A shadow falls over Conn, and he looks up and flinches in the light. Three geese are flying, ragged and disordered, across the town. They are low in the sky, almost touching the roofs. They disappear, and then his eyes go back to the sealed door.

‘There is no one to blame for this,’ he says.

‘You are mad to say that,’ Eoin says.

Inside her house, Dervorgilla, her hands growing stiff over her head, can hear many people moving outside her door. It is like the sound of the lake in the evenings. She sits down on the bed, her leg accidentally touching Tedbalt’s arm.

‘Sorry.’

There is no pain now, just a certain breathlessness. Her eyes dilate, becoming small and then big again. My body, she thinks, is toxic, swollen with foreign pus. It is unknowable now, has been misshaped, invaded. I am disintegrating, grotesque. There is nothing of me left in this body. It disgusts me, and my mind is a stranger in it. There is no future; the world is ending.

‘I may as well have not been born,’ she says, aloud. ‘There will be nothing left of what we were.’

Nobody mourns us, she thinks. All the past will be destroyed, and the present is too tumultuous and erratic to mimic its precedent. Erased, she thinks, our bodies will rot in mass graves. We will melt into one another, grow indistinct. Nothing remains, not dust, not regret. Your self drips away like blood from a gash, forgotten; it is not a kept thing. It becomes earth, swallowed up.

‘Oh, well,’ she says.

Dervorgilla knows her family is dead; has known it for a long time. You are given things you do not ask for, and then once familiar they are taken away. That is what happens, but she will continue to pretend, because the truth serves no purpose.

‘Who is it?’ she calls.

There is a knocking on the door, and then a boisterous guffaw. Someone is laughing at her, taunting her. They are cruel, but she doesn’t mind. It is just people, the way they are, and Conn will be back soon.

The great sleep …

The great sleep is being shaken off, but it is a false awakening. Doors are left open, property become communal. Madness, like a veined river, runs through the town, and in her youth Raghnailt would have loved it, but I am not young any more, she thinks, and always thought I was old when I was young.