“I was taken as a child from—”
“I remember what you told me,” Keram said, his eyebrows raised in good humor. “I’m not sure I believe a word of it. But listen now. In Cata Huuk, the word of the Potus is law. I am the son of the Potus. You will obey me. You will not question me. Do you understand?”
Juna’s folk were egalitarian, like most hunter-gatherer folk; no, she didn’t understand. But she nodded dumbly.
They set off. The young men, unburdened, strode ahead easily enough— as did Juna, despite her pregnancy and the four months she had endured of poor diet and hard labor. But the guards puffed and complained of their weary feet.
It was a great relief for Juna to be out of the squalid town and in the open country once more, a great relief to be
walking
rather than bending her back over some dusty field— even if, as they headed steadily east, she was entering countryside that was increasingly remote from the place where she and her ancestors had always lived.
They stopped each night in small towns, no more or less impressive than Cahl’s had been. The guards were plied with beer and girls. Keram and Muti kept themselves to themselves, spending their nights quietly in huts. They let Juna stay with them, huddled in a corner.
Neither of them touched her. Perhaps it was her pregnancy. Perhaps they were just not sure of her. Part of her, glad to be free of the grubby attentions of Cahl, relished not having to share her body with anybody else. But part of her, more calculating, regretted it. She had no real understanding of what this place, this Cata Huuk, would be like. But she suspected her best chance of surviving was to bind herself to Keram or Muti.
So she made sure that each evening and morning, as she cast off her shift, she showed them her body; and she was aware of how, when he thought she was not looking, Keram’s gaze followed her.
As they walked on, the landscape became more crowded with fields and towns. No trees grew here, though there were stumps and patches of burned-out forest. There was no open land at all, in fact, save for worthless rocky land or marshes. There were only fields, and patches of land that had clearly once been plowed but were now abandoned, useless, exhausted. Soon there was scarcely a footfall she could make without stepping into the track of somebody who had been here before. The extent to which these swarming people had remade the world oppressed her.
And at last they reached Cata Huuk itself.
The first thing Juna saw was a wall. Made of mud bricks and straw, it was a great circular barrier that must have been as high as three people standing on each other’s shoulders, and it bristled with spikes. Outside the wall there was a great ring of shabby huts and lean-tos made of mud and tree branches. The wall was so wide it seemed to cut the land in half.
A broad, well-trodden path led up to the wall itself, a path which Keram’s party followed. But as they approached people came boiling like wasps out of the huts, yelling, plucking at Keram’s robes, holding up meat and fruit and sweetmeats and bits of carved wood and stone. Juna shrank back. But Keram assured her that there was nothing to be concerned about. These people were simply trying to
sell
things; this was a
market.
The words meant nothing to her.
A great gate made of wood had been set in the wall. Keram called out loudly. A man on top of the wall waved, and the gate was hauled open. The party walked through.
As she walked into strangeness, Juna found herself trembling.
The huts: that was the first thing that struck her. There were many of them, tens of tens, strewn in great masses across the kilometers-wide compound inside the walls. Most of them were no better than Cahl’s dwelling, simple slumped mounds of mud and wood. But some, toward the center of the city, were grander than that, tottering structures of two or three stories, their frontages walled with woven yellow grasses that shone in the sun. The clusters of huts were cut through by lanes that sliced this way and that, like a spider’s web. Smoke hung in a great gray cloud everywhere. Sewage ran down channels cut into the center of each street, and flies buzzed in great linear clouds over the sluggishly flowing waste.
And people swarmed, the men walking together, the children running and yelling, the women burdened with heavy loads on their heads and backs. There were animals, goats and sheep and dogs, crowded in as tightly as the people. The noise was astonishing, an unending clamor. The smells— of shit, piss, animals, fires, greasy cooked meat— were overwhelming.
This was Cata Huuk. With ten thousand people crammed within its walls, it was one of Earth’s first cities. Even Keer had been no preparation for this. To Juna, it was like looking into a great murky sea full of people.
