Who believes in his own death? I’ve seen how men stop being, how people that you spoke to and traded with slump to bleeding and lie still, and never rise again. I have my own shiny scars, now; I’ve a head full of stories that goat-men will never believe. And I can tell you: with everyone dying around you, still you can remain unharmed. Some boss-soldier will pull you out roughly at the end, while the machines in the air fling fire down on the enemy, halting the chatter of their guns – at last, at last! – when nothing on the ground would quiet it. I always thought I would be one of those lucky ones, and it turns out that I am. The men who go home as stories on others’ lips? They fell in front of me, next to me; I could have been dead just as instantly, or maimed worse than dead. I steeled myself before every fight, and shat myself. But still another part of me stayed serene, didn’t it. And was justified in that, wasn’t it, for here I am: all in one piece, wealthy, powerful, safe, and on the point of becoming king.

I have the king by the neck. I push my pistol into his mouth, and he gags. He does not know how to fight, hasn’t the first clue. He smells nice, expensive. I swing him out from me. I blow out the back of his head. All sound goes out of the world.

I went to the war because elsewhere was glamorous to me. Men had passed through the mountains, one or two of them every year of my life, speaking of what they had come from, and where they were going. All those events and places showed me, with their colour and their mystery and their crowdedness, how simple an existence I had here with my people – and how confined, though the sky was broad above us, though we walked the hills and mountains freely with our flocks. The fathers drank up their words, the mothers hurried to feed them, and silently watched and listened. I wanted to bring news home and be the feted man and the respected, the one explaining, not the one all eyes and questions among the goats and children.

I went for the adventure and the cleverness of these men’s lives and the scheming. I wanted to live in those stories they told. The boss-soldiers and all their equipment and belongings and weapons and information, and all the other people grasping after those things – I wanted to play them off against each other as these men said they did, and gather the money and food and toys that fell between. One of those silvery capsules, that opened like a seed-case and twinkled and tinkled, that you used for talking to your contact in the hills or among the bosses – I wanted one of those.

There was also the game of the fighting itself. A man might lose that game, they told us, at any moment, and in the least dignified manner, toileting in a ditch, or putting food on his plate at the barracks, or having at a whore in the tents nearby. (There were lots of whores, they told the fathers; every woman was a whore there; some of them did not even take your money, but went with you for the sheer love of whoring.) But look, here was this stranger whole and healthy among us, and all he had was that scar on his arm, smooth and harmless, for all his stories of a head rolling into his lap, and of men up dancing one moment, and stilled forever the next. He was here, eating our food and laughing. The others were only words; they might be stories and no more, boasting and no more. I watched my father and uncles, and some could believe our visitor and some could not, that he had seen so many deaths, and so vividly.

‘You are different,’ whispers the princess, almost crouched there, looking up at me. ‘You were gentle and kind before. What has happened? What has changed?’

I was standing in a wasteland, very cold. An old woman lay dead, blown backwards off the stump she’d been sitting on; the pistol that had taken her face off was in my hand – mine, that the bosses had given me to fight with, that I was smuggling home. My wrist hummed from the shot, my fingertips tingled.

I still had some swagger in me, from the stuff my drugs-man had given me, my going-home gift, his farewell spliff to me, with good powder in it, that I had half-smoked as I walked here. I lifted the pistol and sniffed the tip, and the smoke stung in my nostrils. Then the hand with the pistol fell to my side, and I was only cold and mystified. An explosion will do that, wake you up from whatever drug is running your mind, dismiss whatever dream, and sharply.

I put the pistol back in my belt. What had she done, the old biddy, to annoy me so? I went around the stump and looked at her. She was only disgusting the way old women are always disgusting, with a layer of filth on her such as war always leaves. She had no weapon; she could not have been dangerous to me in any way. Her face was clean and bright between her dirt-black hands – not like a face, of course, but clean red tissue, clean white bone-shards. I was annoyed with myself, mildly, for not leaving her alive so that she could tell me what all this was about. I glared at her facelessness, watching in case the drug should make her dead face speak, mouthless as she was. But she only lay, looking blankly, redly at the sky.

She lied to you, my memory hissed at me.

Ah, yes, that was why I’d shot her. You make no sense, old woman, I’d said. Sick of looking at her ugliness, I’d turned cruel, from having been milder before, even kind – from doing the old rag-and-bone a favour! Here I stand, I said, with Yankee dollars spilling over my feet. Here you sit, over a cellar full of treasures, enough to set you up in palaces and feed and clothe you queenly the rest of your days. Yet all you can bring yourself to want is this old thing, factory made, one of millions, well used already.

I’d turned the Bic this way and that in the sunlight. It was like opening a sack of rice at a homeless camp; I had her full attention, however uncaring she tried to seem.

Children of this country, of this war, will sell you these Bics for a packet-meal – they feed a whole family with one man’s ration. In desperate times, two rows of chocolate is all it costs you. Their doddering grandfather will sell you the fluid for a twist of tobacco. Or you can buy a Bic entirely new and full from such shops as are left – caves in the rubble, banged-together stalls set up on the bulldozed streets. A new one will light first go; you won’t have to shake it and swear, or click it some magic number of times. Soldiers are rich men in war. All our needs are met, and our pay is laid on extra. There is no need for us to go shooting people, not for cheap cigarette-lighters – cheap and pink and lady-sized.

