by Barbara Wood
While many people lived here permanently, some came yesterday and would be gone today, with others arriving today to be gone tomorrow. People came to the Place of the Perennial Spring to barter obsidian for salt, cowrie shells for linseed oil, green malachite for flax fiber, beer for wine, and meat for bread. At the center of this great beehive of humanity, with long irrigation channels radiating out like the legs of a spider, bubbled the perennial spring of sweet water, where even now, in the breaking light of day, girls and women dipped their baskets and gourds.
Avram sighed restlessly. All those females and not one of them was as beautiful or alluring as his beloved Marit.
Like most boys his age, Avram was not inexperienced when it came to sex. Although the sport consisted mostly of going into the hills with his friends to capture a wild ewe and take turns on her, he had engaged in some limited experimentation with girls. But with Marit, Avram had had no experience at all. They had not even, in all their years of living on adjoining properties, exchanged a single word. He was certain his grandmother would kill him if he even tried.
Avram wished he lived in the Old Days, which he imagined had been much better than today. He loved hearing the stories of the ancestors—not Talitha and Serophia, but the very old ancestors—when his people were nomads and had all lived together in one big tribe and men and women took their pleasure with whom they chose. But now they were no longer nomads traveling in great clans but instead small families that lived in one house on the same spot of ground and that somehow made people think that those who lived on one spot of ground were better than those who lived on another. “Yubal’s wine tastes like donkey piss,” Marit’s abba, Molok, was always declaring. “Molok’s beer was squeezed from the testicles of pigs,” Avram’s abba, Yubal, would counter. Not that the two men would voice these opinions to each other’s faces. Members of the Houses of Talitha and Serophia had not exchanged words in generations.
So one could count on it that never, ever would a boy from one house and a girl from the other find their way into each other’s arms.
Avram didn’t think it was fair. The rivalry belonged to the ancestors, not to him. The ancestors had had their day and their say. Now it was Avram’s time. He fantasized about running away with Marit (once he figured out a way to talk to her first), taking her far from his vineyard and her barley field, far from the tents and huts and mud-brick houses, exploring the world together. For Avram had been born a dreamer and a quester, his soul restless, his mind forever questioning and wondering why. In another age he would have been an astronomer or an explorer, an inventor or a scholar. But telescopes and ships, metallurgy and the alphabet, even the wheel and domesticated animals were things as yet undreamed of.
Untying a loaf of flat barley bread, he broke off a piece and as he chewed, turned his eyes to the cluster of humble mud-brick dwellings that crouched at the edge of the Serophia barley field—the threshing hut, the shed where vats of barley grains fermented into beer, and the private house where Marit’s family lived—and he released a sigh filled with longing, his ardor all the more acute because he had no idea how Marit felt about him.
He thought at times that he had caught her watching him. Just a few weeks ago, at the festival of the Spring Equinox, she had suddenly looked away and a flush had appeared on her cheeks. Was it a good-luck sign? Did that mean she shared his sentiment? If only he knew!
As the sun continued to break over the distant mountains, Avram scanned the settlement for Marit—he would consider a glimpse of her at this early hour a good-luck sign, which meant the rest of his day would go well. But all he saw were fat Cochava chasing after her children with a stick; two brick-makers locked in a loud argument over a vat of beer (apparently they had not stopped drinking all night); Enoch the tooth-puller and Lea the midwife engaged in hurried copulation against a tree. Across the way, he saw Dagan the fisherman scrambling miserably out of Mahalia’s hut, his possessions flying after him as if flung by an angry hand inside. Last month Dagan had been living with Ziva, and the month before that, Anath. Avram wondered what it was about Dagan that made women get tired of him so quickly and throw him out. Poor Dagan—without a woman and her hearth, how was a man to live?
