So I said, “Tomorrow?” Or “Morning?” In any case I repeated the word he had said.

“Upon the rising of the sun.” Well, that cleared things up.

“What will happen then?”

“Upon the rising of the sun,” he said mournfully, “they will kill you.”

His words filled me with hope.

Not, let me add, because I thought he was right and hoped for death as a respite from life in a cage. Uncomfortable as my bamboo home might be, the alternative he proposed seemed even less desirable. The cause for hope stemmed not from the information I had received but from the way the message had been couched. It was not what he said but how he said it.

Consider: not We will kill you but They will kill you. Thus implicitly disassociating himself from any personal involvement in the act, either active or passive. And his tone of voice accentuated this – they were going to kill me, and he was sad about it. It even seemed likely that he had violated orders by giving me this bit of news.

“They will kill you at sunrise,” he said again.

I had been sitting in the lotus posture, legs folded up so that each foot rested on top of the opposite knee. I unknotted my legs, stretched out, rolled over onto my stomach, and put my mouth to the aperture in the cage bottom. The cage tilted slightly, but I remained fairly well balanced, physically if not emotionally. And I was able to see my informant clearly in the twilight. He was in his late teens, short and slender, with neatly cropped glossy black hair, and the clean, doll-like features prevalent throughout that part of the world.

“There was talk of getting you a woman,” he went on mournfully. “Usually when a man is condemned to die, he is first given a woman. It is the custom. Formerly it was done only for men who had fathered no children of their own, so that they might have a final opportunity to perpetuate their seed. But then it was said that no man can ever be certain that he has sired children, and so it was decided that every condemned man should spend the night before his execution with a woman.”