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 growling 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.”