When Achlos awoke, the warm rays upon his body had been replaced with the faint silvery glow of moonlight. He stood up on the bed, surprised at how energized and well rested he felt. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept that well. It was more than just the bed being of a superior quality (which it was), but also an overall feeling of security. All his life he’d had to sleep with one eye open. When he was still with his parents, he was often awoken in the middle of the night to pack up as the law was on their tail, when he was a soldier sleep was a rare luxury interrupted by artillery barrages and night raids, and as a bounty hunter and gun for hire, he slept with his gun underneath his pillow, more than once a knife-wielding assassin sneaking through his window in an attempt to end Achlos as reprisal for the mercenary killing their confederate or master.
Yet now, he felt completely secure. He had nothing to fear. It was a strange feeling. His sidearm was still in his suitcase, a first for him. His rifle and dragonbone revolver were unfortunately most likely gone forever, the latter cursed to rot in an evidence locker before being destroyed, or at best auctioned off, the former at the bottom of the Merion River. That would be a costly loss. Not just monetarily, but that rifle had been his companion ever since he graduated the arduous Mountain Hunter sniper school. It had saved his life more times than he cared to remember, especially during the hellish final battle of Wellspring Crossroads, and he owed those five kilos of wood, steel and aluminum a debt of gratitude as great as to any of his comrades. But at the end of the day, it was only an object, and it could be replaced.
He could smell the warm, savory scent of cooking. Something with tomatoes and garlic in it, as well as meat. His growling stomach reminded him of the fact he hadn’t eaten since morning. Judging by the sounds of wood scraping on wood and clinking silverware, they were still setting the table.
Getting up off the bed, he shook off the last of his languor and looked in the mirror next to the drawer, which he had to crouch down to see himself fully. His new clothes were slightly crumpled from being slept in, yet it was nothing a quick smoothover couldn’t fix. With that, he exited his room, seeing the small family as well as their antelope governess busying themselves with setting the table, Tyras coming through with a large tray of cooked meat while Rhodika carried a large pot of some sort of vegetable stew.
“Ah, Achlos, right on time! Thank you, you liberated me from the awkwardness of having to awake you.” Tyras said
“Allow me.” Achlos said hurriedly as he intercepted the man’s wife and relieved her of her burden, placing it on the table. He was rewarded with a warm smile.
“See, Cyprian?” The young governess said as she and Cyprian set the plates and silverware. “A gentleman always assists a lady whenever possible.”
Achlos felt heat rise to his cheeks and he could have sworn Tyras’s wife bristled slightly at that, but masked it with a smile.
“Well, sometimes the lady may be able to do her duties well enough alone, but nonetheless, thank you, Mr. Dribas.” The smile was genuine now.
Tyras set down the tray of steaks then looked up at Achlos apologetically.
“I’m sorry, I never asked if the smell of cooked meat sickens you. Does it?”
The relationship of evolved former herbivores with meat was a strange one. Most of them ate eggs just fine and it was their main source of protein. A select few could even stomach small amounts of meat, yet considering that the one time he tried it on a dare he spent a week expelling nothing but water about twenty times a day, he wasn’t part of that privileged group. But some couldn’t stand the smell of it. It either made them sick or filled them with a sense of unexplainable dread, compelling them to leave the area as soon as possible. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough that some larger restaurants made sections for carnivores and non-carnivores.
Achlos shook his head.
“No. It doesn’t bother me. More than half of my battalion were preds, so-” He stifled a grunt as he felt a sharp jab in his ribs. It was Tyras, giving him a warning glare. Achlos cringed and he heard Cyprian chuckle as children do whenever they hear an adult say a bad word.
“Pred” was by no means a profanity or a contemptuous slur, in fact he was fairly certain carnivores used it self-referentially more than anyone, but it was decidedly street slang and no lord or lady would have been found dead with it upon their lips.
“Uh… sorry. It was rude of me.” Achlos hurriedly said. Cyprian chuckled at the giant cervine’s discomfort.
“That’s okay. My friends at school call me that all the time, but it’s not a mean word or anything. It’s all in good fun.”
“That’s slum talk, young man!” Rhodika suddenly raised her voice, baring her fangs only slightly. “And if I hear that word again, the only thing you’ll be eating tonight is soap!”
