Evolution

The only thing anybody knew about the new people, save for their marvelous ability to make beer, was that there were many, many of them. Some of the women whispered that no baby was discarded among the strangers — not one, not ever. And that was why there was so many of them, though nobody had any idea how they fed themselves. Perhaps in their valleys and lowlands the animals still ran in great herds, just as they had in the days long gone, the days of legends.

"Who?" Sion asked softly.

"Who?"

"Acta said, ‘Take her.’ Who?"

"Why, his wife," Cahl said. "Pepule. Ah. I can see why you’re interested. Acta isn’t your father, but Pepule is your mother, isn’t she?" He grinned, and gazed at Juna with that stone-hard intensity. "That will add spice. While I hump her I will think of you, little one."

Sion said coldly, "Pepule is with child."

"I know." He grinned. "I like them that way. Those big bellies, no?" Again his hard, calculating gaze turned on Juna. Then he took a pinch of ground corn from her mortar and strode away to their mother’s hut.

Dissatisfied, vaguely afraid, Juna left the men to their drinking. She walked out into the country with her grandmother, Sheb. Sheb, nearly sixty, moved with caution, but in her long life she had avoided injury and serious illness and stayed limber.

The people lived on a high plateau. The land was dry, flat, all but featureless. Vegetation clung to the ground, deep-rooted, searching for water. There were streams and rivers, but they were trickles of waters that flowed between mighty banks; they seemed niggardly, starved, a relic of what had evidently passed away.

Naked, carrying lengths of rope and small stone-tipped spears, the women moved from place to place, setting and checking traps for the small game that provided the staple of the people’s diet. They would have been astonished could they have glimpsed the mighty herds of giant herbivores that Jahna and her people had once followed, even though their folk tales talked of richer times in the past.

"Why do the men drink beer?" Juna fretted. "It makes them ugly and stupid. And they have to go to that slithery Cahl. If they must drink beer, they should make their own. They would be just as stupid, but at least Cahl would keep away."

Sheb sighed. "It isn’t so simple. We can’t make beer. Nobody knows how, not even the shaman. It is a secret Cahl’s people keep to themselves."

"When the men are stupid they cannot hunt. All they think about is the beer. It is all they see."

Sheb shook her head. "I won’t argue with you, child. My father never drank beer — we had never heard of beer in those days — and he was a fine hunter. Look, now. A rabbit is near."

Juna dutifully studied the bits of rabbit dropping, pressing them to see how fresh they were. She badly wanted to talk about Tori.

But Sheb had her own agenda. "I remember when I was your age," she was saying. "Once it rained as if the sky had split open, for day after day. The ground turned to mud, and we all sank in up to our knees. And water filled this valley here — not the muddy trickle you see now — all the way up the bank. See where the lip has been scoured?" And, yes, if she looked hard, Juna could make out how the bank had been eroded far above the current water level.

But so what? Absently Juna rubbed her belly. Her grandmother’s tales of huge rain storms, a land turned to mud, the explosive blossoming of life that had followed, were like the fantastic visions of the shaman. They didn’t mean anything to her. What did rain and rivers matter compared to the growing lump inside her?

Her grandmother slapped her head. Juna flinched, startled. Sheb scowled, making her wrinkles deepen. "It would pay you to listen to me, you foolish child. I remember how it was, the last time the rains came. I remember how we coped. How we moved to the higher ground. How we forded the river. All of it. Maybe I won’t live to see the rains come again as they did before, but maybe you will. And then all that will keep you alive is what I have told you today."

Juna knew she had a point. Old people were cared for deeply: Before Sheb’s own mother’s death, Juna had seen Sheb chew her food until soft and spit it into a bowl for her. In this society without writing, old people were libraries of wisdom and experience. And now she was determined to make her granddaughter listen.

But today Juna was in no mood for a lesson in humility. She tried to stare back, defiant, resentful, but, before Sheb’s ferocious glare, she broke down. "Oh, Sheb—" The weeping came suddenly and easily; she rested her head on Sheb’s shoulder and let her tears fall to the arid ground.

"Tell me. What can be so bad?"