Then Avram saw a sight that made him laugh out loud. Here came crazy Namir with another of his goat experiments! Two years ago Namir had hit upon the notion that instead of chasing after goats in the hills, killing what was needed and then returning to the settlement, it would be a lot less work if he brought live goats home, kept them in a pen, and slaughtered them for food or traded them as needed. So he and his nephews had gone into the hills and trapped as many goats as they could. But since they wanted the herd to perpetuate itself, they took only she-goats, leaving behind the males. But after a year, the she-goats stopped producing young and the last of the little herd was eaten or traded away. While his neighbors laughed, Namir vowed to make his plan work. “After all,” he told his friends over vats of beer, “goat herds perpetuate in the hills, why not in my pen?” So he went out again and trapped she-goats, bringing them back to his pen with its fences made of sticks, branches, and brush. This time, none of the goats produced young and in no time the captive herd was eaten or sold. So here he was again, determined to maintain a herd of goats, leading his embarrassed nephews through the awakening settlement as they carried squirming and bleating she-goats tied to long poles. Avram could just see through the gathering smoke, four men sitting under an arbor sharing a vat of beer, shouting insults at Namir and making bets on how long this captive herd would last.
It seemed to Avram that everyone in the settlement had a scheme, and not all as ludicrous as Namir’s. He remembered when everyone had laughed at another man, Yasap, who had arrived ten years ago and planted fields of flowers. The people had laughed because what use were flowers? They stopped laughing when the bees found the fields and Yasap kept hives and collected honey. For the first time in memory, people had sugar all year round, and so great in demand was the sweet treat that Yasap was now the third richest man in the settlement.
More and more people, coming to the Place of the Perennial Spring for the first time, looked around and saw opportunities for an easier life, built shelters and went roaming no more. People with special skills traded their services for food, clothing, and jewelry: barbers and tattooists, soothsayers and star-readers, bone-carvers and stone-polishers, fishermen and tanners, midwives and healers, trappers and hunters. All came, most stayed.
If I were free and on my own, Avram thought, I would not try to think of ways to stay here. I would pack bread and beer, take up my spear and see what was on the other side of the mountains.
Hearing high pitched shouts, he looked down and saw his little brothers running up and down the rows of vines, chasing the birds away. Aged thirteen, eleven, and ten, the boys loved the vineyard and had made it their world. Come the harvest next week they would pull their weight alongside adult men in filling baskets with ripe fruit, and later when all the grapes were gathered, the boys’ little feet would work hard in the winepress mashing the grapes into juice.
Avram was about to wave to Caleb, the eldest of his younger brothers, when he saw something that made him freeze. An elderly woman, bare-breasted in a long doeskin skirt, her braided hair showing white roots beneath the henna dye, shuffled along the path almost over-burdened by the many stone and shell necklaces that weighted her withered body. But she was wealthy, and it was a woman’s duty to thus flaunt her family’s wealth.
Avram’s eyes nearly popped out. Why was his grandmother making her way along the path toward the Shrine of the Goddess? It both startled and alarmed him. What was she doing abroad at this early hour? It could only be an urgent errand. Had she found out about his secret desire for Marit? Was she going to ask the Goddess to cast a spell on him? Like most boys, Avram was terrified of his grandmother. Old women possessed power beyond thinking.
He automatically reached for the phylactery that hung on a leather thong around his neck
. By tradition, when a child reached the age of seven and it appeared he was going to survive into adulthood—so many children dying prior to that age—he was given a permanent name and a small pouch in which to carry precious talismans: one’s umbilical cord, dried and shriveled, one’s first tooth, a lock of mother’s hair. Maybe a small animal fetish, a few dried leaves of a protective plant, all designed to keep one healthy and from harm. As Avram clutched the phylactery that held magic pebbles, pieces of bone and twig, he wondered if it was powerful enough to protect him from his own grandmother.
He watched as she made her way between huts and shelters, stepping around piles of offal and entrails, hurrying through the stink that surrounded the tannery where bloody hides were being stretched in the sun, and finally up the path that led to the small mud-brick structure that housed the Shrine of the Goddess. Avram saw Reina, the priestess, emerge from her small house to greet her visitor.
