First Cycle, page 3
He crowded too close. A moment later he was wrapped in flames, screaming in agony, and running frantically about. One of the others tangled his legs with a bolas and brought him down; in a second the whole gang was swarming over him with sleeping-robes, the wet unicorn-skin, the water pot. They got the fire out, but too late to help Nwilt, who was already dead.
The whole gang was considerably shocked by the incident. Not at the death of Nwilt; death was an old story and a constant companion to them. For for a person to burst into flames like a pitch-soaked faggot, that was frightening. It might happen without warning to any of them.
"We might have all caught fire from him," a woman said, "just as sticks catch fire from a burning stick."
She rubbed a handful of mud on a spot where her fur was scorched.
"We didn't have time to think of that," a man said. "Besides, people don't just catch fire. If you get too close to the fire, you might get burned, but you won't burst into flames."
"Hedid,"one of the women pointed out.
"I smelled black scum on him when he came up to the fire," another woman said. "I think he must have fallen into a scum-pond."
A man poked at the dead bat-bird with his spear point. "That thing is covered with black-scum," he said.
"It was shot with an arrow. Maybe Nwilt shot it and it fell in a scum-pond, and he waded in after it." He gingerly picked up a burning brand from the fire, stepped back, and threw it on the bat-bird. "Let's see what happens now."
The bat-bird blazed up. When the fire went out, at last, it was badly charred.
"Well," one of the older men said. "It was the black-scum that caught fire. We must remember that."
An adolescent named Brilk looked at the body of Nwilt and then at the charred remains of the bat-bird.
"If the black-scum makes people and bat-birds catch fire," he suggested, "maybe it makes other things catch fire. Maybe it would make wet wood catch fire."
The others turned and looked at him for a moment, and in that moment Brilk ceased to speak as a child and became one of the gang council.
"So it should, Brilk," one of the others agreed. "Let's try it."
The next time they met a strange gang, after they settled a hunting dispute and made ritualistic gestures toward stealing each others' women, they made the peace-sign, and both gangs squatted in a circle. The others listened intently while the gang reported the discovery of petroleum.
Then there was the time when a gang built a campfire against an outcropping of bituminous coal. That was a frightening experience, too, until it was realized that coal was a special kind of rock. The idea that the very rock they walked on might catch fire from any campfire was frightening. But from understanding that coal was different, although itlooked like rock, came the understanding that things that look alike are not necessarily the same, and that things might possess properties not evident from outside appearance.
The gangs drifted north and south through the Horizon Zone. Thousands of years passed until two gangs met, half way around the planet, and found that neither could understand the language of the other. At times, from mountain tops, they would glimpse a thing of beauty on the far horizon: a faintly luminous ball, larger than a man's fist at arm's length. Now and then a gang would move toward it, leaving the zone of jumbled mountains and reaching open plains beyond. Some followed the rivers that fed the lakes of the Horizon Zone until they found their way barred by deserts. Then they might wander back and forth until, by chance, they would find another river flowing in the opposite direction and follow it between ever higher mountain ranges until at last they came to another land of lakes, and of mountains higher than they had ever seen before, pushing their snow-capped peaks miles into the air. And, almost at the zenith, the silvery globe.
The beauty of that thing in the sky fascinated them as the sun and the Star-Cluster and Rubra never did.
They never tired of watching it, and they felt somehow attracted to it. But they made no myths about it; they did not worship it as a god. They had no gods, and the very concept of a supreme being was incomprehensible to them. They asked questions, and they accepted nothing on faith. They asked: What is it? What holds it up? How far away is it? What is it really like? They of Hetaira had escaped the two blind alleys of religion and magic; they had already learned that things of nature had natural causes, and that if one were smart enough to ask the proper questions, nature would not withhold its secrets.
There were many gods upon Thalassa, and magic ruled the lives of its people. When Amarush was still a huddle of temporary huts on a flat beach, a thriving trade in magical articles existed-colored or glittering stones, roots in animal or humanoid form, seashells valued as fertility charms-and the concept of pure magic had already become elaborated into belief in some supernatural power behind the magical influences.
