Atlantis
By Orson Scott Card
Kemal Akyazi grew up within a few miles of the ruins of Troy; from
his boyhood home above Kumkale he could see the waters of the
Dardanelles, the narrow strait that connects the waters of the Black
Sea with the Aegean. Many a war had been fought on both sides of
that strait, one of which had produced the great epic of Homer's
ILIAD.
This pressure of history had a strange influence on Kemal as a
child. He learned all the tales of the place, of course, but he also
knew that the tales were Greek, and the place was of the Greek
Aegean world. Kemal was a Turk; his own ancestors had not come to
the Dardanelles until the fifteenth century. He felt that it was a
powerful place, but it did not belong to him. So the ILIAD was not
the story that spoke to Kemal's soul. Rather it was the story of
Heinrich Schliemann, the German explorer who, in an era when Troy
had been regarded as a mere legend, a myth, a fiction, had been sure
not only that Troy was real but also where it was. Despite all
scoffers, he mounted an expedition and found it and unburied it. The
old stories turned out to be true.
In his teens Kemal thought it was the greatest tragedy of his life
that Pastwatch had to use machines to look through the the millennia
of human history. There would be no more Schliemanns, studying and
pondering and guessing until they found some artifact, some ruin of
a long-lost city, some remnant of a legend made true again. Thus
Kemal had no interest in joining Pastwatch. It was not history that
he hungered for--it was exploration and discovery that he wanted,
and what was the glory in finding the truth through a machine?
So, after an abortive try at physics, he studied to become a
meteorologist. At the age of eighteen, heavily immersed in the study
of climate and weather, he touched again on the findings of
Pastwatch. No longer did meteorologists have to depend on only a few
centuries of weather measurements and fragmentary fossil evidence to
determine long-range patterns. Now they had accurate accounts of
storm patterns for millions of years. Indeed, in the earliest years
of Pastwatch, the machinery had been so coarse that individual
humans could not be seen. It was like time-lapse photography in
which people don't remain in place long enough to be on more than a
single frame of the film, making them invisible. So in those days
Pastwatch recorded the weather of the past, erosion patterns,
volcanic eruptions, ice ages, climatic shifts.
All that data was the bedrock on which modern weather prediction and
control rested. Meteorologists could see developing patterns and,
without disrupting the overall pattern, could make tiny changes that
prevented any one area from going completely rainless during a time
of drought, or sunless during a wet growing season. They had taken
the sharp edge off the relentless scythe of climate, and now the
great project was to determine how they might make a more serious
change, to bring a steady pattern of light rain to the desert
regions of the world, to restore the prairies and savannahs that
they once had been. That was the work that Kemal wanted to be a part
of.
Yet he could not bring himself out from the shadow of Troy, the
memory of Schliemann. Even as he studied the climatic shifts
involved with the waxing and waning of the ice ages, his mind
contained fleeting images of lost civilizations, legendary places
that waited for a Schliemann to uncover them.
His project for his degree in meteorology was part of the effort to
determine how the Red Sea might be exploited to develop dependable
rains for either the Sudan or central Arabia; Kemal's immediate
target was to study thedifference between weather patterns during
the last ice age, when the Red Sea had all but disappeared, and the
present, with the Red Sea at its fullest. Back and forth he went
through the coarse old Pastwatch recordings, gathering data on sea
level and on precipitation at selected points inland. The old
TruSite I had been imprecise at best, but good enough for counting
rainstorms.
Time after time Kemal would cycle through the up-and-down
fluctuations of the Red Sea, watching as the average sea level
gradually rose toward the end of the Ice Age. He always stopped, of
course, at the abrupt jump in sea level that marked the rejoining of
the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. After that, the Red Sea was
useless for his purposes, since its sea level was tied to that of
the great world ocean.
But the echo of Schliemann inside Kemal's mind made him think: What
a flood that must have been.
What a flood. The Ice Age had locked up so much water in glaciers
and ice sheets that the sea level of the whole world fell. It
eventually reached a low enough point that land bridges arose out of
the sea. In the north Pacific, the Bering land bridge allowed the
ancestors of the Indies to cross on foot into their great empty
homeland. Britain and Flanders were joined. The Dardanelles were
closed and the Black Sea became a salty lake. The Persian Gulf
disappeared and became a great plain cut by the Euphrates. And the
Bab al Mandab, the strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, became a land
bridge.
But a land bridge is also a dam. As the world climate warmed and the
glaciers began to release their pent-up water, the rains fell
heavily everywhere; rivers swelled and the seas rose. The great
south-flowing rivers of Europe, which had been mostly dry during the
peak of glaciation, now were massive torrents. The Rhone, the Po,
the Strimon, the Danube poured so much water into the Mediterranean
and the Black Sea that their water level rose at about the same rate
as that of the great world ocean.
The Red Sea had no great rivers, however. It was a new sea, formed
by rifting between the new Arabian plate and the African, which
meant it had uplift ridges on both coasts. Many rivers and streams
flowed from those ridges down into the Red Sea, but none of them
carried much water compared to the rivers that drained vast basins
and carried the melt-off of the glaciers of the north. So, while the
Red Sea gradually rose during this time, it lagged far, far behind
the great world ocean. Its water level responded to the immediate
local weather patterns rather than to worldwide weather.
Then one day the Indian Ocean rose so high that tides began to spill
over the Bab al Mandab. The water cut new channels in the grassland
there. Over a period of several years, the leakage grew, creating a
series of large new tidal lakes on the Hanish Plain. And then one
day, some fourteen thousand years ago, the flow cut a channel so
deep that it didn't dry up at low tide, and the water kept flowing,
cutting the channel deeper and deeper, until those tidal lakes were
full, and brimmed over. With the weight of the Indian Ocean behind
it the water gushed into the basin of the Red Sea in a vast flood
that in a few days brought the Red Sea up to the level of the world
ocean.
This isn't just the boundary marker between useful and useless water
level data, thought Kemal. This is a cataclysm, one of the rare
times when a single event changes vast reaches of land in a period
of time short enough that human beings could notice it. And, for
once, this cataclysm happened in an era when human beings were
there. It was not only possible but likely that someone saw this
flood--indeed, that it killed many, for the southern end of the Red
Sea basin was rich savannah and marshes up to the moment when the
ocean broke through, and surely the humans of fourteen thousand
years ago would have hunted there. Would have gathered seeds and
fruits and berries there. Some hunting party must have seen, from
the peaks of the Dehalak mountains, the great walls of water that
roared up the plain, breaking and parting around the slopes of the
Dehalaks, making islands of them.
Such a hunting party would have known that their families had been
killed by this water. What would they have thought? Surely that some
god was angry with them. That the world had been done away, buried
under the sea. And if they survived, if they found a way to the
Eritrean shore after the great turbulent waves settled down to the
more placid waters of the new, deeper sea, they would tell the tale
to anyone who would listen. And for a few years they could take
their hearers to the water's edge, show them the treetops barely
rising above the surface of the sea, and tell them tales of all that
had been buried under the waves.
Noah, thought Kemal. Gilgamesh. Atlantis. The stories were believed.
