The Afgan Campaign

34

Two packets arrive from Shinar while I am at Maracanda. She doesn’t know how to write, so she sends stuff. Candy, beadwork, a pony carved of oryx horn. My emotion upon receiving these little gift boxes surprises me. I have registered Shinar under my oikos. She gets half my pay. In her second packet is a note scratched on beaten leather, with the sign of a scribe from the marketplace. The broken Greek is his, not hers.

I come to Maracanda. Ghilla’s son is born. The soldiers kill Daria for your brother. I bring your pay. If you find a new woman, I make my own way.

So Lucas is a father now. Ghilla has not yet sent a letter. He’s happy to learn, any way he can. We roast a goose to celebrate.

“Do you know,” Lucas confesses, “I’m still writing to my fiancee back home? I am a loathsome cur.”

His betrothed is my cousin Teli, a darling girl who worships him.

“Forgive me, Matthias. I keep waiting to get killed. Then I can avoid giving her the bad news.”

He is a dog for this dereliction. Still we laugh. We’re all waiting to get killed.

Lucas acknowledges his happiness with Ghilla. The fact astonishes him. “Who could have foreseen it? But look at her. She’s beautiful, she cares for me tenderly. I can talk to her, she understands. I don’t have to pretend the world is different than it is or that I’m a better man than I am. Yet she stays. Why? Would any of our girls back home do the same?”

I think: Would they poison us? But I bite my tongue.

“This woman,” says Lucas with truth, “makes no demands for herself, yet she is willing to die at my side. Just being with me puts her at risk of her life, from her family and tribe and even from strangers. Still she remains.” He shakes his head. To me he promises to write to Teli, come clean.

Dice asks, “Will you ever go home, Lucas?”

Our festive hall is the ruins of a farmhouse.

“I am home,” he says.