His carriage clatters to a sudden stop, and he pokes his head out of the window.

And someone had collapsed right in the middle of the road. Which is not good. 

He steps out to investigate, make sure she isn't drunk or dead or blocking traffic to make a point. 

Good news! She's not dead. But oh boy does she look close to it. She doesn't look half starved, she looks all the way starved. 

She needs to be not in the middle of the road, blocking traffic by dying. She needs to be somewhere cooler than the street. He has access to both of those things: his carriage!

He picks her up-- he is just going to ignore what looks suspiciously like blood seeping through the back of her clothes-- and carries her into the carriage. It's awkward, because even though she is light, she is also a very dead weight. But she's in and lying on a seat and not a road, so that is a solid improvement on her situation. 

Mariam has a vague impression of being carried by someone very warm, which is nice.

And then she is put down and the warm goes away! This is no good at all. She flops in the rough direction of the warm. 

Do not fall off the chair--

He awkwardly catches her in his arms. Now she is more or less on the seat, and he is more or less on the floor, but that's fine! She hasn't broken any bones, which was the main goal! 

The warm came back! 

Mariam has an incoherent sense that she's not supposed to like the warm, but she's too tired and hungry and almost-unconscious to remember why, so instead she insistently plants her face on wherever the nearest warm is. 

He is holding this half starved stranger now. This is his life. 

He calls for the driver to head to the Three Judicial Offices, because it is both the appropriate place to take a potential victim of a crime, and also contains food. 

Mariam wakes up enough to process some of what's going on and jerks herself away from the person holding her. There is, as far as Mariam knows, absolutely no way that someone could hold her that isn't a sin. 

And out of his arms she goes!

"Are you alright?"

He's a man! He's Chinese! She's in a carriage with a strange Chinese man! He is going to seduce her or rape her or worship a demon at her!

Her expression is one of sheer terror. 

If he was on a street, passed out, and found himself in a moving carriage, he would be concerned too.

"You're safe. We're just taking you to the Three Judicial Offices."

Is that a brothel? (Mariam doesn't pay very much attention to the government; foreigners in Chang'an handle their crimes internally.)

"I would like to go home, sir," she says, more because she's supposed to and less because she expects it's going to help. 

"Let's get some food into you,  and then I can take you back."

"Sir, today is Friday in the Christian calendar, and I fast on Fridays."

"Is the fainting also scheduled for Fridays?" he asks gently.

"I'm sorry I fainted in the road, sir," she says, "normally I don't leave my house."

This is longer than Mariam expected to be alone with a strange man without having to fight to defend her chastity, which is good, because while Mariam knows that her chastity is more valuable than her life and she should be willing to defend it to the death, actually she's very tired and she's not sure that she's up to more than, like, light shoving. 

... well. That makes a certain sort of sense. 

"You can't worship when you are dead. Let me feed you."

"When I die, if God chooses to take me to Heaven I'll worship Him without ceasing. --My confessor told me to fast and I'm not supposed to disobey him. And through fasting I've disciplined my flesh such that I don't feel hunger."

A treacherous part of Mariam's brain is suggesting that if she was kidnapped-- well, it would still be her fault, because she's supposed to defend her religious practices to the death as well, but it's at least significantly less her fault if someone kidnapped her and forced her to eat at swordpoint.

Yeah, right, she doesn't feel hunger. "I will explain the situation personally to him. He will understand."

Mariam tries to work out whether this strange man is likely to know what her confessor would demand of her, and whether it would be practicing the virtue of obedience to submissively go along with him regardless, and whether even if she's supposed to defy this man for God she could reasonably claim to have been mistaken and therefore not to have committed a sin, and whether there is anything in this conversation she's supposed to be willing to die about (it turns out, on reflection, Mariam is supposed to be willing to die about a lot of things).

However, it turns out that, instead of any of this, her decision is made by the fact that she's very tired and doing things requires energy.

The treacherous part of Mariam's brain elaborates that it wouldn't be that bad if this man raped her a little bit. He had a very nice smile. This is the kind of thought process that means that she needs a knife.

She is agreeing to eat food! ...not disagreeing with the concept of eating food! Success! 

Now, to tactfully bring up the blood. "We also have doctors at the Three Judicial Offices, if you would like to see one." 

Mariam shakes her head. "I just need a change of bandages, I can do that at home."

"We have a woman--" they don't have a woman doctor, Leng Yue is out in the jianghu "--coroner, if you want to make sure things are healing alright." 

She shifts. Thinking about her injury is drawing her attention to it and it hurts. "It's fine, the wounds are shallow."

"I'd worry in case it got infected." Also why is an injured starving person wandering around the streets, when by all indications, she isn't a beggar? 

"If God is displeased with me He'll punish me."

"Would he be displeased by medical attention?"