She lies in the leaf litter unmoving, the spitted partridge still in her hand. Her dress is filthy, her slippers hardly slippers anymore. In the starlight the blood running down her cheek looks black.
Smoke rises from the coals, frogs rasp in the dark, some clockwork inside the night advances one notch, and the girl moans. He binds her wrists with Moonlight’s old halter. She moans again, then thrashes. Blood runs into her right eye; she scrambles to her knees and brings her bound wrists to her teeth; when she sees him, she screams.
Omeir glances back through the trees, frightened.
“Quiet. Please.”
Is she calling to someone nearby? He was stupid to make a fire: too much of a risk. As he smothers the embers the girl howls a torrent of language he cannot understand. He tries to clap a hand over her mouth but comes away bitten.
She gets to her feet, takes several dizzy steps into the dark, then falls. Maybe she is drunk: the Greeks are always drunk, isn’t that what everyone says? Half-beasts permanently inebriated on their own somatic pleasure.
Yet she is so young.
Probably it is a trick, a witch’s disguise.
He tries to simultaneously listen for anyone approaching and examine the wound on the edge of his hand. Then he takes a bite of the partridge, the skin charred, the center raw, and the girl lies panting in the leaves, blood still flowing down her face, and a new thought rises: Does she guess why he is alone? Does she sense what he has done? Why he isn’t rushing into the city with the other victors to claim his rewards?
She squirms away from him. Maybe this creature, too, is alone. Maybe she also has abandoned some post. When he notices that she is crawling toward an object at the base of a tree, he steps in and takes up her sack and she riots. Inside is a little ornamental box and a bundle wrapped in what might be silk—impossible to tell in the dark. She rolls again to her knees, screeching curses in her language, then emits a scream so high and plaintive that it seems more lamb than human.
Terror rockets up his spine. “Please be quiet.” He imagines her scream traveling out through the trees in every direction: across the dark body of water ahead, down the roads leading to the city, directly into the ear of the sultan.
He pushes the sack closer to her and she grabs it with her bound wrists, then staggers again. She is weak. It was hunger that drew her.
Omeir places what’s left of the still-warm bird on the ground near her and she picks it up with her teeth and eats like a dog and in the quiet he tries to gather his thoughts. They are far too close to the city. Any moment men, either beaten or triumphant, will come through here on horses. She will be taken as a slave and he will be hanged for desertion. But, he considers, if they find the two of them together, maybe the girl can serve as a kind of shield: a prize he has won. Maybe, traveling with her, he will draw less suspicion than if he were alone.
Her eyes stay fixed on him as she sucks the partridge bones and a breeze rises and the still-new leaves tremble in the darkness. As he tears a strip from his linen shirt a memory ambushes him: of standing with Grandfather in morning light, their trousers wet to the knees with dew, fitting Moonlight and Tree to their first yoke.
The girl remains still and does not scream as he ties the linen over the wound on her head. Then he hitches Moonlight’s lead to the halter binding her hands. “Come,” he whispers. “We must go.”
He puts her sack over his shoulder and pulls her by the lead as though she were a recalcitrant donkey. They pick their way around the rushes fringing a broad wetland, the girl stumbling now and then as the sun rises behind them. In the early light he finds a patch of brown-capped hog mushrooms and squats in their midst eating the caps.
He holds some out to her and she watches him for a bit, then eats as well. The bandage seems to have staunched the bleeding and the blood on her neck and throat has dried to the color of rusted iron. In the noon light they give wide berth to a burned village. A pack of five or six skeletal dogs rushes them and draws dangerously close before Omeir drives them off with stones.
* * *
By evening they traverse a landscape pocked with ruins—orchards raided, dovecotes emptied, vineyards burned. When he kneels beside creeks to drink, she does too. Just before nightfall they discover peas in a half-trampled garden and eat, and well after midnight, he finds a little hollow inside a hedgerow beside an unplanted field and secures her lead around the trunk of a cypress. She looks at him, her eyelids slipping, and he watches sleep overcome her terror.
In the moonlight he drags the sack away from her and removes the snuffbox. It’s empty, smells of tobacco. A scene Omeir cannot quite make out is painted on the lid. A tall house beneath a sky. Perhaps it is her home?