Yes, but it is mine, she had lied on at me. It was given to me by my son, who went off to war just like you, and got himself killed for his motherland. It has its hold on me that way. Quite worthless to any other person, it is.

In the hunch of her and the lick of her lips, the thing was of very great worth indeed.

Tell me the truth, old woman. I had pushed aside my coat. I have a gun here that makes people tell things true. I have used it many times. What is this Bic to you? or I’ll take your head off.

She looked at my pistol, in its well-worn sheath. She stuck out her chin, fixed again on the lighter. Give it me! she said. If she’d begged, if she’d wept, I might have, but her anger set mine off; that was her mistake.

I lean over the king and push the door-button on the remote. The queen’s men burst in, all pistols and posturing like men in a movie.

It was dark under there, and it smelled like dirt and death-rot. I didn’t want to let the rope go.

Only the big archways are safe, she’d said. Stand under them and all will be well, but step either side and you must use my pinny or the dogs will eat you alive. I could see no archway; all was black.

I could hear a dog, though, panting out the foul air. The sound was all around, at both my ears equally. I knew dogs, good dogs; but no dog had ever stood higher than my knee. From the sound, this one could take my whole head in its mouth, and would have to stoop to do so.

Which way should I go? How far? I put out my hands, with the biddy’s apron between them. I was a fool to believe her; what was this scrap of cloth against such a beast? I made the kissing noise you make to a dog. Pup? Pup? I said.

His eyes came alight, reddish – at the far end of him, praise God. Oh, he was enormous! His tail twitched on the floor in front of me, and the sparse grey fur on it sprouted higher than my waist. He lifted his head – bigger than the whole house my family lived in, it was. He looked down at me over the scabby ridges of his rib-cage. Vermin hopped in the beams of his red eyes. His whole starveling face crinkled in a grin. With a gust of butchery breath he was up on his spindly shanks. He lowered his head to me full of lights and teeth, tightening the air with his growl.

A farther dog woke with a bark, and a yet farther one. They set this one off, and I only just got the apron up in time, between me and the noise and the snapping teeth. That silenced him. His long claws skittered on the chamber’s stone floor. He paced, and turned and paced again, growling deep and constantly. His lip was caught high on his teeth; his red eyes glared and churned. The hackles stuck up like teeth along his back.

Turning my face aside I forced myself and the apron forward at him. Oh, look – an archway there, just as the old woman said. White light from the next chamber jumped and swerved in it.

The dog’s red eyes were as big as those discs the bosses carry their movies on. They looked blind, but he saw me, he saw me; I felt his gaze on me, the way you feel a sniper’s, in your spine – and his ill-will, only just held back. I pushed the cloth at his nostrils. Rotten-sour breath gusted underneath at me.

But he shrank as the old woman had told me he would, nose and paws and the rest of him; his eyes shone brighter, narrowing to torch-beams. Now I was wrapping not much more than a pup, and a miserable wreck he was, hardly any fur, and his skin all sores and scratches.

I picked him up and carried him to the white-flashing archway, kicking aside coins; they were scattered all over the floor, and heaped up against the red-lit walls. Among them lay bones of dog, bird, sheep, and some of person – old bones, well gnawed, and not a scrap of meat on any of them.

I stepped under the archway and dropped the mangy dog back into his room. He exploded out of himself, into himself, horribly huge and sudden, hating me for what I’d done. But I was safe here; that old witch had known what she was talking about. I turned and pushed the apron at the next dog.

He was a mess of white light, white teeth, snapping madly at the other opening. He smelled of clean hot metal. He shrank to almost an ordinary fighting dog, lean, smooth-haired, strong, with jaws that could break your leg-bone if he took you. His eyes were still magic, though, glaring blind, bulging white. His heavy paws, scrabbling, pushed paper-scraps forward; he cringed in the storm of paper he’d stirred up when he’d been a giant and flinging himself about. As I wrapped him, some of the papers settled near his head: American dollars. Big dollars, three-numbered. Oh these, these I could carry, these I could use.

For now, though, I lifted the dog. Much heavier he was, than the starving one. I slipped and slid across the drifts of money to the next archway. Beyond it the third dog raged at me, a barking firestorm. I threw the white dog back behind me, then raised the apron and stepped up to the orange glare, shouting at the flame-dog to settle; I couldn’t even hear my own voice.

He shrank in size, but not in power or strangeness. His coat seethed about him, thick with waving gold wires; his tongue was a sprout of fire and white-hot arrow-tips lined his jaws. His eyes, half-exploded from his head, were two ponds of lava, rimmed with the flame pouring from their sockets – clearly they could not see, but my bowels knew he was there behind them, waiting for his chance to cool his teeth in me, to set me alight.

I wrapped my magic cloth around him, picked him up and shone his eye-light about. The scrabbles and shouting from the other dogs behind me bounced off the smooth floor, lost themselves in the rough walls arching over. Where was the treasure the old biddy had promised me in this chamber, the richest of all the three?

The dog burned and panted under my arm. I walked all around, prodding parts of the walls in case they should spill jewels at me or open into treasure-rooms. I reached into cavities hoping to feel bars of gold, giant diamonds – I hardly knew what.

All I found was the lighter the old biddy had asked me to fetch, the pink plastic Bic, lady-sized. And an envelope. Inside was a letter in boss-writing, and attached to that was a rectangle of plastic, with a picture of a foreign girl on it, showing most of her breasts and all of her stomach and legs as she stood in the sea-edge, laughing out of the picture at me. Someone was playing a joke on me, insulting my God and our women instead of delivering me the treasure I’d been promised.

