After nearly four days at sea they stand on the uncertain ground and watch the cog slip back along the channel.

‘Never again,’ Walter says. ‘I’ll walk from now on. Don’t care where I’m going, you’ll not see me in a bloody boat ever again.’

Nevertheless they’d agreed with the cog master that he will come past on his way back from Wexford to see if they need carriage back to Bristol, but Thomas does not imagine they will see him again.

‘Return journey price double,’ the cog master said once he’d seen where he was dropping them. ‘A man has to make living.’

It carries on raining, soft and constant, but warm – or at least not so cold.

‘See?’ Dafydd says. ‘Told you it was hot.’

‘It’s odd,’ Thomas agrees.

‘Come on then, Dafydd,’ Walter says. ‘Let’s see this fabled castle of yours.’

They carry what they can of their salt-stained baggage, and follow a worn path along the river’s bank, around a low bluff to the church, above which they see the castle rising up on a headland. It is small, but there is something perfect about it, the way its pale walls cap the rise and lean over the valley.

‘See?’ Dafydd asks.

‘Why’s it boarded?’ Walter asks. He is pointing to the castle walls, which are clapped in planks.

Dafydd looks anxious.

‘I don’t know, do I?’

Dafydd leads them splashing through a ford and up into the village that hunkers under the castle’s walls. The houses are very low, stone built, with rough thatches, mossy and rotting in parts. Water throngs everywhere. A straw-flecked road takes them past the church up towards the castle and they meet a boy with three goats and no shoes. Dafydd greets him in a language Thomas doesn’t understand and the boy returns the greeting just as if he has seen Dafydd the day before.

‘That’s Dafydd, that is,’ Dafydd explains when he’s passed on down the road. ‘Dafydd the swineherd’s boy. Grown a bit, hasn’t he?’

Owen moos in agreement.

But there is something strange about the village. They all feel it. There is no smoke in the air, nor any of the workaday clatter they’d expect. There aren’t even any chickens or pigs about. Dafydd stops and ducks under the low lintel of a cottage. Inside it is dark, no fire in its place, no swirl of smoke to sting the eye. The straw mattress is gone, too, and when he feels above the door, where the bow and its arrows might be kept on pegs, there is nothing; nor are there pots either, only a broken-handled bucket half full of something viscid.

‘Where is everybody, Dafydd?’