‘There are only two things,’ he calls, raising two fingers to the empty street. ‘There is the sickness and there are the Gaels; both are here, invisible amongst us, waiting for us to weaken. They reek of the death they will bring us. I can smell them now. Do you not feel that burning in your nostrils? That is the Gael, that is the sickness; that is the devil on the edge of town, storming the boundaries of our lives, overcoming us. And yet every town has that. What town is not doomed? Every mother cries. Every good man falls. Every child starves, but you have a third and a fourth thing that these other do not.’

He raises four fingers to the sky.

‘You have me, and you have the curfew I gave you,’ he yells. ‘I will stop the Gaels and the curfew will stop the sickness, but it takes a little time. I know you crave justice now, for ye are just, but this is the seventh day, and on the seventh day God rested, and who oversaw his dominion on that day? On that day did the devil reign supreme? No, I tell ye, the caretaker did. I am that caretaker. I am your caretaker; that is all I am. You have no priest, no mayor. The sheriff fled; the king himself crumbles under the weight of his own fecklessness, avarice and lust, but you have me. I am here for you. I am yours.’

Behind him, he can hear Colca dragging bodies from where they lay at the forge. The heavy, dull sound of it makes him lose the thread of his thought again. He blinks for a moment, feeling thirsty, sways slightly. I feel like I am disintegrating, he thinks. Perhaps I, myself, have become full of fear. I must be careful not to fall back into the fountain. If I could only sleep the better part of this drunkenness would fall away.

‘All the other towns die because they leave their doors open, they let their sins pile up and they become dead,’ he says. ‘I have heard that but two days ago in Mullingar the people left their doors open and those who didn’t die by nightfall were swallowed into the earth when it cracked open, because if God is away, the devil is not. Only two women survived and as they came to give me the news a band of Gaels took them, tried to plant Gaelic children in them, but the Gaels were so drunk that the women were only sodomised. Thankfully, the two women were in the early stages of infection so did not have to suffer this disgrace upon their honour for too long a time. If only they had listened to me!’