He had been a fool. An utter, inexcusable fool. To think that he had believed her a different kind of Roman—a Roman with a soul. But she was no different than all the rest. They stormed into Arabia with their gold coins and insatiable appetites and expected to do business. ‘Curse the Nabataeans!’ they declared in their damnable Latin. Curse anything of value or meaning. To the Romans, nothing mattered and everything was for sale.
Including, it seemed, Rab himself.
He could not sleep. He could not even rest. How had he misjudged her? When? Memories crowded his mind, visions of her: Atia fumbling with her scarf; Atia kneeling in her bronze gown; Atia collapsing on the hillside and falling into his arms.
Atia placing two coins into his hand.
It did not make sense.
They had shared more than just lust, after all. They had shared laughter and quiet joy. They had endured each other’s anger and come to each other’s aid in desperate times. There was more between them than just the maddening attraction of their bodies. Or did their connection mean nothing to her?
No, not nothing. It had meant exactly the worth of two gold coins.
He stared at the stars without seeing them. Debased. That was how he felt. Drained of his humanity and stripped of his soul. It was as if she had taken their bond and smashed it upon the rocks. How could she do this to him?
But he knew how. She was her father’s daughter. Had she not told him as much? She was obligated not to feel. She peered out from beneath her heavy lids and pushed away everything she saw. She had pushed him away many times, he had just chosen not to see it. She carried frost in her heart and ice in her veins. Indeed, it was why her hands were always so cold.
But they were not always cold, he reminded himself. And her eyes were not always lidded and she was not always trying to keep her distance. In moments when she was not doubting, scolding, or pushing him away, she was the most wonderful woman he had ever met.
The stars seemed to swirl above him now—a blur of cloudy light. He had known plenty of women in his time. Before the Romans came—back when his father had lived and life had still made sense—Rab had pursued many women and had been the subject of pursuit himself. Like all young men he had been fascinated by women—their soft, curvy bodies, their sweet, musical voices, their quiet, unassuming strength.
But what he really wished for was what his father had had with his mother before she died on the birthing bed. He wanted that sweet, intangible thing that seemed to bind his parents together and soften them both.
Finally, at age twenty-five, after many years of chasing and flirting and testing the waters of love, Rab had taken the plunge.
Her name was Babatha. They had known one another since their school days, when they had spent hours in the odeon together listening to philosophers drone. He remembered her long black braid and how her graceful fingers pressed so diligently into her stylus. She was wildly intelligent and had an ability to explain things better than her tutors ever could.
They had married in a ceremony outside his grandfather’s tomb and she had become his Princess. They had moved into her mother’s house, as was the custom, and begun construction of their own small palace. Its foundation had already been poured when the Romans had arrived and his father had taken his own life.
After that, time had slowed, along with Rab’s own mind. Nothing made sense. Throughout their kingdom’s four-hundred-year history, the Nabataeans had fought off the Judeans and the Seleucids, and had for a long time kept even the Romans at bay. Yet when Roman General Palma had led his troops through Rekem’s sacred slot canyon to the steps of the Great Temple, there had not even been a fight.
Babatha had tried to assuage him. Look at Rome’s military might, she had said. Look at the opportunities that being part of the Empire will bring: new roads, new temples, the expansion of trade. But they were not good reasons for how quickly and completely the Nabataeans had given up their glory. ‘Why?’ he had asked Babatha, over and over again.
Why did the Nabataeans do nothing as Palma’s legion set up a permanent camp at the heart of the city? Why did they say nothing when Palma began handing out the taxation contracts to Nabataeans, thus turning Nabataeans against themselves?
Rab had looked around at the kingdom he had once held dear and felt nothing but anger. He listened closely to Babatha’s sensible explanations, but all he could hear were his father’s senseless last words: the elephants.
‘I divorce you,’ Babatha had told him one morning and Rab had made no protest. How could he love when his mind was so confused? How could he feel any joy when his heart was full of pain?
The pain had not gone away. It had only got worse as the years passed. Why had his father given his kingdom to the Romans? No one could give Rab a satisfactory answer.
And so he had thrown himself into his work—the only work that mattered. Resistance. He had grown out his hair and his beard and gone into hiding, maintaining his cover as a camel trainer and moving between the rebel enclaves like a ghost.
