‘No. Please hear me. You know of High King Cormac? His army is gone. Gone, dead.’ He didn’t know the word for scattered, but he tried the next best thing. ‘Broken, like glass. This man and this book did it for Ardhal. Ardhal loves Akisi. They are as brothers.’

He clasped his hands together tightly to show the bond between the king and the Kenyan. macFinn grew acutely uncomfortable.

‘We can’t openly defy our king. But we can’t let him escape his punishment either. What do we do?’

‘Give him to me. I will be his—’ Va’s words finally failed him. He carried on Russian, hoping that macFinn would get the sense of it. ‘I’ll be his tormentor, his constant reminder that he’s a thief and a murderer and a liar and the cheat. That he values the User book more than he values life. I’ll be on his back from the moment he wakes to the moment he collapses from exhaustion. And when he gets up again, I’ll be there, picking up where I left off. He will grow to be the sorriest man you have ever seen. As God is my witness, he will pay.’

macFinn backed away from the sudden outburst of passionate, unintelligible words. He looked behind him for support, but the people were determined to keep their distance from this wild foreigner.

‘macFinn!’ shouted a woman. ‘Come away, man. The brother is touched, either by God or the Devil.’

‘Damn your heathen tongue, can’t you understand one word of honest Rus? I’m trying to stop a disaster worse than the Reversal, and for the want of a translator, the whole world goes to hell. Elenya? Tell these people I’m trying to save them.’

‘What do you think I’m trying to do? There are complications.’ She was with macShiel, and the woman Rose, and macShiel’s shy wife. Looking at them, Va realized she was Rose’s daughter.

‘What could be more important than saving the world?’

‘You’d be surprised.’

He gave up with macFinn, and pushed Akisi every step of the way over to where the others stood. ‘Why is there a problem?’

‘Mainly because they don’t see why it is their problem. We brought it with us; we can just go and take it away again.’

‘That’s what we’re trying to do. Don’t they understand?’

‘Va, you’ve got to calm down. Shouting at people in Rus just makes them think you’re demented,’ said Elenya. ‘I’m not used to thinking in nearly three different languages at once and I’m getting a headache. To put it simply: we need macShiel and his boat to take the three of us and the book to the mainland. However, macShiel wants to hang Akisi for killing the priest and doesn’t see why he should go anywhere with him.’

‘But Ardhal won’t want Akisi to die because he’s too useful,’ said Va.

‘I’ve explained that. They’re torn. On one hand they won’t let him go because they want him to face justice. But if he stays, Ardhal will let him live. So they do nothing but quarrel with us and each other, and those horsemen we saw will soon be here and it’ll be too late to make any sort of decision.’ She sucked air in between her clenched teeth. ‘If you’re going to do something, I’d do it now.’

Akisi fidgeted nervously between them. ‘I’m not stupid,’ he said. ‘I can tell what’s going on. I don’t want to go with you, and I like the idea of a rope around my neck even less. Just turn me over to Ardhal and I’ll take my chances with him.’

Elenya clattered him around the head with her hand. ‘You shut up. You’re coming with us, whether you or they like it or not. There’ll be no going back to making killing machines for Ardhal or anyone, and my knife will be sticking out of your eye-socket the second I see one of Ardhal’s men coming down that road. Do you understand me?’

‘You wouldn’t dare.’ He squared his shoulders and smiled for the first time in a day.

‘Va, you have to make them give you a boat and Akisi. How you do it is up to you, but time is running out.’

Va turned away, beads of sweat springing up on his forehead. He could do it: grab macShiel by the neck, hold him in such a way that if he moved, he’d die. He could force him to his boat, compel the others to push it into the waves. They’d be away. Easier still to put a knife to Eithne’s breast, threaten to kill her instead.

‘No!’ he screamed. He knelt on the cold, wet ground, clasped his cross so tightly that the edges cut his hands and squeezed out fat drops of bright blood. He choked on a prayer, and it turned into a sob.

He blinked back the tears of shame and rage, and staggered to his feet. At last everyone was quiet, watching him with a mixture of fear and pity. A baby was crying in the distance, inside one of the houses, and there was the persistent creaking and squeaking of the millwheel, turned round by the wind in its sails.

‘Listen,’ he said softly, and beckoned with his bloodied hands; ‘listen to my story.’ He sat down on a moss-covered rock and waited as the people of An Rinn crept cautiously closer. Elenya moved behind him, the better to translate, and dragged Akisi with her. ‘Once there was a land where the summers were not scorching and the winters not harsh. In that land there was a king, who was a good man and loved by his people. No one went hungry, and everyone had a home.

‘Then there was a calamity. There came men from the far south and formed a mighty army. But there was worse. They commanded a dragon, who used to fly about over the good king’s land, burning the houses, destroying the crops and eating the cattle. The people were terrified, and they petitioned the king to save them.

‘But the king was old and tired, and his sons were not yet ready to fight, let alone fight a dragon. He sent word out to all his friends, but while sympathy and good wishes were returned, no help came. The king despaired, and his peaceful kingdom was doomed to lie in ruins.’

A little girl squeezed her way to the front and, thinking that this was a normal storytelling, sat at Va’s feet. She looked up at him, waiting for him to continue.

‘I . . .’

‘Go on,’ hissed Elenya.

‘Then, just as the king’s hall itself was attacked by the dragon, a magician came striding in. He bowed low to the king and introduced himself. He had heard that there was trouble: he would send the dragon back to its fiery home, and perhaps then he would chase the southmen all the way to their ice-caves. The king was frightened, but he had only to listen to the thunderous wing-beats of the dragon above his roof to be convinced. He gave his permission, and he waited inside with his sons while the magician went out to do battle.

‘Everything went silent. Eventually the magician came back in, his cloak smouldering, to tell the king that it was as he had wished. The dragon had gone. The southmen were driven away. In return, he wanted nothing but to live and work and study in the king’s land.

‘But the southmen were furious. They looked for their own magician, and they came back with seven. The lakes boiled, the trees burned, the very air caught fire. The good king’s magician was not strong enough to defeat the seven, so he sent for his three brothers. They left the king’s hall, and everything went silent.

‘Eventually they came back in to tell the king that it was as he had wished. The seven southern magicians had been defeated, and the southmen driven back to their ice-caves. They wanted nothing in return but to live and work and study in the king’s land.

‘But the southmen were incandescent with rage. They summoned a demon from the lowest pit of Hell, and seventy appeared. They sent them swarming over the country, destroying everything that was good about the land. The rocks that made the mountains cracked, the sea rose up, the wind blew so hard that every building save the king’s hall was knocked flat. The good king’s magician and the magician’s three brothers were not strong enough to defeat the seventy, so they called on thirty angels. They left the king’s hall, and everything went silent.