They walk on, back into the trees, and more minutes tick by. All Jericho can hear is the shrilling of cicadas.

‘Then what happened?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing I remember.’

‘So what does it mean?’

‘Mean?’ Milton stops, turns to Jericho, and puts his hand on his arm. ‘Englishman.’

‘Do you mean they were fated?’

‘Fate? No. They were bound. Bound tight.’

‘Not destined? “Into the depth of massy green?”’

Milton’s face creases. ‘You’ve been reading too much poetry.’

‘Your poetry,’ Jericho says, and he too falls quiet. ‘So was Rika right, then?’ he says after a while. ‘It was the work that killed him?’

‘He loved the work.’ There’s a note of exasperation in Milton’s voice. Slight, but Jericho hears it. ‘It mattered to him that he did it. She never understood that. Or if she did, she resented it.’ He looks down, then turns to Jericho again. ‘She was jealous,’ he says. ‘And she’d never admit that.’

‘Jealous of what?’

‘Of the pleasure he took in it. The recognition. Being at the centre of things. Part of history. It was like a drug. For all of them. A perfect drug, as they were certain, despite it all, that they were on the side of right.’ He smiles, an ironic, sorrowful smile. ‘Power. Don’t they say it’s an aphrodisiac?’

‘A rival love,’ Jericho says.

Milton shrugs. ‘A rival power,’ he says. ‘A rival road.’

They’ve been walking for an hour, more, when they come out of the trees again, onto a side path that leads to the overgrown clearing where Milton’s village once was. Clouds have come over, blotting out the sun. It’s gloomy, a desolate, forgotten place. Milton looks up at the sky.

‘Rain?’ Jericho asks.

‘No. On the mountain.’ Milton gestures behind him. ‘Not here.’

The ground is hard and dry. Weeds, strangling grass, the remains of house poles sticking up through the wreckage, an old fence and the bush growing in. A few hundred yards on, the plantation begins, covering the land that once belonged to his clansmen. Gone, before independence, before the constitution. Before the court cases.

At the edge of the oil palm, it’s eerily quiet and dark. Anyone with any claim to land has moved further inland. The rest are in the settlements round the edge of town. The scrap heap, Milton calls it, a term he says he learned from Leonard, who said it of himself when he came off the mountain.

‘It’s gone,’ he says. ‘The life we came out of. All that’s left is a shadow, and that’s no good for a Melanesian man.’

‘Couldn’t you say it’s the existential reality, and it’s made you an artist?’

Milton makes a huffing sound. He doesn’t believe in redemption; Meg does, but he doesn’t. ‘If the village is buried in you somewhere,’ he says, ‘how do you turn that loneliness into art?’ He doesn’t write any more. Or won’t, Jericho doesn’t know which. He reads. And he teaches the boys to read. Not to write. The younger teachers do that. ‘Time to go,’ he says, and they cut through the trees and tramp back along the road to the school. Where the mountain should be, all Jericho can see is cloud. In a month he’ll be up there.