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irritated. He said angrily, “I can sympathize with his passion for cricket, but why does he have to play it in Marseilles , for the powers’ sake?”
    Pierre said, slightly shocked, “That’s where England are playing. HRH is a world-class batsman, you know.”
    â€œBut,” Dave said, “until last night he wasn’t going to be in the team.”
    â€œHe changed his mind. Royal privilege,” said Arnold with the foreign accent.
    â€œThat’s our Geoff for you!” Chick said, laughing.
    â€œI know. That worries me,” Dave answered. “What’s he going to be like when he’s King?”
    â€œOh, give him the right advisers, and he’ll be all right,” Chick said soothingly. “His royal dad was just the same when he was Crown Prince, they say.”
    This is a really mad dream, I thought. Cricket in France!
    We droned on for ages. The sun came up and glared in through the left-hand windows. Pretty soon all the soldiers down the other end had their jackets off and were playing some sort of card game, in a slow, bored way. The men in suede didn’t seem to be allowed to take their jackets off. They sweated. It got quite niffy down my end. And I’d been assuming that they weren’t allowed to smoke in the flier, but that turned out to be wrong. The soldiers all lit up, and so did Dave. The air soon became thick with smoke on top of the smell of sweat. It got worse when Arnold lit up a thin, black thing that smelt like a wet bonfire.
    â€œYik!” said Pierre. “Where did you get hold of that ?”
    â€œAztec Empire,” Arnold said, peacefully puffing out brown clouds.
    I shall wake up from this dream with cancer! I thought. The slab seat was hard. I shifted about and ached. Most of the people fell asleep after an hour or so, but I couldn’t. I supposed at the time that it was because I was asleep already. I know that seems silly, but it was all so strange , and I’d been so used to dreaming, for months now, that I had found my way into another world that I really and truly believed that this was just another of those dreams. I sat and sweated while we droned on, and even that didn’t alert me to the fact that this might be real . Dreams usually sort of fast-forward long journeys and things like that, but I didn’t think of that. I just thought the journey was the dream.
    At last there was another of those warning pings . The officer reached into his jacket for his phone and talked to it for a short while. Then he put the jacket on and came toward the men in suede, who were all stretching and yawning and looking bleary.
    â€œMessieurs,” he said, “you’ll have twenty minutes. The royal flit will circle during that time under the protection of the Prince’s personal mages and then put down on the pavilion roof. You’re expected to have the stadium secured by then. All right?”
    â€œAll right,” Arnold agreed. “Thanks, monsieur.” Then, when the officer had gone back to the other soldiers, he said, “Bloody powers !”
    â€œGoing to have to hustle, aren’t we?” Chick said. He jerked his head toward me. “What do we do about him? He’s not skyclad.”
    Arnold was the one in charge. He blinked slowly at me as if he’d noticed me for the first time. “Not really a problem,” he said. “He’ll have to keep out of the circle, that’s all. We’ll put him on boundary patrol.” Then he actually spoke to me. “You, mon gar,” he said, “will do exactly as we say at all times, and if you set so much as a toe over the wardings, I’ll have your guts for garters. That clear?”
    I nodded. I wanted to tell him that I hadn’t the faintest idea what we were supposed to be doing, but I didn’t quite like to. Anyway the flier—flit or whatever—started making a great deal more noise and going downward