‘Yes.’ Mago snorted with laughter. ‘An empty country. A ghost of a place. The ghost that rules the Continent.’ He turned, dropped onto his back, flipped up his legs, locked them around the Hatti’s neck, and sent him flying.

‘Oof!’

Mago got to his feet, yelled, leapt cat-like into the air, and would have slammed down on the Hatti – had not Arnuwanda rolled out of the way at the crucial moment, so that Mago came down hard on the floor. ‘Oh, by the bones of Melqart . . .’

‘Always a mistake to rely on mercenaries, I say,’ the Hatti said. He crawled over to the Carthaginian and drove his elbow into the small of Mago’s back. ‘Had enough now?’

A horn sounded, distant, carrying.

Alxa glanced at her brother. ‘The eruptors?’

‘Yes. That’s the first call.’ Nelo tucked away his sketches. ‘Come on. Let’s put these two back on their leashes.’

They walked towards the princes, who broke and stood, panting, sweating, wiping dust and powder from their skins. Mago grinned at Alxa. He said in his own clipped Carthaginian tongue, ‘I saw you watching.’

She replied in crisp Greek, ‘I saw you lose.’

Arnuwanda frowned. ‘You understand Greek? You should have had the manners to tell us so.’

Nelo said, ‘And you should have had the manners not to insult your hosts.’

Arnuwanda faced Nelo, glaring. He wasn’t as showy as the Carthaginian, Alxa saw, his musculature wasn’t as impressive, or, come to that, his manhood, but the Hatti had a composure, an inner strength, his opponent evidently lacked. And here he was facing down her brother.

Alxa stepped between the two of them. ‘Let’s be friends,’ she said calmly. It wasn’t good for a student diplomat to get into fist fights with foreign guests.

Nelo was angry too, but he nodded and stepped back. With a sneer, the Hatti took a towel from his opponent and turned away.

‘So you heard it all,’ said Mago. ‘Well, what of it? Anything ring uncomfortably true? The charges of hypocrisy, of greed—’

‘Insults cast by the ignorant,’ Alxa said. ‘One thing you were wrong about, though.’

‘What’s that?’

‘We don’t rely on mercenaries for our protection. Not entirely.’ That horn sounded again. ‘Get yourselves back up to the roof before the third sounding and you’ll see.’

She walked away, with Nelo, without looking back.

5

As the second horn sounded, and the evening of the long midsummer day approached, the three women from the Western Continents who had stood near Rina earlier met in a bar, set in the face of the Wall.

Walks In Mist had discovered this tavern. It was on the fringe of the Wall District called the Springs, a precise eight hundred paces from Etxelur, a place full of taverns, hostels and, Walks in Mist suspected, brothels. This place seemed respectable enough; built into a terrace in the face of the Wall, it gave onto a balcony overlooking Old Etxelur and the lowland.

Her friends joined her now, Sabela from the southern continent’s High Country in her robe of llama wool, and Xipuhl from the Land of the Jaguar with her fine steel mirror at her breast. Walks In Mist herself, from the Land of the Sky Wolf, wore her eagle feathers in her hair. Each of them proclaimed who they were in this baffling, crowded place – the centre of the world, if only for midsummer.