I turned the thing over, rubbed the gold-painted lettering that stood up out of the plastic. Rubbish. Still, there were all those Yankee dollars, no? Plenty there for my needs. I pocketed the Bic and put the rubbish back in the hole in the wall. I crossed swiftly to the archway, turned in its safety and shook the dog out of the cloth. Its eyes flared wide, and its roar was part voice, part flame. I showed it my back. I’d met real fire, that choked and cooked people – this fairy-fire held no fear for me.

Back in the white dog’s chamber, I stuffed my pack as full as I could, every pocket of it, with the dollars. It was heavy! It and the white fighting dog were almost more than I could manage. But I took them through and into the red-lit carrion-cave, and I subdued the mangy dog there. I carried him across to where the rope-end dangled in its root-lined niche, and I pulled the loop down around the bulk of the money on my back, and the dog still in my arms, and hooked it under myself.

There came a shout from above. Praise God, she had not run off and left me.

Yes! I cried. Bring me up!

When she had me well off the floor, I cast the red-eyed dog out of the apron-cloth. He dropped; he ballooned out full-sized, long-shanked. He looked me in the eye, with his lip curled and his breath fit to wither the skin right off my face. I flapped the apron at him. Boo, I said. There. Get down. The other two dogs bayed deep below. Had they made such a noise at the beginning, I never would have gone down.

And then I was out the top of the tree-trunk and swinging from the branch, slower now than I’d swung before, being so much heavier. The old woman stood there, holding me and my burden aloft, the rope coiling beside her. She was stronger than I would have believed possible.

‘Do you have it?’ She beamed up at me.

‘Oh, I have it, don’t worry. But get me down from here before I give you it. I would not trust you as far as I could throw you.’

And she laughed, properly witch-like, and stepped in to secure the rope against the tree.

She is not the first virgin I’ve had, my little queen, but she fights the hardest and is the most satisfying, having never in her worst dreams imagined this could happen to her. I have her every which way, and she urges me on with her screams, with her weeping, with her small fists and her torn mouth and her eyes now wide, now tight-closed squeezing out tears. The indignities I put her through, the unqueenly positions I force her into, force her to stay in, excite me again as soon as I am spent. She fills up the air with her pleading, her horror, her powerless pretty rage, for as long as she still has the spirit.

I left the old woman where she lay, and I took her treasure with me, her little Bic. I walked another day, and then a truck came by and picked me up and took me to the next big town. I found a bank, and had no difficulty storing my monies away in it. There I learned what I had lost when I put the sexy-card back in the cave wall, for the bank-man gave me just such a one, only plainer. The card was the key to my money, he said. I should show the card to whoever was selling to me, and through the magic of computers the money would flow straight out of the bank to that person, without me having to touch it.

‘Where is a good hotel?’ I asked him, when we were done. ‘And where can I find good shopping, like Armani and Rolex?’ These names I had heard argued over, as we crouched in foxholes and behind walls waiting for orders; I had seen them in the boss-magazines, between the pages of the women some men tortured themselves with wanting, during the many boredoms of the army.

The bank-man came out with me onto the street and waved me up a taxi. I didn’t even have to tell the driver where to go. I sat in the back seat and smiled at my good fortune. The driver eyed me in the mirror.

‘Watch the road,’ I said. ‘You’ll be in big trouble if I get hurt.’

‘Sir,’ he said.

At the hotel I found that I was already vouched for; the bank had telephoned them to say I was coming and to treat me well.

‘First,’ I said, ‘I will have a hot bath, a meal, and some hours’ sleep. I’ve travelled a long way. Then I will need clothes, and this uniform to be burned. And introductions. Other rich men. Rich women, too; beautiful women. I’m sure you know the kind of thing I mean.’

When I was stuffing my pack full of dollars underground, I could not imagine ever finding a use for so much money. But then began my new life. A long, bright dream, it was, of laughing friends, and devil women in their devil clothes, and wonderful drugs, and new objects and belongings conjured by money as if by wizardry, and I enjoyed it all and thoroughly. Money lifts and floats you, above cold weather and hunger and war, above filth, above having to think and plan – if any problem comes at you, you throw a little money at it and it is gone, and everyone smiles and bows and thanks you for your patronage.

That is, until your plastic dies. Then I understood truly what treasure I’d rejected when I left that card in the third cave. There was no more money behind my card; that other card, with the near-naked woman on it, behind that had been an endless supply; that card would never have died. I had to sell my apartment and rent a cheaper place. Piece by piece I sold all the ornaments and furniture I’d accumulated, to pay my rent. But even the worth of those expensive objects ran out, and I let the electricity and the gas go, and then I found myself paying my last purseful for a month’s rent in not much more than an attic, and scrounging for food.

I sat one night on the floor at my attic window, hungry and glum, with no work but herding and soldiering to turn my fortunes around with. I went through my last things, my last belongings left in a nylon backpack too shabby to sell. I pulled out an envelope, with a crest on it, of a hotel – ah, it was those scraps from the first day I had come to this town, with all my money in my pack. These were the bits and pieces that the chamber-boy had saved from the pockets of my soldiering-clothes. Shall I throw these away, sir? he’d said to me. No, I told him. Keep them to remind me how little I had before today. How my fortunes changed.

