The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls

by Anissa Gray

  “Let go, Meb!” cried Zdorab. “Here it comes!”

  They could see the wall of water from where they were, that’s how high it was—higher, in fact, than the top of the ravine, so that they instinctively ran even higher up the slope they were standing on. Those at the top were never in danger of being swept away, though, for the water stayed lower than they were.

  However, the water that was snagged into the side canyon they had climbed through shot up into it with such force that it rose higher than the main body of the water in the ravine. It slammed into the last two camels and then into Meb, lifting them all off their feet and heaving them the rest of the way up the side canyon. Meb could hear women screaming—was that Dol, howling out Meb’s name?—and then he felt the water subsiding almost as fast as it had risen, sucking him downward. For a moment he thought of letting go of the reins and saving himself; then he realized that the pack camel had braced itself and was now more secure on the ground than Meb himself. So he clung to the reins and was not swept away. But as he hung there, pressed against the side of the camel that he had saved, and which was now saving him, he saw his mount Glupost get dragged off her feet and sucked down into the maelstrom in the ravine.

  In moments, he felt many hands on him, prying the reins from his fingers, leading him, sopping wet and trembling, up to where the others waited. Volemak embraced him, weeping. “I thought I had lost you, my son, my son.”

  “What about Elya?” wailed Eiadh. “How could he save himself from that?”

  “Not to mention Vas,” said Rasa softly.

  Several people looked at Sevet, whose face was hard and set.

  “Not everyone shows fear the same way,” murmured Luet, putting an end to any hard judgments anyone might be inclined to make about the difference between Eiadh’s and Sevet’s reaction. Luet knew well that Sevet had little reason to care much whether Vas lived or died—though she wondered how much Sevet herself actually knew.

  What was most in Luet’s heart was the fact that Nafai was also not with them. He and Obring were almost certainly on high ground, and safe. But they would no doubt be deeply worried.

  Tell him that we’re safe, she said silently to the Oversoul. And tell me—is Elemak alive? And Vas?

  Alive, came the answer in her mind.

  She said so.

  The others looked at her, half in relief, half in doubt. “Alive,” she said again. “That’s all the Oversoul told me. Isn’t it enough?”

  The water subsided, the level dropping rapidly. Volemak and Zdorab walked down the side canyon together. They found it a tangle of half-uprooted trees and bushes—not even the boulders were where they had been.

  But the side canyon was nothing compared to the ravine itself. There was nothing left. A quarter hour ago it had been lush with vegetation—so lush that it was hard to make way through it, and they had often had to lead the camels through the stream itself in order to pass some of the tangles of vegetation. Now the walls of the ravine, from top to bottom, had not a single plant clinging to them. The soil itself had been scoured away, so that bare rock was exposed. And on the floor of the ravine, there were only a few heavy boulders and the sediments left behind by the water as it dropped.

  “Look how the floor of the ravine is bare rock near the edges,” said Volemak. “But deep sediment in the middle, near the water.”

  It was true: already the stream that remained—larger than the original one—was cutting a channel a meter deep through the thick mud. The new banks of the stream would collapse here and there, a few meters of mud slipping down into the water. It would take some time before the floor of the ravine stabilized.

  “It’ll be green as ever within six weeks,” said Zdorab. “And in five years you’d never know this happened.”

  “What do you think?” asked Volemak. “If we stay to the edges, is it safe to use this as a highway down to the sea?”

  “The reason we were using the ravine in the first place was because Elemak said the top was not possible—it keeps getting cut by deep canyons or blocked by steep hills.”

  “So we keep to the edges,” said Volemak. “And we hope.”

  It took a while at the top of the ravine to check the camels’ loads and be sure nothing had come loose during the scramble to safety. “It’s better than we could have hoped, that we lost only the one camel,” said Volemak.

  Zdorab led his own mount forward, and held out the reins to Meb.

  “No,” said Meb.

  “Please,” said Zdorab. “Every step I take on foot will be my way of giving honor to my brave friend.”

  “Take it,” whispered Volemak.

  Meb took the reins from Zdorab. “Thank you,” he said. “But there were no cowards here today.”

  Zdorab embraced him quickly, then went back to help Shedemei get the women with babies onto their camels.

  It turned out that neither Zdorab nor Meb nor Volemak did much riding the rest of that day. They spent their time on foot, patrolling the length of the caravan, making sure the camels never strayed toward the thick and treacherous mud in the middle of the ravine. They had visions of a camel sinking immediately over its head. The footing was wet, slimy, and treacherous, but by keeping the pace slow, they soon reached the mouth of the ravine, where it emptied into a wide river.

  There had obviously been much damage here, too, for the opposite side of the river valley was a mess of mud and boulders, with many trees knocked down and much bare soil and rock exposed. And the rest of the way down the river they could see that both banks had been torn apart. Ironically, though, because the force of the flood had been less intense here than in the ravine, their passage through the debris it left behind would be far harder.

  “This way!”

