I said, “Why didn’t Morpos ask the goddess to turn him into a mouse or a wren so he could escape the bandits that way?”

“Maybe he was afraid she wouldn’t turn him back.”

The clear light of the library was slanting in through the glass-paneled doorway to my right, falling on the table between my tutor and me and on dust motes hung in the air. The tiny flecks drew my eye, and I watched as they dipped and swirled in invisible currents.

“They are beautiful in the light, are they not?” my tutor asked. They were, catching the sun and shining like tiny stars themselves.

“You know, there are just as many outside the sun’s rays that are invisible,” she said. Then, in the way of dreams, she lifted her hand into the air and moved a single dust mote into the light. “And you?” she asked. She lifted her hand again, just beyond the edge of the light, and I knew she held another mote and could move it as easily into the way of the sun, and I said, “No, thank you. I am content where I am.”

A few days later I was beaten. It was entirely my own fault. I forgot that my standing in the barracks was not universal in reach.

There were twenty-two of us in the barracks, ranging from fourteen through fifty or so in years. I had as much freedom as any of the men. With permission, we walked down to the shore in our free time if the day was sunny or lounged in the courtyard. On very rare occasions the men of the megaron might go into town for a festival, but that was only once or twice a year, and it had not happened in my time there. Those with friends in the megaron itself could wander up the slope, across the stable yard to the terrace, and from there into the scullery and the kitchens. None of the field hands went farther than that.

I had been up to the kitchens a number of times with a man named Dirnes and Oreus, the one who’d named me Bunny. At the end of the day after my dream of the dust motes, as the last light was just gone, we were walking up past the stables, intending to cross the yard to the entryway into the lower levels of the megaron. Dirnes was friends with one of the lesser cooks, a baker, and he had hopes of coming by a soft roll or two.

As we rounded the corner of the stables, Dirnes rammed into someone coming the other way. It was a direct collision; neither had the time to turn aside, and the other man was knocked backward. Clutching at Dirnes, he fell, taking Dirnes with him to the ground and swearing a blue streak. Dirnes popped up, apologies on his lips, but the other man, a soldier and a drunken one, was having none of it. Still sprawled on the ground, he struck Dirnes, who was bending over him, hard in the mouth.

Instead of falling back, Dirnes stayed for another blow and went on trying to help the man up. Angry, I pulled Dirnes aside and seized the soldier by the shoulders. Using both hands, I heaved him to his feet. Standing, we were eye to eye, and his belligerence was impaired by the close look into my face.

“Better now?” I asked, and he nodded warily.

I turned him toward his friend and pushed him, not too gently, on his way. He gave me an evil look over his shoulder but didn’t come back, heading on unsteadily toward the entrance of the megaron instead. Dirnes and Oreus, I realized, had left me and gone back down the path toward the field house.

When I caught up to them, I found to my consternation that Dirnes was angry, and angry with me.

“What did you think you were doing?” he snarled.

“He was drunk. There was no point in letting him hit you.”

“Just hope nothing more comes of it,” Oreus advised Dirnes, nudging him on toward the barracks. Unsure of my ground, I held my peace.

In the morning, just after the call to rise, as we all were climbing stiffly to our feet and stretching our muscles to face the day’s work, there was a disturbance at one of the shed doors. It was the soldier of the night before and another man, his officer, I supposed. They came to complain of an unruly slave. Any number of eyes flicked toward Dirnes, who was still sitting on his pallet. But I rose first, drawing the eye of the soldier.

“Him!” he said. Dirnes had knocked him down, and no doubt the soldier would have settled for exercising his revenge there. He may not even have realized, until I stood, that I was also a slave, but he knew that I was the one who had embarrassed him.

With no other choice in the face of a complaint from a free man, Ochto walked me out to the punishment post and tied my hands to the ring there. When he was finished, my knees no longer held me. I don’t know who untied me, but they carried me back to my pallet and left me there while they went off to work.

At the midday break I could get myself to my feet. No one got between me and the first place in line. I had to eat on my knees, the bowl on the ground. Then I lay down again, praying that Ochto wouldn’t expect me to work in the fields after the break.

He didn’t, and I slept on and off through the end of the day. It was interesting. My back was certainly sore, more damage done there than Basrus had done when he was disguising me as an unruly slave, but it was damage to the skin, nothing much deeper. The pain, no matter how sharp, was not as distressing as the aftermath of Basrus’s beating, perhaps because it wasn’t my head that hurt, or because I was not so shattered by other events as I had been then.

I felt no particular distress, but a little surprise.

When we were adventuring after Hamiathes’s Gift, I had watched the magus beat Eugenides. We’d thought he was no more than a common thief from Sounis’s gutters, and had listened to him whine and complain for days. When food was missing, it was easy to blame him. The magus used a riding crop on his back, and holy sacrificial lambs, Gen had come up off the ground like he’d been catapulted. It was as if he was a different person, some stranger who’d manifested in Gen’s body. He’d dumped Pol flat onto his back—something I never thought I’d see—and gone for the magus. If Pol hadn’t been up again so quickly, the magus was ready to run and dignity be damned. Even with Pol between him and Gen, the magus had been wary.

I thought later that this was the real Gen revealed, the person who’d been hiding behind a screen of complaints and needling humor. But I spent whole days with Eugenides after our adventures, and that Eugenides was exactly the Gen I had traveled with. Maybe I don’t know which Gen is real. But I know there was nothing feigned about his emotions after he had been beaten.

Where, I wondered, was my wounded pride? Where was my outrage? My self-respect? Nowhere, it seemed. My back hurt. I lay there on my pallet, hoping it would improve soon and wondering, in a distant, unreproachful sort of way, if I was any kind of man at all, and decided that I probably wasn’t.

I got up the next day. Very sore but well able to move a shovel. Though reduced to half a shovel again at a try, I was no more pathetic than I had been when I first arrived in Hanaktos’s fields, and Ochto didn’t seem inclined to push me. I worked alone. Dirnes wasn’t speaking to me. He cast me bitter looks in the barracks and turned a disdainful shoulder on me if he caught me looking in his direction.

There was nothing I could do about it, so I worked. Ochto was watching me carefully, and I didn’t want to give him the idea that I might be contemplating anything in line with my man-killer reputation. The sweat in my stripes stung, and I was looking forward to rinsing it away with fresh well water once we were back at the barracks. I certainly didn’t want to find myself chained again to the ring in the wall by my pallet.