The man has had many names, and has always been able to discard them at will, moving as he does amongst so many illiterates. None of them have ever made any difference to him, though; never touched at his essence, and he has always felt like names are tricks people play on themselves to obscure their great sameness, a cheating way to distinguish between different nothings. The only name he ever had any fondness for, the only one he wished had stuck a little, was Mary’s name for him; Big Cat, but that is a private name that would be muddied by use in anyone else’s mouth, and she does not call him that any more. Perhaps she has forgotten it, he thinks.

‘Ambrosio,’ he says.

Alannah looks up at him, sees his red eyes, his nodding head. ‘Whatever skill you had when you took over the town is gone,’ she remarks. ‘You have been crying like a woman, and are still drunk. There is nothing left in you.’

The retinue, still indistinct, are coming towards the town; the man gazes at them, wishing he could sit alone under some shady tree and drink until he went blind.

‘If you saw me work,’ the man says, ‘you would see my talent; see how I talk around these men until they are so split amongst themselves that they all attend my leisure, each to their—’

He trails off, notices that only four men are running towards the town; they have left the tall dark man behind. He wonders at it.

‘What is it?’ Alannah says.

‘Remove Colca while he is still fainted,’ he says. ‘Keep him under lock. Use the barrow beyond the monastery. I fear he will harm my woman, and I would not have it. Mary will be set up in my lodgings where I can watch her, and keep that cleaver away out of her reach.’

‘And if I do not?’

The man rests his chin on his chest; lets his eyes close for a moment. He is so tired.

‘Go against me ever again, Alannah,’ he says, ‘and I swear to God I’ll dispatch you to hell. I swear it.’

Alannah smirks and curtseys, but he does not see it.

Approaching a thicket …

Approaching a thicket, Monsieur Hacquelebacq, who has – given certain recent tumultuous upheavals – lost his past in an artful manner, sees high above his head four geese flying in a ragged V. They glide far over his head, only occasionally flapping their wings, and then one, as though struck by an invisible impediment, spirals down in long, sloping spirals, each turn becoming smaller and less graceful. For a brief moment, its fast shadow blocks Hacquelebacq’s light, and then it disappears beneath the distant treetops. He cups his ear, but still he does not hear the goose land.