I catch a small fish, go back to the cave and bake it in the embers of the fire.

After two days of tending the fire almost continuously I have exhausted my supply of wood and peat. I know that I need to do something about it. I raise myself and set out, axe in hand. I leave the spade behind. I am not ready to return to the peat bogs. Not yet. But return I will. I know I will return. But for now the man must wait.

On the way there the going is difficult and I find myself running out of breath. Lack of food, I tell myself. I cannot remember it being this difficult. My feet are sucked in, even when I walk on grass it seems. I look down at them. When I press down the water rises to the surface. Bits of grass, mud, swim over the tops of my feet. Again I find myself looking behind me, waiting for the earth to rise up as if disturbed by some mole-like creature the size of a man. Each time there is nothing.

I reach the forest. The ground here is slightly higher than the plains around it.

It is no longer a forest. A ring of one hundred and twenty-five spind-ly trees. Around them a brown carpet of needles. The trees are barely twelve feet tall. If it’s done right they can be felled with just twenty swings of an axe each.

It is a place of darkness. The trees make it so.

When I stand in the middle of the circle of trees in every direction in which I face there is a potential hiding place behind me. If I look ahead, north, towards the cliffs, I sense something moving behind me.

If I look south towards the peat bogs, the figure shifts to the north.

The shapes behind my eyelids will always be with me.

I look down to my feet again. If this sense of another is not imagined, then movement must take place underground. There would be a network of tunnels criss-crossing the forest, with concealed entrances. Or perhaps they cross the entire island. A legacy from the time of the smoke. Would I have only to dig to find a tunnel, a network, a whole warren of pathways, a settlement, even a city? Is there a world beneath me? One in which creatures scuttle about fol owing the land animal they sense above them.

They wait for the right moment to reach through the silt, moss, earth and drag it below. Perhaps the tunnels are fil ed with water. Perhaps I walk on a porous island, an island whose shell is all that is solid.

I take my axe, lift it high above my head and bring it down with all my force into the earth below. I feel it cut through leaves, earth, and then something more solid. I scrabble frantically with my hands but it is only a root. I have severed a root, clean through. Sap leaks out of the wound.

I know what I have to do, what I want to do. I pick up my axe and get to work on the first tree. I begin quickly but my grip slips on the handle and the axe flies off as I swing my arm. I stand up and see something out of the corner of my eye. A glimpse of white shifting behind the trees. I call out but hear only the echo of my voice. I have stood up quickly and am breathing heavily. Dots begin to swim before my eyes and I have to sit down amidst the pine trees. I look at the spot where I imagined the figure but nothing.

I resume. This time I am slow, methodical. I glance around me now and then. When the tree falls, I do not begin to trim the leaves and branches. Instead I begin on the next tree. And once that is gone, the next and the next. I chop through the night. I don’t know how I last. By mid-afternoon the next day, every single tree is lying on the ground. I strip the branches from one and from that take as much as I can carry.

I run through the grass with my burden. I only notice my heaving chest when I am back in the cave.

I wake in the night chilled to the bone. I throw more wood on the fire and lie back on the damp grass. I draw my coat closer. I close my eyes and think of Tora. The kind words, the smiles. I think of Amhara too, running, laughing, disappearing round corners in an abandoned settlement. I fall asleep remembering Tora’s warm body against mine, her head on my shoulder, her breath on my neck. This is what I see, what I feel, when I fall asleep.

It is pouring today. I strip off my clothes and run out into the rain.

I run down the hill, my arms stretched out to the side to keep my balance. I trip and tumble and am up again, running again. I am a child again. After a few minutes I am no longer cold. I run out onto the flats and there it becomes more difficult. My feet begin to sink and I feel like I am in slow motion and then I am flying through the air. I land face down in the mud and I can’t stop myself, my arms are useless. I am lying in the mud and I feel it breathed into my throat. I turn and retch and lie on my back. I struggle to contain my breathing. I am spread-eagled. And then I feel it happening: I am sinking.

And with the sinking I feel the hands. They prod my flesh, feeling for something to clutch. They take hold of my fingers, my hands, drag these down below the mud and they try to grab my hair but I shake my head. They grow more frantic but their hands slip off my wet limbs and I roll over again and again.

I am covered in mud now, although each time I turn the rain washes some of it away. I must look a true spectacle, white on top, brown underneath. A dissolving man.

I sit up and look around me. The grasses stretch on forever. I look over to where I have just been lying. The mud moves, as if alive. It is settling back into place. This much I know. Still, I get to my feet hastily and begin to walk away.

I walk over to the peat bogs. A short distance away I stop, crouch down. Nothing moves. I see only grass, mud, water.

I feel faint. Black dots swim before my eyes. I close them and the world spins. Lack of food. The cold.

When I open them he stands before me: shoulder wrenched from its socket, toothless jaw hanging open, wisps of red hair waving in the breeze.

And then he is gone and again I see only mud, water and the grim skies above.

I shout. I put my face close to the ground and yell with all the strength I can muster. It is not a word I yell. It is a sound, a deep guttural yell.

The noise of a beast in its cave, taunted by men.

15

The man sits in a cave. He has his head in his hands. He is not in despair, merely thinking. His friends sit around him, waiting for him to speak. Eventually he says, ‘The end has come. Our sacrifice will save all that we know. Though you won’t be around to see it, the pain I am about to inflict will surround our settlement like a girdle, will protect our children from starvation.’

The men sitting around him bow their heads too. ‘Do not forget me. I will have to live with this forever. You have chosen me to do this.

I have accepted your will.’ The men nod. ‘We must go.’

They leave the cave in single file and walk towards the bog in the fading light. Once there, they line up, kneel down and bow their heads.

The chosen man unsheathes a blade. One by one he places a hand on each man’s forehead, kisses him on the cheek and slits his throat. Some tremble. None make a sound.

He rolls the bodies into the bog and drives stakes through them. It is custom. When all six have been done, the chosen man sits alone on a rock weeping. He is red, splattered with blood.

He sits alone on a rock on the wet plain and weeps. He is surprised at his reaction. He cannot pinpoint the moment he stopped believing.

All he knows is that he no longer believes.

He walks slowly back to the village, the knife, still in his hand, faintly sticky.

It seems the gods listen. Things get better for the people. Fewer die.

He watches his wife cook meals. He watches his daughter play. He feels glad for them. But he has stopped believing. It is difficult to touch them with his hands when he can see only blood on them. Sometimes he thinks it would have been better for everyone to have died than to have this sacrifice at the core of everything they are, everything they have become. A sacrifice he has come to think of as murder.