Going shyly forward, and taking off my hood, I said, “I’ve been brought by the wagoner—the merchant said I could get warm.”

I spoke in the vowel-blur of the Southern peasants I had heard so constantly in the last months, as I’d remembered just in time that I was supposed to be the wagoner’s assistant.

“Fine assistant you are,” the woman said at once. She had finely plucked eyebrows and a lot of face-paint, and she spoke in a metallic voice with genteel clipped vowels. “Well, sit down,” she added. “Do you want something to eat?”

It was an ungracious question, but I couldn’t refuse. “I’ll mull you some wine,” she said. She set a pitcher on the hob and meanwhile gave me big wheaten biscuits to crunch with chocolate-slabs. I hadn’t tasted chocolate since, as a child, small squares had been given to me as “sweets”.

The little girl sat up on her heels and watched the mulling 214

wine. They both remained quite quiet, but they hadn’t been speaking when I came in, so I didn’t feel I had interrupted anything and simply looked at them both.

The little girl had a stupid low forehead, wide brown eyes, sweetly innocent enough to be irritating, and a loose rosebud mouth. She wore her brown hair in braids as mine used to be. She didn’t wear the loose shapeless smock which in all my previous experience even high-born children wear till they are a certain age. Her dress was a long green woollen one, lined with fur, and with an embroidered belt. Under that she wore tight green leggings and leather laced shoes. The woman wore a dress and trousers of pink wool brilliant with little sequins, both boots with forked toes, a bead anklet and lots and lots of necklaces of painted wooden beads decorated with metal filigree. Their clothes surprised me at first, but I learnt later that the merchant sells not only peat but faggots of wood as well, and in fact calls himself a “fire-merchant”. These are wares tremendously in demand in the wintry Southern Capital, and though he doesn’t live in a good part of town his wife and daughter can have practically anything they want.

The woman would have disliked me if I’d been a girl. I’d braced myself instinctively when I saw her face, infallibly recognizing her type. If I’d been an older man she’d have roused herself.

I was glad that I am something as uninteresting as a young boy. Quite a young boy, for my voice obviously hasn’t broken yet. For the first time I felt it lucky that my breasts are small, small enough to be unnoticed under a loose leather jerkin, and my hips and seat have got small again after my recent Long Walk.

As the wine hissed on the hob I glanced aside.