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one hand to scratch it, and thought no more about it. For a little while afterwards there was a tender spot at the base of her neck, in the soft hollow between the collar bones.

 
     
     
    3
     
     
    Sisi’s kiss
     
     
     
    T he cracks were becoming more frequent, and wider. They ran in random zigzag patterns all over the land, as if the ground had been baked too long in some distant summer and had shivered like a badly-glazed plate. At first the cracks were only inches wide, and inches deep; but as the column of the Manth people marched on north, the cracks grew in size, until they were too wide to step over, and they had to find a way between them.
    There was no made road, but the path taken by other travellers before them was easy enough to see. Here the tough grasses had been beaten down by the tread of men and beasts, forming a winding route that made its way through the cracked land. After a while the path began to descend, and so entered a natural groove in the plain, which seemed to be the bed of some long-ago dried-up stream. This path, no more than a dozen yards wide at the base, snaked its way here and there between the sudden fissures, descending all the time. The downward gradient was barely noticeable, but little by little the slopes rose up on either side, until they were higher than the travellers’ heads.
    Hanno Hath didn’t like this stream-bed of a road. He sent scouts up the side slopes to look for some other route, Mumpo to the west and Tanner Amos to the east. The surface of the sloping sides was crumbling and littered with loose fragments of stone, which made them hard to scramble up. Every step kicked free a few of the loose stones, which skittered down in miniature avalanches, picking up smaller stones as they went.
    ‘What do you see, Mumpo? Is there another way?’
    ‘No,’ Mumpo called back. ‘The cracks are too wide.’
    From his viewpoint on the west slope, Mumpo could see that the land-cracks had increased and widened and deepened in every direction. The dried-up riverbed was the only way through.
    By mid-afternoon, when they stopped to rest again, the road had cut deeper still into the land, and was now running down a steep-sided valley. Mumpo and Tanner descended the slopes, picking their way with care, then taking it at a run, racing the rolling rocks to the bottom.
    ‘Still nothing?’
    ‘Just cracks, everywhere.’
    Hanno Hath turned to his son. ‘Are we near water, Bo?’
    Bowman shook his head. Sometimes he could sense the presence of springs or streams, but right now he felt nothing.
    ‘I can’t smell anything.’
    ‘My dear?’
    This was to Ira Hath, who had sat down and was composing herself on the ground, her back leaning against a wagon wheel. She closed her eyes. Several times a day she repeated this process, in order to make sure that they were going the right way. It was a little like sensing the direction of the wind, only it wasn’t wind she felt on her upraised face, but warmth. The sensation was faint, but clear. It told her the way to the homeland. There was another part to the feeling, which was harder to describe: a sense of gathering hush, the prelude to a storm. Ira never spoke to the others of how much she feared this coming time. They could travel no faster than they were doing. There was no point in spreading panic. To herself and to Hanno, she called it the rising wind: every day, a little more every day, the wind was rising. They must seek shelter, they must reach the safety of the homeland, before the storm broke; or the coming wind would carry them away.
    Her husband squatted down before her, and took her hands in his.
    ‘Are we getting closer?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes. Closer.’
    ‘And you?’
    ‘I’ll live to see the homeland. Haven’t I said so?’
    He gave her the last of the bread that he’d saved from his own ration, together with a cup of milk. She ate a little and drank a little for his sake, but she wasn’t hungry.
    ‘You’re getting