The stories were remembered. Of course they forgot where it
happened--the civilizations that learned to write their stories
naturally transposed the events to locations that they knew. But
they remembered the things that mattered. What did the flood story
of Noah say? Not just rain, no, it wasn't a flood caused by rain
alone. The "fountains of the great deep" broke open. No local flood
on the Mesopotamian plain would cause that image to be part of the
story. But the great wall of water from the Indian Ocean, coming on
the heels of years of steadily increasing rain--THAT would bring
those words to the storytellers' lips, generation after generation,
for ten thousand years until they could be written down.
As for Atlantis, everyone was so sure they had found it years ago.
Santorini--Thios--the Aegean island that blew up. But the oldest
stories of Atlantis said nothing of blowing up in a volcano. They
spoke only of the great civilization sinking into the sea. The
supposition was that later visitors came to Santorini and, seeing
water where an island city used to be, assumed that it had sunk,
knowing nothing of the volcanic eruption. To Kemal, however, this
now seemed far-fetched indeed, compared to the way it would have
looked to the people of Atlantis themselves, somewhere on the
Mits'iwa Plain, when the Red Sea seemed to leap up in its bed,
engulfing the city. THAT would be sinking into the sea! No
explosion, just water. And if the city were in the marshes of what
was now the Mits'iwa Channel, the water would have come, not just
from the southeast, but from the northeast and the north as well,
flowing among and around the Dehalak mountains, making islands of
them and swallowing up the marshes and the city with them.
Atlantis. Not beyond the pillars of Hercules, but Plato was right to
associate the city with a strait. He, or whoever told the tale to
him, simply replaced the Bab al Mandab with the greatest strait that
he had heard of. The story might well have reached him by way of
Phoenicia, where Mediterranean sailors would have made the story fit
the sea they knew. They learned it from Egyptians, perhaps, or nomad
wanderers from the hinterlands of Arabia, and "within the straits of
Mandab" would quickly have become "within the pillars of Hercules,"
and then, because the Mediterranean itself was not strange and
exotic enough, the locale was moved outside the pillars of Hercules.
All these suppositions came to Kemal with absolute certainty that
they were true, or nearly true. He rejoiced at the thought of it:
There was still an ancient civilization left to discover.
Everyone knew that Naog of the Derku People was going to be a tall
man when he grew up, because his father and mother were both tall
and he was an unusually large baby. He was born in floodwater
season, when all the Engu clan lived on reed boats. Their food
supply, including the precious seed for next year's planting, was
kept dry in the seedboats, which were like floating huts of plaited
reeds. The people themselves, though, rode out the flood on the open
dragonboats, bundles of reeds which they straddled as if they were
riding a crocodile--which, according to legend, was how the
dragonboats began, when the first Derku woman, Gweia, saved herself
and her baby from the flood by climbing onto the back of a huge
crocodile. The crocodile--the first Great Derku, or dragon--endured
their weight until they reached a tree they could climb, whereupon
the dragon swam away. So when the Derku people plaited reeds into
long thick bundles and climbed aboard, they believed that secret of
the dragonboats had been given to them by the Great Derku, and in a
sense they were riding on his back.
During the raiding season, other nearby tribes had soon learned to
fear the coming of the dragonboats, for they always carried off
captives who, in those early days, were never seen again. In other
tribes when someone was said to have been carried off by the
crocodiles, it was the Derku people they meant, for it was well know
that all the clans of the Derku worshipped the crocodile as their
savior and god, and fed their captives to a dragon that lived in the
center of their city.
At Naog's birthtime, the Engu clan were nestled among their tether
trees as the flooding Selud River flowed mudbrown underneath them.
If Naog had pushed his way out of the womb a few weeks later, as the
waters were receding, his mother would have given birth in one of
the seedboats. But Naog came early, before highwater, and so the
seedboats were still full of grain. During floodwater, they could
neither grind the grain into flour nor build cooking fires, and thus
had to eat the seeds in raw handfuls. Thus it was forbidden to spill
blood on the grain, even birthblood; no one would touch grain that
had human blood on it, for that was the juice of the forbidden
fruit.
This was why Naog's mother, Lewik, could not hide alone in an
enclosed seedboat for the birthing. Instead she had to give birth
out in the open, on one of the dragonboats. She clung to a branch of
a tether tree as two women on their own dragonboats held hers
steady. From a near distance Naog's father, Twerk, could not hide
his mortification that his new young wife was giving birth in full
view, not only of the women, but of the men and boys of the tribe.
Not that any but the youngest and stupidest of the men was overtly
looking. Partly because of respect for the event of birth itself,
and partly because of a keen awareness that Twerk could cripple any
man of the Engu that he wanted to, the men paddled their boats
toward the farthest tether trees, herding the boys along with them.
There they busied themselves with the work of floodwater
season--twining ropes and weaving baskets.
Twerk himself, however, could not keep from looking. He finally left
his dragonboat and climbed his tree and watched. The women had
brought their dragonboats in a large circle around the woman in
travail. Those with children clinging to them or bound to them kept
their boats on the fringes--they would be little help, with their
hands full already. It was the older women and the young girls who
were in close, the older women to help, the younger ones to learn.
But Twerk had no eyes for the other women today. It was his
wide-eyed, sweating wife that he watched. It frightened him to see
her in such pain, for Lewik was usually the healer, giving herbs and
ground-up roots to others to take away pain or cure a sickness. It
also bothered him to see that as she squatted on her dragonboat,
clinging with both hands to the branch above her head, neither she
nor any of the other women was in position to catch the baby when it
dropped out. It would fall into the water, he knew, and it would
die, and then he and everyone else would know that it had been wrong
of him to marry this woman who should have been a servant of the
crocodile god, the Great Derku.
When he could not contain himself a moment longer, Twerk shouted to
the women: "Who will catch the baby?"
Oh, how they laughed at him, when at last they understood what he
was saying. "Derku will catch him!" they retorted, jeering, and the
men around him also laughed, for that could mean several things. It
could mean that the god would provide for the child's safety, or it
could mean that the flood would catch the child, for the flood was
also called derkuwed, or dragonwater, partly because it was aswarm
with crocodiles swept away from their usual lairs, and partly
because the floodwater slithered down from the mountains like a
crocodile sliding down into the water, quick and powerful and
strong, ready to sweep away and swallow up the unwary. Derku will
catch him indeed!
The men began predicting what the child would be named. "He will be
Rogogu, because we all laughed," said one. Another said, "It will be
a girl and she will be named Mehug, because she will be spilled into
the water as she plops out!" They guessed that the child would be
named for the fact that Twerk watched the birth; for the branch that
Lewik clung to or the tree that Twerk climbed; or for the
dragonwater itself, into which they imagined the child spilling and
then being drawn out with the embrace of the god still dripping from
him. Indeed, because of this notion Derkuwed became a childhood
nickname for Lewik's and Twerk's baby, and later it was one of the
names by which his story was told over and over again in faraway
lands that had never heard of dragonwater or seen a crocodile, but
it was not his real name, not what his father gave him to be his
man-name when he came of age.
