After that, in the stillness that followed, two truths arrived with equal force. The first was that he wanted, very much, to smoke a cigar (though he had none and had not smoked since Glasgow). The second was that today would be his last with Calley. They could leave the island together, he had no objection to that, but then their ways must part. There would be some fuss, some name-calling. He would be reproached. But he would remain calm; he would be immovable. They might even shake hands, nothing warm of course, but a recognition of what they had shared, the strangeness of their journey, the fate that had thrown them together. And after that, well, Calley could do as he wished, could find the English officer and carry his head back to Lisbon in his knapsack, a thing he was, in fact, quite likely to do. As for his own path, he had no money and was unlikely to be offered any, but it was harvest time and with so many men at the war help would be needed in fields and barns. He would work his way, farm by farm, back down the road they had come. And somewhere on that road he might hear of Phyrro, of the men he had swum with in the river, the women with their sunburned arms and dusty boots . . .

To this—the vision of his figure on the road, free as a boy—he gave a single vigorous nod of assent, then set off for the beach, seeing, as he worked his way down, the rim of the rising sun a finger’s width above the horizon, already too fierce to be stared at.

When he reached the shore he sat on the sand, took off his boots, peeled off the frayed mess of his stockings and walked into the sea, standing with the surf around his calves until his feet throbbed with the cold. He came out, picked up his boots and walked—sauntered—to the western end of the beach, stepping from sand on to stones shaped like giant turtles, then up on to the plateau where, after losing his bearings (distracted by the setting moon) he came again to the rock with the mussels on it. He squatted, picking off a dozen of the smaller shells and eating them where he was, dropping the shells into the water. Further off, the sea seemed hardly to move at all. He saw other islands, small ones, inhabited, surely, only by birds. No fire smoke, no black speck of a boat.