“Do you want me now, Zerd? Great General? Does my skin at last match yours which tired of mine? Let me lay it against yours. If only the poison would spread back to whence it came and prove deadly now augmented with mine, for Gods know I hate you deadly enough. You, who have allowed me a few days more to live, hidden away like a cancer in my father’s house, till swollen blue with your derision—”

The harsh whisper which he had left of her voice continued and continued.

I didn’t wait for it, I didn’t wait to look at his fascinated, amused, proud, inhuman man-formed face—I was out of the window and my hands soon on the wall-creeper out there. The rain tried to tear it and me apart, but when it eventually won and ripped my hand from the stem I was near enough to the ground for it not to matter.

Now I knew another secret of the General’s—the secret even Smahil had not dared do more than hint at. And she was the woman whom I had last seen hanging, panting, near-nude, like a drowning woman on Zerd on the Night of the Dinosaur.

I was on the brick river-wharf.

The river boiled under the rain.

Crouched in a little boat among rows of empty others, jamming myself under its plank-bench, soon myself impregnated with the smell of sodden wood, I saw him through the rain-sheets, emerged from the house, scanning the street, the windows, the roofs, the river.

He turned away, walking across the brick bridge, a silhouette in the drumming, leaden air. He did not even shrug, his rather leonine profile containing every possible expression and each negating the others, but there was a definite expression to his shoulders as he disappeared in the maze of rainy brick alleys the other side of the bridge.

The abandoned rainfall slashed at the river.

I climbed from my little boat on to a bigger one, hid among the baled goods unseen by the rain-weary watch before the crew boarded her, and was miles up-river and at their destination before, a night and day later, they discovered me.

PART TWO

THE BELOVED

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE PALACE

As I write this I lean my book on a thick, quashy, purple cushion. As I wriggle with the satisfaction of what I write, my bed on the end of its chain from the ceiling sways and springs, responding to my every emotion, the most aimless of my kicks at this superfluity of coloured cushions. It is a very different bed from that cupboard I’ve been incarcerated in for the last weeks.