In the morning Rina woke early as she usually did.

She walked outside, breathing air that was fresh and crisp, with a tang of frost – not an unpleasant mix, but it felt autumnal, even though the summer solstice was barely gone. The travellers had been ordered to keep within a perimeter around the dock marked by a crude chalk line scrawled on the cobblestones. Rina walked up to the line now, looking to the south bank of the river. Raised up on an artificial mound very like the flood mounds that studded Northland, she could see a sky temple, rings of massive stones polished until they shone. In the low light of the morning sun priests in white robes walked and bowed and prayed to ancient gods. But other deities were being addressed too. Banners had been set up within the innermost stone ring, showing the crossed palm leaves of Jesus, the star of Islam, even the crescent moon and outstretched finger of Baal Hammon and his consort Tanit, gods of Carthage. A temple of many faiths for this city of traders, and all the gods, she imagined, would be subject to ardent prayers for summer.

A soldier, patrolling in his face mask and bearing an ugly-looking spear, waved her back, and called something in his own guttural tongue. He looked ill himself; he coughed into his mask, his forehead was slick with sweat despite the cold. She hurried away, back to the warehouse and her children.

30

Pyxeas and his party, heading steadily east, were in a more varied country now, of arid plains, green valleys, towering snow-capped peaks. Water was more readily had, there was grass for the camels to graze on, and the caravanserai were more frequent, often no more than an easy day’s ride apart. Here the way stations were called robats, in the local tongue, which came from an old word for a rope to tie up your horse. But just as further west, they were like small walled towns where you drove your animals into the shelter of the walls for the duration of your stay.

In the evenings, as Pyxeas studied or slept, Avatak sat shyly in bars with Jamil and Uzzia. Uzzia drank beer and wine and a particularly disgusting concoction that turned out to be fermented mare’s milk, a speciality of the Mongols. Jamil preferred hot tea, and when he wasn’t happy with the local offering he asked for boiling water and used dried leaves he carried with him. As for Avatak, who got drunk too easily, he stuck to watered beer. He listened to conversations in a hundred tongues, about the wealth that flowed through these little communities, from gleaming gems called rubies to the medicines and narcotics made from the produce of the poppy fields which spread wide to either side of the trails across much of this country. There were plenty of blood-chilling tales of bandits too.