‘Kastom kago,’ Mela said.

‘Wana knows,’ Sam said.

Wana had seen it all. She’d been in the canteen eating lunch when Aaron came in. It was hot, as usual, and the food was mush. The milk was going off; it’d been left out since breakfast. The mood was desultory, with people talking idly or reading for their afternoon tutorials. The moment Aaron came through the door the atmosphere changed. It was clear from the way he walked that he was angry. He went straight to Jacob, who was sitting at the same table as Eremiah, reading the newspaper. Aaron had a man with him, a relative from the fjords who worked at the hospital, an older man with cropped hair. ‘Is it true?’ Aaron demanded, standing in front of Jacob. Was it true he’d sold the koána, the emblems of the elders? Jacob accused in turn: what would Aaron know about what the elders wanted? He’d been out of the country for years, and now he was sorcered by a white woman. He spat out a vile word: cunt-struck. The older man lifted his hands in warning. The word Aaron used against Jacob was the word for lesser – lesser man, lesser brother, lesser rank; the impetuous, treacherous one who brings trouble and dishonour to his people. The word Aaron used came laden with contempt, and he used it in front of students eating their lunch and kitchen hands, who understood the full impact of the insult.

Jacob had broken their pact, their agreement. After Aaron left the fjords, Jacob had talked big, and on the promise of bringing back wealth, he’d persuaded the old men, the elders, to give over some of the treasures that had come down to them from their fathers. He’d carried them back to Port Moresby and made the enquiries that took him to the hotel room of Mr Lim, a man who understood how to convert one kind of wealth into another. That morning the kinsman who worked at the hospital had walked out to the university to warn Aaron that Mr Lim had the koána and was about to leave, flying out the next day to Kuala Lumpur.

In the canteen, Jacob was on his feet. ‘Arrogant man,’ he accused Aaron. Who was he to decide? It wasn’t a pact they’d made; on the contrary it was a giving-over by Aaron, a surrender of old privileges, a sharing of responsibility. How else were they to get the money to begin the business of bringing wealth to the fjords? To Jacob it was of minor significance that among the items he’d removed were treasures said to have come with the first ancestors from their place of origin deep in the ranges. Handed down through the generations, they would rightfully come to Aaron when Noah, his eldest uncle, died and returned to the spirits. They would not come to him as personal wealth, or even as symbols of the power of lineage and history. The point, which Wana struggled to get across, was that their power was not separate from the lime pots and plumes and head-rests that Jacob had taken to Mr Lim. They were not symbols, or representations. They were the power.