“The best advice any person about to embark on life—and that means everyone—can be given is to care very little about anything you witness or anything that is done to you, either physically or mentally. Maintain your own principles and ethics: they should be elastic but you should never violate them; and don’t let anything hurt you. Don’t trust anybody too much; even when you love them greatly, keep in your mind a little reserve, the knowledge that they may not be trustworthy. Don’t let yourself feel disloyal for holding this doubt; it needn’t stop your love, it will probably heighten it, and you will be all the more happily surprised when you find that after all they arc usually very trustworthy. Feel superior to everybody, but despise nobody, no matter what they are or do. Finally, remember that it is wise to be friendly to everyone until you have decided definitely whether enmity is the relationship you prefer with them. And to get people’s friendship you must employ very careful tactics. Never, never let anybody know that you are ‘cynical’ as they call it: they will at once feel inferior before you, and that will make them hate you. Always pretend to be more innocent than you are—it is very useful to be among people who underestimate you.

“Pay no attention to anything I or Ooldra have told you if your intuition tells you otherwise. Your behaviour depends on the people you are with, and there are too many different kinds of people in the world for any rules to be kept when dealing with them.”

“But the rules you have given me will generally be the right ones?”

“The rules we have given you will fail you with extreme rarity.”

Well, I have managed to get them all down so that now I shan’t forget them, and now it is time for bed.

CHAPTER TWO

THE JOURNEY

Incredible space. Devastating wideness.

I got down from the carriage expecting my attention to be drawn by the crowds of people, and the other carriages, and soldiers and everything but as I stepped down I glanced ahead and then couldn’t pull the glance away.

There was a plain there, and it stretched away, away, till it disappeared up into the sky.

And it was covered, dotted with small red lights, close together, very very many.

The air moaned with the thrum of small black drums.

I started at the hand on my shoulder. It was not my mother’s short heavy hand, it was the strange, alive, thrilling grip which is so completely Ooldra’s. It is always hard not to start at the touch of Ooldra’s hands.

“Come,” Ooldra said.

We were moving in a long procession, along the wide paved top of the city wall. From it, the army encamped on the plain could easily be seen.

There were drummers everywhere.