Silas looks around him. By daylight he can see he is in some sort of brick-built shelter. The wind howls around the place, grabbing anything that is loose: door-hinges creak and the gaps between the bricks whistle back. He looks at the objects around him: chairs made from the skulls of large cattle covered in furs, tables made from boxes, shelves and beds built into the walls. He props himself up, tries to stand. No one is around. Through the open door he can see the remains of last night’s fire being blown around – a swirl of ashes and small charred branches.
He is still weak. Beside his bed someone has left a cup of water and a small piece of biscuit. He sits back down on his fur-lined pallet and eats slowly, soaking the biscuit in the water to soften it before breaking off tiny pieces with his teeth. After he has finished he lies back again looking at the ceiling – it is a complicated structure of supporting beams. Who has built this place? Not Jacob and the men that came with him.
Holding onto walls and pieces of furniture for support he hobbles carefully to the doorway of the cottage and looks outside. Last night Jacob bound his ankle tightly in rags so that it couldn’t move. There is a square with four large brick-built cottages each with doors and shutters for the windows, and in the centre a hearth for a fire and what looks to be a kiln. Around the cottages seems to be a high earth wall. It reminds him of a small fort, because at each corner is a small solid-looking cannon.
‘What do you think, Silas?’
Jacob has returned with some scraps of tinder and is clumsily rebuilding the fire. ‘There’s a moat outside – apparently there’s an old story that Indians won’t attack over water, but maybe it was just that the fellow who built this place wanted to feel like some sort of lord.’
‘Who was he?’
‘We don’t know, really. One of Edwyn’s servants told me he remembered hearing about some Welshman called Evans wanting to start off a ranch in the Chubut valley but he gave up very soon, after just a few years. The man said there had been a rumour that the Indians had got wind of Evans’ plans and made sure all the cattle scarpered to the hills before he’d even started.’
Silas sits beside him. Every part of him aches.
Jacob, he notices, is making a mess of building the fire. Even though he is easing each piece into place, he is getting it wrong, but Jacob is soon standing back and smiling contentedly at his handiwork. He looks at Silas. ‘The Lord was clearly saving this place for us. Why don’t you go outside and see?’
Silas stands slowly while Jacob looks at him and grins. Nothing seems to affect Silas’ brother-in-law. Although almost as broad and tall as Selwyn Williams, Jacob’s bulk is of the soft sort, consisting of blubber rather than anything as hard as muscle, and his hands, though large, are paw-like and too clumsy to be useful. As he blinks at Silas benignly, Silas wonders yet again how long it takes Jacob to shave carefully away at his cheeks, chin and upper lip to leave this ridiculous fringe of dark honey-coloured beard outlining his face.
Silas shivers. It is too cold to sit still for long. He stands and walks unsteadily towards the entrance of the fort and peers outside. The fort is on a small embankment surrounded by a shallow moat. The moat is dry now but obviously fills with water from the river when the tide is high or the river is in full spate. He takes a few steps outside the fort and looks around him for meadows but all he can see are patches of grass and thorn. It is certainly greener than the land he has so recently crossed, and he supposes that if you came across it from one of the barren slopes a couple of miles away you might have the impression of a meadow, but it is still more yellow than green, and beside his feet there are patches of bare ground where there is no vegetation at all.
‘Well, what do you think?’ Jacob has come to stand beside him. He is smiling and looking around the place as if he is happy.
‘Where are the trees? I thought there were supposed to be trees.’
‘Over there, look.’
Silas follows Jacob’s finger. By the river a trio of willows droop over the river, but they are stunted and small.
Silas is too depressed to speak. The seagull was right. Away from the river, wherever the ground is higher, it is as barren as everywhere else: a few bushes and some scraps of thorn, and between them the sand or the earth, dry and dusty, scooped up by the wind into briefly-travelling vortices.
His legs suddenly give way and he sinks to his knees. It is a desert, just another desert. He thinks of the promises, the assurances, and Edwyn Lloyd and his carefully chosen words. Seven thousand miles for a desert. Did the Meistr think they wouldn’t notice?
‘Here, drink this. It’s a sort of tea,’ Jacob says, pouring some boiling water on to a couple of small twigs in a cup. ‘It doesn’t taste of much, but it’s better than nothing.’
Silas sips. It has a faintly tarry taste and for a few seconds it fools his stomach into thinking it is being filled.
