James dozed for a while and some time later he found himself in a dark place being gently lowered on to a soft bed of animal skins. The last thing he remembered before he slipped into oblivion was the girl’s brown, animal face, watching over him.

24

24

The Dance of Blood

James awoke to an agony of itching. For a moment he didn’t know where he was; all he knew was that he was in pain. There wasn’t a bit of him that didn’t hurt; his whole body crawled with irritation. He knew he couldn’t move. He could feel the tight leather straps at his wrists and ankles, cutting into him. He remembered the dream he had had about being carried through the night and then he realised that he was scratching himself. His hand was somehow free. He could feel his chest studded with angry red lumps. He clawed at it with his broken fingernails before someone grabbed his arm and stopped him. He opened his eyes and saw a girl leaning over him, her black hair falling into her face, her eyes serious and intense.

‘No,’ she said, and shook her head.

So it wasn’t a dream. Slowly the details of last night began to come back to him. The arrival of the girl, the young guard with his throat opened up, trying to follow the girl through the swamp, falling over and being carried by the shepherd, first to the village and finally to this place.

He propped himself up and looked around.

He was lying on a bed of straw and animal skins inside a massive cave with a domed roof. At the back were a row of ancient, worn steps that led up to a vertical crack in the rock and a bright slash of sunlight. Four swallows flew through the crack, dodging and swooping, but always keeping in formation. James watched as they darted up through a jagged round opening in the roof. The light from the opening fell on the remains of a Nuraghic village that filled the cave. James could make out the low stone walls of some fifty or sixty huts, and thought that this must once have been a fairly substantial settlement.

A group of Sardinian men had made camp. They had lit a fire below the hole in the ceiling to keep the insects away, and were sitting around it, chatting in low voices. They wore the traditional black and white peasants’ outfits with shaggy sheepskin waistcoats and black stocking caps.

Each man had a rifle at his side.

James twisted his head and looked the other way. Here, the cave wall was partly open to the outside world, and through the low, wide gap he could see thick vegetation baking and shimmering in the heat of the day.