‘Ha!’ I laid the half-spliff on my knee. A grain fell out of the tip. That had been a good spliff, I remembered, well-laced with the fighting-powder that made you a hero, that took away all your fear.

‘And you!’ I took out the pink lighter, still fingerprinted with the mud of that blasted countryside.

‘Ha!’ One last half-spliff would make this all bearable. A few hours, I would have, when nothing mattered, not this house, not this hunger, not my own uselessness and the stains on my memory from what I had done as a rich man, and before that as a soldier. And then, once it was done . . .  Well, I would just have to beggar and burgle my way home, wouldn’t I, and take up with the goats again. But why think of that now? I scooped the grain back into the spliff and twisted the end closed. I flicked the lighter.

Some huge thing, rough, scabby, crushed me to the wall. I gasped a breath of sweet-rotten air and near fainted. Then the thing adjusted itself, and I was free, and could see, and it was that great grey spindly dog from the underground cave, turning and turning on himself in the tiny space of my attic, sweeping the beams of his red movie-disc eyes about, at me, at my fate and circumstances.

I stared at the lighter in my hand. A long, realising sound came out of me. So the lighter was the key to the dogs! You flicked it, they came. And see how he lowered his head and his tail in front of me, and looked away from my stare. He was mine, in my power! I didn’t need some old apron-of-a-witch to wrap him in and tame him.

Sweat prickled out on me, cold. I’d nearly left this Bic with the old biddy, in her dead hand, for a joke! Some other soldier, some civilian scavenger, some child, might have picked it up and got this power! I’d been going to fling it far out into the mud-land around us, just to laugh while she scrabbled after it. I’d been going to walk away laughing, my pack stuffed with the money I’d brought up from below, and the old girl with nothing.

I looked around the red-lit attic, and out the window at the patched and crowded roofs across the way, dimming with evening. I need never shiver here again; I need never see these broken chimneys or these bent antennae. Now I enjoyed the tweaking of the hunger pangs in my belly, because I was about to banish them forever, just as soon as I summoned that hot golden dog with his never-dying money-card.

I clicked the lighter three times.

And so it all began again, the dream, the floating, the powders and good weed, the friends. They laughed again at my stories of how I had come here from such a nowhere. For a time there my family and our goats had lost their fascination, but now they enthralled these prosperous people again, as travellers’ tales had once bewitched me around the home fires.

I catch the queen by the shoulders. One of her men dives for his gun. I shoot him; his eye spouts; he falls dead. The queen gives a tiny shriek.

I heard about the princess from the man who fitted out my yacht. He had just come from the tricky job of making lounges for the girl’s prison tower, which was all circular rooms.

‘Prison?’ I said. ‘The king keeps his daughter in a prison?’

‘You haven’t heard of this?’ he laughed. ‘He keeps her under lock and key, always has. He’s a funny chap. He had her stars done, her chart or whatever, right when she was born, and the chart said she’d marry a soldier. So he keeps her locked up so’s this soldier won’t get to her. She only meets people her parents choose.’

Oh, does she?, I thought, even as I laughed and shook my head with the yacht-man.

That night when I was alone and had smoked a spliff, I had the golden dog bring her. She arrived asleep, his back a broad bed for her, his fire damped down for her comfort. He laid the girl on the couch nearest the fire.

She curled up there, belonging as I’ve never belonged in these apartments, delicate, royal, at peace. She was like a carved thing I’d just purchased, a figurine. She was beautiful, certainly, but not effortfully so, as were most women I had met since I came into my wealth. It was hard to say how much of her beauty came from the fact that I knew she was a princess; her royalty seemed to glow in her skin, to be woven into her clothing, every stitch and seam of it considered and made fit. Her little foot, out the bottom of the nightdress, was the neatest, palest, least walked-upon foot I had ever seen since the newborn feet of my brothers and sisters. It was a foot meant for an entirely different purpose from my own, from most feet of the world.

Even in my new, clean clothes, like a man’s in a magazine, I felt myself to be filth crouched beside this creature. These hands had done work, these eyes had seen things that she could never conceive of; this memory was a rubbish-heap of horrors and indignities. It was one thing to be rich; it was quite another to be born into it, to be royal from a long line of royalty, to have never lived anything but the palace life.

The princess woke with the tiniest of starts. Up and back from me she sat, and she took in the room, and me.

Have you kidnapped me? she said, and swallowed a laugh.

Look at your eyes, I said, but her whole face was the thing, bright awake, and curious, and not disgusted by me.

Perhaps your name? she said gently. Her nightwear was modest in covering her neck-to-ankle, but warmth rushed through me to see her breasts so clearly outlined inside the thin cloth.

I made myself meet her eyes. Can I serve you somehow? Are you hungry? Thirsty?

How can I be? said the princess, and blinked. I am asleep and dreaming. Or stoned. It smells very strongly of weed in here. Where was I before?

I brought a tray of pretty foods from the feast the golden dog had readied. I sat beside her and poured us both some of the cordial. I handed it to her in the frail stemmed glass, raised mine to her and drank.

I shouldn’t touch it, she whispered. I am in a story; it will put me under some spell.

Then I am magicked too, I said, and raised again the glass I’d sipped from, pretending to be alarmed that half was gone.

She laughed, a small sweet sound – she had very well-kept teeth, just like the magazine women, the poster-women – and she drank.

Now, tell me, what is all this? I said of the tray. These little things here – they must be fruit by their shape, no? But why are they so small?