Cyprian bowed his head. Achlos couldn’t decide if it was out of shame or to conceal a smirk.
“Yes, mama.”
After a few more seconds of awkwardness, Tyras grabbed his wife’s plate and served her a generous piece of fatty steak and several spoonfuls of potato mash and vegetable stew. While most certainly not a meat connoisseur, Achlos could tell the meat was svini: a not so distant unevolved genetic cousin to the pig and boar, with toughened skin and each weighing up to two tons. He’d seen nomads in Nyter use them as pack animals as well as for sustenance.
Following Tyras’s example, Achlos took the governess’s plate, who sat right next to him, and filled it with large spoonfuls of the non-meat variety, until she raised a slight hand to tell him to stop. He set it back in front of her.
“Actually,” She began, her blue eyes twinkling with something akin to mischeviousness. “I enjoy a bit of gravy as well.”
The moose tried his best not to look shocked so as not to offend the lady, but he felt an eyebrow raise nonetheless. Still, he obeyed her and scooped up a spoonful of the sauce around the steaks and placed it on the “herbivore’s” mashed potatoes.
The five began eating, Achlos noting that they ate slowly, almost with disinterest despite the food being excellent. They took small bites and took their time chewing as if to prolong the ritual of the family dinner. His entire life, food had been nothing but a necessity, one to be taken care of as soon as possible before resuming whatever his role was:help his family prepare for an assault on whatever target their clients had quarrel with, preparing for a Lunist attack or tracking down a fugitive.
Not here. Food was a ritual to be respected. An event to be shared with friends and family. A respite consisting of a warm meal, chatter and laughter after a trying day.
The conversation for now was around the process of the family’s remotion. They had all been busy while he slept, Rhodika applying for a new position at the Khudur Military Hospital and Tyras going to a telegraph office equipped with a telephone to explain the situation to his old landlord and arrange for the removal of their furniture, clothing, books and other miscellaneous items left in their old city. During it he’d picked up that the governess’s name was Sabina.
The conversation then turned to the city itself. Of its various attractions, places of worship, parks and promenades.
It was a cheery conversation, one that Achlos hardly added a word to, and this only after his second glass of wine when his tongue was with difficulty unloosened.
“So, if I may ask, Achlos,” piped Tyras up suddenly. “What was it like in Nyter?”
It was a pretty broad question, and one that seemed to come out of the blue. The kind of question you ask someone who hasn’t said a word for 20 minutes and you want to ply something out of them.
“Well…” He thought deeply. Of the strange vast nation of island-states, some being as advanced and civilized as the city they now resided in, some little more than dusty barren strips of land with nary a tiny mining town to see through the endless deserts. Of the countless hopeful immigrants who disembarked with little more than the clothes on their back, especially after the Burning Steel War had all but destroyed many smaller nations. Many were successful, etching out a laborious yet honest living working the mines or railways and finding something better years later. Others were all but worked to death by avaricious robber barons, with nothing but broken backs and empty pockets to show for it.
And others got off the ships looking to join the gold and silver prospectors, but not to work alongside them, but to skip the arduous work required of such a profession with the intermediary of small arms to part the poor laborers from their hard-gotten treasure. For a Nyteri laborer, the revolver had become as vital a tool as the pick and shovel.
“It’s less crowded.” Achlos concluded. This got a chuckle out of everyone at the table.
“Were you a sheriff, Mr. Dribas?” Cyprian asked, looking at the large moose with the curious fascination that only children had.
“No. I worked with lawmen and was part of a posse plenty of times, but never was one directly myself. I was a… freelancer, you could say. Mostly taking bounties but also sometimes acting as a sort of advisor to deputies hunting down fugitives. If there’s one good thing the war did for me, is that being a Mountain Hunter made me an excellent tracker. I never found myself wanting for work.” He obviously evaded stating that his patronage also sometimes extended to the other side of the law.
“Wow,” The cub mouthed in amazement. He probably read a lot of Penny Dreadfuls taking place in the Nyteri Frontier, with heroic lawmen chasing down vile irredeemable outlaws on equiback, where the bad guys were always bad, and the good guys were always very, very good.
