“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, and wiped off the birthing fluid with a bit of skin. Then the older women, including Sheb, clustered around the baby, examining it closely, picking over its limbs and face.
Juna experienced a sudden, unexpected surge of joy. “He’s a boy,” she said to Pepule. “He looks perfect…”
Her mother gazed back at her, her face empty. Then she turned away. Juna became aware that there was muttering from the women working on the baby; some of them glared up at Juna disapprovingly.
Now Juna saw what they were doing. They had put the baby on the ground, where he grasped at the air feebly. He had wisps of blond hair, Juna saw, stuck to his scalp by the fluids from the birth. Pepule’s sister took a stick. She pushed the baby into the hole the women had dug, as if she was shoving away a bit of sour meat. Then the women started to fill in the hole. The first dirt fell on the baby’s uncomprehending face.
“No!” Juna lunged forward.
Sheb, with surprising strength, took her shoulders and pushed her back. “It must be done.”
Juna struggled. “But he is healthy.”
“It,” said Sheb. “Not he. Only people are he, and that baby is not yet a person, and never will be.”
“But Pepule—”
“Look at her. Look, Juna. She is not hurt, not grieving. It is the way. She does not yet feel anything for the baby, not for these first few heartbeats when the decision must be made. If it were to live, to become a he, then the bond would grow firm, of course it would. But the bond is not there yet, and now it can never be.”
On and on.
Pepule was coughing. She sounded exhausted — ill. Juna thought of Cahl lying with her mother just hours ago, and she wondered what filth he had brought with him.
Still Sheb was talking to her.
At last Juna dropped her head. “But the baby is healthy,” she whispered. “He is healthy.”
Sheb sighed. “Oh, child, don’t you see? We cannot feed it, however healthy it is. This is not a time for a child — not for Pepule, anyhow.”
“And me?” Juna raised her head and whispered. “What will become of me? What of my baby?”
Sheb’s eyes clouded.
Juna twisted away and ran out of the hut, with its stink of shit and blood and useless milk.
The two sisters sat whispering in a corner of the small shelter they had constructed for themselves as children.
Juna had told Sion everything.
“I have to go,” she said. “That’s all. I knew it the moment they pushed the baby into that hole. Pepule is strong and experienced, where I am a child. And Acta, for all his drunken flaws, is beside her still. Tori doesn’t even know my baby is his. If her baby is pushed into a hole, then what of mine?”
In the dusty dark, Sion shook her head. “You shouldn’t speak like that. Sheb was right. It was not a person, not until it was named.”
“They killed him.”
“No. They could not let it live. For if all the babies were allowed to live, there wouldn’t be enough to eat, and that would kill us all. You know the truth of it. There is nothing to be done.”
It was ancient wisdom, drummed into them since birth, an echo of tens of millennia of human subsistence. Jo’on and Leda had had to face this. So had Rood’s people. It was the price you paid. But for some in each generation, it was too high a price.
“I don’t care,” said Juna.
Sion reached for her sister’s hand. “You can’t leave. You must give birth here. Let the women come to you. And if they decide the time is not right—”
“But I’m not like Pepule,” Juna said miserably. “I won’t be able to give it up. I just know it.” She looked into her sister’s shadowed face. “Is there something wrong with me? Why am I not as strong as our mother? It feels as if I love my baby even now, as strongly as Pepule ever loved you or me. I know that if they take it from me, then I may as well follow it into the hole, for I could not live.”
“Don’t talk like that,” said Sion.
“I will go in the morning,” Juna said, trying to sound stronger. “I will take a spear. That is all I need.”
“Where will you go? You can’t live alone — and definitely not with a baby at your breast. And wherever you go the people will drive you off with stones. You know that. We would do the same.”
But there is one place, Juna thought, where the people are at least different, where, perhaps, they do not murder their babies, where the people may not drive me off.
“Come with me, Sion. Please.”
Sion, her eyes drying, pulled back. “No. If you want to kill yourself, I — I respect your choice. But I will not die with you.”
“Then there is nothing more to be said.”
Carrying nothing but a spear and a spear-thrower, wearing a simple shift of tanned goat hide, she jogged easily. She covered the ground quickly, despite the unaccustomed burden in her belly.
The land was so dry that Cahl’s footsteps were crisp. Here and there she found his spoor — splashes of half-dried piss on rocks, a neatly coiled turd — hunting beer men, it seemed, was not hard. Even far from the village, farther than the hunters would usually roam, the land was empty.
After Jahna’s time, once more the ice had retreated, brooding, to its Arctic fastnesses. The pine forests had marched north, greening the old tundra. And across the Old World people spread out from the refuges where they had survived the great winter, islands of relative warmth in the Balkans, the Ukraine, Spain. Quickly their children began to fill up the immense depopulated plains of Europe and Asia.
But things were not as they had been the last time the ice retreated.
