Stone Spring

by Stephen Baxter

  He had traveled further than anybody he knew, even among the loose community of traders who met at the harbors and river estuaries and confluences, key nodes in the natural routes that spanned the Continent. He believed he had seen as much of the world as anybody alive. He spoke a dozen languages, knew many more in fragments, and was a master of the crude, flexible traders’ tongue that people spoke from one end of the Continent to the other. He was clever and resourceful, and he was without fear—almost.

  But he was afraid of Jericho. And he could already see the pall of smoke, fed by dozens of fires, that hung over his destination. His belly clenched.

  Following a trail well defined by the feet of animals and people, he climbed away from the river and up toward the higher ground, heading northwest. It was close to noon, and the morning clouds had long burned from a blue shell of sky. Away from the river the ground was dusty and the air was dry as a dead man’s mouth.

  He heard a murmur of voices, a clatter of hooves, a rattle of stones. Ahead of him on the trail a group of boys were herding goats. They carried long sticks to prod the animals as they bleated and jostled. The rattling Chona heard came from wooden gourds, each containing a pebble, hung around the neck of each goat.

  Even this was a strange sight to Chona. They were only boys, but he found his footsteps slowing. Goats were for hunting, or for chasing down for milk when you needed it. Why gather them? Why fix gourds to their necks?

  He always felt like this. He could turn back, head down south to the communities of fisherfolk around the shore of the Salt Sea, where his bone harpoons and elaborate lures always ensured him a welcome.

  “Chona.” Magho came striding down the dusty slope to meet him. He clapped the trader on the shoulder. “So you came.”

  “Yes, I came. But—”

  “But you nearly turned back.” Magho boomed laughter. “I know you, my friend, and that’s why I came to fetch you. Once I have a fish on the hook I don’t let him get away!” He was a big, burly man, grown fat on the produce of his wheat meadows. He had a heavy bull-like jaw and fleshy nose and thick, tied-back black hair, and his luxuriant beard was turning to gray. He wore a skin tunic, but tied around his ample waist was a belt of green-dyed spun yarn.

  If Magho had been keen enough to haul his ugly bulk all the way out to the river trail to meet him, he must want Chona’s goods rather badly, and Chona, an instinctive trader, began to smell a deal, and his fear receded. “You know me well enough, Magho. Only the promise of your hospitality lures me on.”

  “You have the obsidian.”

  “I have it.”

  Magho’s grin widened.

  As they walked on, Magho kept up a steady flow of chatter. Chona had no family, no children, and preferred not to talk of his life, which consisted of walking to places Magho had never heard of, to make deals with people he didn’t want Magho to know about. So he let Magho speak of his own family, his wife, their home, their three children, of whom the eldest boy, Novu, was such a disappointment. It was all a tactic to keep Chona on that fishhook, of course, but Chona endured it politely.

  Now, following a track that curved around to the northwest, they were passing through the gardens that surrounded the town. They were a patchwork of shapes, lopsided circles and rough squares marked out by wicker fences. Here women and many children labored, bent over, plucking weeds from the meadows of wheat and barley and pulses. They didn’t look up at Chona and Magho.

  The men passed a field where bricks of mud and straw had been laid out in rows to dry in the sun. Another extraordinary sight.

  And as they neared the town, that pall of smoke spread a dirty brown stain across the sky ahead, and Chona could already smell meat roasting, and human ordure.

  Then, approaching from the west, the trail led them over a bluff, and at last Chona saw Jericho itself. It sprawled across the landscape, a mass of round, brick-built houses pressed together in a plain of dirty mud. Beyond lay the river valley and its reed beds, brilliant white and yellow. Even in the heat of the day smoke seeped up from the reed-thatched roofs of the houses, for the people of Jericho were always busy, busy.

  But even stranger to Chona was the wall that faced him, standing in front of the town at its western end. Built of stone pressed into dried mud, the wall ran for dozens of paces, cutting the town off from the country to the west, and looping around like a moon crescent to enclose the buildings, though the loop was not completed. The people of Jericho, or their ancestors, had built this wall to save their town from floods and mudslides from the western hills. Strangest of all was the “tower” that had been built against the wall, a round structure like a vast tree trunk, wider than it was tall, and likewise made of stone blocks pressed into mud. Chona had seen this before. The tower was so wide you could walk inside it, and climb steps up to the top.