If he needed sex, he paid for it, though he rarely needed it. All he needed was something useful to do and the only thing useful was to fight.
Now the stars were perfectly clear—tiny points of light in a sea of endless black. They seemed to confirm his deepest certainty: that the world was an empty place.
And now that Atia had shown her true light, it was emptier still.
The next morning, Plotius was howling. ‘I am not going.’
Rab secured the saddle of their strongest donkey and pointed to it. ‘We must ascend Wadi Mujib,’ said Rab. ‘There is no other way out.’
‘Of course there is another way out—the wadi stream,’ said Plotius. ‘Why can we not just follow it downhill?’
‘The stream drains to the Bitumen Lake. As I told you before, rebels patrol its shores.’
‘I do not care,’ said Plotius. ‘I command this party and I say we follow the sea route from now on.’ Plotius gripped the hilt of his gladius. ‘No more of this canyon hopping.’
Rab shrugged. He had not slept a single minute the night before. His heart was heavy and his head throbbed. He was too exhausted to argue.
It was late afternoon the next day when the entourage finally stumbled on to the shore of the great salty lake. The sweaty, tired men dropped their weapons and rucksacks and plunged into the water like a troupe of boys.
Rab noticed that Atia was not among them. He searched the shoreline and caught her ambling northwards towards a lone date palm.
Her stride had changed. Only days before, she had been bounding up and down the hills in long, energetic steps. Now she was barely picking up her feet. At last she arrived at the base of the palm and took her seat in its meagre shade.
Why was she so crestfallen? Had his rejection of her offer really hurt her that much? It did not seem like the behaviour of a woman without a soul.
‘We rest here tomorrow,’ Plotius announced to a storm of cheers.
Fools, Rab thought, saying nothing. He turned from the shore and made his way up a craggy cliff overlooking the sea. Arriving at the flat of a natural lookout, he saw the black coal dust of a campfire. Just beyond it, an area had been cleared to make room for several bed mats. There was the small figure of an acacia tree carved into one of the boulders.
Rab was seized with a terrible foreboding. The sign of the acacia was what the rebels used to mark their territory. Clearly a group of rebels had been here recently and likely patrolled the site. If they spotted the Romans, they would not hesitate to attack.
Rab gazed out at the Bitumen Lake, trying to calm his nerves. It was such an unremarkable name for such an unusual lake. Whereas other salty seas held the bounty of life, this sea’s only bounty was black and tarry—like the bile of the earth itself.
And that bile was precious.
Bitumen, it was called, and it floated up several times a year to be harvested by the bitumen traders, who would sell the sticky black substance for use in waterproofing everything from boats to mummies. Rab could see the bitumen pontoons still afloat even at this late hour—their figures obscured by a horizontal layer of liquid air.
He peered north. If the rebels were here, they would likely approach from that direction, for the steep, craggy shoreline offered many places to hide. Now, however, the only sign of life along the sun-baked shore was Atia. She was still there, still seated beneath the lone date palm. But she was no longer staring out at the lifeless sea. She was gazing up at a man standing over her, his hands gripping his formidable hips. Plotius.
‘I am worried about you, Atia,’ said Plotius. A thin line of salt had dried in a circle around the edge of his fleshy face, making it appear as if he wore a mask.
‘I do not wish to speak with you, Plotius,’ said Atia. She turned away from him, but he only hobbled back into her view.
‘You have not been yourself, Atia. Your enthusiasm is lost. You do not even wish to bathe in the lake.’
‘It should not matter to you whether or not I wish to bathe in the lake.’
‘Oh, but it does,’ he said and the fissure of a smile opened across his face. He squatted low and she felt her stomach tighten.
‘If you dare touch me, I will let out a scream to shake the heavens,’ she said. She peered down the shore, instinctively looking for Rab. He was nowhere to be seen. ‘And I will run. Faster than you.’
‘Calm down, woman,’ Plotius said. He was laughing casually as if they were two old friends teasing each other. ‘I have only come to deliver a gift,’ he said. He held out a small bottle.
‘What is that?’ Atia asked.
‘What do you think it is?’
Atia shook her head. ‘No, thank you, Plotius.’
‘I have plenty for myself,’ said Plotius. ‘Think of it as an olive branch.’
Atia smiled politely. What kind of olive branch came in the form of debilitating poison? ‘Gratitude, Plotius, but I no longer use the tears.’
