He began carving up the goat, dislocating its legs and then crudely deboning them. He cut as many slices as he could from the resulting lump of meat, placed them on a stone and salted them liberally. At one point, he made the mistake of wiping the sweat from his brow. The salt penetrated the wounds on his sweat-moist cheeks. The pain was such that he clenched his eyes tight shut and felt a kind of hollow forming inside him. He didn’t cry out. He merely gazed up at the sky and wept like a St Sebastian full of arrows, his hands burning and his skin cauterised by the salt. He spun round and round, holding his hands out, palms facing him, as if shading the glowing lamp of his face. Had there been a swamp nearby, he would gladly have hurled himself into it. The old man watched this agonising dance and even tried to get up, not that he could have done much to help. The boy knelt down and fell back on the ground, still keeping his hands away from his face. The old man reached out one arm to him and held it there for as long as he could. Then he slowly let it fall and closed his eyes.
In the silky light of the half-moon, the boy unwound the string from the handle of the knife, his eyes still red and his face still stinging. Having hunted around for a couple of sticks and stuck each in a hole in the wall, he then strung a piece of string between the two sticks and on it hung the strips of meat. The result drew a grotesque smile on the bluish stones, a smile that soon attracted the flies. Then he picked up his tools and arranged them around the old man, as if he were a sailor shipwrecked on a beach. Again following the goatherd’s instructions, he rounded up the three surviving goats and tied them together using the collars from the bells of those who had been killed. Then he tethered one end to a nearby rock so that they were all within reach of the goatherd’s crook. He put the saddle pad and the blanket on the donkey, tied the two empty flasks together and slung them over the donkey’s back like a pair of boots.
By dawn, they had finished their preparations for the journey. There was scarcely any breeze, and the stones of the castle wall were quietly doing penance for the heat they had absorbed during the day. The old man and the boy ate what little remained to them: a few crumbs of bread, a handful of raisins salvaged from the ground and some wine. When they had finished, the old man asked the boy to sit down next to him.
‘I’m going to teach you how to milk a goat properly.’
The boy looked at the goatherd in surprise. At any other moment, those words would have filled him with pride. However, it seemed strange to him that, in their current situation, the goatherd should want to waste precious time on such a thing.
‘It’s getting late. If I don’t leave soon, it will be daylight.’
‘I know it’s late.’
‘You can teach me when I get back.’
Several black birds flew past, heading for the well. Their wings creaked as they flew across the dark sky. The donkey, head down, was moving forlornly about in front of them. The boy’s eyes filled with tears, but he didn’t cry or even sniffle. He simply stayed where he was next to the bent old man, feeling the sky brushing the earth and aware of an ancient murmur emanating from the rocks. He imagined a watermill in a beech wood and horizons like the jagged blade of a saw. The sky penetrating and piercing the earth, and the mountains rising up to meet it. The home of the gods. The paradise the priest had so often spoken of. A green carpet on which the trees rested nonchalantly, unaware of their own lush foliage. Maples, fir trees, cedars, oaks, pines, ferns. Water springing eternally up between the rocks. Cool moss covering everything. Pools where transparency was the norm and whose stony beds glinted in the sun. Rushing streams temporarily tamed and on which the light traced rainbow spirals.
The boy hastily swallowed his tears and got up. Without even bothering to untie it from the others, he led one of the goats over to the old man. Then he sat down next to him and waited while the old man placed the tin in its proper place. When he had done this, he asked the boy to take hold of the teats. The boy formed his hands into loose fists, put them around the teats and squeezed. Then the goatherd positioned the boy’s thumbs so that the nails pressed the teats against his other fingers. He put his hands over the boy’s hands and, without a word, manipulated the teats, making the milk flow freely. And in doing so, the old man passed on to the boy the rudiments of his trade, handing him the key to a knowledge that was at once vital and eternal. The key to extracting milk from animals or making a whole wheatfield grow from an ear of wheat. They had soon filled the tin and the empty oil bottle, leaving the goats completely dry. They kept the bottle for the old man’s breakfast the next day and shared the milk in the tin between them.
Later, once he was mounted on the donkey, he took one last look at the goatherd, who was lying down now, his beard sticky with rivulets of dried milk. He appeared to be asleep or unconscious. A fine breeze touched the boy’s cheek, reminding him that, only a while before, his face had been like a fiery planet.
‘Be very wary of the people in the village.’
The old man’s voice emerged from some indefinable place, from somewhere beyond exhaustion.
The boy turned his gaze north, towards his uncertain fate. Then he slung his knapsack on the packsaddle and dug his heels into the donkey’s sides, to which the donkey responded by emitting a series of sour belches and breaking into a trot that carried them away from the castle.
8
THE WAXING CRESCENT moon hung in a clear night sky. Thousands and millions of stars, many of them already dead, winked down at him from above. He had to head north along the towpath until he reached a lock. From there, he was to follow a gentle downhill path for about two hours until he came to a small oak wood, from where he would be able to see the village. The well was in the village. Assuming he didn’t get lost, he should, according to the old man, be within sight of the houses by dawn.
Boy and donkey travelled beside the dried-up aqueduct, from which side channels occasionally branched off, only to vanish into the barren fields. Empty, bluish fields. From time to time, the boy nodded off and almost lost his balance. Then he would briefly become more alert and beat the donkey with his stick, and while this succeeded in eliciting protests from the poor, startled creature, it failed to make it trot any faster. The boy was aware that they were only moving at a walking pace, but he still preferred to ride rather than walk, so as to preserve the little strength he had for when they reached the well.
‘Be very wary of the people in the village.’ Each time the donkey stumbled, the boy would wake, pondering the old man’s words with a mixture of disquiet and satisfaction. He didn’t know if the goatherd had said this because his own life depended on him returning with the water or simply out of a desire to protect him. Then his neck would droop and his head would once again fall onto his chest and he would again become lost in the magma of his thoughts and memories. The hole he had dug, the palm tree, the poultice, the arrow slit, the goatherd’s penis, the bailiff’s cigarette ends.
The boy spotted the sluice during one of his brief waking moments and, after that, he did not fall asleep again. To urge the donkey on, he dug his heels into the donkey’s sides and squeezed its flanks with his thighs, but received no response. When they arrived, he dismounted and, for the last few yards, led the donkey by its halter, before releasing it to nose around for dry stalks to graze on. The boy scrambled up the bank to the tank into which the water from the aqueduct had once flowed. The aqueduct formed a T-junction here. Two iron sluices operated by winding gear controlled the flow of water. From his vantage point, he looked southwards down the gap-toothed channel until it became lost in the darkness. The bottom of the aqueduct was nothing but dry mud. He turned then and looked north, where the path curved down towards the plain. No oak woods and no villages, only bare, eroded slopes ribbed with stones.