I nodded and smiled through the twilight, and walked towards the city. The breeze made the grass a silky sea-edge about my ankles. I felt young and supple and feminine through and through, the whole universe loved and was at one with my ankles. My dress, the breeze being against me, followed the movements of my legs. I looked down and realized my dress, simple and attractive as it was, was Smahil’s shirt; I shrugged. Moths flowed on the air in and out among the pin-prick stars, the sky was still china blue. The gurgle and gush of the stream down beside me in its stony bed mingled with the bells and bleating as the goats gathered. There was a smell of onions and cheese superimposed on the heady scent of meadow twilight; the boy loomed up beside me, his eyes shining on me from the bronze.

I faced him in the breeze.

“What be your name?” he asked.

“Cija.”

“Keeya.” His voice was hoarse as it hushed to handle the name. “I’ll remember,” he said simply.

I ran on into the dusk which gathered like a swift sigh from a vast purple mouth half enfolding the world. All the scents in the meadow sharpened. My sandals swung against my side; from my trousers as much as from my slim, delicate mould the peasant boy must have thought me a fine city girl.

Suddenly a hill reared up above me. A stony track, deep on either side with drifts of wildfiowers among the trees’ roots, led up to its crown, dim in this light but I could see its wooded shape. Was it?—My shoulders bowed and my body ached.

The mountain conical guardian of the City rose hugely black beyond the conical shadow of the hill.

I climbed the stairs slowly and entered immediately after knocking. I hadn’t expected to find Terez still there.

The light in the room seemed exactly the same as when I’d left: the seven dusty sunbeams seemed hardly redder. I’d been away little more than an hour.

Terez was squatting mainly naked on the edge of the open cupboard bed. Her hair was dishevelled, her lips swollen and her eyes glinted topaz from under languid violet-stained lids. But in sharp contrast to her physical satisfaction was the bitchiness she forced out upon me.

She glared at me with the greedy topazes as I walked to the middle of the room and again kicked off my sandals. Her head

swung to follow me without a stare-flicker.

It was now I saw Smahil. He was laying back behind her in the bed-gloom, sinewy-naked, munching an apple. His face was chiselled and remote, the face of the audience at some primitive, savage blood-sport. For the first time I could expect no help from him.