She ate one, and it clearly pleased her. Who is your chef? she said, with a kind of frown of pleasure.

He is a secret, I said, for I could hardly tell her that a dog had made this feast.

Of course. She took another of the little fruits, and ate it, and held her fingers ready to lick, a delicate spread fan.

She touched her fingers to a napkin, then put the tray aside. She knelt beside me, and leaned through the perfume of herself, which was light and clean and spoke only quietly of her wealth. Who are you? she said, and she put her lips to mine, and held them there a little, her eyes closing, then opening surprised. Do you not want to kiss me?

I sit with my fellows in the briefing-room at the barracks. Up on the movie screen, foreign actors are locked together by their lips. Boss-soldiers groan and hoot in the seats in front of us. We giggle at the screen and at the men. ‘And they call us “tribals”,’ says my friend Kadir who later will be blown to pieces before my eyes. ‘Look at how wild they are, what animals! They cannot control themselves.’

The princess was poised to be dismayed or embarrassed. Oh, I do want to, I said, but how is it done? For, except for my mother in my childhood, I had never kissed a woman – even here in my rich-man life – in a way that was not somehow a violence upon her.

So handsome, and you don’t already know? But she taught me. She was gentle, but forceful; she pressed herself to me, pushed me (with her little weight!) down onto the couch cushions. I was embarrassed that she must feel my desire, but she did not seem to mind, or perhaps she did not know enough to notice. She crushed her breasts against me, her belly and thighs. And the kissing – I had to breathe through my nose, for she would not stop, and there was no room for my breath with all her little lively tongue, and her hair falling and sliding everywhere, and eventually I dared to put my hands to her rounded bottom and pull her harder against me, and closed my eyes against the consequences.

Hush, she said over me at one point, rising off me, her hair making a slithering tent around our heads and shoulders, all dark gold. Her breasts hung forward in the elaborate frontage of the nightgown – I was astonished by their closeness; I covered them with my hands in a kind of swoon.

I told her what I was, in the night, over some more of that beautiful insubstantial food. I told her about the old woman, and the dogs; I showed her the Bic. That is all I am, I said. Lucky. Lucky to have lived, lucky to have come into this fortune, lucky to have you before me. I am not noble and I have no right to anything.

Oh, she said, but it is all luck, don’t you see? And she knelt up and held my face as a child does, to make you listen. My own family’s wealth, it came about from the favours of one king and one bishop, back in the fourteenth century. You learn all the other, all the speaking and manners and how to behave with people lower than yourself; it can be learned by goatherds and by soldiers just as it can by the farmers my family once were, the loyal servants.

She kissed me. Certainly you look noble, she whispered and smiled. You are my prince, be sure of that.

She dazzled me with what she was, and had, and said, and what she was free from knowing. But I would have loved her just for her body and its closeness, how pale she was, and soft, and intact, and for her face, perfect above that perfection, gazing on me enchanted. She was like the foods she fancied, beautiful nothingness, a froth of luxury above the hard, real business of the world, which was the machinery of war and missiles, the flying darts and the blown dust and smoke, the shudder in your guts as the bosses brought in the air support, and saved you yet again from becoming a thing like these others, pieces of bleeding litter tossed aside from the action, their part in the game ended.

With the muzzle of the pistol, I push aside the queen’s earring – a dangling flower or star, made of sparkling diamonds, a royal heirloom. I press the tip in below her ear, fire, and drop her to the carpet. It’s all coming back to me, the efficiency. ‘Bring me the prince!’ I cry.

The women of the bosses’ world, they are foul beautiful creatures. They are devils, that light a fire in the loins of decent men. One picture is all you need, and such a picture can be found on any boss-soldier’s wall in the barracks; my first time in such a place, all my fellows around me were torn as I was between feasting their eyes on the shapes and colours taped to the walls, and uttering damnation on the bosses’ souls, and laughing – for it was ridiculous, wasn’t it, such behaviour? The taping itself was unmanly, a weakness – but the posturing of the picture-girls, I hardly knew how to regard that. I had never seen faces so naked, let alone the out-thrustingness of the rest of their bodies. I was embarrassed for them, and for the boss-men who looked upon these women, and longed for them – even as the women did their evil work on me, and woke my longings too.

We covered our embarrassment by pulling the pictures down, tearing one, but only a little, and by accident. We put them in the bin, where they were even less dignified, upside down making their faces to themselves, of ecstasy and scorn, or animal abandon. We looked around in relief, the walls bare except for family pictures now. Someone opened a bedside cupboard and found those magazines they have. Around the group of us they went, and we yelped and laughed and pursed our mouths over them, and some tried to whistle as the bosses whistled; I did not touch one at all, not a single page, but I saw enough to both disgust and enliven me for a long time to come.

Someone raised his head, and we all listened. Engines. ‘Land Rover! They are coming!’ And we scrambled to put the things back, clumsy with laughter and fear.

‘This is the best one! Take this one with us!’

‘Straighten them! Straighten them in the cupboard, like we found them!’

I remember as we ran away, and I laughed and hurried with the rest, another part of me was dazed and stilled by what I had seen, and could not laugh at all. Those women would show themselves, all of themselves, parts you had never seen, and did not want to – or did you? – to any man, any; they would let themselves be put in a picture and taped up on a wall for any man’s eyes. I was stunned and aroused; I felt so dirtied that I would never be clean, never the man I had been before I saw what I had seen.

