Only a month. Yet Kuma’s head had already been emptied of its eyes, her gaping mouth cleansed of tongue and palate. Scraps of flesh and wisps of hair still clung, but enough bone had been exposed for Milaqa to be able to see the crater-like indentation in the back of the skull, the result of that fatal fall. This is my mother. Milaqa probed for feeling, deep in her heart. She had not cried when she had heard her mother was dead. Now all she seemed to feel was a deep and savage relief that it wasn’t her lying on this platform, her flesh rotting from her broken frame. Did everybody feel this way?

‘It works so quickly,’ Teel said, marvelling. ‘The processes of death. Look, of the body’s soft parts there’s not much left save the big core muscles.’ He pointed to masses of dull red meat beneath Kuma’s ribs. ‘The birds and the insects and the rats, all those little mouths pecking and chewing-’

‘Is this some kind of test? I know what you’re like. I grew up with you setting me tricky challenges, uncle.’

‘All for your own good. I wanted to show you something.’ He pointed to the flaw in the bronze breastplate. ‘Look at that.’

The breastplate, supposedly a gift from the tin miners of Albia to some Annid many generations back, was finely worked, incised with the rings and cup marks of the old Etxelur script. The damage was obvious close to. She inspected the rough slit, the flanges of metal folded back to either side. ‘What of it? When the next Annid takes the plate, this will be easily fixed.’

‘Perhaps so. But how do you imagine it got there?’

Milaqa shrugged. ‘During the accident. She fell from her horse, when it bucked before the charging aurochs.’

He nodded, and mimed a fall, tipping forward. ‘So she landed hard, and – what? A bit of rock punctured her breastplate?’