Ginger stiffened and silently opened his bloody maw. He no longer felt the kicks or pokes of the broom with which the housewife was now thanking him for eleven years of catching mice. Kicked out of the yard, he was dying in a gutter frothing with soap suds and urine. He died, wishing that those ungrateful people would also fall ill. And suffer like him.

His wishes were about to come true. And on a great scale. A great scale indeed.

The woman who had kicked and swept Ginger from the yard stopped, lifted her frock and scratched her calf below the knee. It was itchy.

A flea had bitten her.

The stars over Elskerdeg twinkled intensively. They formed the backdrop against which the sparks from the campfire were dying out.

‘Neither can the Peace of Cintra,’ said the elf, ‘nor yet the bombastic Novigradian parade, be considered a watershed or a milestone. What kind of notions are they? Political authority cannot create history with the help of acts or decrees. Neither can political authority assess history, give grades or characterise it, although in its pride no authority would ever acknowledge that truth. One of the more extreme signs of your human arrogance is so-called historiography, the attempts to give opinions and pass sentences about what you call “ancient history”. It’s typical for you people, and results from the fact that nature gave you an ephemeral, insectile, ant-like life, and an average lifespan of less than a hundred years. You, however, try to adapt the world to that insectile existence. And meanwhile history is a process that occurs ceaselessly and never ends. It’s impossible to separate history into episodes, from here to there, from here to there, from date to date. You can’t define history, nor change it with a royal address. Even if you’ve won a war.’

‘I won’t enter into a philosophical dispute,’ said the pilgrim. ‘As it’s been said before, I’m a simple and not very eloquent fellow. But I dare observe two things. Firstly, a lifespan as short as insects protects us, people, from decadence, and inclines us to respect life, live intensively and creatively in order to make the most of every moment of life and enjoy it. I speak and think like a man, but after all, the long-lived elves thought likewise, going to fight and die in the Scoia’tael commando units. If I’m wrong, please correct me.’

The pilgrim waited a suitable length of time, but no one corrected him.

‘Secondly,’ he continued, ‘it seems to me that political authority, although unable to change history, may by its actions produce quite a fair illusion and appearance of such an ability. Political power has methods and instruments to do so.’

‘Oh, yes,’ replied the elf, turning his face away. ‘Here you’ve hit the nail on the head, master pilgrim. Power has methods and instruments. Which are in no way open to discussion.’