Evolution

women’s huts were smaller satellites of this rude giant. Gravelly snoring from within the men’s hut told the girls that the shaman was sleeping off another hard night of beer and visions. Nobody was moving: not the dogs, not the adults. Most of the men were out hunting; the women were dozing in their huts with their infants. There weren’t even any children around.

Sion sprinkled a little more ground fennel on her grain. The fennel’s aromatic oil was actually a defense evolved by the plant before the death of the dinosaurs, intended to make its leaves too slippery for the legs of boring, nibbling insects; now the result of that ancient evolutionary arms race flavored Sion’s snack. 'You are joking,' said Sion. 'Juna, I love you dearly. But you are the most shallow person I know. Since when has personality mattered a dried fig to you?'

Juna felt her face burn.

'Ah. There’s something you aren’t telling me.' Sion studied Juna’s face with a hunter’s expert knowledge of her prey. 'Have you two lain together? '

'No,' Juna snapped.

Sion was still suspicious. 'I didn’t think Tori was lying with anybody yet. Apart from Acta, of course.' Acta was one of the oldest of the men — not to mention the fattest — but he continued to prove his strength with his wily leadership of the hunts, and so he continued to assert his rights over the boys and young men. 'I know Tori’s getting sick of being poked with Acta’s stinking dick; that’s what Jaypee told me! Soon he’s going to want to be with a woman, but not yet—'

Juna couldn’t meet her sister’s eyes — for the truth was, she had lain with Tori, just as Sion suspected. It had been out in the bush, with Tori boastfully full of beer. She didn’t know why she’d let him do it. She hadn’t even been sure he had done it right. She longed to tell her sister everything — how her bleeding had stopped, how she already felt the new life moving inside her — but how could she? Times were hard — times were always hard — and it wasn’t a good time to be producing a baby by a feckless boy. She hadn’t yet told Tori himself. She hadn’t even told her mother, Pepule, who was herself expecting a child. 'Sion, I—'

There was a hand on her arm, hot and heavy, a breath redolent with unfamiliar spices. 'Hello, girls. Something on your mind?' Juna flinched away, pulling her arm free.

This was Cahl, the beer man. He was a big man, fatter even than Acta, and he wore strangely constraining clothes: a tightly sewn jacket and trousers, heavy leather shoes, a hat stuffed with straw. On his back was a heavy skin full of ale; it sloshed as he squatted down beside them. His skin was cratered, like soil after rain, and his teeth were ugly brown stumps. But his gaze, as he smiled at Juna, had a kind of predator’s intensity.

Sion glared at him. 'Why don’t you go back where you came from? Nobody wants you here.'

He frowned briefly, striving to translate what she had said. His language was different from theirs. It was a common speculation that Cahl’s folk had come from somewhere far to the east, bringing their peculiar language with them. 'Oh,' he said at last, 'plenty of people want me here. Some want me an awful lot. You’d be surprised what people will give me, in return for what I can give them.' And he leered again, showing a mouthful of brown, rotten teeth. 'Maybe we should talk about it, you and me,' he said to Juna. 'Maybe we should find out what we can do for each other.'

'Keep away from me,' Juna said tremulously.

But Cahl kept on staring at her, a snake’s stare, hard and intense.

It was with relief that she heard the footsteps of the returning men, their bare feet grinding in the dirt. Their naked bodies were caked with dust, and they were obviously weary. Juna saw that once again the dozen men had returned home empty-handed save for a few rabbits and rats; bigger game was very rare.

Old man Acta had his fat arm draped over Tori’s shoulders. Juna didn’t want to meet the slim boy’s gaze, and yet she longed to know what he was thinking. How would he react if she told him what had happened as a result of their foolish fumble?

Cahl broke away from the girls, stood up, and raised his sack of beer over his head. 'Welcome the hunters!'

Acta strode up to him. His tongue hung out doglike, as if the pendulous sack contained the only drink in the world. 'Cahl, my friend. I hoped you would be here. You are a better shaman than that old fool in the hut.'

Sion gasped at that casual blasphemy.

Cahl handed over the beer sack. 'You look like you need this.'

Acta grabbed it and held it close. But a trace of his old wiliness showed in his deep, piglike eyes. 'And the payment? You can see how we are. We have little enough meat for ourselves. But —'

'But,' said Cahl evenly, 'you will take the beer anyway. Won’t you?' And he kept staring, until he had faced down Acta. Some of the men muttered uncomfortably at this show of weakness. But what Cahl said was obviously true. Cahl slapped Acta’s shoulder amiably. 'We can talk about it later. Go rest in the shade. And as for me—'

'Take her,' Acta mumbled, gazing at the beer. 'Do what you like.' He shambled toward the men’s hut. The other failed hunters dumped their meat outside the women’s huts and followed Acta, eager for a share in the beer. Soon Juna heard the growling of the shaman, who was always quickly revived by the stink of ale.

Cahl came back to the girls. He shook his head. 'In my home such a depraved oaf would be cast out.'

Sion prickled at this new insult. 'The boys live with the men, in the men’s hut. It is a place of wisdom, where the boys learn to be men. And each man has a small house for his wife and his daughters and his infant sons. It is our way. It has always been our way.'

'It might be your way, but it isn’t mine,' Cahl said bluntly.

Juna found her curiosity pricked by that.

The only thing anybody knew about the new people, save for their marvelous ability to make beer, was that there were many, many of them. Some of the women whispered that no baby was discarded among the strangers — not one, not ever. And that was why there was so many of them, though nobody had any idea how they fed themselves. Perhaps in their valleys and lowlands the animals still ran in great herds, just as they had in the days long gone, the days of legends.

