One time we met a little group of Hiding People, people who didn’t even live in a cluster but just wandered naked through the trees like animals do, eating whatever they could find, resting wherever they were when they felt tired, and hiding away from guards and Davidfolk. There were just five grownups and a bunch of kids, but Mary sat down with them for the rest of the waking, finding out what stories they told one another, so she should figure out how to talk to them and what it was that they needed to know. They spoke about a great Leopard Man they must feed with burnt meat to keep him happy, and a Slinker Man with a thousand bony claws, who’d crawl into their dreams and steal their shadows if they didn’t repeat certain words at the end of every waking, and rub ash into their skin.

‘Who looks after you, then?’ asked Mary. ‘If Leopard Man and Slinker Man are after you, who’s there to care for you in this ­dangerous world?’

‘The Great Mother,’ said the oldest of their women.

‘She’s like a bat that’s as big as the sky,’ a younger woman ex-plained. ‘Sometimes she flies across the stars, but mostly she lives deep down under the ground, using her big big wings to fan the fire.’

Their stories seemed so weird and childish that I had a job not to laugh at them, but Mary didn’t so much as smile. ‘What fire is that?’ she asked, like she really wanted to understand.

‘The one that warms the roots of the trees, of course,’ the old woman said. ‘The one that makes them grow. Without the Great Mother there’d be no heat or light. There’d be no food. There’d be no animals or starflowers. There’d be nothing alive at all.’

‘And where do your shadows go when you die?’ asked Mary.

The old woman laughed. ‘When we die, this dream ends and we wake up. No one knows in their dreams where they’ll be when they wake up. If they knew that, they wouldn’t really be dreaming in first place.’