Soldier of Arete by Gene Wolfe

Author:Gene Wolfe
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

23

At This, My Zygite Bench

I must finish what I began writing last night. I have just now reread it all, and I confess that I think myself rather foolish for having recorded Hegesistratus’ story in as much detail as I did; but the time we spent about the fire, between the time the Mede left and the moment when he and Polos returned with Cleton, seems very precious to me; I think that Io and I cannot have had many such moments, times of comfort, free from danger. Perhaps that is why Io speaks of Kalleos’ house in Thought as she does. Kalleos was the hetaera Actes mentioned, she says.

The old man was nearly unconscious when Oeobazus and Polos carried him in. While Hegesistratus and Elata saw to his wound, Acetes, the black man, and I questioned Oeobazus. He said that he knew Cleton because Cleton had come to see him while he was a prisoner in the temple of Pleistorus. He had seen him standing in the street arguing with half a dozen Thracians. There had been a woman servant beside him holding a lamp—its light had attracted his eye. He had just recognized Cleton when one of the Thracians cut at him with a sword. The woman had dropped her lamp and fled; and the boy—Oeobazus had not known his name—had dashed up to help. Together they had lifted Cleton onto Oeobazus’ mount and brought him here.

“He’d said he was a friend of your master’s,” Oeobazus told me, “and I know he was a friend to me while I was imprisoned—the only person who offered me any hope.”

“He was,” Hegesistratus confirmed, glancing up from binding Cleton’s wounds. “Or rather, I should have said he is. I don’t think this is going to kill him.”

Elata nodded, and winked at me.

“The sword was not heavy enough or the arm strong enough—whichever way you care to put it. The blade bit into the bone, and deeply, too; but a skull is thick this high above the ear.”

Cleton (whose name I had heard by that time from Oeobazus) muttered, and Elata held a wine cup to his lips. “He’s dry—it’s how I often feel as the vine laps my roots. He must have water to make new blood.”

He drank all the cup held, and we laid him before the fire. That is when I wrote what I did, starting when Io showed me our old camp; for she had said (this as we whispered among ourselves and listened for the old man’s rasping breath) that he had come to see us there, speaking to me as well as to Hegesistratus. I asked her whether I had written of that and whether she thought I should read it now, but she said she had overheard everything that had been said and would tell me at need.

After a long time, Cleton spoke to Hegesistratus and the black man, who helped him sit up. That was when I ceased to write. They set him beside the hearth, with his back to its warm stones.

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