‘Yes, instead of using them, you have decided to shed them.’
Was it that obvious? She had been weeping all day, though she thought she had been careful to conceal her emotion beneath her scarf.
Now she wrapped that scarf around her face several times.
‘I will leave the bottle here at the base of the trunk,’ said Plotius.
‘I told you, no!’ shouted Atia, but her voice was muffled by her scarf, and by the time she had unwrapped herself, he was already halfway back to camp.
And there was the bottle.
‘I do not want it!’ she cried out.
Just a few days ago, the statement would have been true. But now it was a lie. She wanted it badly. She knew it was the only thing that would stop the chest-splitting pain she had felt since the moment Rab had rejected her.
The tears will wash away the pain, she told herself. They always had in the past and they were the only thing that could now. She lifted the small but heavy bottle. In its weight she felt the promise of lightness. In the memory of it, the promise of forgetting.
She ran her fingers over the cork and gently tried to pull it free. It would not come loose, thank the gods. It was wedged too firmly inside the bottle. It would take a good deal of effort to get it free.
But once she did get it free, she would have her bliss—perhaps for days. It was a good amount of tears and she would drag out the oblivion for as long as she could. Her energy would flag, of course, and she would be unable to keep up the march. She would have to ride atop one of the donkeys. But it would be worth it, for she would no longer feel this terrible sadness.
And when the tears ran out, what then? The sickness would return, along with the headaches and restlessness and shameful trembling. She would be plunged once again into the realm of Tartarus and have to fight her way back out.
And that was not even the worst of it. If Plotius tried to steal a goat or harm someone or seek to undermine Atia, she would not have the will to stand up to him. She gazed into the bottle and understood for the first time the real danger of the tears: they robbed her of her ability to do the right thing.
She stood and hurled the small bottle into the sea.
When she turned, she peered up at the distant cliffs and caught sight of Rab. He was gazing down at her, his long ghutrah fluttering behind him in the breeze. She lifted her arm in greeting and waited for him to do the same. But he quickly turned away from her and disappeared among the rocks.
A tiny part of her soul seemed to break in half. Of course he had turned away. He no longer wanted anything to do with her. And rightfully so, for she had insulted him in the most profound way that one person could insult another. She deserved his disdain.
She walked slowly back to camp and waited for him to return, but he never did.
That night she could not sleep. She lay on her back and stared at the stars. They seemed dimmer here than they had been in the mountains—smaller and further away.
It was not just the stars, it was as if everything was receding. She had lost her appetite and could find no satisfaction in the trail. Even the ethereal blue of the Bitumen Lake had seemed greyer when she had finally arrived on its shores and she had had no desire to feel its healing waters.
It was as if the world had become a kind of mirage and the only reality was the pain inside her heart.
And every time she closed her eyes, the pain acquired a new facet. Because as she sorted through her memories of him, she could only find joy. Rare, luminous joy, along with a kind of all-encompassing sense of safety in his presence.
And that damnable pull of her body towards his.
She searched her mind, trying to remember the bad, digging for evidence in the case against him. She could find none. The only crime had been the one she had committed. The one that could not be taken back.
The full moon was rising now, its light obliterating the stars. She watched it cast its milky path across the sea. She wished she could follow that path to the end of the world, then simply jump off the edge. Would she become a star? Or would she simply fall off into the darkness, his words echoing inside her ears: You are not beautiful. You are ugly and you wish to make me ugly, too.
He had made his thoughts as clear as glass and they hurt her as much as a thousand shards. There was no escaping the pain of what he had said to her. Eyes closed. Eyes open. It made no difference. It only hurt.
Ugly. Not because of her big nose. Ugly because, in trying to compensate him for the valuable thing he had given her, she had unknowingly cheapened it and also cheapened him.
She gazed at the moon, who seemed to wear Rab’s face.
Why did you do such a thing, Atia? he asked.
Because I wanted you to feel that it was worth it.
Why would it not be worth it? Do you doubt my desire for you? My love?
Love?
I thought you were a different kind of Roman, Atia. I realise now that I was wrong.
I am different! she wished to tell him. But how different was she really? She was the rich, spoiled daughter of a Roman governor. What more was there to say? Soon she would likely be married. If she survived beyond her foretold death, she would become the complicit, biddable wife of one of the most Roman men in the province.