“Sounds like a lawless and dangerous place from the little I read about it.” Sabina piped up, giving Cyprian a meaningful look. As his governess, she was doubtlessly the recipient of the boy’s endless gushing about the glorious Nyteri chases and shootouts in the weekly adventure gazettes he read, and as someone who looked highly educated and guarded from anything even resembling violence, she was evidently not as keen on it.
“It is. In some places.” Achlos replied. “The cities are safe enough, they have their own police forces and they’re mostly well trained, capable chaps. But out on the Frontier, where they’re building new railways and mining for gold, each town has a sheriff, with more than one deputy if they’re lucky. And there’s a posse of Rangers in each region, no more than twenty strong, who can get to a trouble spot should a town need heavier protection, but they’re mostly for hunting down outlaw gangs and intercepting fugitives.”
“Sounds dreadful,” The young antelope shook her head. “I hope I should never be obliged to live in such a lawless place.”
“You already do, I’m afraid, Miss Sabina.” Tyras said, not taking his eye off his steak as he took another tiny bite. “The City is every bit as dangerous as the Frontier. In some instances, more so.”
The governess’s eyes narrowed in confusion, but it was Achlos who posed the question:
“What do you mean? I’ve been here less than a day and there’s a cop on every corner… erm, constable.” He added seeing a glare from Tyras’s wife at his use of the informal term for police officer.
The half blind lion smiled indulgently.
“And how many people live on each corner, hm? And you’ve only really seen the more affluent parts of this city. Earlier when you… walked through a worker’s quarter,” Achlos cringed inwardly as he was reminded of the police chase earlier today. “You saw that there were hardly enough constables to cut through the sea of thousands of workers. And the lawmen didn’t even enter the ‘Dark Zone’... tell me, how many towns are in a Ranger posse’s typical jurisdiction?”
Achlos thought for a moment.
“It varies greatly, but, where I mostly operated… four or five, mostly mining or fishing towns, each with a population between 500 and 2000.”
“Really? And you say each town had at least one sheriff and a deputy, and that there are about 20 rangers. Correct?” Tyras asked rhetorically.
“Again, it varies, but just about.”
“Then, let us take the most unfortunate scenario: five cities of 2000 residents, each with a sheriff and a single deputy and 20 rangers to police them. That’s 30 lawmen for 10000 people, or about one lawman per 335 people.”
“Yeah. A lot.”
“Yet, do you know how many constables this city has?” Tyras asked with a slight smirk.
Achlos frowned.
“I… don’t know.”
“As of the last headcount, 5449. This includes strictly clerical and administrative positions, but let us stick with that number for the sake of argumentation. This city has a population of four and a half million. With some approximation, that is one constable for every 820 residents. More than twice the workload of a lawgiver out on the Wild Frontier.”
The moose blinked. “I… never thought of it that way.”
“Furthermore,” Tyras continued. “One must consider the social aspects. As dangerous as the Frontier is, everyone knows everyone in a small town of a few hundred. When anyone dies, it is a citywide event. If they are murdered, well, that is an outrage. Friends and family mourn, telegraphs are dispatched to the Ranger stations, some pluckier residents may even take up their hunting rifles to join the posse formed to hunt down the fiend that took their friend, coworker and neighbor.
But here in the city? At least one person has been murdered every day for five years and it affects the average person’s day less than if their morning eggs are served too hot or cold. They are none the wiser, as the broadsheets normally do not report on such deaths save for a succinct obituary, except for the most macabre or sensational of crimes.
The Frontier may be savage, but it has the benefit of showing itself as is, all of its virtues and benefits laid bare. Even the most fantastical stories about it center around gunfights, bandits and constant danger.
The City however, any city, hides its defects and dangers behind impressive architecture, wide boulevards overflowing with opulent carriages and well dressed citizens, theaters and the latest technologies proudly on display, taking any visitor on something akin to a carnival ride, hoping that its riders never stray too far from the pre-scripted path into the less salubrious backrooms of the funfair, thereby breaking the illusion of traveling through the fantastical world its designer had concocted. It is a mask of culture, civilization, concrete and steel. And a very pretty mask it is, but like any mask, its purpose is to deceive.”
