Saved by three layers of canvas and the thick undergrowth that slowed her descent, Marina lies on a bank of rough grass a little way downstream. There were three loops of rope holding the canvas fast. The top one was yanked off during her descent. Her blindfold, too, has gone, at the cost of a bloody scrape down the side of her head.

  What happens next is not clear. No, that’s not right. What’s next is the clearest memory of the whole night, but it makes no sense. A woman is crouching beside Marina—tunic and boots, spear and bow. The woman slices through the remaining two ropes around the canvas and unrolls her. She is holding a small knife. She cuts the gag from Marina’s mouth then turns her onto her side and frees her hands and feet. It is hard to make anything out in this low light and Marina has seen her own reflection only in rudimentary mirrors and on the surface of still water, but the woman looks like her. Exactly like her. She holds Marina’s face with both hands and looks into her eyes. Marina is giddy with the strangeness of the encounter. The woman lays Marina’s head gently back on the grass then stands. Marina hears the growl and yap of animals and the voices of other women. Her otherworldly twin turns and walks away.

  There is a river, there is a steep chine, there are hills. Bats scribble back and forth over the moon which burns overhead. Is this real, or is this the mind losing its footing as it crosses the border between life and death? She was taken from her bed in the middle of the night. She was driven out of the city and into the hills. She rolls over, lifts herself onto all fours and looks back upstream. The woman has gone. All the women have gone. If there really were other women. She feels very much alive, rope-burns around her wrists and ankles, a stabbing pain in the side of her head. Further upstream the cart in which she was travelling lies snapped and folded on the stream bed. Beside it lies a horse which must surely be dead. But she can see movement on the far side of the wreckage and hear the noises of someone or something in pain. It is surely safest to walk away, but she can see a fat leather satchel lying beside the cart. The night is bitter and she needs everything useful she can lay her hands on.

  She picks her way between the slippery rocks. She can hear two separate noises now. A man is whimpering and the second horse is making a desperate noise for which she has no words. Carefully she steps round the cart to see what is happening. The horse is still alive, just, though it will not be alive for long. Three wolves are tearing into its abdomen, the ripped-out organs glittering with reflected moonlight. The man lies beside the horse, his leg trapped under a smashed wheel. His face is familiar. Someone from the palace. Every time the man breathes out he makes a sad, wheezing noise as if he has run a very long way.

  He turns to look at Marina. It is no surprise to him that she is alive. Nothing is a surprise any more. He feels no pain, not yet, despite the injury he has sustained. He cannot beg for help. It is not in his nature. He is, in any case, beyond help of any kind. Nevertheless he wants to prove that he has agency even at this final moment. He says, “The queen ordered this. She wanted you dead.”

  Somewhere deep down Marina knew it already. The revelation holds no significance. That was her old life. A wolf pauses and looks at her, mouth rimmed with bloody fur. The horse is no longer moving. The wolf returns to its meal, as if to say, A scrawny thing like you is of no interest to us. She kneels beside the leather bag and unbuckles the strap. Her would-be abductor has filled it with her clothes, as if he were taking her on a holiday. There is bread, too, and sausage. She puts on the sandals and the travelling cloak and throws the bag over her shoulder.

  The man says, “I was going to feed you to the pigs on my brother’s farm. I was going to smash your skull with a rock and feed you to the pigs.”

  She steps around him and starts to follow the river up the stony little valley. She does not know where she is going, only that she will be travelling for a long time.

  * * *

  . . .

  The nurse arrives later the same day, briefed so completely that she could have been doing the job for a month. Her name is Deborah. She doesn’t give her surname. She comes from Cardiff and wears a navy-blue uniform with a white trim and chocolate-brown, mannish shoes. She carries a suitcase containing medical equipment and a smaller bag containing a flask of coffee and a Tupperware box of sandwiches so that her interaction with the family can be kept to a minimum.

