“Now,” said Hawk, leaning back in his chair. “What shall we do with these naked savages?”

“My arm!” Paedr senior was almost pleading! Oh, this felt good!

“It can wait a little longer,” said Hawk – he almost spat it.

That didn’t seem like Hawk. “I think I’d better see to it now, and get it over with,” I replied.

“No, it can wait!”

Hawk?

“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “You’ll enjoy it! Promise!”

Hawk shrugged, but his lips were white. “No – I – Oh – Oh, OK then!”

The wooden frame where the cloaks were thrown was very solid, so I undid the bandage and strapped his arm to the beam; it was just the wrong height for him. Then I pretended to probe the wound.

“Can you feel this?”

“No,”

“Or this?”

“No.”

“This?”

“No.”

“Perhaps we’ve left it too late,” I sighed, opened the pot, and told one of the children to bring me a cup of hot water – boiling hot – and a spoon. The salve mixed with the hot water scented the whole room, as I’d intended.

I lifted a little out with the spoon, and waited till it cooled.

“I’m going to swab out the wound,” I told him. “It might hurt.”

Actually I only swabbed the skin around the wound.

“It’s not too hot in the wound is it?” I asked.

“I – I can feel it not at all in the wound!” His voice quavered with fear. I was enjoying myself immensely.

“Then we must wait a moment.”

After a minute or so I placed a drop of scalding hot water from the cup directly into the wound itself. He jerked so hard it tested the wooden frame.

“You felt that, I take it?”

He whimpered.

“Ah, good. The antidote is taking effect.”

I repeated the treatment at half minute intervals, until the water had cooled too much to be fun.

“Excellent,” I said. “Now I will treat the wound with real salve, and bind it up again.” I waved the bandage in the general direction of the family. “Wash that out for me. It may have poison on it.”

When I had finished, Hawk took up position again. He did look more relaxed.

“We still have the problem of what to do with these naked savages, and it’s getting late. Stack, take the man savage and tie him up in the byre.”

“No tricks,” I added, “just his good arm tied tight. He needs to be able to move that bad arm around, at least to some extent. And let him sleep – don’t make him too uncomfortable.”

Stack looked sulky – in other words, his expression didn’t change.

I looked at young Paedr, still clutching his stomach. “And take this thing out there too – he’ll be too smelly for us to want him in here,” I said. “But no tricks with him either – he’s too weak. Or at least, no worse than uncomfortable. He won’t get much sleep, whatever you do.”

Stack continued to look sulky, and went out with the two Paedrs.

Hawk took over. “Now, the rest of you! Through that door seems to be warm enough, and has no other ways out. You can spend the night in there. You don’t come out till we say so.”

“You can take just one cloth for the baby,” I added quickly. “Go! Now!”

By the time they’d all squeezed into the little space, Stack returned. I went out to check on his work, and he had been good. The man’s good arm was tied to an overhead beam, the bad arm to a horizontal beam, but above the elbow, so he could flex and move his lower arm where the wound was. He would have to sleep kneeling, but I was happy with that. The lad was tied face down at floor level, in the sheep pen, his head resting on a pile of droppings. How appropriate.

We drew straws, and I lost. I threw my cloak down in front of the prison door, while the other two slept cosily by the fire. I fell asleep before I knew I was lying down.

But I woke, suddenly and completely, some time in the dark of the night. I was still tired, but my brain was racing.

You expect I’d be feeling triumphant, but I wasn’t. In front of my mind was anger, anger at how these people had treated us. It wasn’t that they’d tortured us or robbed us, they hadn’t; it was that they’d despised us. That hurt, and it hurt through any sense of victory I might have had.

So to try and calm my mind, I began thinking through what had happened, and found something else churning my brain. Why hadn’t we resisted more? Why did I suddenly decide to pick up that pill, when I could have done so a dozen times before? And then as I began to work on it, another question: why had they collapsed so? I tried thinking it through; it wasn’t easy to remember exactly what had happened. In the end I decided that all these questions were one; that somehow the humiliation had made us unable to resist, and then when they suffered humiliation, they were unable to resist. I still couldn’t quite see it, but surely the answer was somewhere there?

Underneath all this was the worst question of all. If I really was a shaman, wouldn’t I understand this? I didn’t understand what had happened here, I didn’t understand what difference the ceremonies in Mistwater camp made, I’d totally failed to humiliate Hawk with the flies and gnats, I understood nothing. Nothing. And I called myself a shaman.

I couldn’t lie there any longer. I sat myself in the corner next to the doorway, in the Approach posture, and very very softly began crooning the Cradling Song. It’s restful, and it’s got happy memories; my Nan used to sing it to me. I hoped it would calm my nerves.

There was a rustle, and a little head poked round the door curtain. I recognised the lad who’d counted the days to market day.

“Please!” it whispered. “Can I come out? I’m Geivin. Can I come out and speak to you, please, miss?”

What the heck. “Yes, all right, but we must whisper.”

He was eight or nine, I suppose, skinny and generally a nondescript brown. In fact, he had the air of someone you wouldn’t notice. His eyes were big, but that might just have been that he was scared.

He sat next to me, hugging his knees. “I heard you singing, so I knew it was you. It’s about the Spirits,” he whispered. “Everyone else would laugh at me, cos they believe not in them; but I do. I know they’re real.” He shuffled. “I know you’re an enemy, and all that, so you probably will not, but I just hoped, I just wondered, whether you would mind teaching me a bit about them? You’re the first person I’ve met that I’ve had a chance to talk to. Nobody else understands.”

He stared up at me with big eyes.

What could I do? I couldn’t tell him what I really thought, could I? So I put my arm round him, and I taught him about the Spirits, just like my Nan had taught me. The very simplest things: who they are, what they are, what they do, how you tell a good Spirit from a bad one.

“So my friend’s a good Spirit. I thought he was,” he whispered.

“Your friend?”

“Yes, that’s how I first knew they were real.” He yawned. “He always felt good, just like you, even when things go wrong he always feels good.”

“Hasn’t he told you anything about the Spirits?”

“Not really. It ben’t like that. He ben’t someone you talk to, like Gort.”

“Gort?”

“Gort is Ioann’s friend. He’s just imaginary. But my friend ben’t like that. He’s…” and when I looked down, he was fast asleep.

By the Stones, I felt such a hypocrite.

I folded my cloak over us both, and fell asleep too.