On the first day she had begged for medicine to soothe the pain in her head.

On the second day she had begged to be released from the shackles and for food.

Now she lay still. Her breathing was shallow, her skin damp with sweat. There was a grey smear of ashes on her pale forehead. Her black-lashed eyes were closed; her lips were slightly parted. Her dark-chestnut hair was a lank coil on the dirty sheet. The air of the hut was thick with smells of incense, oil, wax and excrement.

‘You are bound for a greater glory, miss,’ Little Mouse had reassured her. ‘You are to be reborn in Christ.’ But she had not understood.

The priest had taught him well. The necessary rites had been conducted and the blade was sharp.

He had not enjoyed killing the hen – she had struggled in his arms and he had felt her heart beating in fear. But the hen’s death, too, served a higher purpose. Little Mouse had daubed the bird’s blood on the concrete floor beneath the bed.

The priest now stood at the foot of the bed, intoning the Latin litany.

Little Mouse parted the robe of sackcloth in which they had dressed the woman. He thought of the glorious martyrdom of St Erasmus. His eyes filled with tears at the beauty of it.

It was a fate that might have been his, he knew. But the Almighty had intended for him a different path. He was Christ’s servant. He was the Lord’s blade.

He drew the knife blade across the woman’s belly. She woke from her fevered dozing and screamed. The fine red line scored by the blade swelled into a glossy belt of blood.

She screams because the body does not want to release the soul, Little Mouse thought. The body is a blind thing. Soon she will see – soon she will see the light. Again he drove the blade through the skin. The cut he made bisected the first to make a cross.

He put his hand wrist-deep into the woman’s hot, roiling belly. Blood slopped over his feet. Shrieks rang in his ears. He thought: This is not like when I killed the hen. That was a practical matter, a necessity. This is something greater – O, far greater, and far more magnificent!

Little Mouse’s spirit soared.

Though he knew that this was the most solemn and the most sacred of rites, though he knew that in this moment he was in the very presence of Christ, as he drew out from her gut a fistful of the howling woman’s intestine, Little Mouse began to laugh.