The dinghy swung in close to the rocks and cut its engine. The kiap jumped ashore with two station policemen. He shook Noah’s hand, conferred with Jacob, went onto the platform to see the body and pay his respects to the women. With Jacob standing beside him, he spoke to the crowd. He said he’d leave the police to make a report, and, heaping injury upon injury, he asked – he ruled – that the burial was to be delayed. Jacob would stay with the village, and he, the kiap, would take Rika to the station and ring to Moresby, speak to the chief minister.

Martha relays these details in a calm, even voice. Jericho already knows most of them from Leonard. The mechanics of how they left the village.

‘I opened the door of the house and bright light fell across the floor. You two children stepped out into a golden morning with me. Matisse’s goblet,’ she says with a sigh. ‘I could smell the smoke of wood-fires and knew this was the last food that anyone would eat before the burial. The kiap took you children, handed you into the dinghy.

‘I went back for Rika. She was hunched down on the floor with Aaron’s singlet held to her face. I couldn’t lift her, couldn’t persuade her to lift herself. Jacob came and together we got her onto her feet and into the doorway. “Better if you walk alone,” Jacob said, and she did. Like a sleepwalker, she walked down the steps and through the crowd that she had tried so hard to regard as family and clan. She walked to the edge of the water where the dinghy waited. The kiap put out his hand to help her across the rocks but she turned and walked back. She walked up to Naomi, who was streaming tears, and took both her hands. She went to Dulcie. Dulcie nodded, and she too put out her hand. And last to Aita. Aita looked her straight in the eye. “Ai,” she said. “Go! You go!”

‘That,’ Martha says, ‘is what happened. That is how we left the village.’

On the wharf, thirty years has spooled back, and for Jericho, as well as for Martha, that distant day is more vivid than the men smoking in the door of the trade store. When a canoe slides in, it takes an effort of reason and will to comprehend that it is not aya Aita sitting on the platform with the wives of her sons. Then, for a moment, Martha thinks it is Naomi, now an aya, come with a letter for Rika. But no. Jericho stands up and walks across to help the old woman onto the wharf. She tells him the name of her village and gestures across the fjord. She has a swollen, bloodied ankle, from a fall in the garden, and when she adjusts the cloth that is wrapped around her foot, he sees it is a recent wound.

The sun is dipping towards the mountains. The sky is streaky. The injured woman and her daughters with their babies begin the steep climb up the hill to the haus sik.