The god of the Navvazorf was the sun. Of the three major sky-objects, only Elektra gave heat as well as light; it brought the storms and bloods, providing fresh silt to renew the land for planting. At first it was worshipped directly, and then as the god's abode, and finally as the god's visible manifestation. Rubra and the Star-Cluster were also venerated, but their cults gradually merged into the worship of Dindash, the Sun God. Altars rose; sacrifice-fires blazed; priests howled and chanted as they moved from orgiastic dance to ceremonial procession.
The Navvadrov, the Upland People, at first had a complex system of animal-totems and ancestor spirit cults. The priest remained half wizard, purveying charms even as he offered prayers. When agriculture and the breeding of domestic animals began to supplant hunting, the deities of the Navvadrov became fertility gods; a polytheism arose, with Mother-Goddess, Father-God, slain and risen Seed-God, and a host of field-gods and herd-gods and local and special deities.
Those of the Navvadrov who had crossed the High Ridge and gone down into the veldt beyond had carried with them their primitive totemisms and spirit-worships, but many of their totemic animals were not native to the veldt and were forgotten, and the ancestors whom they had venerated on the benches of the High Ridge were buried there and their spirits could not follow into the plains. They came to worship the spirits of the warriors and wizards who had led them onto the veldt, and a pantheon of gods and goddesses no longer remembered as having been mortals gradually arose. Their worshippers were no longer Navvadrov; they had split into many tribes, and, with the domestication of pack and riding animals, wandered far.
A temple of the Mother-Goddess and a temple of Dindash stood side by side at Amarush; both were respected by the conqueror. The priests of Dindash traded generously for gold to enrich their altars. The first bits of copper and silver to reach Amarush went into vessels for both temples. For as long as Tammak I reigned, and Vallak I, his son, and through the reigns of Tammak II and Tammak III and Vallak II, there was peace in Amarush, though there was much fighting elsewhere on the river.
It was in the reign of Tammak IV that a trading town was established a hundred miles down-river from Amarush. Colonists came from Gvazol, an important town at the mouth of the river, and settled the town they called Gvazopinath. Their clear intention was to anticipate the upbound trade from the coast and break the monopoly of Amarush.
Tammak IV led an expedition against Gvazopinath before the thongs were dry on the roof-poles of the trading huts, and razed it to the ground. Unlike his illustrious ancestor, he spared neither the lives of the Navvazorf traders nor the temple of Dindash.
The next season, no traders came to Amarush. Instead, a fleet of fifty pirogues and rafts came up from Gvazol and attacked, attempting to put Amarush under siege. The siege lasted less than two weeks before the warriors from Gvazol were beaten off in a ruthless and bloody battle. Tammak IV immediately demolished the temple of Dindash in Amarush, taking its riches for the crown. The priests and the Gvazolla traders hiding in the temple he burned alive on a pyre beside the river, in a burlesque of the sacrifice ceremony to Dindash.
The Gvazolla attack had been voted on by the Gvazol village council and acted upon immediately. The warriors were an undisciplined mob without a semblance of leadership. For some time the thought had been abroad in Gvazol and the other coastal villages that they had outgrown their village-council government and communal economy. This crushing defeat, from which only fifteen of the fifty boats returned, converted thought into certainty.
"At Amarush," the survivors said, "Tammak is king; all obey him. The Amarusholla fight as one, while we try to plan as one, but fight without a leader. Our fighting quickly becomes each-for-him-self. We too must have a leader whom all will obey."
