There was another newcomer to the village, a man whose intense and troubled career in Orahua trailed alongside my own, like two meandering streams that run through the same valley but keep their separate courses. Heronimus Daely was an outsider, a man from the north. He had no family, no past to which he referred (although he once mentioned a Catholic seminary), indeed no credible present. At times I wondered whether he was being paid to spy on us. Possibly he was a fugitive. It was not unusual for men who had been involved in violent feuds to take refuge in remote villages; so too would outlaws, political and criminal. But his venerable name – a gift of the Church? – was too striking to be anything but true.

I first encountered him when, a few days after returning from Gunung Sitoli, I called on the martial arts master to enquire about lessons in silé, a balletic but lethal form of kung fu that had originated in Sumatra. Ama Onekhe was outside in the dark, mending the walls of a fish pond. I waited in the bare living room of his spacious wooden house, where two women sat on the floor, their legs stretched out in front of them, cleaning rice under a smoky lamp. In the corner, hunched over a table, sat a sturdy grim-faced man, intent upon some intricate task made more difficult by the dimness of the room.

After a terse acknowledgement, nobody spoke further and there followed a long, tense silence, punctuated by the rhythmic slushing of rice grains in winnowing trays and the hissing of cicadas. Presently Ama Onekhe came in with a towel round his neck, his spiky hair still dripping.

“They've filled in one of my fishponds and poisoned the other”, he said with a pained grin that suggested this wasn't much of a surprise. It was a common form of indirect aggression, the expression of “resentment”, a cardinal sin in Nias.