Suddenly, she wanted that death to come. She wished for it more than she ever had before, though she had somehow lost track of the days until its arrival. Was it coming in twenty days now, or was it nineteen? Eighteen, perhaps? It did not matter. Death was coming and she welcomed it.
She sat up. Her chest felt tight; her breaths were short. She stared out at the vast black lake, instinctively searching for the splash of a fish. But she knew that nothing could live in its salty waters or anywhere along its sun-baked shores.
It was truly a dead sea.
Atia stood and began to walk. The moon was getting higher in the sky. It was flooding the silent landscape with its ghostly light. Across the water, the craggy hills of Judea looked shadowy and forlorn and Atia tried to imagine a time when they had been green and the sea below them full of life.
Perhaps this was the fate of all places on earth. Perhaps all seas eventually salted up and all forests turned to dust. Perhaps there was just a small window of time when life could take hold. A small, precious window. Perhaps it was the same for love and she had somehow missed it.
When Atia arrived back at the base of her lone palm, she observed the arc of its melancholy arms as moon shadows on the ground. She stepped beneath their strange shade and gazed out at the sea.
That was when she saw the bottle. It had somehow washed up on shore. It was sitting at the water’s edge as if beckoning her.
But how was that possible? She had thrown it away, had watched it plunge into the depths of the salty lake. Had the gods somehow retrieved it for her? But Atia was not important enough to be of notice to the gods. And yet there it was, the tiny bottle, like a divine gift.
She retrieved the bottle from the water and studied it for many moments. A memory surfaced—a vision of the first time she had ever tried the tears. She saw herself standing inside her mother’s bedchamber, staring at her mother’s cold, white body. Even in death she had been beautiful, despite the terrible wound traversing her face.
The wound that, in a fit of rage, her father had made.
Even now, she could hear the sound of her mother’s wails inside her mind. She could see the look on her mother’s face when her father had announced that they would not be keeping her mother’s newborn. ‘I married you so that you would give me a son,’ her father had said. ‘Not another daughter.’
Atia had listened outside her mother’s bedchamber to the sounds of an argument, then violence.
The next morning, Atia had entered her mother’s chamber and had at first believed her mother to be asleep. She had nearly tripped on the empty bottles littering the floor and it was many moments before she realised why her mother would not wake. She had gathered them up one by one and smashed them against the wall.
She had sat beside her mother and wept for many hours. When her own tears ran out, she had caught sight of one last bottle inside her mother’s cold grip. It was still full.
In a burst of anguish, Atia had wrenched the bottle from her mother’s hand and taken a long gulp. The pain inside her heart had disappeared instantly and a kind of bliss had coursed through her young limbs.
Now she craved that bliss once again. She wanted comfort, for she would never again feel the warmth of Rab’s smile or hear the spark of his laugh or feel a thrill as his eyes burrowed into her.
You are not beautiful, Rab was repeating in her mind. You are ugly and you wish to make me ugly, too.
Pain. Sharp, heart-splitting pain. And right here in the palm of her hand was the antidote. She gazed up at the sky. Rab was still there, staring down at her, shaking his head in disappointment.
Atia uncorked the bottle and raised it up to him, as if in a toast. Then she held it to her lips and took a small sip. She felt a rush of happiness. It tasted so good—like coming home. Her body tingled with joy. She waded out into the water until her feet no longer touched the ground, then she lay back. She was floating! Her body was suspended, cradled by the thick, salty water.
What a wonder was this dead sea! What an absolute joy! Why had she not bathed in it earlier? She could hardly remember the reason. It was something to do with a man who had wanted her once, but did not want her any more. She opened the bottle and took another sip, and then another. She gazed out at the otherworldly landscape. Nothing lasted for ever, she thought suddenly. And if nothing lasted for ever, then nothing mattered at all.
Atia was still floating when Sol’s pale light began to paint the sky pink. Her mind was fuzzy with her lingering bliss. She spotted movement along the southern shore. In the distance she could make out the shapes of strange creatures. They had elegant long legs, sloping necks and backs like small brown hills.
Camels. She watched in fascination as they neared, for their movements were so fluid and they seemed so at ease in this barren place. Equally at ease were their riders, whose long sandy robes and matching ghutrahs seemed to fuse with the colours of the camels so perfectly that they appeared as single two-headed beings—like centaurs of the desert.
