A small girl arrives with a pineapple. Hector slices it with his bush-knife, looks at the sky, a flock of birds; the small girl points upwards, over the peaks. Rain is near, she says, though there are no clouds. They work on into the afternoon, until the women pack up the cloth, fold it into their string bags and return to their houses as the clouds rumble in overhead.

‘Josephine is married to Hunter, yes?’ Jericho asks Obi as they walk back through the village to Nelson’s house. ‘Josephine all the same as the trouble with Don?’

Obi looks reluctant. ‘The same.’

‘And Brenda here, her number-one daughter? Number-one child?’

‘The same.’

‘Could she be Don’s child?’

‘Nogat. She’s Hunter’s girl.’

‘When was she born? Same time as me?’

‘Before. A little before.’

‘There you are. She could be Don’s.’

‘No. Josephine, her mother’s blood made her.’

‘The timing’s right,’ Jericho says.

Obi is silent.

‘Look at it this way,’ Jericho says. ‘Don and Josephine. For many weeks Josephine went to Don. The village was upset. Nanaji was angry. Leonard made a settlement. He told me.’

Obi remains silent.

‘It could easily be that the baby came from Don. I came from Janape, and she went to Leonard one time only. Before Leonard left. One time, maybe two?’ He turns it into a question.

‘Janape did not go to Leonard.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She did not go to Leonard. She was not sent to Leonard.’

‘But she went, didn’t she?’

‘No, she did not go.’

‘They didn’t have sex? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘They did not lie together.’

‘Of course they lay together. How else would I be here?’

‘You do not understand.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Leonard made you.’

‘That’s what I’m saying. With Janape.’

‘He makes you as an ancestor gift. No lying together.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘It’s true,’ Obi says. ‘In the new world they think the baby is made only with semen and blood. It is not so. In our world it is spirit that makes the baby. Spirit comes from the ancestors. From the mountain. It is always so.’

‘You don’t think you’re getting muddled up between the old stories and the new ones? Bible stories?’

‘You grew on Leonard’s land. You have much to learn of the mountain.’

‘I sure do.’

Jericho is unaccountably angry. He walks over to the edge of the village and looks down at the trees. The night before, he’d walked out there with Hector, and there below them were trees alight with fireflies, flickering on and off in unison, like Christmas lights. For a few seconds, maybe thirty, maybe more, they were all on. Then off. Then on again. Then off. Synchronised within each tree and between trees.

‘Now I believe in magic!’ he’d said.

‘Fireflies, that’s all,’ Hector said. ‘It is always like that.’

A magical place, and now, today, before the earth has had time to make its daily move around the sun, he is cursing those same qualities. What seemed magical last night, today is credulous and self-serving. What has he walked into? An ancestor gift. Well, that has him shackled. Hapkas nothing. As if it isn’t enough being born between two cultures, now he’s a gift from some mythic entity; a virgin birth, no less. Is that really what they think? Is it concocted as a trap? Surely not. These open faces. Open, yes; and yet always something behind, beyond, something unknowable.