‘Surely,’ Rika had said after their last visit to the fjords, ‘by the time we next go, it will be different.’ It’d been a punishing visit, made at new year, just the two of them. Maybe that was the mistake – there was nothing to deflect from the flatness of her stomach and the smallness of her breasts. Aaron said she was a natural concern to them – ‘give them time to get used to you’ – but for Rika time was exactly the issue.

‘Come with us,’ she said to Martha as the next visit loomed.

‘Why not,’ Pete said. ‘It’ll do us good. Get you out of the library.’

He’d been there before as part of his research on exchange and the gift. Martha had never been. She didn’t go into the villages, not to stay, not often.

‘Please come,’ Rika said to Martha. ‘You could be my second eyes. Aaron thinks I exaggerate and the women aren’t turning against me. But he’s always with the men, and I’m alone when things happen.’

Rika was hard to refuse when she wanted something, so they went, the four of them, and Martha accepted the role that was cast for her.

It was a clear morning when they crossed the ranges, with the peaks rising to a high dome of sky. Below them, the forest canopy swelled with such voluptuousness Martha wouldn’t have been surprised to see cherubs or ancestor figures resting there. Pete laughed at her, and so did Aaron. The only beings they saw were the young boys, who crowded around the plane when it came down at a mission strip to deliver mail and supplies, and then ran along the grass, chasing it as it took off again, up over the vast expanse of forest. Rika pushed her hair back from her face and frowned.

At Popondetta, out on the flat, they landed on the old military strip and came to stop at a small shed beside a road. An oil-palm worker who came from the fjords climbed in behind a clerk from a store in town, who was some kind of complicated relative of Aaron’s. Names were offered with much laughing and hand-shaking. They were on their way home, like Aaron, for the vasái, the ritual feast of the clans. It was the first since a cyclone had ripped along their coastline the year before, wrecking gardens and flattening houses – a bad omen with self-government coming up so soon, which was why Derek let Aaron go. There were enough troublesome omens along the coast and he could do some useful work while he was over there, smoothing the political path, so Derek signed off on a week. A whole week! By the time the pilot closed the door of the Cessna and swung himself up into his seat, there was a festive mood inside the small cabin. ‘All aboard?’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’ And off they went, back down the runway, taking off over the oil-palm plantations, skimming the coastal forests until the fjords came into view, punching out from the mountains, their steep sides a vivid green against the rich blue of the Solomon Sea.