‘Thick idiot.’

He said the words aloud. He crouched down and forced himself to look in again. Something moved in the darkness. He got up in what he hoped was a casual way and looked around for Kathleen. She was up on the top of the fort leaning over the wall.

‘Come on up,’ she yelled down at him. ‘Up.’ The wind took the word from her mouth and tossed it away towards the gathering clouds.

‘Up.’

She waved at him with both hands. Her hair and all her clothes were filled with wind and seemed to dance. He began to climb the steps, carefully fitting his feet on to the odd-shaped stones. He reached the first tier and looked down into the circus ring, seeing in his mind’s eye the small people crouched round their fires, the frightened cattle trampling people to death, and clashing round them with their huge horns.

‘They couldn’t have,’ he shouted up at Kathleen.

‘Couldn’t have what?’

‘They couldn’t have had the cattle in here with them.’

She shrugged and turned back to the view. He climbed up the next set of steps and joined her.

‘There wouldn’t have been room.’

‘I’m only saying what I’ve been told. But look, if the wind doesn’t blow you away, you can see four counties. So they say.’

The whole world swung beneath them. The fortress city was below them, its grey walls and climbing houses quite plain to be seen, in the crook of the curling river which broadened then into the lough, beyond which the cliff of Benevenagh rose like a wall. Across Inishowen shadows moved constantly over the surface of Lough Swilly making it look as if it were alive with creatures of different colours and shapes. Away beyond, divided from each other by brown hills Mulroy Bay and Sheephaven glittered and the great mountains of Errigal and Muckish rose above the rest, rising blue from the treeless boglands and rimming them along the Atlantic ocean, a silver line between the earth and sky. Storm clouds were banking up in the west, grey and white and sun-shot as if the sea was boiling up into the sky. Then back from the loughs and the sea the mountains subsided into hills again, and the bog became tilled winter fields neatly patterning the land, and trees waited and smoke blew bravely from the cottage chimneys, and the river Foyle again wound its way along its valley from Strabane to protect its own city. It was as if he owned the world.

‘Oh,’ was all he could say, but he needn’t have bothered as the wind pushed the exclamation back down his throat again.

So he walked around the walls in silence, and again and again, pushing his way against the wind, clutching from time to time protectively at his hair. The clouds gathered round Errigal, and as he watched, the distant mountain was quite hidden, as if it had never existed. If he could write a poem. Now, but now. But nothing came into his head except the drumming of the wind. It was a long time before he realised that Kathleen was no longer up there. He looked down into the fort and saw her hunched against the wall, smoking furiously.