And now I was worse, myself, even than those bosses. I lived, I knew, an unclean life. I did not keep my body pure, for marriage or any other end, but only polluted myself and wasted my good seed on wanton women, only poisoned myself with spliffs and powders and liquors.

It is very confusing when you can do anything. You settle for following the urge that is strongest, and call up food perhaps. Then this woman smiles at you, so you do what a man must do; then another man insults you, so you pursue his humiliation. While you wait for a grander plan to emerge, a thousand small choices make up your life, none of them honourable.

It is much easier to take the right path when you only have two to choose from. Easiest of all is when you are under orders, or under fire; when one choice means death, you can make up your mind in a flash.

These things, about the women and my impurity, I would not tell anyone at home. This was why my family stayed away from the greater, the outer world; this was why we hid in the mountains. We could live a good life there, a clean life.

Buzzz. I go to the wall and press the button to see out. Three men stand at the door downstairs. They wear suits, old-fashioned but not in a dowdy way. You thought you had run ahead of us, say the steep white collars, the strangely-fastened cuffs, and the fit, the cut of those clothes; even a goat-boy can hear it. But our power is sunk deep, spread wide, and knotted tight into the fabric of all things.

The closest one takes off his sunglasses. He calls me by my army name. I fall back a little from the screen. ‘Who are you and what do you want?’

‘We must ask you some questions, in the name of His Majesty the King,’ he says. He’s well fed, the spokesman, and pleased with himself, the way boss-soldiers are, the higher ranks who can fly away back to Boss-Land if things get too rough for them.

I speak into the grille. ‘I’ve nothing to say to any king.’ How is he onto me so quickly? Does he have magic dogs as well?

‘I have to advise you that we are authorised to use force.’

I move the camera up to see beyond them. Their car gleams in the apartment’s turning circle, with the royal crest on the door. Six soldiers – spick and span, well armed, no packs to weigh them down if they need to run – are lining up alert and out of place on the gravel. Behind them squats an armoured vehicle, a prison on wheels.

I pull the sights back down to the ones at the door. I wish I had wired those marble steps the way the enemy used to. I itch for a button to press, to turn them to smoke and shreds. But there are plenty more behind them. By the look of all that, they know they’re up against more than one man.

I buzz them in to the lobby. In the bedroom, I take the pistol from my bedside drawer. In the sitting-room lie the remains of the feast, the spilled throw-rug that the princess wrapped herself in as she talked and talked last night. I pick up the Bic and click it twice. ‘Tidy this up,’ I say into the bomb-blast of silver, and he picks up the mess in his teeth and tosses it away, and goggles at me for more orders. He could deal with this whole situation by himself if I told him. But I’m not a lazy man, or a coward.

The queen’s men knock at the apartment door. I get into position – it feels good, that my body still knows how. ‘Shrink down, over there,’ I say to the silver dog. The light from his eyes pulses white around the walls.

Three clicks. ‘Fetch me the king!’ I shout before the gold dog has time to properly explode into being, and they arrive together, the trapped man jerking and exclaiming in the dog’s jaws. He wears a nice blue suit, nice shoes, all bespoke as a king’s clothes should be.

The knocking comes again, and louder. The dog stands the king gently on the carpet. I take the man in hand – not roughly, just so he knows who’s running this show. ‘Sit with your friend,’ I say to the dog, and it shrinks and withdraws to the window, its flame-fur seething. The air is strong with their spice and hot metal, but it won’t overpower me; I’m cold and clever and I know what to do.

I lean over the king and push the door-button on the remote. The queen’s suits burst in, all pistols and posturing. Then they see me; they aren’t so pleased with themselves then. They scramble to stop. The dogs stir by the window and the scent tumbles off them, so strong you can almost see it rippling across the air.

‘You can drop those,’ I say. The men put up their hands and kick their guns forward.

I have the king by the neck. I push my pistol into his mouth, and he gags. He doesn’t know how to fight, hasn’t the first clue. He smells nice, expensive.

‘Maybe he can ask me those questions himself, no?’ I shout past his ear at the two suits left. I swing him around to where he will not mess me up so much. ‘Bring me the queen!’ I shout to the golden dog, and blow out the back of the king’s head. The noise is terrific; the deafness from it wads my ears.

The queen arrives stiff with fear between the dog’s teeth. Her summery dress is printed with carefree flowers. Her skin is as creamy as her daughter’s; her body is lean and light and has never done a day’s proper work. I catch her to me by the shoulders. One of the guards dives for his gun. I shoot him in the eye. The queen gives a tiny shriek and shakes against me.

The dogs’ light flashes in the men’s wide eyes. ‘Please!’ mouths their captain. ‘Let her go. Let her go.’

I can feel the queen’s voice, in her neck and chest, but her lips are not moving. She’s trying to twist, trying to see what’s left of the king.

‘What are you saying, Your Majesty?’ I shake her, keeping my eyes on her men. ‘Are you giving your blessing, upon your daughter’s marriage? Perhaps you should! Perhaps I should make you! No?’ My voice hurts in my throat, but I only hear it faintly.

I take her out from the side, quickly so as not to give her goons more chances. I drop her to the carpet. It’s all coming back to me, the efficiency.

