Sabela held out the note she had been sent, written on reed paper, scrawled in a soldier’s hasty hand. It had found her eventually at her mother’s home on the other side of the city, where she had been visiting with the twins. ‘You sent me this? Your name is – C’merr.’ The click in the back of the throat, characteristic of lowlander tongues, was alien to Sabela’s own language.

‘C’merr – yes. And you are Sabela, wife of Deraj.’

‘You claim we offered to take you in.’

The woman frowned, perhaps puzzling at her speech. ‘Yes. Not you. Husband, Deraj.’

Sabela found that hard to believe; Deraj, busy running a wool business that spanned swathes of the highlands and thousands of llamas and alpacas, was not given to making sentimental gestures to unfortunates like this nestspill. Especially not to a grubby, unprepossessing – ugly – woman like this one. Deraj, for better or worse, had always had an eye for beauty. ‘You understand that the city is crowded.’

‘Crowd – yes.’

‘Many people come here for refuge.’ It had been a one-way flow from the lower lands for years. ‘We have no room.’

‘Deraj. He say.’

Sabela said coolly, ‘We never spoke of it.’

‘Deraj say.’

Sabela studied the woman. Her features were nondescript, the tone of her skin hidden by dust and the stains of sweat. ‘Where are you from? Were your family alpaca herders?’

‘No. Fisher folk.’

‘From the river valleys?’

‘Ocean.’

Sabela was shocked. If that was true, it was no surprise the little girl was having trouble breathing; not everybody born by the sea adapted well to the thin air up here. ‘You lost your living there.’

‘Fish died. Years ago. Only one baby then. We moved, and grew beans.’

That would have been in the river valleys, above the coast, marginally richer land where folk grew beans and squash and cotton, in farms irrigated by summer meltwater from the mountain glaciers. ‘And then?’

‘No water. No rain. No rivers in summer.’ Because the summers had got so cold the glaciers stayed frozen, and there was no meltwater. ‘Then more babies. We grew potatoes.’ In the mountain foothills, probably. ‘Not bad.’ She grinned, almost wistfully. ‘Grew fat, one summer. But then, no water. Then came here.’

‘Where’s your husband?’

‘Died. Fighting in war.’

Sabela had no idea which war she might be talking about; the whole region, the mountain country, the coastal strip, even the borders with the forest nations to the east, had been convulsed by raids and petty wars for years. So, after fleeing step by step from her home by the ocean, climbing gradually into the highlands, the woman had ended up here, at the summit of the world, the home of the gods, like so many others.

‘C’merr – I’m sorry for your troubles. But Deraj never said anything to me about you.’