The other nodded. He remembered the Englishman of course. The man was drunk when they set out. By the time they landed at Mingulay he had to be carried ashore. But he had paid them what he promised, had been courteous in the way a man three sheets to the wind may still be if he has sufficient breeding. He had a bag with him, his dunnage, but no fiddle unless it was a very small one and inside the bag. Which he doubted.

“He mention Spain or anything?” asked Calley.

“Spain?” MacCuish shook his head. There had been no mention of Spain. “He spoke,” said MacCuish, “of the world’s beauty. And as we carried him up the beach he begged us to remember a woman’s name.”

“What name?” asked Medina.

MacCuish could not remember but then his cousin arrived, coming down the face of a sand dune in three long glides like a skater. He looked much like MacCuish though without the dent, the missing fingers, the tattoos. They talked in their own tongue a while.

“Lucy,” said the cousin.

“That was it,” said MacCuish. “Lucy.”

Calley looked at Medina. In a voice not much above a whisper he said, “That’s the sister’s name.”

An arrangement was made. If the weather held they would go in the morning, first light. Calley and MacCuish walked down the beach to do the money business. The former rating’s rolling gait, the soldier’s bandy legs.

“Fada, fada, fada bho thir,” said Medina to the cousin. It was from a song the old man on Jura had chanted to him, something about the sea (he thought their language, in general, was an endless address to the sea). The cousin listened politely, looked for a moment as if he might offer a response, then went on plaiting strands of marram grass into a slender rope.

They spent the night at a house belonging to one of MacCuish’s relatives. Dark inside and smoky, and with a sweet dungy smell.

“In England—” said Calley.

“I know,” said Medina. “You would not keep your dogs in such a place.”

“Dogs? We wouldn’t keep fucking badgers in here.” But he was in an excellent mood, almost at ease, almost affable. He drank his smoky milk from the bowl, ate his food squatting on a low stool by the fire.

“A week from now,” he said to Medina—there was only an old woman with her head in a scarf to overhear him—“we’ll be on a boat back to Lisbon. And when we get there that cunt Henderson will have something nice for us. I’m going to put in a word for you. Yeah? I’m going to say you did all right. There might even be a medal in it. Imagine someone like you with a medal. A proper one.” He laughed. “Then they can start the war again.”