Pilgrim had visited it with Master Able, who had advised the merchant about his purchases. It was as large as one of the bays of the Library’s Hall of Stones and Bones, with a marble floor in which fossil imprints of shells were inlaid, and adjustable skylights that could direct beams of sunlight on different specimens.

‘If the quarry could give up the bones of a thunder lizard, it would subsidise a life’s work,’ Pilgrim said. ‘But its fossils are marine, and from an earlier epoch. It would take no small amount of work to make money from them, but I think it’s possible.’

Willow had a hard time understanding why anyone would spend so much on a collection of creatures from the deep past. It seemed like flirting with the displeasure of the Mother, given that She was the author of the catastrophe which had destroyed them.

‘I don’t question why people want to collect them,’ Pilgrim said, suppressing the impulse to correct his sister’s misapprehension about the extinction of the thunder lizards. ‘But they do. If the men’s council won’t support my research, I’ll tell them how to make money from stones the quarrymen discarded out of superstition, and use my cut of the profits to subsidise my real work.’

‘Scholars may not be as unworldly as I thought,’ Willow said.

‘Master Able was the scholar; I was his secretary. I spent six years trying to balance his accounts and placating his creditors. After his family cut his stipend I did a little book-running on the side to make ends meet. Finding books scholars lusted after, buying them as cheaply as possible, selling them on. It did not make much, but helped to put food on the table, and paid for my master’s physics and salves.’

‘It would be better if you told them about the fossil trade, and left the research into the visitors out of it. Offer it up as a gift, and don’t mention why you want to take some of the profits. Explain that you want to give something back to the tribe. That you want to satisfy the great harmony.’

‘Setting up the fossil business would delay the research by many moonspans, which is why it is a last resort.’

‘But it’s the kind of thing the council is more likely to support,’ Willow said. ‘It would be a good idea to have a proposal to hand, setting out costs and likely profits. I’ll be happy to look it over. And you should have some examples to show the council, too.’

‘There’s the coilshell in the pups’ classroom.’

‘It might be better if you can show them some freshly collected material. The kind of things you want to sell.’

‘I hope there’ll be no need for it.’