‘From the slush and mud of the yolk grew the first mother. She gave birth to the three little mothers, and the sun and the earth serpent and the sky bird of thunder.
‘But still the giants fought, until they fell on the first mother. Her own body, torn apart by the giants, became the substance of the earth, and of animals, and of people. The world became rich.
‘But when the land became too full of mouths, the little mothers and the sun came to a concord with the moon, a terrible pact, and death was given to the world.
‘Now, Sunta, by lying in these broken shells, you are returned to the egg from which all creation emerged…’ He shook his head, as if dizzy. He began to speak other words, words so old nobody but the priests understood them any more.
Somewhere a sea bird called, welcoming the day. Ana saw how the low, pinkish sunlight glinted from the shells of the midden, tens of tens of tens of them, the labour of generations. It was unexpectedly beautiful, the sparkling shells, the sweeping curve of the middens. She would not cry, she told herself. Not today.
Shade the Pretani touched her shoulder. ‘I am your friend, Ana. I think we are alike, you and I. If you would like to talk of your grandmother, or your mother or father-’
She could smell his sweat. She turned away. She didn’t even look at him again, as the priest completed the ceremony, and the sun, mistily visible, at last hauled its bulk clear of the sea.
8
In the days that followed, far to the west of Etxelur the last of the True People in the land of the Sky Wolf struggled to stay alive.
And far to the east, beyond a continent of rivers and forest, a man walking alone approached a place where people lived in a huddle of mud bricks and stone walls. Chona was not prone to fear.
This morning he walked alone, as he preferred, with his pack of dried meat and trade goods on his back, his worn walking staff in his right hand, his left hand hanging loosely by the blade hidden in a fold of his cloak. He had walked up from the Salt Sea to this river valley, its banks thick with woodland, reeds and papyrus, a green belt in this arid country that led him north towards the town. Skinny to the point of gaunt, the skin of his face made leathery by years of sunlight and wind, the soles of his feet hard as rock, Chona knew he looked elderly, at nearly thirty years old. No threat to anybody. Easy to drive away, even to rob of his precious pack of goods. Well, he was not so weak, as would-be robbers had found to their cost.
He had travelled further than anybody he knew, even among the loose community of traders who met at the harbours and river estuaries and confluences, key nodes in the natural routes that spanned the Continent. He believed he had seen as much of the world as anybody alive. He spoke a dozen languages, knew many more in fragments, and was a master of the crude, flexible traders’ tongue that people spoke from one end of the Continent to the other. He was clever and resourceful, and he was without fear – almost.
But he was afraid of Jericho. And he could already see the pall of smoke, fed by dozens of fires, that hung over his destination. His belly clenched.
Following a trail well defined by the feet of animals and people, he climbed away from the river and up towards the higher ground, heading north-west. It was close to noon, and the morning clouds had long burned from a blue shell of sky. Away from the river the ground was dusty and the air was dry as a dead man’s mouth.
He heard a murmur of voices, a clatter of hooves, a rattle of stones. Ahead of him on the trail a group of boys were herding goats. They carried long sticks to prod the animals as they bleated and jostled. The rattling Chona heard came from wooden gourds, each containing a pebble, hung around the neck of each goat.
Even this was a strange sight to Chona. They were only boys, but he found his footsteps slowing. Goats were for hunting, or for chasing down for milk when you needed it. Why gather them? Why fix gourds to their necks?
He always felt like this. He could turn back, head down south to the communities of fisherfolk around the shore of the Salt Sea, where his bone harpoons and elaborate lures always ensured him a welcome.
‘Chona.’ Magho came striding down the dusty slope to meet him. He clapped the trader on the shoulder. ‘So you came.’
‘Yes, I came. But-’
‘But you nearly turned back.’ Magho boomed laughter. ‘I know you, my friend, and that’s why I came to fetch you. Once I have a fish on the hook I don’t let him get away!’ He was a big, burly man, grown fat on the produce of his wheat meadows. He had a heavy bull-like jaw and fleshy nose and thick, tied-back black hair, and his luxuriant beard was turning to grey. He wore a skin tunic, but tied around his ample waist was a belt of green-dyed spun yarn.
If Magho had been keen enough to haul his ugly bulk all the way out to the river trail to meet him, he must want Chona’s goods rather badly, and Chona, an instinctive trader, began to smell a deal, and his fear receded. ‘You know me well enough, Magho. Only the promise of your hospitality lures me on.’
‘You have the obsidian.’
‘I have it.’
Magho’s grin widened.
As they walked on, Magho kept up a steady flow of chatter. Chona had no family, no children, and preferred not to talk of his life, which consisted of walking to places Magho had never heard of, to make deals with people he didn’t want Magho to know about. So he let Magho speak of his own family, his wife, their home, their three children, of whom the eldest boy Novu was such a disappointment. It was all a tactic to keep Chona on that fish hook, of course, but Chona endured it politely.
Now, following a track that curved around to the north-west, they were passing through the gardens that surrounded the town. They were a patchwork of shapes, lopsided circles and rough squares marked out by wicker fences. Here women and many children laboured, bent over, plucking weeds from the meadows of wheat and barley and pulses. They didn’t look up at Chona and Magho.
The men passed a field where bricks of mud and straw had been laid out in rows to dry in the sun. Another extraordinary sight.
And as they neared the town that pall of smoke spread a dirty brown stain across the sky ahead, and Chona could already smell meat roasting, and human ordure.
Then, approaching from the west, the trail led them over a bluff, and at last Chona saw Jericho itself. It sprawled across the landscape, a mass of round, brick-built houses pressed together in a plain of dirty mud. Beyond lay the river valley and its reed beds, brilliant white and yellow. Even in the heat of the day smoke seeped up from the reed-thatched roofs of the houses, for the people of Jericho were always busy, busy.
But even stranger to Chona was the wall that faced him, standing in front of the town at its western end. Built of stone pressed into dried mud, the wall ran for dozens of paces, cutting the town off from the country to the west, and looping around like a moon crescent to enclose the buildings, though the loop was not completed. The people of Jericho, or their ancestors, had built this wall to save their town from floods and mud slides from the western hills. Strangest of all was the ‘tower’ that had been built against the wall, a round structure like a vast tree trunk, wider than it was tall, and likewise made of stone blocks pressed into mud. Chona had seen this before. The tower was so wide you could walk inside it, and climb steps up to the top.
As far as Chona had travelled he had never seen such a structure as this. He believed it must be unique in all the world. Why, even the ‘tower’ only had a name in the language of Jericho itself, a word that was needed nowhere else. Yet the wall was very ancient; you could see how the stones were worn and cracked, and the wall itself looked half-buried by mud drifts and accumulated garbage.