‘But the year is wakening.’ He waved his hand over the sketched Continent. ‘The trade routes are opening. There are many mountains and forests in the way, but rivers span the Continent east to west, north to south. Trade flows along these great channels, as sap rises in a tree in spring, as the blood flows in a young man’s cock. Hah! There are great gatherings here and here, where the rivers rise or cross, and much business can be done.’ The places he indicated with stabs of his muddy finger were dauntingly far to the west. ‘These gatherings are soon. I would go there. You can carry my trade goods there, and my bounty back. Then, in the autumn, I will return you to the villages of mud and brick and find somebody who will trade for your skill.’
Novu grunted. ‘You use me as my people use cattle, with heavy goods laden on their backs.’
‘I use you any way I choose,’ Chona snapped. ‘Anyway, by the autumn you will be in better condition. Less of this flab.’ He poked Novu’s belly, not hard. Novu flinched back.
In the morning, they walked on. Day by day, with the steady walking and his sleep deepened by exhaustion, Novu felt his body changing, growing more lean, the soles of his feet toughening, the muscles of his legs tightening. Once he glimpsed his reflection in a flat pond. His face had grown dark in the sun, dark and tough like Chona’s.
He wouldn’t say he liked Chona; he was too alien for that. But he came to admire the man’s self-reliance, his inner strength, his composure, his competence. And now that he was over the shock of his departure he had no desire to go back to Jericho, save on his own terms. He didn’t even have any wish for revenge over his father, who, now he thought back, struck him as a murky, worm-like figure, wriggling and jostling with other worms in the crowded, worked-over dirt of the town.
But he was wary of Chona. For one thing he was aware of the way Chona looked at him, at times, when he was washing, or walked ahead. He’d seen Chona’s lust for his cousin Minda. The two of them were alone much of the time, sometimes spending days without seeing another human being. Novu had no wish to be the object of that angry passion.
And then there was the coughing. It was getting worse; sometimes it woke Chona in the night, and then Novu. Clearly Chona was growing ill. Maybe he’d caught something back at Jericho. If so, Novu didn’t want to share it.
Life could be worse. In many ways Novu’s life back at Jericho had been worse than this. But Novu knew that if he ever got the slightest chance he would get away from Chona. If he had to kill the man, he would do it.
16
Some days later they reached the shore of a sea. The strand was crowded with groups of people, but they were fisherfolk, eccentric and inward-looking, and not very interested in Chona’s goods.
While they camped by the water Chona had Novu hunt for pretty shells to trade.
At length they reached the outflow of a great river. The estuary with its mud flats, reed beds and threading water channels was densely populated, for it allowed access both to the sea and via the river and its valley to the forests to the west. Chona did not linger here, for, he said, this mighty river was one of the great trade routes that spanned the Continent. So he and Novu headed west, following tracks that paralleled the river.
This was not like the river close to Jericho. It was a broad, rich stream, muscular in its grand flow, and its banks were green, fringed by marshes and reed banks with woodland rising beyond. There was life everywhere, frogs and toads croaking in the shallows, whole flocks of birds nesting and feeding in the reeds, and deer shyly emerging from the forest fringes to drink. Slowly Novu gathered a sense of the huge, rich Continent that stretched to the west of here, on and on, and how this tremendous river drained its very heart.
And there were people here – there could scarcely not be, given how rich the land was, people scattered in small communities along the riverbank and sometimes further inland. They all lived off the land and the bounty of the river. Sometimes Chona would visit them, do a little trading. Some days they rode in their boats, paddled against the river’s flow, in return for a few of Chona’s shells or bits of stone.
All these people were human beings who had babies and grew old. But apart from those basics they could differ in every detail of how they lived their lives – how they built their houses, how they adorned themselves, how they celebrated birth and death and coming of age, how they arranged their marriages. And, most striking to Novu, they differed hugely in their languages. You could walk for a day along the river to find yourself coming upon yet another community whose tongue was utterly unlike anything you’d ever heard before. He built up a picture in his head of a vast landscape of forests and rivers and grassland, populated by these little communities of people, each of them all but isolated. It was only the traders who travelled far, with their bundles of trade goods, smiling and nodding their way across the landscape.
But nowhere did Novu find a place that was remotely like Jericho. Maybe his father was right in his boasting, that Jericho was something new in the world, and the pride of all mankind. As the days passed and they headed ever further west the land changed its character, becoming more mountainous. Now the river was constrained by steep banks. The walking was hard work on the sloping ground near the river, and they had to climb to find easier tracks.
Then, one morning, the country opened out, and Novu was treated to a spectacular view of a gorge, deep but narrow. The river cut like a blade through cliffs of pale, banded limestone, coated with ragged forest that in places descended almost to the water’s edge.
Chona grunted, shifting his pack. ‘This place is called the Narrow, in a hundred tongues. Look, we climb up over this next bluff, and then we’ll come to the camp where we’ll stay for the night.’
The camp, when they scrambled down to it, turned out to be a roughly flat area by the river where robust- looking houses sat, built on frames of thick tree trunks. All this was in the lee of a steep cliff whose bare rock was covered with odd, fish-shaped carvings. Chona, evidently knowing the place, led Novu in. They were met by the usual gaggle of curious children, and by one or two suspicious stares from the women.
Everyone seemed to be working on fish. The silver bodies were heaped everywhere, fresh caught, or were being gutted or scraped or skinned, or hung up to dry out, or were wrapped in river mud and baked slowly in pits. Wicker baskets and bone harpoons hung on racks and on the walls of the houses. Novu saw boats pulled up on the rocky shore and out working on the river, whose roar was a constant, not unpleasant background to the human noises of the settlement.
Well, it was clear how the folk of this place made their living. After so long by riverbanks and sea coasts Novu had thought he had got used to the stink of fish, but in this place it was ripe and high. There were no dogs, though, and that was unusual.
At last Chona came to a house he recognised, and called a name in another new language. Out came a burly, bearded man of perhaps thirty-five who reminded Novu, oddly, of his father. But this man was dressed in what looked like deerskin, carefully softened, cut and stitched, and he had a hat thick with fish scales on his head, which would have appalled Magho. He greeted Chona with apparent pleasure, but he pulled back when Chona had one of his coughing fits. With gestures, he invited Chona into his home.
Chona turned to Novu, and pointed to the cliff face. ‘You’re sleeping over there. You’ll find hollows and caves and such. No animals; the people use them for winter stores, and I think the children play in there.’ He looked around. ‘It’s a rich place to live. You can see it. They hunt in the forest, where there’s deer and aurochs and boar, and then there’s the river itself. Fish, the river, it’s everything to these people, you know. They bury their dead with their heads pointing downstream, so the river can take their spirits away. And, of course, anybody coming this way, like me, has to pass this point. So old Cardum and his friends can just sit here and let the food and the wealth flow by, and trap it in their nets like salmon. This is no Jericho, but they’ve been here a long time, and they’re rich in their own way. A boy like you might feel at home here. Well – go fix yourself up. Cardum says he’ll have his kids bring you supper.’
‘Fish?’
Chona laughed. ‘If I need you I’ll call.’
Novu quickly found a deep, snug cave beneath the cliffs at the back of the settlement, too low to stand up in. It was clean enough, though he did find one dry, coiled turd, maybe left by one of the playing children. He scooped this up in a handful of dirt – it actually smelled of fish – and threw it away. And as he did so he noticed more of those odd fish carvings, this time in the roof of the cave, out of the way of the wind and rain.
He went down to the river and, having drunk his fill and taken a discreet piss, he returned with a bowl of water
