The matter should have been easy to resolve, but when Sylvia next visited him, George had feared that anything she said about that night would support his self-imposed verdict. Better, he decided, to maintain a modicum of doubt concerning his moral turpitude than to have none. He was unable to perform with Sylvia, excusing his failure by claiming to have stomach trouble, and as they lay listening to the wind flowing across the plain, watching clouds skimming a half-moon that set their edges on silvery fire, he allowed this intimacy to change his mind and blurted out what had happened between him and Peony the day before, and asked Sylvia if she had come to him the night following the rescue, because he feared now that it had not been her.
She was silent for a beat and then turned to face him. ‘Is that what’s got you in a twist? Of course it was me!’ She gave him a playful punch. ‘I’m insulted you didn’t recognize me!’
Later he realized that if he had desired an honest response, he would have asked the question without preamble, not letting on that he suspected his visitor had been Peony, telling Sylvia that he’d had a dream and he wondered whether or nor it was real. He should never have afforded her the opportunity to weigh the situation, to determine that it would be best for her if she lied, thus giving his confidence a boost and assuring that he would remain capable of defending her. This scenario called for a complex understanding on her part, but he had long since discarded the idea that she was other than an intelligent, subtle woman. And so the conflict remained unresolved, continuing to erode his mental underpinnings, distracting him from more important considerations.
George could not separate himself from Peony during the day, but he minimized their physical contact and treated her with a rigid formality, permitting neither hugs nor holding hands. That the loss of a simple animal comfort appeared to have no effect on her should have offered him a degree of absolution, since it pointed out how damaged she was, how trivial an influence the actions of others had upon her inner turmoil; but instead it served to distress him further, seeming to add to his offense, and made him even more mindful of her well-being than he had been before. Every scraped knee and pricked finger was cause for worry; every complaining noise engaged his full concern. When he was unable to sleep (something that happened with increasing frequency), in order to safeguard her more thoroughly he would patrol the perimeter of the camp with a regularity that rivaled the dragon’s, taking pains to avoid his own booby traps. One evening as he made his rounds, he heard a succession of cries coming from the thickets out past his shelter. They subsided as he approached and he could hear nothing except the wind. An oblate moon emerged from cloud cover to the south, silvering the fluttering tops of the bushes and showing his path. Soon he heard the voices again. Men’s querulous voices. He crept toward the sound, peeking between leaves. Separated from the bank of one of the lesser pools by a thin fringe of vegetation, two men sat athwart an animal trail. Delicate rills of blood, black in the moonlight, trickled from wounds on their legs – they had fallen into one of his traps and were picking out banderilla barbs from their flesh. The smaller of the two, a sinewy man with a mane of dark hair half-hiding his face, wearing a pair of rotting trousers, cursed as he removed a barb, digging at his calf with the tip of a fishing knife. The other man was Edgar. He had received fewer injuries and was cautious with the barbs, yipping as he worked them free.
