Down the river sailed Miranda, in the company of a native guide, a television set, and a dwarf. Each day the river had a different name, and looked different and felt different, but it was always the same river, inescapable. Today it was broad and flowed languidly, its surface smooth and khaki except where textured by clots of black weed. The banks were hidden by low, dense jungle -- but the sounds of warfare crept through all the same, a thread of continuity linking the daily costume-changes of the landscape: always the same river.

It was now four days since their last landfall, and the dinner with General Aileron: four days spent on the move and perhaps, though no-one said so, on the run. Where previously most nights would be spent moored, perhaps even going ashore, now they drifted silent and furtive over the sky-black waters, though there was no hint of pursuit.

Days were measured in paces on the raft deck, occasional dance steps from the dwarf, negotiating minor obstacles -- weeds threatening to foul the propeller, logs, sandbars, trigger-happy patrols, once a floating mine -- and naps in the hut which served as engine-room, sleeping quarters, galley. Miranda and Lok, the guide, took shifts navigating and steering, while the dwarf for the most part sulked and watched the television, sometimes danced, reluctantly lent a hand in (say) disentangling them from the decaying carcass of a crocodile.

Days were a haze of sweat and flies and often-too-evocative smells from ashore, but the nights were worse.

The heat abated little with the setting sun, but drew closer, more suffocating, more fœtid. Mosquitoes swarmed, malarial, over the raft, devouring all in their path, and each morning Miranda would be leprous with bites and patches of blood from insects crushed mid-feed. As if to compensate for the shrinking of vision to a feverish canopy of stars above and the occasional nightmare vista lit by magnesium flares and gunfire, the river by night overloaded the other senses: battlesounds, snatches of song, endless -- and endlessly various -- unidentifiable shrieks and howls, whooping and chattering, all underscored by the ceaseless whine of the cicadas; rich, nauseating smells, rotting meat and vegetation, smoke, shit, sickly-sweet jungle blooms, bestial pheromones, acrid cordite, gunpowder, blood; the exhausting, clammy pressure of the air, beat of wings against the face, crawl of insect feet across the skin, sag and twist of damp, dirty, ill-fitting clothes, constant itch and prickle and sting of bites and splinters and sweat in grazes and sores.

Sleep was rarely possible at night -- Miranda would nap during the day while Lok piloted, and vice versa; the dwarf did not seem to sleep at all -- and in the darkness all that could be done was try to keep clear of the banks and try not to go mad with the boredom and the petty irritations, to count the seconds and count the minutes and count the quarter-hours and half-hours and hours until the return of the light.

In eight weeks on the river Miranda had watched her past lives shed away and felt no pain. It was a choice made long before. Still, in weaker moments, usually at night, she sometimes caught herself wondering how she'd wound up on the river. "Listen," she'd say then to the screeching from the shore, whispering so the others would not hear, "listen to the sound of my failure."