They drove the blue two-wheeled cart slowly down the northern approach road. They dropped the gentle switchbacks that led from the granite pass into the agricultural terraces of the Orchard Ward.
Cira held the leather reins with both hands. That let the leather slide smoothly through her palms as Barnaby set his iron shoes against the gravel grade with steady, rhythmic caution. Beside her on the bench, Len sat with his boots resting flat on the dashboard, his walking stick wedged securely between his knees, his right arm resting easily on his hip.
For Cira, the descent was a disorienting, almost physical assault upon twelve years of inherited dread.
In the northern towns of the Highfield district, the landscape of Rookvale had never been described in the language of ordinary ground shape. No one talked about its soil chemistry, its drainage gradients, or the yield of its wheat terraces. It was always the Basin. A dark, choking cooking pot of poisoned fog and stale water, where no bird sang, where trees grew only in the stunted, weeping shapes of fungal growths, and where the dead stood at street corners wearing copper masks, checking the identity papers of living men who had forgotten their own mothers’ names.
