‘Alxa is dead,’ she said bluntly. ‘The plague. Nelo is at the war. I’ve heard nothing of him for months.’ Strange to think, when she summed it up like that, that she had come here in the first place to protect her children.

‘Alxa,’ he whispered. ‘I heard of her. The work she did to support the dying – remarkable. And you are untouched.’

‘Some are spared, for no reason that any can see.’

‘I thought that of myself . . . I had lasted so long. But then it came for me, it came. I heard Pyxeas is alive. That he is here, in Carthage.’

‘Yes. Though I have not been able to see him myself. He made it to Cathay and back! He got here just before the equinox, he and that Coldlander boy of his. He had to talk his way through the Hatti siege to get into the city. How did you know?’

Jexami’s face twitched; perhaps he was trying to smile. ‘His was an epic journey, though I never saw the point of it myself. News of it travelled – something to admire, an achievement to light up a time of blackness.’

The maid returned with the water. Rina wet a cloth, and sponged drops into Jexami’s mouth.

‘You wonder why I summoned you,’ he whispered.

Summoned. Even now, that haughty term.

‘Listen to me.’ His hand closed on hers, the last of his strength. ‘I don’t want to die and finish up as these Carthaginians do. Oiled up and stuck in a hole in the ground. And nor will I be thrown into a pit with the poor people . . .’

He wasn’t alone in obsessing how he would die; she had seen it a hundred times. And, she saw, he was to remain a snob even beyond his death. ‘What, then?’

‘I want to die a good Northlander, as I believe I’ve lived like one, for all I have been seduced at times by the ways of the city folk. Take me home, Rina. Don’t leave me here. Take me home and bury me in the Wall, facing the sea, like all our ancestors back to the age of Ana and Prokyid. One day this weather will relent, or even if it does not there may be a way . . . Say you will do this for me.’

‘Of course,’ she murmured. ‘Rest now. You will sleep for ever in the Wall, with your mother, your father, all your family, under the care of the little mothers . . .’

His eyes fluttered closed. Perhaps he slept.

She stayed with him until the daylight started to fade.