I

Knox woke in the early hours to engine noise and headlights sweeping up towards the lodge. He pulled on trousers and a shirt, hurried outside as Rebecca climbed in obvious distress from the driver’s door. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked, going to help her.

‘I’m fine,’ she told him. But her grimaces belied her words.

He put his arm around her waist, took as much of her weight as he could. ‘Where have you been?’ he asked. ‘Have you had news about Adam and Emilia?’

She looked sharply at him. ‘What makes you ask that?’

‘You left so suddenly.’

‘It was nothing to do with them. It was something else.’

It was pretty obvious she wasn’t levelling with him, but he let it go. ‘Are you hungry?’ he asked. ‘Is there anything I can get you?’

‘I could do with some aspirin.’

He helped her to her camp-bed, fetched some painkillers and a glass of water. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what happened earlier. If you don’t want to tell me, fine, I trust your judgement. But I can still be useful. Just tell me what needs doing, and I’ll do it, okay? No questions asked.’

Her eyes moistened, he thought she was about to crumble. But then she caught herself and her expression hardened, as though he’d been trying to trick her. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.

‘Fine,’ he sighed. ‘Sleep well.’ He returned to his bed, lay there listening to her bitten-off cries as she readied herself for bed. It distressed him to hear her pain, to not be allowed to help. He struggled for sleep, turning this way and that on the thin mattress without ever quite finding repose. It grew less dark outside. He tiptoed quietly through the gloom to the washroom, dressed and went out. The sun wasn’t yet up, leaving the morning grey and cool. Down on the beach, he kicked off his shoes. The thin, cold crust of sand crunched satisfyingly beneath his tread, like the dried bark of a rotted tree. He bowed his head as he walked, searching the beach for fragments of pottery.

He stopped, crouched, picked up a white shard; but it was only a piece of eggshell. From the size of it, it had to have belonged to an aepyornis, a one-time Madagascar endemic, and the largest bird ever to have lived, taking advantage of the island’s lack of large predators to become the bully on the block. But then the first settlers had arrived and they’d eventually hunted them to extinction—for their meat, of course, but also for their eggs. The damned things had been the size of rugby balls, so that an aepyornis omelette would feed a family for a week. The birds had become well known in the ancient world. Marco Polo had immortalised them as the rukh or roc, capable of carrying off elephants in their claws and then dropping them like bombs from a great height; though actually the aepyornis had been as flightless as ostriches.

There’d always been a bit of a question mark as to how Marco Polo knew about the birds. He’d never visited the island himself. In fact, he’d actually confused it with Mogadishu, a corruption of which had given Madagascar its name. Most likely he’d heard of them from Arab merchants, who’d certainly been familiar with the place. They’d called it the Island of the Moon, and they’d believed it to be a point of no return for the southern ocean; that he who sailed beyond it was lost. Yet people undoubtedly had sailed beyond it. A Chinese map completed in around 1390 in honour of the first Ming emperor showed the world in traditional fashion, with a swollen China at its heart, shrunken apologies for Africa and Mediterranean Europe to the west. But what was most remarkable about the map was that it got the shape of Africa broadly right, including its southern and western coasts, even though the Chinese had never explored it themselves.

Whatever their sources had been, Zheng He and his admirals would have known it to be perfectly possible to reach and even round the Cape of Good Hope. Sailing along unfamiliar coasts had been a painfully slow business, however. If you stayed in sight of land, you increased exponentially your risk of running aground, so you had to go slow, take constant soundings, find a new safe harbour every afternoon, because sailing at night that close to land was suicide. If a Chinese treasure fleet had crawled in this manner all the way down Africa’s eastern coast, the crew would doubtless have been restless for home and impatient of a slow retracement of their route, so it was entirely plausible that their navigators would have set a course directly for China. Draw a line between the Cape and Beijing, and it would run pretty much straight through these reefs here. Just as easy for the coral to snag two ships as one.

Ahead of him, mangroves were being slowly ducked by the incoming tide, like a village of elders undergoing baptism. Knox turned and headed back along the beach, past the Yvette and Eden and on to Pierre’s cabins and beyond, still searching the shore as he went. The sand became infested with tiny flies; he set off blizzards of them with every step, cascading ahead of him down the beach. He went down to the sea’s edge to avoid them, small waves splashing timidly around his ankles before withdrawing like unctuous servants, his feet leaving shallow imprints that quickly filled with water and then faded into nothing. It was there in the wash that he saw the shard of porcelain. He crouched to pick it up. It was perhaps an inch long, its edges abraded smooth, white with just a trace of blue upon it, the exact same shade he’d seen on the porcelain fragments on the Morombe sea-bed. He tossed it up and caught it, thinking through what it might mean. Then he tucked it away in his pocket and headed back to Eden.