The dogs died last year; some illness when there was no vet to be found. Generations of devotion and meticulous breeding went with them.

I let the damn birds go when first we left the castle, fleeing from a fate that instead found us, and where they sail now, what they see and take, I cannot know.

The wind wraps me, the wind comes to me and leaves across the beaten plains. Slim slivers of sunlight prise underneath the clouds and, reflecting, appear to take instead of give, dazzling like camouflage, by their Jarring contrast, bright on dark, breaking up the few remaining shapes and signs of civilisation still evident, in better light (like that the memory provides), within the steady chaos of the landscape's reach.

Within the fields, the outcrop hills and the stands of trees, the stagnant oxbows gleam with a soiled yellow grace, alive to the eye from this angle only. The trees, lately coloured within the season's slow turn chill, now are bared black shapes, branches bared for the weight of snow and the force of winter storm. Higher, the forests glisten with the clouds that slew above them and about, and snag their slow grace down.

I listen for the sound of artillery, but the freshened wind has quartered, and holds the gunfire back. That distant, artificial thunder has become an almost comforting companion over these last weeks. It is as though we have relapsed into a more primitive system of belief, as though by the fractious meddling with our collective, lived through histories we have woken one of the old gods; a storm god, one to stride, hammerfooted, anvil headed over the land, amorphous, angry and omnipresent, while thunder like the sound of cracking skulls splits over all our darkened lands and the air conducts the lightning's breath to earth.