“But I’m a patriarch,” Meru said brusquely. “If I say a match is good, it is.”
“Undoubtedly. Still, I want to know more about the men my daughter and nieces will spend the rest of their lives with,” Kakhent rejoined. “And there are issues we must resolve first.”
“Such as?” Meru asked warily.
“Will your band settle permanently at the lake?” Kakhent asked.
Aya’s ears perked up. She knew, though Kakhent didn’t, that Meru would certainly stay at the lake as long as Kakhent was alive. But after his death, after Meru’s already–arranged joining to her was consummated, would he feel compelled to remain? She had no idea, and that worried her. Meru’s decision either way would profoundly affect her future.
“Why does it matter?” Meru asked.
“Frankly, my band is strained to the breaking point by the need to guard and care for our animals day and night, and the need to protect our grain from predators and pests.”
“Not to mention the countless tasks we women must accomplish each day to simply stay alive,” Aya interjected. She knew that women’s burdens never crossed Kakhent’s mind.
“Giving you a number of my women and receiving an equal number in return will not resolve that issue if your band returns to the East afterwards. It will not resolve my lack of people resources,” Kakhent said.
“We might as well let cousins join with cousins if you don’t plan to settle permanently at the lake,” Aya added. Best to remind Meru that her people didn’t really need him. They could get along on their own just fine if they had to. “We’ll lose nothing, and our women won’t be ripped away from their friends and families.”
“If I were to stay, what exactly do you envision as the future of our two bands,” Meru asked Kakhent.
“I see us both at the lake forever – my band on our ridge, yours overlooking this basin. I see your men helping my men herd our animals. I see your women helping my women care for our grain. In return for this help, I would give you a share of milk and blood and meat from my animals. I would give you a share of what we harvest. Then, as the years pass and those who are now too young reach an age, I see them joining, and having children, and both of our bands growing larger and prospering.” Kakhent stared at Meru. “If this is a vision you cannot accept, its best that our bands go our separate ways now.”
“How can I possibly give you an answer today?” Meru shrugged noncommittally. “I’ve just arrived at your lake. At first glance, the country is promising. I’m inclined to settle here, at least for the short term.” He looked meaningfully at Aya. “But I need to know more before I can decide the long–term fate of my people.”
“Fair enough,” Kakhent replied. “My people will do their best to get your people acclimated to this land and its rhythms in the coming months. We’ll tell you whatever you need to know to make your decision. Aya will take charge of it.”
“I’ll show your women where all the patches of foodstuffs are,” Aya confirmed. “We can manage them together. I’ll show them the best places to obtain reeds for building, and flax to weave linen, and clay to make jars and bowls and platters, and wood for fires, and flint for weapons. I’ll show them where to fish, where to harvest wild grasses, where to set snares for small game.”
“My oldest son, Paser, will show your hunters the best places to lie in wait for large game,” Kakhent added. “In fact, our men should hunt together and share what we slay.”
Meru nodded. He eyed the pelt draped over Kakhent’s shoulders. “You should be aware that among my people the killing of lions and leopards and such are reserved for patriarchs.”
“It is the same among my people,” Kakhent assured him. He stroked the lion’s paw dangling over his right shoulder. “We don’t want just anyone wearing one of these.”
“No we don’t,” Meru smiled.
“You should assign someone for me to teach about our animals and our grain,” Aya told Meru.
“Since Qen has already taken an interest, teach him,” Meru replied. “No sense diverting a hunter.”
The only worse choice than Qen would have been Meru himself. Then Aya couldn’t have avoided being with him. I suppose I should be grateful for that, Aya thought. She sighed. She could assign Iuput to continue educating Qen about the herds, but she’d have to teach him about farming personally. The prospect of spending time with him was distasteful, but she didn’t see any way to avoid it. She rose, refilled both men’s cups, took her seat again. She had more questions for the barbarian patriarch, the answers to which would ultimately affect her and her daughter and sister. “What about the things the women in my band do that yours don’t – weaving, pottery making – would you like me to teach them? Will my daughter and sister and the rest who join your band continue to do these tasks and everything else we currently do after the joinings take place? Will they be allowed to worship our gods and goddesses, or will you make them adopt yours?”