‘The prince!’ I command, and there he is, flung on the floor naked except for black socks, his wet man wilting as he scrambles up to face me. I could laugh, and tease him and play with him, but I’m not in that mood. He’s just an obstacle to me, the king’s only other heir. My gaze fixes on the guards, I push my pistol up under his jaw and I fire. The silent air smells of gun smoke and burnt bone.

‘Get these toy-boys out of here,’ I shout to the dogs, even more painfully, even more faintly. ‘Put the royals back, just the way they are. In their palace, or their townhouse, or their brothel, or wherever you found them. My carpet, and my clothes here – get the stains off them. Don’t leave a single clue behind. Then go down and clear the garden, and the streets, of all those men and traffic.’

It’s not nice to watch the dogs at work, picking up the live men and the dead bodies both, and flinging them like so many rags, away to nothing. The filthy dog, the scabbed one – why must he be the one to lick up the blood from the carpet, from the white leather of the couch? Will he lick me clean too? But my clothes, my hands, are spatter-free already; my fingertips smell of the spiciness of the golden dog, not the carrion tongue of the mangy one.

Then they’re gone. Everything’s gone that doesn’t belong here. The carpet and couch are as white as when I chose them from the catalogue; the room is spacious again without the dogs.

I open the balcony windows to let out the smells of death and dog. Screams come up from the street, and a single short burst of gunfire. A soldier flies up past me, his machine-gun separating from his hands. They go up to dots in the sky, and neither falls back down.

By the time I reach the balcony railing, all is gone from below except people fleeing from what they’ve seen. The city lies in the bright morning, humming with its many lives and vehicles. I spit on its peacefulness. Their king is dead, and their prince. Soon they’ll be ruled by a goatherd, all those suits and uniforms below me, all those bank-men and party-boys and grovelling shop-owners. Everyone from the highest dignitary to the lowliest beggar will be at my disposal, subject to my whim.

I stride back into the apartment, which is stuffed fat with the dogs. They shrink and fawn on me, and shine their eyes about.

‘I want the princess!’ I say to the golden one and he grins and hangs out his crimson tongue. ‘Dress her in wedding finery, with the queen’s crown on her head. Bring me the king-crown, and the right clothes, too, for such an occasion. A priest! Rings! Witnesses! Whatever papers and people are needed to make me king!’

Which they do, and through everyone’s confusion and my girl’s delight – for she thinks she’s dreaming me still, and the news hasn’t yet reached her that she is orphaned – the business is transacted, and all the names are signed to all the documents that require them.

But the instant the crown is placed on my head, my rage, which was clean and pure and unquestioning while I reached for this goal, falters. Why should I want to rule these people, who know nothing either of war or of mountains, these spoiled fat people bowing down to me only because they know I hold their livelihoods – their very lives! – in my hands, these soft-living men, these whore-women, who would never survive the cold, thin air of my home, who would cringe and gag at the thought of killing their own food?

‘Get them out of here,’ I say to the golden dog. ‘And all this nonsense. Only leave the princess – the queen, I should say. Her Majesty.’

And the title is bitter on my tongue, so lately did I use it for her mother. King, queen, prince and people, all are despicable to me. I understand for the first time that the war I fought in, which goes on without me, is being fought entirely to keep this wealth safe, this river of luxury flowing, these chefs making their glistening fresh food, these walls intact and the tribals busy outside them, these lawns untrampled by jealous mobs come to tear down the palaces.

And she’s despicable too, who was my princess and dazzled me so last night. Smiling at our solitude, she walks towards me in that shameful dress, presenting her breasts to me in their silken tray, the cloth sewn close about her waist to better show how she swells above and below, for all to see, as those dignitaries saw just now, my wife on open display like an American celebrity woman in a movie, like a porn queen in a sexy-mag.

I claw the crown from my head and fling it away from me. I unfasten the great gold-encrusted king-cape and push it off; it suffocated me, crushed me. My girl watches, shocked, as I tear off the sash and brooches and the foolish shirt – truly tear some of it, for the shirt-fastenings are so ancient and odd, it cannot be removed undamaged without a servant’s help.

Down to only the trousers, I’m a more honest man; I can see, I can be, my true self better. I take off the fine buckled shoes and throw them hard at the valuable vases across the sitting-room. The vases tip and burst apart against each other, and the pieces scatter themselves in the dogs’ fur as they lie there intertwined, grinning and goggling, taking up half the room.

The princess – the queen – is half-crouched, caught mid-laugh, mid-cringe, clutching the ruffles about her knees and looking up at me. ‘You are different,’ she says, her child-face insulting, accusing, above the cream-lit cleft between her breasts. ‘You were gentle and kind before,’ she whispers. ‘What has happened? What has changed?’

I kick aside the king-clothes. ‘Now you,’ I say, and I reach for the crown on her head.

My mother stirs the pot as if nothing exists but this food, none of us children tumbling on the floor fighting, none of the men talking and taking their tea around the table. The food smells good, bread baking, meat stewing with onions.

It is a tiny world. The men talk of the larger, outer one, but they know nothing. They know goats, and mountains, but there is so much more that they can’t imagine, that they will never see.

I shower. I wash off the blood and the scents of the princess, the bottled one and the others, more natural, of her fear above and of her flower below that I plucked – that I tore, more truthfully, from its roots. I gulp down shower-water, lather my hair enormously, soap up and scrub hard the rest of me. Can I ever be properly clean again? And once I am, what then? There seems to be nothing else to do, once you’re king, once you’ve treated your queen so. I could kill her, could I not? I could be king alone, without her eyes on me always, fearful and accusing. I could do that; I’ve got the dogs. I could do anything. (I lather my sore man-parts – they feel defiled, though she was my wife and untouched by any other man – or so she claimed, in her terror.)