After much pushing, Lewik's baby finally emerged. First came the
head, dangling between her ankles like the fruit of a tree--that was
why the word for HEAD and was the same as the word for FRUIT in the
language of the Derku people. Then as the newborn's head touched the
bound reeds of the dragonboat, Lewik rolled her eyes in pain and
waddled slowly backward, so that the baby flopped out of her body
stretched along the length of the boat. He did not fall into the
water, because his mother had made sure of it.
"Little man!" cried all the women as soon as they saw the sex of the
child.
Lewik grunted out her firstborn's baby-name. "Glogmeriss," she said.
GLOG meant "thorn" and MERISS meant "trouble"; together, they made
the term that the Derku used for annoyances that turned out all
right in the end, but which were quite painful at the time. There
were some who thought that she wasn't naming the baby at all, but
simply commenting on the situation, but it was the first thing she
said and so it would be his name until he left the company of women
and joined the men.
As soon as the afterbirth dropped onto the dragonboat, all the other
women paddled nearer--like a swarm of gnats, thought Twerk, still
watching. Some helped Lewik pry her hands loose from the tree branch
and lie down on her dragonboat. Others took the baby and passed it
from hand to hand, each one washing a bit of the blood from the
baby. The afterbirth got passed with the baby at first, often
dropping into the floodwater, until at last it reached the cutting
woman, who severed the umbilical cord with a flint blade. Twerk,
seeing this for the first time, realized that this might be how he
got his name, which meant "cutting" or "breaking." Had his father
seen this remarkable thing, too, the women cutting a baby off from
this strange belly-tail? No wonder he named him for it.
But the thing that Twerk could not get out of his mind was the fact
that his Lewik had taken off her napron in full view of the clan,
and all the men had seen her nakedness, despite their efforts to
pretend that they had not. Twerk knew that this would become a joke
among the men, a story talked about whenever he was not with them,
and this would weaken him and mean that he would never be the clan
leader, for one can never give such respect to a man that one laughs
about behind his back.
Twerk could think of only one way to keep this from having the power
to hurt him, and that was to confront it openly so that no one would
laugh behind his back. "His name is Naog!" cried Twerk decisively,
almost as soon as the baby was fully washed in river water and the
placenta set loose to float away on the flood.
"You are such a stupid man!" cried Lewik from her dragonboat.
Everyone laughed, but in this case it was all right. Everyone knew
Lewik was a bold woman who said whatever she liked to any man. That
was why it was such a mark of honor that Twerk had chosen to take
her as wife and she had taken him for husband--it took a strong man
to laugh when his wife said disrespectful things to him. "Of course
he's naog," she said. "All babies are born naked."
"I call him Naog because YOU were naked in front of all the clan,"
answered Twerk. "Yes, I know you all looked when you thought I
couldn't see," he chided the men. "I don't mind a bit. You all saw
my Lewik naked when the baby came out of her--but what matters is
that only I saw her naked when I put the baby in!"
That made them all laugh, even Lewik, and the story was often
repeated. Even before he became a man and gave up the baby-name
Glogmeriss, Naog had often heard the tale of why he would have such
a silly name--so often, in fact, that he determined that one day he
would do such great deeds that when the people heard the word NAOG
they would think first of him and his accomplishments, before they
remembered that the name was also the word for the tabu condition of
taking the napron off one's secret parts in public.
As he grew up, he knew that the water of derkuwed on him as a baby
had touched him with greatness. It seemed he was always taller than
the other boys, and he reached puberty first, his young body
powerfully muscled by the labor of dredging the canals right among
the slaves of the dragon during mudwater season. He wasn't much more
than twelve floodwaters old when the grown men began clamoring for
him to be given his manhood journey early so that he could join them
in slave raids--his sheer size would dishearten many an enemy,
making them despair and throw down his club or his spear. But Twerk
was adamant. He would not tempt Great Derku to devour his son by
letting the boy get ahead of himself. Naog might be large of body,
but that didn't mean that he could get away with taking a man's role
before he had learned all the skills and lore that a man had to
acquire in order to survive.
This was all fine with Naog. He knew that he would have his place in
the clan in due time. He worked hard to learn all the skills of
manhood--how to fight with any weapon; how to paddle his dragonboat
straight on course, yet silently; how to recognize the signs of the
seasons and the directions of the stars at different hours of the
night and times of the year; which wild herbs were good to eat, and
which deadly; how to kill an animal and dress it so it would keep
long enough to bring home for a wife to eat. Twerk often said that
his son was as quick to learn things requiring wit and memory as to
learn skills that depended only on size and strength and quickness.
What Twerk did not know, what no one even guessed, was that these
tasks barely occupied Naog's mind. What he dreamed of, what he
thought of constantly, was how to become a great man so that his
name could be spoken with solemn honor instead of a smile or
laughter.
One of Naog's strongest memories was a visit to the Great Derku in
the holy pond at the very center of the great circular canals that
linked all the Derku people together. Every year during the mud
season, the first dredging was the holy pond, and no slaves were
used for THAT. No, the Derku men and women, the great and the
obscure, dredged the mud out of the holy pond, carried it away in
baskets, and heap it up in piles that formed a round lumpen wall
around the pond. As the dry season came, crocodiles a-wandering in
search of water would smell the pond and come through the gaps in
the wall to drink it and bathe in it. The crocodiles knew nothing of
danger from coming within walls. Why would they have learned to fear
the works of humans? What other people in all the world had ever
built such a thing? So the crocodiles came and wallowed in the
water, heedless of the men watching from trees. At the first full
moon of the dry season, as the crocodiles lay stupidly in the water
during the cool of night, the men dropped from the trees and quietly
filled the gaps in the walls with earth. At dawn, the largest
crocodile in the pond was hailed as Great Derku for the year. The
rest were killed with spears in the bloodiest most wonderful
festival of the year.
The year that Naog turned six, the Great Derku was the largest
crocodile that anyone could remember ever seeing. It was a dragon
indeed, and after the men of raiding age came home from the blood
moon festival full of stories about this extraordinary Great Derku,
all the families in all the clans began bringing their children to
see it.
"They say it's a crocodile who was Great Derku many years ago," said
Naog's mother. "He has returned to our pond in hopes of the
offerings of manfruit that we used to give to the dragon. But some
say he's the very one who was Great Derku the year of the
forbidding, when he refused to eat any of the captives we offered
him."
"And how would they know?" said Twerk, ridiculing the idea. "Is
there anyone alive now who was alive then, to recognize him? And how
could a crocodile live so long?"
"The Great Derku lives forever," said Lewik.
"Yes, but the true dragon is the derkuwed, the water in flood," said
Twerk, "and the crocodiles are only its children."
To the child, Naog, these words had another meaning, for he had
heard the word DERKUWED far more often in reference to himself, as
his nickname, than in reference to the great annual flood. So to him
it sounded as though his father was saying that HE was the true
dragon, and the crocodiles were his children. Almost at once he
realized what was actually meant, but the impression lingered in the
back of his mind.
"And couldn't the derkuwed preserve one of its children to come back
to us to be our god a second time?" said Lewik. "Or are you suddenly
a holy man who knows what the dragon is saying?"
