But the city was closed. The landward side was surrounded by a stout wall, the gates were firmly barred. The wave of nestspills broke against this wall, and the result was a kind of ghost town of misery, with no provision for food or water, and sewage flowed down improvised gutters. The Carthaginian party cautiously passed through. Barmocar, weary, frustrated, angry, said loudly that it would be better if the plague came and swept these purposeless wretches off the face of the earth, just so long as they got out of his way.

Just like the nestspills, however, Barmocar and his party were excluded from Massalia. It was fear of the plague, yes, that and a shortage of food. But his party was allowed to pass around the city to the harbour – and here, to everybody’s relief, the ships he had ordered were waiting, at least some of them. Again there was a weary flurry of packing and repacking, a shedding of still more goods, by now endured in grim silence.

Nelo was fascinated by the ships. They were quite unlike the wide-bodied sailing ships of the Northland fishing fleet. These vessels of the Middle Sea were sleek, driven by sails supplemented by banks of rowers, and they had mighty spikes fixed to their prows. They were ships designed to fight on an enclosed ocean that had been an arena for warfare for millennia.

As the ships were loaded, on this summer afternoon in Massalia, on the shore of the Middle Sea, the sky clouded over, and the air grew cold, and Rina watched snowflakes, just a few, fall from the sky.

They left the harbour the next day, at dawn. The wind was low, and they had to take to the oars; the professional seamen Barmocar had hired were supplemented by volunteers from among the passengers.

Cautiously they sailed down the eastern coast of Ibera. On the open sea Barmocar’s soldiers kept an eye out for pirates. At night they put into land at small harbours away from the main population centres. Nobody knew what condition the communities on land were in after years of drought, after the plague. Some slept on the land; Rina, who found the movement of the creaking ship on the slow swell of the sea quite soothing, preferred to remain on board.

One night Rina was woken by a wind off the land that made the ship heave and roll, and the air moaned in the rigging.