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Achlos thought deeply on what Tyras had spoken. Indeed, before he’d even arrived in the city, his airship had been attacked by pirates and the crew only escaped with their lives thanks to two war veterans just happening to be onboard to turn the tide. He remembered the Air Police constables as they came after the final shot had already rang out, casually loading the apprehended and slain pirates onto their ship, taking quick statements from the airmen, then returning to their ship to escort the attacked aircraft safely to port, with an almost bored disinterest, like a bank clerk stamping thousands of papers a day, the countless documents eventually mingling into each other, a fifty Krata withdrawal being no more of interest to them than a declaration of bankruptcy from an esteemed company. Those were not the first pirates they put away, and they would not be the last. Perhaps it wasn’t even the first that week.
A new perspective of the city began to emerge. When one stripped away the newly paved boulevards, towering skyscrapers and almost carnival-like showcase of culture and wellbeing, there remained a place no more safe than a Frontier Town or a Stateless Market, only stretched out a few hundred times, and in some respects, even more dangerous.
He opened his mouth to reply, yet something cut him off. Not the speech of one of the interlocutors at the table, but a high pitched whine coming from one of the rooms, muffled somewhat by the door. A second later, the whine turned into the wail of an infant. Tyras’s daughter. No doubt she was already fed and asleep at this hour, which allowed the adults to have a quiet dinner… or so they thought. He looked at Tyras, expecting to see him sigh in resignation and either go himself or beckon his wife or governess to do so. Instead, the moose saw abject terror.
His singular eye was glued somewhere far beyond, as if he was glancing at something a thousand yards away, its lifeless silver companion glinting as if the fake eye quivered. He’d been in the process of taking a morsel of meat up to his mouth and the fork was a few inches from his maw, frozen still as if he were one of the life sized wax figurines he’d seen in the Nyteri city of Waxonloft. The sniper’s keen hearing, trained to listen for the slightest rustle or shift of foliage, heard Tyras’s heartbeat picking up, until it sounded akin to an organic sewing machine. Yet, he remained stock still, frozen in the limbo between cutting away a piece of food and eating it. The baby wailed again, more insistently this time.
If the first wail had the effect of freezing Tyras on the spot, the second had the opposite effect. His wife was in the process of getting up to attend to her offspring, yet Tyras dropped his cutlery, letting them clatter on the plate, the knife falling down to leave a greasy stain on the carpet. He got up with such speed, his dining chair fell over behind him. He did not care. With wide steps that were just a degree below running, he quickly covered the distance to the door, all but ripped it open and stepped inside, hands reaching inside the crib and lifting his daughter up to his chest.
“I’m here…” He breathed out a shaky sigh of relief. His hands caressed her small form, as if to reassure himself that she was real and in his large paws. He kissed her cheek and sang sweet nothings as she wailed again. Was his eye shining with moisture? “No, no… papa’s here… I’m here… you’re alright…” He whispered. Achlos got the strange sensation that Tyras was saying it to soothe his daughter as much as himself.
Rhodika slowly approached the father and daughter, placing a reassuring paw on her husband’s shoulder.
“She just needs changing, judging by the smell,” She chuckled dryly, attempting to insert some humor into the situation with little success. “I’ll take care of her. You finish your dinner, hm? You had a long day, darling.”
After caressing his daughter’s back for another few seconds, he handed her to his wife with some reluctance. His heartbeat was slowing. He walked back, picking up his seat, knife and fork with the shame of a schoolboy who knew he’d caused an undue scene. The governess and his son looked at him with a sort of familiar pity, yet they averted their gazes back to their plates when he looked back.
Achlos strained for something to say, yet found nothing. He simply braved through the dinner with everyone else, the only words exchanged from that moment being when Rhodika returned, her maternal mission completed, letting Tyras know that their daughter was sleeping soundly once again. He said nothing.
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Tyras was alone in the sitting room, wreathed in pipe smoke, sitting cross-legged on several cushions liberated from the sofa and armchairs around the sitting room. His eyes were closed, his lips a tight line, the only indication that he was not asleep being that he occasionally took the pipe to his lips for a drag.
He thought deeply on the events of the last couple of days. His chance encounter with Achlos, them being able to emerge victorious outnumbered and outgunned thanks to their impromptu alliance, and this just before he was to present the idea of a Scout Raider-like tactical team for the police, led by him. Then of course, him being able to save Achlos from the wrath of the constabulary after correctly deducing not only that he would soon assassinate a crime lord, but also where and how. Altogether, that was a lot of pieces falling very neatly together.
