William and de Flunkl are speechless. They watch on as the man’s face goes purple. Then, when his face is so dark that the features are rendered almost invisible, his tongue pokes out of his lips and lolls loosely out the side of his mouth.

William blinks once; decides to leave. He turns and walks up the stairs and de Flunkl follows after him.

Outside, the light is big, multifaceted, throwing all colours in strong relief. The world is too loose and too big to grasp in one set of eyes. It cannot be held in anyone’s hands, in any one person’s senses, and the two men are blinded by the sun, and too many things are happening at once.

There is a Gael with his face painted black sitting sideways on one of their horses, like a lady, picking at the calluses on his feet with incredibly long fingernails. Another Gael is untying de Flunkl’s horses’ reins from the post to which they have been secured.

‘Our horses,’ William of Roscrea yells, running towards them, and an arrow slides through him from behind. He looks down and sees the tipped head has come out through his bellybutton. Silence breaks through him; it flows like a river. Gaelic words come out of the sky and he looks at the big curving blue expanse above him, listless in its lazy, ever-present power, and he hears the mutilated sky, in Gaelic, apologising for killing him, and he thinks of how it makes sense, that, of course, God is both a Gael and mischievous.

And then it occurs to William that he is dying.

The voice is coming from the sky, but it is behind him. It is saying that it is sorry for killing someone with such a remarkable faculty for the earth’s native language, and that in kinder times it would have had him visit the clan, and have fed him well, and have given him the head of the table as the choice, honoured story-teller.

William tries to turn towards the voice and the muscles in his stomach blossom in a pain that explodes through his system. Blood is leaking inside him in the wrong places. He feels a hole has gone through him the size of a fist, but he knows it is not true and the cause of his pain has narrow dimensions.