  As far as Chona had traveled he had never seen such a structure as this. He believed it must be unique in all the world. Why, even the “tower” had a name only in the language of Jericho itself, a word that was needed nowhere else. Yet the wall was very ancient; you could see how the stones were worn and cracked, and the wall itself looked half-buried by mud drifts and accumulated garbage.

  They walked on, rounding the wall, and the crammed-in houses of Jericho were revealed. Chona recoiled from the crowd and the clamor, and the rank stench. But Magho led the way boldly, treading between the piss puddles, ignoring the stinks and the shouts of children and the bleating of goats, shouting greetings to friends or relatives.

  A mob of people crushed through narrow, tangled lanes, some carrying baskets of grain or heavy bread loaves. Children, skinny, pale creatures, ran everywhere, playing and yelling as children always did. And there were animals in with the people: goats, hairy, long-legged sheep, even cattle, adding to the filth around the houses. Birds hovered overhead, gulls roosting on the house roofs or swooping down to feed on heaps of waste.

  Chona was always overwhelmed by the sheer number of people you saw in this place. And yet many of them looked so unhealthy, the women with their gappy teeth, the children with their stick-thin limbs and pockmarked faces, the men worn down by the constant work.

  In some ways this place wasn’t unique. Who didn’t have a favorite hazel tree? Who didn’t try to keep the weeds out of a favorite mushroom patch? People even built walls and dug ditches to take away the rainwater. But nowhere else, in all Chona’s travels, had these habits been driven to the extremes you saw around Jericho. Nowhere did you see the obsession, the bent backs and anxious eyes. Nowhere else did people live crushed in together like this, though Chona had traveled as far as anybody else in this empty world, east until you came to the deserts where the camels and horses ran in huge herds, or to the far west along the great river roads until you came to the gray ocean. Nowhere save here: Jericho.

  The deep human core of him recoiled. But the trader in him was drawn back here again and again, like a fly to a turd. And so he walked on with Magho, pushing his doubts and fears deep down inside.

  9

  Chona had no idea how Magho found his way through the muddle to his home; all the houses looked the same to him, just heaps of mud brick rising up in the midden-like town like ugly brown poppies.

  Magho brushed aside a gap in the wall covered by a mat of reeds, and led Chona down earthen steps into a kind of pit dug down beneath the level of the ground. Rush mats had been scattered on the ground. A fire burned in a central hearth, banked up and not giving off much smoke, but even so the air was dense and hot. Most of the daylight was shut out, and the house was like a cave. The fecal stink outside was alleviated a bit, but in here there was a more complex aroma of stale food, farts, baby milk, sweat, and a disturbing, almost sweet smell of profound rot.

  Two women sat, cross-legged, tying knots in some kind of twine. They wore smocks dyed bright green, with their legs left bare. Chona knew one must be Magho’s wife, but he couldn’t tell which. And three children were here, one older boy who sat sullen against a w
all with his legs drawn up against his chest, and two little ones who played with toy mud bricks on the floor. All this Chona glimpsed in the light that leaked through the reed-thatch roof.

  Magho clapped his hands. “Out! Come on, I need to talk to my friend here. Not you, Novu, you little snot,” and he pointed a finger at the older boy, who didn’t look up.

  The women, looking weary, rolled up their twine, gathered their toddlers, and pushed past Chona. The second was much younger than the first, perhaps a younger sister. She was a plump little thing with bare legs, wide innocent eyes, and full breasts whose weight showed through her loose smock.

