These were my people. The children of the tree. And although that mighty fig and its water were long gone before my time, the cave remained. And I went to it, man and boy, to rappel into the darkness and feel the scars in the rock left by ancient roots. Their refuge was my refuge.

  Hard to believe, isn’t it? That there were harsher times than these, and folks hardy enough to survive them. But persist they did, right through the Terror. And when the madness subsided around them, they came up from the earth, children of the tree, to become the people of the plain.

  This is who I’m from. That’s what I’m made of. You need to know this.

  Well, stranger, what I need to know is not for you to say.

  Fair enough, I murmur. Better to say there are things I need to tell you.

  To save your skin.

  Improve our odds. All three of us.

  So you say.

  I need you to trust me.

  Clearly.

  I’m not a savage.

  That remains to be seen. You’re just another wayfarer. Taking your chances. I don’t blame you for that. But you’re nothing to me.

  Not true, comrade. You know it’s not.

  You keep telling me what I know.

  It’s chaos out there.

  True, he says. Things have gone to shit. But one thing I’ve learnt. Wringing your hands won’t make water.

  You’re right, I tell him. But isolation doesn’t produce order. Does it? Hiding alone in a bunker – doesn’t the irony make your teeth hurt?

  Jesus. Everything makes my teeth hurt.

  Hear me out.

  Do I have a choice?

  Haven’t you already made one?

  I might already be regretting it, he says.

  I see you, comrade. You see me. We both know already. We recognize each other.

  Again with the assumptions.

  Here, I say. My bona fides.

  If you must.

  My people were forged in the Terror. But we were never berserkers or barbarians.

  This is what my mother told me. I can hear her now. She schooled me as we worked. And as we broke clumps of seedlings to separate and plant out in pods, I thought I could hear an echo of my father’s voice in hers. In those words, I could almost feel him.

  Before we were plainsfolk, she said, we were hill people, but not by choice. And prior to that, on your father’s side, we were sea people – fisherfolk. In the days when the world was kinder. But eventually your father’s people had to abandon their boats and retreat to higher ground.

  So this is when?

  A long time back. Many generations.

  And what about your folk? I asked.

  Oh. They were berry growers and scholars from the south.

  And how did they come here?

  Well, the way it was told to me, their soil turned sour and then it rained so long and hard everyone in their district got sick. And like everyone else, they fled to the city for shelter, but with so many people moving in all at once, civil order was lost and it was unsafe to stay, so they left again and pressed north. They travelled for months. A caravan of refugees on the road winding their way into hard dry country until they settled here on the peninsula, with the sea before and behind. Even then conditions were harsh, but these people were hardy. They knuckled down, fitted in, made a life. But then, as if it had been pursuing them all along, the weather overtook them. The sky itself seemed fickle, and this treachery turned people bad. In time, madness took hold on the plain. People believed the world was ending. They were consumed by panic and ugliness. They fell into savagery and magic. When my parents’ people fled up into the range, it was more in blind desperation than hope. What could they possibly expect on the baked ridgetops but sun and starvation? But your father’s people watched them come up, saw their distress, and took pity on them.

  And that’s how our clan was born?

  Yes, she said. In extremis. Out of chaos. By necessity. With a compact of civility. Beneath the fig. They shared the skills each had brought to that place and those they’d learnt there. There were many crafts held in common, but the most prized of these was discipline.

  She gestured to the long, tidy aisles of our growhouse, the bobbing heads of the birds, the rows of eggs.

  But they were trekkers, I said. Scouts and foragers, right?

  Yes, but there’s no successful trekking and foraging without restraint. You don’t survive up there or down here without self-control.

  I went about my work a while, tamping soil around the root nubs of okra. I knew the old stories well enough. I only asked her for the pleasure of hearing them rehearsed again. They felt more intimate than the sagas because these were tales of kinfolk. It was good to hear how our people had held their own during the Terror when so many others lost their way. As you know, that age of turmoil was universal. Provinces and cantons that had once prospered from order and co-operation slowly lapsed into fiefdoms based on raiding and slavery. It was said every hamlet square and city plaza sported a gibbet. Nights were lurid and raucous with public burnings.

  Things were no different on the peninsula and on the plain, where the work of growing food and tending children and catching water was neglected. As provisions began to dwindle, any resources held in reserve were seized and hoarded by petty tyrants. Water became currency, then power itself. Many new bores and wells were dug to defend and consolidate that power, every one of them excavated manually, in all weather, by serfs worked to death.

  During that time, secreted high in the ridge country, and safe beyond the barriers of superheated canyons, our people lay low in the shade of their tree, holding fast in the hope that they might outlive this blighted season.

  To make a refuge, said my mother. And to live with water at your feet. That’s the key. That’s the rule. They never forgot this, the children of the tree. And afterwards, when they came down here to take up what was left when the plainsfolk had all died or fled, they lived this way. And that’s how we live today.

  People of the plain, I said.

  Don’t you forget it.

