She nodded her thanks and hurried on down the hill, following one of the main drags that ran radially away down the Byrsa, and headed straight for the western gate.

It wasn’t hard to get out past the guards and through the gate. It might be harder to get back in. Well, she would use her bit of money.

She was shocked by what lay beyond the city wall. Once again this was something she had known about intellectually from Alxa’s descriptions, from complaints from Barmocar’s guests about the grubby crowds they had to pass through on their way into the city. The reality of it was astounding. It was another city, she saw, grown up out of nothing, a ramshackle metropolis built from spare stone and sagging bits of canvas and piled-up turf blocks – no wood, for that had all long gone to the hearths. Smoke rose up from desultory fires of peat or dung. Everywhere she looked she saw men moving listlessly, mothers holding silent infants, children playing in odd, aimless ways. Gaunt faces and stick limbs and swollen bellies. It was quiet. There was nothing like the noise you would have expected from such a crowd. But flies buzzed everywhere, and carts moved along the rough tracks that threaded between the hovels, carts towed by skinny men with their faces masked and bearing heaped-up bodies.

She felt a stab of anxious fear. But she must find Alxa.

She strode forward boldly, asking everybody she met if they knew about the Ana, the Northlander, Alxa. She got a few replies, listlessly given. They all pointed her away from the city, away, further out. The shanty town stretched out along the main road out of the city – the result of beggars competing to be first for the cash of arriving visitors, perhaps. She followed the road until the shacks and hovels began to thin out.

She came to a kind of compound, set aside from the road, marked by a loose ring of stones, a scratched mark in the earth. A handful of huts stood here, and smoke curled up from a central open fire. She saw men in masks and heavy gloves digging a pit.

As she was about to cross the line into the compound, a man limped over. ‘You don’t want to come closer,’ he called, his accent a thick country brogue, obscured by his mask. ‘Not unless you’re ill yourself.’

‘I’m looking for somebody,’ she said as clearly as she could. ‘The Ana, they call her. The Northlander.’

Above the mask his eyes narrowed, suspicious. ‘Who wants to know?’

‘I am her mother. Please, if she is here – tell her I have come.’

He hesitated. ‘Wait here.’ He hurried off to one of the huts. Not running, nobody living outside the city walls seemed capable of running any more.