Keram smiled at her. “Are you all right?”
“What trickster god made this teeming pile?”
“No god.
People,
Juna. Many, many people. You must remember that. No matter how strange all this appears, it is the work of people, like you and me. Besides,” he said with mock innocence, “this is where you were born. This is where you belong.”
“This is where I was born,” she said, unable to project much conviction. “But I am afraid. I can’t help it.”
“I’ll be with you,” he murmured.
With calculation she slid her hand into his. She caught Muti’s eye; he was smirking, knowing.
They walked down a radial avenue toward the great structures at the center of the city. Now Juna was truly stunned. Three stories high, these buildings were great blocks that loomed like giants over the rest of the city. The buildings were set in a loose square around a central courtyard, where grass and flowers grew thickly. Men armed with barbed pikes stood at every entrance, glaring suspiciously. Women moved with bowls of water, which they sprinkled on the grass.
Muti grinned at Juna. “Again she is staring. What is so strange now?”
“The grass. Why do they throw water on it?” She struggled to express herself. “Rain falls. Grass grows.”
Muti shook his head. “Not regularly enough for the Potus. I think he would command the weather itself.”
They walked into the largest of the buildings. Juna had never been in such a huge enclosed space. Stairways and ladders connected the mezzanine-like floors above. Despite the brightness of the day, torches burned smokily on the walls, banishing shadows and filling the palace with yellow light. People dressed in shining clothes walked through all the levels, and some of them waved down to Keram and Muti as they went by. It was like looking up into the branches of a great tree. Even the floor was extraordinary, made of wood cut so smoothly it felt slippery under her feet, and oil or grease had been worked into it until it shone.
They came to the very center of the building. Here was a platform, raised to shoulder-height above the ground. And on the platform, sitting on an ornately carved block of wood, was the fattest man Juna had ever seen. His breasts were larger than a nursing mother’s. His belly, glistening with oil, was like the Moon. And his head was a ball of flesh, completely devoid of hair; his scalp was shaved, and he had no beard, moustache, or even eyebrows. He was naked to the waist, but he wore finely stitched trousers.
This fat creature was the Potus, the Powerful One. He was one of mankind’s first kings. He was talking to a skinny corpselike man at his elbow, who thumbed through lengths of knotted string with intense concentration.
Keram and Muti waited patiently until the Potus’s attention was free.
Juna whispered, “What are they doing with the string?”
“Tallies,” Muti whispered. “They record, umm, the workings of the city and the farms: how many sheep and goats, how much grain can be expected from the next harvest, how many newborn, how many dead.” He smiled at her wide-open eyes. “Our stories are told on those bits of string, Juna. This is how Cata Huuk works.”
Keram nudged him. The man with the string had withdrawn. The Potus’s great head had swiveled toward them. Keram and Muti immediately bowed. Juna just stared, until Keram dragged her down.
“Let her stand,” said the Potus. His voice was like riverbed gravel. His eyes on Juna, he beckoned her.
Hesitantly Juna walked forward.
He leaned over her. She could smell animal oil on his skin. He pulled at her hair, hard enough to make her yowl. “Where did you get her?”
Keram quickly explained what had happened at Keer. “Potus, she says she was born here— here, in Cata Huuk. She says she was stolen as a baby. And—”
“Take your clothes off,” the Potus snapped at Juna.
She glared back, repulsed by his smell, and did not obey. But Muti hastily ripped her skin shift from her, until she stood naked.
The Potus nodded, as if appraising a hunter’s kill. “Good breasts. Good height, good posture— and a pup in the belly, I see. Do you believe her, Keram? I never heard of a child like this being stolen— what, fifteen, sixteen years ago?”
“Nor I,” said Keram.
“They say the wild ones beyond the fields grow like this: tall, healthy-looking, despite their appalling way of life.”
“But if she is wild, she is a clever one,” Keram said carefully. “I thought her tale would amuse you.”
Juna said, “It is the truth!”
