Finally, after an hour or so, when the sun is almost directly above their heads, they pass a peasants’ hamlet, sign that they are coming upon Nobber. In the first excuse of a dwelling, the entryway has been loaded with mounds of shale, as have been the small glassless windows, and a charcoal X marks the wall. Whoever lives inside has been ineffectively walled in. The other hovels are empty, their bare, straw-strewn insides visible as they have no doors. Outside the first, an enormous, sleeping pig suns itself, a crow sitting on its belly that rises and falls with the pig’s thick breathing, like an anchored ship bobbing on the sea. A cockerel struts out of the dark entryway, and stands small and proud, its chest out, eyeing them out of the side of its head.

The procession leaves the hamlet at a wide berth and Harold starts singing a sad ditty. The path becomes more trodden and worn. Saint John is going slower now, the mushroom juice drying in yellowish crusts across his chin. He staggers somewhat, tripping over nothing, breathing heavily. And then a mewling moves through the air, picking up in volume until it is accusatory, desultory almost.

‘Do you hear that?’ Harold asks.

He turns his head and sees, in front of the hamlet they have passed, a small child is standing out in the sun, yelling in an unbroken scream, its limbs swinging madly in a tantrum. It is at that young age where its features are so small that they are sexless and ill-defined. That pain, that madness, as Harold knows well, swells the energy for a quarter of a day before weakness and shivering disable the infected permanently and the armpits swell to the size of autumn apples.

They watch the child.

‘If it approaches, shoot on it,’ de Flunkl says.

‘It is just scared,’ Harold Tuite says.

‘I can hear your voice, serving-man. You do not even believe your own words,’ de Flunkl says. ‘This child will not recognise the banner. Fire, all of you, on it in warning.’

‘Are you mad?’ Harold Tuite says.

‘The child is already dead,’ William of Roscrea remarks. ‘What is at stake is how many of us are dead along with it, but I think it would be a kindness to kill this child.’

The child, she or he, is still screaming, and has been, without taking a breath, for a long time. Harold thinks of that young age where the lungs are still at the control of the will and not the instinct. He recalls his own eldest daughter, Fllavie, a tempestuous young girl, now dead a month, contrary and fierce like his own father had been, who, up until the age of seven, if she became angry, would hold her breath to punish her parents whenever they had the gall to refuse her a favour.