"All this talk about this Great Derku being one of the ancient ones
brought back to us is dangerous," said Twerk. "Do you want us to
return to the terrible days when we fed manfruit to the Great Derku?
When our captives were all torn to pieces by the god, while WE, men
and women alike, had to dig out all the canals without slaves?"
"There weren't so many canals then," said Lewik. "Father said."
"Then it must be true," said Twerk, "if your old father said it. So
think about it. Why are there so many canals now, and why are they
so long and deep? Because we put our captives to work dredging our
canals and making our boats. What if the Great Derku had never
refused to eat manfruit? We would not have such a great city here,
and other tribes would not bring us gifts and even their own
children as slaves. They can come and visit our captives, and even
buy them back from us. That's why we're not hated and feared, but
rather
LOVED and feared in all the lands from the Nile to the Salty Sea."
Naog knew that his father's manhood journey had been from the Salty
Sea all the way up the mountains and across endless grasslands to
the great river of the west. It was a legendary journey, fitting for
such a large man. So Naog knew that he would have to undertake an
even greater journey. But of that he said nothing.
"But these people talking stupidly about this being that same Great
Derku returned to us again--don't you realize that they will want to
put it to the test again, and offer it manfruit? And what if the
Great Derku EATS it this time? What do we do then, go back to doing
all the dredging ourselves? Or let the canals fill in so we can't
float the seedboats from village to village during the dry season,
and so we have no defense from our enemies and no way to ride our
dragonboats all year?"
Others in the clan were listening to this argument, since there was
little enough privacy under normal circumstances, and none at all
when you spoke with a raised voice. So it was no surprise when they
chimed in. One offered the opinion that the reason no manfruit
should be offered to this Great Derku was because the eating of
manfruit would give the Great Derku knowledge of all the thoughts of
the people they ate. Another was afraid that the sight of a powerful
creature eating the flesh of men would lead some of the young people
to want to commit the unpardonable sin of eating that forbidden
fruit themselves, and in that case all the Derku people would be
destroyed.
What no one pointed out was that in the old days, when they fed
manfruit to the Great Derku, it wasn't JUST captives that were
offered. During years of little rain or too much rain, the leader of
each clan always offered his own eldest son as the first fruit, or,
if he could not bear to see his son devoured, he would offer himself
in his son's place--though some said that in the earliest times it
was always the leader himself who was eaten, and they only started
offering their sons as a cowardly substitute. By now everyone
expected Twerk to be the next clan leader, and everyone knew that he
doted on his Glogmeriss, his Naog-to-be, his Derkuwed, and that he
would never throw his son to the crocodile god. Nor did any of them
wish him to do so. A few people in the other clans might urge the
test of offering manfruit to the Great Derku, but most of the people
in all of the tribes, and all of the people in Engu clan, would
oppose it, and so it would not happen.
So it was with an assurance of personal safety that Twerk brought
his firstborn son with him to see the Great Derku in the holy pond.
But six-year- old Glogmeriss, oblivious to the personal danger that
would come from the return of human sacrifice, was terrified at the
sight of the holy pond itself. It was surrounded by a low wall of
dried mud, for once the crocodile had found its way to the water
inside, the gaps in the wall were closed. But what kept the Great
Derku inside was not just the mud wall. It was the row on row of
sharpened horizontal stakes pointing straight inward, set into the
mud and lashed to sharp vertical stakes about a hand's-breadth back
from the point. The captive dragon could neither push the stakes out
of the way nor break them off. Only when the floodwater came and the
river spilled over the top of the mud wall and swept it away, stakes
and all, would that year's Great Derku be set free. Only rarely did
the Great Derku get caught on the stakes and die, and when it
happened it was regarded as a very bad omen.
This year, though, the wall of stakes was not widely regarded as
enough assurance that the dragon could not force his way out, he was
so huge and clever and strong. So men stood guard constantly, spears
in hand, ready to prod the Great Derku and herd it back into place,
should it come dangerously close to escaping.
The sight of spikes and spears was alarming enough, for it looked
like war to young Glogmeriss. But he soon forgot those puny sticks
when he caught sight of the Great Derku himself, as he shambled up
on the muddy, grassy shore of the pond. Of course Glogmeriss had
seen crocodiles all his life; one of the first skills any child,
male or female, had to learn was how to use a spear to poke a
crocodile so it would leave one's dragonboat--and therefore one's
arms and legs--in peace. This crocodile, though, this dragon, this
god, was so huge that Glogmeriss could easily imagine it swallowing
him whole without having to bite him in half or even chew.
Glogmeriss gasped and clung to his father's hand.
"A giant indeed," said his father. "Look at those legs, that
powerful tail. But remember that the Great Derku is but a weak child
compared to the power of the flood."
Perhaps because human sacrifice was still on his mind, Twerk then
told his son how it had been in the old days. "When it was a captive
we offered as manfruit, there was always a chance that the god would
let him live. Of course, if he clung to the stakes and refused to go
into the pond, we would never let him out alive--we poked him with
our spears. But if he went boldly into the water so far that it
covered his head completely, and then came back out alive and made
it back to the stakes without the Great Derku taking him and eating
him, well, then, we brought him out in great honor. We said that his
old life ended in that water, that the man we had captured had been
buried in the holy pond, and now he was born again out of the flood.
He was a full member of the tribe then, of the same clan as the man
who had captured him. But of course the Great Derku almost never let
anyone out alive, because we always kept him hungry."
"YOU poked him with your spear?" asked Glogmeriss.
"Well, not me personally. When I said that WE did it, I meant of
course the men of the Derku. But it was long before I was born. It
was in my grandfather's time, when he was a young man, that there
came a Great Derku who wouldn't eat any of the captives who were
offered to him. No one knew what it meant, of course, but all the
captives were coming out and expecting to be adopted into the tribe.
But if THAT had happened, the captives would have been the largest
clan of all, and where would we have found wives for them all? So
the holy men and the clan leaders realized that the old way was
over, that the god no longer wanted manfruit, and therefore those
who survived after being buried in the water of the holy pond were
NOT adopted into the Derku people. But we did keep them alive and
set them to work on the canals. That year, with the captives working
alongside us, we dredged the canals deeper than ever, and we were
able to draw twice the water from the canals into the fields of
grain during the dry season, and when we had a bigger harvest than
ever before, we had hands enough to weave more seedboats to contain
it. Then we realized what the god had meant by refusing to eat the
manfruit. Instead of swallowing our captives into the belly of the
water where the god lives, the god was giving them all back to us,
to make us rich and strong. So from that day on we have fed no
captives to the Great Derku. Instead we hunt for meat and bring it
back, while the women and old men make the captives do the labor of
the city. In those days we had one large canal. Now we have three
great canals encircling each other, and several other canals cutting
across them, so that even in the dryest season a Derku man can glide
on his dragonboat like a crocodile from any part of our land to any
other, and never have to drag it across dry earth. This is the
greatest gift of the dragon to us, that we can have the labor of our
captives instead of the Great Derku devouring them himself."
"It's not a bad gift to the captives, either," said Glogmeriss. "Not
to die."
Twerk laughed and rubbed his son's hair. "Not a bad gift at that,"
he said.
