When they are so close to him that he can hear them padding through the mulch, he breathes in some dirt through his nose. He pinches his nostrils to stop himself from sneezing, and this causes him to cry so much that his eyes are cleared of dirt. Insects are crawling over his hands, swarming him, decorating him in senseless patterns. His arms and hands are covered in ant bites, and he wants to scratch them but he is afraid the Gaels would hear even that.

Finally, the footsteps grow quieter; and Hacquelebacq realises he has been holding his breath. He gasps and then leaps up to follow them, brushing dirt off his front, but then he stops, runs his hands through his hair.

‘I would forget my own head,’ he says.

He kneels back down in the grave and digs up the man’s legs; undoes the leather laces carefully and then shakes off the boots. The old man’s feet look very white against the earth, almost like they are shining. Hacquelebacq does not cover them up again; instead he steps out of the grave, taps the boots against one of the oak trees to get the dirt out of them and puts them on; walks about in them for a moment. He sits on the pile of earth, much diminished now, crossing his legs and then uncrossing them, moving his head about so he can see the boots from different angles. They are very fine, he thinks; and then he notices, near his boots, a little clump of scallions.

The earth is very giving, he feels, and it would be a bad idea to go into Nobber so soon after the Gaels have gone there. He plucks a scallion, shakes it until the larger clumps of dirt have fallen off it, and then spits on it. They come up so easily, he thinks, as though nothing held them.

The fox wanders over, sits near Hacquelebacq, and together they stare into the trees.

William of Roscrea …

William of Roscrea, from his new vantage point, sees, at some distance from him, a small hut, whose pillars are made of unshaven tree trunks. It frames a man in a leather apron amidst a cold forge hammering away at some small things on an anvil. Centred by the hut as he is, the man looks like the subject of a crooked portrait set amidst a larger warped landscape. Though the noise is disturbing, it has issued from a tradesman so it smacks to William of some forgotten regularity. Relieved to see him, William sets his hopes on this regularity in a town so strange.