Fourteen

He made half a living catching rats that spring.

They were all over the hill, right through the thirsty crops and into the mine buildings. Aubrete himself had come to him, to his waggon hidden among the copse of trees, covered with a green cotton sheet so that the colour could not be seen from the lane. He didn’t want to be in their eyes, held in their sight.

The Egyptian never went down to their houses, not even in search of women. Sometimes they looked at him with their small half-smiles, looked at his arms, looked at his body. But he never went to find women. Not here, not now.

Aubrete found him in the evening.

The mine owner came striding through the trees as the Egyptian tended his fire, gutting the rabbit he had taken from Aubrete’s own land. It was a killing offence, the rabbit. But Aubrete hardly looked at the carcass, though it lay in the Egyptian’s grasp. And that was when he first knew, for sure, how wrong things were.

‘I want you to come to the pit and set traps,’ he said.

The Egyptian looked at the landowner, at the soft dark coat, at the white face. ‘I can’t come there,’ he said. ‘I go anywhere else you want, sir. But not there.’

‘I will pay you.’

‘No matter,’ he said. ‘Begging pardon, I can’t come.’

‘Why not?’ Aubrete had demanded.

He couldn’t tell him. He couldn’t come near. Even within half a mile of it, the screaming of the entrance made his skin crawl. The door was broken, the Gate lay naked. It was a terrible thing, terrible in his throat and head, like fever. It woke him with its keening in the darkness.

He saw Aubrete hesitate. He knew that there was something else. He read it in the man’s face.

Water.

Too much water.

‘Will you come and look, at least?’ Aubrete asked.

The question was so soft that it astonished him. It caught him so off-guard that he heard himself say, across the smoke of the fire that drifted between them, ‘I shall come and look, if it pleases you.’

And that was all, a few little words.

The end began that way.