What need of magicians do you have, Darg Sih?” Ossif asked,

  “A man mauled by the old cat there. It has fine teeth before it dies, though no longer, for the women steal them for necklets.” Darg Sih laughed. “You will come and work healmagic? The men of the Red Camp tell me you wish the forge. That will be payment, yes? To heal my man?”

  Gyest said he would look at the man and see what could be done. Darg Sih’s straight eye, meanwhile, had run up my uncovered face while the other gazed at my boots.

  “Who is this one? Not Sri, not Hesk, not Seema-boy. Nor Masrian, I think. Who?”

  “A northerner,” Gyest said.

  “North-what is north?” demanded Darg. “And has the scut no tongue?”

  “Tongue and teeth,” said Gyest, sounding amused, though probably this was a precaution. Insults and threats flew about in the bandit camps; if everyone kept smiling, they could be supposed friendly, but to ask for water with a solemn face might invite wrath.

  “But I long to hear the voice of him,” said Darg. He leaned precariously, poked me in the chest, and grinned and said, “Eh, boy, thrill me with your speech.”

  A year back this would have put me in a rage. Now I

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  bowed low, and said, smiling of course, “The thrill of my voice to you, oh master, would not compare to my delight at hearing yours.”

  Both his eyes popped, one on me, one on my belt. Plunging from the saddle with a bellow, Darg Sih embraced me, punching me in the back and roaring. I had spoken inadvertently in his own polyglot bandit language, heard as I came in the camp. He thought me a bandit now, regardless of racial characteristics and garb. He was pressing koois on me, the gum drink, tiger’s blood, and inviting me to couple with his women and his sons.

  It was me he bowleggedly led, crowing, toward the tent of the mauled man, telling me the while of Gyest’s cleverness as healer. Gyest and the brothers followed, their women clustered close, returning bandit grabs, where they had to, with productions of snakes, phosphorescent lights, and careful laughter.

  The camp lived in a diversity of dwellings-in huts of piled stones, in grubby tents, in wicker-work bothies. At its center a spring of white water opened in the rock, and made a pool where wizened fruit trees grew, and here, in a cave, lay an unconscious man, with most of his right arm chewed away. A boy wept at his feet. Darg swept him up and kissed him noisily, trumpeting that the magicians had come and all should be well.

  Gyest and Ossif bent to examine the man. There were broad claw-marks on his breast, too, but they were clean and would close. The arm was useless. A city physician would long since have had it off and bound up the stump before a gangrene set in.

  “It is his mare, you see, offered for bait,” Darg explained. “This one, he runs and leaps the tiger. Chunk! The tiger’s teeth meet in his wrist. He thinks it an appetizer, the old brown one.”

  The boy wept in the doorway.

  “I doubt he can keep his arm, Darg Sih,” Gyest said.

  “His right arm!”Darg roared. “Consider, his knife handyou must save it.” He tapped his smiling jaw with a playful finger. “Save, or no forge.”

  Gyest straightened, came over to me, and said in accurate if slightly halting Masrian, “I can only salvage, and then he may still die. The bandits of Ost Wilderness don’t understand that our magic is mostly illusion. We are not great healers. There’s only one here who can actually heal.”

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  “No,” I said.

  “You renounce the good Power with the bad, then? You have learned nothing?”

  “I swore I’d never play sorcerer again, Gyest. I meant it.”

  “You are long-lived,” he said. “How often will you force this denial from yourself in all the years before you?”

  The man began to rouse, and started to cry out in weak stutterings of pain. The boy ran to him, and took his sound hand.

  “It doesn’t move me,” I said to Gyest, as if this were some show he had ordered them to put on in order that I be impressed.

  “But, Vazkor,” Gyest said, “when has human suffering ever moved you?” I had not expected that. It went through me like the distant cast of a spear, like hurt in a scar long sealed. “You have no compassion,” he said quietly, without anger, merely telling me a fact. “You survive all human ills. How can you expect to feel compassion? You must see that the sympathy any man feels for the plight of another is, at its core, simply a realization and fear that he, too, might suffer the same plight. We grow cold in the loins and about the heart when we confront disease, wounds, death, because we know they are also our heritage. But you, Vazkor, who have overcome any and all these devils of the flesh, how shall you tremble and ache for us?”

  My mind slid back, as if he had directed it, to the shot deer at the pool, my fourteen-year-old pity sprung from my own terror at the aspect of death. I thought, too, of how I had worked among the victims of the yellow plague, trying to ease their wretchedness, as if thereby I would ease my own that I knew would come to me. It was exact, every word he spoke. Yet I should never have fathomed it without Gyest.

  “Don’t chide yourself,” he said now. “Expect only what you can give. Which is pity, rarely, accidentally, some trigger sprung by nostalgia or regret. True sympathy you will never give. Yet how much more you are able to give. Ask the dying man if he would rather you wept for him or healed him.”

  Darg’s hand fell on my arm.

  “What’s this? Masrian you speak and my soldier howling like the she-wolf. Come, Gyest. Heal! Heal!”

  My voice sounded rough as a boy’s when I said, “Gyest, get all of them out. If I must do it, I want no witnesses, no shouts of sorcery.”

  The place was cleared; he spun them some yarn of me,

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  that I had been tutored by a doctor-sage in BarIbithni the Golden, and so on. Even the youth was taken away, sobbing, which left me the writhing, moaning man.

  I healed him. No wonder now, no hubris, no surge of pleasure or contempt, not even my own questioning that I felt nothing. Just healing. The absolute, as I had finally been shown, does not need the accompaniment of pipes and drums.

  He came to himself shortly. By then I had bound his arm with a strip of rag lying on the ground, to conceal its wholeness.

  He fixed me with blazing eyes, and told me the pain was gone and he could flex the fingers and wrist. I told him he could expect total recovery, providing he did not remove the bandage for seven days nor look at the wound. He gawked, and began to argue that he could feel no wound, that I was a magician. I leaned very near, and promised him if ever he called me that again, to my face or at my back, I would send a ghoul to gnaw on his liver.

  We parted in unfriendly silence, my patient and I.

  I sat on a rock, some way above the camp. Smoke, firelight, and a yapping of hounds and men filled up the space below. The space above had changed from carmine to indigo, and the brass dust-moon of the Wilderness had just risen. Somewhere the dog-rats of the waste were twittering, barely audible, out of a vast hollow quiet. It is a phenomenon of such spots that any noise is encapsulated in this ringing stillness, and made strangely tiny, however loud. The shouts of bandits and the squeaks of fauna sound as if confined in bubbles, a symbol of their impermanence. Only the desert endures.

  I sat a long while there. Now and then I noticed the glare of the smithy fire burst up, and thought, Well, I have won Gyest his forge. But mainly my mind went wandering. I was digesting my life. To say I was at peace would not be honest, but to say peace showed itself to me, brushed me with its cool breath, yes. There is, too, a sort of relief in admitting defeat. Struggling to drag a mountain from my path, acknowledging at last the mountain would remain, lying down beneath the mountain, thankful for the shade of it.

  About five hours must have folded themselves away into the night. The moon had touched the roof of the sky and turned her sail to the west.