“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.
The streets were full of people. Skinny, filthy, many dressed in ragged skins or rags of vegetable fiber, they swarmed like hungry rats. To Juna the merged voices of the mob were not human: They were like the roaring of thunder or the gr
owling of a rainstorm, something beyond human control. Clutching her children, she tried to control her fear. “It is the hunger,” she said.
“Yes.”
Famine: It was another word Juna had been forced to learn. A blight had affected the main wheat crop of the farms in the area. Nobody understood it; nobody could cure it. When the harvest had failed, the hunger had spread rapidly. The first signs of unrest had been the murder of tribute collectors, trying to gather what was rightfully the Potus’s. And now it had come to this. Juna’s folk fed on many wild plants; no blight would destroy them all, as it could wipe out a single vital crop. Famine: another ambiguous gift of the new way of living.
The family kept their heads down. They avoided the main avenues, and made their way zigzag fashion toward the main gate.
Keram said, “There is a new settlement west of here, by the coast. The farmland is rich, and the resources of the sea are bountiful. It is many days’ travel, but—”
“We will make it,” she said firmly.
He nodded curtly. “We have to.”
At last they reached the open gate. Here Muti waited for them. The three of them, cradling the children, slipped into the night.
As they headed east, everywhere they traveled, they walked through lands transformed by farmers and city builders. Even the land Juna had once crossed, fleeing with Cahl from her home, was now changed beyond recognition, so rapid had been the expansion.
The expansion happened because farmed lands soon became overcrowded. Sons and daughters wanted to own their own slice of the world, to master it as their parents had. This was easily achieved. The farmers’ knowledge was not tied to a particular patch of land, as the hunter-gatherers’ had been. Their thinking was systematic: They knew how to transform the land to make it the way they wanted it — any piece of land. They did not have to accept it as it was. For farmers, colonization was easy.
And so, from the first humble scratched farms in the east of Anatolia, the great expansion began. It was a kind of slow war, waged on the Earth itself, as it was transformed to suit the needs of the growing crowd of human bellies. It became an expansion that would soon outstrip geographically the diffusion of Homo erectus and earlier generations of humans, an expansion that would proceed with astonishing speed.
But the expansion did not occur into a vacuum, but into land already occupied by the ancient hunter-gatherer communities.
It was not possible to share, of course. This was a conflict between two fundamentally different views of the land. The hunters saw their land as a place to which they were attached, like the trees that grew from it. To the farmers, it was a resource to own, to buy, sell, subdivide: Land was property, not a place. There could be only one outcome. The hunter-gatherers were simply outnumbered: Ten malnourished, runtish farmers could always overcome one healthy hunter.
After three days’ traveling, they reached a kind of shantytown, a rough huddle of shelters and lean-tos. Juna peered around, tense, uninterested. “Why have we come here? We should move on before it grows dark—”
Keram placed a kindly hand on her arm. “I thought you would want to stop here. Juna, don’t you recognize this place?”
“You should,” came a woman’s voice, oddly familiar.
Juna turned around. A woman was limping toward her, an ancient piece of skin thrown over her head. Juna’s mind whirled. The words had been strange, yes — because they were in Juna’s birth language, a tongue she had not heard since the day she had followed Cahl out of her village.
Now Juna could see the woman’s face. It was Sion, her older sister. An unidentifiable longing came rushing back. “Oh, Sion—” She stepped forward, arms outstretched.
But Sion drew back. “No! Keep away.” She grimaced. “The sickness did not murder me, as it murdered so many others, but I may carry it yet.”
“Sion. Who—”
“Who died?” Sion barked a bitter laugh. “It would be better for you to ask who survived.”
Juna glanced around. “And is this truly where we lived? Nothing is the same.”
Sion snorted. “The men drink beer and mead. The women labor in the farms of Keer. Nobody hunts now, Juna. The animals have been driven off to make room for fields. We get by. Sometimes we sing the old songs for the farmers. They give us more beer.”
“Who is shaman now?”
“Shamans are not allowed. The last of them drank himself to death, the fat fool.” She shrugged. “It makes no difference. Nothing the shaman could tell us would help us now. It is not the shaman who knows how the wheat grows, nobody but the farmers, and their masters from the city with their bits of string and narrow eyes that peer at the sky.”
The disease, as it happened, had been measles.
Mankind had always been prey to some diseases, of course: leprosy, yaws, and yellow fever were among the most ancient blights. Many of them were caused by microbes that would maintain themselves in the soil, or in animal populations — as yellow fever was carried by African monkeys. But people had had time, evolutionary time, to adapt to most such diseases and parasites.
