Bili reasons with him, but it’s not reason that’s at issue. She says she’ll cover the expenses and the old man can go with him. No, he says, he will not have his charge leave these waters. When the doctor tells him to listen to Bili, he raises himself to deliver a torrent of vernacular in the language of the patient, who’s in such pain he doesn’t register the angry words that fly in the air above him.

‘I suppose it’s what happens when you’re caught between two cultures,’ Martha says when they leave. ‘Two epochs.’

‘Does that mean we take the worst from each?’ Bili snaps.

It’s easy enough for you, she says to Martha, living in Sydney, to buy the liberal version. Easy enough to say that all these cultural manifestations are equally valid, equally important. It’s another form of racism to say it’s fine if a young man dies for a cultural belief that wilfully prefers witchcraft over medical science. Is that what Martha wants? For us to say, fine, you go on believing the world is flat and the stars are made from the souls of dead ancestors and we’ll say you’re just as right as anyone else, and in the meantime those who have good hospitals will reap the rewards of your ignorance and make off with your resources. There are powerful forces ready to take advantage of the lie, she says, and if Martha hadn’t known Bili as a child, she might have crumpled under the force of her words, which come out something like this as they leave the haus sik and propel them back along the path to the township.

‘If we’re not to become another post-colonial casualty, more of a post-colonial casualty,’ Bili says to drive home her point, ‘we have to discriminate.’

Then she quietens, and they walk on more slowly. She puts her arm across Martha’s shoulder and looks at her with an expression that is half sigh, half smile. ‘In any case,’ she says, ‘this business with the boy has more to do with a land dispute than with sorcery. Magic’s useful in a power struggle, it’s a potent accusation.’

‘You still gave him a hundred kina for the dinghy to Spear Point,’ Martha says, and Bili laughs. Sort of.

Outside the councillor’s house they find Jericho and Milton under a tree, at a table of bush planks. They are sitting with an assortment of men Martha doesn’t recognise. Archie is mixing coffee and sugar and powdered milk. He pours hot water from a blackened kettle and passes round the cups. The councillor is asking Archie about the fishing boats. He doesn’t want them back, anywhere near the fjords, and nor do the elders, who are here at his house to prepare their reception for Laedi. They want to ask a minister of government what it means that the pirate fishing boats can go against clan laws and gavman laws all at the same time.