n ten days before, I ordered Chryseros
to loose Agathemer and he obeyed me, as if I had been what I felt myself,
his master.

He and Agathemer stood up and looked at me and each other: I must have
made a laughable spectacle, swaying as I knelt, my hands on the rock, my
hair and beard mere clipped stubble, and I naked, with my back bleeding
and both shoulders and one hip inflamed, purple-red and puffy. Certainly
both Chryseros and Agathemer appeared comical to me, even in my pain and
misery and weakness and through the enveloping horror of my fever.
Agathemer, his hair and beard a worse stubble than mine, was gasping and
ruefully rubbing his throat, making a ridiculous figure in his brown
tunic, patched with patches of red, yellow and blue, all sewed on with
white thread. Chryseros was panting, and his bald head shone in the sun.
He had cast off his cloak as he rushed at Agathemer and stood only in his
rusty brown tunic, himself as dry and lean as a dead limb of a tree.

Although he had obeyed instantly when I ordered him to loose Agathemer,
yet, perhaps from some vagary of my fever, I stared at Chryseros without
any other feeling than that he had been for most of his life the tenant of
our family enemy. As I looked at him I felt utterly lost, as if there was
now no hope for me, as if Chryseros would certainly betray me to the
authorities. I felt utterly despairing and totally reckless. This mood,
oddly enough, urged me to do the very best thing I could have done.

Either from right instinct or delirious folly, I informed Chryseros fully
of our purposes, doings and plans. He apologized to Agathemer for his
assault on him, affirmed his complete loyalty to me and promised all
possible assistance and perfect secrecy. He examined me and said:

"I'll have your wounds clean, your back dried up, every inch of you
healing properly and your fever cooled before morning. Here, Agathemer,
help get him abed."

They washed my back and laid me, naked as I was, on the quilt laid over
the bed of leaves, then they covered me with the other quilt.

"You two keep close till I come back," Chryseros advised. "Someone else
might use this path. I'll be back soon and I'll arrange to excite no
suspicion."

When he returned he had me out on the flat-topped stone, washed my back
and wounds, and then bathed them with some lotion which, when first
applied, felt cooling and soothing, but almost at once burnt into me till
every part of my back,