“So many questions!” Meru laughed.
“Forgive Aya,” Kakhent said, staring at her, eyes narrowed and brow furrowed. “She forgets her place too often and speaks out of turn.”
Meru shrugged. “Frankly, I’ve given no thought to any of that,” he admitted. “I suppose the members of my band will always live as my forefathers did. So, then, will those who join with my sons and nephews. That’s how its always been when women have joined our band.”
That was disconcerting. Aya closed her eyes, pictured the future she wanted for Ahaneith and Takhat and herself. It was not even close to the one Meru envisioned. She saw her daughter and sister sentenced to a lifetime of gleaning and gathering and raising babies from dawn until dusk, giving up the things they enjoyed doing, likely dying young and exhausted as Meru’s three women had. Kakhent wouldn’t object; Ahaneith and Takhat and the others were just chattel to him. But that was unacceptable to Aya. She knew it was up to her to convince Meru to allow her family and his own women to fully adopt her people’s way of living instead of simply existing at its edges. He’d be better off if he did. It might even be enough to make him decide to stay at the lake. She sensed it was going to take time for her to convince him, perhaps years. But time was on her side. Since Meru had committed to settling at the lake, at least until she was his, she had a period in which to overtly and subtly point out to him the benefits that would accrue to him and his people from giving up their hunting and gathering ways. She’d eventually converted Kakhent to seeing agriculture’s importance, after all. If she’d done it once, she could do it again with a different man. And since Meru seemed anxious to please her right now, she supposed she could use the promise of her future charms as leverage to obtain what she wanted from him before she was forced to actually surrender herself to him. She might as well start now by appealing to his vanity.
“I’m very surprised by that, Patriarch,” Aya said innocently.
“Aya!” Kakhent snapped.
Meru held up a hand, silenced Kakhent’s objection. “Let her speak. What surprises you, Aya?”
“Frankly, the least among my people is better dressed than you, a patriarch,” she said.
Meru’s face reddened.
“Stop me if I’m not speaking the truth,” Aya said.
“Go on,” Meru said tersely.
“You dress in skins and grasses, we dress in linen. Every one of my people uses finer pottery and sturdier baskets and, why, almost everything, than you. But you don’t have to remain so… backward… forever. Our girls who are joined to your men will bring skills they’ve been honing since they were young children to your camp. In your place, I’d allow them to utilize those skills on my behalf, so that no bands you may encounter in the future think you lesser than them. I’d let my own women learn those skills too.”
Meru stared at Aya for a long moment. Then he smiled. “I will consider what you’ve said, Aya. After all, I hardly want to be taken for anything less than a patriarch.”
Aya breathed a sigh of relief. And triumph. Meru�
�s vanity, she’d just discovered, was a weapon for her arsenal. She planned in the future to wield it with impunity.
