‘I have nothing but what others tell me.’

‘That is not true,’ he says. ‘Tell me of your life here, your life before.’

Fields, she thinks, brothers, and a sick mother. Restlessness. Want.

‘Life here is much changed lately,’ she says. ‘For years it was the same, Heinrich and Sophey and me and the bees. Agnethe is only recently returned.’

‘From where?’

‘The mountains.’

‘I noticed her hair, of course. But that is something of her. What of you?’

Lisbet feels like a child caught out at simple addition. One added to one, and the answer a blank. What has she to tell?

‘What about the bees?’ he prompts. ‘They are fascinating creatures. How do you care for them?’

She seizes upon his suggestion with gratitude. He listens with the same expression he’d had while she darned his shirt, his eyes hooded. But this time it is not silent music he hears, but her, and she pours her learning about the bees into him. How they lead others to flowers by dancing, how the king never leaves the hive unless it is damaged, how honey tastes different hive to hive and comb to comb, how they can swarm thick as mist and kill a man. How she no longer needs gloves to tend them, how the poison troubles her only a little. How she knows how to breathe, now, how to make her heart slow and her movements as though through water, and so can calm them by the rhythms of her body.

‘You speak as though you love them,’ he says, but his voice is serious, no hint of jest, and she breathes yes, yes that is it exactly.

‘I am the same with my lute, though it does not live,’ he says. ‘It lives when I hold it, and so I become fully alive too. There are not words closer for it than this.’

Lisbet leans back against the boulder, cupping her belly. ‘How did you come to play?’

‘My father,’ he says, pulling his knees up to his chest like a boy. ‘That is how he paid our way, in the beginning. We came from Constantinople when I was a boy. I barely remember it, but for the music. That, my father brought with us.’

‘You have brothers?’

‘Sisters. Five living. All married and elsewhere. One went back, but the others are here.’

‘In Strasbourg?’

‘We are not welcome in Strasbourg. Other places it is not so bad.’

‘And your wife?’

He looks at his hands, spreads them wide, his fingers slender as vines. On an exhale he closes them and says, ‘Dead.’

‘I am sorry.’ She waits, thinking he might elaborate, but the silence grows into something gritty and she breaks it. ‘Do you play it for the dancers? The music of your father?’

‘Never,’ he says. ‘It is not the sort of music they want. Arabism is a crime in Strasbourg.’

‘Why do you stay?’

‘Why should I not?’ There is anger there, flared like a caught flame, and then it is gone again.