‘Since Concessa ate the cockerel,’ Raghnailt says, ‘yes, I suppose they are the earliest risers.’

‘It must be near midday. It will be hot for some time.’

‘We are approaching it, but how did you sleep at all?’ Raghnailt asks. ‘I am hot all the time. I cannot stand it, but perhaps it is just the age I am at. I cannot breathe any more without an open door.’

‘Did Mary attempt a strangulation again?’

‘She did.’

‘I heard it, but with my eyes still closed my dreams improvised upon the reality of the moment.’

Raghnailt does not want to talk about the morning’s events, about the lives the sickness has claimed, about the men who surround them; she only wants to speak with her Alannah, as though they were alone together.

‘Tell me of your dream,’ she says.

‘I dreamt it would be hot forever,’ Alannah muses, ‘but that is just a sensation of hell and I do not believe in that place.’

‘How can you not believe in it?’ Raghnailt says.

‘Because Father Unction told me hell is just heat, and on asking him to what this heat compared he told me it was like an Andalusian heat, but I am kin to a man who once travelled to that Islamic place, and, on returning, he said heat was a very pleasant sensation when you are near the ocean’s breeze. It is only in this part of the world the heat gives you a headache because there is so much wetness in the ground that when the sun comes it turns the air into a stew.’

‘There is no ocean breeze in hell.’

‘Well, then you would have me believe that there is no ocean there,’ Alannah replies, ‘and if there is no ocean, then there are no rivers to flow into it, and if there are no rivers you would die of thirst there, and if you die in hell surely you go to some other place.’

‘That is too Gaelic a way of thinking for me, so let sit that matter,’ Raghnailt says. ‘Just continue your dream talking.’

‘This sensation of heat was the end of the dream. It came to me after I was killed in childbirth by a bleeding that could not be staunched. The child who came out of me was a blond girl, her neck wrapped in the noose made of its own umbilical cord, and it dangled out of me, scared of the world it had found itself in, and though I could see, I was dead, too, and could not disentangle the child, so it died.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘It has no meaning,’ she replies. ‘It is just the expression of any woman’s fear. Say me your dream.’

Raghnailt tells her about the eye, and Alannah is silent for a while.