It was a small pine wood, but dense enough for them to be able to camp inside it and not be seen from the road. Of course, for anyone intent on finding them, it would be easy enough, but, just then, even that did not matter to him. He gathered together a few branches and, using a rough circle of bushes as posts, quickly built a corral of sorts. With the help of the dog, he herded the goats into the corral and went back to help the goatherd dismount and then unload the donkey.
‘We can rest here for a while if you like.’
The old man said nothing. The boy went over to the donkey and lifted the brim of the old man’s straw hat. His eyes were closed, and the boy rather envied him. He released the goatherd’s legs from where they were lodged between the panniers and the donkey’s ribcage. Then, propping one shoulder against the old man’s waist, he tried to pull him off the back of the donkey. The weight proved too much for him, however, and both of them fell backwards onto the carpet of crisp pine needles.
The old man’s body, lying on top of him, stank as much as his. For a moment, the boy couldn’t understand what he was doing there underneath, and had it not been for the unbearable stench, he might have stayed there. He pushed at the goatherd, whose body fell back onto the ground like a door opening. He remained there next to the old man’s corpse, as if he had thrown off a blanket on a particularly warm morning. Exhaustion bound him to the earth. He lay there, breathing and gazing up at the tops of the pine trees. The millions of needles combed the yellow light and sifted the glow from a sky too bright to be looked at directly. In the breeze the needles kept up a soothing murmur. There was no point shaking the goatherd’s head or trying to open his eyelids. The boy knew the goatherd was dead and that was that. He had neither the energy nor the desire to think about what had happened nor about what was to come, because his child’s body was utterly exhausted. He shuffled his bottom and his shoulders deeper into the pine needles he was lying on. Then, without thinking, he linked arms with the old man and surrendered to sleep much as someone standing at the seashore allows the wind to cool his face.
He was woken by the dog prodding him in the small of his back. He opened his eyes and touched the dog’s head, and the dog immediately relaxed and lay down on the ground. The tops of the pine trees were still there, but they were no longer filtering the intense midday light, and were filled instead with the dusty orange of evening. Suddenly aware of the old man’s arm in his, the boy sat bolt upright. His stomach hurt. Something sharp was sticking in his back. He turned, knelt down and scrabbled among the pine needles until he found a small, sharp pine cone. Still rubbing his back, he studied the cone, then lobbed it over the top of the corral. He didn’t know how long he had been asleep. The donkey was still there, laden with all the food and implements. The boy went over and pressed his face to the animal’s muzzle, stroking its cheeks. Then he emptied the panniers, removed the halter and poured some water into a saucepan he had taken from the inn.
Despite his aching stomach, he walked to the edge of the pine wood to look back at the road. The light was brighter there and, from where he was standing, he saw the road stretching away in either direction. Seeing no sign of movement, he went back to where the old man was lying. The pain in his stomach, he thought, might well be due to the putrid water they’d been drinking, and the only reason his stomach hadn’t hurt before was because his body hadn’t had a moment’s rest. He felt thirsty but, instead of drinking more of the untreated water, he decided that, from then on, he would boil it first. He saw the donkey with its muzzle deep in the saucepan, and his eyes moved from the saucepan to the donkey and then to the goats. He looked around him as if hoping to find some solution in the air around him. A slight breeze to fan a fire or a spring appearing out of nowhere to pour cool water into his leather-dry mouth. Then he felt the bailiff’s lighter in his pocket and this decided him against lighting a fire.
He wandered aimlessly about the wood, deliberately avoiding looking at the old man. He checked their store of food, tested the solidity of the frying pan and sniffed the oil. He let the goats out of the corral so that they could move around a little and watched as the dog immediately sprang into action to keep them in order. He again stroked the donkey, went back to the edge of the wood and sat down on a fallen tree trunk. After a while, he remembered that he was thirsty and returned to the encampment.
Choosing the goat with the fullest udder, he sat down behind it and worked the teats with one hand until he had extracted the first few drops. He placed a saucepan underneath and milked until the pan sounded fairly full. He then shooed the goat away and raised the pan to his lips to drink the little milk he had managed to get. He sat still for a while, then put the saucepan down on the ground and went over to where the goatherd was lying. For the first time since the old man had died, the boy dared to look at his corpse. The old man was stretched out on the ground, his face relaxed and seemingly less lined. His straw hat lay about a foot from his body, where it had landed when he fell off the donkey. His fists were almost clenched. His filthy jacket was unbuttoned to reveal the scars from the beating he had taken. He could have been asleep, but he was doubtless already rotting inside. Behind him, the boy heard the clink of goats’ bells and, falling to his knees beside the motionless body, he wept.
It was still dark when the ants woke him. They were running over the back of his hand, which served as his pillow, and onto his face. He got to his knees and quickly brushed the ants off. He could barely see six feet in front of him. He touched the old man’s body beside him and felt how cold it was. With his hands he scraped away the pine needles until he reached soil and then made a slightly larger clearing. In the centre he piled up a few dry leaves and with the lighter lit a tiny bonfire. The feeble flames were just bright enough for him to be able to see that the goatherd’s face and chest were also covered in ants. He got rid of them by using a small pine branch as a broom. He then went to the panniers to fetch the frying pan and stood at the goatherd’s feet. Starting at the top of the old man’s head, he used the handle of the frying pan to draw a horizontal line out to the left, then he went down to his heels and drew another line. He then extended these lines further out to the left, measured the width of the body with his hands, and transferred that measurement out to the two parallel horizontal lines.
Initially, he made rapid progress. He cleared the pine needles from an area of ground next to the body and, with the help of the frying pan, removed the first layers of sandy soil. A few inches down, however, he encountered roots going in all directions, forming a subterranean fabric in which the frying pan kept getting stuck.
By dawn, the hole he had dug was not even deep enough to cover the old man’s nose. Halfway through the morning, he stopped to rest and, from inside the hole, saw that the surrounding earth now came up to his knees. He could have buried him there and then, but any marauding dogs would soon have dug him up. He decided to continue and, by the afternoon, the hole he was standing in came up to his waist.
As on all the previous days, his time was spent either awake or working. Tiredness had become like a second skin. Only one thing occurred to distract him. At midday, the dog got up from its resting place to sniff the air coming from the direction of the road. The boy calmed the dog and led it over to the edge of the wood. A few muleteers were heading north. Three men and ten or twelve pack mules. The boy assumed that they must have passed through the village and would, therefore, know that the inn had been burned down. They would also have seen the bailiff’s motorbike at the entrance to the village and would doubtless have found the charred bodies in what remained of the inn.