She proved to be adept at getting people to talk, and Pilgrim let her take charge of the interviews while he scribbled notes in a borrowed jotter; his wire recorder had been confiscated by Noble Seatree, along with everything else. Although they failed to find anyone who had encountered the visitors, a surprising number claimed to have seen, or knew or had heard of people who claimed to have seen, lights in the night sky or silvery seeds flying high and fast. One man told Poppy that several of his maras had been mutilated, and there had been strange footprints on the ground around the eviscerated corpses. Another said that his recently dead grandmother had come to him in a dream, and led him to an old-fashioned burrow in the shadow of a ruined bear city, where two silver-pelted strangers were waiting for him. He had talked with them for a long time, but couldn’t remember, on waking, what they had told him.

‘All I know is that I had to come here, where I will see them again,’ he said, smiling with the calm simplicity of a saint.

Most had come because they believed, or wanted to believe, Foeless Landwalker’s claim that the visitors had come to help people like them. They were hoping for miracles, from cures for the mortal illnesses of children and kin to an end to the droughts, wildfires and swarms of locusts which had afflicted the west coast for the past five years.

‘Making a living is hard at the best of times, and these times are far from the best,’ one young woman said. ‘People are starving themselves so they can feed their children. They’re eating seed corn that should be saved for planting the next harvest. Meanwhile the authorities still demand their tithe and in return give little relief and less charity. So it isn’t surprising that people take what hope they can find. Hope that these visitors will bring the changes the prophet talks about. Fix the world so there’s less suffering in it. Because right now there’s plenty of that to go around.’

An old man sitting on a folding stool beside a covered cart, neatly dressed in a blue velvet vest and canvas trews with neatly folded cuffs, studied Poppy and Pilgrim and said, ‘You’re from the Union, ain’t you? But you ain’t authority.’

‘We are scholars,’ Pilgrim said.

‘Trying to figure the truth of this, I’d guess.’

‘Something like that,’ Pilgrim admitted.