"Of course, if the Great Derku really loved the captives he would
let them go home to their families."
Twerk laughed even louder. "They have no families, foolish boy," he
said. "When a man is captured, he is dead as far as his family is
concerned. His woman marries someone else, his children forget him
and call another man father. He has no more home to return to."
"Don't some of the ugly-noise people buy captives back?"
"The weak and foolish ones do. The gold ring on my arm was the price
of a captive. The father-of-all priest wears a cape of bright
feathers that was the ransom of a boy not much older than you, not
long after you were born. But most captives know better than to hope
for ransom. What does THEIR tribe have that we want?"
"I would hate to be a captive, then," said Glogmeriss. "Or would YOU
be weak and foolish enough to ransom me?"
"You?" Twerk laughed out loud. "You're a Derku man, or will be. We
take captives wherever we want, but where is the tribe so bold that
it dares to take one of US? No, we are never captives. And the
captives we take are lucky to be brought out of their poor,
miserable tribes of wandering hunters or berry-pickers and allowed
to live here among wall-building men, among canal- digging people,
where they don't have to wander in search of food every day, where
they get plenty to eat all year long, twice as much as they ever ate
before."
"I would still hate to be one of them," said Glogmeriss. "Because
how could you ever do great things that everyone will talk about and
tell stories about and remember, if you're a captive?"
All this time that they stood on the wall and talked, Glogmeriss
never took his eyes off the Great Derku. It was a terrible creature,
and when it yawned it seemed its mouth was large enough to swallow a
tree. Ten grown men could ride on its back like a dragonboat. Worst
of all were the eyes, which seemed to stare into a man's heart. It
was probably the eyes of the dragon that gave it its name, for DERKU
could easily have originated as a shortened form of DERK-UNT, which
meant "one who sees." When the ancient ancestors of the Derku people
first came to this floodplain, the crocodiles floating like logs on
the water must have fooled them. They must have learned to look for
eyes on the logs. "Look!" the watcher would cry. "There's one with
eyes! Derk-unt!" They said that if you looked in the dragon's eyes,
he would draw you toward him, within reach of his huge jaws, within
reach of his curling tail, and you would never even notice your
danger, because his eyes held you. Even when the jaws opened to show
the pink mouth, the teeth like rows of bright flame ready to burn
you, you would look at that steady, all-knowing, wise, amused, and
coolly angry eye.
That was the fear that filled Glogmeriss the whole time he stood on
the wall beside his father. For a moment, though, just after he
spoke of doing great things, a curious change came over him. For a
moment Glogmeriss stopped fearing the Great Derku, and instead
imagined that he WAS the giant crocodile. Didn't a man paddle his
dragonboat by lying on his belly straddling the bundled reeds,
paddling with his hands and kicking with his feet just as a
crocodile did under the water? So all men became dragons, in a way.
And Glogmeriss would grow up to be a large man, everyone said so.
Among men he would be as extraordinary as the Great Derku was among
crocodiles. Like the god, he would seem dangerous and strike fear
into the hearts of smaller people. And, again like the god, he would
actually be kind, and not destroy them, but instead help them and do
good for them.
Like the river in flood. A frightening thing, to have the water rise
so high, sweeping away the mud hills on which they had built the
seedboats, smearing the outsides of them with sun-heated tar so they
would be watertight when the flood came. Like the Great Derku, the
flood seemed to be a destroyer. And yet when the water receded, the
land was wet and rich, ready to receive the seed and give back huge
harvests. The land farther up the slopesof the mountains was salty
and stony and all that could grow on it was grass. It was here in
the flatlands where the flood tore through like a mad dragon that
the soil was rich and trees could grow.
I will BE the Derkuwed. Not as a destroyer, but as a lifebringer.
The real Derku, the true dragon, could never be trapped in a cage as
this poor crocodile has been. The true dragon comes like the flood
and tears away the walls and sets the Great Derku crocodile free and
makes the soil wet and black and rich. Like the river, I will be
another tool of the god, another manifestation of the power of the
god in the world. If that was not what the dragon of the deep heaven
of the sea intended, why would he have make Glogmeriss so tall and
strong?
This was still the belief in his heart when Glogmeriss set out on
his manhood journey at the age of fourteen. He was already the
tallest man in his clan and one of the tallest among all the Derku
people. He was a giant, and yet well-liked because he never used his
strength and size to frighten other people into doing what he
wanted; on the contrary, he seemed always to protect the weaker
boys. Many people felt that it was a shame that when he returned
from his manhood journey, the name he would be given was a silly one
like Naog. But when they said as much in Glogmeriss's hearing, he
only laughed at them and said, "The name will only be silly if it is
borne by a silly man. I hope not to be a silly man."
Glogmeriss's father had made his fame by taking his manhood journey
from the Salty Sea to the Nile. Glogmeriss's journey therefore had
to be even more challenging and more glorious. He would go south and
east, along the crest of the plateau until he reached the legendary
place called the Heaving Sea, where the gods that dwelt in its deep
heaven were so restless that the water splashed onto the shore in
great waves all the time, even when there was no wind. If there was
such a sea, Glogmeriss would find it. When he came back as a man
with such a tale, they would call him Naog and none of them would
laugh.
Kemal Akyazi knew that Atlantis had to be there under the waters of
the Red Sea; but why hadn't Pastwatch found it? The answer was
simple enough. The past was huge, and while the TruSite I had been
used to collect climatalogical information, the new machines that
were precise enough that could track individual human beings would
never have been used to look at oceans where nobody lived. Yes, the
Tempoview had explored the Bering Strait and the English Channel,
but that was to track long-known-of migrations. There was no such
migration in the Red Sea. Pastwatch had simply never looked through
their precise new machines to see what was under the water of the
Red Sea in the waning centuries of the last Ice Age. And they never
WOULD look, either, unless someone gave them a compelling reason.
Kemal understood bureaucracy enough to know that he, a student
meteorologist, would hardly be taken seriously if he brought an
Atlantis theory to Pastwatch--particularly a theory that put
Atlantis in the Red Sea of all places, and fourteen thousand years
ago, no less, long before civilizations arose in Sumeria or Egypt,
let alone China or the Indus Valley or among the swamps of
Tehuantapec.
Yet Kemal also knew that the setting would have been right for a
civilization to grow in the marshy land of the Mits'iwa Channel.
Though there weren't enough rivers flowing into the Red Sea to fill
it at the same rate as the world ocean, there were still rivers. For
instance, the Zula, which still had enough water to flow even today,
watered the whole length of the Mits'iwa Plain and flowed down into
the rump of the Red Sea near Mersa Mubarek. And, because of the
different rainfall patterns of that time, there was a large and
dependable river flowing out of the Assahara basin. Assahara was now
a dry valley below sea level, but then would have been a freshwater
lake fed by many rivers and spilling over the lowest point into the
Mits'iwa Channel. The river meandered along the nearly level
Mits'iwa Plain, with some branches of it joining the Zula River, and
some wandering east and north to form several mouths in the Red Sea.