***
Aya sat facing east on a bit of sand just beyond the waves rhythmically lapping the long peninsula that was shaded by groves of palms and thickly lined with patches of reeds, munching a piece of bread, watching the first light of day turn the lake from rose to silver and yellow as the sun was disgorged by the goddess and reappeared above the horizon and began to climb the sky. The peninsula was shaped like a man’s bent arm, the bicep extending straight south from the lakeshore for fifty yards, the forearm swinging directly west for a quarter of a mile. Aya was at the elbow of the peninsula, at its southeast end. The lake edged both its southern and eastern sides; a small deep inlet lay north of the spit of land, squeezed between it and the lakeshore. A broad strip of green, flat land, varying in width from a quarter to three–quarters of a mile, lined the lakeshore itself as far as she could see both east and west. To her left sunlight was just illuminating the tops of her band’s reed and mud huts. They stood atop a low ridge rising from the flat plain, a hundred fifty yards long and two–thirds as wide, overlooking the junction of the peninsula and lakeshore. Beyond her camp, on the far side of a narrow valley, rose a plateau some seventy–five feet high, curving gently from west to east. A hundred yards beyond, atop that plateau, rose another twice as high, angling from southwest to northeast, the section of its face directly west of her camp sheer and rocky. Beyond the second plateau was a ridge, twice as high as the plateau, irregular in width, curving from southwest to northeast. In the far distance was another high narrow abruptly–rising ridge. Aya knew that north of that ridge were vast expanses of rolling savannah. That’s where her band grazed their herds and hunters chased wild game. All of the flat land between the lakeshore and the base of the first plateau was thickly covered with waist–high cereal grasses as far as she could see, abundant and ready for harvest. Sedges and reeds taller than a man lined the shore itself; birds balanced precariously on some of the stalks, clutching them with one claw above the other, their songs ringing across the water. More birds called from branches in the groves of trees on the shore and nearby savannah – dom palm, tamarisk, willow, acacia, lotus, sycamore. A flock of geese splashed to a noisy landing well out on the lake; more paddled about in the extensive marsh that lay between Aya’s camp and that of Meru’s a mile farther east and a mile and half farther north atop another low ridge overlooking the nearest of the three basins that were the major features of the northern lakeshore.
A week had passed since Aya’s return to the lake. While many tasks necessary to prepare for the harvest had been accomplished by the band’s women in her absence, supervised by Takhat, who had followed her explicit instructions, many last–minute details remained and Aya had worked on them tirelessly. She’d managed to carve out enough time from those tasks to make sure Meru’s people settled into their new surroundings as easily as possible. She’d assigned several of Kakhent’s sons to help Meru’s sons erect huts atop their ridge. Others had shown Meru himself the best places to lay in wait for the game animals that came to the lake daily to drink. Aya had personally shown Meru’s women where the various patches of edible plants were located along the lakeshore and on the nearby savannah and in the marsh, the best places to catch fish, where to gather fruit and wood and reeds and clay. She’d donated half a dozen grinding stones to Meru’s band that her people had carved from the sandstone where the eastern wadi passed through the gap in the northern plateau, for such objects had been too heavy for his women to lug with them on their travels.
Today was harvest day. Aya had awakened hours ago, baked bread enough to last her family the entire day, then carried her portion here. It was her ritual at least once a week; she never tired of observing the transformation of the lake as it and the day were reborn. Finished eating, she knelt in the sand, cupped her hands in the water, raised them to her lips, drank deeply. The water was cool and sweet and refreshing. She cupped several more handfuls, washed her face. Then she sat back on her haunches and swept the shore with her eyes.
She saw smoke thinly spiraling into the sky from cookfires fueled with tamarisk branches before the distant rude huts of Meru’s camp. She turned. In the opposite direction her people were beginning to leave their ridge, trudging down the slope to the fields at its base that they’d planted months before. The men and older boys all balanced the sickles she’d designed and Iuput had crafted on their shoulders. The women and children carried pouches and containers, some filled with food for the midday meal, the others, empty, to collect individual grains that fell from the stalks onto the ground. Aya rose to her feet and hurried to join everyone.
By midmorning the harvest was well underway. The area Aya’s band was working today was a mile long and half a mile wide, its width marking the extent of the inundation north of the lakeshore at that particular point. The field was lush, green, rippling in the morning breeze, the waist–high stalks heavy with emmer, bending under its weight. A line of men and older boys swinging sickles with wide sweeping strokes had already cut a narrow ribbon through the greenery beginning at the edge of the shore, leaving a foot and a half of stubble standing in their wake, poking up through fallen stalks.
