Behind the women a rawboned ox pulls a wagon crowded with marble statuary: the torsos of angels; a robed and curly headed philosopher with his nose flaked off; a single enormous foot, bone white in the June light. Finally in the rear rides an archer with a shield slung across his back and a bow across his saddle, murmuring a song to himself or to his horse, looking off into the fields as they pass. Across the rump of his horse a little slain goat is tied, and seeing it, hunger vaults inside Omeir. He rises and is about to step out of the brake to call to them when he feels the girl’s hand on his arm.

She sits holding her sack, arms scratched, head shorn, desperation written into every line of her face. Little brown birds rustle in the thorns above his head. She taps her chest with two fingers and stares at him, and his heart pounds, and he sits, and in another minute the wagons are past.

That afternoon rain falls. The girl clasps her bundle as she walks, trying everything she can to keep it dry. They make their way through a muddy field and find an abandoned house blackened by fire and sit starving beneath the thatch, and an oceanic fatigue enters him. He shuts his eyes and hears Grandfather pluck and dress two pheasants, stuff them with leeks and coriander, and set them to roast over a fire. He smells the cooking meat, hears the rain hiss and spit in the coals, but when he opens his eyes there is no fire and no pheasants, only the girl shivering at his side in the growing darkness, bent over her sack, and rain slashing onto the fields.

In the morning, they enter a vast forest. Great dripping pendulums of catkins hang from the trees and they move through them as if passing through thousands of curtains. The girl coughs; rooks screech; something clatters high in the branches above: then silence and the hugeness of the world.

Whenever he stands, the trees bleed away in long streaks and take several heartbeats to right themselves. He aches to see the shape of the mountain on the horizon but it does not appear. Once in a while the girl mutters words, prayers or curses, he cannot say. If only, he thinks, they had Moonlight with them. Moonlight would know the way. He had heard it said that God made men above beasts, but how many times had they lost a dog high on the mountain only to find it covered with burrs back home? Was it by smell or the angle of the sun in the sky or some deeper, hidden faculty, possessed by animals but lost to men?