I have urged my fellow-citizens to cultivate their kitchen gardens, to plant root vegetables that will withstand the winter frosts. "Above all we must find ways of surviving the winter," I tell them. "In the spring they will send relief, there is no doubt of that. After the first thaw we can plant sixty-day millet."
The school has been closed and the children are employed in trawling the salty southern fingers of the lake for the tiny red crustaceans that abound in the shallows. These we smoke and pack in one-pound slabs. They have a vile oily taste; normally only the fisherfolk eat them; but before the winter is out I suspect we will all be happy to have rats and insects to devour.
Along the north rampart we have propped a row of helmets with spears upright beside them. Every half-hour a child passes along the row moving each helmet slightly. Thus do we hope to deceive the keen eyes of the barbarians.
The garrison that Mandel bequeathed us consists of three men. They take turns in standing guard at the locked courthouse door, ignored by the rest of the town, keeping to themselves.
In all measures for our preservation I have taken the lead. No one has challenged me. My beard is trimmed, I wear clean clothes, I have in effect resumed the legal administration that was interrupted a year ago by the arrival of the Civil Guard.
We ought to be cutting and storing firewood; but no one can be found who will venture into the charred woods along the river, where the fisherfolk swear they have seen fresh signs of barbarian encampments.
I am woken by a pounding on the door of my apartment. It is a man with a lantern, windburnt, gaunt, out of breath, in a soldier's greatcoat too large for him. He stares at me in bewilderment.
"Who are you?" I say.
"Where is the Warrant Officer?" he replies, panting, trying to look over my shoulder.
It is two o'clock in the morning. The gates have been opened to let in Colonel Joll's carriage, which stands with its shaft resting on the ground in the middle of the square. Several men shelter in its lee against the bitter wind. From the wall the men of the watch peer down.
"We need food, fresh horses, fodder," my visitor is saying. He trots ahead of me, opens the door of the carriage, speaks: "The Warrant Officer is not here, sir, he has left." At the window, in the moonlight, I catch a glimpse of Joll himself. He sees me too: the door is slammed shut, I hear the click of the bolt inside. Peering through the glass I can make him out sitting in the dim far corner, rigidly averting his face. I rap on the glass but he pays no attention. Then his underlings shoulder me away.
Thrown out of the darkness, a stone lands on the roof of the carriage.
Another of Joll's escort comes running up. "There is nothing," he pants. "The stables are empty, they have taken every single one." The man who has unharnessed the sweating horses begins to curse. A second stone misses the carriage and nearly hits me. They are being thrown from the walls.
"Listen to me," I say. "You are cold and tired. Stable the horses, come inside, have something to eat, tell us your story. We have had no news since you left. If that madman wants to sit in his carriage all night, let him sit."
They barely listen to me: famished, exhausted men who have done more than their duty in hauling this policeman to safety out of the clutches of the barbarians, they whisper together, already re-harnessing a pair of their weary horses.
I stare through the window at the faint blur against the blackness that is Colonel Joll. My cloak flaps, I shiver from the cold, but also from the tension of suppressed anger. An urge runs through me to smash the glass, to reach in and drag the man out through the jagged hole, to feel his flesh catch and tear on the edges, to hurl him to the ground and kick his body to pulp.
As though touched by this murderous current he reluctantly turns his face towards me. Then he sidles across the seat until he is looking at me through the glass. His face is naked, washed clean, perhaps by the blue moonlight, perhaps by physical exhaustion. I stare at his pale high temples. Memories of his mother's soft breast, of the tug in his hand of the first kite he ever flew, as well as of those intimate cruelties for which I abhor him, shelter in that beehive.
He looks out at me, his eyes searching my face. The dark lenses are gone. Must he too suppress an urge to reach out, claw me, blind me with splinters?
I have a lesson for him that I have long meditated. I mouth the words and watch him read them on my lips: "The crime that is latent in us we must inflict on ourselves," I say. I nod and nod, driving the message home. "Not on others," I say: I repeat the words, pointing at my chest, pointing at his. He watches my lips, his thin lips move in imitation, or perhaps in derision, I do not know. Another stone, heavier, perhaps a brick, hits the carriage with a thunderous clatter. He starts, the horses jerk in their traces.
Someone comes running up. "Go!" he shouts. He pushes past me, beats at the door of the carriage. His arms are full of loaves. "We must go!" he shouts. Colonel Joll slips the bolt and he tumbles the loaves in. The door slams shut. "Hurry!" he shouts. The carriage heaves into motion, its springs groaning.
I grip the man's arm. "Wait!" I cry. "I will not let you go until I know what has happened!"
"Can't you see?" he shouts, beating at my grasp. My hands are still weak; to hold him I have to clasp him in a hug. "Tell me and you can go!" I pant.
The carriage is nearing the gates. The two mounted men have already passed through; the other men run behind. Stones clatter against the carriage out of the darkness, shouts and curses rain down.
"What do you want to know?" he says, struggling vainly.
"Where is everyone else?"
"Gone. Scattered. All over the place. I don't know where they are. We had to find our own way. It was impossible to keep together." As his comrades disappear into the night he wrestles harder. "Let me go!" he sobs. He is no stronger than a child.
"In a minute. How could it be that the barbarians did this to you?"
"We froze in the mountains! We starved in the desert! Why did no one tell us it would be like that? We were not beaten-they led us out into the desert and then they vanished!"
"Who led you?"
"They-the barbarians! They lured us on and on, we could never catch them. They picked off the stragglers, they cut our horses loose in the night, they would not stand up to us!"
"So you gave up and came home?"
"Yes!"
"Do you expect me to believe that?"
He glares desperately back at me. "Why should I lie?" he shouts. "I don't want to be left behind, that is all!" He tears himself loose. Shielding his head with his hands, he races through the gate and into the darkness.
Digging has ceased at the third well-site. Some of the diggers have already gone home, others stand around waiting for orders. "What is the trouble?" I say.
They point to the bones lying on a heap of fresh earth: a child's bones.
"There must have been a grave here," I say. "A strange place for a grave." We are on the vacant plot behind the barracks, between the barracks and the south wall. The bones are old, they have absorbed the colour of the red clay. "What do you want to do? We can start digging again nearer the wall if you like."
They help me to climb into the pit. Standing chest-deep I scratch away the earth around the side of a jawbone embedded in the wall. "Here is the skull," I say. But no, the skull has already been dug up, they show it to me.