Tros horse broke stride, looking reproachfully about at him to see what that
shift of weight could possibly be construed to mean.
Tempus stopped the horse in the middle of the cool shadowed way on that
beautiful morning and sat stiffly a long while, conducting an internal battle
which had no resolution.
After a time, he swung the horse back in its tracks, kicked it into a lope
towards the barracks from which he had just come. Let her stay with One-Thumb,
if she would. She had come between him and his god before. He was not ready to
give her to the god, and he was not ready to give himself back into the hands of
his curse, rip asunder what had been so laboriously patched together and at such
great cost. He thought of Abarsis, and Kadakithis, and the refractory upcountry
peoples, and he promised Vashanka any other woman the god should care to choose
before sundown. Cime would keep, no doubt, right where she was. He would see to
it that Lastel saw to her.
Abarsis’s Tros horse snorted softly, as if in agreement, single-footing through
Sanctuary’s better streets towards the barracks. But the Tros horse could not
have known that by this simple decision its rider had attained to a greater
victory than in all the wars of all the empires he had ever laboured to
increase. Now the Tros horse whose belly quivered between Tempus’s knees as it
issued a blaring trumpet to the dusty air did so not because of its rider’s
triumph over self and god, but out of pure high spirits, as horses always will
praise a fine day dawned.