I picked up the boots, and tried them on. They were soft leather from the uppers to the ankles and the soles were grooved wood. They fitted so well, the wagoner being a small man, that I hadn’t the stamina to refuse them. The hood was good dark cloth, with a long peaked tail dangling from the crown of the head. The whole thing was very grubby but with it on even in daylight my face was practically hidden, and I put my fingers in the dust on it and wiped them across my cheeks and forehead and the bridge of my nose.

The land, though as unbuilt-on as ever, was soon obviously tilled and cultivated, and then divided itself into roadways with rutted lanes leading off them. Later hedges appeared, and ditches, then houses, straggling hamlets, workers in the fields, passers-by, villages. It was a frosty morning, there was rime on everyone’s hair. I shivered in my shirt sleeves and drew the straw up around me. The sun still shone but the cloudless blue sky grew harder and the air bleaker as we rose into the hills around the Southern Capital.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE KITCHEN AT H.Q.

When the early evening of the City clamped down on the steep narrow streets, lights sprang out of the icicled windows and threw their reflections fiat on the snow. I lost count of how many reflections our horses trampled through, how many times our wheels changed the patterns in the snow. And all the time even the latest patterns left by feet and horses and wheels were ceaselessly obliterated, silently but thickly powdered over. The snow smudged the outlines of the roofs overhanging the streets. The streets wound and wound, and the comers were hairpin bends. The traffic was not heavy on this snowy evening but what there was, including us, dashed round comers with gay yellings and whipcracks which were very likely to bring down all the roof-snow and icicles on oneself or some innocent passer-by. Gay confident yells and whip-cracks, yes, but no lessening in speed: the idea being that the noise warned anyone coming round the comer from the opposite direction. Of course, they would be doing the very same thing. We didn’t see any collisions. I suppose everyone grows expert.

One of the reasons we were going so fast was that I was cold.