believe that you are a holy woman in a rather unusual guise, and I respect that. If it were up to me as a man, I would take you back to your people. If it were up to you as a simple woman, I believe that you would continue to use your gift as you have been doing, for the benefit of anyone who needs you. But it is not up to me, or to you.
“If I release you, your gift will be discovered in time and your government will use your gift to lead my people to the false conclusion that the Will of Heaven is with the Americans and resistance useless. Do you understand? Wandering among us in normal times, you would be a mendicant holy woman. Among your people, what you mean as good is a weapon against us. Even if you do not mean to cooperate, they can force it. You and your gift will be scrutinized, analyzed, and your talent ultimately perverted to military purposes, which I know, and you know, are the thing furthest from your heart. Unfortunately, I can promise you that if you cooperate, my side will do much the same, but it is my side. I cannot betray it by allowing you to fall back into the hands of the enemy. I can protect you only so far.”
“As far as you protected that man who stepped on the mine? Or those children?” I asked.
“It was necessary that the village pay in its most valuable currency for its treachery. The soldier would have been no good to us alive. Dead, he made it at least seem a fair trade. I have done many things to your own countrymen you would like even less well,” he said with deliberate menace that failed to frighten me nearly so much as his gentle tone of regret. “You are overly sentimental.”
“I am overly human,” I said bitterly. “What’s your problem?”
He sighed and extended his limbs in a gesture that was more writhing than stretching, then returned to his relaxed pose, the cigarette dangling from his fingers, which dangled between his knees. “I knew I should have killed you back at the village. I hope you don’t think I’m a good example of a dedicated Communist. I’m not even a Party member yet, though perhaps you will help me become one. I’m not really worthy. I haven’t yet purged all of the reactionary Confucian notions from my heart.” He grimaced when he said the last, too. Neither communism nor Confucianism really meant anything to him, his voice and face said. They were constructs that were useful because of how other people used them to define him. Then he looked back up at me, and though his aura had been too slim for me to read it, I could read his eyes. They were like those of a patient who’s had a stroke and has just awakened to find himself paralyzed, his face crooked and his mouth unable to make intelligible sounds. “Damn you, woman,” he said finally. “Do you want to know why I really saved your life?”
I blinked assent.
“At first it was because it would have shamed me to kill you, shamed my daughter, shamed my wife’s memory, shamed the movement in front of my home village. And, of course, I would have had to kill my daughter, to whom I am incorrectly sentimentally attached, before I could have killed you. But later, in the jungle, when I intended to kill you, I did not because when I looked at you, started to question you, for the first time in years I saw another person—a living person. Everyone has been walking corpses to me for years, even my daughter. But I think now I should have killed you at once after all. Life is not meant to return to a dead limb, and now that it does, it burns with the fires of hell.”
Hien crawled out of the hole then, followed by some of the others, and we resumed our march. We were doing most of our traveling in the evening, at night, just as the American troops were making camp and starting to assign patrols.
I think Hien must have heard some of what the colonel said. He stuck very close to me, the blue of his aura all but buried in an avalanche of depressed brown. The night before must have been more horrible for him than it was for me, must have made him