“I’m frightened, I’m frightened,” I kept saying.

“How surprising it would be if you weren’t.”

Well, I felt absolutely and totally bewildered too. There was all this noise and drumming and soldiers. Some of them were ours but the nearest ones were His—these, the Army’s. They are of the brutish race, the race native to his world. They’d come to escort me the rest of the way to the camp. They don’t wear such a pretty uniform as our soldiers—it’s red with leather boots and the jacket has an odd sort of slanting cut and they have stiff caps with red cockades on. No one had forced them to polish their buttons when they were coming to meet me. There were crowds and crowds of people down below, on the city side of the wall. A queer collective noise came from their throats.

“What is that? What are they all saying?” I asked nervously.

“Various things,” Ooldra said amusedly. “Some are talking to each other and some are calling out good wishes to you and some are cursing the foreigners.”

All the time we were walking along and trying not to catch our toes in the cracks and little plants and things on the wall.

The soldiers ahead of me were not at all dignified, they were talking and joking with each other and laughing in hoarse voices. Men all have hoarse voices.

“Do the people know who I am?”

“Yes, they have been told,” Ooldra said non-committally.

I would have liked to ask how my father has taken the sudden news that I am still alive, but at that moment the procession reached the edge of the wall.

The soldiers stopped and did various things with their spears at the orders of a careless-looking individual who was their leader. It was a kind of ceremony.

“I’ve never walked such a long way in a straight line before,” I said. “The tower had no rooms as large as the top of this wall.”

The eyes of the Dictatress followed me fondly for a while, but I know she is always quick to notice the mood of her people and she could not unaware of the tension of the crowd.

She glanced over the crowd. Her glance was keen. She knows the crowd through and through, knows its moods and its impulses and is complete mistress of any situation involving it.

But she wanted to know how it was taking this situation.

Her ears, by long habit more attuned than mine to the voice of the crowd, were alert and intent as she walked along the wall to the Main Stairgate.

(Ooldra told me about this later.)