The old man wanders the avenues of the garden, halting to smell the flowers or observe a bee, with the sun warming his shoulders. Birds chatter in the blossom trees. The stream burbles across the pebbles. Butterflies flit silently from petal to petal. Under the dappled shade of an ivy trellis he walks and then hears the crunch of their boots on the sand.
‘Master, you are needed,’ says a breathless young man at the head of a small company of warriors.
The old man observes them. His aged eyes take their time to drink in the details of the people standing over his carefully raked sand garden, now trodden and disordered.
‘It’s urgent,’ insists the young warrior. ‘One has been sighted at the border.’
The old man nods. There is only one thing they might come all the way up the mountain for. It’s likely none of them are old enough to have ever seen one alive, let alone prowling the border of their homes.
The old man points at the ruined lines of sand at their feet. ‘Clear that up,’ he says. ‘Then we’ll talk about this angel of yours.’
Paddy Dobson
10th January 2022