The man whips at the two horses and the trap begins to clatter away.

‘You will be caught and hanged,’ the man calls out.

‘And the Gaels will get you,’ Saint John shouts. ‘They own these lands and they are the better for it. I saw it in the visions that the earth created in me so I could escape the likes of you who crowd the world with so much death; who profit so greatly from the unnatural pains our people bear.’

‘There are no Gaels in these parts,’ the man shouts back, not turning his head. ‘These are the delusions of a murderer.’

‘You will find there are,’ Saint John shouts out. ‘But I hope they don’t get you because I have a last blessing for you before you go: I hope the sickness takes every last man, woman and child, and leaves you alive, alone on this island, and then you may pick up the dead’s bodies for always, and always bury them for always, and you may collect your coin off their corpses but have no one to exchange it with, and you may claim all their property but have no one to guard it from, and after much monies and bodies were accrued and you had had your fill I would let you live forever so you could drown in the suicidal silence of yourself.’

The man does not reply, does not even look round, and Saint John watches the mound of bodies sway with the rollicking of the trap until they turn round the bend of the thicket and are gone, but the smell they brought still lingers.

The world is natural and green again, though the sky is turning a dark pink, and Saint John feels a panic rise over him, and some strange tightness in his forehead. His loneliness and sobriety rise up within him. The grass, he feels, is too long about him, the birdsong is too tumultuous and fearful and the lake is too big. He drops to his knees and begins crawling around the bases of trees, searching for mushrooms of the kind he had eaten earlier, digging into the ground with his nails, like a piglet searching for roots.

He scrambles around for hours in a listless blank. At one point he comes across a sharp stone, worn down and whitened by recent use. It is sticky in his hands. Peering closer at it, he sees it is covered in fresh blood and tangled in some few strands of brilliant, orange hair. He hurls it into the lake, and continues scuttling back and forth, zigzagging through the undergrowth. He is frenetic. There is an enormous energy and a hunger in him, but he does not find that which he craves so much.