There are no words, no sequence, to describe Rika howling no, no, no, and Naomi trying to calm her, and being shaken off, and Rika’s face swollen, saliva dripping in long strands from her mouth, mucous from her nose. Her running forward, zig-zagging towards Noah’s house, and Naomi running after her, and the two of them back on the ground. And then, clear as day, aya Aita standing at the steps to the house, a praetorian guard. ‘My mother took him from the womb. She wrapped the placenta. Oh evil hands, evil day. He leaves us for the town. The order is broken. Mother ground, we all weep to you.’

‘Do you remember nothing from that day?’ Martha asks Jericho.

‘Nothing other than colour. Green, that terrible green.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘The one image I have, and I don’t know if it’s from that day or another, is of Rika – I think it’s of Rika and not Janape – lying still and turned from me. I touch her, and there’s no response. I touch her, and she’s cold.’

‘Do you remember Jacob coming?’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘Not at all?’ Martha is surprised, though she has reason to be relieved that on this his memory is partial. Even now, even here, there are some things she doesn’t want known. She tries to imagine, sometimes, what would have happened if Jacob hadn’t been there, up at the high village, if he hadn’t come with the men as soon as the news was shouted up the ridge. He was in the gardens where they were planting vanilla. It can’t have been long, an hour, maybe two, before he arrived, but for Martha, waiting for him that afternoon, it might have been eternity. Time indeed stood still. Everything stood still, a great breath taken in with the shock, and at the same time nothing stayed still long enough to be comprehended. Except Aaron’s body, which lay dead and cold in Noah’s house, a corpse with its knees loosened so he could walk.

All Martha can tell Jericho with certainty is that Jacob was in the village before dark. She watched him cross the fjord. He was fast and accurate. All those years of canoeing to school, she supposed. He came ashore, came to her, right up close, first, before anything else, before going to Noah, to the body. She leaned in towards him and grief hit like an aftershock, and it was then, weeping in the release of his presence, that she understood how afraid she was. Badly, seriously afraid.

‘Káe,’ she said. ‘They’re saying it was sorcery.’ Káe. The word had clanged at her like the toll of a bell.

‘Where are the children?’ he asked.

‘With the others. With Naomi.’

Why weren’t they with her? Why hadn’t she gathered them to her? Another memory that returns to her at night, and that she does not tell Jericho.

‘Stay here,’ Jacob had said, but she didn’t want to let him go. She clung to him, held on to his arms. Even after all these years, it’s humiliating to recall Jacob taking her arms, peeling her away from him. ‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘Stay with Rika.’ Anyway, it has no bearing on the story Jericho needs to know. That’s what she thinks, sitting under the shade-cloth at the side of the wharf, his hand in hers. It is late in the afternoon. The same time of day. A canoe pulls up. A man comes over and talks to Jericho. They hear voices in the trade store, and Jericho walks over to buy two cans of Coca-Cola. Martha drinks one down for the first time in perhaps thirty years.