  I promised her I wouldn’t. And I haven’t. Even if, as an old man, with the benefit of so much more information, I parse these origin stories a little differently.

  As a youth, such tales of family lore did more than bind me to our homeplace – they helped make my father real. Because all I had of him were a few brief, interrupted years, fragments and memories I had to strain to keep hold of. If it hadn’t been for the trek to the water cave we made each year as the winter waned, even these might have slipped away. His presence was closest and most vivid up there.

  Our annual hike up into the range tops was a kind of pilgrimage, a ritual we fortified ourselves with before shuttering the house and retreating to the cellars.

  Before dawn, we rode out to the range with ropes and harnesses and waterpacks lashed to the quad, and from the closest canyon mouth we clambered up spurs and terraces until we could feel the salt wind in our faces from the sea beyond. From that elevation it was a level but slow tramp along the fractured spine of the range to where the fig had once stood. There, at the broken rim of the hole the tree once hid, we shrugged off the rope and sat a moment to catch our breath and suck some water before anchoring off and harnessing up for the rappel.

  My mother drilled rope work into me early. I was still a boy when I learnt to make the drop unassisted. But it never goes away, does it, that fizz of fear at the edge when you clip on, put your back to the abyss and step off. It was a vertical shaft, an open-throated swallet of thirty metres. The first descent I can remember, I was clipped to my father, my back against his chest, little boots bumping against his shins every time he kicked back off the wall. The sensations are still so clear: the rough stone wall up close; the dark fissures where massive roots once bit into the limestone; the scrape of his boots and the burr of rope through the pulleys; the leathery scent of him in the warm, sandy-tasting air into which we sank, as if into a tepid bath.

  As a boy, descending alone, my mother already out of sight at the surface, I slipped back into those memories, and further still, imagining myself clambering down with my ancestors on the roots of that great tree, writhing through the fissure at the bottom, picking my way by touch to the pool deep underground. There I would kneel beside my father’s people and lave up sweet water by the handful.

  Of course, these old ones were my mother’s people too. Generations of them had shared the place together. And yet I only ever thought of them as my father’s line, and she never corrected me. I only thought about this later in life, how for my sake, in upholding tradition and keeping my father’s memory alive, my mother rendered herself invisible. I went to the cave many times with her. But it was always him I was summoning. Clipping off. Standing at the swallet floor. Looking up at the almond eye of sunlight, catching the fire of it in his beard as he craned up to survey the scene beside me. When he drew himself upright and raised his hands to the sky, it seemed he was gazing in awe at the glory of the world in expectation that at any moment something even more wonderful would reveal itself.

  Now, of course, I see the moment I invested with all the grandeur of antiquity, and the gravity of the sagas, was just an unremarkable instant. He probably wasn’t standing there in anticipation of some miracle – he was simply catching his breath, freeing the line, and waiting for my mother to descend. But in my mind, and in that place, he belonged to a time of legend. And look, I’m old enough to know about myths, what happens to a stone if you spin it in a barrel with others long enough. But it still strikes me as impressive, the way those folks lived during the age of chaos.

  Just imagine what it took to endure beneath that tree and in the guts of the earth while fires engulfed the plain, soil and ash taking to the sky, the wells of every compound turned so salty that folks went mad, peons and chieftains alike. There was no purpose on the lowland. Even the brutal order of the strongmen fell apart. Folks were possessed by nihilism, every kind of ugliness. The stink of death was everywhere. Until, finally, there was a great exodus. The plain grew deserted.

  Still, it was a long time before our people came down off the tops. For years the soil was grey, the floodplain reeked, and the sky was dark with carrion birds. From the ridges above, the land looked scorched, haunted. So they stayed put. Life on the heights was all they knew. Hadn’t the tree and the cave kept them safe? Hadn’t restraint and caution served them well?

  But the water in the cave began to take on a worrisome taint. And for a while – too long – the people suffered doubt and denial. They delayed, telling themselves that the hint of brine in their spring was imaginary, just alarmism. They told themselves that the tree and the cave remained their best protectors. That all would be well while they hid and did nothing. These were years of shame and folly. They were so close to liberty, but unable to come out into the open to take it up. As the water turned brackish, their elders wasted away, and their newborns died. Their ways began to falter, and the young spoke against the old.

  In the end, when it was rank seawater rising beneath them, the truth was unavoidable. But even then, some couldn’t forsake the shelter of the cave. And by that stage many were too weak to make the descent, so only the hardiest and most determined came down off the tops.

  Those who did inherited a field of bones. They ground them, and sowed them in the dirt. The bones of strangers. And, later, the bones of their own folk, which they carried down, season after season, from the ranges, until none was left behind. This is how my forebears made themselves anew. The people of the plain.

  These stories never ceased to excite my imagination, and my mother seemed more than happy to tell them over and again. The day she gave me this iteration, in the growshed, as we planted out okra seedlings, she was brisk in the telling. Perhaps by then she knew she needn’t bother with embellishments. She could tell from my rapt expression that I brought my own romance to the tale.