Camels. She loved them irrationally, for they seemed to represent everything she had come to appreciate about this quiet, desolate land. She laughed aloud as they came more fully into view. So quiet and deliberate in their movements. So graceful and humble beneath the sun.
She wondered if the riders were traders coming to offer their wares. Or perhaps they were bitumen hunters coming to see if there had been any sightings of the large rafts of black tar that they pursued. The camels appeared to increase their pace, then broke into a run.
But why were they running? What rush could there possibly be to arrive anywhere in the barren desert? They were getting closer and Atia saw the outlines of longswords hilted at the men’s waists. They were drawing the blades from their sheaths.
‘Raiders!’ Atia shouted, but it was too late. She stared in horror as the first two riders thundered into camp and began slaying the sleeping soldiers.
‘To arms!’ a Roman shouted. The Roman soldiers began to wake—though not quickly enough. The raiders flew down from their saddles with blades fully drawn. There must have been at least twenty raiders and as they fought they shouted expletives in the Nabataean tongue.
Or were they shouting other things as well? Atia listened closely. She perceived the Nabataean word for justice and then the word for freedom. These were not simple raiders, Atia realised slowly. These were Nabataean rebels.
Atia watched as a rebel thrust his sword through a Roman soldier’s belly, slaying him instantly. Another rebel gave an ear-splitting screech and charged at a Roman from behind, slicing his head cleanly from his body. Blood spouted from the Roman’s convulsing corpse as it tumbled to the ground.
Atia sank deeper into the water. Her thoughts were sluggish, her limbs lifeless and heavy. Her heart beat out a slow, even rhythm.
She should have been feeling horror. She should have been feeling anything at all. But she had drunk a great number of tears and they had smothered her mind and numbed her heart. She watched another Roman take a blade in the throat, then saw a rebel who looked like a boy slain in the chest. She could only stare, waiting for the pain to come. It never did. She was cold and lifeless. Crocodilian. On the shore, the sand pooled with the blood of the fallen.
‘Form a phalanx!’ shouted Plotius and the remaining Romans scrambled to form a tight group. There was the clang of swords and a chaos of shouting as the Romans attempted to fend off their foes. Only a few of the Romans wore their chain mail armour. Fewer still had use of their shields.
Atia spied two shields between the Roman phalanx and the shore. Perhaps she could retrieve them for the Romans. She swam closer to the phalanx, but when she was near enough to reach the shields, she simply could not summon the energy to get them.
Move, Atia! she told her body, but it would not listen. The Romans were now fewer in number than the rebels, who were swarming the Romans’ small, defensive group like bees. Meanwhile, several of the rebels were plundering the corpses of the fallen Romans, taking everything they could.
There was a loud noise from somewhere near and Rab’s robed figure came into view. He was bounding down from the craggy hills, his sword swinging, his terrifying bellow filling the air.
Catching sight of him, the rebels ceased their efforts. They stared at the stampeding man in the silence of shock. And in that small window of time, the Romans were able to regroup and become the aggressors.
Atia watched Plotius take down two men and saw Livius stab another. There was so much blood. It was pooling around the men’s feet and filling the air with its stench. So much death and for what?
One of the rebels was making off with the Romans’ train of donkeys. Another had gathered what looked to be about a dozen swords. But they were no longer fighting—the Nabataeans were in retreat. They mounted their camels and bounded away into the terrible morning.
The silence was punctuated by groans, the air polluted by the smell of fresh blood. Needles of horror were finally beginning to poke at Atia’s heart. The tears were wearing off, but not quickly enough.
The flies. Where had they all come from? They were buzzing around the living and the dead. Of the living, there were only ten left. They threw down their swords and collapsed in the bloody sand.
Nobody seemed to notice as Atia emerged from the water. She sat beside two men who were weeping into their hands. Atia envied them, for she wanted to cry. She wanted to feel anything besides this terrible numbness.
The remaining men spent the next several hours gathering fuel for a pyre, then watched the dreadful black smoke carrying the fallen soldiers’ souls to the sky.
The sun was low in the sky when at last Atia wept. She sat beside the smouldering embers and mourned the lives of men who had not deserved to die. And not just the Romans. She mourned for the dead Nabataeans, for she knew their suffering had turned them desperate.
