Senhora Aurora asks the first question

She has no surname. She has no record. She lives on the Almada hill, above the south bank of the Tagus, opposite the city that will, three and a half thousand years from her morning, be called Lisbon. She is the first woman of the line — and the line, at this moment, is only her.

What she does, on a particular morning at the beginning of the rains, is ask a stone a question. We do not know the question. We do not know whether she heard an answer.

What we know — and what the series’s last sentence will affirm, four hundred years after the priest who heard the same voice on the cool floor of a Brazilian rainforest — is that she is the audience. Not the audience to anything that follows. The audience of what arrives.

The sky pattern she sees on the night before her question is the same sky pattern the Tupinambá keepers will name as the beginning of the rains, in a Tupi calendar that is not yet a Tupi calendar because the Tupi are not yet on the Atlantic coast in the form they will later take. The pattern is sky. The pattern is older than any of the languages that will, three thousand years from this morning, claim to know what it means.

She is the first woman of the line because there is, in this hour, only one woman in the line.

She is the audience-name because, in a hand the priest Almeida will not be able to recognise in 1652 as a hand practised in Arabic numerals, her name will appear on an atlas the priest carries — on the front endpaper, stamped in oxblood, dated 1567 by someone who was not yet born when the stamp was made, in a script that came later than the date and earlier than the stamp.

The question Almeida is asked, on the cool floor of the rainforest, three thousand two hundred and sixty-seven years from this morning, is the question she asked the stone.

She is what answered him.