Once upon a time an English knight and a French knight were sitting side by side on a blanket, high on a hill under the branches of an olive tree, peeling oranges. Below them lay a lifeless village where every blackened room of every butchered cottage lay roofless and crudely exposed to the midday sun. On the hills around them, smoke from dozens of other villages mingled in the haze. Occasionally the bark of an abandoned dog echoed from somewhere in the deserted valley.

A little way off the French knight's priest and a small group of servants sat in a circle among the wild flowers. Nearby a young groom was watering the knight's brightly dressed horse and several mules which were hobbled in the shade of a Cyprus tree. The groom was being teased by two little girls who were trying to crown him with daisy-chains.

"Who are those girls?" the French knight asked.

"It's hard to say," the English knight replied. "I found them in a village two years ago. They were the only survivors. They had nowhere to go and attached themselves to me. They've never spoken a word and can't even tell me their names. They were aged about nine and ten. So, I still call them 'nine' and 'ten'!"

The Frenchman hugged his knees and gazed thoughtfully into the abandoned village below.

"And what brought you here?" he said at last.

"My king sent me here four years ago," the Englishman replied. "He and your duke are planning a new crusade. They know their armies have to pass this way. I'm here simply to observe, to report, to describe what I see."

"But this isn't war as they know it," the Frenchman said, "not a war of faith or principle. These are wolves fighting over the still-beating heart of a dismembered corpse. Will you tell them that?"

The Englishman laughed: "I'll tell them the truth," he said, "but they of course will only hear and believe what they wish to hear and believe "

"Naturally!" said the Frenchman, "How else would they persuade young men to throw away their lives two thousand miles from home!"

Just then the two girls came running towards them pointing excitedly into the valley. Shading their eyes from the sun, the knights saw a ragged band of men, women and ponies approaching across the valley floor.

"Looters again!" sighed the English knight wearily. And for a while the knights and their servants watched from the hill-top as the slowly advancing horde made its way towards the village.

But suddenly the English knight stiffened. He had spotted a wisp of fresh blue smoke rising from a chimney in one of the ruined cottages below.

"They must have hidden some of the women," he said, "and now the women think it's safe to come out. We'll have to try to warn them."

Leaving the others on the hill-top the French knight followed his friend in a headlong race into the valley. Twenty minutes later they stood panting among the cluster of ruins, the smell of burning mingled with the stench of rotting flesh. The looters had seen them coming and were now running off with whatever they had managed to scavenge.

The knights separated, the Frenchman heading for caves by the river while the Englishman searched the narrow, rubble-strewn alleys until he found the cottage with the smoking chimney.

Cautiously he stepped over a body slumped in a half-collapsed doorway, startling a rat which vanished into the corpse's gaping mouth. He found himself in a room open to the sky, the back half of it hidden by part of the collapsed roof. Treading carefully over the broken roof-tiles and smouldering timbers, for fear of traps or snares, he approached the dark space beyond. Gradually his eyes adjusted to the dim light.

On a table before him lay a young woman. Her shoulders were slightly raised against the wall and her hands and black hair were tethered to a ring above her head. She was naked from the chest down, staring in wide-eyed astonishment between her bare splayed knees. Between her feet, which were nailed to the table, lay a knife.

Appalled by the silence and white with fear and cold, the English knight took a step forward, and then another. Now he could see the long slack wound sagging from her rib-cage to the black triangle between her thighs. Looking down he found he was standing in the contents of her belly.

He turned and in retching spasms spewed the contents of his own belly down the wall beside her head.

Eventually he braced himself to face the woman again and with shaking fingers found himself unwinding her hair from her wrists and laying it around her shoulders. For one insane moment he thought her eyes had turned to look at him.

And then he was aware of figures in the doorway, the silhouettes of the two girls standing side by side, silent as ever.

"You shouldn't be here," he said gently. "Please go away "

But something in his voice only drew them closer. The younger girl took his hand and watched solemnly as her sister lowered the woman's smock to cover her waist.

It was then that he heard her speak for the first time in two years:

"She'll die soon," said the older girl, her head bowed and her hands folded in front on her.

He could no longer avoid the truth. The woman's ashen face had never moved, but her pleading eyes were indeed looking up at him. He had seen them once before, long ago, the large eyes of a pretty black colt in the candlelight.

"Go outside," he told the girls, "I'll join you soon."

From his pocket he drew a small knife and delicately opened an artery in her neck. She had little left to lose and it didn't take long.

Outside, the English knight sat absorbing the heat of the sun and watching the girls poking with sticks among the litter of other people's lives. Eventually the French knight joined them, his face giving no clue as to what he had found in the caves.

"What are you doing down here?" the Frenchman asked the girls with mock gravity, scarcely expecting a reply.

"We've been to see our mother... no, a lady," said the younger one in a clear voice, offering him a broken lamp and blushing when she heard her mistake.

"Ah!" said the Frenchman exchanging a glance with his English friend.

Hoisting the girls onto their shoulders they began the long climb back to the top of the hill.