As the patriarch’s woman and overseer of the harvest, Aya had assigned tasks to every man and woman and girl and boy. Every cutter was being trailed across his section of the field by a girl or woman who was gathering the felled stalks into sheaves and binding them with long stems of grass. Aya had paired herself with Iuput; she was too restless and full of energy to simply oversee and not work at the same time. The younger girls were carefully gleaning the field behind the binders, picking loose grains from the ground and placing them in reed baskets strapped to their backs. Among the gleaners were Pageti and Betrest. Shifts of young boys were carrying leather pouches full of water from the lake and passing among the harvesters with them; even so early in the morning the sun was hot and the work was hard and the dust choking. After only fifteen minutes in the field Aya was completely drenched with sweat, her throat parched. The children were all naked, the men and women wearing only loincloths. Two women carried infants in slings against their chests as they worked. One small boy was beating a wooden drum in the shade of a tree at the edge of the field; beside him Paser’s woman, Bintanath, was playing a long reed pipe. To Aya’s immediate right Takhat was singing as she worked. Aya added her voice. Music always helped the hours pass more quickly.
At midday Aya joined Kakhent and her daughters for a quick meal under the acacia tree where he’d been sitting in the shade all morning, observing, occasionally drowsing. He alone in the band would do no work this day, except, of course, for the very young. The four women joined to Aya’s stepsons began circulating among the famished workers, distributing bread and the fruit of dom palms and sycamore figs and roasted clubrush seeds and dented dock and prickly douch seeds and clubrush and nutgrass tubers they’d carried from camp in baskets. Aya was grateful for the break and short rest. Her hair was plastered to her brow and shoulders and back and her body glistened with sweat and dust turned to mud. Her knees were muddy from kneeling on the ground and her fingers stained green by the stalks of grain she’d bound. As she munched a bit of bread Aya saw Qen limping towards her tree, leaning heavily on his staff.
She sighed. Come to learn about our crops, I suspect, as Meru promised. She hadn’t seen Qen since their talk at Iuput’s camp a week earlier, though she hadn’t stopped replaying her discussions with both him and Meru almost nonstop in her mind ever since. She’d spent hours after both encounters trying to figure out a way to keep the girls in her band from joining with the men in Meru’s, for such joinings would be disastrous from her perspective. But she’d ultimately concluded, bitterly, that stopping the joinings would be impossible. The future of both bands depended on the joinings; neither Kakhent nor Meru would ever pass on this opportunity for any reason, despite Kakhent’s indication the day he’d met
Meru that he might. He’d just been posturing, Aya knew. Having accepted that as fact, what frightened Aya most was the likelihood that once Meru’s inevitable joining with her took place – whether soon or several years from now – Meru would lead his band away from her beloved lake, for he’d have no incentive to remain. So Aya had decided to refocused her energies, understanding that the best thing she could do for her family was convince Meru to remain at the lake permanently. If she had to be with him she wasn’t about to lose her home in the bargain.
“Good day, Patriarch,” Qen said amiably, halting before Kakhent.
“This is Qen. He’s Meru’s half–brother,” Aya said.
“You’re the one Meru assigned to learn about our animals and our crops?” Kakhent asked.
Qen nodded. “I am.”
“Qen helped Iuput drive our herds here from the river,” Aya said. “He’s helped my brother guard them since we returned.”
“Why?” Kakhent asked Qen.
“To me, your animals are a wonder, Patriarch.” Qen glanced at Aya. “Aya claims the domestication of animals makes your people superior to mine. I want to find out if she’s right.”
Typical man. He knows nothing yet he thinks he knows better than me.
“What have you learned so far?” Kakhent asked.
“How to calm a mother cow when its being milked by tying its calf to its leg. How to convince a herd to ford a stream by putting a calf on your shoulders so the mother cow will follow you and the rest will follow her. How to keep the animals moving in more or less one direction. How much and when to water them. How to use dogs to control them. How to protect them from the scavengers that lurk on the savannah – jackals and foxes and lions. How long to graze a single pasture. Among other things.”
Kakhent relaxed a bit. “I assume you’ve come today to learn about our grain?”
“I have.”
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