They walked on, rounding the wall, and the crammed-in houses of Jericho were revealed. Chona recoiled from the crowd and the clamour, and the rank stench. But Magho led the way boldly, treading between the piss puddles, ignoring the stinks and the shouts of children and the bleating of goats, shouting greetings to friends or relatives.
A mob of people crushed through narrow, tangled lanes, some carrying baskets of grain or heavy bread loaves. Children, skinny, pale creatures, ran everywhere, playing and yelling as children always did. And there were animals in with the people: goats, hairy, long-legged sheep, even cattle, adding to the filth around the houses. Birds hovered overhead, gulls roosting on the house roofs or swooping down to feed on heaps of waste.
Chona was always overwhelmed by the sheer number of people you saw in this place. And yet many of them looked so unhealthy, the women with their gappy teeth, the children with their stick-thin limbs and pock-marked faces, the men worn down by the constant work.
In some ways this place wasn’t unique. Who didn’t have a favourite hazel tree? Who didn’t try to keep the weeds out of a favourite mushroom patch? People even built walls and dug ditches to take away the rainwater. But nowhere else, in all Chona’s travels, had these habits been driven to the extremes you saw around Jericho. Nowhere did you see the obsession, the bent backs and anxious eyes. Nowhere else did people live crushed in together like this, though Chona had travelled as far as anybody else in this empty world, east until you came to the deserts where the camels and horses ran in huge herds, or to the far west along the great river roads until you came to the grey ocean. Nowhere save here: Jericho.
The deep human core of him recoiled. But the trader in him was drawn back here again and again, like a fly to a turd. And so he walked on with Magho, pushing his doubts and fears deep down inside.
9
Chona had no idea how Magho found his way through the muddle to his home; all the houses looked the same to him, just heaps of mud brick rising up in the midden-like town like ugly brown poppies.
Magho brushed aside a gap in the wall covered by a mat of reeds, and led Chona down earthen steps into a kind of pit dug down beneath the level of the ground. Rush mats had been scattered on the ground. A fire burned in a central hearth, banked up and not giving off much smoke, but even so the air was dense and hot. Most of the daylight was shut out, and the house was like a cave. The faecal stink outside was alleviated a bit, but in here there was a more complex aroma of stale food, farts, baby milk, sweat, and a disturbing, almost sweet smell of profound rot.
Two women sat, cross-legged, tying knots in some kind of twine. They wore smocks dyed bright green, with their legs left bare. Chona knew one must be Magho’s wife, but he couldn’t tell which. And three children were here, one older boy who sat sullen against a wall with his legs drawn up against his chest, and two little ones who played with toy mud bricks on the floor. All this Chona glimpsed in the light that leaked through the reed thatch roof.
Magho clapped his hands. ‘Out! Come on, I need to talk to my friend here. Not you, Novu, you little snot,’ and he pointed a finger at the older boy, who didn’t look up.
The women, looking weary, rolled up their twine, gathered their toddlers, and pushed past Chona. The second was much younger than the first, perhaps a younger sister. She was a plump little thing with bare legs, wide innocent eyes, and full breasts whose weight showed through her loose smock.
He felt a stir of interest in his loins. He had been on the road a while. Jericho was a place where the ancient balance between man and woman, of which he had witnessed all manner of variants in his travels, was tipped firmly in the man’s favour. Here a woman hardly dared even speak without a man’s permission. And certainly the body of a female relative would be within Magho’s gift. It would depend how badly Magho wanted Chona’s goods, of course, and how protective he felt of the girl. He might even have his eye on her as a second wife himself – Chona couldn’t remember, nor did he care, what the marriage rules were here. If so, Magho might not want her spoiled. And spoiled she would be, Chona thought, indulging in a faint reverie, if he got his hands on her. As with all things in the human world, it just depended who wanted what, and how badly. Those innocent eyes…
For now he had to concentrate, as Magho was beckoning him to the mats. ‘Sit down, sit down.’ Magho offered him food. ‘Here, have some meat, this is pickled and spiced, have some bread.’
Chona dropped his pack by the door and propped his walking staff up against a wall. He kept his blade hidden at his left side, however. Magho was a harmless sort, but you never knew, and he didn’t much like the look of the boy sitting against the wall. He stepped cautiously through the house’s clutter of clothes and bits of food and clay pots, making for Magho on his mats. Niches had been cut into the dried mud of the bricks in the wall, and small artefacts stood here, like sculptures of human heads, with bulging eyes and flaring nostrils and protruding tongues done in bright ochre paint. Chona knew from his previous visits that these were in fact real heads, the flensed skulls of honoured ancestors coated in mud and painted. Chona never liked to meet the eyes of these ancients, who he imagined might know the deals he was trying to strike all too well.
Magho cracked open one of his loaves, digging big earthy fingers into the thick crust, and tore off a piece to hand to Chona.
The trader bit into it. This ‘bread’, another word Chona had learned here, did fill your stomach, but it was like eating dry wood, and he knew that the coarse gritty stuff wore your teeth down if you ate too much of it.
Chewing, he sat on the mat Magho had indicated, crossing his legs. But something pale pushed out of the dirt before his mat. It was a skull embedded in the ground, its jaws gaping, dust sifting in its eye sockets.
The boy saw him flinch, and laughed. He was perhaps sixteen. He was wearing a robe not unlike his mother’s, not of hide but of woven vegetable fibre, dyed a bright green. ‘Nothing to be afraid of, trader man. It’s just another grandfather, wearing his way out of the ground. We bury our dead in the ground under our houses where the worms can cleanse their bones. So you’re sitting on a big old heap of corpses. No wonder it stinks of rot in here – that’s what you’re thinking, aren’t you?’
‘Shut up, Novu,’ his father said. Chona was startled at the change in his voice. Where he had treated the women with indifference, there was real hatred in his tone towards the boy.
But Novu kept talking. ‘The last trader we had in here was just the same. He threw up in the piss-pot-’
Magho leaned over and punched the boy in the side of the head. Novu went sprawling. ‘I told you to shut up! And if you did what I told you, you wouldn’t be in this plight now, would you?’ Magho took a deep breath, his massive chest expanding. Then he sat up and turned to Chona, his smile returning. ‘Don’t worry about that. I caught him above the hairline. The bruise won’t show.’
Chona watched the boy rise, cautiously, rubbing his head. He wondered why the father thought Chona would care. And why, if the boy angered his father so much, he was keeping him here in the house during this meeting. ‘He doesn’t bother me, Magho. He’s just a child.’
‘A child? A child-man, and that’s all he’ll ever be, I fear. The gods know he’s a difficult one. Here, try some of this tea.’ He handed Chona a clay bowl of hot, steaming green liquid. ‘We’ve business to do.’ He glanced over at Chona’s pack. ‘I take it you have what I want.’
Chona allowed himself to smile. ‘I wouldn’t be here otherwise, my friend.’ He leaned over and unfolded his pack. In with the bits of sky-fallen iron and shaped flint and fragments of reindeer bone carved into elusive fish and lumbering bears, he had tucked small parcels wrapped in the softest doe skin. He made a show of unwrapping them slowly. Magho all but drooled.