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is prescient
to an extent – it’s in art’s nature to look forward – but art deals
with feelings, not facts. Great art shows you what you want to see
– that’s the greatness of it. But the future doesn’t exist until we
get there. You can’t change something that doesn’t
exist.”
    “ There are people who would say your views are
blasphemous.”
    “ There are others who would say they are the law.” Layla
turned away abruptly, pouring boiling water over the tea leaves.
She felt angry with Nashe Crawe for goading her into saying things
she didn’t believe. She had no respect for lawmen who put statutes
in place simply to uphold their own prejudices. It had been men
just like them who ordered the death of her mother. In Layla’s view
the clairvoyancy laws were despotic and ultimately illogical; you
might just as well try to outlaw insanity. But she felt Nashe Crawe
had backed her into a corner.
    As she waited
for the tea to brew she thought about the old woman, Thanick
Acampos. Thanick was an odd name, foreign. Layla wondered what she
had meant by sending Nashe Crawe to her, Nashe Crawe with her dirty
trainers and expensive jewellery, her hackneyed belief in a
philosophy the old woman knew Layla despised. Perhaps it was simply
that Nashe Crawe was rich, and Thanick Acampos thought Layla could
probably do with the money.
    She poured the
tea and tore open a packet of cookies. “I’m sorry about your son,”
she said. “I wish I could help, but I can’t.”
    “ Would you just come and see him?” said Nashe Crawe. “Alcander
doesn’t get many visitors. Not now.” There was a pleading look in
her eyes, a kind of willed helplessness that filled Layla
simultaneously with rage and pity.
    “ I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” she said. “I don’t
really have the time.”
    “ I’ll pay you for your time, of course,” Nashe Crawe said
swiftly. “I mean, I’d like to commission something from you. I want
to order one of your tapestries.” She plucked at the cord of the
bag in her lap. The coins inside clinked together like wafers of
granite. “Could you come tomorrow?” She told Layla her address, a
street in a part of the city Layla had heard of but never visited,
a district of bulky mansions behind electrified railings, of narrow
cobbled cul-de-sacs and marble fountains. She had heard that a lot
of ex-militiamen lived there, high stakes gamblers, people with
security concerns.
    Nashe Crawe
had said her husband was a marksman, which was really an admission
that he was a gun for hire. In spite of herself, Layla felt
curious. She asked Nashe Crawe if she would mind leaving the bag of
coins as a deposit on the commission. She thought such blatant talk
of money might put an end to the whole business, but to her
amazement the woman agreed without hesitation.
    “ I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” she said. She handed
her the bag. Once Nashe Crawe had left, Layla tipped out the coins
and spread them across the floor. There were twenty in all, the
gold amulettos that
had stopped being official currency two centuries before but that
could be exchanged unofficially anywhere for five thousand drachmas
apiece.
    Layla felt
faint. It was more money than she had ever seen in her life. She
felt an urge to run after Nashe Crawe, to pursue her down the
street and thrust the bag with its contents back into her hands.
She knew that her possession of the coins committed her to
something, that it tied her to Nashe Crawe and her son and to the
old woman Thanick Acampos in ways she did not yet understand. She
was not used to being tied to anything. It was tantamount to
selling her soul.
    It was a lot
of money though. A sum like that would assure her of financial
freedom for many years.
    She
picked up one of the coins, remembering the fake brass amulettos that had once been a collecting
craze among her schoolmates. It was from these that she recognised
the twin motifs: Idris and Seneca on one side, the