I was sobbing, silently I think, and my gullet where I felt the blade was cold.

He didn’t speak, but strode round towards me, his boots and sleeves catching dung. We circled once and then by changing his direction unexpectedly he had me. The black eyes glittered grimly down on me. The mouth smiled. I bit his hand, my teeth grated so that I thought I had struck bone, so savage was my determination, but I could not even puncture those scales.

“I carry my own armour-plating with me, you see.”

His voice hurt me.

“Reptile!”

His expression, beneath its surface of grim triumph, was unfathomable.

He was so inescapable in that tiny squalid space, I nearly despaired.

As his other hand came to me; fingers flexing to frighten me and impress me with my helplessness which Gods knew weighed on me already as heavy as the pattern going through marqueterie, I seized the pitchfork sticking in the hill behind me and lunged it at his face. I longed to see blood gush from his face by an action of mine, that thick, dark blood. He let go my wrist, seized the fork. This was like a game of chess, he knew I would be away again but I had checked him, he had to admit to the efficacy of that sharp threat.

He cursed me, angry now, and I fled.

I made for the kitchen door, but he was between me and that and there was no room to pass him even if I were adroit enough. The window to the long room was behind him too.

I sprang up on the yielding soggy hill, and before I could sink in it I leaped for the nearby shed-roof. It wasn’t high.

I ran along the top of this, hoisted myself on to the inn-roof. He threw the clattering pitchfork, missed, and was up after me. He had the speed of some horrible, nimble, big animal, a panther or, yes, a crocodile. I had to flee so fast that there was no time to choose a route and soon I was splashing in the roof-gutters. These were at a sloping angle and my panic heightened. I held out my arms to balance myself as though tightrope-walking. He came on. He was laughing now, stalking me slowly, steadily—certainly. I leaped for the next roof, landed sprawled on my knees in its gutter. Tried to climb up the roof-slope, but a tile fell and me nearly with it.