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He dreams of it in the cold May, when the blossom whitens the boughs like snow and in the morning his breath catches in his mouth like a kiss: a fool that self-damned policeman may have been from his lawful prating to his wasteful chastity, but he had the right of it when he shouted across the fire. When the substitute fails the harvest, it is the king of the land who must shed his own blood to redden the roots of his orchards, blush his apples as ripe as his own heart, whose ashes will be dug into the readied earth that each green thing that grows thereof might raise him closer to the leaf-masked sun; he has known it since his father walked him down the hothouse lanes of his inheritance, close-planted with all manner of trees that should have stunted on this island of salt and stone, since he was old enough to turn the stiff copperplate pages of his grandfather's journals and understand that his religion was no older and no less real than the sharp-sweet crunch of his favorite apple, the quirky, russeted one whose twigs he touches as gently as a lover, bridal-frosted in the nip of the spring air. Too early to tell from the fruit, the sacrifice may yet pass from him as the world grows—he reads the literature—in science and heat, but it amuses him nonetheless to wake from his cage of branches and imagine the face of that frightened, determined sergeant if he could but see himself as Summerisle dreams him, fool turned king turned blaze of new-blooded sun, vine-bearded and flourishing, watching his island's lord burn.