The old woman smiled. “So that’s her name, is it? Now I’ll know, if anybody should mention her. He might. You’ve money, why not try him?”

Why not indeed, I thought.

“Brought from the jun-gles of the North! Never eats! A-kin to the bush-es and the grass-es!” BOOM! BOOM! “The fu-ture and the re-mote past are one to him!” When he saw me approaching the door of his tent, the drummer stopped his clamor. “Only an aes to see him. Two to speak with him. Three to be alone with him.”

“Alone for how long?” I asked as I selected three copper aes.

A wry grin crossed the drummer’s face. “For as long as you wish.” I handed him his money and stepped inside.

It had been plain he had not thought I would want to stay long, and I expected a stench or something equally unpleasant. There was nothing beyond a slight odor as of hay curing. In the center of the tent, in a dust-spangled shaft of sunlight admitted by a vent in the canvas roof, was chained a man the color of pale jade. He wore a kilt of leaves, now fading; beside him stood a clay pot filled to the brim with clear water.

For a moment we were silent. I stood looking at him. He sat looking at the ground. “That’s not paint,” I said. “Nor do I think it dye. And you have no more hair than the man I saw dragged from the sealed house.”

He looked up at me, then down again. Even the whites of his eyes held a greenish tint.

I tried to bait him. “If you are truly vegetable, I would think your hair should be grass.”

“No.” He had a soft voice, saved from womanishness only by its depth.

“You are vegetable then? A speaking plant?”

“You are no countryman.”

“I left Nessus a few days ago.”

“With some education.”

I thought of Master Palaemon, then of Master Malrubius and my poor Thecla, and I shrugged. “I can read and write.”

“Yet you know nothing about me. I am not a talking vegetable, as you should be able to see. Even if a plant were to follow the one evolutionary way, out of some many millions, that leads to intelligence, it is impossible that it should duplicate in wood and leaf the form of a human being.”