  It was Elemak, with Vas behind him. The two of them were on foot, but they could see that their camels were not far behind. They were on higher ground. It would be a steep but not very difficult climb to reach them.

  “We have a path here through the high ground!” called Elemak.

  In a few minutes they were gathered at the beginning of Elemak’s path through the forest. As husbands and wives embraced, Issib noticed that the forest here was considerably less dense than it had been higher up the mountain. “We must be near sea level now,” he said.

  “The river makes a sharp bend to the west over there,” said Vas, one arm around Sevet, his baby held against his shoulder. “And from there you can see the Scour Sea. Between this river and the one to the south it’s open grassland, mostly, a few trees here and there. Higher ground, thank the Oversoul. We felt the earthquakes, but when they passed we didn’t think anything of them, except to worry that it might have been worse up where you were. Then suddenly Elya insisted we needed to go to the higher ground and look over the area, and just as we got there we heard this roaring noise and the river went crazy. We had images of seeing all the camels floating by, with all of you still riding on top of them.”

  “Issib was warned through the Index,” said Volemak.

  “It’s a good thing we weren’t all together,” said Issib. “Four more camels, and we would have lost them. As it was, Meb lost his mount—because he was saving pack animals, I might add.”

  “We can wait for the stories until we’re at our camp for the night,” said Elemak. “We can reach the place between rivers before nightfall. There’s little moon, so we want to have the tents up before dark.”

  That night they stayed up late around the fire, partly because they were waiting for dinner to cook, partly because they were too keyed-up to sleep, and partly because they kept hoping that Nafai and Obring would find the camp that night. That was when the stories were told. And as Hushidh bade Luet goodnight in the tent where she would be sleeping alone with her baby, she said, “I wish you could see as I see, Luet. That flood did what nothing else could have managed—the bonds between us all are so much stronger. And Meb . . . the honor that flows to him now ...”

  “A nice change,” said Lue
t.

  “I just hope he doesn’t strut too much about it,” said Hushidh, “or he’ll waste it all.”

  “Maybe he’s growing up,” said Luet.

  “Or maybe he just needed the right circumstance to discover the best in himself. He didn’t hesitate, Issya says. Just dismounted and risked his own life dragging Issib to safety.”

  “And Zdorab took the Index, and then led us back down . . .”

  “I know, I’m not saying Meb was the only one. But you know how it is with Zdorab. That gesture he made, giving his mount to Meb. It was a generous thing to do, and it helped bind the group together—but it also had the effect of erasing the memory of Zdorab’s own role in saving us. Our minds were all on Mebbekew.”

  “Well, maybe that’s how Zodya wants it,” said Luet.

  “But we won’t forget,” said Hushidh.

  “Hardly,” said Luet. “Now go to bed. The babies won’t care how little sleep we got tonight—they’ll be starving on schedule in the morning.”

  It was only a few hours after dawn when Nafai and Obring returned. They had been far from the flood, of course, but they had also been on the wrong side of it, so that coming home they had to find a place to cross either the ravine itself or the river. They ended up dragging the camels across the river upstream of the ravine, making a long detour around the worst of the destruction, and then crossing the river in shallow marshes and sand bars near the sea—at low tide. “The camels are getting less and less happy about crossing water,” said Nafai.

  “But we brought back two deers,” said Obring happily.

  With everyone reunited, Volemak made a little speech establishing this place as their campsite. “The river to the north we will name Oykib, for the firstborn boy of this expedition, and the river to the south is Protchnu, for the firstborn boy of the next generation.”

  Rasa was outraged. “Why not name them Dza and Chveya, for the first two children born on our journey?”

  Volemak looked at her steadily without answering.

  “Then we had better leave this place before the boys are old enough to know how you have honored them solely because they have penises.”

  “If we had had only two girls, and two rivers, Father would have named the rivers for them,” said Issib, trying to make peace.

  They knew it wasn’t true, of course. For several weeks after they got there, Rasa insisted on calling them the North River and the South River; Volemak was just as adamant in calling them the River Oykib and the River Protchnu. But since it was the men who did more traveling, and therefore crossed the rivers more often, and fished in them, and had to tell each other about places and events up and down the rivers’ lengths, it was the names Oykib and Protchnu that stayed. Whether anyone else noticed or not, however, Luet saw that Rasa never used Volemak’s names for the rivers, and grew silent and cold whenever others spoke their names.

  Only once did Nafai and Luet discuss the matter. Nafai was singularly unsympathetic. “Rasa didn’t mind when women decided everything in Basilica, and men weren’t even allowed to look at the lakes.”

  “That was a holy place for women. The only place like it in the world.”

  “What does it matter?” said Nafai. “It’s just a couple of names for a couple of rivers. When we leave here, no one else will ever remember what we named them.”

  “So why not North River and South River?”

  “It’s only a problem because Mother made it a problem,” said Nafai. “Now let’s not make it a problem between us.”

  “I just want to know why you go along with it!”

  Nafai sighed. “Think, for just a moment, what it would mean if I had called them the North and South rivers. What it would have meant to Father. And to the other men. Then it really would have been divisive. I don’t need anything more to separate me from the others.”