  He felt a stir of interest in his loins. He had been on the road a while. Jericho was a place where the ancient balance between man and woman, of which he had witnessed all manner of variants in his travels, was tipped firmly in the man’s favor. Here a woman hardly dared even speak without a man’s permission. And certainly the body of a female relative would be within Magho’s gift. It would depend how badly Magho wanted Chona’s goods, of course, and how protective he felt of the girl. He might even have his eye on her as a second wife himself—Chona couldn’t remember, nor did he care, what the marriage rules were here. If so, Magho might not want her spoiled. And spoiled she would be, Chona thought, indulging in a faint reverie, if he got his hands on her. As with all things in the human world, it just depended who wanted what, and how badly. Those innocent eyes . . .

  For now he had to concentrate, as Magho was beckoning him to the mats. “Sit down, sit down.” Magho offered him food. “Here, have some meat—this is pickled and spiced—have some bread.”

  Chona dropped his pack by the door and propped his walking staff up against a wall. He kept his blade hidden at his left side, however. Magho was a harmless sort, but you never knew, and Chona didn’t much like the look of the boy sitting against the wall. He stepped cautiously through the house’s clutter of clothes and bits of food and clay pots, making for Magho on his mats. Niches had been cut into the dried mud of the bricks in the wall, and small artifacts stood here, like sculptures of human heads, with bulging eyes and flaring nostrils and protruding tongues done in bright ochre paint. Chona knew from his previous visits that these were in fact real heads, the flensed skulls of honored ancestors coated in mud and painted. Chona never liked to meet the eyes of these ancients, who he imagined might know the deals he was trying to strike all too well.

  Magho cracked open one of his loaves, digging big earthy fingers into the thick crust, and tore off a piece to hand to Chona.

  The trader bit into it. This “bread,” another word Chona had learned here, did fill your stomach, but it was like eating dry wood, and he knew that the coarse gritty stuff wore your teeth down if you ate too much of it.

  Chewing, he sat on the mat Magho had indicated, crossing his legs. But something pale pushed out of the dirt before his mat. It was a skull embedded in the ground, its jaws gaping, dust sifting in its eye sockets.

  The boy saw him flinch, and laughed. He was perhaps sixteen. He was wearing a robe not unlike his mother’s, not of hide but of woven vegetable fiber, dyed a bright green. “Nothing to be afraid of, trader man. It’s just another grandfather, wearing his way out of the ground. We bury our dead in the ground under our houses where the worms can cleanse their bones. So you’re sitting on a big old heap of corpses. No wonder it stinks of rot in here—that’s what you’re thinking, aren’t you?”

  “Shut up, Novu,” his father said. Chona was startled at the change in his voice. Where he had treated the women with indifference, there was real hatred in his tone toward the boy.

  But Novu kept talking. “The last trader we had in here was just the same. He threw up in the piss-pot—”

  Magho leaned over and punched the boy in the side of the head. Novu went sprawling. “I told you to shut up! And if you did what I told you, you wouldn’t be in this plight now, would you?” Magho took a deep breath, his massive chest expanding. Then he sat up and turned to Chona, his smile returning. “Don’t worry about that. I caught him above the hairline. The bruise won’t show.”

  Chona watched the boy rise, cautiously, rubbing his head. He wondered why the father thought Chona would care. And why, if the boy angered his father so much, he was keeping him here in the house during this meeting. “He doesn’t bother me, Magho. He’s just a child.”

  “A child? A child-man, and that’s all he’ll ever be, I fear. The gods know he’s a difficult one. Here, try some of this tea.” He handed Chona a clay bowl of hot, steaming green liquid. “We’ve business to do.” He glanced over at Chona’s pack. “I take it you have what I want.”

  Chona allowed himself to smile. “I wouldn’t be here otherwise, my friend.” He leaned over and unfolded his pack. In with the bits of sky-fallen iron and shaped flint and fragments of reindeer bone carved into elusive fish and lumbering bears, he had tucked small parcels wrapped in the softest doe skin. He made a show of unwrapping them slowly. Magho all but drooled.

  Small, precious items, bartered across the Continent, were Chona’s stock-in-trade. Not for him the heavy work of trading meat or grain, or sacks of unworked flint. What he liked to carry were treasures valuable far beyond their size and weight—and the further from their source you took them, the more valuable they became. The fragments of obsidian he unwrapped now, taken from sites in a mountain range far from here, were among the most valuable of all.

