One morning, I went to check on Eidos, and I noticed that he had trouble with one of his legs.
He was in some distress, and I was still learning to communicate properly with him, so it was a struggle to find out exactly what had happened during the night.
It turned out that Eidos had slipped over on the wet ground at some time after midnight, and turned his carpus. It took 20 minutes or so to establish this, such was my inexperience in horse-language, but we got there in the end.
Eidos told me that he was sore, but would recover eventually, and I began to relax.
Then it struck me: Eidos is a fictitious horse, and the injury he had sustained was trying to point me towards something novel; something important. It either hadn't happened yet, or I was missing it.
In the same way as Misha Glenny's heavy (both materially and intellectually) book was an arrow directed into the past, and a portent that my American journey was hopelessly dommed, the damage toEidos was the beginning of the journey ended by Misha Glenny's survey of the declining Ottoman Empire.
A few days later, a woman with dark hair and dark eyes made herself known to me and the first time we spoke, she was recovering from a broken foot.
