Goodwill led the way at a good pace; natives were descended from animals that had been most active after dusk, and their vision in crepuscular light was much better than that of humans. They were passing through a store of artefacts unearthed from the ruins of bear cities. Granite millstones, surfaces cut with different patterns of grooves. Rows of stone pestles and mortars. A huge wooden plough, apparently hauled by a team of slaves. Flint adze heads and chisels, ground stone axe heads. Hundreds of flint arrowheads, diamond or leaf shapes with serrated edges. Harpoon points and knife blades shaped from polished flint, from black volcanic glass. Big wooden clubs, some with sharp fragments of flint or jasper or glass set in their business ends, battle axes with stout wooden hafts and blades of polished jade as long as Ysbel’s forearm, and maces crowned with polished cobblestones as big as her head. The bears which had wielded these weapons had been only a little bigger than humans, but they considerably outmatched human strength.

Goodwill and Ysbel left the cabinets and shelves of tools and domestic implements and weapons behind and entered a small forest of the carved wood and stone slabs which had marked the graves of bear royalty. Goodwill said that his great-grandfather, Bearbane, had donated several of these stelae, collected when he had helped Master Able survey the ruins of a bear city and sink a shaft into a grave mound where hundreds of generations of kings and their wives and children had been buried.

‘Years later, Bearbane recommended my uncle for the position of Master Able’s secretary, and here we are.’

‘You are proud of your family’s history.’

‘Few from my tribe found fame or fortune in the wider world. My great-grandfather was one of them and my uncle was another, although his part in First Contact has been mostly forgotten. My tribe was embarrassed by it, to tell it straight. Especially now, with the growing resentment against your people and the changes they have caused.’

‘Your society was already changing,’ Ysbel said. ‘All we did was help you get where you were going a little sooner.’

‘If anything, my tribe has become more conservative,’ Goodwill said. ‘I was the sixth pup in my family. The youngest. My eldest sister took over the running of my mother’s tea business, and like most of the men in my family I was expected to become either a forester or a herder. I lit out for the New Territories instead, and after trying my hand at fishing I became a lawkeeper. My mother says that I am like my uncle. Restless. Curious about the world.’

It was a kind of confession that lay bare the contours of his pride and stubbornness, and Ysbel was touched by the implied trust. She said, ‘What happened to the stelae your great-grandfather donated?’