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his men. His booming voice scared him; he worried that he might be waking the dead.
    The moon rose. Gneuss watched in horror as a ray of light slithered over the battlefield. The night would hide the atrocities no longer. Under this moonlight shroud the ravaged lowlands stretched out for miles, scattered with corpses and wreckage. This light wasn’t like daylight; it showed you what lurked in the shadows, but only made you more afraid.
    Gneuss was on his feet, sweating. He wished he could run up a hill and snuff out that pallid night-light. Now that they could see him, he wondered what was keeping the dead from rising up and taking their revenge. It frightened Gneuss to see them so motionless; he shut his eyes and waited for something awful to happen.
    He was standing just like this when he felt something tepid and wet at his feet. He bent down to examine the groundand saw a thin trickle of blood. It nipped from pebble to pebble, carefree, emerging out of the darkness and into the moonlight, then winding back into the shadows like some enormous black-scaled snake with endless, wriggling coils. Gneuss jumped back, but he couldn’t shut his eyes; an excruciating spasm forced them wide open, fastening them on this gory rivulet.
    He watched it slowly widen and swell. The rivulet turned into a stream – a gentle, placid stream that any child could have skipped over. The stream turned into a crashing torrent, spraying reddish foam around its banks; the torrent turned into an immense, monumental river.
    This river was full of bodies; they were being carried along on the glut of blood that spurted from their wounds. It was a horrible, bizarre spectacle.
    Gneuss recoiled in front of the bulging river. He couldn’t see over to the other side; it seemed to him that the plain was now a lake.
    All of a sudden he was knocked down onto a rocky knoll. He regained his balance, before feeling a wave lap against his knees. The drifting corpses were jeering at him; their wounds turned into mouths that mocked his cowardice. The deep sea kept rising; it stained his hips. He made a huge effort to climb out, digging his hands and feet into the gaps between rocks. The rocks crumbled; he fell. It was up to his shoulders.
    A pale and miserable moon was watching over this sea that reflected no rays. The light hung in the sky. The howling black sea looked like a vast portal to a cavernous void.
    The waves rose, spraying Gneuss’s lips with their red spume.

2
    The noise of Elberg returning woke Gneuss at dawn. ‘Mate, I got lost in those woods. I must have nodded off after I sat down for a minute under a tree. I had some really bizarre dreams; my memory’s still clear even now I’ve been awake.
    ‘It was back at the beginning of time. The sky was like a great big smile. The unsown soil was spotless under the spring sunshine. The grass grew taller than the tallest of our oaks; the trees were covered with leaves like we’ve never seen. Sap ran freely through the earth’s veins, and there was so much of it that it didn’t stay only in the plants; it poured into the rocks too, bringing them to life.
    ‘A calm horizon shimmered. It was Nature, waking up. Like a child giving thanks to God for the morning light, it offered up all its scents and all its songs, lingering fragrances and inimitable music, so much so that I could hardly bear it, so holy did it seem.
    ‘The lush sweet soil bore fruit without labour. The trees grew with abandon; the roads were lined with wheatfields, just like today’s are lined with nettles. The air smelled fresh; there was no trace of our sweat. God alone worked to provide for his children.
    ‘Man lived off the fat of the land. He picked the fruits from the trees, drank spring water, and at night slept under the shelter of leaves. Meat disgusted him. He didn’t know what blood tasted like, and his palate valued only those foods that water and sunlight had made for him.
    ‘So man stayed blameless. His innocence