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battle.
    Hedgerows parcelled out the land amiably, scarcely disturbing the green vista which now and then would shade into drifts of purple heather or the darker green gloss of the ferns. On the southern hillsides the grass was beginning to brown in patches under the late summer sun. Innumerable tracks and lanes criss-crossed the verdure like cracks in a fine glaze. Where roads met, a few cottages might cluster about the crossroads, sometimes a church, a new villa, or one of the older seigneurial manors. The twelve parishes of the island, from St Brelade’s to St Ouen’s, St Clement’s to his own St Martin’s, traced their invisible boundaries on the island’s face, and these were subdivided further into vingtaines. More ostentatious evidence of the old desire to mark the earth littered the island. The druids had left their menhirs and poquelayes, the Romans their houghes, although raised fortifications seemed superfluous on the inland sites where they were to be found. Around the coast, Martello towers, observation platforms, castles and forts bespoke more recent fears of invasion from France whose coast, not fifteen miles distant, was just beginning to appear as the sun burnt the morning sea-mist out of the air.
    To Charles’s right was Rozel windmill where, in a few weeks, apples from the new orchards would be brought for pressing. Below him, the hill fell away in côtils, each carefully cut shelf overgrown with couch grass. The slope had not been worked for six or seven seasons now. On the far side of the hilltop a flock of four-horned sheep started at some brief private terror and wheeled en masse before stopping just as suddenly. He turned back to the scene before him. The scent of cider apples was blown in and away by the southerly breeze, each seventh wave was just audible from the bays at Bouley, Rozel and Fliquet. The sound was carried and checked in the air, reaching him in sustained, sibilant whispers. Their dull repetition seemed to carry the ghost of a message that may once have been vital, but now spoke only of attrition and defeat.
    Do not take comfort in our sound. Do not believe you can discover the least purpose in our action, they seemed to say. When your rock is worn flat as the ocean bed, do not imagine it marks our triumph. It marks nothing but the beginning of the same action elsewhere. We go on, we continue, that is all. The sea rippled and chopped around the island, its surface crawled like the skin of an immense beast, flexing and readying its muscles for violence. It brooked no dissent against its ancient murmur: to be isjustification enough. And the man on the hill struggled with that maxim. His grandfather clutching at his throat and crying out ‘Rochelle!’ before his tongue thickened and the poison turned it blue. His father who had left shore in an open boat and returned, face down, on the tide. Old anger, tempered hard with grief, had turned to revenge. And now it was alloyed with fear. The fight would continue a little while yet, just time enough to finish it. He would not see those he brought down, he did not even know their names, but the wheel only required a nudge now to bring them blinking into the light. The line of ancestral casualties arrayed itself at his back to urge him forward to the act. The long-kept secret had found them all. And will find me too, he thought. But not yet, not on this fine summer’s morning, not on this island where my life has been spent. He looked down at the stream which raced through the shallow dale. Silvery-black, they had dammed it as boys, but to what purpose he could not remember. There were no fish in it. Beyond it the copse of elms and oaks where, he smiled at the memory, Marianne had led him fearlessly, stripped and lain with him in the hard tufts of grass among the tree roots. To his left was the church where he had married her a fortnight later. And there, on the track between the two was the offspring of that union cutting an eccentric