Even from here, Avram could see Reina’s magnificent breasts. In the summer, all the women of the settlement went bare-breasted so the men could feast their eyes upon the treasures of their women. This was what had triggered his new lust for Marit: when had she turned from a child into a woman? Reina’s breasts were high and firm, not the least bit sagging as were those of most women her age, because Reina had never had children. When she had been anointed priestess, she had dedicated her virginity to the Goddess. But that didn’t make her any less of a woman. Reina rouged her nipples with red ocher and perfumed her hair with fragrant oils. Her hips were wide and the belt of her doeskin skirt was slung low below her navel, just above the blessed triangle that was no man’s land.
Avram sighed again in youthful lust and confusion, wondering why the Goddess had created this confounding hunger between men and women. Reina, whom no man could touch thus making men want to touch her all the more. Marit, the owner of his heart and whom he could never have. Where was the pleasure in that?
When he saw his grandmother emerge a few minutes later from the Shrine of the Goddess, where the sacred statue with the blue-crystal heart was kept and cared for, he was surprised at the old woman’s haste back to their house, as if she were filled with urgency. A moment later Avram heard two voices in the house, rising in pitch. Grandmother and his abba were having an argument!
A moment later his abba burst from the house, as if in fury, and set out on the dirt path leading to the barley fields and the house where Marit lived.
It upset Avram to see Yubal look so distressed. A memory: Yubal carrying him on his shoulders, big hands holding tight to the boy’s ankles, Yubal’s long strides bearing them both through meadows and across streams. Avram had felt like a giant and had rode those broad shoulders with such pride that he never wanted to climb down. Avram didn’t know any other boys who enjoyed such a relationship with their abba.
Not all men deserved the honorific “abba,” which meant “lord,” or “master,” usually over a prospering business, sometimes over the house and children of a woman he had become devoted to. As few men stayed with one woman for long, especially once she started having children, Yubal was a rare exception, for he had been open in his affection for Avram’s mother, and had lived in her house for twenty years.
Avram watched Yubal—handsome in fine buckskins, his long hair and beard richly oiled as befitting his high status—go a few steps, then stop suddenly, rub his jaw, and turn away to take the path toward the settlement, as if suddenly changing his mind. A few moments later Avram saw Yubal take a seat beneath the shady arbor of Joktan the beer merchant, where three other men were already sharing a vat of beer. Yubal was greeted with cheers of welcome for he was one of the most liked and admired men in the settlement. Then he signaled to Joktan who brought out a reed that was roughly two arm’s-lengths long. Yubal dipped the reed into the tall vat, pushing it past the scum from the brewing process that always clogged the surface, and began sucking up the liquid underneath. Joktan’s beer was far inferior to Molok’s, but Yubal swore he would drink snake piss before he would let the beer of Serophia’s bloodline pass his lips.
Seeing Yubal, Avram redoubled his efforts as lookout. It was for his abba that he wanted to do a good job. He wanted Yubal to be proud of him. However, for all his efforts to focus on being a good guard, there were reminders everywhere of his new obsession with Marit and sex.
Glowing brightly in the morning sun on the door of the stone-polisher’s house was a freshly painted picture of female genitalia. The old man was hoping it would help his daughters get pregnant. Many families painted such symbols beside their front doors—usually breasts and vulvas—hoping to invite the Goddess’s fecundity into their homes. Such hopeful women went to Reina the priestess for magic charms, fertility potions and herbs with supernatural powers.
Men had no part in the pursuit of fertility for Avram’s people were not yet aware that men had any role in procreation. Conception was a mystery worked solely by women through the power of the Goddess.
