"But you're able to do things the rest of us can't," Rachel replied.

"Not much," Galilee said lightly.

He lifted his hand, and the flames of the fire seemed to leap like an eager dog. "Of course we have more power together-you and I-than either of us had apart. But maybe that's always true of lovers."

Rachel said nothing; she just watched Galilee's face through the fire.

"What else can I tell you?" he went on. "Well… my mother can raise storms. She raised the storm that brought me back here. And she can send her image wherever she wants to. I guess she could go sit on the moon if she was in the mood. She can take life like that-" he snapped his fingers "-and I think she can probably give it, though that's not her nature. She's been a very violent woman in her time. She finds killing easy."

"You don't."

"No, I don't. I'll do it, if I have to, if I've agreed to, but no I don't like it. My father was the same. He liked sex. That was his grand obsession. Not even love. Sex. Fucking. I saw a few of his temples in my time, and let me tell you they were quite a sight. Statues of my father, displaying himself. Sometimes not even him, just a carving of his dick."

"So you got that from him," Rachel said.

"The dick?"

"The love of sex."

Galilee shook his head. "I'm not a great Jover," he said. "Not like him. I could go for months out at sea, not thinking about it." He smiled. "Of course, when I'm with someone, it's a different story."

"No," Rachel said, with a smile of her own. "It's the same story." He frowned, not understanding. "You always tell the same story," she said, "about your invented country…"

"How do you know?"

"Because I recognized it when I heard it again."

"Who from? Loretta?"

"No."

"Who, then?"

"One of your older conquests," Rachel said. "Captain Holt."

"Oh…" Galilee said softly. "Where did you find out about Charles?"

"From bis journal."

"It still exists, after all these years?"

"Yes. Mitchell took it from me. I think his brother's got it now."

"That's a pity."

"Why?"

"Because I think it probably contains the way into L'Enf-ant. I told it all to Charles when we were going in there together, and he wrote it down."

"Why did you do that?"

"Because I was sick and afraid I'd lose consciousness before we got there. They would have been killed trying to find their way in without my help."

"So now Garrison knows how to get to your mother's house?" Rachel said.

Galilee nodded. "Ah, well. Nothing to be done about it now. Did you read all the journal?"

"Most, not all."

"But you know how we met? How Nub brought Charles to see me?"

"Yes. I know all that." A flurry of snatched pictures passed through her mind's eye: the battlefield at Benton-ville, the phantom child on Holt's horse, the ruins of Charleston and the grisly sights in the garden of the house on Tradd Street. She'd seen so much through Holt's eyes. "He wrote well," she said.

"He'd wanted to be a poet in his youth," Galilee said. "He spoke the way he wrote, believe it or not. The way sentences fell from his lips; it was beautiful to hear."

"Did you love him?"

Galilee looked surprised at the question. But then he said: "I suppose I did, in a way. He was a noble fellow. Or at least he had been. By the time I met him he was so very sad. He'd lost everything."

"But he found you."

"I wasn't adequate compensation," Galilee said, smiling ruefully at his own formality. "I couldn't be his wife and children and all the good things he'd had before the war. Though… maybe I imagined I could. I think that's always been my big mistake. I want to give gifts. I want to make people happy. But it never ends well."

"Why not?"

"Because I can't give anybody what they really want. I can't give them life. Sooner or later they die, and dying's never very good. Nobody dies a good death. People ding on. Even when they're in agony they want a few more minutes, a few more seconds-"

"What happened to Holt?"

"He died at L'Enfant. He's buried there." He sighed. "I should never have let them take me back. It was asking for trouble. I'd been away such a long time. But I was wounded. All used up. I needed somewhere I could heal myself."

"How did you come to be wounded?"

"I was careless. I thought I was untouchable… and I wasn't." His hand went up to his face, his fingers instinctively seeking out the scars on his brow and scalp, touching them delicately as though he were reading something there: the braille of past suffering. "There was a woman called Katherine Morrow," he said. "She was one of my… what's the word? Concubines? She'd been quite the Southern virgin until she came to be with me. Then she showed her real feelings. This was a woman who had no shame. None. She would do whatever came into her head. But she had two brothers, who had survived the war, and when they returned home to Charleston came looking for her. I was drunk that night. I was drunk most nights, but that night I was so drunk I don't think I knew what was happening to me until I was out on the street, surrounded by a dozen men-the brothers and their friends-all beating me. It wasn't just that I'd seduced the girl. I was a nigger, and they were so full of hatred, because that spring all the niggers in America were free men and women, and they didn't like that. It was the end of their world. So they beat me and beat me, and I was too stupid with drink and my own despair to stop them."

"So how was it they didn't kill you?"

"Nickelberry shot the brothers dead. He walked up with two pistols-I can still see him now, just parting the crowd around me, and blowing holes in their heads. Bang! Bang! Then Charles was there, threatening to do the same to the next man who tried to land a blow. That made them scatter. And Charles and Nub picked me up and took me away."

"Off to L'Enfant."

"Eventually."

"What happened to the people who'd been with you in your…"

"Pleasure palace? I don't know. I went back to Charleston a few years later, to look for them. But they'd all gone their separate ways. I heard Miss Morrow went to Europe. But the rest…?" He shrugged. "So many people have come and gone, over the years. So many faces. But I don't forget them. I never forget them. I see them all still. I dream about them, as though I could open my eyes and they'd be there." His voice dropped to a murmur. "And maybe they would…" he said.

He halted for a moment, then he got to his feet. "The fire's too bright," he said. "Walk with me, will you?"

They walked together, down the beach. Not hand in hand, as they'd walked that bright day when he'd taken her to see The Samarkand, but a little way from one another. He was so raw, right now; she was afraid that she'd hurt him, if she so much as touched him.

He continued to talk, but in the darkness he lost the thread of what he'd been telling her, and now he offered only fragments; disconnected observations about how his life had been in those distant days. Something about how his homecoming had unleashed a string of catastrophes; about horses killing his father; about his sister Marietta protecting him from his mother's rage; about his other sister's skills with the poultices and pills, which had helped heal him. Rachel didn't press him with questions about any of this. She just let his mind wander and his lips report.

Though Galilee made no defense of his actions, I feel that for the sake of veracity I must offer some observations of my own. Though he took the blame upon himself as though every sin committed at L'Enfant in those few grim days were his fault and his alone, this was simply not so. He wasn't responsible for my giving Chiyojo over to Nicodemus; he wasn't responsible for Cesaria's unrepentant rage; he wasn't responsible for the death of his friend Charles Holt, who died by his own hand.