The sky had been lightening in their direction of travel. No fiery industrial sunrise but a grey-whitening that crept in from the east by imperceptible degrees until the first bright edge of the sun was eating up the residue of mist over the river. What Lee had written off as “just more geography” was touched by that light and transformed into something quite different. A village, as promised. She felt as if she was caught in one of those TV shows where popular archaeologists showed you computer images of a Bronze Age landscape before tearing up some farmer’s field with a JCB. She saw a mound of earth which was too regular, and too close to the river, to be a natural hill. Atop it were a handful of rough domes that looked like they’d been woven from sticks, like bowerbird nests brought down to the ground. Around the mound, another thirty or so dwellings of various sizes were scattered about. Initially, the grouping seemed random. However, the more Lee stared, the more the whole seemed arranged to some plan beyond her human comprehension. There were pens here and there, and she could make out the huddled forms of livestock within. And there was smoke rising in thin serpentine trails from at least half the huts: fire, warmth, cooking.

“Welcome,” Mal said, “to New Goldblum.”

They were spotted soon after, and a rider veered out towards them, cutting a curving path over the tall grass. Lee stared, but somehow she was ready for this: a puffball-feathery dinosaur wearing a leather cape and a feather headdress, both patterned in the full spectrum of the rainbow. It was crouched on a wooden-block saddle atop a murder-ostrich, which was itself barded with a saddlecloth of red and white bars. Looking past, she saw at least two dozen of the reptiles gathered between the huts. They’d been called away from their morning ablutions, no doubt, by the arrival of creatures from another world.

There were three javelins sheathed beside the thing’s saddle, and for a moment Lee thought: So this is how I die. The dinosaur’s jaws were gaping, enough to show her a hundred or so curved teeth. Yet she also caught a voice on the wind: at first just bird squawks and whistles, but then, “Mal! Mal!”

Mal waved at it. “Hi! Hola! Hi!”

“Hi, Mal! Clever Girl!” Within ten feet of them, it leant in the saddle and its mount trotted to a halt, shaking its axeblade beak at them disapprovingly. The rider cocked its head, bright gaze flicking from one to the other. “Mal-Mal,” it noted, and then uttered a gabble of clucking sounds.

“You speak their language?” Lee asked.