Thus dependable sources of fresh water fed the area, and in rainy
season the Zula, at least, would have brought new silt to freshen
the soil, and in all seasons the wandering flatwater rivers would
have provided a means of transportation through the marshes. The
climate was also dependably warm, with plenty of sunlight and a long
growing season. There was no early civilization that did not grow up
in such a setting. There was no reason such a civilization might not
have grown up then.
Yes, it was six or seven thousand years too early. But couldn't it
be that it was the very destruction of Atlantis that convinced the
survivors that the gods did not want human beings to gather together
in cities? Weren't there hints of that anti-civilization bias
lingering in many of the ancient religions of the Middle East? What
was the story of Cain and Abel, if not a metaphorical expression of
the evil of the city-dweller, the farmer, the brother-killer who is
judged unworthy by the gods because he does not wander with his
sheep? Couldn't such stories have circulated widely in those ancient
times? That would explain why the survivors of Atlantis hadn't
immediately begun to rebuild their civilization at another site:
They knew that the gods forbade it, that if they built again their
city would be destroyed again. So they remembered the stories of
their glorious past, and at the same time condemned their ancestors
and warned everyone they met against people gathering together to
build a city, making people yearn for such a place and fear it, both
at once.
Not until a Nimrod came, a tower-builder, a Babel-maker who defied
the old religion, would the ancient proscription be overcome at last
and another city rise up, in another river valley far in time and
space from Atlantis, but remembering the old ways that had been
memorialized in the stories of warning and, as far as possible,
replicating them. We will build a tower so high that it CAN'T be
immersed. Didn't Genesis link the flood with Babel in just that way,
complete with the nomad's stern disapproval of the city? This was
the story that survived in Mesopotamia--the tale of the beginning of
city life there, but with clear memories of a more ancient
civilization that had been destroyed in a flood.
A more ancient civilization. The golden age. The giants who once
walked the earth. Why couldn't all these stories be remembering the
first human civilization, the place where the city was invented?
Atlantis, the city of the Mits'iwa plain.
But how could he prove it without using the Tempoview? And how could
he get access to one of those machines without first convincing
Pastwatch that Atlantis was really in the Red Sea? It was circular,
with no way out.
Until he thought: Why do large cities form in the first place?
Because there are public works to do that require more than a few
people to accomplish them. Kemal wasn't sure what form the public
works might take, but surely they would have been something that
would change the face of the land obviously enough that the old
TruSite I recordings would show it, though it wouldn't be noticeable
unless someone was looking for it.
So, putting his degree at risk, Kemal set aside the work he was
assigned to do and began poring over the old TruSite I recordings.
He concentrated on the last few centuries before the Red Sea
flood--there was no reason to suppose that the civilization had
lasted very long before it was destroyed. And within a few months he
had collected data that was irrefutable. There were no dikes and
dams to prevent flooding--that kind of structure would have been
large enough that no one would have missed it. Instead there were
seemingly random heaps of mud and earth that grew between rainy
seasons, especially in the drier years when the rivers were lower
than usual. To people looking only for weather patterns, these
unstructured, random piles would mean nothing. But to Kemal they
were obvious: In the shallowing water, the Atlanteans were dredging
channels so that their boats could continue to traffic from place to
place. The piles of earth were simply the dumping-places for the
muck they dredged from the water. None of the boats showed up on the
TruSite I, but now that Kemal knew where to look, he began to catch
fleeting glimpses of houses. Every year when the floods came, the
houses disappeared, so they were only visible for a moment or two in
the Trusite I: flimsy mud-and-reed structures that must have been
swept away in every flood season and rebuilt again when the waters
receded. But they were there, close by the hillocks that marked the
channels. Plato was right again--Atlantis grew up around its canals.
But Atlantis was the people and their boats; the buildings were
washed away and built again every year.
When Kemal presented his findings to Pastwatch he was not yet twenty
years old, but his evidence was impressive enough that Pastwatch
immediately turned, not one of the Tempoviews, but the still-newer
TruSite II machine to look under the waters of the Red Sea in the
Massawa Channel during the hundred years before the Red Sea flood.
They found that Kemal was gloriously, spectacularly right. In an era
when other humans were still following game animals and gathering
berries, the Atlanteans were planting amaranth and ryegrass, melons
and beans in the rich wet silt of the receding rivers, and carrying
food in baskets and on reed boats from place to place. The only
thing that Kemal had missed was that the reed buildings weren't
houses at all. They were silos for the storage of grain, built
watertight so that they would float during the flood season. The
Atlanteans slept under the open air during the dry season, and in
the flood season they slept on their tiny reed boats.
Kemal was brought into Pastwatch and made head of the vast new
Atlantis project. This was the seminal culture of all cultures in
the old world, and a hundred researchers examined every stage of its
development. This methodical work, however, was not for Kemal. As
always, it was the grand legend that drew him. He spent every moment
he could spare away from the management of the project and devoted
it to the search for Noah, for Gilgamesh, for the great man who rode
out the flood and whose story lived in memory for thousands of
years. There had to be a real original, and Kemal would find him.
The flood season was almost due when Glogmeriss took his journey
that would make him into a man named Naog. It was a little early for
him, since he was born during the peak of the flood, but everyone in
the clan agreed with Twerk that it was better for a manling so
well-favored to be early than late, and if he wasn't already up and
out of the flood plain before the rains came, then he'd have to wait
months before he could safely go. And besides, as Twerk pointed out,
why have a big eater like Glogmeriss waiting out the flood season,
eating huge handfuls of grain. People listened happily to Twerk's
argument, because he was known to be a generous, wise, good-humored
man, and everyone expected him to be named clan leader when sweet
old ailing Dheub finally died.
Getting above the flood meant walking up the series of slight
inclines leading to the last sandy shoulder, where the land began to
rise more steeply. Glogmeriss had no intention of climbing any
higher than that. His father's journey had taken him over those
ridges and on to the great river Nile, but there was no reason for
Glogmeriss to clamber through rocks when he could follow the edge of
the smooth, grassy savannah. He was high enough to see the vast
plain of the Derku lands stretching out before him, and the land was
open enough that no cat or pack of dogs could creep up on him
unnoticed, let alone some hunter of another tribe.
How far to the Heaving Sea? Far enough that no one of the Derku
tribe had ever seen it. But they knew it existed, because when they
brought home captives from tribes to the south, they heard tales of
such a place, and the farther south the captives came from, the more
vivid and convincing the tales became. Still, none of them had ever
seen it with their own eyes. So it would be a long journey,
Glogmeriss knew that. And all the longer because it would be on
foot, and not on his dragonboat. Not that Derku men were any weaker
or slower afoot than men who lived above the flood--on the contrary,
they had to be fleet indeed, as well as stealthy, to bring home
either captives or meat. So the boys' games included footracing, and
while Glogmeriss was not the fastest sprinter, no one could match
his long-legged stride for sheer endurance, for covering ground
quickly, on and on, hour after hour.
What set the bodies of the Derku people apart from other tribes,
what made them recognizable in an instant, was the massive
development of their upper bodies from paddling dragonboats hour
after hour along the canals or through the floods. It wasn't just
paddling, either. It was the heavy armwork of cutting reeds and
binding them into great sheaves to be floated home for making boats
and ropes and baskets. And in older times, they would also have
developed strong arms and backs from dredging the canals that
surrounded and connected all the villages of the great Derku city.
