Money. Always money. Jericho frowns, but the young women are laughing – a man come to sit on the platform. ‘Brother-cousin, white-man visitor.’ He asks Nelly’s mother about the story of the ancestors who came from inside the mountain, and there’s another ripple of laughter, more hands to faces. A small girl is sent to find Lilla. Nelly’s mother pats the mat beside her, clears the children with a flick of her hand. Jericho sits watching. The women return to their work and the soft murmur of their voices brings that old familiar sensation somewhere around the region of his heart; he’s always thought of it as an ache. But today there is no threat of tears. Surrounded by women – Hector will laugh at him – he feels soft, liquid all the way through.

‘Okay,’ Lilla says when she arrives, quietly beside him. ‘Okay, you learn.’ She is talking in their language, and he understands that she will talk to Obi and the other chiefs. Then she will tell him the ancestor story. When he is ready.

The following afternoon Jericho goes again to watch Nelly’s mother paint the cloth that is to be for him. Long and thin, a loincloth for him to dance in. This time he has a notebook with him. More children are crowded onto the platform, they take his book, turn its pages with care, and after a lot of whispering, Nelly tells him they’d like to draw in it. He hands over his pen and they lean into the page drawing – first one, then another: a plane flying in the sky, a tree with its roots down into the earth, a kundu drum, a snake.

Underneath, Nelly draws the design of the vine. ‘First the girl learns this. The vine,’ she says.

‘And a boy?’

She draws two concentric circles. ‘There,’ she says. ‘The number one tattoo. Long before, it was tattooed on his belly. The sign of a mountain man. See, my mother paints for you.’

On the cloth, which her mother holds up, at the junction of the lines that form the grid, are the bellybutton circles, perfectly placed. ‘A gift for you,’ Nelly says, speaking for her mother, who laughs and pats Jericho’s arm as he thanks her. ‘Ai, ai, Jericho.’ Then she gestures to a woman who’s sitting back against the wall in the shadows, rubbing a twisted foot. She’s a thin woman, scrawny; her ribs show under empty breasts that hang low.

‘Her foot,’ Nelly tells him. ‘It broke. Long ago when she was young yet. Now it pains her. Every day. See. You look.’

The woman unwraps a cloth from her foot. It is twisted over onto one side and where the skin is bunched up on itself is an angry, weeping sore. He paints the sore with red antiseptic liquid and squeezes antibiotic cream into it. He gives her codeine, and the next day she asks for more. He can paint her foot each day, but even Jericho knows she can’t have codeine every day. Besides, there isn’t enough. He sends another note down to Meg, and to Bili. Nothing has come back yet. He tells Bili about dressing the putrid sore on the woman’s foot.