‘Don’t cry,’ Leonard said. ‘I know what it’s like when you’re first in a village. Everything is raw, and there are none of the things we’re used to.’ He kissed her forehead. ‘Go to sleep now. There’s plenty of time for us. Years and years.’

RIKA WENT TO THE MOUNTAIN EXPECTING TO CATCH ONE PLANE IN and the next plane out. But instead of staying two weeks, she stayed for four, held first by the dancing and then by the rain. In those weeks, time was divided. It seemed both to slow and to speed. Without a watch, she couldn’t tell what hour it was. She might think it noon and find it was ten. The sky was no help; mountains, clouds, the canopy of trees confused the angle she might expect of the sun. As time slowed to the ticking of her heart, a week could pass without her knowing the day. Tuesday had no meaning, Friday was an idea that belonged somewhere else. Her mind was similarly divided. The part occupied by Aaron remained a pulse-beat of longing. The days without him could stretch the distance of a life, but elsewhere in her mind the mental settings she had brought to the mountain slipped the relentless catch of the clock.

During the time that accompanied the moon’s movement towards full, when the dancing for the mountain would begin, days that were not counted but passed one by one, she went into the forest with the women when the morning sun was low and the grass of the dance ground patterned with shadow. Nogi led the way with a chief who wore unpainted bark-cloth and red parrot feathers in her hair. Unlike Nogi, who was adorned with many necklaces, Kimame wore one strand plaited with a single cowrie shell. In the pierced septum of her nose was a short piece of polished bamboo. Her realm was the mountain. She knew when it was disturbed, and how to placate it. She knew its pathways and boundaries, its rituals and language. She knew where gardens liked to be cut, where rivers could not be swum. ‘Kimame is a strong woman,’ Janape told her. She’d been to the edge of the volcano’s crater, where the heat turns skin white.

As they walked, Lilla showed Rika the bush-snails from her alphabet, flat and green. Kimame taught her to recognise the curled vine that was a clan insignia, and the pattern on the fat caterpillar that lived in the black palm. Each day, with Janape at her side, Rika learned a little more. She could greet a chief, duvahe, and call out as she approached a house. She could name a baby or a child, a pig or cooking fire, a string bag or yam. She could repeat the names of certain birds, though she’d get them wrong often enough, when she saw them fly from one tree to another, her errors sending the women rippling into laughter. They took her hand in theirs, and taught her a new word: friend of ours. Though her language was sparse and the words she knew were paltry, she could hear the tone in their voices, and she knew that they could hear the response in her voice, the humour, she hoped, and her respect. But did they also hear through the woven walls of Leonard’s house the sharpness in her voice when she talked to him? How much did they know, did Janape know, of those unruly, ugly feelings of hers? What did they hear in the language she and Leonard spoke?