After another bout of the Gaelic tongue, which de Flunkl now is suspicious of because it all seems very amicable, William says, ‘He tells me that they definitely are Christians and that’s why they’re all alive, and that we’re not proper Christians and that’s why all our society is being destroyed.’

‘Ask them what those things are round their necks,’ Harold calls out, from behind, as he lets one of the horses nuzzle his open palm. ‘They’re very strange.’

‘That is a good question,’ de Flunkl concurs. ‘What are those slight bitches round the neck?’

‘I want to know, too,’ Saint John says, speaking for the first time since dawn, munching on a fistful of grass to remove the mank dust that has whistled and drifted through the gap in his teeth and accumulated in his mouth from letting his jaw hang slack while breathing so heavily along the trek.

Harold looks at the sky during a lengthy conversation in which two of the Gaels talk over one another, while William’s lips move silently in delayed comprehension. A batch of swallows disrupt the trees at head height, bursting out of it all at once like sweat from pores, and they are above their heads, warbling, arcing high over the valley like the curve of the world, and then they are gone.