Two hot-seasons later a second expedition was led by a veteran river-trader and pirate-fighter named Shishdosh; he had twenty boats of Gvazol and five each from the neighboring villages of Trashol and Murshol. His warriors carried a new weapon: a sort of sword made by inserting rows of sharp flint into a thin hardwood board. They did not capture Amarush; the stockades built by Tam-mak I and strengthened by each of his successors were too strong. But while ten of the boats engaged the defenders in an arrow-fight at the front gate of the town, the others landed their boats out of bowshot and attacked on the leeward side, burning the fields of ripe grain, looting and firing the storage-sheds outside the walls, and making off with much spoil, including tools and weapons of a new, hard, brown metal that had come to Amarush from a village in the far uplands. They also captured twenty prisoners to bring back to Gvazol and sacrifice to Dindash.
The credit of Shishdosh stood extravagantly high after this exploit. When he began talking about another expedition, he was unanimously voted its chieftain. He began by gathering a personal staff of a dozen or so veterajis of the previous expedition and appointing them sub-chieftains, responsible only to him. He further ingratiated himself with the priests of Dindash, imposed levies on the villagers, and put several dissenters to death in various showy manners; after which he effectively ruled Gvazol directly. The frightened, sycophantic village council was reduced to an advice-giving function, and Shishdosh seldom heeded its advice. On one pretext or another he managed to extend the period of preparation for the Great Raid for five flood-seasons.
Another village, Novzol, farther down the coast at the mouth of a smaller river, had begun trading with the Upland People several centuries before. A little below the head of pirogue navigation on their river they had found a Navvadrov village whose people had begun to mine and smelt copper. It was these people who learned to alloy it with other metals: silver, and tin, and zinc. By the time of Shishdosh's second expedition against Amarush, bronze tools and weapons were in limited use in the uplands and along the coast. Shishdosh himself carried a bronze sword with a double sawtooth edge, the appearance copied from the wood-and-flint weapons he had carried on his first campaign.
The Great Raid, five flood-seasons in the preparation, was successful. Shishdosh filled a number of captured Navvadrov canoes with his own warriors disguised in uplander skins and cloth caps. They raced ahead of his main fleet, simulating panic-stricken flight. Hastily beaching their canoes, this party rushed pell-mell for the gate, shouting that the Gvazolla war-party was behind them. Before the deception could be seen, the gate was opened for them and they swarmed in. The pirogues and rafts of Shishdosh's main fleet followed, landing their warriors directly in front of the gate. The disguised warriors kept the gate open until the main body could rush it and achieve a toehold inside the town itself. There was a desperate resistance, but in the end the defenders were wiped out or captured. Tammak IV himself was taken alive and then impaled on a great stake outside the front gate, where his body was left to swing in the wind for season after season until it finally disintegrated, and then the bones were gathered and mashed up, and the dust scattered.
Having tasted power, Shishdosh was loath to put aside the heady cup. Loading several pirogues with the richest loot, including bronze tools but no weapons, he sent them down the river in charge of a trusted henchman, inviting the priests of Dindash to come to Amarush and consecrate a new temple. While waiting, he strengthened the defences of the town, sent embassies to the adjoining upland chieftains, and recruited a company of Navvadrov archers. Then, after the consecration ceremony, he conferred the crown of Amarush upon Pinchidun, an old and trusted comrade, and returned to Gvazdol with his mercenaries and the Dindash priests. To keep order in Amarush, Pinchidun kept with him the warriors from the villages adjoining the Gvazol who had joined the expedition.
Back at Gvazol, Shishdosh entered the town triumphantly and immediately proclaimed himself king. The priests of Dindash annointed and crowned him, with the blessing of the Sun-God. Then, without even pausing to rest, he seized, one after the other, the three neighboring villages whose warriors were all still at Amarush keeping order, and added them to his kingdom.
Novzol, which had taken no part in the conquest of Amarush, was the main rival in prosperity of the new Gvazolla Kingdom. With bronze tools, the Novzolla had become skillful shipwrights. Their mariners learned to take advantage of the winds which rose after the hot season; instead of poling their small boats through the inland network of marshes and channels, they followed the coast, trading with other communities which were slowly changing from neolithic villages into mercantile cities. These, also, sent expeditions into the uplands in search of metals. Occasional wars broke out; alliances were formed and disintegrated. Finally, two centuries after the Shishdosh Dynasty came to power, Sharphad V of Novzol conquered Gvazol; shifting his capital to the city at the mouth of the Gvaru. Within a score of hot-seasons he had brought all the coastal cities into a single empire.
