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 like 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?