  She bathes Angelica and rubs cream gently into her sores and rashes. Angelica allows Dottie’s scrambled egg to be placed into her mouth but will not chew so that Deborah must lean her over and get her to spit the food back into a bowl. When Deborah pours only the smallest amount of milk into her mouth she chokes and coughs. A bed is made up in the adjacent room. Deborah wakes at two-hourly intervals during the night to check on her charge.

  Dr. Kellaway returns early the following morning and fits a nasogastric tube. Philippe cannot bear to watch. Angelica struggles but does not attempt to remove it once it is in place. A bag of liquid food is connected to the other end of the tube and hung on a stand beside the bed. It is Germolene pink and plump as a stomach. The doctor says that he cannot promise anything but hopes that she will now stabilise at the very least. He will return the following day.

  A second nurse arrives mid-morning to relieve Deborah, a third in the evening. The three women will take it in turns to watch over Angelica just as three nurses were paid to watch over her at the beginning of her life. Deborah, Joyce and Gillian. These may not be their real names. They are unfailingly polite but do not encourage personal questions. They are all delivered to the house in a dark green VW Polo by one of two taciturn, besuited men who look Turkish and must surely be brothers. Not once do they leave the car.

  The doctor returns the following day as promised, and the day after that. He seems cautiously confident. Angelica is bathed regularly. The bag is replaced once every twelve hours. The house enters a state that mirrors Angelica’s motionless drift. Even Hervé who is normally impervious to the emotions of those around him feels as if he is moving underwater.

  It takes the best part of a week for Dottie to realise that Nikki has abandoned them. She decides that she must do something herself. She calls the surgery where she herself is registered in Winchester meaning to ask for help, but Hervé appears in the kitchen as she is talking. She pretends that she is ringing Skates about a faulty tumble dryer. Hervé scares her. She does not ring again.

  Philippe glides slowly through the house and gardens like the resident ghost, only partially present, unable to settle, unable to read, unable to watch television or listen to the radio, unable to sleep.

  And Angelica herself?

  She no longer hears the voices around her. And if the owners of those voices could hear her thoughts, would they understand them? She cruises at depth, many fathoms below the world, ticking over in a state which is neither sleep nor wakefulness.

  August turns to September. September turns to October. Unnaturally warm nights mean more sugar in the leaves and new colours sweeping over the hill. The drier, wind-exposed trees turn first. Orange and brown, russet, auburn, bronze. Arcturus is gone and Pegasus is rising. There are leafless branches now, bare ruined choirs. Only robin, chaffinch, blackbirds and blue tits are left, the occasional buzzard circling. The temperature drops. Bitter winds, early frosts and the Pleiades visible on cloudless nights.

  Only one story ties her to the world.

  Tashkent, Zadracarta, Ecbatana, Nineveh…

  * * *

  . . .

  Two and a half thousand leagues and four months of riding. He has sold five horses and two camels en route, keeping only one horse for his own use and another as insurance. Sold them at poor prices, too, wanting only a swift sale and sufficient supplies for the next leg of the journey. With the exception of a bout of fever just after crossing the Oxus, he has not spent two nights in the same place. He has felt, always, at the back of his mind, the low rumble of fear, wondering if he has left it too late to prevent something terrible happening to his daughter. If he rises early and eats and drinks in the saddle he can outride the anxiety for half a day or more, but it always catches him by the evening. As the year turns he is grateful for the lengthening days so that he can travel further and sleep more deeply afterwards.

  He has little money left. He is exhausted. He cannot imagine his life beyond reunion with his daughter, or rejection by her. He knows that Cleon and Dionyza remain in power. Such facts are part of the bedrock upon which all trade is done, but news about adopted daughters has little commercial value and about Marina he has heard nothing.

  When he arrives in Tarsus he will send a message to Cleon and Dionyza saying that he has news from the lost prince. He will prove his credentials by handing over a little bag of sunflower seeds and macadamia nuts and say, “These are for the king’s three parrots,” though the parrots are probably long dead by now. From that point on events are beyond his control. What if Marina sees his mutilated hand and is revolted? What if Cleon and Dionyza decide that he no longer has the right to claim paternity? What power does he have to gainsay them?

