The Ancient. Muriel Gray
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MURIEL GRAY
The Ancient
HarperVoyager an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015
Copyright © Muriel Gray 2002, 2015
Cover photograph © Stewart Sutton/Getty Images; Shutterstock.com (sky, sea, mist)
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Muriel Gray asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008158262
Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 9780007404438
Version: 2015-10-29
For
Hamish, Hector, Rowan and
Angus James Barbour, with love
Contents
In other circumstances, Eugenio might have given the rat a name. Rats, and the bold rats of this sun-baked slum more than most, were hard to capture. He might have kept it under a crate and thrown it pieces of food, simply to be its master, to control it, to confine it, the way his own life was determined by pinched-faced adults.
But this rat was to die. It was their sacrifice, and as such, it needed no name.
The creature writhed and thrashed in the soiled canvas bag that Eugenio held out from his body. His two companions watched, eyes big in anticipation, waiting for their leader, their priest, to guide them.
As the oldest at nine years of age, Eugenio felt the weight of that responsibility: he moulded his face into an expression of suitable solemnity as he kicked at a piece of hardboard in the rubbish.
‘Here.’
The two smaller boys glanced at him, then went to work, pulling the wood from the malodorous pile, farmers lifting a diseased crop from a toxic field. This slowly-shifting glacier of garbage was their home, their playground, their store cupboard. The fetor had long since ceased to make any impact on their senses, nor did the uniformity of its colour and texture, a mosaic of