My panting breath was sawing in my throat, my hand was crushed between his face and the turf; my heart was beating as if it would burst out of my chest — and I wanted desperately to vomit, to piss, to void my own bowels. I could feel tears burning the backs of my eyelids, and it was only by using a great deal of force on myself that I fought back these unmanly urges. I turned my head and looked over my shoulder at the sleeping camp. All was quiet. So far, it seemed, no one had noticed anything. But for the limp, shit-drizzled corpse lying under me, it might never have happened.
I tugged my jelly-slick blade from his lolling head, plunged it into the turf to clean it, wiped it on my sleeve and shoved it back into the leather sheath in my left boot. I saw that in his death spasm he had bitten into the meat of the middle finger on my left hand, but I could feel no pain in that moment as I bound the finger tightly, quickly, with a scrap of linen torn from my undershirt. Then I pulled his corpse off the road and, with some difficulty, stripped the black-and-red surcoat from his dead weight and pulled it over my own sodden black clothes. I took off his helmet and gathered up his spear and sword and set them to one side. Then I recovered the bag from the lee of the stone wall and, peeling back the moist sacking, I pulled out a massive sticky lozenge of meat and bone, about a foot and a half long, complete with pointed ears and white, still eyeballs; it was the severed head of a wild moorland pony, cut from the neck below the animal’s square jawline, and very nearly drained of blood. I looked round anxiously at the sleeping camp; there was still nothing stirring.