‘There can never be a definitive answer, that’s not in the nature of philosophy—’

‘Now you have interrupted the bounty ceremony and carted us all off in here, and the mothers only know what our guests will make of that!’

‘You’ll understand why when I tell you—’

‘Tell us, then, man! What have you learned?’

He paused, and considered. ‘Only that we have the answers already. The cause of the dismal seasons we are suffering, as attested across the Continent too. Our ancestors knew it all along – or rather, they remembered.

‘Avatak, give me that scroll – no, boy, that one.’ He took the yellowing scroll, rolled it out, and began to read. ‘In the beginning was the Gap. / The awful interval between being and not being. / The tension of emptiness caused the creation of an egg, out of nothing. Its shell was ice and its contents were slush and mud and rock. / For an unmeasured time the egg was alone, silent.’

His gravelly voice, the familiar text, fixed the attention of everyone in the room. Alxa knew these words, as surely did everybody else. This was the mythos of Northland, the oldest, deepest part: the account of the earliest days, before history, before the Black Crime of Milaqa, before the heroism of Prokyid who defied the Second Great Sea, even before the exploits of Ana herself who had founded the Wall.

‘Then the egg shattered. / The fragments of its shell became ice giants, who swarmed and fought and devoured each other as they grew.

‘Meanwhile from the slush and mud grew the first mother. She gave birth to the three little mothers, and to their brother the sun, and to the earth serpent and the sky thunderbird. The first mother tended the ice giants as lovingly as her own cubs.

‘All time might have ended there, with the first mother and her family. / But for the restlessness and envy of the giants.

‘They fought each other for the attention of the mother, and drove off her true children. / At last, sadly but with love, she allowed the giants to destroy her in their wars.

‘Enraged and saddened, they threw the sun in the sky, and cast the little mothers into the dark. / Then they made the world from the mother’s body, the land from the bones of rock and the mud, the sea from her slush blood. / Their sculpting was violent and rough, which is why the world is such a jumble now, with shaved-off hills and valleys too big for the rivers that contain them . . .’ He skipped ahead. ‘The three little mothers and the sun had stood by dismayed while the giants fought. / Now the mothers spoke to the sun, and together they woke the shell of ice, and asked her to lift the weight of death from the world. She did so, and the ice sailed into the sky to become the moon. / The three mothers touched the revealed world, and shaped the wreckage the ice giants had left behind into a living world . . . I think that’s enough.’ He rolled up the scroll. ‘You see? You see?’ He slapped the scroll to emphasise his point. ‘It’s all – in – here.’