  He spends his penultimate night in a post-station just north of the Cilician Gates. Traders, messengers and civil servants. He removes his travelling clothes and gives them to one of the house slaves as a gift. He bathes, cuts his hair and shaves off his beard. He oils his body and changes into the clothes he purchased in Nicomedia—a tan linen chiton, a cloak in cream wool with a patterned red border, new fawn-skin boots. He feels effete, metropolitan.

  He has gifts for Marina in a travelling bag—a tiny box of black walnut with a marquetry dolphin on the lid which seems, at first, to be a solid block of wood unless one tilts and shakes it in the right way so as to release the hidden bolts; a bullfinch carved in such exquisite detail and painted in such vivid colours that every time he unwraps it he thinks, all over again, that it is a real sleeping bird; and a painting in ink on a paper scroll of a black-and-white bear climbing a gnarled tree in the snow from Yang Kuan which is now a little kinked but which struck him at the time, and still strikes him, as a perfect gift for a girl. He hopes that these things are not so shoddy as to seem insulting to someone who can doubtless have anything she wants. Perhaps modest is good. He does not want her to think that he is trying to buy the forgiveness for which he must beg and which, in truth, he does not deserve. He long ago forfeited any rights he had as a father. If she rejects him it will be neither wrong nor cruel, but his life will no longer have meaning or purpose. He puts these thoughts to the back of his mind as he has put so many similar thoughts to the back of his mind over the previous sixteen years.

  He sleeps fitfully and rises early. As he is saddling the roan and loading the skewbald he sees a young man being dragged from the building by two Tarsian soldiers. Murder? Fraud? The settling of scores? The soldiers are rougher than they need be and the young man is weeping. He is drunk perhaps, or feeble-minded. He is bound, laid unceremoniously across the back of a pony and led away.

  Pericles fights the urge to turn and ride back the way he came. The easy call of a perpetual journey where he can leave names and obligations behind at every border. A magpie paddles and sips in the shallow end of the water trough. Already the road shimmers in the heat. He tightens the buckle of the roan and puts his foot into the stirrup.

  He enters Tarsus as he has entered every city on his travels, trusting no one and gathering information before offering any. He has seen men stabbed to death for using the wrong dialect. He has returned to cities after a single year to find the entire ruling class butchered. He stables his horses at an unassuming tavern on the western side of the Bridge of the Virgin, watches his belongings deposited in the locked cellar and attaches the numbered brass tag to his belt. The box of black walnut, the bullfinch and the painted scroll he keeps in the leather bag slung across his chest. There is a dagger beside the brass tag should anyone plan to take it from him.

  He stands on the bridge itself. The crowds flow back and forth at his back. The tide flows out beneath his feet. Shelduck and goldeneye paddle in the eddies at the river’s edge where rushes and garbage comb the current into curls. He feels unsteady on his feet. Sections of palace roof are visible through the highest arches of the amphitheatre. The family quarters, or near enough, with their high ceilings and windows full of ocean. His daughter is in there somewhere. Poor bird, why art thou singing in the shadows at this late hour? He wants opium, he wants trees. He wants a hot fire, the steamy breath of horses and the music of bridles.