A shout brought his attention back to the settlement and its activities. One of the criminals tied to a punishment post near the bubbling spring was yelling at the children who were throwing shit and rotten stuff at him. Although it was usually cheats and liars, trespassers and malicious gossipmongers who were tied to the posts, the man tied there now, naked and helpless, had gotten drunk on barley beer, climbed to a rooftop and urinated on unsuspecting passersby. His punishment might have gone easier if one of his victims hadn’t been Avram’s grandmother. Two other men were also tied to posts, punishment for raping a daughter of the House of Edra. Because these men were the target of wrathful women, who threw stones and dung at them, a group of bystanders were wagering on whether the rapists would survive until sundown.
Justice in the community was swift and brutal. Thieves suffered a hand chopped off. Murderers were executed. From Avram’s vantage point in the tower he could see, on the other side of the wheat fields, the corpse of a murderer hanging from a tree, his execution so recent that ravens were still pecking out the eyes.
Avram froze.
Then he shaded his eyes and tried to sharpen his eyesight. Was that a column of dust? Coming from the northeast?
He felt a lump rise to his throat. Raiders!
But then his eyes widened and he gasped. It wasn’t raiders at all but Hadadezer’s caravan! “Blessed Mother!” he cried, and because he couldn’t take the steps fast enough he fell the rest of the way down the ladder.
Avram ran shouting and waving his arms—the obsidian traders had come! There would be feasting tonight like no other. And in so merry a throng, with so many people drinking and taking pleasure, who would notice if two young people chanced to exchange a forbidden glance?
The caravan was always a sight to behold: a virtual river of humanity that had flowed over mountains, meadows, and streams, a thousand souls marching like drones, each man a beast of burden stooped beneath the weight of trade goods and supplies. Some bore wooden yokes across their shoulders with bundles suspended from each end; others hauled baskets on their backs attached to leather straps across their foreheads; heavier goods were hauled on sledges by teams of men yoked together. It was a long, slow, back-breaking endeavor to cover so many miles, tramping over thistle and rock, baking under the sun, freezing under rain, through mountain passes and scorching deserts. But there was no other way for it to be done. People in the south wanted what people in the north had to trade, and vice versa. Although a few brave men in the northern mountains were experimenting with cattle to tame them and train them to be draft and pack animals, the results so far had been unsuccessful. So upon the backs of men came malachite and azurite, ocher and cinnabar; goods made from alabaster, marble, and stone; pelts, furs, antlers, and horns; and the fine wooden tableware the north country was famous for—sauceboats and tiny eggcups, and platters with carved handles. All of this was being taken south where it would be traded for papyrus and oils, spices and wheat, turquoise and shells, to be hauled back north on the same bent backs.
There were women in the caravan, equally burdened with bedrolls, tents, live fowl, and cook pots—women who were following their men or who had joined the convoy along the way, some with children in tow, of which a few had been born during the caravan’s impressive southward progress. Some of these women would leave the caravan when it reached the Place of the Perennial Spring, and local women, for their various secret reasons, would run away from the Place of the Perennial Spring and disappear southward with the caravan.
Ahead of this enormous human convoy rode its captain, an obsidian trader named Hadadezer. Hadadezer’s personal mode of transportation was another wonder to behold. Hadadezer did not walk—anywhere. And certainly not the two thousand miles comprising his caravan circuit. A carrying platform devised of two sturdy poles with a webbing of branches and reeds was hefted on the shoulders of eight strong men. Here Hadadezer rode in splendor, sitting cross-legged on woven mats with soft doeskin pillows stuffed with goose down supporting his arms and back. Since everyone knew that a fat man was a wealthy man, judging by Hadadezer’s generous girth, he must be the wealthiest man in the world.
Hadadezer’s long black hair was impressively oiled and braided and reached his waist, as did his great black beard, likewise oiled and braided and threaded with a wealth of beads and shells. He wore a knee-length leather tunic that was covered entirely in cowrie shells, collar to hem, a garment so splendid that it made people gape in awe. Six thousand years hence, Hadadezer’s descendants would adorn themselves with gold and silver, diamonds and emeralds, but in this time, when precious metals and gems lay as yet undiscovered in the earth’s secret places, cowries were the ornament of choice. They were also the coin of commerce.