‘Of course I speak only of craftsmanship. Would I challenge your choices, your beliefs, the way you live and the things you desire and the cost of those things? Are the lines sure? Are the colours true? What of those veils on the eyes – have you seen their likeness before? Judge only my skill, my feeble efforts in imbuing a dead thing with life using dead things – dead paints, dead brushes, dead surface, with naught but my fingers and my eyes living, together striving to capture truth.

‘I choose to paint death, yes, and you ask why – in horror and revulsion, you ask why? I choose to paint death, my friend, because life is too hard to bear. But it’s just a face, dead paints on dead surface, and it tells nothing of how the neck snapped, or the wrongness of that angle with the body. It is, in truth, a failure.

‘And each time I paint this boy, I fail.

‘I fail when you turn away. I fail when you walk past. I fail when you shout at me about the beautiful things of the world, and why didn’t I paint those? I fail when you cease to care, and when you cease to care, we all fail. I fail, then, in order to welcome you to what we share.

‘This face? This failure? It is recognition.’

There were other corpses. A man and a woman, their backs cut and stabbed as they sought to hold their bodies protectively over those children they could reach, not that it had helped, since those children had been dragged out and killed. A dog was stretched out, cut in half just above the hips, the hind limbs lying one way, the fore limbs and head the opposite way. Its eyes, too, were flat.

When travelling through the forest, Kadaspala was in the habit of leaving the main track, of finding these lesser paths that took him through small camps such as this one. He had shared meals with the quiet forest people, the Deniers, although they denied nothing of value that he could see. They lived in familiarity and in love, and wry percipience and wise humility, and they made art that took Kadaspala’s breath away.

The figurines, the masks, the beadwork – all lost in the burnt huts now.

Someone had carved a wavy line on the chest of the dead boy. It seemed that worship of the river god was a death sentence now.

He would not bury these dead. He would leave them lying where they were. Offered to the earth and the small scavengers that would take them away, bit by bit, until the fading of flesh and memory were one.

He painted with his fingers, setting in his mind where all the bodies were lying in relation to one another; and the huts and the dead dog, and how the sun’s light struggled through the smoke to make every detail scream.