Keram smiled at her. 'Are you all right?'
'What trickster god made this teeming pile?'
'No god.
'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, back-breaking 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.
And almost everywhere, right from the beginning, the new communities were dominated by men: men competing with each other for power, in societies where women were treated more or less as a resource. During the days of the hunter-gatherers humans had briefly thrown off the ancient prison of the primate male hierarchies. Equality and mutual respect had not been luxuries: Hunter-gatherer communities were innately egalitarian because to share food and knowledge was self-evidently in the interests of everybody. But those days were vanishing now. Seeking a new way to organize their swelling numbers, humans were slipping comfortably into the ways of a mindless past.
The new urban concentrations appeared to be an utterly new way of living. No hominids — indeed no primates — had ever lived in such dense heapings. But in fact they were a throwback to a much more ancient form. The new cities had less in common with the hunter-gatherer communities of their immediate past than with the chimpanzee colonies of the forest.
Juna’s interval of security lasted no more than four years.
In the dark of night, Keram shook her awake. 'Come. Get the children. We have to leave.'
Juna sat up, bleary-eyed. The previous evening they had thrown a party, and Juna had drunk too much mead, honey liqueur, than was good for her. Only in farmed lands were alcoholic drinks possible, for they needed cultivated grain for their manufacture — one of the key advantages of the farmers over the hunters, who had grown dependent on beer but could never learn to manufacture it for themselves. As for Juna, it was a luxury she still had to get used to.
She looked around, trying to wake up and cut through her confusion. The room was in darkness, but there was light outside the window. Not the light of day, but of fire.
And now she could hear the shouting.
She slipped out of bed and pulled on a simple, functional shift. She went to the next room and collected the children. The two boys were grumpy at being disturbed, but they settled to sleep again in her arms. She went back to Keram, who was cramming weapons and valuables into a sack. 'I’m ready,' she said.
He looked at her, standing waiting for him with their children held in her arms. He ran to her and kissed her hard on the lips. 'I do love you, by the Potus’s balls. If he has any left.'
She was puzzled by the non sequitur. 'Any what?'
'This is a bad night for Cata Huuk,' he said grimly. 'And for us, unless we are lucky.' He turned and made for the door, lugging his sack. 'Come on. We’ll leave by the back gate.'
They slipped out of their house. Now she could see the source of the fire. The great yellow palace of the Potus was burning, the flames and sparks rising high into the air. Juna heard screams from within the palace itself, and glimpsed people running.
