“She’s … She’s here.”

“Where?”

“The big tent. Fa’s tent. Fa and Mabon’s.”

Mabon. The spurned lover who’d followed her. Whose head she’d biffed with a rock. My blood rustled, a nervy herd about to be panicked into a stampede.

I knocked the lookout unconscious and went in silence back to the camp. (Strictly I ought to have slit his throat, but the possibility he was kin to Vali stopped me.) Thirty or so tents, no mistaking the biggest. Two spear-equipped guards and a fire already going outside. You’d think I’d have thought out what I was going to do. But having the capabilities I had, I hadn’t. Human resistance, to me, was like the resistance of straw to fire.

The guards were awfully surprised when I morphed out of the firelight.

“Greetings,” I said, palms raised. “Peace. I’m here to speak with your chief.”

From their reaction I might as well have said: Die screaming, motherfuckers, I’ve come to kill you all! They both assumed a combat stance, spears hoisted, and simultaneously released a strange, warbling, falsetto cry—something like, mooloo​mooloo​mooloo—which, I knew, with a sort of weariness, was the raised alarm. Women shrieked and dropped their firewood. Tents stirred. Feet scurried. Within a few moments I was surrounded by gawping humans in varying states of dress and consciousness. The old, the women, the children, mainly. Perhaps a dozen men under twenty-five, armed with spears, flints, bows and arrows, the string-and-rocks caboodle with which their most skilled hunters could niftily trip and hobble an antelope from fifty paces. (The masculine cream of the tribal crop away on the hunt, obviously.) The sweet stink of roused human blood roused my blood, lashed the already restive thirst into prancing delight. But that wasn’t what I was here for.

The flap on the main tent whipped open and a young woman of dark, bitchy prettiness emerged, a-jangle with beads and teeth. Firm little breasts and a taut belly. Her black hair hung in thick ripples down to her trim waist. Tribal psyche hushed, more in fear of her than they were of me. Mabon and Fa. This was Fa, evidently. Chief’s wife. Mabon had sought solace in the arms of another. I doubted he was entirely happy.

“Greetings,” I repeated. “I’m here for the woman, Vali. Let me speak with her and we’ll be on our way.”

Mistress bitchy looked me up and down. She had a fiery, perpetually calculating little brain. Very few men would be her match, I thought.

“Hold him, idiots!” she barked.

Muscled arms found me, established what they thought would be an undislodgable grip on my wrists and biceps and neck. Removing them would be a moment’s trifle, once I’d decided on it.

“What do you want with her?”

“To escort her from your camp, quietly.”

“She’s your woman?”

“My companion.”

“Ha!”

She had very white teeth, plump lips but a small mouth. Her face was too easily and too much animated. She wanted power. She was devoted to it.

“She’s not your woman,” she said, grinning. “She’s not a woman at all. She’s a traitor and a murderer and a stinking malek-hin!”

“I’d like to see her, please,” I said. “Perhaps I could speak to Mabon?”

Crowd murmur. The very slightest hint of uncertainty in Fa.

“Mabon is not here,” she said. “I speak for him in his absence. However, we will give you your ‘companion,’ so you can ‘escort her’ from our camp safely. Bring her!”

One knows, of course.

Always, with the big things, one knows just a moment ahead.

I will come back to you. And you will come back to me. Wait for me.

The two guards disappeared behind the tent. Then returned with what they had to show me. The first was dragging Vali’s naked, decapitated body. The second bore a wooden pole, with her head jammed onto its sharpened end.

I don’t know how many of them I killed. Not all, since most of them began running once they saw what they were up against. I don’t remember killing any children (though I can hardly swear to it) but I certainly killed several women, starting with Fa, whose guts I opened with a single swipe. That image, actually—her looking down to see her abdomen yawning, emptying its contents like someone opening his mouth and letting half-masticated food fall out—was the last clear snapshot. Everything after that swims red. Rage (the dark twin of ecstasy) is transcendent, in that you only know you were gone in it by virtue of coming back to yourself. It’s a blank Somewhere Else defined by the return to the all too vivid Here and Now, where you find yourself still saddled with insufficient finiteness, still in dismal possession of fingertips and eyebrows, a face, hands, legs, the whole maddening corporeal package. Maddening because every cell speaks the reality, the new reality—in this case the reality of what I’d lost. Forever.

The disgust was unbearable. The disgust at what they’d done to her, yes, the violent demonstration that her body obeyed the physical laws, but disgust too at the thought that as far as the world was concerned this couldn’t be anything other than justice. If there was to be a notion of justice it would have to entail this. And who—millennia before poor Socrates asked his suicidal question—did not have an intuitive notion of justice? Here was the core of monstrosity: If you were a monster the human world had nothing to offer you but the just demand for your death. And since they were, in the last analysis, your food and drink, what could they be but right? There was no argument you could bring against them. All you could bring was your monstrous enmity. Irreconcilable differences, as the divorce laws would have it, far in the future.

I buried her a mile away, in the forest, since forests were her favourite, in either form. I buried her a mile away. Let me not exclude the vicious, innocent practicalities, that I had to cradle her body in my arms with her severed head resting on her own soft midriff. There are things you think you won’t be able to do, that need the actual to become possible. There are things that only become thinkable once you’re already doing them. And even then perhaps not. I performed the actions in a self-averted trance, not really taking it in, not really accepting it. Thinking all the while, in fact, that I would discuss the horror and absurdity of it with her later.

Promise me you’ll live as long as you can.

I nearly broke the promise there and then, sitting by the freshly filled grave while the world without her in it boomed against me like an ocean. An ocean going about its vast, repetitive, pointless business. The temptation to simply wait for the sun was full of warm comfort. It would be so easy. Just don’t move. Just. Don’t. Move.