  He handed Magho one of the smaller pieces. Magho turned the black, shining rock over in his hands, his eyes wide, his mouth a dark circle. “I take it you have better examples,” he breathed.

  “Oh, yes. All from the finest source in the known world. And all yours, if—”

  “If I can pay.” Magho let out his throaty laugh. “I do like you, Chona. Well, I like all traders. At least you’re honest, which is more than can be said for most people in this wretched world.”

  “That particular piece would make a fine axe-head,” Chona said. “Or perhaps something more abstract. An amulet—”

  “Oh, I’ll leave that to the experts,” Magho said. “There’s a man on the other side of town, called Fless, very old now, about forty and half-blind, but he works stone as you wouldn’t believe. My way is simply to give him such pieces as this, and let him see what lies within the stone, see with his cataract-blighted eyes, and then tease it out, flake by flake, with his bits of bone.” He mimed a fine pressing. “Marvelous to see him work, with those twisted-up hands and his milky eyes. Yes, he’s the man. If I can get his time, if somebody hasn’t stolen him away.”

  Chona took back the obsidian scrap, and handed him another piece. “I’m sure what Fless makes of these pieces would dazzle your friends like rays of the sun . . .”

  This was the odd part of trading with the men of Jericho. Everywhere in the world you found men, and sometimes women, of power, who accumulated wealth—maybe trinkets, maybe more functional items like tools or food. But everywhere else you showed off your power by giving your treasure away: the more you had to give, the greater you were. In Jericho’s elaborate, layered society men strutted and showed off what they owned, be it women and children, goats and stores of grain—and pointless, purposeless trinkets. Your status came from what you kept to yourself, not what you gave away.

  Well, Chona didn’t care. He never judged a man he traded with. Magho could wipe his ass on his precious obsidian for all Chona cared—as long as Chona got a fair price first.

  But the boy, Novu, still nursing his head, snorted his contempt at Chona’s manipulation.

  Magho handed back the stone. “Let’s do business. How many pieces?”

  “A dozen. I’ll show you the rest when we have a deal.”

  Magho nodded. “Very well. So let me show you what I have to trade . . .” He produced a figurine of a pregnant woman, carved of the tooth of some sea creature, quite fine. And a whistle made from the bone of a bird, delicately carved, so small you would need a child’s fingers to stop its holes, and yet fully functio
nal, Magho assured him. And a bit of iron, small but one of the purest pieces Chona had ever seen. Magho evidently knew Chona’s preference for small, portable treasures, and with one piece after another he built up an array on the rush mat.

  Chona kept his face like stone, merely nodding politely. Some of this was impressive, and in the loose map of the Continent he carried in his head he calculated where he might make a decent profit on each of these pieces. Still, when Magho was done arraying his treasures Chona was disappointed. He would win out of the deal, of course, but not as much as he had hoped.

  “I have to be honest, Magho. I’d love to do business with you; you know that. But I’d have to haul away a sack full of pieces like these to compensate me for my obsidian.”

  Magho’s face fell, but Chona wasn’t fooled; Magho, while clearly wanting the obsidian, was an experienced trader too. “Perhaps we could come to some arrangement. If I could choose the best four or six of your pieces—”

  “I wouldn’t want to break up the set. That way, if I need to take it elsewhere in the town, I’ll have a much better chance of a sale.” That was true enough, and a subtle threat to take the hoard to one of Magho’s deadly social rivals.

  “I know what will make him cough up the obsidian,” said Novu, the son, still cradling his head, but speaking slyly. “I saw the way he looked at Minda. Give him a bit of time alone with her and—”

  This time the blow he received from his father was to the back of his neck. The boy recoiled, obviously shocked.

  “I apologize again for the boy,” Magho said. “But . . . Minda.” He grinned at Chona. “You couldn’t help noticing her, and I couldn’t help noticing you. Fifteen years old and sweet as a peach. Virgin, of course.”

  “Your wife’s sister?”

  “Niece, actually. Promised to another. I couldn’t help you there, my friend. And besides I already owe my wife’s brother, her father, a favor.”