The enormity of Raghnailt’s shame and failure agitates her chest like a second heartbeat. The voices and screams are more distant now, but she still sees the eyes, visible to her even with her own eyes closed. There is no meaning to the visions that choke her and tear her apart, and there never has been; but still she will see the eyes forever, in everything. She will want to die, but will not.

‘A child could have been saved,’ she says.

She could not have loved him more.

Hacquelebacq drops to …

Hacquelebacq drops to his knees and sticks his little finger through the earth. On bringing it up, he sees his finger has pierced layers of musty foliage, sodden stacked leaves from autumnal pasts. The leaves closer to the fingernail are older, and those nearer the knuckle are fresher. The past is a layered thing and what is closer to the surface is always newer, he thinks, feeling somewhere hidden in this a profound observation.

It is a great shame, he feels, that bodies are buried so deep; it unnaturally cheats the proper order of the world, which stacks itself sensibly in its unhurried chronology. Bodies should lie atop the earth and sink at a natural pace, as befits their rate of decomposition, so that if future generations are of a meddlesome sort they can, on digging them up, be able to layer time more accurately. Perhaps, he thinks, the earth is growing each year with its accumulations of dead leaves, and all the bodies we bestow on it, thickening and swelling it up, and after several thousand years it is not unforeseeable that the earth will be twice what it is now.

After the roof of his mouth had grown sore from his fill of scallions, he had hurled a rock at the little fox and watched it disappear beneath a bed of ferns that swayed in its wake. He had wandered around, feeling secure in his new boots, until he came across an ocean of swarming ants that seemed to grow out of the base of an oak tree like an enormous tumour. Millions of them, looking like one enormous, writhing ghost. The ants never stopped moving, piled on top of one another in a layered stampede, scurrying in some private panic that would never end; but taken altogether they seemed to move slowly, in clipped waves that rose and fell and then rose again; and every now and again their shifting shapes seemed to form a screaming face. Out of their centre protruded a wind vane, which some few ants crawled up and down in an orderly line.