I thought again of the Southern girl Yle who had been the cause of Lara’s entry. She was another witness. She was well-acquainted enough with everything on me—she had noted the fish about my neck. She wouldn’t hesitate to say so.

“Your continued existence isn’t worth a surmise,” Ooldra said, pouring herself some water with one of those hands whose vibrancy I have so often loved. “If I can’t have both your death and his, at least I’ll have yours.”

“Why do you want me dead, Ooldra?”

“Why will I have you dead? Your father never loved your mother,” she said, smiling into the surface of the water. “They shared an infatuation once, when he was a boy. He has been mine for all the years since. We have had several children. When your mother is dead and he is Dictator I shall be First Lady of the whole country. I hate your mother, I have hated her all the years of your life, only less than I have hated you. I have moved well for this end and waited long. Now one of the deaths I coveted has slipped through my long-long-long-patient fingers but it was not yours.”

“Why did you want Zerd dead? If it was not from love for me, to see my birth-fate annulled, what was it? Do you love my mother’s country so much that you wish to avenge his depredations of it?”

“The ‘Dictatress’s country’! Pah! What He did to it was well done!”

There were sounds of marching outside.

I wanted to clutch her arm, for she was still Ooldra.

“Not long to live,” she said in a dreadful hiss, then waited amused to see my reaction.

I kept my face under control, which was not hard, I feeling as numb already as the soldiers could soon make me.

Then swiftly, breaking the link with her eyes, I turned and dashed from the tent.

I doubled back round it as soon as I was out, dodged the marching phalanx, ran head down between the numberless dark tents and the fires throwing their sparks and thrusting their smoke at heaven.

Blob’s short bulk stayed me. I cried out in new terror when I saw his face.

“Now, now, missy,” he said, “what’s to do? Is this the night she would set the guard on you?”

“You know?” I said. “Blob! Blob!” I clutched at him. “Can you save me? We are not friends but you would not see me murdered?”

“A swift knife is less pain than seven lash-strokes, missy.”

“It is more irrevocable, Blob!”