They found rooms on the outskirts of the city, for an exorbitant rent, and they got a lousy price when they tried to sell their horses. Avatak concluded that despite their haste the rumours about the Khan’s fate had reached this city, and things were falling apart. Uzzia disappeared to find a ship. Pyxeas withdrew to his bed in the rented room.

Avatak cautiously explored Quinsai.

Yes, it was like Hantilios, as Uzzia had promised, but so overwhelmingly larger in scale it made comparisons with that city seem specious. Like Hantilios, Quinsai was built on a lagoon strewn with islands. Canals ran everywhere, crowded with waterborne traffic and crossed by many bridges. These canals were straight and clean, with none of the fetid stink of Hantilios. A freshwater lake embraced one side of the city, and a river to the other side kept the canals clean of stale water.

The city itself was an artificial landscape of wide squares, and broad, straight streets paved with baked brick, and magnificent houses, most of them built of wood. There were pavilions, temples, palaces. Every day the great squares were full of market stalls where you could buy foodstuffs, clothing, heaps of shoes and bales of silk and wool, racks of jewellery – and full of crowds, Cathay and Mongols and many others, Persian, Muslim, Carthaginian, Rus, even Northlanders, and exotic folk Avatak had never seen before, perhaps from further east. And full, too, of entertainers, jugglers and magicians and acrobats. Avatak heard a rumour of a man who had trained a fish to wear a hat and perform various tricks, but never saw him.

Far though he walked in his brief time in Quinsai, Avatak knew he did not get a sense of its true scale. He suspected that a western city like Hantilios could be lost without trace here.

‘Of course it is beautiful,’ Pyxeas whispered when Avatak described all this in the evening. ‘A beautiful and ancient city built by a beautiful and ancient people. This is how Cathay was, before the Mongols came along to build their temples to vulgarity and greed, like Daidu. And of course it is crowded. We are a good way south of Daidu – that much further south of the eventual march of the ice. This place will not be spared – nowhere will be spared – but comparatively, Quinsai may prosper, and so people will flock here like migrating birds. But this is an occupied city despite its beauty, as you can tell from the number of soldiers on the streets – Mongols all, I’ll wager.’ And he fell silent again, retreating inward to his own inner mesh of calculation.

He was right, of course, and the soldiers became more obvious when night drew in. Towards midnight great drums were beaten to signal the curfew, a pulsing rhythm that crossed the city air.