Slaves did most of that now, but the Derku took great pride in never
letting their slaves be stronger than they were. Their shoulders and
chests and arms and backs were almost monstrous compared to those of
the men and women of other tribes. And since the Derku ate better
all year round than people of other tribes, they tended to be
taller, too. Many tribes called them giants, and others called them
the sons and daughters of the gods, they looked so healthy and
strong. And of all the young Derku men, there was none so tall and
strong and healthy as Glogmeriss, the boy they called Derkuwed, the
man who would be Naog.
So as Glogmeriss loped along the grassy rim of the great plain, he
knew he was in little danger from human enemies. Anyone who saw him
would think: There is one of the giants, one of the sons of the
crocodile god. Hide, for he might be with a party of raiders. Don't
let him see you, or he'll take a report back to his people. Perhaps
one man in a pack of hunters might say, "He's alone, we can kill
him," but the other hunters would jeer at the one who spoke so
rashly. "Look, fool, he a javelin in his hands and three tied to his
back. Look at his arms, his shoulders--do you think he can't put his
javelin through your heart before you got close enough to throw a
rock at him? Let him be. Pray for a great cat to find him in the
night."
That was Glogmeriss's only real danger. He was too high into the dry
lands for crocodiles, and he could run fast enough to climb a tree
before any pack of dogs or wolves could bring him down. But there
was no tree that would give a moment's pause to one of the big cats.
No, if one of THEM took after him, it would be a fight. But
Glogmeriss had fought cats before, on guard duty. Not the giants
that could knock a man's head off with one blow of its paw, or take
his whole belly with one bite of its jaws, but still, they were big
enough, prowling around the outside of the clan lands, and
Glogmeriss had fought them with a hand javelin and brought them down
alone. He knew something of the way they moved and thought, and he
had no doubt that in a contest with one of the big cats, he would at
least cause it grave injury before it killed him.
Better not to meet one of them, though. Which meant staying well
clear of any of the herds of bison or oxen, antelope or horses that
the big cats stalked. Those cats would never have got so big waiting
around for lone humans--it was herds they needed, and so it was
herds that Glogmeriss did NOT need.
To his annoyance, though, one came to HIM. He had climbed a tree to
sleep the night, tying himself to the trunk so he wouldn't fall out
in his sleep. He awoke to the sound of nervous lowing and a few
higher-pitched, anxious moos. Below him, milling around in the first
grey light of the coming dawn, he could make out the shadowy shapes
of oxen. He knew at once what had happened. They caught scent of a
cat and began to move away in the darkness, shambling in fear and
confusion in the near darkness. They had not run because the cat
wasn't close enough to cause a panic in the herd. With luck it would
be one of the smaller cats, and when it saw that they knew it was
there, it would give up and go away.
But the cat had not given up and gone away, or they wouldn't still
be so frightened. Soon the herd would have enough light to see the
cat that must be stalking them, and then they WOULD run, leaving
Glogmeriss behind in a tree. Maybe the cat would go in full pursuit
of the running oxen, or maybe it would notice the lone man trapped
in a tree and decide to go for the easier, smaller meal.
I wish I were part of this herd, thought Glogmeriss. Then there'd be
a chance. I would be one of many, and even if the cat brought one of
us down, it might not be me. As a man alone, it's me or the cat.
Kill or die. I will fight bravely, but in this light I might not get
a clear sight of the cat, might not be able to see in the rippling
of its muscles where it will move next. And what if it isn't alone?
What if the reason these oxen are so frightened yet unwilling to
move is that they know there's more than one cat and they have no
idea in which direction safety can be found?
Again he thought, I wish I were part of this herd. And then he
thought, Why should I think such a foolish thought twice, unless the
god is telling me what to do? Isn't that what this journey is for,
to find out if there is a god who will lead me, who will protect me,
who will make me great? There's no greatness in having a cat
eviscerate you in one bite. Only if you live do you become a man of
stories. Like Gweia--if she had mounted the crocodile and it had
thrown her off and devoured her, who would ever have heard her name?
There was no time to form a plan, except the plan that formed so
quickly that it might have been the god putting it there. He would
ride one of these oxen as Gweia rode the crocodile. It would be easy
enough to drop out of the tree onto an ox's back--hadn't he played
with the other boys, year after year, jumping from higher and higher
branches to land on a dragonboat that was drifting under the tree?
An ox was scarcely less predictable than a dragonboat on a current.
The only difference was that when he landed on the ox's back, it
would not bear him as willingly as a dragonboat. Glogmeriss had to
hope that, like Gweia's crocodile frightened of the flood, the ox he
landed on would be more frightened of the cat than of the sudden
burden on his back.
He tried to pick well among the oxen within reach of the branches of
the tree. He didn't want a cow with a calf running alongside--that
would be like begging the cats to come after him, since such cows
were already the most tempting targets. But he didn't want a bull,
either, for he doubted it would have the patience to bear him.
And there was his target, a fullsized cow but with no calf leaning
against it, under a fairly sturdy branch. Slowly, methodically,
Glogmeriss untied himself from the tree, cinched the bindings of his
javelins and his flintsack and his grainsack, and drew his loincloth
up to hold his genitals tight against his body, and then crept out
along the branch until he was as nearly over the back of the cow he
had chosen as possible. The cow was stamping and snorting now--they
all were, and in a moment they would bolt, he knew it--but it held
still as well as a bobbing dragonboat, and so Glogmeriss took aim
and jumped, spreading his legs to embrace the animal's back, but not
SO wide that he would slam his crotch against the bony ridge of its
spine.
He landed with a grunt and immediately lunged forward to get his
arms around the ox's neck, just like gripping the stem of the
dragonboat. The beast immediately snorted and bucked, but its
bobbing was no worse than the dragonboat ducking under the water at
the impact of a boy on its back. Of course, the dragonboat stopped
bobbing after a moment, while this ox would no doubt keep trying to
be rid of him until he was gone, bucking and turning, bashing its
sides into other oxen.
But the other animals were already so nervous that the sudden panic
of Glogmeriss's mount was the trigger that set off the stampede.
Almost at once the herd mentality took over, and the oxen set out in
a headlong rush all in the same direction. Glogmeriss's cow didn't
forget the burden on her back, but now she responded to her fear by
staying with the herd. It came as a great relief to Glogmeriss when
she leapt out and ran among the other oxen, in part because it meant
that she was no longer trying to get him off her back, and in part
because she was a good runner and he knew that unless she swerved to
the edge of the herd where a cat could pick her off, both she and he
would be safe.
Until the panic stopped, of course, and then Glogmeriss would have
to figure out a way to get OFF the cow and move away without being
gored or trampled to death. Well, one danger at a time. And as they
ran, he couldn't help but feel the sensations of the moment: The
prickly hair of the ox's back against his belly and legs, the way
her muscles rippled between his legs and within the embrace of his
arms, and above all the sheer exhilaration of moving through the air
at such a speed. Has any man ever moved as fast over the ground as I
am moving now? he wondered. No dragonboat has ever found a current
so swift.
