‘The other, the younger,’ William says, his throat parched and his voice quavering from the length of his spiel, ‘seems to disagree somewhat and says that these enormous lower regions, stretched wide as the valley we are currently shaded by, do not ward off evil or sickness, but welcome it, embracing and holding it inside themselves, smilingly, and that women do not eat the evil of the world by their mouths, but digest it by the healthy internal fluids of their hidden regions that they can call forth at will, that attract evil diseases, and, but only incidentally, weak Norman men from Dublin and Kilkenny both, with their promising smells, but then that once inside they are eaten by the goodness of their women, held there until unleashed through the incarnation of the weak children they bear who will die without our – yours and mine – unnatural and interfering surgeries that give life to those who should die.’

‘I suppose,’ de Flunkl says, ‘it is rare to converse with such leisure and with no busyness in such an indiscriminate manner with such people, and in such a place. Though the surmise was confusedly told, I feel, momentarily, almost relieved from my ambitions and fears, but ask the eldest, I presume him the eldest, if he does truly believe those bald sluts round his neck have protected him from the sickness that does not even respect merchantry, or the king’s cousins, or God’s appointed clergymen?’

William of Roscrea sighs, his mouth dry from his long, complicated, but artful interpretation, and looks behind himself.

Harold is leaning sleepily off his horse, unafraid of death from these Gaels after this last spring, feeling it would be a good, pleasant way to go, by a spear or a sword, rather than what he witnessed in his own household, his wife and his young daughter now in a mass grave, sewn up in sacks and hurled down without prayer or service, though he did say a-one, even if he didn’t know which two sacks in the pile below him he was directing his praying towards.

‘I have heard,’ Harold says softly to Saint John so as to distract himself, ‘a Gael has a way about himself of soliloquying so much, with such an incessant flatness in the voice, that the listener is provoked into falling asleep on the very spot he stands, and that the Gael does do this so as to make his murdering all the easier.’

Saint John of Barrow does not answer. The stupid child is on his hunkers hungrily eating an entire troop of mushrooms indiscriminately off the path, not listening to the translations. Harold Tuite wants to warn the childish boy away from the ugly fungi, but a wave of tiredness and sadness overcomes him and, besides, the Gaels have begun to speak again.

Once the Gael, in turn, is finished speaking, William of Roscrea is silent for a while.

‘Well?’ de Flunkl asks.