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.”
“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.