‘I wish I knew her name,’ Harold says, dragging Saint John after him by the arm. ‘She seems to be a fine woman.’

‘That deformed hag a fine woman?’ de Flunkl says. ‘Only one who was a woman themselves would prattle such idiocies, but maybe that is what you are degenerating into with your big, soft tears that even a beaten bitch would be ashamed to have shed so plentifully as you have done today.’

‘There are plenty of fine women,’ Harold says. ‘The world is happily thick with them. They are blessings, the true companions of the earth. They are born, live and die every day, but it takes a man to see them, not a boy. The eyes of a man are soothed by the sight of any woman who does carry the burden of her life well and with generosity, whereas the eyes of a boy are always half-closed, and when they are open they do not understand what they see, unless it is their own thwarted pleasure, and I will thwart the pleasure that is the breath in your lungs if you question me on my manliness once more, you littlest of boys.’

‘I insist on quiet,’ William says. ‘I will not intervene if you two play at insults. I will ride on and leave you behind, and you may navigate this treacherous land without the skills I bring to bear on this group.’

They walk on, having to pass into thick undergrowth, the little chorus of evenly spaced axe blows on wood trailing behind them, growing dim, complementing the breeze that sets the trees’ branches in musical contact. They find themselves beating their way through a thicket, its diverse life and dimensions that of a forest, but its size too shy and enclosed to classify it as anything but a glorified grove. The heat is close and dirty, a heavy thing that is alive.

And then the noise of the woman’s axe stops, and for some reason this is deeply unsettling to William of Roscrea, far more unsettling than when the infected child stopped, with cut suddenness, screaming. A noisy silence surrounds him. A weariness beyond physicality envelops him. Birds rattle, screech and warble; insects gurgle and crunch under his boots, but all this noise is just inhuman silence.