Jacob and the rest of the men there had given up waiting for the Mimosa’s lifeboat several days ago, and Silas’ confirmation that it will not arrive at all comes as no surprise. At first they had gone looking for game, trying to trap rather than shoot to preserve ammunition, but had been unsuccessful. Then one of the men managed to trap some sort of long-legged rabbit, and the next day they had come across an injured animal that seemed halfway between a deer and a goat. Neither of these had kept them going for long, of course. From time to time they have seen other strange creatures – a large bird with long legs that couldn’t fly which was like nothing they have ever seen before; and sometimes something that seemed so familiar – a fox just as red and bushy-tailed as the foxes at home – that they were shocked into stillness. Once they saw a small tabby cat which looked quite tame but snarled and ran when they approached. Other times they have seen small dogs, mangy looking things that are also shy but seem much less wild. Then another week had come when they had not found anything at all and in desperation shot a few ducks – but they had been too rich for them and made some of them sick.
The fire is burning well now and the men are returning. Every morning they do their best to hunt, leaving Jacob to guard the place and tend to the fire. One by one they sit and warm their empty hands.
‘Well, what do you think of the place, Silas?’ one man says, waving at the buildings around them. ‘It’s quite a surprise, isn’t it ? Not much different from home. Sometimes when I wake I think I am back in my little place in Carmarthen and Mam is going to be in soon with a cup of tea, but instead in comes Jacob.’ He laughs, then adds more seriously and quietly, ‘but of course I wasn’t starving to death in Carmarthen.’
‘And it is a little less like a desert.’
‘Yes, there is that, too.’
They return to stare at the fire, each one silent with his own thoughts for a few minutes until the last man returns with something heavy slung over his shoulder. He rests his gun carefully against the side of the house and then walks slowly up to the rest of them. They look at him with bright expectant faces.
‘Bagged something, did you, Ivor?’
He lays the bird along the ground beside the fire and looks at Jacob.
‘A bird of prey, brodyr. We cannot eat this. The good book forbids it.’
But little by little the bird is plucked, roasted and eaten. For another day their bellies are not empty. In the afternoons they go about their other work: some are clearing the ground, some are trying to make a track to the west, while others are digging out pits for the houses and gradually building up walls.
The next day they catch nothing, and the next day nothing again. Soon they will be too weak to even walk out of the fort.
‘What’s going to happen now?’ Silas asks.
Jacob shakes his head. ‘I don’t know.’ Even he has stopped smiling, and above his lip there are small hairs starting to grow.
Then, suddenly, there appears a dog. It comes from nowhere. A whippety sort of animal with long legs and a tail that stands up pointed and tall from its backside. It trots around as if it knows the place, sniffing and cocking its leg at every corner then sniffing again. It visits each man in turn, begging or nuzzling up, and then when it receives nothing but a pat on the head from anyone it runs out of the fort into the desert.
‘Did I dream that?’ asks Silas to no one in particular. ‘Am I going mad? First a talking seagull and now a stray dog that comes from nowhere?’
But if the dog was a dream everyone else has dreamt it too. The men go to sleep in their houses while Silas and Jacob keep guard at the entrance.
The dog returns with a rabbit in its maw, and then something like a small deer. Each one has been killed with a single bite, expertly placed. Then he presents them with a fox and a couple more rabbits. He drops each cadaver at Silas’ foot and then trots off again into the desert. The bodies are still warm. Silas gathers them together and Jacob helps him to skin them, then they assemble a spit over the fire and thread the six trussed carcasses upon it so they hang like fat beads on a string. When they start to cook the dog returns with a rabbit that he keeps for himself.
‘What shall we call him?’ asks Silas.
‘Antur,’ says Jacob, ‘our hope, our future.’
The smell of cooking invades dreams. It is the odour of every feast, every Christmas, every Easter, and the men smile as they sleep. Then they wake shouting and laughing. Soon everyone is grabbing and eating – their faces glistening with trails of fat and their hair festooned with pieces of gristle. Silas has never felt so full; his stomach strains against the belt he has had to draw in to keep his trousers up. All may be well. All they have to do to survive in the place is to find enough game – and surely if a dog can do that then so can they.
The dog curls up on Silas’ feet. He strokes its head. Just like Polly’s head – the same size, the same shape. His favourite little dog – oh, how he’d loved that animal. Antur shivers suddenly, a single ripple spreading over his body like a pebble in a pond.
‘Someone walking on your grave, eh, boy?’
In the night a brief shower turns the top layer of ground into mud. They call again for Antur but he has gone; the only trace of him is footprints leading out of the fort and quickly disappearing in the desert. They whistle again, but the empty desert whistles back.
‘Is it possible for everyone to have the same dream, do you think?’ Silas asks.
‘No, it happened,’ says Jacob, patting his stomach. ‘Our manna from heaven. A sign from God. We are meant to be here, brawd. Even you must believe that now.’