  He must keep himself moving if he is to do this. He steps away from the balustrade and lets the crowd carry him towards the centre of the city. He enters the warren of the old market which clings to the side of the palace wall like mussels on a rock. He should feel at home here but it is too crowded, too loud. Tunics of peach-coloured silk, striped linen shalvars in gold and sky blue, simlahs, keffiyehs. A fashion for preposterous hats seems to have taken hold since he was last in this part of the world, none of them possessing any obvious function apart from drawing attention to the wearer. The alleys are rammed. The sound of a psaltery, the sound of a flute. Several trained monkeys are ferrying cash to upper windows. Cardamom, turmeric, aniseed. Sappho and Herodotus on papyrus. Two old men are deep in a game of Go. There are squirrels, tailed, skinned, gutted and smoked into big leathery stars. There are great curtains of hung sausage. There are spotted furs and striped hides. A poorly played bagpipe sounds like a dying elk. There is bolt upon bolt of silk at such stupid prices he regrets not having loaded up a third horse. Little gods in ivory soapstone, antler and oak. A woman reads entrails. Caged falcons, caged doves, caged parrots, a caged eagle. Two leopard cubs are being sold by a man who seems unaware of what they will become. Suspended from a hook an entire tuna is being hacked into oval steaks from the tail up. Stalls sell salep and sweet spiced milk and black tea from Hastinaptur. Gossip and haggling in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Phoenician, Persian, Aramaic. He smells myrrh and sandalwood and sweat and woodsmoke and burnt sugar. He runs his fingers over fabrics, tastes dabs of paprika and sumac, asks for prices reflexively, shakes his head and walks away. He buys a cheap tart containing a stringy meat which is almost certainly not the promised pigeon.

  “Titus…!” It takes him a few moments to realise that it is he who is being addressed and a few more moments to connect the deep voice with the tiny man, no taller than his waist at most, who sits on a barrel so that he can bargain eye to eye with potential customers for the dyes whose garish, powdery cones sit in the mouths of little sacks ranged on the trestle table beside him.

  Pericles can remember using the name but not the location in which he used it. The man laughs gently, perhaps understanding the quandary in which Pericles finds himself. “It matters little, my friend.” He puts his hand against the flat of his chest and Pericles mirrors the gesture. “May the gods keep you well,” they say almost simultaneously.

  “What news?” asks Pericles. “I arrived this morning.”

  “Three donkey trains in yesterday,” says the man. “Salt, spices, dried meats. Some slaves taken in Melitene. Strong, healthy, very ill-tempered.”

  The man’s wife appears from a dark arch behind him. He remembers the two of them now. Talub and Amira. She cannot speak, as a result of some terrible event to which Talub made only a passing reference. He met them at a trading post in the Caucasus mountains. Cow bells and driving rain. Not even a village, closed during the winter. Talub is lame in one leg as well as short. Pericles was profoundly touched by the way they looked after one another, each performing the tasks the other couldn’t, with an effortless synchrony which required neither request nor thanks. Amira smiles. Hand to chest. Does she recognise him? He smiles back.

  “…but the horse-market is empty,” says Talub.

  “And up there?” Pericles gestures towards the palace whose outer wall blocks the sunlight at the alley’s end. “There were two daughters, one by blood and one adopted.”

  “I would set your sights a little lower, my friend.” Talub laughs, then he pauses, seeing something serious in the face of this not-quite-stranger. “You have not heard.”

  “Heard what?” His heart thumps.

  Talub nods towards the arched alcove in front of which their stall is pitched. Amira is listening intently to a talkative Ethiopian merchant. Without a glance in the direction of her husband she reaches out, he takes her hand and she helps him down from the barrel. Pericles feels the faintest prickle of a tear at the corner of his eye.

  “Follow me,” says Talub.

  They step into the dark. Brick barrel roof, hessian sacks and locked boxes. A white duck sleeps in a bell-shaped bamboo cage. Talub ascends another barrel via a makeshift staircase of two trunks. “You will like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “The troubles of our supposed betters.”

  Pericles feels nauseous.

  “Only one daughter remains.” Talub rubs his hands together and spreads his fingers as if warming them in front of a fire.

  “Which…?” He cannot speak.

  “The daughter by blood. The other vanished in the night.” Talub makes an explosive gesture with his hands. Boom. Gone. Then he hotches forward on the barrel and looks theatrically first to one side then the other, though it is clearly not possible for a third person to be hiding in this overfilled nook. “The official story is that she ran away. Two weeks ago.”