‘You take the cloth when you go,’ she says. ‘It is good.’

‘So you chiefs have decided?’

‘We think much on this yet. Last night we watch you dance. Today I tell you the first story of our ancestors. Tonight you and Hector will come and sit with us, all the chiefs together.’

Oh, oh, oh. Jericho is raw, all the way through.

‘Come now,’ she says. ‘You must eat.’

He gets up from the mat, tests the strength of his legs. With Lilla beside him, he steps out into the afternoon light and sees the smoke rising from the earth ovens. Tonight there will be a feast of pig.

JERICHO DOESN’T KNOW HOW MANY DAYS HAVE PASSED SINCE HE came up to this high village. His watch has sunk to the bottom of his pack, and he’s long since ceased to think of it. Something has shifted so that he no longer feels himself on the end of a very long rope, as far away as it’s possible to be from his life in London. Even from Moresby and Bili. Or Milton and the school. For these past weeks, he’s come to glimpse himself at the centre of something, with time and distance rippling out, not in a line but in some sort of rhythmic, circling movement.

And now, when at last he’s dropped into mountain rhythm, drifting with the days, breathing in and breathing out, Obi says they must return to their village. The moon will soon be full again and the chiefs will tell the gathering clans about the bisnis. Jericho already knows their decision, and their conditions. After the night of dance and the feast of pig, he and Hector sat with the duvahe on their platform. Lilla was there, the youngest of the chiefs, and Obi, a chief-in-waiting. A small hurricane lamp was lit for the occasion, casting shadows on their faces and the cloth that hung from the walls. Yes, the chiefs said, there can be a bisnis, the cloth can go with Jericho, but the duvahe must agree on each cloth that leaves, and each story that is told. And before they speak aloud to the clans, Jericho and Hector must tell them how they will be sure the mountain art and its stories will not fall into bad hands. Copyright law is not easily explained, but the chiefs know of Laedi and her lawyer daughter who got Jericho and the boys out of the police cells. It is not an event Jericho wishes to recall, but Hector, not having been there, has no such qualms. ‘Bili has a strong spirit,’ Napo told them.

Jericho’s letter asking for her advice was sent down to Presley, and Obi has now heard that men returning from the market have left a package for Jericho in the village below. So in the early light of dawn, Jericho straps on his boots for the walk down the mountain. At the river that runs beneath the rocky scarp, they wait for the people coming from other villages, and the dreadlocked women from theirs, the only village he has not been taken to visit. With the artists and the chiefs and the men and the children, all together maybe two hundred people are in the long line that snakes through the forest. The steepness of the ridges no longer alarms him. He keeps pace with Hector. With every step, even in his boots, he can feel the mountain pressing up through the soles of his feet.