The common theological consensus was that the gods did not directly get involved in the affairs of mortals. They didn’t thunderbolt someone who was a thorn in their side or sent down storms of meteors to bring down the walls of a citadel they wished wiped out like they did in the ancient times of the Second or Third Era (if the holy texts were to be taken literally at least), yet they could still nudge things along. Such as when he met Rhodika thanks to a clerical mistake sending her to the 15th Scout Raider Platoon, where he met and fell in love with her. It had been fated to happen. A momentary lapse in concentration by an overworked desk jockey, and the rest had come about by itself.
It seemed Providence had a plan for him. That was by no means a guarantee of his success, the gods gave but they didn’t put it in your bag for you, yet it offered him some degree of comfort. It gave him the eagerness he needed for tomorrow’s events.
The pink bundle wailed again, its lower half crushed by debris and detritus, screaming in pain its infant mind could barely comprehend. Did it think it was a nightmare? Some contemporary psychologists theorized that babies under a year old had vivid nightmares of an intensity and terror unmatched by older children or adults, reliving fragments of their genetic memory of warfare, hunting or being hunted, as a sort of mental bootcamp from the craddle, to accustom the infant’s mind to hardships and horrors it may face once fully developed. The exact details of the dreams are mercifully forgotten, else the mind may never recover, yet the instincts remain.
Did the babe hope it was such? Was she yearning for one of those night terrors that the youngest had to go through? Was she praying with its almost nil knowledge of Divinity for this to merely be yet another terrifying trip into the abyssal depths of her still forming brain? Could she even comprehend death?
Tyras approached it, knowing already it was doomed. He could do nothing. The shell would hit again, and either take them both, or only her after he’d run off like a coward.
Then she turned towards him. The tiny cut and bruised face was hardly recognizable, yet it was undeniably his daughter, her tear-filled eyes wide and accusing.
His eyes darted open, stifling a gasp and anxiously looking around. No smell of fire and gunpowder. No sobs and distant artillery shells. He was in his new apartment. It was the 147th year of the Fifth Era, nearly seven years after the war had been won.
The fire was still cracking happily away in front of him. The 15 hour clock showed it was the 14th hour of night, sharp. He wasn’t in his old uniform, but a nightgown. And Achlos was standing on the far end of the room, watching him.
He looked down in frustration and shame. This had been the second time in one evening his new companion had seen him lose control. He thought of what was going on in the large moose’s mind, the judgment, the conclusion that Tyras was an out of control loon who couldn’t keep his emotions in check…
Every time his daughter cried, he saw her in the wolf cub’s place, buried beneath rubble and shrapnel, mere seconds from being lost forever after the next artillery shell, either crushed or buried alive. It had been the same when Cyprian was a babe. Usually, he could keep it under wraps well enough. It was a flashing image, one he could force to end in a fraction of a second, the only clue that it had even happened being a momentarily elevated heart rate, perhaps a slight tremor of the hand for a few seconds.
Yet not this time. Lack of sleep, the exertion during the battle against the pirates and stress must have taken their toll on his psyche and it left him with his mental defenses in tatters.
“How long have you been here?” He asked Achlos with some asperity.
“Just a few minutes. I heard your bedroom door opening about 30 minutes ago and thought you only went for the bathroom or for a glass of water. When you did not return, I… thought to investigate.” Achlos cringed and looked away. “Sorry, I… shouldn’t have pried.”
“It’s fine,” Tyras forced a smile. “I had merely forgotten to pay my respects to Sapistia tonight and thought I’d best do so.” It was a half truth, which was the best kind of lie.
“Sapistia? Is that the goddess you worship? Sorry, I’m not… well versed in Fakonan theology.” the big moose inquired.
“She is. I chose her as my patron deity at twelve. Usually one chooses which god shall guide them in life at 15, which used to be considered maturity in Fakonan culture, but I had always known it would be her.”
Achlos frowned in confusion. “You… didn’t look like you were praying.”
“I wasn’t,” Tyras replied. “Sapistia is the goddess of wisdom and knowledge. The way you worship her is by always learning more and seeking to broaden your horizons. In place of evening prayer, her worshippers are to meditate on what they have done that day to further their knowledge in the sciences, arts, culture, general knowledge or personal growth. And if the answer to those questions is a negative, then what we will do the next day to fix that.