The Potus barked laughter. “It speaks.”
“She speaks well. She is clever, sir, with—”
“Dance for me, girl.” When Juna stared back at him, mute, the Potus said with a quiet hardness, “Dance for me, or I will have you dragged from here now.”
Juna understood little of what was happening, but she could see that her life depended on how she responded now.
So she danced. She recalled dances she and her sister Sion had made up as children, and dances she had joined as an adult, following the capering of the shaman.
After a time, the Potus grinned. And then he, as well as Keram and Muti, began to clap to the rhythm of her bare feet as they slapped against the floor of polished wood.
Naked, stranded in strangeness, she danced, and danced.
From the beginning Juna saw very clearly that if she wished to remain healthy, well-fed— and free of the scourge of endless, repetitive, backbreaking work— then she had to stay as close to the Potus as she could.
And so she made herself as interesting as possible. She rummaged through her memories for skills and feats that had been commonplace among her own people, and yet would seem marvelous to these hive dwellers. She organized long-distance races, which she won with stunning ease, even heavily pregnant. She made spear-throwers, and showed her skill at hitting targets so small and distant most of the Potus’s court couldn’t even see them. She would take random bits of stone, wood, and shell, and, starting with no tools at all, knap out blades and carve ornaments, a process that seemed charming and miraculous to these people, so remote were they from the resources of the Earth.
Her baby was born. He was a slender boy, who might grow up to look like Tori, his now-lost father. As soon as she could she began to train him to run, to dance, to throw as she could.
And when at last she coaxed Keram into her bed— when he forgave her the lies she had told to persuade him to bring her here— and when a year later, wearing his gold-studded shell necklace, she gave birth to his child, she felt her place at the heart of this nest of people was secure.
As for the city, it didn’t take Juna long to see the truth about this cramped hive.
This was a place of layers, of rigidity and control. The mass of the people here slaved their days away to feed the Potus, his wives, sons, daughters, and relatives, and those who served him, and the priesthood, the mysterious network of shamanlike mystics who seemed to live an even grander life than the Potus himself.
It had to be this way. With the taming of the plants, the land had become much more productive. The natural checks that had held back the growth of populations were suddenly removed. Human numbers exploded.
Suddenly people no longer bred like primates. They bred like bacteria.
The new, dense populations made possible the growth of new kinds of communities: large centers of population, towns, cities, fed by a steady flow of food and raw materials from the countryside.
There had never been such numbers before, never such an elaboration of human relations. The cities, of necessity, shook themselves down into a new form of social organization. In communities like Juna’s, decision making had been communal and leadership informal, since everybody knew everybody else. Kinship ties had been sufficient to resolve most conflict. In slightly larger groups, chiefs would gather central control in order to manage affairs.
Now it was no longer possible for everybody to participate in every decision. It was no longer efficient for each family to grow and gather its own food, to make its own tools and clothing, to trade one-on-one with its neighbors. And day by day people could expect to meet perfect strangers— and have to get along with them, rather than just drive them away or kill them, as in the old days. The old inhibitions of kinship were no longer enough: Policing of some kind was required to keep order.
Central control rapidly asserted itself. Power and resources were increasingly concentrated in the hands of an elite. Chiefs and kings arose, with monopolies on decision making, information, and power. A new kind of redistributive economy was developed. There was political organization, rapidly advancing technology, record keeping, bureaucracy, taxation: an explosion of sophistication in the means by which human beings dealt with one another.
And, for the first time in hominid history, there were people who didn’t have to work for food.
For thirty thousand years there had been religion, art, music, storytelling, war. But now it became possible for the new societies to afford specialists: people who did nothing but paint, or perfect melodies on flutes of bones and wood, or speculate on the nature of a god who had given the gifts of fire and agriculture to an unworthy mankind, or kill. Out of this tradition would eventually emerge much of the beauty and grandeur implicit in human potential. But so would emerge armies of professional, dedicated killers, of whom Keram’s guards were a prototype.