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"Yeah," said the red-haired girl, in the garden of the deserted casino "We seen her, o"

Father Gomez said, "And do you remember what she looked like?"

"She look hot," said the little boy "Sweaty in the face, all right"

"How old did she see, "I suppose maybe forty or fifty We didn’t see her close She could be thirty,a big rucksack, "

Paolo whispered so up his eyes to look at the priest as he did so The sun was bright in his face

"Yeah," said the girl impatiently, "I know The Specters," she said to Father Gomez, "she wasn’ afraid of the Specters at all She just walked through the city and never worried a bit I ain’ never seen a grownup do that before, all right She looked like she didn’ know about the at hie in her eyes

"There’s a lot I don’t know," said Father Gomez mildly

The little boy plucked at her sleeve and whispered again

"Paolo says," she told the priest, "he thinks you’re going to get the knife back"

Father Gomez felt his skin bristle He remembered the testimony of Fra Pavel in the inquiry at the Consistorial Court: this must be the knife he meant

"If I can," he said, "I shall The knife coli Angeli," said the girl, pointing at the square stone tower over the red-brown rooftops It shilare "And the boy who stole it, he kill our brother, Tullio The Specters got hiht You want to kill that boy, that’s okay And the girl - she was a liar, she was as bad as hiirl, too?" said the priest, trying not to see filth," spat the red-haired child "We nearly killed the women - "

"Witches," said Paolo

"Witches, and we couldn’ fight theirl and boy We don’ knohere they went But the woot soht Andher chin to stare at him boldly

"I have no knife," said Father Goainst these - Specters"

"Yeah," said the girl, "maybe Anyway, you want her, she went south, toward the mountains We don’ knohere But you ask anyone, they know if she go past, because there ain’ no one like her in Ci’gazze, not before and not now She be easy to find"

"Thank you, Angelica," said the priest "Bless you, arden, and set off through the hot, silent streets, satisfied

After three days in the company of the wheeled creatures, Mary Malone knew rather reat deal about her

That firstthe basalt highway to a settlement by a river, and the journey was unco to hold on to, and the creature’s back was hard They sped along at a pace that frightened her, but the thunder of their wheels on the hard road and the beat of their scudding feet nore the discomfort

And in the course of the ride she becarazers’ skeletons, theirs had a diamond-shaped frame, with a limb at each of the corners Sometime in the distant past, a line of ancestral creatures must have developed this structure and found it worked, just as generations of long-ago crawling things in Mary’s world had developed the central spine

The basalt highway led gradually doard, and after a while the slope increased, so the creatures could freewheel They tucked their side legs up and steered by leaning to one side or the other, and hurtled along at a speed Mary found terrifying - though she had to adhtest feeling of danger If only she’d had so to hold on to, she would have enjoyed it

At the foot of the reat trees, and nearby a river round Soleam that looked like a wider expanse of water, but she didn’t spend long looking at that, because the creatures werewith curiosity to see it

There were twenty or thirty huts, roughly grouped in a circle, ainst the sun to see - wooden beams covered with a kind of wattle-and-daub mixture on the walls and thatch on the roofs Other wheeled creatures orking: so a net out of the river, others bringing brushwood for a fire

So they had language, and they had fire, and they had society And about then she found an adjust made in her mind, as the word creatures becas weren’t human, but they were people, she told herself; it’s not them, they’re us

They were quite close now, and seeing as coers looked up and called to each other to look The party from the road slowed to a halt, and Mary cla that she would ache later on

"Thank you," she said to her, her what? Her steed? Her cycle? Both ideas were absurdly wrong for the bright-eyed amiability that stood beside her She settled for - friend

He raised his trunk and iain they laughed, in high spirits

She took her rucksack from the other creature ("Anku! Anku!") and walked with thee

And then her absorption truly began

In the next few days she learned so ain, bewildered by school What was more, the wheeled people seein with They couldn’t get enough of the out thuently, and they watched with amazement as she picked up her rucksack, conveyed food to her mouth, scratched, combed her hair, washed In return, they let her feel their trunks They were infinitely flexible, and about as long as her arm, thicker where they joined the head, and quite powerful enough to crush her skull, she guessed The two finger-like projections at the tip were capable of enorentleness; the creatures seemed to be able to vary the tone of their skin on the underside, on their equivalent of fingertips, from a soft velvet to a solidity like wood As a result, they could use theh business of tearing and shaping branches

Little by little, Mary realized that their trunks were playing a part in communication, too Aof a sound, so the word that sounded like "chuh" meant water when it was accoht, rain when the trunk curled up at the tip, sadness when it curled under, and young shoots of grass when it made a quick flick to the left As soon as she saw this, Mary i her arm as best she could in the sa to talk to theun to talk (h she lish: they could say "anku" and "grass" and "tree" and "sky" and "river," and pronounce her naressed much more quickly Their word for themselves as a people was ht there was a difference between the sounds for he-zalif and she-zalif, but it was too subtle for her to ian to write it all down and compile a dictionary

But before she let herself become truly absorbed, she took out her battered paperback and the yarrow stalks, and asked the I Ching: Should I be here doing this, or should I go on so?

The reply ca still, so that restlessness dissolves; then, beyond the tureat laws

It went on: As a mountain keeps still within itself, thus a wise man does not permit his will to stray beyond his situation