there before dark, which is all that matters. The kids are fagged out.'

Roger said: 'So am I.' He lay back on the dry, stony ground, and rested his head on his hands. 'Pirrie isn't, though.'

Pirrie was explaining something to Jane, pointing out over the flat lands to the south.

'She won't knife him now,' Roger added. 'Another Sabine woman come home to roost. I wonder what the little Pirries will be like?'

'Mjllicent didn't have any children.'

'Conceivably Pirrie's fault, but more probably Millicent's. She was the kind of woman who would take care not to be burdened with kids. They would spoil her chances.'

'Millicent seems a long time ago,' John said.

The relativity of time. How long since I found you up in your crane? It seems something like six months.'

The moors had been more or less deserted, but when they descended to cross the lower land north of Kendal, they witnessed the signs, by now familiar, of the predatory animal that man had become: houses burning, an occasional cry in the distance that might be either of distress or savage exultance, the sights and sounds of murder. And another of their senses was touched here and there their nostrils were pricked by the sour—

sweet smell of flesh in corruption.

But their own course was not interrupted, and soon they began to climb again, up the bare bleak bones of the moors towards their refuge. Skylarks and meadow pipits could be heard in the empty arching sky, and for a time a wheatear ran along ahead of them, a few paces in front. Once they sighted a deer, about three hundred yards off. Pirrie dropped to the ground to take a careful aim on it, but it darted away behind a shoulder of the moor before he could fire. Even from that distance it looked emaciated. John wondered on what