With the coming of the new, dense communities had come new plagues — crowd diseases, like measles, rubella, smallpox, and influenza. Unlike the older illnesses, the microbes responsible for these diseases could only survive in the bodies of living people. Such diseases could not have evolved in humans until there were sufficiently dense and mobile crowds to allow them to spread.
But, if they infected crowds, they must have come from crowds. And so they had: crowds of animals, the heavily social herd creatures people now lived close to, animals in which the diseases had long been endemic. Tuberculosis, measles, and smallpox crossed to humans from cattle, influenza from pigs, malaria from birds. Meanwhile, with the building of grain stores, the vectors of infectious diseases — rats and mice and fleas and bugs — reached populations of unprecedented density. Still, those who survived developed resistance of some kind, though some of these mechanisms were clumsy, with damaging side effects. The mechanisms of adaptation operated too slowly, compared to the frenzied rate of change of human culture, to iron out the deficiencies.
But the hunter-gatherers at the farms’ expanding borders had no resistance. They were devastated, even as their lands were overwhelmed by their farmer neighbors.
This transition, from the old way of living to the new, was a crucial moment in human history. A mass, unconscious choice was being made between limiting population growth to match the resources available, as the hunter-gatherers of the past had done, or trying to increase food production to feed a growing population. And once that choice had been made, the farmers’ expansion could only accelerate. Henceforth the folk following the older ways would survive only in the most marginal environments, the fringes of deserts, the mountain peaks, the densest jungles — places the farmers could not tame.
It would happen in Africa, where Bantu farmers equipped with iron weapons would spread out of the western Sahara, overwhelming peoples like the pygmies and the Khoisan — ancestors to Joan Useb — at last marching all the way to the east coast of South Africa. It happened in China, where farmers from the north, aided by China’s interconnected geography, would march south to repopulate and homogenize much of tropical southeast Asia, driving existing populations ahead of them in secondary invasions that hit Thailand and Burma.
And the great east-west span of Eurasia proved especially conducive to expansion. Farmers spread easily along lines of latitude, moving into places with a similar climate and length of day to their origin, and so suitable for their crops and beasts. With their cattle and goats and pigs and sheep, their highly productive wheat and barley, and their swelling numbers, the descendants of the farmers of Cata Huuk would build a mighty dominion of wheat and rice. The pyramids of Egypt would be built by workers fed by crops whose ancestors had been native to southwest Asia. They would take their Indo-European language with them, but it would splinter, mutate, and proliferate, generating Latin, German, Sanskrit
, Hindi, Russian, Welsh, English, Spanish, French, Gaelic. At last they would colonize a huge east-west band stretching from the Atlantic coast to Turkestan, from Scandinavia to North Africa. One day they would even cross the oceans, in boats of wood and iron.
All across this immense span of cultivated land cities would burgeon, and empires would flourish and decay, like mushrooms. And everywhere the farmers went they carried the great diseases with them, a vicious froth on a tide of language, culture, and war.
Juna said impulsively, “Sister, come with us.”
Sion glanced at Keram and Muti, and laughed. “That will not be possible.” With an expression of anguish, she peered at Juna’s children, who slept in the arms of Muti and Keram. Then she whispered, “Good-bye,” and hurried back to the huts.
Juna made to call good-bye after her, but, she thought, that would be the last word I will ever speak in my own tongue. For I will never come back here. Never.
So, without speaking, she turned her face away and, with her children, resumed her steadfast walk to the west, and the new city on the coast.
CHAPTER 15
The Dying Light
Rome. Common Era [CE] 482.
I
In Rome, the sun was bright, and the Italian air felt liquid to men used to the milder climes of Gaul. Everywhere lingered the immense stenches of the city: of fires, of cooking, and, above all, of sewage.
When Honorius led him into the Forum, Athalaric tried not to be overwhelmed.
Gaunt old Honorius stumbled forward, his threadbare toga wrapped around him. “I had not expected the strength of this sun. The light must have molded my ancestors, filled them with vigor. Oh! How I have longed to see this place. This is the Sacred Way, of course. There is the Temple of Castor and Pollux, there the Temple of the Deified Caesar with the Arch of Augustus beside it.” He made his way to the shade of a statue — a horseback hero done in bronze, whose plinth alone towered ten to twelve times Athalaric’s height — and he leaned against the marble, wheezing. “Augustus said he found Rome a city of brick and left it one of marble. The white marble, you see, comes from Luna, to the north, and the colored marbles from northern Africa, Greece, and Asia Minor — not so exotic destinations as they are today—”
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