  Luet chewed on that idea for a while.

  “All right,” she said. “I can see that.”

  And then, after she had thought a little more, she said, “But you didn’t see anything wrong with naming the rivers after the boys until Mother pointed it out, did you?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “In fact, you really don’t see anything wrong with it now, do you?”

  “I love you,” said Nafai.

  “That’s not an answer,” she said.

  “I think it is,” he said.

  “And what if I never give you a son?” she said.

  “Then I will keep making love to you until we have a hundred daughters,” said Nafai.

  “In your dreams,” she said nastily.

  “In yours, you mean,” he said.

  She made the deliberate decision not to stay angry with him for this, and as they made love she was as willing and passionate as ever. But afterward, when he was asleep, it worried her. What would it mean to them for the men to make their company as male-dominated as Basilica had been female-dominated?

  Why must we do this? she wondered. We had a chance to make our society different from the rest of the world. Balanced and fair, even-handed, right. And yet even Nafai and Issib seem content to unbalance it. Is the rivalry between men and women such that one must always be in ascendancy at the expense of the other? Is it built into our genes? Must the community always be ruled by one sex or the other?

  Maybe so, she thought. Maybe we’re like the baboons. When we’re stable and civilized, the women decide things, establish the households, the connections between them, create the neighborhoods and the friendships. But when we’re nomadic, living lives on the edge of survival, the men rule, and brook no interference from the women. Perhaps that’s what civilization means—is the dominance of the female over the male. And wherever that lapses, we call the result uncivilized, barbarian … manly.

  They spent a year between the rivers, waiting for Shedemei’s baby to be born. It was a son; they named him Padarok—gift—and called him Rokya. They might have moved on then, after the first year, but by the time little Rokya was born, three of the other women had conceived—including Rasa and Luet, who were the most fragile during pregnancy. So they stayed for a second harvest, and a few months more, until all the women but Sevet had completed their pregnancy and borne a child. So there were thirty of them that began the next stage of the journey, and the first generation of children were walking and most of them beginning to talk before they were on their way.

  It had been a good two years. Instead of desert farming, they had lush, rain-watered fields on good soil. Their crops were more varied; the hunting was better; and even the camels thrived, giving birth to fifteen new beasts of burden. Making saddles was harder—none of them had ever learned the skill—but they found a way to put two toddlers on each of the four most docile animals, which always traveled in train with the women’s camels. When the children first tried out the saddles, some of them were terrified—camels ride so high above the ground—but soon enough they were used to it, and even enjoyed it.

  The journey was easy through the savanna along the seacoast; they ate up the kilometers as they never had before, even on the smooth desert west and south of Basilica. In three days they reached a well-watered bay that the men were already familiar with, having hunted and fished there during the past two years. But in the morning, Volemak dismayed them all by telling them that their course now lay, not south as they had all expected, but west.

  West! Into the sea!

  Volemak pointed at the rocky island that rose out of the sea not two kilometers away. “Beyond it is another island, a huge island. We have as long a journey on that island as we have had since we left the Valley of Mebbekew.”

  At low tide, Nafai and Elemak tried fording the strait between the mainland and the island. They could do it, with only a short swim in the middle. But the camels balked, and so they ended up building rafts. “I’ve done it before,” said Elemak. “Never for a saltwater crossing, of course, but the water here is placid enough.”

  So they felled trees and floated the
logs in the bay, binding them together with ropes made of the fibers of marsh reeds. It took a week to make the rafts, and two days to take the camels across—one at a time—and then the cargo, and then, last of all, the women and children. They camped on the shore where they had landed, as the men poled the rafts around the island to the southwestern tip, where again they would need the rafts to ferry everyone and everything to the large island. In another week the company had traversed the small island and crossed to the large one; they pushed the rafts into the water and watched them float away.

  The northern tip of the large island was mountainous and heavily forested. But gradually the mountains gave way to hills, and then to broad savannas. They could stand at the crest of the low rolling plain and see the Scour Sea to the west and the Sea of Fire to the east, the island was so narrow here. And the farther south they went, the more they understood how the Sea of Fire earned its name. Volcanos rose out of the sea, and in the distance they could see the smoke of a minor eruption from time to time. “This island was part of the mainland until five million years ago,” Issib explained to them. “Until then, the Valley of Fires came right down onto this island, south of us—and the fires still continue in the sea that has filled the space between the two parts of the valley.”

  Growing up in Basilica, most of them had never understood the forces of nature—Basilica was such an unchanging place, with so much pride in its ancienthood. Here, even though the timespans were measured in the millions of years, they could clearly see the enormous power of the planet, and the virtual irrelevancy of the human lives on its surface.

  “And yet we’re not irrelevant,” said Issib. “Because we are the ones who see the changes, and know them, and understand that they are changes, that once things were different. Everything else in the universe, every living and non-living thing, lives in the infinite now, which never changes, which always is exactly as it is. Only we know the passage of time, that one thing causes another and that we are changed by the past and will change the future.”