Benzamir got down beside Wahir, though he didn’t attempt to dig. ‘Listen. Seeing things like this, and your reaction to them. It worries me.’

‘Why, master?’ Wahir sifted dust and wind-worn grit through his fingers.

‘Because it doesn’t inspire you. You don’t look on this and wonder how you could make it for yourself. You just wonder at the power and foolishness of the Users, see what there is to scavenge and walk away, shaking your head.’ He saw Wahir’s reaction and quickly added: ‘It’s not just you. It’s everyone. Anything the Users left behind is impossible for you to recreate. So no one tries. Someone should be trying.’

‘Master, I know your ways are different to ours—’

‘It’s like Selah. He finds it easier to get his steel from the diggers, and in a generation there’ll be not a single man who remembers how to make it for himself. It’ll be lost. Not for ever, but lost all the same.’

Wahir stopped scooping and sieving. ‘What’s wrong, master?’

Benzamir unwrapped his headscarf and let the end dangle in the dirt. He gave a sad little smile. ‘You see, Wahir, this is what temptation is like. You know the story of Eden, the apple, what it represents? The traitors: they fell. They gave in, for all the best motives, for all the wrong reasons. Me? I can feel it too. The push, the voice telling me that it’s right to eat.’

‘When you talk like this, I don’t understand. Is it because I’m too young?’

‘No. It’s because I’m always trying to hide the truth from you.’ Benzamir sighed and slapped the carbon fibre support with his hand. It shivered for a moment. ‘I’m trying to save you from this, from all the works of the Users. And suddenly I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do any more.’

He got up abruptly, and the flying carpet glided over towards them.

‘I trust you,’ said Wahir, ‘whatever it is you have to decide.’

‘Thank you,’ said Benzamir, kicking up dust with his sandals. ‘I hope I won’t let you down.’

‘Master, where are we going now?’

‘Something that Said and me were talking about – how the faster we go, the less chance there is of getting caught. So: the Kenyan emperor wants his User book back. I’m rather interested in having a look at it myself. Let’s go and find it before he does.’

CHAPTER 20

THE FIRST THAT Va and Elenya saw of An Rinn was a boy up a tree. The boy disappeared down behind the leeside of the hill and was lost to sight.

‘We can expect a welcome, if not news.’ Va strode out with renewed vigour, leaving Elenya in his wake.

‘This Kenyan – this rumour of a Kenyan – has led us halfway across the world, and six months later we’re in Aeire, the arse-end of nowhere. But it’s all the same to you, isn’t it?’

Va declined to reply.

She shouted: ‘You’re a bigger gossipmonger than the whores at court!’

‘We’re closer now than we’ve ever been,’ he called back.

A stone skittered past him, kicked by Elenya. It fell into the roadside ditch. He stopped and waited for her, his black habit flapping and snapping in the wind as she adjusted her small pack.

He, of course, had nothing. Poverty was one of his vows.

‘God has led us here,’ he said when she had caught up.

‘You’ve led us here, and don’t pretend otherwise.’

When they crested the hill, they could see the rough huts and natural harbour that made up An Rinn. The wind blew in their faces, and they caught hints of wood smoke and cured fish, seaweed and soil. On the flank of the hill towards the headland was a stone church – a single nave with a tower, as was the style in these lands.

‘Look,’ said Va. ‘There, at the end of those houses.’

Four sails processed round above the turfed roofs.

Va picked up the hem of his habit and started to run down the dirt track. The machine slowly revealed itself between walls and trees and the folds in the ground until it was laid bare before him. He stood at the foot of one of its huge supporting beams and looked up at it, amazed and appalled in equal measure.

Under the machine was a woman with a sack of grain, feeding it a handful at a time into the ever-turning millstone. She had her back to him, until the boy they had seen climb down from the tree slipped out from behind a building and gestured to her.

She frowned at him, said something in her barbarian language that sounded like a scold, but the boy just waved more frantically. Eventually, with a long-suffering shrug of her shoulders, she glanced behind her.

She stopped. She put the sack down. She stood and wiped floury hands on her dress.

Va finally noticed that he was being stared at, but all he could think about was the soft swoosh of the sails and the low clatter of the wheel as it turned over his head.

‘What manner of abomination is this?’ he muttered. ‘This has to be the Kenyan’s doing.’ He shook himself violently to break the spell, and the woman jumped back with a shriek.

She shouted at him; tried to shoo him away as if he was a chicken.

‘Who built this?’ he raved. ‘How can you bear to have it here?’

Neither could understand the other. Va was demanding answers, the woman was barking questions, and soon they were surrounded by the villagers, who had no idea what to make of any of it.

‘Out of the way, get out of the way, will you? Nice going, your holiness.’ Elenya pushed into the circle. She looked up at the windmill and patted one of the uprights. ‘This is new.’

‘The Kenyan, I swear it.’

‘I’ll ask.’ She pulled back her hood and cleared her throat. Her beauty commanded silence. ‘I bring greetings from Mother Russia,’ she said in their language.

The woman who had been having the pointless argument with Va sniffed. ‘Who’s she? And who are you? And who, in the Good God’s name, is this rough thing? If he’s supposed to be a monk, he’s like none I’ve ever seen before. What sort of cross is that? What’s he saying? Is he mad, or drunk?’ She leaned closer to smell his breath, forcing Va to step back against the crowd.

He was pushed from behind to the accompaniment of jeering and hooting.

‘I apologize for Brother Va’s rude and abrupt manner.’ Elenya kicked him to get him to stand still, but she succeeded only in making him dance away from the blow. ‘Yes, he is mad, though he’s harmless enough. Mother Russia is a land far to the south and west, across the sea and beyond the Franks.’

The locals looked at one another: naFraince marked the edge of their knowledge.

‘We’re looking for a man – a man who stole something from the brother. This device tells us that he’s been here.’

‘You mean Solomon Akisi,’ said the woman.

Va was listening carefully. Now his enemy had a name.

‘Is he a Kenyan?’ asked Elenya.

‘Sent from the mighty Kenyan empire, as he was fond of saying. Gave us greeting in the name of his king – emperor – whatever he called him.’

‘Good woman, we need to speak to him.’

‘He’s not here,’ she snapped. ‘The King of Coirc has him, and good riddance, I say.’

‘Why, what did he do?’

‘Filled our heads with dreams and foolishness, that’s what he did, him and his natural philosophy. I said no good would come of it, and I was right. These simpletons were too easily deceived, but—’

‘Rose naMoira, it was you who took him in!’ said an outraged voice.

‘That was common courtesy, macFinn, and I won’t have you saying otherwise.’ Rose singled out a man in the front row and jabbed him in the chest. ‘You’re never one for sharing in the good times, but as soon as something goes wrong, you’re hanging around your neighbours’ thresholds complaining and bellyaching until they give you what you want just to make you go away.’

macFinn snorted like a pig. ‘How dare you, you harpy, you morrigan! I keep a well-stocked house and don’t you forget it.’