She seemed to puzzle over his meaning, as if she wasn’t quite sure what “possessions” were. “Nothing. And friends — only Gwerei.”
Keram shrugged; the name meant nothing to him. “Make your preparations. We leave soon.” He clapped his hands, and Muti and the troops proceeded to carry out his orders.
But Cahl, restrained by a guard, continued to beg and plead. “Take me! Oh, take me!”
III
It would take them three days to cover the ground to Keram’s mysterious home, to Cata Huuk.
The grain and meat, what Keram called the “tribute,” was briskly collected. Juna had no idea why the townsfolk — hardly well-off themselves — should wish to hand over so much of their provisions to these strangers. They didn’t even get beer back in return.
But now was not the time for her to inquire into such matters. The speech she had rehearsed for so long, since first seeing Keram, had paid off. Now was the time for her to keep quiet and follow where she was led.
The party formed up into a loose line. Keram and Muti took the lead. Their four squat guards followed, two of them with hands free to deploy weapons, the others loaded up with the tribute. Juna, carrying nothing but the spear with which she had arrived here, approached one of the guards, expecting to be given a share of the load.
Keram rebuked her. “Let them do their job.”
Juna shrugged. “In Cahl’s town, it would be my job.”
“Well, I am not Cahl. You must do as we do, girl. It is our way.”
“I was taken as a child from—”
“I remember what you told me,” Keram said, his eyebrows raised in good humor. “I’m not sure I believe a word of it. But listen now. In Cata Huuk, the word of the Potus is law. I am the son of the Potus. You will obey me. You will not question me. Do you understand?”
Juna’s folk were egalitarian, like most hunter-gatherer folk; no, she didn’t understand. But she nodded dumbly.
They set off. The young men, unburdened, strode ahead easily enough — as did Juna, despite her pregnancy and the four months she had endured of poor diet and hard labor. But the guards puffed and complained of their weary feet.
It was a great relief for Juna to be out of the squalid town and in the open country once more, a great relief to be walking rather than bending her back over some dusty field — even if, as they headed steadily east, she was entering countryside that was increasingly remote from the place where she and her ancestors had always lived.
They stopped each night in small towns, no more or less impressive than Cahl’s had been. The guards were plied with beer and girls. Keram and Muti kept themselves to themselves, spending their nights quietly in huts. They let Juna stay with them, huddled in a corner.
Neither of them touched her. Perhaps it was her pregnancy. Perhaps they were just not sure of her. Part of her, glad to be free of the grubby attentions of Cahl, relished not having to share her body with anybody else. But part of her, more calculating, regretted it. She had no real understanding of what this place, this Cata Huuk, would be like. But she suspected her best chance of surviving was to bind herself to Keram or Muti.
So she made sure that each evening and morning, as she cast off her shift, she showed them her body; and she was aware of how, when he thought she was not looking, Keram’s gaze followed her.
As they walked on, the landscape became more crowded with fields and towns. No trees grew here, though there were stumps and patches of burned-out forest. There was no open land at all, in fact, save for worthless rocky land or marshes. There were only fields, and patches of land that had clearly once been plowed but were now abandoned, useless, exhausted. Soon there was scarcely a footfall she could make without stepping into the track of somebody who had been here before. The extent to which these swarming people had remade the world oppressed her.
And at last they reached Cata Huuk itself.
The first thing Juna saw was a wall. Made of mud bricks and straw, it was a great circular barrier that must have been as high as three people standing on each other’s shoulders, and it bristled with spikes. Outside the wall there was a great ring of shabby huts and lean-tos made of mud and tree branches. The wall was so wide it seemed to cut the land in half.
A broad, well-trodden path led up to the wall itself, a path which Keram’s party followed. But as they approached people came boiling like wasps out of the huts, yelling, plucking at Keram’s robes, holding up meat and fruit and sweetmeats and bits of carved wood and stone. Juna shrank back. But Keram assured her that there was nothing to be concerned about. These people were simply trying to sell things; this was a market. The words meant nothing to her.
A great gate made of wood had been set in the wall. Keram called out loudly. A man on top of the wall waved, and the gate was hauled open. The party walked through.
As she walked into strangeness, Juna found herself trembling.
The huts: that was the first thing that struck her. There were many of them, tens of tens, strewn in great masses across the kilometers-wide compound inside the walls. Most of them were no better than Cahl’s dwelling, simple slumped mounds of mud and wood. But some, toward the center of the city, were grander than that, tottering structures of two or three stories, their frontages walled with woven yellow grasses that shone in the sun. The clusters of huts were cut through by lanes that sliced this way and that, like a spider’s web. Smoke hung in a great gray cloud everywhere. Sewage ran down channels cut into the center of each street, and flies buzzed in great linear clouds over the sluggishly flowing waste.
And people swarmed, the men walking together, the children running and yelling, the women burdened with heavy loads on their heads and backs. There were animals, goats and sheep and dogs, crowded in as tightly as the people. The noise was astonishing, an unending clamor. The smells — of shit, piss, animals, fires, greasy cooked meat — were overwhelming.
This was Cata Huuk. With ten thousand people crammed within its walls, it was one of Earth’s first cities. Even Keer had been no preparation for this. To Juna, it was like looking into a great murky sea full of people.
Keram smiled at her. “Are you all right?”
“What trickster god made this teeming pile?”
“No god. People, Juna. Many, many people. You must remember that. No matter how strange all this appears, it is the work of people, like you and me. Besides,” he said with mock innocence, “this is where you were born. This is where you belong.”
“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.”