  Was my father a good grower? I asked, pulling another punnet from the cart.

  Oh, he was handy enough, my mother replied, flicking back the skirts of her hat. But he loved the sea more. He went back to it.

  Because it was in his blood?

  Maybe.

  I don’t feel it, I told her. The sea, I mean.

  No, she said. Geography is destiny. But blood tells many stories.

  Nobody talks about the Terror. No one in the hamlet, I mean.

  Those were dark days, she said. Folks scrubbed it from memory. I guess they were afraid of being haunted forever. They wanted to forget.

  So why don’t we?

  Because we’re not ordinary people.

  But I’m no better than hamlet folks. You said it.

  Nevertheless.

  As a boy I was proud of not being ordinary and careful to disguise it. Such studied humility was a family trait. I didn’t look any different to hamlet folks. And if I made a little effort, I could sound the same, too. But in my secret self I didn’t feel that way. I cleaved to the virtues – modesty, discretion, self-reliance, the greatest good for the greatest number – but I was schooled differently, and I suppose that made me more curious than the kids I met now and then at the wharf or in the market square.

  Of course, I wasn’t nearly as inquisitive as I thought I was. I learnt that later. And to say it came as a shock – well, I don’t need to tell you, comrade.

  For all that, I was a dogged little fellow. By the time I was twelve, I was pestering my mother about why our habits and routines were so fixed. I wanted to understand why we did things the way we did them. Beautiful as it was, the legend of the water cave had come to feel insufficient as explanation.

  She was a woman of extraordinary patience, my mother. For the longest time she batted me off mildly with the same old tales. But eventually she cracked. Or came to a decision. Reached a point where she thought I was ready. I don’t know if she was exasperated or relieved, but one morning, after I’d once again pressed and wheedled for an hour, she lifted a hand to shut me up. Then she kicked out a crate, sat me down on it abruptly and said: Look, there are things people simply don’t know. Big stuff. Like why we exist at all. Then there are the things they won’t allow themselves to know. Like when the water turned salty in the cave. It didn’t suit our people to believe it.

  So why did it go bad?

  Same reason all the wells went sour down here on the plain. The sea rose. Pushed up through the limestone. See, under our feet, this entire peninsula is like a honeycomb. More holes than solid ground. Down here, for a while, wells would’ve turned into springs as the sweet water was forced up by the salty water. You know why?

  Fresh water is lighter?

  Yes, less dense. It forms a layer – a lens over the top of the brine. So, for a while, as the sea pressed in, there were days of plenty. And folks got complacent. They knew it, too. Deep down. They were simple folks but not ignorant. Yet even then they denied it. Until it was too late.

  All salt.

  Correct. The great mystery of people lies in the many ways in which they’ll deceive themselves.

  All people?

  All the ones I’ve known. Everything you read in the sagas.

  Even now?

  Especially now. Like I said, there are lots of things we don’t know. Stuff that’s obscure. Even hidden from us. But there’s plenty we prefer not to know. Things we don’t dare remember. Sometimes that’s a mercy. Other times it’s a form of servitude.

  Like what?

  Well, like how the world is.

  I know how the world is, I replied. It’s round. Like an orange.

  Okay, she said, passing me the shears. Go down and cut one.

  They’re not ripe, I protested. That’d be a waste.

  Not if you learn from it.

  Bridling a little, I got up and slunk past the furry-stemmed tomatoes, the blocks of bright-boy and crisp-leaf and mignonette, to where the trolleyed rows of citrus stood in their irrigated tubs. I searched for the readiest navel I could find, but it was green-gilled and hard, and it felt improper to snip it off, but I did as I was told, brought it back to where she sat with a bowl of basil heads in her lap.

  She took the orange and pulled out her clasp knife. She set the fruit on its axis and passed the blade around the rind. Not quite at the middle, but a third of the way down. She turned it until the cut met itself. Then she set the knife a little lower and repeated the procedure. When she was finished, a curl of pithy rind came away and a whole band around the middle of the orange was naked.

  She put the fruit in my hand.

  That’s how the world is, she said.

  I don’t get it.

  Leave it here, on the bench. Come back tomorrow and look at it. And the day after that. That’s the world, how it is. Most people know this. But not many understand why.

  So, what’s the answer?

  That’s for another time. Geography before history.

  Why can’t you say?

  Everything in its time and season.

  Talk like this unsettled me, but I was an obedient son. I left the orange where it was. Next morning, and several days thereafter, I returned to it and saw how the wounded orange scoured and struggled to heal itself.

  Whenever my mother saw me examining it, her expression was impassive. On the third day, as she passed, she picked up the orange and dug the ragged nail of her index finger into the very centre of the sphere.

  What’s this part? Of the world, not the orange.

  The equator, I said.

  Correct.

  Then she set her thumb against the lower band of skin.

  See this? This is us. Just north of —