‘Where have Pete and Aaron gone?’ Martha asked.

‘They drive towards the university.’

‘How was Aaron?’ The real question, from Rika.

‘He was cross, like this,’ Wilkie said. He pulled down his mouth and for a moment looked exactly like Aaron when the weight of what was coming bore down on him. ‘Smoking plenty of cigarettes.’

Rika frowned. She’d taken to wearing her hair tied back. It gave her a severe, uncompromising look. Grim was Pete’s word, and he was right; there’d been a change in her.

On the stands at the stadium, Laedi and the girls had watched the match with the Highlanders from the camp on the hill behind their house. Neighbours wouldn’t have put up with their shacks and their gardens, their tramping to and fro, if it weren’t for Laedi, and because of Laedi not so much as a lemon was taken from a tree, or an egg from a chicken coop. They got water and an electricity cable from her, and were fiercely loyal, but that afternoon at the stadium they surged off into the fight, leaving her alone with two small children in a turmoil of shouting people.

Laedi got the girls out by a side gate, where she ran into a priest from the mission. He was surrounded by sobbing teenage girls with torn clothes, their hair messed up in tufts. They’d been taunting the losers when they found themselves surrounded by angry Highland men. The priest had waded in to rescue them, and having hauled them out had no idea what to do with them. At the sight of Laedi, he crossed himself and handed them over. All around people were vomiting from the tear gas, men were being loaded into police vans; an old lady was sitting in the middle of the road, tears pouring down her face. Laedi got most of the girls onto a PMV, one of the last to take passengers, pulled the old lady to safety and bundled the rest into her car. By the time they reached Hohola they were no longer crying, though in the space of a few miles their ordeal had escalated: they would be ‘dead finish’ if it hadn’t been for the priest and the spirit of Jesus. For the rest of the evening the story grew: the savagery of the Highlanders, the bravery of the priest, the power of holy Jesus.

Bili was scowling. A Highland girl with her chin in a stance worthy of her grandmother, she went up the back to guard her chickens.

In Laedi’s kitchen, Rika was slumped on a chair. Sweat was pooling under her breasts, but all she felt was cold. A creeping edge of fear was upon her again. Fear for Aaron, fear for herself, and for the child who hadn’t yet come. His clan-sisters might think the inability to summon up a child was hers, but she knew it was his. She’d consulted a Chinese herbalist in town; she took her temperature each morning, and knew she was ovulating.