“You see anything to eat?” asked Calley.

Medina shrugged. “There will be something. There is always something.”

“We’ll have to eat that tree,” said Calley.

Medina worked his way back to the beach. The fog was breaking up, drifting through. At the end of the beach he began to clamber over likely, sea-touched rocks until he found what he was looking for, a tilted block, slippery and cluttered with black shells. He began to pick them off, leaning over the sea and filling both of the large side pockets of his coat. He was singing, “La Gallina Que se Perdió,” and wondered who was the last who had sung on the island and if anyone had ever sung there in Spanish. (Hadn’t the armada of Rey Felipe’s time come down this coast? Might they have stopped here? Taken on water? He thought of the portrait he had seen in the ayuntamiento in Cordoba of the armada’s general, the Duque de Medina Sidonia, whose sallow face had seemed so well fitted to defeat. As Spain herself, perhaps, was well fitted to defeat.)

On his way back he was guided by the firelight above the walls of the house and when he reached the house Calley was crouched by the flames, tidying and poking. Without looking round he asked Medina what he had found.

“Mejillones,” said Medina.

“You what?” said Calley. He stood and turned. Medina took one of the shells from his pocket, held it up.

“One oyster,” said Calley. “That’s fucking brilliant. What are we then? Voles?”

“Not an oyster,” said Medina. “Mejillones. And many of them. You will not sleep hungry.”

He tried to tempt Calley with eating them raw but the Englishman shook his head and Medina fetched water from the hollow of a stone, rainwater in which he glimpsed the rising moon and his own dark face. They cooked the mussels in their mess tins, threw the shells into the shadows.

While they ate, Calley explained what he would do to the savage sailors should he ever find them again. It involved fire and rocks, firearms, a rope. “And they wouldn’t even complain,” he said, “because they know what they’ve done. Sticking us here like Robin what-the-fuck.”

On the fire they burned the house’s own roof beams. As the end of a beam charred and fell away they pushed it along and gave fresh wood to the flames. Medina searched his pockets for more mussels. The moon had climbed above the walls of the house. Other than the smoke from their fire the air was perfectly clear now. Stars opened like flowers.

“When you were small,” said Medina. “A boy. Who was your friend?”