Evolution

'The baby,' she blurted. 'They killed it.'

'What baby? Ah. Your mother’s. They wouldn’t let her keep her calf, eh? I know that’s what you animals do, kill your young. Some say you feast on the tender little corpses.' He continued to study her, calculating. 'I think I see. If you have your baby, they’ll take it away too. So that’s why you came running after a greedy wretch like me — to save your unborn baby.' Briefly his expression dissolved, and she thought she glimpsed sympathy.

She murmured, 'They say—'

'Yes?'

'They say that in your place no babies are killed.'

He shrugged. 'We have a lot of food. We don’t have to spend all of every day running after rabbits, as you people do. That’s why we don’t have to murder our children.'

She wondered how this miracle could come about: Cahl’s people must have a powerful shaman indeed.

But that brief lightening of Cahl’s face had already dissipated, to be replaced by a kind of desperate greed. He approached her and grabbed her breast, pinching hard; she forced herself not to cry out. 'If you come with me it will be hard for you. The way we live is—' he waved a hand at the open plain ' — different from all this. More than you can imagine. And you will have to do as I say. That is our way.'

She could smell his breath. She closed her eyes, shutting out his moonlike, pockmarked face. This was the decision point, she knew. She could still turn away, still run home. But her baby would be doomed. When Acta and Pepule found out they might even try to beat it out of her belly.

'I’ll do what you say,' she said hastily. What could be worse than that?

'Good,' he said, his breath coming in short, hot gasps. 'Now, let’s get down to business. Kneel down.'

So it began, there in the dirt. She was grateful that nobody she cared about could see her.

II

He made her carry his load of meat, his bag of half-chewed roots, and his empty beer sack. He said it was the way, in his home. It wasn’t heavy — the meat was nothing more than the spindly catch of small game brought back by the men the day before — but it seemed very strange to Juna to have to walk behind Cahl with meat piled on her shoulder while he strutted ahead, inexpertly brandishing her spear.

Soon they had walked far from her familiar range. It was deeply frightening to think that she was entering land where, probably, none of her ancestors had set a foot, not once; deep taboos, inspired by her well-founded fear of death at the hands of strangers, warred against her impulse to continue. But continue she did, for she had no choice.

They had to spend one night in the open. He brought her to the shelter of a bluff, a half cave he had evidently used before, for she saw more signs of his unpleasant spoor. He would not let her eat any of the meat, nor even hunt for more. Evidently he didn’t trust her that far. But he gave her some of the thin, ill-tasting roots he had carried.

As darkness fell he used her again. The brutal coupling made her juvenile fumbling with Tori seem full of tenderness. But to her relief Cahl finished quickly — he had already spent himself that day — and when he rolled off her he quickly fell asleep.

She massaged her bruised thighs, alone with her thoughts.

In the morning they began to descend from the high, dry plateau into a broad valley. This was a greener land; grass grew thickly, and she could see the blue thread of a sluggish river, with trees clustered in a green ribbon along its bank. This would be a good place to live, she thought — better than the arid upper lands. There must be plenty of game here. But as they descended further she caught only fleeting glimpses of rabbits and mice and birds. There was no sign of the spoor of large animals, none of their characteristic tracks.

At last she made out a broad brown scar close to the bank of the river. Smoke rose from a dozen places, and she made out movement, a pale wriggling, like maggots in a wound. But the maggots were people, crowded, diminished by distance.

Gradually she understood. It was a town: a huge, sprawling settlement. She was astonished. She had never seen a human gathering on such a scale. Deepening dread settled in her stomach as they moved on.

Even before they got to the settlement they began to encounter people.

They all seemed short, dark, and bent, and they wore filthy clothes. And men, women, and children alike worked at patches of ground. Juna had never seen anything like it. In one place they were bent over, scratching roughly at the bare soil with stone tools mounted in wood. A little further on there was a meadow full of grass — nothing but grass — and the people here were pulling at the grass stems, plucking seeds to collect in baskets and bowls. Some of them peered up as she passed, showing a dull curiosity.

Cahl saw her staring. 'These are fields,' he said. 'This is how we feed our children. See? You clear the ground. You plant the seed. You kill the weeds while the crops grow. You take your harvest.'

She struggled to make sense of this; there were too many unfamiliar words. 'Where is your shaman?'

He laughed. 'We are all shamans, perhaps.'

They passed another open area — another 'field,' as Cahl called it — where goats were penned by a fence of wooden stakes and bramble. When they saw Cahl and Juna approaching, the goats ran bleating to the fence, their heads lunging forward. They were hungry, Juna saw immediately. They had eaten all the grass in their enclosure, and they longed to be free, to go find food in the valley and the hills. She had no idea why the people kept them shut up like this.

They reached the valley bottom. The grass petered out, giving way to churned-up mud that was thick with shit and piss — human waste, just dumped here. It must be like living on a huge midden, she thought.

At last they reached the settlement itself. The huts were very solid and permanent, built on frames of tree trunks rammed into the muddy ground, and plastered over with mud and straw. They had holes in their roofs, from many of which smoke curled, even now in the middle of the day. Huts were huts. But there were many, many of them, so many she couldn’t even count them.

