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Tighe couldn’t help staring at the old man, snatching looks. His face was so weirdly deformed. This is what happened if you lived into old age; the cheeks became cluttered with wrinkles, the nose spread andbecame pitted with tiny dots, the hair blotched white and started coming away from the head in patches at the top and back. Yet the very fact that so few people survived to any great age gave Grandhe a distinctiveness that fed into his habitual gravity. He slurped his milk noisily and then lowered the skin, a white line painted on his dark upper lip. He was looking straight at Tighe.
    ‘You are my only grandchild, boy,’ he said, sonorously.
    Tighe nodded, unsure. Grandhe had a way of making even the simplest statement sound charged with terrible significance. Was this just an observation, or was it leading into something profound?
    ‘My enemies,’ said Grandhe and stopped. The three of them, Pashe, pahe and Tighe waited. Grandhe often began sentences with the words ‘my enemies’. He looked, slowly and seemingly with an effort at penetration, into the faces of Tighe and pashe in turn. ‘My enemies say that my grandchild frequents the house of the known heretic, of the dangerous man. This is damaging to me.’
    Tighe’s heart bucked. His thoughts went back to the night before. He had been to Witterhe’s house a few times, but last night was the first time anything that might be styled
heresy
had been spoken to him. And surely news about last night had not gone round the village already?
    ‘You’, said Grandhe again, lowering his gaze on Tighe once more, ‘are my only grandchild.’
    Tighe nodded again, but he could feel his face flushing. His heart was moving rapidly. But Grandhe said nothing more and a silence settled in the room. Grandhe Jaffiahe slurped up the rest of the milk, and wiped the eyebrow-thin line of white from his lip. Then he cleared his throat.
    ‘Daughter,’ he said, without looking at pashe, ‘you have lost a goat.’
    ‘I have, pahe,’ she replied in a soft voice.
    ‘I am sorry for your loss.’
    There was a quiet period. Tighe could see that his pahe could barely control an expression of astonishment from possessing his face. Pashe was unreadable.
    ‘Daughter,’ said Grandhe, ‘some of that goat was mine.’
    ‘That is true, pahe.’
    ‘At a time like this,’ said Grandhe, making a swoopy gesture with his right hand, ‘there is no need to press such debts.’
    Even pashe was surprised by this; her face showed it. But she struggled. ‘Why thank you, pahe,’ she said.
    Grandhe sniffed, dropped the hand to his side. Tighe stole another look. There was a rheum in his eyes that looked very like tears. His cheek quivered once, like the twitch that will sometimes pass over the face of a goat when bothered by flies. The motion dislodged some of the moisturefrom his eye and a bead of water slid downwards over his seamed cheek. Tighe had never seen Grandhe like this.
    ‘When God built the wall …’ he declaimed, suddenly loud as if beginning one of his sermons; but he broke off. There was a moment of silence.
    ‘Konstakhe is dead,’ he said, more softly. ‘He died in the night. God took him in the night.’
    Nobody said anything for a while. Then pahe offered, ‘What terrible news,’ in a tentative voice.
    ‘Death comes to us all,’ boomed Grandhe suddenly. ‘That is God’s way. That is why he has placed us on the wall, to remind us at all times of the precariousness of life, of the immediacy of death.’ But his preacher’s passion faded from the words as he spoke them and the sentence ended in little more than a whisper. Another tear trembled on the ledge of his underlid and then tumbled down his cheek. ‘He was a friend,’ he said.
    ‘I know,’ said pashe and reached out with her hand. But the touch seemed to spur Grandhe back into his manner. He stood up, abruptly, and spoke noisily. ‘We’ll be burning him today, of course, and it would be good for the whole