But this year a curtain has fallen all along the frontier. From our ramparts we stare out over the wastes. For all we know, keener eyes than ours stare back. Commerce is at an end. Since the news arrived from the capital that whatever might be necessary to safeguard the Empire would be done, regardless of cost, we have returned to an age of raids and armed vigilance. There is nothing to do but keep our swords bright, watch and wait.

I spend my time in my old recreations. I read the classics; I continue to catalogue my various collections; I collate what maps we have of the southern desert region; on days when the wind does not bite so keenly I take out a party of diggers to clear drift-sand from the excavations; and once or twice a week I set off by myself in the early morning to hunt antelope along the lakeshore.

A generation ago there were antelope and hares in such numbers that watchmen with dogs had to patrol the fields by night to protect the young wheat. But under pressure from the settlement, particularly from dogs running wild and hunting in packs, the antelope have retreated eastward and northward to the lower reaches of the river and the far shore. Now the hunter must be prepared to ride at least an hour before he can begin his stalk.

Sometimes, on a good morning, I am enabled to live again all the strength and swiftness of my manhood. Like a wraith I glide from brake to brake. Shod in boots that have soaked in thirty years of grease, I wade through icy water. Over my coat I wear my huge old bearskin. Rime forms on my beard but my fingers are warm in their mittens. My eyes are sharp, my hearing is keen, I sniff the air like a hound, I feel a pure exhilaration.

Today I leave my horse hobbled where the line of marshgrass ends on the bleak south-west shore and begin to push my way through the reeds. The wind blows chill and dry straight into my eyes, the sun is suspended like an orange on an horizon streaked black and purple. Almost at once, with absurd good fortune, I come upon a waterbuck, a ram with heavy curved horns, shaggy in his winter coat, standing sideways on to me, teetering as he stretches up for the reed-tips. From not thirty paces I see the placid circular motion of his jaw, hear the splash of his hooves. Around his fetlocks I can make out circlets of ice-drops.

I am barely attuned yet to my surroundings; still, as the ram lifts himself, folding his forelegs under his chest, I slide the gun up and sight behind his shoulder. The movement is smooth and steady, but perhaps the sun glints on the barrel, for in his descent he turns his head and sees me. His hooves touch ice with a click, his jaw stops in mid-motion, we gaze at each other.

My pulse does not quicken: evidently it is not important to me that the ram die.

He chews again, a single scythe of the jaws, and stops. In the clear silence of the morning I find an obscure sentiment lurking at the edge of my consciousness. With the buck before me suspended in immobility, there seems to be time for all things, time even to turn my gaze inward and see what it is that has robbed the hunt of its savour: the sense that this has become no longer a morning's hunting but an occasion on which either the proud ram bleeds to deam on the ice or the old hunter misses his aim; that for the duration of this frozen moment the stars are locked in a configuration in which events are not themselves but stand for other things. Behind my paltry cover I stand trying to shrug off this irritating and uncanny feeling, till the buck wheels and with a whisk of his tail and a brief splash of hooves disappears into the tall reeds.

I trudge on purposelessly for an hour before I turn back.

"Never before have I had the feeling of not living my own life on my own terms," I tell the girl, struggling to explain what happened. She is unsettled by talk like this, by the demand I seem to be making on her to respond. "I do not see," she says. She shakes her head. "Didn't you want to shoot this buck?"

For a long while there is silence between us.

"If you want to do something, you do it," she says very firmly. She is making an effort to be clear; but perhaps she intends, "If you had wanted to do it you would have done it." In the makeshift language we share there are no nuances. She has a fondness for facts, I note, for pragmatic dicta; she dislikes fancy, questions, speculations; we are an ill-matched couple. Perhaps that is how barbarian children are brought up: to live by rote, by the wisdom of the fathers as handed down.

"And you," I say. "Do you do whatever you want?" I have a sense of letting go, of being carried dangerously far by the words. "Are you here in bed with me because it is what you want?"

She lies naked, her oiled skin glowing a vegetal gold in the firelight. There are moments-I feel the onset of one now-when the desire I feel for her, usually so obscure, flickers into a shape I can recognize. My hand stirs, strokes her, fits itself to the contour of her breast.

She does not answer my words, but I plunge on, embracing her tightly, speaking thick and muffled into her ear: "Come, tell me why you are here."

"Because there is nowhere else to go."

"And why do I want you here?"

She wriggles in my grasp, clenches her hand into a fist between her chest and mine. "You want to talk all the time," she complains. The simplicity of the moment is over; we separate and lie silent side by side. What bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of thorns? "You should not go hunting if you do not enjoy it."

I shake my head. That is not the meaning of the story, but what is the use of arguing? I am like an incompetent schoolmaster, fishing about with my maieutic forceps when I ought to be filling her with the truth.

She speaks. "You are always asking me that question, so I will now tell you. It was a fork, a kind of fork with only two teeth. There were little knobs on the teeth to make them blunt. They put it in the coals till it was hot, then they touched you with it, to burn you. I saw the marks where they had burned people."

Is this the question I asked? I want to protest but instead listen on, chilled.

"They did not burn me. They said they would burn my eyes out, but they did not. The man brought it very close to my face and made me look at it. They held my eyelids open. But I had nothing to tell them. That was all.

"That was when the damage came. After that I could not see properly any more. There was a blur in the middle of everything I looked at; I could see only around the edges. It is difficult to explain.

"But now it is getting better. The left eye is getting better. That is all."

I take her face between my hands and stare into the dead centres of her eyes, from which twin reflections of myself stare solemnly back. "And this?" I say, touching the worm-like sear in the corner.

"That is nothing. That is where the iron touched me. It made a little burn. It is not sore." She pushes my hands away. "What do you feel towards the men who did this?" She lies thinking a long time. Then she says, "I am tired of talking."

There are other times when I suffer fits of resentment against my bondage to the ritual of the oiling and rubbing, the drowsiness, the slump into oblivion. I cease to comprehend what pleasure I can ever have found in her obstinate, phlegmatic body, and even discover in myself stirrings of outrage. I become withdrawn, irritable; the girl turns her back and goes to sleep.

In this moody state I pay a visit one evening to the rooms on the second floor of the inn. As I climb the rickety outside stairway a man I do not recognize hurries down past me, ducking his head. I knock at the second door along the corridor and enter. The room is just as I remember it: the bed neatly made, the shelf above it packed with trinkets and toys, two candles burning, a glow of warmth coming from the great flue that runs along the wall, an odour of orange-blossom in the air. The girl herself is occupied in front of the mirror. She gives a start at my entry, but rises smiling to welcome me and bolts the door. Nothing seems more natural than to seat her on the bed and begin to undress her. With little shrugs she helps me bare her trim body. "How I have missed you!" she sighs. "What a pleasure to be back!" I whisper. And what a pleasure to be lied to so flatteringly! I embrace her, bury myself in her, lose myself in her soft bird-like flurries. The body of the other one, closed, ponderous, sleeping in my bed in a faraway room, seems beyond comprehension. Occupied in these suave pleasures, I cannot imagine what ever drew me to that alien body. The girl in my arms flutters, pants, cries as she comes to a climax. Smiling with joy, sliding into a languorous half-sleep, it occurs to me that I cannot even recall the other one's face. "She is incomplete!" I say to myself. Though the thought begins to float away at once, I cling to it. I have a vision of her closed eyes and closed face filming over with skin. Blank, like a fist beneath a black wig, the face grows out of the throat and out of the blank body beneath it, without aperture, without entry. I shudder with revulsion in the arms of my little bird-woman, hug her to me.