I rinse and rinse, and turn off the hissing water, dry myself and step out into the bedroom. There I dress in clean clothes, several layers, Gore-Tex the outermost. I stuff my ski-cap and gloves in my jacket pockets, my pistol to show my father that my tale is true. I go into my office, never used, and take from the filing drawers my identifications, my discharge papers – all I have left of my life before this, all I have left of myself.

Out on the blood-smeared couch, my wife-girl lies unconscious or asleep, indecent in the last position I forced on her. She’s not frightened anymore, at least, not for the moment. I throw the ruined ruffled thing, the wedding-dress, to one side, and spread a blanket over her, covering all but her face. I didn’t have to do any of what I did. I might have treated her gently; I might have made a proper marriage with her; we might have been king and queen together, dignified and kind to each other, ruling our peoples together, the three giant dogs at our backs. We could have stopped the war; we could have sorted out this country; we could have done anything. Remember her fragrance, when it was just that light bottle-perfume? Remember her face, unmarked and laughing, just an hour or so ago as she married you?

I stand up, away from what I did to her. The fur-slump in the corner rises and becomes the starving grey, the white bull-baiter, the dragon-dog with its flame-coat flickering around it, its eyes fireworking out of its golden mask face.

‘I want you to do one last thing for me.’ I pull on my ski-cap. The dogs whirl their eyes and spill their odours on me.

I bend and put the pink Bic in the princess’s hand. Her whole body gives a start, making me jump, but she doesn’t wake up.

I pull on my gloves, heart thumping. ‘Send me to my family’s country,’ I say to the dogs. ‘I don’t care which one of you.’

Whichever dog does it, it’s extremely strong, but it uses none of that strength to hurt me.

The whole country’s below me, the war there, the mountains there, the city flying away back there. I see for an instant how the dogs travel so fast: the instants themselves adjust around them, make way for them, squashing down, stretching out, whichever way is needed for the shape and mission of the dog.

Then I am stumbling in the snow, staggering alongside a wall of snowy rocks. Above me, against the snow-blown sky, the faint lines of Flatnose Peak on the south side, and Great Rain on the north, curve down to meet and become the pass through to my home.

The magic goes out of things with a snap like a passing bullet’s. No giant dog warms or scents the air. No brilliant eye lights up the mountainside. My spine and gut are empty of the thrill of power, of danger. I’m here where I used to imagine myself when we were under fire with everything burning and bleeding around me, everyone dying. Snow blows like knife-slashes across my face; the rocky path veers off into the blizzard ahead; the wind is tricky and bent on upending me, tumbling me down the slope. It’s dangerous, but not the wild, will-of-God kind of dangerous that war is; all I have to do to survive here is give my whole mind and body to the walking. I remember this walking; I embrace it. The war, the city, the princess, all the technology and money I had, the people I knew – these all become things I once dreamed, as I fight my frozen way up the rocks, and through the weather.

‘I should like to meet them,’ she says to me in the dream, in my dream of last night when she loved me. She sits hugging her knees, unsmiling, perhaps too tired to be playful or pretend anything.

‘I have talked too much of myself, ’ I apologise.

‘It’s natural,’ she says steadily to me, ‘to miss your homeland.’

I edge around the last narrow section of the path. There are the goats, penned into their cave; they jostle and cry out at the sight of a person, at the smells of the outside world on me, of soap and new clothing.

In the wall next to the pen, the window-shutter slides aside from a face, from a shout. The door smacks open and my mother runs out, ahead of my stumbling father; my brothers and sisters overtake them. My grandfather comes to the doorway; the littler sisters catch me around the waist and my parents throw themselves on me, weeping, laughing. We all stagger and fall. The soft snow catches us. The goats bray and thrash in their pen with the excitement.

‘You should have sent word!’ my mother shouts over all the questions, holding me tight by the cheeks. ‘I would have prepared such a feast!’

‘I didn’t know I was coming,’ I shout back. ‘Until the very last moment. There wasn’t time to let you know.’

‘Come! Come inside, for tea and bread at least!’

Laughing, they haul me up. ‘How you’ve all grown!’ I punch my littlest brother on the arm. He returns the punch to my thigh and I pretend to stagger. ‘I think you broke the bone!’ And they laugh as if I’m the funniest man in the world.

We tumble into the house. ‘Wait,’ I say to Grandfather, as he goes to close the door.

I look out into the storm, to the south and west. Which dog will the princess send? The grey one, I think; I hope she doesn’t waste the gold on tearing me limb from limb. And when will he come? How long do I have? She might lie hours yet insensible.

‘Shut that door! Let’s warm the place up again!’ Every sound behind me is new again, but reminds me of the thousand times I’ve heard it before: the dragging of the bench to the table, the soft rattle of boiling water into a tea-bowl, the chatter of children.

‘You will have seen some things, my son,’ says my father too heartily – he’s in awe of me, coming from the world as I do. He doesn’t know me anymore. ‘Sit down and tell us them.’

‘Not all, though, not all.’ My mother puts her hands over the ears of the nearest sister, who shakes her off annoyed. ‘Only what is suitable for women and girl-folk.’

So I sit, and sip the tea and soak the bread of home, and begin my story.