Nekatopo opened her eyes.
“…Mother?”
“Oh, Mane, Mane.” It was a childish diminutive she had not used since Manekato was a baby. She reached up, her great arms withered and weak.
Manekato embraced her, feeling the tears soak into the hairs in her own chest.
“Oh, Mane, I’m so sorry. But you must go to the Market.”
Manekato frowned. She knew that no woman had travelled to the Market since her grandmother’s day. Manekato herself had never left the boundary of the Farm, and the prospect of travelling so far filled her with dread. “Why?”
Nekatopo struggled to sit up, and wiped her face with the back of her hand. “I don’t even know how to tell you this. We are going to lose the Farm.”
Manekato felt her mouth fall open. A change in the possession of a Farm occurred only when a Lineage became extinct, or when some member of a Lineage had committed a grave crime.
“I don’t understand.”
“I know you don’t. Oh dear, dear Mane! It is the Astrologers. They have news for us which — well, it has gone around and around in my head, like the Astrologers” own wretched stars wheeling around the world. The Farm is to be destroyed. A great catastrophe is to befall the world — so say the Astrologers.”
Manekato could not take in any of this. “Storms can be averted, waves tamed—”
“You must believe the Astrologers,” Nekatopo whispered, insistent. “I’m sorry, Manekato. You must go to the Market and meet them.”
Manekato pulled away from her frail mother, frightened, resentful. “Why? If all this is true, what use is talk?”
“Go to them,” Nekatopo sighed, subsiding back into the arms of the semi-sentient branches.
Manekato walked to the door. Then — torn by shock, uncertainty, shame, doubt she hesitated. “Nekatopo — if the Farm dies — what will become of me?”
Nekatopo lay on her bed, a dark brown bundle, breathing softly. She did not reply — but Manekato knew there was only one possible answer. If the Farm died, then the Lineage must die with it.
She burned with confusion, resentment.
But still she hesitated. It struck her that whatever the fate of the Farm, if she travelled to the Market, her mother might not be able to welcome her home again.
So, softly, she began to recite her true name. “Manekatopokane-mahedo…”
Manekato’s true name consisted of nearly fifty thousand syllables — one syllable more than her mother’s name, two more than her grandmother’s — one syllable added for each generation of the Lineage, back to the beginning, when members of a very different species, led by a matriarch called Ka, and her daughter called Poka, had first scratched at the unpromising slopes of the eroded hills here.
Manekato’s people had farmed this scrap of land for fifty thousand generations, for more than a million years.
Nekatopo listened to this child-like performance, unmoving, but Manekato sensed her wistful pleasure.
Joshua:
Joshua crouched by a bubbling stream. His nostrils were filled by the musky smell of the hunters” skins, the soft green scent of grass.
The giant horse had become separated from its herd. It snorted, stamping a leg that seemed a little lame. Forgetting its peril in the foolish way of all horses, it nibbled at grass.
The Ham hunters crept forward. Most of them were men. There was no cover, here on the open plain, but they hunkered down in the long grass, and the drab brown skins they wore helped them blend into the background. They were patient. They worked towards the horse step by silent step, staying resolutely downwind of the animal. Lame or not, the heavy old stallion could still outrun any of them-or punish them with its hooves should they fail to trap it properly.
This small drama took place on a plain that stretched from the foot of a cliff. To the east, beyond a stretch of coarsely grassed dunes, the sea glimmered, a band of grey steel. And to the north a great river decanted into the sea via a broad, sluggish delta system. The plain was wet and scrubby, littered by pools. At the base of the cliff itself, a broad lake was fed by springs that sprouted from the cliff’s rocks.
The coastal plain, with its caves and streams and pools and migrant herds, was the home of Joshua’s people. They called themselves the People of the Grey Earth. Others called them Hams. They had lived here for two thousand generations.
To Joshua, the landscape was a blur, marked out by the position of the other hunters, as if they glowed brightly — and by the horse, the centre of their attention.
A soft call came. Abel was waving his arm, indicating they should approach the horse a little closer. Abel was Joshua’s older brother.
Joshua crouched lower and moved through the grass, towards the incurious horse.
But now his questing fingers found something new, lying hidden in the grass. It was a stick, long and straight. No, it was a spear, with a stone tip fixed to the wood by some black, hard substance; he could see where twigs had been sheared away from it by a stone knife. He picked up the spear and hefted it, testing its weight. It was light and flimsy; it would surely break easily on a single thrust. Its shaft was oddly carved, into fine, baffling shapes.
A bear.
He dropped the spear, crying out, and stumbled back. Suddenly a bear had been looking at him, from out of the shaped wood in his hands.
A massive hand clamped over his mouth and he was pushed to the ground.
Abel loomed over him. His skins, of horse and antelope, were tightly bound about his body by lengths of rawhide thread. His eyes were dark pools under his bony brow. “Th” horse,” he hissed.
“Bear,” Joshua said, panting. “Saw bear.”
Abel frowned and cast around, seeking the bear. Then he saw the broken spear. He picked it up, briefly fingering its dense carving, then hurled it from him with loathing. “Zealots,” he said. “Or En’lish. Skinny-folk.”
Yes, Joshua thought uneasily. Skinnies must have made the little spear. But nevertheless there had been, briefly, a bear glaring at him from out of the carved wood.
“Ho!” It was Saul, another of the Ham hunters. “Horse breakin’!”
Abel and Joshua struggled to their feet. The horse, startled, was coming straight towards the brothers, a mountain of meat and muscle, a giant as large as a carthorse.
Joshua grabbed a cobble, and Abel raised his thrusting spear. They grinned at each other in anticipation.
Joshua ran straight into the animal’s mighty chest.
He was knocked flying, and he landed in the dirt in a tangle of loosened furs. Winded, he got straight up, and ran back towards the fray.
He saw that his brother had grabbed the horse around its neck. The horse was bucking, still running, and it carried Abel with it; but Abel was stabbing at the horse’s throat with his spear. The spear was a short solid pillar of wood, stained deep with the blood of many kills. It was a weapon of strength and utility, without carving or decoration of any kind.
The slender spear of the Skinny-folk was meant to be thrown, so that an animal could be brought down from a distance, sparing such hard labour; the Hams had no such technology, and never would.
In a moment Abel’s thrusts had reached some essential organ, and the animal crashed to the dust. The other men closed, yelling, hurling themselves on the animal to subdue it before it died. With a gleeful howl, ignoring the pain of his bruised chest and back, Joshua joined in. Before the animal was overpowered they all suffered bruises and cuts; one man broke a finger.