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the end of all known things and certain desolation. She hesitated and the stranger caught her by the throat again. She pushed him away and started up the lorry.
    He crowed with delighted laughter.
    They had gone a hundred yards before she heard the alarum bells ringing above the sound of the engine. As they crashed through the wooden gate, the first bullets from the sentries bounced off the cabin. They left the start of hubbub behind them and roared along the road the Soldiers used.
    ‘Shake ’em off,’ he ordered, hanging out of the window to look after him. ‘They’re coming after us on their motorbikes.’
    She veered off through a field of tender young wheat. He fell back inside the cabin. The cut on his face had opened up again and he wiped away the blood with his wrist.
    ‘Even so, it hurts me to destroy good bread,’ she said.
    He looked at the cornfield and then at her.
    ‘I see you’re an intellectual,’ he remarked obscurely.
    ‘I never thought you’d know such a word!’ she exclaimed, tearing open a hedge.
    ‘I’m bloody well educated,’ he said. ‘And my name is Jewel.’
    ‘Who’d have thought it.’
    ‘I am the cleverest of all the savages,’ he told her. ‘But by no means the kindest.’
    ‘Will you be kind to me?’
    ‘I very much doubt it.’
    They reached the end of the farmland and went through the wire fence, setting off a carillon of alarum bells.
    ‘I know a road through the ruins,’ she said. ‘Though they say the ruins are full of ghosts.’
    She thought he was bound to be superstitious but all he said was:
    ‘Drive on.’
    Now they entered the arid zone and the lamps of the lorry picked out a few bony skeletons on either side of the shadow of a road along which they hurtled at a crazy speed. He stared out of the window.
    ‘Faster.’
    ‘I can’t go any faster. Is anyone following?’
    He opened the door and swung out on it; she was already growing accustomed to his extraordinary appearance, streaked with moonlight.
    ‘Can’t see. Faster, go faster, anyway.’
    ‘I can’t.’
    He howled in fury and hit her. She then became very angry herself but found she could force still more perilous speed from the lorry and so they went on. The ruins dipped and reared on either side. They could not tell where their pursuers were or if they had any pursuers. The moon veered back and forth across the sky and everything around them shifted and tilted continually. Every minute she expected to crash. The forest started. To the right of the road he saw an oak tree with a thick trunk covered with ivy.
    ‘Drive into that. Go on.’
    She directed the lorry towards the tree, convinced they would both die in a few seconds. But he opened the door on his side of the cabin, grabbed her shoulders, hauled her from her seat and jumped. The lorry crashed on, driverless, hit the tree with the loudest bang she had ever heard and burst into flames. They fell softly into a marshy pool.
    He released her and watched the fire. First his face expressed a delighted glee and then became impassive. The heat of the flames bathed their faces. When the green tree took fire, spurts of acrid smoke, blown on the wind, made her eyes water.
    ‘They’ll see you,’ she said. ‘You’ve sent them up a big signal to show where you are. Why on earth have you done that?’
    He turned to look at her curiously. He had red paint on his cheekbones, the firelight turned it red again. He appeared about to speak but thought better of it, shrugging.
    He dragged her out of the mud and led her some distance into the forest, till they reached a place where they could see the road from the rasping core of a clump of ferns. Soon a posse of Soldiers whined up on motorcycles. Jewel clasped her mouth firmly with his hand but she would have stayed silent, anyway, for the moonlight glistened so strangely on the glass visors and slick leather limbs of the Soldiers they seemed mechanical, ingenious objects who would not have heard her if