When he was tied the man turned and walked away.
‘Hey!’ Angilù shouted after him. ‘Hey! Put me in the hut!’ But the man didn’t turn back and Angilù had to crawl like a caterpillar past the heat of the fire to get into the safe darkness of his shelter. Beyond its walls he could hear shouting, the snapping of whips, the bleating and scrambling of sheep driven away in the dark.
The men were busy for a while but eventually it was done and there was quiet, just the wind and the remaining sheep, spooked, rattling the stones. And suddenly his mule brayed into the emptiness, loud and angry. The dumb beast. He lay on his side so as not to lie on his hands and looked out at the diminishing flames and white ashes of the fire as they were torn away towards the stars. He relaxed slowly, slowly fell asleep past sudden painful jerks of his trussed legs.
He awoke before dawn and stretched the cramps out of his legs and arms then lay still and watched the cold red spill of light across the hills. As the sun climbed he smelled the dew on the ground as it burned away, the vegetation of his hut as it heated. He was thirsty but he couldn’t think how to get the stopper from the skin of water without it emptying everywhere. Perhaps he could drink the whole thing. Also he wanted to piss, but what could he do? He flipped himself over and squirmed and kicked towards the waterskin. Then he twisted upright so that it was behind him and within reach of his hands. His fingertips found the stopper, grasped it and pulled. He moved it by millimetres, with great concentration. When finally it suddenly came loose he had to spin around on the floor as quickly as he could, push his lips up against the weight of spilling water and fix his mouth over the hole. He lay there like a suckling infant, swallowing away as his stomach expanded with the cool darkness of the water. He detached himself, the water flowing over his face again, and crawled away. His hair was wet now, coarse and heavy with dust. He made his way over to the doorway and sat upright waiting to be discovered.
Angilù squinted out over the hills. No one. Nothing. He stared into the blue and pink distances and looked for figures. Nothing. The world was only just creeping awake. His mule quivered its flanks to shake off the first flies. Angilù really needed to pee now and there was no way to get his hands round to the front of his body. He could try lying back with his knife under him but surely someone would come soon. He kicked himself back into the shade of his hut, found a dry area the spilled water hadn’t soaked and lay still.
He woke up with one image roaring in his mind — a stream exploding over a rock. There was no choice now. He wrestled his knife out of his belt, gripped it with the blade upright against the rope and lay back over it. He rocked from side to side, crushing his fingers, feeling the blade bite into the rope, its tip sting against his back. He pushed with his heels so all his weight came down on it, and when it was almost through he rolled onto his face and pulled his arms apart as hard as he could. After three exertions his arms flew apart and he used them to drag himself out of the hut. He fell on his side, pulled open his trousers and let himself go in a long, loud stream that rolled over the ground as thick as a sheet of glass.
The sun was well past its highest point. They had forgotten him. Angilù shouted as loudly as he could, separating each syllable, ‘Motherfuckers!’
He crawled back inside his wet, disordered hut and took the knife to cut the rope at his ankles. His arms were weak. His fingers trembled inaccurately. He saw that the dirt floor was churned, marked with the tracks of his struggle. He pushed the stopper back into the flaccid skin and picked it up. He collected his gun and left to ride his sombre, patient mule back to the estate to report the stolen sheep to the man who had ordered the theft.
Climbing onto his mule, he felt a hot fluttering pain in the small of his back. He checked with his fingertips: fine wet lines where his knife had cut him. He kicked the beast forwards, patting its strong neck as it collected itself under his weight and lunged.
Sant’Attilio appeared by stages, sliding behind slopes, emerging at other angles. From one ridge, Angilù saw the landlord’s separate house, close to the palace, its outer walls and olive trees. From another, the whole of Sant’Attilio was disclosed — cubes of flaking yellow and grey, red roofs, the white church tower, the empty stripe of the roadway, the palace large on its outskirts. Everything he knew was down there, every name, every person, every secret.
He rode straight to the landlord’s house to do it quickly and get it over with. He got down from his mule at the gate and led it by the bridle between the hissing silver leaves of his beloved olive trees. He walked up to the front door and pulled the bell. He heard the sound of shaken brass pass through the house and frightened himself by imagining the landlord’s presence moving in response through the interior darkness and no way of knowing how close he was, shifting closer and closer. The door opened. The landlord, smoking, looked down at him from the step then out over the top of his head. A clean white shirt and braces. Angilù thought of the dust in his hair, the dirt on his clothes, his shirt plastered to the small of his back with stiff dried blood. Best for your reputation.
Angilù began, ‘Sir, last night …’
Cirò Albanese seemed bored. He raised a languid upturned palm and curled his fingers to summon the story he already knew out of Angilù.
‘Last night,’ Angilù began again. ‘Bandits. The sheep. They took most of my sheep.’
‘How many?’
‘I don’t …’ Angilù didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t say, I didn’t count them because I thought they’d tell you. He said, ‘I didn’t count.’
‘You didn’t count.’
‘No.’
‘Mother of God. All right. You go straight back up. Don’t talk to anyone in the village. You understand me? I’ll let the Prince know next time I see him.’ The landlord leaned backwards and closed the door.
Angilù wanted to go and see his mother, to wash, to eat, to be comforted, to get a new saint for the string around his neck because he was worried that the one he had on was losing power. But he’d been told. He climbed back onto his mule and kicked its belly with his heels, kicked again and again until it bounced up into a trot and carried him up and away, the heavy pull of his unvisited home dragging at his back. It carried him up to many days of heat and silence, the noon sun pressing the colours flat to the ground, nights of stars and the sharp points of the returning moon. He drove the remaining sheep on with a whirling whip and they stumbled before him, nervous, thick-skulled, reeking. When he paused they stopped where they were, haggard, and stared down at their own shadows as if wanting to crawl into them. Angilù drove them on past his place of faces in the ground. He looked across and felt a surge of communication from them. He couldn’t say what it was they were telling him. The impulse was dark, opaque, but it was commanding. It felt as though they recognised him and what it was had something to do with his shame, trussed up and helpless, forgotten by the world. He should … what? He touched the weakening saint on his collarbone and said a prayer.
Finally they reached a hollow full of prickly pears and the sheep hurried towards them, their tatty rumps swaying as they ran. This was now the far west of the estate, the dangerous edge. Bandits here were not the friends of friends. They would be stealing to sell or even eat. He would have to sleep lightly in the day and try to keep watch at night, his gun close at hand.
He was up there for days before anything happened, more days than it would take for him to be seen and word to spread so he was past his fear when they came, having assumed that no one cared. He’d even started sleeping at night for hours at a time, a decision he made collecting snails one day. He detached their light bodies from a rock, dropped them into his bag, then lay down in the shade and drifted into sleep. When he awoke he found his little prisoners crawling out again in laborious escape. Their long grey feet fully extended, their tiny eyes circling on their stalks, they strived forwards as quickly as they could. He laughed as he picked them up again, unsuckering them from the stones, and kept on laughing, finding it hilarious, and that laughter rinsed right through him, made him careless and light-hearted. He laughed at the thought of himself up in the hills, picturing the top of his head from above as God might see it and whatever, fuck it, whatever would happen would happen. He wiped tears from his cheeks.