“You’re going to die,” whispered the Voices again.

“I want to see the Pyrenees. I want to see the valley one more time, Talbo. You know that I’m going to die.”

Yes, he knew. He was a man accustomed to battlefields and he could tell when a wound would prove to be the death of one of

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his soldiers. Loni’s wound had been open for three days, poison-ing her blood. Those whose wounds did not heal might last two days or two weeks, but never longer than that.

And Loni was close to death. Her fever had passed. Talbo knew that this, too, was a bad sign. As long as the foot hurt and the fever burned, that meant the organism was still fighting. Now the struggle was over, and it was only a matter of time.

“You’re not afraid,” said the Voices. No, Loni wasn’t afraid.

Even as a child, she had known that death was merely another beginning. At that time, the Voices had been her great companions.

They had faces, bodies, and gestures visible only to her. They were people who came from different worlds; they talked to her and never let her feel lonely. She’d had a very interesting childhood, playing with the other children but using her invisible friends to shift objects around and make strange noises that startled her companions. Her mother was glad that they lived in a Cathar country—“if the Catholics were here, you’d be burned alive,” she used to say. The Cathars paid no attention to such things; they believed that the good were good, the bad were bad, and that no force in the Universe could change this.

Then the French arrived, saying that there was no Cathar country, and since the age of eight, all she had known was war.

The war had brought her one very good thing: her husband, hired in some distant land by the Cathar priests, who never themselves took up arms. But it brought something bad, too: the fear of being burned alive, because the Catholics were moving ever closer to her village. She began to feel afraid of her invisible

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friends, and they gradually disappeared from her life. However, the Voices remained. They continued to tell her what was going to happen and how she should behave, but she didn’t want their friendship, because they always knew too much. Then one Voice taught her the trick of thinking about that ancient tree, and she hadn’t heard the Voices at all since the last crusade against the Cathars had begun, and the French Catholics had continued to win battle after battle.

Today, though, she didn’t have the strength to think about the tree. The Voices were back, and she didn’t mind. On the contrary, she needed them. They would show her the path once she was dead.

“Don’t worry about me, Talbo. I’m not afraid of dying,” she said.

They reached the top of the wall. A cold, relentless wind was blowing, and Talbo drew his cloak more tightly about him. Loni didn’t feel the cold anymore. She could see the lights of a town on the horizon, and the lights of the encampment at the foot of the mountain. All along the valley bottom bonfires were lit. The French soldiers were awaiting the final decision.

The notes from a flute wafted up from below, along with the sound of voices singing.

“It’s the soldiers,” said Talbo. “They know they could die at any moment, and that’s why, for them, life is one long celebration.”

Loni felt suddenly furious with life. The Voices were telling her that Talbo would meet other women, have children, and grow

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rich on what he plundered from cities. “But he will never love anyone as he has loved you, because you are part of him forever,”

said the Voices.

Loni and Talbo, their arms about each other, remained for a while gazing down on the landscape below, listening to the soldiers singing. Loni sensed that the mountain had been the setting of other wars in the past, a past so remote that not even the Voices could remember it.

“We are eternal, Talbo. That’s what the Voices used to tell me in the days when I could see their bodies and faces.”

Talbo knew about his wife’s Gift, but she had not mentioned it for a long time. Perhaps it was the effect of the fever.

“And yet no one life is the same as any other life. It might be that we will never meet again, and I need you to know that I’ve loved you all my life. I loved you even before I met you. You’re part of me.

“I’m going to die, and since tomorrow is as good a day to die as any, I would like to die with the priests. I’ve never understood their ideas about the world, but they have always understood me.

I want to accompany them into the next life. I might prove to be a good guide, because I’ve visited those worlds before.”

Loni thought how ironic fate was. She had been afraid of the Voices because they might set her on the path that would lead her to the fire, and yet there the fire was, waiting for her.

Talbo looked at his wife. Her eyes were growing dull, and yet she still retained the same peculiar charm that had first drawn him to her. He had never told her certain things, about the women he

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received as part of the booty of battle, the women he met while he was traveling the world, the women who were expecting him to return one day. He hadn’t told her this because he was certain that she knew everything anyway and forgave him because he was her great love, and a great love is above the things of this world.

But there was something else he had never told her, and which she would possibly never know: that she, with her affection and her gaiety, had been largely responsible for him having rediscovered the meaning of life, that her love had driven him to the far corners of the Earth, because he needed to be rich enough to buy some land and live in peace with her for the rest of his days. It was his utter confidence in this fragile creature, whose life was now fading fast, that had made him fight with honor, because he knew that after the battle he could forget all the horrors of war in her arms, and that, despite all the women he had known, only there in her arms could he close his eyes and sleep like a child.

“Go and call the priest, Talbo,” she said. “I want to be bap-tized.”

Talbo hesitated for a moment. Only warriors choose how they will die, but that woman had given her life for love, and perhaps, for her, love was a strange form of war.

He got up and walked down the steps in the wall. Loni tried to concentrate on the music coming from below and which was somehow making dying easier. Meanwhile, the Voices kept talking.

“In her life, every woman can make use of the Four Rings of Revelation. You have used only one, the wrong one,” they said.

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Loni looked at her fingers. They were torn and cracked, the nails filthy. There was no ring. The Voices laughed.

“You know what we mean,” they said. “The virgin, the saint, the martyr, and the witch.”

Loni knew in her heart what the Voices were saying, but she couldn’t remember what it meant. She had heard about it a long time ago, in an age when people dressed differently and saw the world differently, too. She’d had another name then and had spoken another language.

“They are the four ways in which a woman can commune with the Universe,” the Voices said, as if it were important for her to recall these ancient things. “The Virgin has the power of both man and woman. She is condemned to Solitude, but Solitude reveals its secrets. That is the price paid by the Virgin—to need no one, to wear herself out in her love for others, and, through Solitude, to discover the wisdom of the world.”

Loni was still looking at the encampment down below. Yes, she knew these things.

“And the Martyr,” the Voices went on, “the Martyr has the power of those who cannot be harmed by pain and suffering. She surrenders herself, suffers, and, through Sacrifice, discovers the wisdom of the world.”

Loni again looked at her hands. There, shining invisibly, she saw the ring of the Martyr encircling one of her fingers.