Chapter 5: The Fire Field

The shepherd's wife met me at the gate at first light with her son riding her hip.

He was pale and cross and wrapped in three blankets, and he had not let go of the wooden sheep.

"He wanted to say thank you," she said. "He's not very good at it."

"Thank you," the boy said, to the sheep.

"You're welcome," I told the sheep.

His mother laughed, and it cracked halfway through.

"Come on," she said. "He told you to see it. I'll show you."

We walked out past the barley field and up a slope of black grass.

At the top the hill flattened into a wide square of earth that nothing grew on.

Eight years, and the ground was still burned bare.

A single stone chimney stood up from the middle of it.

Around it lay the footings of a hall, row on row of charred stumps where the posts had been.

"The long house," the shepherd's wife said.

She set her son down on a flat stone, and he sat there wrapped in his blankets, staring.

I walked into the square.

The wind carried the smell up out of the earth even now, faint and sour, burned wood and oil and something older.

At the foot of the chimney someone had set eleven small stones in a ring.

Each one had a name cut into it with a knife.

Fresh flowers lay on three.

I read the names one at a time.

I wanted to be able to say them if I had to.

"My sister's on that one," the shepherd's wife said behind me. "She was nineteen."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't say that. I don't want it from you."

She said it flatly, not cruelly.

"I want you to see it. Your father watched this burn from the far bank."

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