And there were people everywhere.

They wore the strange, tightly sewn, all-covering clothes that Cahl favored. They were all smaller than she was, men and women alike, and their dark skin was pocked and scarred. Many of the women carried huge burdens. Here was one small woman bent over under a great sack; the sack was tied to her forehead, and it looked like it must weigh more than she did. By contrast the men seemed to carry little beyond what they could hold in their hands.

She had never seen so many people in her life, still less all crammed together in such a small space. Despite what she had glimpsed of the fields she still had no idea how such a dense knot of people could feed themselves; surely they must soon drive off all the game, devour all the edible vegetation in the area. And yet she saw butchered carcasses stacked outside one hut, grain baskets outside another.

And there were many children here. Several trailed after Juna, plucking at her shift and gazing at her shining hair. Then that much at least was true: There really were more children here than her own community could ever afford to support. But many of the children had bent bones and pocked skin and browned teeth. Some of them were scrawny, even displaying the ominous potbellies of malnutrition.

The men crowded around Cahl and Juna, jabbering in an incomprehensible language. They seemed to be congratulating Cahl, as if he were a hunter home with game. When the men leered at her she saw their teeth were bad, as bad as Cahl’s.

Suddenly her nerve gave out. Too many people. She shrank back, but they followed her, pressing closer, and children plucked at her yellow hair, yelling. She found herself panicking, breathless. She longed for a glimpse of green, but there was no green, nothing but the shit brown of this dung heap of a place. The world spun around her. She fell, helplessly dumping Cahl’s meat in the dirt. She was aware of Cahl’s angry yell. But still children and adults clamored around her, prying, laughing.

She came to herself slowly, reluctantly.

She had been taken inside one of the huts. She was on her back, on the floor. She could see daylight poking through cracks and seams in the roof above her.

And Cahl was on her again, thrusting, heavy. She could smell nothing but the beer on his breath.

There were other people in the hut, moving in the dim dark, jabbering a language she couldn’t understand. There were many children, of various ages. She wondered if they were all Cahl’s. A woman came close. She was short, like the rest, scrawny, her face slack and lined, her black hair lying flat beside her face. She was carrying a bowl containing some liquid. She looked older than Juna -

Cahl’s meaty hand clamped painfully around her jaw. 'Watch me, you sow. Watch me, not her.' And he continued his thrusting, harder than before.

At dawn the black-haired woman — whose name turned out to be Gwerei — came to rouse Juna with a kick to her backside. Juna climbed off the rough, filthy pallet she had been given, trying not to gag on air dense and laden with the stink of sweat and farts.

The woman jabbered at Juna, pointing at the hearth. Then, irritated at Juna’s incomprehension, she stamped out of the hut. She returned with a fat day log that she threw on the fire. Pushing children out of the way, she uncovered a pit in the ground, which contained a mass of billowy white shapes. At first Juna thought they were fungi, perhaps mushrooms. But the woman bit into one of the masses, and broke up others, throwing handfuls to the clamoring children.

She threw a chunk of the white stuff to Juna. Juna tried it cautiously. It was bland, tasteless; it was like biting into wood. And it was gritty, with hard bits inside that ground against her teeth. But she had eaten nothing since her last stop with Cahl on the high plain, and hunger gnawed. So she devoured the food as readily as the children did.

It was her first mouthful of bread, though it would be many days before she learned its name.

While they ate, Cahl snored on in his pallet. It seemed strange to Juna that he should choose to stay with the women, but there seemed to be no men’s hut here.

When they had eaten, Gwerei took her out of the town, up the valley, and to the open spaces on the far side. They walked in silence, since they shared not a word of common language: Juna was trapped in a bubble of incomprehension. But she was relieved just to get out of the great anthill of people that was the town.

Soon they were joined by more women, older children, a few men. They followed ruts worn into the ground by innumerable feet. Some of the women gazed at Juna curiously — and the men speculatively — but they seemed exhausted before their day had even started. She wondered where they were all going. Nobody was carrying any weapons, any spears or snares or traps. They weren’t even looking for spoor, tracks or dung, any signifiers that animals had been here. They didn’t even look around at the land they inhabited.

At last she came to the open spaces she had glimpsed yesterday, the fields. Gwerei led her into one of these fields, where people were already at work. Gwerei handed her a tool, and began to jabber at her, miming, holding her fists together and scratching imaginary gouges in the air.

Juna inspected the tool. It was like an ax, with a stone head fixed to a wooden handle by a binding of sinew and resin. But it was big, surely too heavy to use as an ax, yet the curved stone blade made it impractical to use even as a thrusting spear. As Gwerei yelled at her with increasing frustration, she just stared back.

At last Gwerei had to show her. She bent over the dirt, clasping the tool, and stuck the blade deep into the ground. Then she began to walk backward, legs stiff, bent over, dragging the blade through the earth. She had made a furrow a hand’s length deep in the ground.

Juna saw that other people were doing just as Gwerei had, dragging their curved axes through the ground. She remembered seeing people do this yesterday. It was so simple a task a child