He was not frightened by the Gaels, nor by the infected child, nor by the depleted landscape, nor by the free animals unresponsive and forgetting of their manly masters. He was not scared by the uneasy frisson in the glimmering eyes of the skinny peasants in Trim. He is not afraid of their insane quest. None of this has frightened him. But now he is afraid because the woman stopped swinging her axe, and though he hopes she will begin destroying the bridge again, he realises that the only thing that scares him is the death of industriousness, the death of work; whether it be destructive or creative, it is all of a piece to him.

He thinks of the Gaels with their insanity and their strangeness and their mysterious rats and admires them, secretly, the secret even secret to himself. They have been here for a long time and still their industry is invisible, but sociable, everywhere complementary of the landscape, temporary and fluid, but it is there, undoubtedly, and so it is harder to break than the hammer and smash of his people’s industry with their mills and their looms and their stony, towering structures that fall into neglect and nothingness at the shadow of adversity, whereas the Gaels only add to nature’s existing edifices to harden nature’s instruments, and so it is more difficult to erase. They complicate nature with a softness that is unimaginable to him.

The problem with the Gaels is that they are too free, and this freedom, he realises, is their only reaction to the devastating losses they have sustained for almost two centuries, but all these displays of wild freedom are flailing attempts to hide an enormous and smothering anxiety; and anxiety, he believes, is the root of all manmade things.

But everything is green here, nothing is manmade, and, still, I too am becoming anxious amongst all this naturalness, he thinks, noticing his breath has grown quick.

The horse he is leading accidentally clops away a portion of stripped bark, capsizing it, and hundreds of woodlice squabble and clamber over one another in fear of the light. They are as he is. They too are the expression of his wordless anxiety, a centreless hurrying and scrambling, confusion the only unifier amongst them.

He is sick of everything being so dark and green, his eyes rejecting the uniformity of the untameable world. He longs for a bright bird, or a pink butterfly, or a red rose, something to break the browns and greens, but nothing ever comes.

There are so few humans in the world. The earth is an unconquered thing, leafy and overgrown, uncaring. A monotonous thing with no edges that swallows up lonely travellers. It is terrifying to behold. It is terrifying to be so small within it.