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There were flickers of red in the water, a tint the colour of blood He stood in the river, naked as a stone, and opened his hands and drew the water to his lips and tasted it He knew the tastes of the river well, its differences like moods, as after a storm when the earth washed down from the fields and the clay sediment left his mouth bone dry He gazed upstream at the horizon, at the evening sun and the evening sky, at the river He was cold and began to shake, and though it was the beginning of summer and the air was warm his lips turned a bright blue   A package wrapped in cloth came to a still against his stomach and he scooped it from the water and unwrapped a small baby, so dead that it seemed a doll, and strange though it was, he reparcelled the dead thing in the cloth and returned it to the river where he watched it go, turning his toes in the silt and stones, his feet hardened against the medley of sharp rocks that formed the riverbed He remembered the still hot corpses of the burnt out men in what was left of the church, expiring smoke from their chimney mouths and whistling like so many kettles His father smouldering among them   A larger body appeared in chase of the child Signs of torture riddled the chest and face of the man, who was dead and naked He took hold of the body and waded through the river with it wrapped intimate in his thick arms and lifted it onto the rocks and laid it down He sat facing the water and waved the flies from the dead man’s pulpy face There followed another man, spilling over himself in the shallow breaks, reaching out a hand – it looked like He caught the second man, but he was also dead and he dragged him clear of the current and left him in the company of his fellow corpse Their black and bloody faces twinned by bruising