New methods were needed to handle increasing wealth and expanding trade. Gold-because it was universally valued, universally rare, and practically indestructible-became the standard of value. The art of writing and the science of mathematics were pressed into service in support of the empire, and were advanced and developed by the need for keeping increasingly complicated accounts and records. A new class grew up; humble scribes and bureaucrats, upon whose knowledge and administrative abilities the well-being of the empire depended.
Ships forced to sea by misadventure found the coasts of new continents: Dudak, to the north, and Zabash, to the south. Deliberate exploration followed accidental discovery; tribes of savages were encountered, with whom the explorers alternately fought and traded. The Coastal Empire grew, gradually and imperceptibly, into the first Sea Empire.
* * *
Chapter Five
The wandering gangs spread out across Hetaira, some to the Outer Hemisphere, but more toward the silver globe in the sky. They followed the game-herds in the plains beyond the Horizon Zone, first as foot-nomads, and then catching and breaking pack and riding animals, and driving game from one feeding ground to another. After generations in captivity, the descendants of these wild grazers and browsers had been selectively bred into domestic flocks and herds.
The larger and more prosperous gangs did not travel very far. They fought with one another over grass and water in the age-old manner of nomads, but tended to keep the peace when there was enough for all. They formed friendships and enmities and kept closely aware of one another by constantly meeting to trade and gossip. The smaller gangs, pushed out of the best grazing lands by their more numerous neighbors, invaded the mountain country around the Central Peak.
These displaced nomads found the country already peopled. Earlier gangs of paleolithic hunters had moved into the mountain valleys and up the rivers, and had discovered metals and something of how to use them. Little permanent communities, the first in the planet's history, had appeared at the richer ore-outcroppings; there would be houses around the mine-pits, and a furnace, and a forge. Hunting and food-gathering were still the chief occupation, but there would be some cultivation, and intermittent working of metal into tools and weapons.
Sometimes there would be bloody fights; more often the newcomers would trade cattle for metalware and carry it back to the plains, trading it for more cattle, and return then to the mountains to begin the cycle again. The miners and smiths came to depend less and less on hunting and farming, and more and more on being able to trade their work for foodstuffs.
There seems to have been no clearly defined demarcation between a Bronze and an Iron Age in Hetaira.
As one community would learn to alloy copper, another would begin smelting and working iron. Even the carbonization of iron into steel came surprisingly early. The inquiring Hetairan mind, with its unceasing search for novelty, the ability to use existing knowledge to uncover new facts, all accelerated progress.
Changes which might have taken millennia in another culture sometimes happened in decades on Hetaira.
The wheel developed an axle shortly after it was first used as a roller under heavy objects. Almost at once it begot its numerous and varied progeny-the spinning-wheel, the potter's wheel, the water-wheel, the grindstone, the cart wheel. It gained spokes or teeth, and learned how to lift weights and turn corners; became the windmill, the bucket-chain, the windlass, the pulley, and a variety of devices for lifting or moving solids or liquids. Soon the cartwheel gained an iron tire, and the plow an iron plowshare; fields were cleared and roads were built.
The communities were still based on gangs. Sexual promiscuity and the basic equality of the sexes and lack of any sex-based division of labor prevented the development of anything like patriarchy or matriarchy. There was little authority of any sort, and no tyranny whatsoever. Once in a while some individual would, by virtue of superior strength or cunning, try to impose his will on others; such a one would invariably be found, in a short time, laying in some field with an arrow in his back. People deferred only to greater knowledge or experience or inventiveness; and they had an unerring ability to separate the gold from the dross.
What might be called capital property was usually owned in common by the gang; there were few fixed rules of distribution, but there was very little inequity or prolonged dissatisfaction with anything within their control.