'Who?' Sion asked softly.

'Who?'

'Acta said, ‘Take her.’ Who?'

'Why, his wife,' Cahl said. 'Pepule. Ah. I can see why you’re interested. Acta isn’t your father, but Pepule is your mother, isn’t she?' He grinned, and gazed at Juna with that stone-hard intensity. 'That will add spice. While I hump her I will think of you, little one.'

Sion said coldly, 'Pepule is with child.'

'I know.' He grinned. 'I like them that way. Those big bellies, no?' Again his hard, calculating gaze turned on Juna. Then he took a pinch of ground corn from her mortar and strode away to their mother’s hut.

Dissatisfied, vaguely afraid, Juna left the men to their drinking. She walked out into the country with her grandmother, Sheb. Sheb, nearly sixty, moved with caution, but in her long life she had avoided injury and serious illness and stayed limber.

The people lived on a high plateau. The land was dry, flat, all but featureless. Vegetation clung to the ground, deep-rooted, searching for water. There were streams and rivers, but they were trickles of waters that flowed between mighty banks; they seemed niggardly, starved, a relic of what had evidently passed away.

Naked, carrying lengths of rope and small stone-tipped spears, the women moved from place to place, setting and checking traps for the small game that provided the staple of the people’s diet. They would have been astonished could they have glimpsed the mighty herds of giant herbivores that Jahna and her people had once followed, even though their folk tales talked of richer times in the past.

'Why do the men drink beer?' Juna fretted. 'It makes them ugly and stupid. And they have to go to that slithery Cahl. If they must drink beer, they should make their own. They would be just as stupid, but at least Cahl would keep away.'

Sheb sighed. 'It isn’t so simple. We can’t make beer. Nobody knows how, not even the shaman. It is a secret Cahl’s people keep to themselves.'

'When the men are stupid they cannot hunt. All they think about is the beer. It is all they see.'

Sheb shook her head. 'I won’t argue with you, child. My father never drank beer — we had never heard of beer in those days — and he was a fine hunter. Look, now. A rabbit is near.'

Juna dutifully studied the bits of rabbit dropping, pressing them to see how fresh they were. She badly wanted to talk about Tori.

But Sheb had her own agenda. 'I remember when I was your age,' she was saying. 'Once it rained as if the sky had split open, for day after day. The ground turned to mud, and we all sank in up to our knees. And water filled this valley here — not the muddy trickle you see now — all the way up the bank. See where the lip has been scoured?' And, yes, if she looked hard, Juna could make out how the bank had been eroded far above the current water level.

But so what? Absently Juna rubbed her belly. Her grandmother’s tales of huge rain storms, a land turned to mud, the explosive blossoming of life that had followed, were like the fantastic visions of the shaman. They didn’t mean anything to her. What did rain and rivers matter compared to the growing lump inside her?

Her grandmother slapped her head. Juna flinched, startled. Sheb scowled, making her wrinkles deepen. 'It would pay you to listen to me, you foolish child. I remember how it was, the last time the rains came. I remember how we coped. How we moved to the higher ground. How we forded the river. All of it. Maybe I won’t live to see the rains come again as they did before, but maybe you will. And then all that will keep you alive is what I have told you today.'

Juna knew she had a point. Old people were cared for deeply: Before Sheb’s own mother’s death, Juna had seen Sheb chew her food until soft and spit it into a bowl for her. In this society without writing, old people were libraries of wisdom and experience. And now she was determined to make her granddaughter listen.

But today Juna was in no mood for a lesson in humility. She tried to stare back, defiant, resentful, but, before Sheb’s ferocious glare, she broke down. 'Oh, Sheb—' The weeping came suddenly and easily; she rested her head on Sheb’s shoulder and let her tears fall to the arid ground.

'Tell me. What can be so bad?'

Sheb listened gravely to what she had to say. She asked specific questions: Who was the father, how he had approached her or she him, why she had chosen to conceive now. She seemed most dissatisfied with the news that it had all been a childish mistake. In response to Juna’s agonized questions — 'Sheb, what am I to do?' — for now, at least, Sheb would say nothing. But Juna thought she saw the shape of her future in the hard, sad lines of Sheb’s set expression.

And then there was a keening wail from the village. Juna took her grandmother’s arm and helped her to hurry home.

It turned out that Pepule, Juna’s mother, Sheb’s daughter, had gone into labor early.

As she entered the camp with Sheb, Juna saw the beer man, Cahl, walking away eastward, back toward his mysterious home. A sack of goods over his arm, he ignored the labor cries of the woman with whom he had lain only that morning, and Juna glared with futile hostility at his retreating back.

In Pepule’s hut, Sion and other kinswomen had gathered. Juna hurried to Pepule’s side. Pepule’s bleary, pain-filled eyes turned toward her daughter, and she grasped Juna’s hand. Juna saw a bruise the shape of a man’s grip on her mother’s shoulder.

As was their way, the women had set up a frame of wood to which Pepule clung, squatting. Meanwhile others were moistening the patch of earth under Pepule to soften it, and were digging a shallow hole nearby. There was a strong smell of vomit and blood.

Juna had witnessed and aided at many births before, but, bearing her own small burden within, she had never before shared so much pain herself.

At least this birth was quick. The baby dropped easily into the arms of one of Pepule’s sisters. With a brisk, confident motion she cut the infant’s umbilical and tied it off with a strip of sinew,