‘I do not doubt your power or your skill,’ William says, ‘but I need no horseshoes. I do not mean to be inopportune, sir, but why do you beat cold metals with so little vigour? They will surely fragment and blind you. Where is the fire in your forge?’

‘Nobody has any use for my horseshoes any more since their wearers have become so edible, and it is far too hot for a fire,’ Colca says, ‘and it is likewise too sweltering for clothes. You may have remarked that I am naked beneath my apron. You should be wary any man wearing clothes in these times, as it is well known that the sickness is dispersed in an airborne manner through sweating.’

‘But I have recently come from Trim,’ William says, ‘where lazy, unwashed people live in cold and damp structures and yet they die in their great swathes, giving the lie to your measure.’

The man harrumphs, gritting his squat teeth, which, brown as they are, seem unnaturally light against the glimmering blackness of his face. ‘You are calling me a liar.’

William looks back over his shoulder to the dead mare on its side in the distance. ‘You misunderstand me,’ he says.

‘You think me a liar because you passed through Kells,’ Colca says, pointing his mallet at him, ‘and spoke with that Fitzsimmons washerwoman slut. I cannot escape the slander and calumny they heap on me in that town, and I only an honest farrier looking to mind his family. Despite what they say of me I have never felt the need to engage in congress with swan, goat, mare, or any of the more beautiful and lascivious beasts that do stalk this land. You are a stranger to this town and do not know with whom you are trifling. I would do well to smash your skull in with this mallet.’

William realises, with a great and defeating disappointment, that he has met yet another insane person. ‘Your head has been touched by the sun,’ he says. ‘There was no accusation in my words. I leave now.’

‘If I were so full of perversions why would I have such a beautiful wife, then?’ Colca says. He turns to the nearest house and yells, ‘Goodly wife, come to.’

After a moment, the door to the adjacent house is pushed open and Alannah emerges.

‘Is she not like some faerie come down from the mountains?’ Colca says proudly.

‘You are married to this man?’ William says to her. ‘You were surely kidnapped, then?’

Alannah looks up at her husband, playing with the feather between her fingers.

‘Tell him how I make love to you every night,’ Colca says, ‘and how I harbour no perversions like they would say of me in Kells.’

The woman begins muttering in Gaelic to herself.