Evolution

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."