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seen from where we were sitting, she must have meant the death-scenting vultures that hover in the stratosphere out of sight. I looked at the child’s face as it bobbed on its mother’s shoulders and saw a premonitory cloud of sickness centred between nostril and ear. I turned to Bee-flight and met her eyes, and we wordlessly agreed on the treatment. The child recovered. That same night Bee-flight invited me to her house and a year later gave me the right of fatherhood. She had two sons by me, both of whom have remained in our estate; one’s a physician, the other’s a poet. But she’s left the Magic House now and become an elder.’
    Truth or half-truth? I could not be sure. So I asked Sapphire: ‘Tell me, does it never happen among magicians that children are begotten as the result of a sudden impulse without the usual formal preliminaries?’
    ‘Yes, occasionally children are conceived at their parents’ first meeting. They’re regarded as very lucky. They announce themselves by knocking three times on the bedroom door, which their parents must open at once and say “welcome!” and then come together. Door-knockers, as we call children that are unusually anxious to be born, always become famous for one thing or another.’
    After this it seemed unnecessary to ask whether abortion was practised. But I asked: ‘How do bad people get born, people of the sort that Sally has to destroy?’
    ‘None is ever born to magicians; but other estates are less careful in their unions and if prospective parents disregard a failure of sympathy between themselves, the child may be born bad. The whole village is then disgraced, because it should have discountenanced the match. That happened two years ago a few miles away. The sequel was a war: the neighbouring village felt obliged to protest on moral grounds.’
    ‘I should have liked to watch the fighting.’
    ‘There’s talk of another war being fought next week not far from here. If that happens, we’ll take you to see it, if you like.’
    ‘How kind you are! May the best village win!’
    ‘Thank you. That’s our formula too.’
    Then the servants came in and with quick deft movements began clearing away the breakfast things. They pretended not to take any particular notice of me, but I could see that they were very much interested, though there was nothing noticeable about my clothes. I had been evoked naked, and immediately dressed in pyjamas and dressing-gown, but was now wearing an outfit that See-a-Bird had lent me: an open-necked shirt, baggy linen trousers, embroidered waistcoat and a short frieze jacket. He had also given me a black bearskin cap. The effect was slightly Kurdish.

Chapter IV
The Origin of New Crete
    It was gradually borne in on me that I had been brought here for some special purpose. These New Cretans were not an inquisitive people and would hardly have risked shocking their finely-balanced sensibilities, by the evocation of such a barbarous monster as myself, merely to ask me routine questions about my epoch. And why should they take the trouble to show me around their country? Could this be mere hospitality? But what hospitality did they owe me? Why had they not dismissed me as soon as I told them what they wanted to know? Sapphire loved me, or so it seemed; but was it true love in the New Cretan style? I could not hope to live up to her exalted moral standards. Nor – if that was what she expected – could I make a nightly exchange of farfetched poetic riddles with her. I am a poet only on occasion, as I think is the case with all poets, always; we are seldom on the crest of the wave and no amount of rhetoric or hard swimming can keep us there for more than a brief moment. But she had not only accepted me with all my shortcomings: if that laugh was hers that I had heard in the middle of the night, she had intuitively impersonated Antonia so as to gain my confidence. Why? Had she a secret motive – a public, rather than a private