They came early so he’d only just fallen asleep. He saw their grey shapes moving in the moonlight. He shouted, ‘I have only thirteen sheep! The others were stolen! They’re not worth taking.’ There was a yellow flash, a jump in the dirt near his feet and he fell away onto his face, his hands over the back of his head. ‘Don’t shoot! I won’t do anything! Don’t shoot!’ They fired again. He could still see the ghost of the muzzle flash smeared across the darkness when he heard his mule growl and stagger and fall hard onto its knees. To the rhythm of its heart, blood was pumping out of the poor beast, masses of blood, a sound like a fountain or like a basin emptied over and over onto the ground. The mule wheezed, snarling and snoring, and struggled to stay upright. Angilù saw its head flail down onto one side as the blood continued to gush. ‘Why did you?’ he shouted and reached for his gun. Another shot thumped into the ground right by him. Angilù aimed at one of the hurrying grey shapes and fired. A twisting fall. He’d hit him. There were curses, two more shots from different places, running feet. Angilù fired again. He saw the men, heads low, arms half raised, racing down into the darkness and disappearing.
Then Angilù was alone with the man he’d shot and had to listen to him dying. Angilù was cursed, forgotten, all his luck gone. His saint was painted tin. In the moonlight he could see the man lying on the ground by a dark irregular shape of blood, his loose legs and outflung arms like a dropped puppet’s. The man chattered to himself and cried. Angilù didn’t know what to do. He sang to drown out the sound. He thought of the man lying there, was suddenly himself inside the dark cave of his dying mind, hearing the man who’d killed him singing. It was terrible. But what else could he do? After a while he sensed silence beyond the sound of his voice and stopped. Stillness. The bandits gone. The shape of the mountains and the moon. His dead mule. A dead man.
Everything had ended. It was all over. And there was nothing Angilù could do, no way to alter one thing. All the time there had been death, he’d heard gunshots and stories, but he’d always been apart, hidden in the hills, in his gleaming good fortune. Now he was himself forced to eat death. Now he was taking part. His life was over. He felt tiny sitting there in the dark, his head hanging forwards, the round bones of his neck exposed to the wind. The world had its huge thumb on the back of his neck. It pressed down. It would never release him.
In the faint, frayed light of dawn, Angilù went over to look at the body to see if he recognised the man. He didn’t. The shape of the man’s skull was distinctive, tall and narrow and accented along the jaw with tufts of beard. His eyes had already sunk under the ridge of bone. His mouth was open showing yellow teeth, surprisingly long, like a sheep’s. Angilù crossed himself. The son of some mother, some woman who would beat her head with open hands when she knew, who would clasp her rosary and howl, held up by her daughters. Probably word had already reached her.
Angilù had to go and tell someone. He had, at the very least, to be away from there so that the bandit’s people could climb up and collect the body. He picked up his gun and bag and whip and scared the sheep into a huddle and drove them past the fallen body of the mule towards the village. Leaving now, not stopping, they could be back by nightfall.
After the thick, surging colours of sunrise, two little birds joined them, wagtails, hunting the insects that whirred up where the sheep trod. They twitched their yellow tails and emitted their one bright, repetitive note. They kept flying a foot or two in the air and landing again, maintaining a precise distance from Angilù and the animals. Where they landed was the exact midpoint between their hunger and their fear.
Cirò Albanese rode to a nearby town to talk to somebody, a large stationary man who sat with a boulder of stomach resting on his thighs. This man, Alvaro Zuffo, modestly dressed and inconspicuous as he was, made a centre wherever he sat. Any chair enthroned him. Cirò found him in the clean-cut rectangle of shade cast by the awning of a particular bar on the square. This man had a surprisingly delicate way of smoking. He puffed, the cigarette held low in an open hand of evenly spread fingers. The man talked elliptically but to the point. Birds. Barking dogs. Stones. Fishermen. He spoke in proverbs. Only when Cirò mentioned the posters around the town did he speak directly, with rage. His anger was so large and powerful it seemed to tire him like an illness. He half closed his eyes. That mule-jawed, cuckolded son of a whore had appointed a Fascist governor to Sicily, as Cirò knew, and now disappearances, torture, order destroyed. So the decision Cirò was making was very wise. Cirò didn’t know he had made a decision. He thought, rather, that he had come for advice. The man told Cirò where to go. There was a coffin maker down in the harbour who arranged things. Cirò shouldn’t say one word to anyone, not even his wife, just slip away there and go.
Angilù pulled hard at the bell of the landlord’s house. The jangling faded. He rang again. Silence solidified on the other side of the door. He was relieved, for the moment. He was alone. Nothing was happening. He walked back through the olive trees to the pillared gate. Beyond it he saw a motor car, dark green, its gleaming polish filmed with road dust. Beside it there was a tall man in a brown suit wearing bright shoes of two different colours of leather.
The tall man saw him. Their eyes met. Angilù wished that hadn’t happened. He should have just hidden. He had no wish to meet any unknown friends of the landlord. He hung his head down between his shoulders, an insignificant peasant, and pushed through the gate.
The tall man said, in good Italian, ‘He isn’t here?’
Angilù answered, as he had to, in Sicilian. ‘No one answered.’ He tried to walk away.
‘What business do you have with him?’ The tall man bent down towards Angilù. His face was composed of neat triangles, a clipped beard and moustache, a sharp nose and arched eyebrows. He put his hands in the soft checkered fabric of his pockets, leaning forwards.
‘I … I have to talk to him, to tell him, about my flock.’
‘But as he’s not here, why don’t you tell me?’
‘I should go now, sir, and …’
‘He’s not here. Tell me instead.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’ Angilù scratched his head. ‘I need to speak …’
‘What do you do?’ The man kept his eyes on Angilù’s face, stepping with him as he tried to shift away, preventing him.
‘I’m a shepherd, here on the estate.’
‘I see.’ The man smiled. ‘And do you know who I am?’
‘No, sir. I can’t say I do.’
‘That’s my fault,’ the man said, producing a gold pocket watch as smooth as a river pebble from his waistcoat pocket. He checked it and flipped shut its thin gold door. ‘But that will change. I’m your Prince, you see. You work for me.’
‘I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t … I saw you once as a child, at harvest …’