Chapter Four She rose to her feet and stretched out her hand. Jason took it, and she squeezed his fingers and let go. She said, ‘I can see that it’s an open road.’Jason said, ‘Gee up!’ and beat the little donkey on the rump with the flat of his hand. They set off again after their rest, walking side by side down the wide road. She thought: This is March 1629, and we keep moving north, but each day is hotter than the last.Nearly six months, and uncounted hundreds of miles, lay between them and Jason’s City of Pearl. So many things had passed since they left the shores of Coromandel, all passed in a slow blur before her eyes, from the heavy green of the south to the harsh brown and paler green here, from the sticky embrace of Manairuppu’s damp heat to the fiery touch of this sun. In the south a crowd had been a shimmer of black skin and coloured cloth; here it was a dotting of brown on white. The food had changed, and the taste of water, and the smell of the air at night.Jason had changed.
