Beside the road stood handsome properties, estates of well-constructed stone buildings clustered in rectangular plots. The estates were surrounded by carefully defined fields, and Rina recognised vines, olives, fruit trees. This hinterland, so close to this major route into town, must once have been a lush and prosperous place to live. But the vines looked withered, the fruit trees barren, and the few animals, sheep and cattle, cropped desultorily at sparse, yellow grass. There were some hastily heaped-up stone barriers, with threatening signs hand-painted in the angular local script. On the road there wasn’t much traffic – carts laden with produce heading back towards the city, a few carts heading out. And there was a thin trickle of nestspills, all heading to the city, all on foot. It was a sight Rina had become inured to in Northland. It was something of a shock to have come to the other end of the world to see the same thing.

Jexami’s property turned out to be a particularly large and well-built group of buildings set back from the road. In scraps of shade, servants watered orange trees. As Rina clambered down, the carriage-man stood by, eyes bright in a dusty face, waiting to be paid. He was thin, evidently underfed, dressed in dusty rags.

‘Typical of that crook Barmocar not to pay you in advance,’ she murmured in her own tongue. She switched to Greek. ‘Thank you . . . I don’t know your tongue, I am sorry.’ She dug her purse from a fold in her robe and withdrew Northlander scrip. ‘Is this enough? I’m sure you can convert this to your own currency in the counting houses . . .’

He took the handful of coins, stared at them, then tried to hand them back, speaking in his own tongue.

She closed his fingers over the coins. ‘This is your fee. If it’s not enough—’

He grew angry. He threw the coins on the ground and held out his empty hand, all but shouting.

‘I’ll take care of it.’ The voice was cultured Etxelur. A burly, expensively dressed man came walking quietly from an opened gate, a servant at his side. Rina, with relief, recognised him: it was indeed the Jexami she remembered, cousin to Ywa Annid of Annids, on Ywa’s father’s side, and so a remote cousin of Rina too. He snapped out questions to the carriage-man and gestured to his servant. Pay him. Jexami was shorter than Rina and a little younger, with thinning black hair cropped in the local style, and he wore a purple tunic and tight-cut trousers. He looked like a Carthaginian. Even his accent, when he spoke the language, sounded authentic to her. She would not have recognised the man if he had not spoken to her.

She bowed in the formal Etxelur style, ignoring her own grubbiness, and the scattering of coins at her feet. ‘Cousin Jexami. Thank you for meeting me.’