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were banished as punishment to a hut some distance from the village, as persons unworthy to live among their kinsfolk. Most startling of all, he saw that it was a boy’s mother, not his father, who owned the hut in which they lived and all the utensils and chattels contained within it. It was his mother to whom he looked for instruction and guidance, the mother’s brothers who disciplined him when he transgressed.
    For a long time the boy puzzled over this. He studied Issiokhena, with whom he lodged, and Baiyilah, her husband, and the kinsfolk who came in and out of their hut as though it were their own. His ears squinted with the effort of listening, of understanding. And so he learned that when a savage boy spoke of his brothers and sisters, he spoke of his cousins. His mother’s brothers he called not uncle but father. It was to be several months before he grasped that the savages had arranged matters the wrong way round so that a savage child reckoned his descent through not his father’s but his mother’s line. The father was regarded fondly enough but was granted little respect and no authority. At night the boy lay in his bed of skins, turning this over and over in his mind. It was an uncommon mistake. In France, and in all civilised nations, a boy’s father was, for better or worse, the key to him.
    The boy’s father’s name had been Auguste Guichard. It was the boy’s name also but no one in the village used it. Though he repeated it many times, the French sounds were slippery in the savages’ mouths and they could not keep hold of them. Instead, in the first months, his fellows called him Nani , which in their language meant fish. They said it was for the paleness of his skin, but the boy knew that they made fun of him. From the first he had shown himself a poor swimmer.
    When they called him Nani , Auguste’s mouth tightened and he refused to answer. The name endured a little while before it withered and died. No new one grew in its place. When it was necessary to refer to the boy by some kind of name, they called him only Ullailah , or boy by himself.
    The savage boys stopped gesturing at the boy to join in their games before he had readied himself to accept. He watched from the shadow of the palisades as they tossed wooden dice or threw spears at rolling stones to see who could come closest to the place where the stone would finally stop. He thought of Jean. It was not difficult to imagine Jean squatting among them, his sharp knees poking holes in his breeches as he coached them in the rudiments of mia and hazard. Ever since Auguste could remember, his cousin had always been in the middle of everything. There was something about Jean that drew boys to him like lice. When he ran, he never troubled to glance over his shoulder. He knew they would follow.
    Auguste had watched him and watched him but, though he had tried to copy his cousin, he had never caught the trick of it. He could only observe that in La Rochelle there was a shape to the air that fitted around Jean exactly. It was not the same for Auguste. The air inside him did not match the air outside. When he breathed out the other boys could smell it.
    Once he had found a wasps’ nest beneath the eaves of his mother’s cottage. He had watched it for almost an entire afternoon and he had seen that though most of the wasps came and went unmolested, one wasp seeking entrance to the nest was set upon by the others and stung to death. When they were gone, Auguste picked the dead wasp up by its wings and studied it closely. He could see nothing about it that was different from all the other wasps.
    In La Rochelle the grey seas of France had hurled themselves against the land like capricious giant-children, one moment cradling a ship in the palm of one hand, the next snapping it carelessly in two. They demanded unceasing attention and applause, and their tempers set the tempers of those who lived alongside them just as the sun set the hour of the