She nods. "He says by mid-summer. He says he wants a horse too. For me."

"Tell him we have a long hard road before us. Our horses are in a bad way, as he can see for himself. Ask if we cannot buy horses from them instead. Say we will pay in silver."

She interprets to the old man while I wait. His companions have dismounted but he still sits his horse, the enormous old gun on its strap over his back. Stirrups, saddle, bridle, reins: no metal, but bone and fire-hardened wood sewn with gut, lashed with thongs. Bodies clothed in wool and the hides of animals and nourished from infancy on meat and milk, foreign to the suave touch of cotton, the virtues of the placid grains and fruits: these are the people being pushed off the plains into the mountains by the spread of Empire. I have never before met northerners on their own ground on equal terms: the barbarians I am familiar with are those who visit the oasis to barter, and the few who make their camp along the river, and Joll's miserable captives. What an occasion and what a shame too to be here today! One day my successors will be making collections of the artifacts of these people, arrowheads, carved knife-handles, wooden dishes, to display beside my birds' eggs and calligraphic riddles. And here I am patching up relations between the men of the future and the men of the past, returning, with apologies, a body we have sucked dry-a go-between, a jackal of Empire in sheep's clothing!

"He says no."

I take one of the little silver bars from my bag and hold it up to him. "Say this is for one horse."

He leans down, takes the glittering bar, and carefully bites it; then it disappears into his coat.

"He says no. The silver is for the horse he does not take. He does not take my horse, he takes the silver instead."

I almost lose my temper; but what good will haggling do? She is going, she is almost gone. This is the last time to look on her clearly face to face, to scrutinize the motions of my heart, to try to understand who she really is: hereafter, I know, I will begin to re-form her out of my repertoire of memories according to my questionable desires. I touch her cheek, take her hand. On this bleak hillside in mid-morning I can find no trace in myself of that stupefied eroticism that used to draw me night after night to her body or even of the comradely affection of the road. There is only a blankness, and desolation that there has to be such blankness. When I tighten my grip on her hand there is no answer. I see only too clearly what I see: a stocky girl with a broad mouth and hair cut in a fringe across her forehead staring over my shoulder into the sky; a stranger; a visitor from strange parts now on her way home after a less than happy visit. "Goodbye," I say. "Goodbye," she says. There is no more life in her voice than in mine. I begin to climb down the slope; by the time I reach the bottom they have taken the sticks from her and are helping her on to a pony.

As far as one can ever be sure, spring has come. The air is balmy, the green tips of new grass-shoots are beginning to push out here and there, flurries of desert-quail chase before us. If we had left the oasis now rather than two weeks ago we would have travelled faster and not have risked our lives. On the other hand, would we have been lucky enough to find the barbarians? This very day, I am sure, they are folding their tents, packing their carts, bringing their flocks under the whip for the spring migrations. I was not wrong to take the risk, though I know the men blame me. ("Bringing us out here in winter!" I imagine them saying. "We should never have agreed!" And what must they think now that they realize they were not part of an embassy to the barbarians as I hinted but simply an escort for a woman, a leftover barbarian prisoner, a person of no account, the Magistrate's slut?)

We try to retrace our old route as closely as possible, relying on the star-sightings I have been careful to plot. The wind is behind us, the weather is warmer, the horses' loads are lighter, we know where we are, there is no reason why we should not travel fast. But at the first night's stop there is a setback. I am called to the campfire where one of the young soldiers sits dejectedly with his face in his hands. His boots are off, his footcloths unwrapped.

"Look at his foot, sir," says our guide.

The right foot is puffy and inflamed. "What is wrong?" I ask the boy. He lifts the foot and shows me a heel caked with blood and pus. Even above the smell of dirty footcloths I detect a putrid odour.

"How long has your foot been like this?" I shout. He hides his face. "Why did you not say anything? Didn't I tell you all that you must keep your feet clean, that you must change your footcloths every second day and wash them, that you must put ointment on blisters and bandage them? I gave those orders for a reason! How are you going to travel with your foot in that condition?"

The boy does not reply. "He did not want to hold us up," his friend whispers.

"He did not want to hold us up but now we have to cart him all the way back!" I shout. "Boil water, see that he cleans his foot and bandages it!"

I am right. When next morning they try to help him on with his boot he cannot hide his agony. With the bandaged foot wound in a bag and tied he can limp along over the easier ground; but for the most part he has to ride.

We will all be happy when this journey is over. We are tired of each other's company.

On the fourth day we strike the bed of the dead lagoon and follow it south-east for several miles before we reach our old waterhole with its clump of stark poplar-trunks. There we rest for a day, gathering our strength for the hardest stretch. We fry a supply of fatcakes and boil the last potful of beans to a mash.

I keep to myself. The men talk in low voices and fall into silence when I am near. All the earlier excitement has gone out of the expedition, not only because its climax has been so disappointing-a palaver in the desert followed by the same road back-but because the presence of the girl had spurred the men into sexual display, into a brotherly rivalry which has now declined into morose irritability directed willy-nilly against me for taking them on a foolhardy jaunt, against the horses for their recalcitrance, against their fellow with the sore foot for holding them up, against the brute impedimenta they have to carry, even against themselves. I set an example by laying out my bedroll beside the fire beneath the stars, preferring the cold of the open air to the choking warmth of a tent with three disgruntled men. The next night no one offers to pitch the tent and we all sleep outside.

By the seventh day we are making our way through the salt wastes. We lose another horse. The men, tired of the monotonous beans and flourcakes, ask to slaughter it for food. I give my permission but do not join in. "I will go on ahead with the horses," I say. Let them enjoy their feast. Let me not hinder them from imagining it is my throat they cut, my bowels they tear out, my bones they crack. Perhaps they will be friendlier afterwards.

I think with yearning of the familiar routine of my duties, of the approaching summer, the long dreamy siestas, conversations with friends at dusk under the walnut trees, with boys bringing tea and lemonade and the eligible girls in twos and threes promenading before us on the square in their finery. Only days since I parted from that other one, and I find her face hardening over in my memory, becoming opaque, impermeable, as though secreting a shell over itself. Plodding across the salt I catch myself in a moment of astonishment that I could have loved someone from so remote a kingdom. All I want now is to live out my life in ease in a familiar world, to die in my own bed and be followed to the grave by old friends.