Mela cooked pumpkin and rice, and Rifle came into the house, sat at the table. Mela, who not so long ago had refused to take tea out to a Highland man, refilled his cup, spooned in sugar and counted out the biscuits. Rika counted the hours. Martha came to sit with her. Seven o’clock. Eight. Still Aaron didn’t come. Rifle walked over to Laedi. There was no news from Tamba. Laedi and Don were sitting in chairs, he could see them through the window.

Outside, the wind was blowing in the trees. Inside Rika’s house, the radio relayed a serial from Australia after the nine o’clock news. Rika switched it off. Mela put out a mat beside the door for Rifle, and pulled a mattress for herself into the room with Rika. ‘Thank you,’ Rika said. ‘The two of you good. Gut tru.’

All was quiet. No car drove past, no one seemed to be watching. Eventually the man from the bursar’s office turned off his lights. The moon shone on the leaves of the trees. Rifle was like a shadow, circling the house. He wouldn’t sleep, he told Martha when Pete arrived to walk her back to their house.

Rika lay on the bed she had shared with Leonard and listened for footsteps. She heard fruit bats in the pawpaws, Rifle going out and chasing them away. She heard him tie up the fruit. Against her will and intention, she fell asleep into a dark nothingness that had barely begun before she was pulled out of it by the jolt of headlights in the window and a thud of cold, sinking fear.

Rifle was out on the veranda when Laedi got out of the car. Pete and Martha were coming across from their house; Laedi had stopped to wake them as she passed.

‘What?’ Rika said. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Aaron’s been attacked,’ Laedi said.

‘Attacked,’ Rika echoed. She had a vision of wolves. Lions.

‘Some men got him. He was on his way over to you.’

‘How bad?’ she asked. She was still. Calm.

‘Bad,’ Laedi said.

Aaron had rescued the elders’ treasures and returned to his room in the dormitory. He was on the way to Rika, cutting across to avoid the road. A group of men was waiting not far from the turn-off. He didn’t hear them, and he didn’t see them until they jumped, dark, hooded figures pulling him into the scrub. They had a bat of some sort, and their fists in hard leather gloves. He went down, felt a boot in his ribs. ‘Stay away from our women. Use your own black cunt.’ Another boot landed on his shoulder. ‘Stand up, you prick.’ They hauled him up, another fist landed on his face. He felt something move. They dropped him. Another boot, and he lost count, until the boots crunched away through the dry grass and a car’s motor started up.

For a while Aaron lay there, drifting with the movement of wind, smelling the dust, listening for the rustlings of creatures. He was alive and the earth smelled sweet, grass stems a memory of the dry grass along the ridges above the fjords, where he’d wept as a child after his mother died. He knew he wasn’t far from the road, but still he lay in the grass and let his mind move to the stories he’d grown up to: of Papuan warriors, the men who raised themselves up from defeat and led their people to new victories, new villages, new conquests, new lives. He remembered the morning in Leiden when he was woken by a bird outside his window. The day was pale and cold and the bird insistent. Though he didn’t know the bird’s name, he knew it’d come to tell him that in the fjords his father had died. All that day he walked, and all that day he heard the bird. When he closed his eyes, down there in the grass, it wasn’t his father’s face he saw, but Rika’s on the day he told her this story.