You may pray to her, of course, no divine being minds it, they are as susceptible to compliments and worship as us mortals, but unlike most of her kin, Sapistia appreciates a worshiper actively growing and bettering their spirit and intellect rather than direct worship and sacrifice. It’s part of why I chose her. That, and when I was a child, I was more the bookish sort. I had the same lean build I do today, yet without the hard-earned sinewy compact musculature to fortify it. I was only a mediocre shot and my hand to hand combat skills were abysmal, something the other children from the Tribe never ceased to tease me about, and I depended upon my older brother to save me from bullies. Our parents always said that he was the body, and I the mind.”
Tyras smiled humorlessly.
“As we grew up, he discovered a passion for reading unnurtured in childhood, and I, with determination to not be a liability if and when our Tribe was attacked by Marauders or Mercenaries, threw myself into arduous fitness and marksmanship exercises. And while our physical appearances were still much the same, when the war came, within two years my brother’s keen mind got him into Military Intelligence, and I became a Scout Raider, one of the most feared shock troops in the war. Funny how that works.” The sad smile was still there, yet the singular eye remained pained.
Achlos sat down on one of the cushionless armchairs, unsure of what to say to comfort his new friend.
“Look… Tyras…” He instantly saw the lion tense up, as if in preparation for a physical blow. “What happened earlier…I… I understand-”
“Understand what?” The lion quickly cut him off, any hint of his previous joviality gone now. “That I can kill a man twice my size with my bare claws without breaking a sweat, yet the moment I hear my daughter cry I am a quivering mess?” He almost yelled, yet kept his voice down knowing his family was asleep. “I should be better than this,” He muttered in disgust. “How am I supposed to lead men into danger if I myself am so susceptible to the merest trifle?”
“Like everyone else.” Achlos replied tersely. “You think you’re the only veteran affected by banalities? After the war, I’ve seen men freeze up when they hear a sewing machine as it reminds them of the chatter of machine guns, who scream and dive for cover when a bottle drops and rolls as it reminds them of grenades. And I can only imagine what you went through so that the wail of a child has such an effect on you. Even so, you usually manage to keep your trauma in check. I could tell.”
Tyras blinked in confusion.
“How come?”
“When your daughter began crying, Miss Maloko was calmly getting up to attend to her. If what you did occurred each time she cried, she’d have made preparations for that instead of going to the babe’s crib unimpeded. Which means that each time you hear that, every day, it triggers something in you. Something awful and dark I dare not imagine. Yet, you manage to squander it. Today was just one exception out of thousands.” Achlos said with conviction. Tyras’s lips were a thin line, yet he nodded in agreement.
“For me it’s whistles.” The large moose continued. “Really, if the constables that gave me chase weren’t so enthusiastic about blowing into them as they chased me, I may not have had the motivation to run as keenly as I did.” He chuckled. He almost sighed in relief when Tyras chuckled back.
“You’re no worse off than any other veteran.” The sniper continued. “Gehl, you have a loving family, an esteemed position in the constabulary and I’ve only seen a handful of men fight like you do. You didn’t come out of the war empty handed.”
“The war indeed gives those lucky enough to survive skills and experiences that no other circumstance can bring. Yet for every ounce that war giveth, a pound of flesh it taketh away.” Tyras absentmindedly tapped the silver ball lodged in his right eye socket.
After smoking the rest of his pipe, he emptied its dregs into the fireplace and set about replacing the cushions.
“Get some sleep, Achlos. Tomorrow, which is in four hours from now, we’re going to meet my new recruits and your future teammates. And I’ve already sabotaged my own sleep enough as is.”
Achlos nodded, feeling grateful for the afternoon nap he’d already taken.
“Right. Goodnight, Tyras.”
“Night, old fellow.” The lion replied, heading for his own bedroom. “Oh, and Achlos?”
“Yeah?” The moose turned.
Tyras gave a smile. The smile the moose knew all too well by now. The smile of the master tactician as he quickly figured out how to get the upper hand on the pirates, the same smile of the husband as he surprised his family with a property normally above their means, the smile of the gentleman thoroughly content with life.
“Thank you.” With that, the Scout Raider creaked open his bedroom door and disappeared back into his room, sneakily climbing into the bed next to his wife and finally sleeping soundly the moment his head touched the pillow.