She wept and wept, and had never been more grateful for her own tears. They anchored her to what was true, reassuring her that there was right and wrong—and what she had just seen was very, very wrong.
Images of the fighting haunted her mind. The senseless violence. The terrible chaos of it all. Over thirty men—Roman and Nabataean—had lost their lives in a matter of minutes. Thirty men who would never again laugh, or love, or gaze up at the night sky in wonder.
Atia’s head throbbed. The sun burned down on the bronze landscape, but there was a new darkness everywhere she looked. Shadows and despair. Pain and waste. The world itself seemed to have changed.
If only she had been in her right mind, she might have helped the Romans defend themselves. If only she could have delivered the shields, she might have prevented one of those men from meeting his death. But she had been too numb to do the right thing. She had been paralysed by the effect of the tears.
She gazed down at the tiny half-empty bottle, which she somehow still held in her hand. ‘I hate you,’ she said. She squeezed with all her strength and the bottle burst open. The small shards sliced into her hand and the precious liquid spilled on to the ground.
Pain. Perfect exquisite pain. It shot through her with terrifying efficiency. Opening her hand, she discovered a mess of blood and glass. She closed it again, just so she could make it worse. Pain. It seemed to invade her whole body. A deep aching awareness of what was true. Pain was not bad. It was necessary. And in that moment Atia knew that she would never allow herself to become numb again.
‘We must leave now,’ Rab announced. His face was ashen. He placed a final branch into the fire and cringed, and Atia wondered if he had been injured. ‘Gather your things,’ he told the remaining soldiers. ‘We must return to the hills.’
Beside him, Plotius was stirring the ashes with his sword. ‘We will do no such thing.’
‘The rebels will return soon to collect their dead,’ Rab said to Plotius. ‘If we are still here when they arrive, they will finish us.’
Plotius gazed into the flames. ‘Where were you, Camel Man?’ he asked. ‘When the rebels arrived?’
‘I was scouting in the hills behind camp,’ Rab said, turning to face Plotius.
‘A convenient time to go scouting,’ commented Plotius, glancing around at the other men.
‘What are you suggesting?’ asked Rab. He stepped closer to Plotius. No, thought Atia. Do not provoke him.
‘How many rebels did you kill?’ asked Plotius. ‘Just curious.’
‘None,’ Rab said. He stood frozen before Plotius. His tall, muscular frame looked almost thin against Plotius’s thick, bulky mass.
‘Not a one? Why does that not surprise me?’ Plotius said. He pulled his sword from the flames and rested it on the ground.
‘I arrived rather late to the fight,’ said Rab through clenching teeth.
‘Exactly,’ said Plotius.
‘If you would like to accuse me of something, then do it,’ said Rab, retrieving his dagger from the sheath against his leg.
‘Stop this madness,’ Atia said. She lunged between the two men. ‘There will be no more fighting today, lest you would like to kill me as well.’
Plotius hissed, but he sheathed his sword. ‘We are not returning to the cursed hills,’ he growled. ‘We will follow the shores of the Bitumen Lake and come what may.’
‘Certain death,’ said Rab. ‘The rebels will find you and they will kill you all.’
‘What makes you so certain?’ Plotius asked. He lifted aside a boulder to produce the small metal box that Atia’s father had given him. He held it aloft. ‘This box contains all the coin we need to make our way to Rekem. And in our current circumstances, I do not think the Governor will mind if we use it.’
‘Coin cannot keep you safe from rebels,’ Rab remarked.
‘Of course it can. We can buy whatever we need, including mercenaries.’ Plotius turned to address his men. ‘What say you, soldiers? Will you follow this slithering Arab back into the hills, or will you follow me along the shore and help me seek our revenge?’
‘Revenge!’ the soldiers shouted.
There was only one man who did not shout. He sheathed his sword and stood by Rab’s side. Livius.
‘You betray me, Gaul,’ said Plotius.
‘My orders are to deliver the woman safely to Rekem,’ said Livius. ‘That is what I plan to do.’
‘Idiot!’ Plotius shouted. ‘The woman will come with me!’
‘Will she?’ asked Livius.
Atia felt all the men’s eyes on her, but she could only keep staring into the flames.
‘Well, Atia?’ said Plotius. ‘Whom will you follow to Rekem? The man with weapons and coins and...medicine for what ails you, or the man with nothing?’