‘What do you make of it?’ Rika asked Leonard when they took the lamp to their dark bedroom.

‘Williams has a very good book on Orokaivan magic and sickness,’ he said.

‘This isn’t Orokaiva.’

‘Many of the same broad principles apply. He categorises sickness in four ways, and most of them have a supernatural component. The most dangerous are caused by malign spirits and sorcerers, though their origins—’

‘I don’t want to know what Williams said.’ She was struggling to keep her voice even. ‘I want to know what you think.’

‘About what?’

‘About if it’s possible that the boy has been, how do you say, sorcered?’

‘Darling, it’s almost certainly yaws.’

‘Then he should go to Tobias.’

‘Of course he should, but he won’t if he thinks it’s magic sickness from down there.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘I’ll talk to Boja.’

‘Wouldn’t it be better to send a message to Tobias and see if he can come up?’

‘We must be careful not to interfere.’

‘Leonard, if we don’t, and it’s yaws, he’ll die.’

She lay on her back, watching as Leonard checked his notebooks, put them in a pile on the floor with his glasses on top. She watched him undress, straightening his shorts, hanging his shirt on a nail, careful as if it were an evening suit he’d hired. She saw the fold of flesh at the base of his buttock, purplish balls hanging low in their sack.

‘There’s that other boy too,’ she said. ‘Hunter.’

‘What about him?’ Leonard’s voice was sharp.

‘His mother wants you to bring him back here.’

‘Best to leave that for the chiefs to deal with,’ Leonard said.

‘Why?’ she asked.

Leonard didn’t reply.

The lamp cast shadows, making him look gaunt and slightly sinister. When he lifted the mosquito net and came into bed, he turned to her and she accepted the arm he offered. But when he put out the lamp and in the darkness moved his mouth to hers, his hand to her breast, she lay very still, drawing herself into the smallest beat of a heart.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’ She could feel tears sliding down the side of her face.

Why didn’t she tell Leonard then? Why didn’t she take the opportunity that presented itself? This was the question that would plague her when she thought of that night afterwards. Laedi would say it was because she didn’t want to hurt him, not after what Don had done. And then there was the filming. The great dance of the clans was coming up, when the moon was full: the dance to the mountain that he’d waited and watched for. But that night she’d not thought of Don or the dancing, or even the film. That night she was angry, and registered only the shock she had not expected, that his skin had become unwelcome to her, contrary to her heart, almost repugnant, and it was this that tipped her into a place of no words.