was no chance of encountering anybody who might know him, and laugh at his shame - or, worse, turn away in pity.
After many days of walking they came to a lake. Chona had Novu make camp in a stand of willow, while he sat and bathed his bare feet in the stagnant water at the lake’s edge.
‘So,’ Chona said at length. ‘Do you know where you are?’ He spoke in Novu’s own tongue, his words lightly accented.
Novu had tried to follow the route, with the vague idea of running back home if he got away. After the first couple of days he had run out of familiar landmarks, and since then he knew only that they had kept moving north. He admitted, ‘No.’
‘Good.’ Chona, sitting on the ground, was a slim silhouette in the light of the low sun that reflected from the still water. He looked calm and strong. ‘Now, if you ever got away from me, you’d run south, trying to get back to Jericho.’
Novu shrugged. That seemed obvious.
‘But if you did flee, I’d run you down easily. Even if you had a day’s head start. You know that, don’t you?’
‘I suppose—’
‘And when I did catch you, I’d hamstring you. Do you know what that means? Probably just one leg. You could walk with a crutch. You could still make bricks. But you’d never run anywhere ever again. Do you believe me?’
‘Yes. Yes, I believe you.’
Chona folded his legs under him, stood easily, and came over to where Novu was sitting. He dug a stone blade from a fold of his tunic. The boy flinched back, but Chona bent down, and held the blade to the rope hobble at Novu’s ankles. ‘Then we understand each other.’ He cut the attaching rope with a single swipe of the blade. ‘Get those bands off your ankles, and bathe your feet. Then go catch some fish.’ He coughed, wiped his nose on the back of his hand, and walked away.
After that they walked on, still as master and slave, Novu still bearing the bulk of the load. But now at least they went side by side, for Novu, without the hobble, was able to keep up with Chona’s long stride, and Chona no longer bothered with the demeaning tether at night.
Novu got less things wrong, and less slaps to the back of the head. Chona helped Novu repair his soft town boots when they started to wear out. He even taught him a few words in the traders’ tongue, which he said was spoken from one end of the Continent to the other.
And he began to talk more openly to Novu.
One night he sketched a kind of plan of his world in riverside mud. ‘Here is Jericho, at the eastern end of a great ocean that runs far to the west. There are lands to the north of the ocean, lands to the south, as you see. I know little of what lies south, but to the north there are many people, much trading to be done. A vast, vast area. This is the land we call the Continent.’
Novu was used to drawings and plans; they were used all the time in Jericho in building work. But he had no clear idea of what an ‘ocean’ was, or how far this body of water stretched. It was only when Chona used his thumb to indicate how far they had walked in comparison that he began to grasp its scale.
‘That ocean’s huge.’
‘Yes,’ Chona said. ‘But I, and other traders, walk its coasts, and have seen the gates of rock in the far west where it opens out into a greater ocean still. Now, I had been thinking of taking you to the north, here . . .’ This was a fat peninsula between the middle ocean to the south, and a lesser sea, still a great body in its own right, to the north. ‘There are communities that live like you do in Jericho. All heaped up in boxes of mud. There, I am sure, your skills as a brickmaker will be worthy of trading - if your father wasn’t lying about you.’
Novu said hotly, ‘My father lies about many things, but not about that.’
‘But the year is wakening.’ He waved his hand over the sketched Continent. ‘The trade routes are opening. There are many mountains and forests in the way, but rivers span the Continent east to west, north to south. Trade flows along these great channels, as sap rises in