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his handbell, and speaks to everyone.
    Musicians sometimes play and sing from the gallery. Last year, a man with a cymbal and stick climbed up without our noticing him while his wife was singing a song about how a wicked knight seduced and then abandoned a miller’s daughter. “Wicked!” cried the woman. And her husband up in the gallery clashed the cymbal with his stick, and gave us all a great shock. There’s not enough room up there for dancers or mummers, though, because it’s only one pace wide.
    Two little rooms lead out of the gallery. They are like nests under the eaves. The first room is stuffed with barrels of wheat and barley. My father thinks it’s prudent to keep some food stored inside the house, in case the Welsh raiders do come and stop us getting out to the kitchen or the barn. But our mice and rats don’t like waiting. Our meal for tomorrow is their meal today. “Grab it! Scoff it!” That’s what they squeak.
    If they hear what happened to the jumpers, the raiders won’t be in a hurry to come. They may not risk coming at all. It was last November. Just before dawn the jumpers tried to climb into our chamber through one of the little windows. But my father heard them. He rolled out of bed and picked up his sword. Then he crept over to the window and stood to one side of it and raised his sword.
    As soon as the first man put his head through the window, my father brought his sword down. He cut the jumper’s head right off.
    â€œQuick!” said a muffled voice outside.
    Then the second jumper gave the first one’s twitching legs a push, so that the rest of him fell into the chamber.
    â€œGo on!” said another voice. “Quick!”
    So the second jumper heaved himself up and stuck his head through the window. Then in the gloom he saw…and at once he tried to jerk himself back. But his friends outside were holding onto his legs and trying to push him into the chamber. Then the jumper yelled and my father crashed the sword down for a second time.
    â€œHis head was still yelling after I had sliced it off,” my father said.
    I don’t think that can be true, because our words and sighs and screams and farts are all made out of air—the air we breathe in through our mouths and down into our lungs. Merlin has got a whole skeleton folded up in a chest, and he got it out once and explained this to me.
    When the men outside heard their friend yell, they ran away, and we don’t even know how many of them there were. But after that, my mother wouldn’t sleep in the chamber for a long time.
    The bodies of the two men were buried in the same pit in the north corner of the churchyard, while their heads were buried in a hole in the south corner.
    â€œAnd that way,” said Oliver, “their ghosts won’t be able to trouble you.”
    Then Tanwen got Ruth from the kitchen to help her. They took out all the chamber-rushes and burned them. They even washed the clay floor with wet cloths. Then they brought in fresh rushes, and laid them, and laced them with sprigs of rosemary and tansy and thyme.
    After that, my father asked Oliver to say prayers of purification in the chamber.
    Even so, my mother wouldn’t sleep in there. She had the mattress of the Great Bed dragged into the hall, and that’s where she and my father slept all through the winter.
    After that, my father had the two little chamber-windows almost blocked in. They are just slits now, and Sian is the only one who can get her wrists through them.
    The second little room off our gallery is empty. The inner walls are quite soft. If I so much as touch them, they sprinkle me with flakes and pale powder. The outer wall is made of stone, though, and sparrows often fly in through the wind-eye and pick and peck at the mortar, because they like the taste of lime. The gaps they have made between the blocks of dressed stone are homes for all kinds of little creatures.