Across the grass, in the shade of Noah’s house, the elders of the chiefly clan leaned forwards.

‘Pete will like this,’ Rika said, looking across to him hovering on the edge of their deliberations with his notebook. ‘They’re figuring out how to placate the younger brother clans, without upsetting the vasái. I told Aaron that Jacob would try something. He’ll be behind this delay, I’m sure of it.’ She gestured inland, across the fjord to the adjacent peninsula, from which the host clans still hadn’t signalled for the feast to begin. ‘So much for alliance!’ she said. ‘It’s all rivalry, and strategy. Look at them!’

Pete had drawn Martha a diagram before they left Moresby. Two pairs of reciprocal arrows pointed in two directions: one between the chiefly clans, who maintain alliances in the broader politics of the fjords; the other between chiefly clans and the younger brother clans with whom they share gardens and resources and the daily fare of village life. These clans might not be chiefly, may even be regarded as lesser, but they were powerful in their own realms, for they owned the knowledge that governed such essentials as the fertility of gardens and the availability of fish. And sorcery. The problem with them, as Martha could see from the stamping and the shouting, was that they were prone to be impulsive, rushing into conflict, if not constrained by the elders. From her vantage point under the mango tree, listening to Naomi’s explanation as the mood darkened, it seemed to Martha that the aim of the vasái was as much to disturb Pete’s neat arrows as to preserve their reciprocal neatness. Gift and enmity, Pete called his research.

Out on the dance ground, young men had hung up their headdresses and were hollering. One line of dancers marched away, saying they’d not go when the invitation came, so great was the insult. Others, shouting in protest, walked over to the platform where the heads of the elders had drawn closer. Under their tree, the women were making soft whistling sounds. The children were quiet, their large eyes following the flurries of anger.

‘What happens now?’ Martha whispered to Naomi.

‘The kotúfu will know,’ she said. It was in their nature to be wise. They listened, they negotiated, they had the gift of talk. Their words were their wisdom, and their wisdom held the clans together. That’s how she put it. The kotúfu made the path, the road, to success and riches.

Aaron was from a kotúfu clan.

‘And Jacob?’ Martha asked Naomi, ‘Is he from a younger brother clan?’

It was Rika who replied, ‘Yes, of course he is,’ as if Martha should have known something so obvious. Angel turned up her pretty nose. She was a kotúfu girl, she said, reeling off the names that took her to Aaron and the elders deliberating on the platform, and before them all the way to the ancestor who built this village when his father’s land was taken by the first kiap.