To wake up sweating, there is nothing like it; you can be certain the world is against you already, and he had awoken so early that he had felt like he was losing his mind. Six nights since he had slept properly, and a sound of sawing near him had opened his eyes. He had woken up thinking that someone was cutting off his head with rusted teeth and when he looked around for the noise he found it was an ocean of flies buzzing over the dead family, a noise that, though it had been constant for days, all of a sudden seemed grating. He had begun drinking cider in order to get back to sleep, and that just made him crave Mary.

This town is unravelling me, he thinks, and I will slide into death with such carelessness.

He came by this place too easily, and he knows it has made him arrogant and stupid. It is bringing me down to its level, and he doubts he even has the will to stop drinking any more. It was a mistake to take Nobber. De Fonteroy had thought they needed some secluded place out of which to work, but he was wrong. It has only created more problems, robbed him of that spontaneous looseness so necessary for this kind of undertaking.

It still surprises him how little work it all took; a few suggestions and the violence poured out of the people. It is always inside them; one just needs to know the words that release it, the words that direct it. Stopping it again is always the hardest part because that can’t be done with language alone, but he had been prepared for that. Eoin Preston was the man to break before the rest would follow. At first he had thought it would be Joseph Toqville, but that man had already been broken by something else, and Eoin Preston broke in four or five movements.

‘What happened to your neck?’

Colca is standing naked in the doorway of the registrar’s office. The man remembers how the moment Eoin Preston was down, Colca had placed his foot on Preston’s neck, threatened to take his life, meaning every word of it.

‘I was just thinking of you.’

‘Your neck, though—’

Since he took over the town, Colca has remained naked. His face and arms are black from the forge he worked over for several years, but now his feet and legs are covered in streaks of pollen from the fields of buttercups he treks through every night; his belly all covered in rashes from the woods he has crawled in.

The man looks at the degenerate he has cast his lot with, and, for a brief moment, considers killing him. Colca is a part of the sloppiness overtaking the town, but then again, he thinks, so am I.

‘Mary,’ the man says.

‘Why do you keep her?’ Colca asks.

‘I love her; she is mine.’