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a sensation of falling. His eyes were such a blank, inexpressive brown the colour might have been painted on the backs of the irises. The left eye was very much puffed and swollen because of the cut immediately above it. A few birds began to sing. Jewel was seized with a violent fit of coughing; his body shook convulsively, he rolled away with unexpected gentility and spat. Maybe something was wrong with his lungs. When he recovered himself, he said:
    ‘You been awake all night?’
    She nodded.
    ‘That’s pretty stupid,’ he said. He looked at her closely. ‘Been crying?’
    She nodded again. He shrugged. The early light was now beautifully iridescent and took substantial form in drops of white dew strung out on the rough surfaces of his coat. His face was a spoiled palette; she could make out no features beneath the thick crust of colours and dried blood.
    ‘I could have killed you in your sleep,’ she said.
    ‘But you forbore,’ he remarked and was once more convulsed, doubled up with such noisy coughing he frightened morning birds into the air. When the coughing was over, he gave the impression of assembling himself together again, perhaps rather painfully, as if each attack disintegrated him a little more. But there was still nothing at all she could see of his face and what was she to do when it was so hard to look at him, harder still to describe him and hardest of all to know how he would look when they reached their destination, this wild man who now rose, stretched, squinted, first towards the sky, then downwards to the ashes of the lorry and the tree? He laughed quietly to himself. He was as complete a stranger as she could wish to meet and her only companion. He had a ring on every finger and two on some.
    ‘Thought you was a boy at first,’ he offered conversationally. ‘Who chopped all your hair off?’
    ‘Nobody. I did. Myself.’
    ‘Thought it might be a punishment for something.’ He yawned again and then approached her sideways with circumspection, although offering her his hand. She continued to sit quite still.
    ‘What if I say I’m not coming any farther with you?’
    ‘Well …’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t believe you.’
    ‘Why is that?’
    ‘You can’t go back to your village, can you? You wouldn’t half look a fool, wandering back with some concocted story to explain what happened. And they wouldn’t believe you; they’d invent a crime and punish you for it, for they wouldn’t understand why you had wanted to go away in the first place and would suspect you. And you can’t stay right here ’cos you’ve got nothing to eat and there’s peril of Out People, isn’t there, to say nothing of savage beasts.’
    She was very affronted at this apparent cheerfulness, especially since she decided he was right; she could not or would not return where she came from nor could she stay where she was. She refused his hand and got to her feet herself. She picked up the fox fur.
    ‘If I come with you, remember I’m coming of my own free will.’
    ‘Oh, yeah. Sure.’
    They at once turned their backs on the road. He led her through the skirts of the forest until they came to a stream. It was now fully morning and solid gold kingcups floated on the surface of the blue water. He knelt, drank, dipped his face and washed away the rime of red, black and white. She knelt beside him, bathed her eyes, wiped the mark from her forehead and also drank. She was surprised to see his real face, which was wary, withdrawn, private, full of bones, dark and scored by weather. He was clean-shaven. His ears were pierced and he wore dangling earrings made of beaten tin. He began to unfasten his braided, decorated hair.
    ‘Why do you do your hair up so strangely?’ she asked.
    ‘It makes us more frightening,’ he said and grinned. She was glad he did not file his teeth to a point as was the fashion of many Barbarians. A maze of midges began to dance above the surface of the stream.
    ‘Is that why you paint