“Is there a gatehouse?” she asks me quietly. I nod.

“Any other road or track avoiding the gatehouse?”

“Not for the trucks,” I tell her.

“The jeep?”

“I'd think so.”

She stands quickly, rocking the carriage, tips her cap at you then nods to me. “You lead us. We'll take a jeep.” You glance fearfully at me and put your hand out to me. “Kneecap,” our lieutenant says to one of the men in the jeep. “You look after the horses.”

The lieutenant gives orders I do not hear to the men in the trucks, then swings into the jeep, taking the wheel herself. The fellow sitting in the passenger seat holds a drainpipe diameter olive tube about a metre and a half long. I take it to be a rocket launcher. I am squeezed in the back between the metal post supporting the machine gun and a fat, pale soldier who smells like a week dead fox. Behind us, sitting on the rear lip of the vehicle, crouches a fourth soldier who holds the heavy machinegun.

We take the narrow forest track, round the back of the old estate, beneath the small escarpment fringed with dripping evergreens. The overhanging trees and bushes in places form a tunnel around the track, and the soldier manning the machinegun curses quietly, ducking as snagging branches try to wrest the gun from his grip. The track approaches the stream that feeds the moat. The bridge is rotten, too frail for the jeep, timbers skewed and loose. The lieutenant turns to me, a look of disappointment beginning to form on her face.

“We're close now,” I tell her, keeping my voice low. I nod. “Just over the ridge; there's a clear view.”

She follows my gaze, then says quietly to the soldier at the machine gun, “Karma, take the gun. Let's go.”