‘I will survive and prevail,’ de Flunkl shouts at them. ‘And you will die and rot in the unmarked graves that spot country places that will bear my name, and will bear it down the years, and the generations and all the lusty millennia that rush to greet us.’

And with that, he sprints the other way and is gone.

Saint John, dazed by the onslaught of the sun and the mushrooms he ate, does not hear the last words of the master he was born into, and William’s senses are becoming closed off one by one; he does not hear them either.

Underneath the crawling William, as he leaves the village, the dry dirt of the worn street transforms to thick, long grass that it is difficult to crawl through. He has gone blind, but he pushes forward, the tail of the arrow occasionally bumping off the ground, moving in his guts, but he no longer knows any pain, only numbness, mainly felt around his tongue and lips. He moves slowly to what he believes must be the lake, but he is moving in a slow arc, doubling in on himself, turning back towards Nobber. Then his hands fail before him and he leans down on his side and curls up into a ball, nestled amongst the grass, moaning slightly, wheezing until the moaning stops and darkness swallows him up.

Saint John tucks the little rat in a fold in his clothes, pulls the arrow with crows’ feathers for fletching out of William and drags him by the legs to the edge of Moynagh lake, and there he props William under a blazing red maple tree. Saint John brushes the leaves and twigs out of William’s hair and sits down next to him. He is exhausted; he has been dragging William for a long time.

‘Did you see my drawing rock?’ someone says. ‘I need it.’

Saint John opens his mouth to yell in fear, but no sound comes from his mouth.

‘No?’

A half-naked woman with a hole in her face and an axe over her shoulder is walking by.

‘Is that body from Nobber?’ she asks. ‘You must take nothing from that place.’

Saint John shakes his head.

‘No, I see he is not of that town,’ she says, ‘that he is your own; and that though you were there, too, you were not truly there. You cannot go back to it; it is dying.’

The woman is sunburnt; her axe drips with blood. Her face is broken, warped; a single tooth grows out of her flattened nose. To Saint John, she is glorious, beautiful.