We begin to glide tentatively forward; Saskia is unbelievably deft at the helm, but one strong swell could ruin us within sight of the shore. Not all the lifeboats have been patched—some still show daylight through the holes Makemin made. A little after noon, the sun is a snowy coin above us, and with a gasp of relief we drift forward into clear fathoms between the two arms of land. Nardac is reverently lifted from the life boat back to the deck, and, resting her meagre weight in my arms, permits herself to be carried back to her bunk, clucking once or twice to herself in satisfaction. This is as close as I’ve ever been to her, her eyes do sparkle like diamonds, as though a cold fire were caught in them.

Our eyes peeled for more rocks, we are making our way cautiously up a wide estuary. The wind dies away nearly to nothing as the land closes around us, and, in the raw new stillness, the noises of the ship seem excessively conspicuous. Above us, on the port side, are high grey cliffs with black bangs and gaunt, shaggy pines that stand out, dark and insubstantial, against the clouds. The opposite shore is lumpy and sere with blistered yellow-grey stubble, lunging up toward the mountain line. Ahead, the land bells out like a vast low amphitheatre, the river curves away behind slopes and, still far off, in the crook of the river’s sweeping curve, I see an enclosed sprawl of buildings collected there like mine talings. With care, Saskia brings our prow to bear on it.

The water here is as calm as a lake, with an indifferent current. Deep chasms are tearing open and grinding shut again in the clouds above us. We pass a ruin set in among the cliffs, its foundations half submerged; I can’t make out the contour of the building. It seems likely to have been a square tower, with its feet in the water and its head up in the pines. Its exposed grey bricks are insanely uniform in shape and size; a tangle of pipes sprouts from the wall like a trunk of thickened vines, and their ends shiver in the air.

A dream pulling up alongside another dream, each measures the other. The war is up there on the island, where we’re going to meet it, but there’s no war there, nor could there be. War is dreamlike, but war is a dream ... Where is the war? In the guns and helmets and uniforms? Is it in the rock from which the ore to make the gun was mined, the grass that fed the sheep whose wool went into the uniform, or the sun that lights the battlefield? Not impossible to escape but it tethers as unsubstantially, as lightly, as a dream, the bonds binding me inside. I go on with it; I’m not bound like a prisoner, but like a sleeper. Two men meet, and one will give his life for the other, or they will each try to kill the other, while the day is still blandly unfolding around them. The violence I’ve already seen has been as random and abrupt as a dream, always ending in death that seems only to become more and more impossible. I always know that I’m no more than one sharp breath from waking. It’s a breath I can never manage.