They crossed the River Mercy and arrived at Liverpool in the rain. The horses needed new shoes and something more to eat than wayside grass. The men were in similar wise—saddle-sore, creak-kneed, in want of stillness, settled air. They worked their way into the quarters of the poor, found a stable in Comus Street and, in the street adjoining, a public house called the Lamb and Fox. They rented a room above the bar, two beds (narrow as those the dead are laid on), a stand with a basin on it, a piss pot under the bed by the door. Hanging from a nail on the wall between the beds was a print in a frame. Medina studied it and after a while decided that it showed Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.

Though it was the first night in many they had a roof and a bed, neither man could sleep. Perhaps they missed the speech of trees, the scent of damp earth. Medina lay on his back listening to dogs fight in the street, to the drinkers in the bar below, their attempts at singing. He heard Calley go out. When he came back he brought with him the sour air of the bar, tripped over the end of Medina’s bed, cursed. Tempting to ask if they served tea in the bar—tempting but unwise. Medina opened his eyes a little, just enough to peep at the ceiling where points of light coming up between the floorboards made a kind of constellation. He could not see Calley but heard him lie down, and then—the sounds almost lost amid the tireless raging of the dogs—heard him mutter and sigh. Half-words, gasps, hisses. Was Calley starting to feel as he did? That they were fools on a fool’s errand? Men who, far from being engaged upon an urgent mission, had been cut loose? He could ask him, whisper across in the dark, invite a confidence. But that too would be unwise. And more likely Calley was simply rehearsing some complaint Medina would hear in the morning, or finishing an argument begun in the bar or some quarrel started years before, the antagonist forgotten but the theme remembered. One of those endless rebuttals that become a man’s protest at what he has been given . . .

In some sliver of the night—too late and too early to be easily explained—they heard horses on the street and sharpened at the sound of them, suspended breath. But the horses did not stop and the men settled again, scratched at their skin, picked at their blankets, each man a small wave that broke on the other’s shore, each the other’s burden, perhaps his comfort. Below them, the last of the drinkers had perfected himself and swum away into the summer night. One by one, the landlady’s breath put out the stars.