Martha watches as they go off down the path. At the bend, Jericho turns and waves, and she leans over the railing of the terrace to see them on the wharf. They stand there for a while, talking, and then Archie climbs down the ladder into the water and swims out, kicking a silver trail in the morning water. She watches as Jericho puts on his goggles and follows, down the steps, another trail of silver in the dark water. In the goblet light, something swells in her – forgiveness? acceptance? pleasure? – and why would it not? The days she waited for him and the girls at the international school are still vivid to her, standing on the grass at the bottom of the hill with the other mothers, watching him come out of his classroom and run down the walkways to find her. When he wrapped his arms around her, it was a blessing. The girls, too. For those two years she had every reason to believe that new sorts of families could be created in the new life they were making. And as with any family, the children let them exist up on the busy surface of daily meanings. Down below, unspoken injuries might have kept a steady pulse, but they rarely rippled to the surface. She sighs. They were young enough to hold fear at bay, to plunge into the golden goblet, and now all she wants, she says to herself in a plaintive bleat, is some time with Jericho. Today. Alone. Before Leonard and Laedi arrive, before they go to the village, before the memorial for Aaron. She wants to hear his account of the mountain and how it is with Bili, and what he is going to do now that the future is upon him. She wants to feel the air between them before they stand at Aaron’s grave. If there is a grave. She doesn’t even know that.

When Bili appears from Jim’s office, where she’s been on the phone to Moresby, Martha can tell from the briskness of her walk that it’s going to be a day of interruptions.

‘Do you want to come to the haus sik?’ Bili asks. ‘I wouldn’t mind your opinion.’

So Martha goes with her to see the young man who came in on the dinghy with them and was carried up the hill on a stretcher. At the small hospital along the point past the school, he lies curled tight by a pain that has his breath coming sharp and shallow. He’s running a fever, hot to the touch, and when he’s persuaded to turn on his back, there’s a growth like a hard mango extending up under the left side of his ribcage. His spleen, the Highland doctor says. He needs to go to Popondetta, or, better still, to Moresby. But the old man who’s come with him rejects the idea. Gnarled and implacable, he’s crouched beside the bed. With an insistence matched by the set of his jaw, he says that the ill boy – not much more than seventeen, by the look of him – must go instead to the point at the far western edge of the fjords where the traditional medicine man lives.