It was cold, the clear wet chill that dripped through the trees before a summer dawn. The fire was out. The woman, showered over by her summer hair, lay sleeping on her side. Her face was cupped into one hand. One bare full breast gleamed out against her own tawny colour, startlingly snow-white. The dog stood, hackles raised. A horse cropped the turf nearby. Beside the wagon was a man.
He looked almost every inch the uncouth robber the woman had feared the night before. From that alone, Dro recognised him as her husband. Squat, dirty and dishevelled, he poised in a bizarre kind of half crouch, hair and clothes flopping, and a loose gut flopping before all that. Only the man’s hands were curious, thin and articulate, though crammed now into raw red fists.
“Well,” he said, slurred and drunken and all too lucid, “well, well, well.”
The situation was laughable, the pith of many an inn song and joke. Dro got to his feet slowly, pulling his clothes together as he did so, and the man winked malevolently, leering.
“Well, well, well.”
Dro said nothing, and then the man thought of some more words.
“Aren’t you going to say: It’s all a bad mistake? Aren’t you going to say: Just because you found me lying between your wife’s legs, I don’t actually have to have been doing anything with her? Well?”
“I’ll say all that, if you like,” Dro said.
“Like? Like?” The man straightened. He stepped over a leather sack on the grass—robber’s booty? As he passed the dog, not looking at it, it cowered. He came walking through the ashes of the fire. “You forced her,” said the man. “Right? She was unwilling and you raped her.”
“Yes. I raped her.”
“She looks raped. I must say. Definitely raped.”
Dro was aware the woman had woken and sat up, but he did not turn to her. The man was now close enough that the stench of ill-digested alcohol on his breath struck Dro’s nostrils. Dro moved an inch or so, coming between husband and wife in the only manner left.
“I think,” said the man, smiling down at his wife, “she was slightly willing.”
Dro moved, his fist already rising, left arm already extending to block any move the other man might make. But the woman was on her feet, catching back Dro’s arm.
“No,” she panted. “No. It’s all right.”
“Of course it is,” said the man. “Why should I care? I’ve been with a whore all night.” He beamed at Dro. “Both been with whores. Yours any good? Mine was.”
The woman began to push Dro fiercely.
“Go away. Please. Go away now.”
She was breathless. Dro said, “You’d better come with me.”
“Who’ll cook my breakfast?” asked the man aggrieved. “Come on, I don’t care.” He sat down by the dead fire and took off his boots carefully. “Let’s have some service,” he said.
The woman, holding her dress together over her white breasts with her brown hands, took up the beerskin and handed it to her husband.
“Thanks,” he said. He drank noisily.
“Go away,” the woman said to Dro. “I’m begging you.”
“All right. But you—”
“Go.”
In the deadly still quarter dark Parl Dro started to walk away. At the clearing’s edge, he looked back and she was lighting the fire. The man drank from the skin. The dog lay like a rock, and the horse plodded about the turf.
Dro walked out of sight, and waited. Nothing happened. At last the sun rose. The woman appeared out of the trees when he had given her up. She stood some yards from Dro and cried in a low wild voice: “Didn’t I say you must go? If you get off, he’ll be all right. He’s only a great baby. Go now, like I told you. Damn you, you’re nothing to me. He’s my man.”
For a while, Dro walked slowly, listening for her to scream. The wood rustled and chirped with birds. Nothing else. He began to be able to convince himself she had known what she did, and that everything would be well. She had had, after all, a choice. Dro could have protected her. She was not obliged to stay with such a man as the drunkard.
She ceased to resemble Silky. She became a woman he had spent a night with. The circumstances of discovery were embarrassing and futile.