Chapter 9 · Chapter 9

The road north of the city thins into walls. Not the walls of houses — the walls of holdings, each one longer than the last, all of them bleached the same colour as the ground they stand in, so that from the car the whole north looked like one continuous intention broken only by gates.

Ours was already moving when the driver eased off the road. Two men at the outer post. One held a page against the wind and the other held nothing at all, which is its own kind of authority.

The car stopped. The driver came around and opened my door and stood back, and I stepped down onto gravel that had been raked that morning and would not be raked again until the visit ended.

I gave my name at the post. The man read down his page, and read it again, and his thumb went still somewhere in the middle, and whatever he found there did not please him. He stepped aside anyway.