In Australia, since Ejan’s first footsteps, it had taken a mere five thousand years to achieve the grand erasing of the megafauna, the great kangaroos, reptiles, and birds. Now, everywhere people went, similar patterns unfolded.
In North America there had been ground sloths the size of rhinos, giant camels, bison with sharp-tipped horns that measured more than a man’s arm span from tip to tip. These massive creatures were the prey of muscular jaguars, saber-toothed tigers, dire wolves with teeth able to crunch bone, and the terrible short-faced bears. The American prairies might have looked lik
e Africa’s Serengeti Plain in later times.
When the first humans marched from Asia into Alaska, this fantastic assemblage imploded. Seven in ten of the large animal species were lost within centuries. Even the native horses were destroyed. Many of the creatures that did survive — like the musk oxen, bison, moose, and elk — were, like the humans, immigrants from Asia, with a long history of learning how to survive in a world owned by people.
Similarly, in South America, once humans walked across the Panama land bridge, eight in ten of the large animal species would be destroyed. It happened across the great plains of Eurasia too. Even the mammoths were lost. All the large animals vanished like mist.
The damage was not always proportionate to the size of the territory occupied. In New Zealand, where there had been no mammals but bats, evolution had playfully filled the roles of mammals with other creatures, especially birds. There were flightless geese instead of rabbits, little songbirds instead of mice, gigantic eagles instead of leopards, and seventeen different species of moa, giant flightless birds, eerie avian parallels to deer. This unique fauna, like that of an alien planet, was wiped out within a few hundred years of human settlement — not always by humans themselves, but by the creatures they brought with them, especially the rats, which devastated the nests of the ground-dwelling birds.
All these animals had been under pressure from the fast-changing climate at the end of the glaciation. But most of these ancient lines had survived many similar changes before. The difference this time was the presence of humans. It was no great blitzkrieg. People were often pretty inept as hunters, and big game contributed only a fraction of their diet. Many communities, like Jahna’s folk, actually believed they were touching the animals lightly. But by pressuring the animals at a time when they were most vulnerable, by selectively killing off the young, by disrupting habitats, by taking out key components of the food webs that sustained communities of creatures, they did immense damage. It was only in Africa, where the animals had evolved alongside humans and had had time to adapt to their ways, that something like the old Pleistocene diversity was maintained.
Rood’s chill Eden had long gone. There had been a hideous shriveling, leaving an empty, echoing world, through which people walked as if bewildered, quickly forgetting that the great exotic beasts and different kinds of people had even existed.
People still lived by hunting and gathering, of course. But it turned out to be much harder to hunt deer and boar in the forests than it had been to ambush reindeer crossing rivers on the open steppe. After the extinctions, life was impoverished compared to what it had been in the past, with poorer quality food and less leisure time. Worldwide, people’s culture actually devolved, becoming simpler.
Always, deep down, they would know that there was something wrong. And now they faced a new pressure.
Juna had been traveling only half a day when she caught up with Cahl. He had sprawled in the shade of a worn sandstone bluff, and he was eating a root. The meat and artifacts of shell and bone he had taken from the people had been dumped in the dirt at his side.
He watched her as she approached, his eyes bright in the shade. “Well,” he said silkily. “Little gold head.”
She didn’t understand that word, “gold.” She slowed as she approached, dismayed by his hard stare.
He got to his feet clumsily. His belly strained at his skin shirt. “What a frightened rabbit!” he said. “Look, you came all this way to find me, not the other way around. And I notice that no matter how repulsive I am, you aren’t yet running off. So, why are you here?”
She stood frozen, staring at him. Her mind seemed flattened, as if a great rock had fallen on her, pinning her to the dirt. Although she had rehearsed this encounter — imagining herself taking control, making demands — this wasn’t going remotely as she had planned.
He said, “No reply? Here’s why. You want something from me.” He approached her, his gaze raking over her body. “That’s how I make my living. Everybody wants something. And if I can figure out what that one thing is, then I can make anybody do whatever I like.”
She forced herself to speak. “As Acta wants beer.”
He grinned. “You follow. Good. So, just like Acta, you want something from me. But you’re not going to get it, little girl, until you figure out what I might want from you.” He walked around her, and let his fingertips slide over her buttocks. “You’re skinny for my taste. Lean. All that chasing after wild goats, I suppose.” He yawned, stretching, and looked off into the distance. “Frankly, child, I wore out my cock humping that fat mother of yours.”
Impulsively she pulled up her shirt, exposing her belly.
Startled, he ran his hand over her skin, feeling the bump there. The flesh of his palm was oddly soft, without calluses. “Well,” he said, breathing harder. “I knew there was something different about you. I must have good instincts. And as for you, you’re getting the idea. My strange lust for pregnant sows; my one weakness—” He stroked his chin. “But I still don’t know what you want. I can’t believe it’s the alluring thought of my fat belly on your back—”
“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.
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