It seemed that they ran for hours and hours, though when they
finally came to a stop the sun was still only a palm's height above
the mountains far across the plain to the east. As the running
slowed to a jolting jog, and then to a walk, Glogmeriss kept waiting
for his mount to remember that he was on her back and to start
trying to get him off. But if she remembered, she must have decided
she didn't mind, because when she finally came to a stop, still in
the midst of the herd, she simply dropped her head and began to
graze, making no effort to get Glogmeriss off her back.
She was so calm--or perhaps like the others was simply so
exhausted--that Glogmeriss decided that as long as he moved slowly
and calmly he might be able to walk on out of the herd, or at least
climb a tree and wait for them to move on. He knew from the roaring
and screaming sounds he had heard near the beginning of the stampede
that the cats--more than one--had found their meal, so the survivors
were safe enough for now.
Glogmeriss carefully let one leg slide down until he touched the
ground. Then, smoothly as possible, he slipped off the cow's back
until he was crouched beside her. She turned her head slightly,
chewing a mouthful of grass. Her great brown eye regarded him
calmly.
"Thank you for carrying me," said Glogmeriss softly.
She moved her head away, as if to deny that she had done anything
special for him.
"You carried me like a dragonboat through the flood," he said, and
he realized that this was exactly right, for hadn't the stampede of
oxen been as dangerous and powerful as any flood of water? And she
had borne him up, smooth and safe, carrying him safely to the far
shore. "The best of dragonboats."
She lowed softly, and for a moment Glogmeriss began to think of her
as being somehow the embodiment of the god--though it could not be
the crocodile god that took this form, could it? But all thoughts of
the animal's godhood were shattered when it started to urinate. The
thick stream of ropey piss splashed into the grass not a span away
from Glogmeriss's shoulder, and as the urine spattered him he could
not help but jump away. Other nearby oxen mooed complainingly about
his sudden movement, but his own cow seemed not to notice. The urine
stank hotly, and Glogmeriss was annoyed that the stink would stay
with him for days, probably.
Then he realized that no COW could put a stream of urine between her
forelegs. This animal was a bull after all. Yet it was scarcely
larger than the normal cow, not bull-like at all. Squatting down, he
looked closely, and realized that the animal had lost its testicles
somehow. Was it a freak, born without them? No, there was a scar, a
ragged sign of old injury. While still a calf, this animal had had
its bullhood torn away. Then it grew to adulthood, neither cow nor
bull. What purpose was there in life for such a creature as that?
And yet if it had not lived, it could not have carried him through
the stampede. A cow would have had a calf to slow it down; a bull
would have flung him off easily. The god had prepared this creature
to save him. It was not itself a god, of course, for such an
imperfect animal could hardly be divine. But it was a god's tool.
"Thank you," said Glogmeriss, to whatever god it was. "I hope to
know you and serve you," he said. Whoever the god was must have
known him for a long time, must have planned this moment for years.
There was a plan, a destiny for him. Glogmeriss felt himself thrill
inside with the certainty of this.
I could turn back now, he thought, and I would have had the greatest
manhood journey of anyone in the tribe for generations. They would
regard me as a holy man, when they learned that a god had prepared
such a beast as this to be my dragonboat on dry land. No one would
say I was unworthy to be Naog, and no more Glogmeriss.
But even as he thought this, Glogmeriss knew that it would be wrong
to go back. The god had prepared this animal, not to make his
manhood journey easy and short, but to make his long journey
possible. Hadn't the ox carried him southeast, the direction he was
already heading? Hadn't it brought him right along the very shelf of
smooth grassland that he had already been running on? No, the god
meant to speed him on his way, not to end his journey. When he came
back, the story of the unmanned ox that carried him like a boat
would be merely the first part of his story. They would laugh when
he told them about the beast peeing on him. They would nod and
murmur in awe as he told them that he realized that the god was
helping him to go on, that the god had chosen him years before in
order to prepare the calf that would be his mount. Yet this would
all be the opening, leading to the main point of the story, the
climax. And what that climax would be, what he would accomplish that
would let him take on his manly name, Glogmeriss could hardly bear
to wait to find out.
Unless, of course, the god was preparing him to be a sacrifice. But
the god could have killed him at any time. It could have killed him
when he was born, dropping him into the water as everyone said his
father had feared might happen. It could have let him die there at
the tree, taken by a cat or trampled under the feet of the oxen. No,
the god was keeping him alive for a purpose, for a great task. His
triumph lay ahead, and whatever it was, it would be greater than his
ride on the back of an ox.
The rains came the next day, but Glogmeriss pressed on. The rain
made it hard to see far ahead, but most of the animals stopped
moving in the rain and so there wasn't as much danger to look out
for. Sometimes the rain came down so thick and hard that Glogmeriss
could hardly see a dozen steps ahead. But he ran on, unhindered. The
shelf of land that he ran along was perfectly flat, neither uphill
nor downhill, as level as water, and so he could lope along without
wearying. Even when the thunder roared in the sky and lightning
seemed to flash all around him, Glogmeriss did not stop, for he knew
that the god that watched over him was powerful indeed. He had
nothing to fear. And since he passed two burning trees, he knew that
lightning could have struck him at any time, and yet did not, and so
it was a second sign that a great god was with him.
During the rains he cross many swollen streams, just by walking.
Only once did he have to cross a river that was far too wide and
deep and swift in flood for him to cross. But he plunged right in,
for the god was with him. Almost at once he was swept off his feet,
but he swam strongly across the current. Yet even a strong Derku man
cannot swim forever, and it began to seem to Glogmeriss that he
would never reach the other side, but rather would be swept down to
the salt sea, where one day his body would wash to shore near a
party of Derku raiders who would recognize from the size of his body
that it was him. So, this is what happened to Twerk's son
Glogmeriss. The flood took him after all.
Then he bumped against a log that was also floating on the current,
and took hold of it, and rolled up onto the top of it like a
dragonboat. Now he could use all his strength for paddling, and soon
he was across the current. He drew the log from the water and
embraced it like a brother, lying beside it, holding it in the wet
grass until the rising water began to lick at his feet again. Then
he dragged the log with him to higher ground and placed it up in the
notch of a tree where no flood would dislodge it. One does not
abandon a brother to the flood.
Three times the god has saved me, he thought as he climbed back up
to the level shelf that was his path. From the tooth of the cat,
from the fire of heaven, from the water of the flood. Each time a
tree was part of it: The tree around which the herd of oxen gathered
and from which I dropped onto the ox's back; the trees that died in
flames from taking to themselves the bolts of lightning meant for
me; and finally this log of a fallen tree that died in its home far
up in the mountains in order to be my brother in the water of the
flood. Is it a god of trees, then, that leads me on? But how can a
god of trees be more powerful than the god of lightning or the god
of the floods or even the god of sharp-toothed cats? No, trees are
simply tools the god has used. The god flings trees about as easily
as I fling a javelin.
Gradually, over many days, the rains eased a bit, falling in steady
showers instead of sheets. Off to his left, he could see that the
plain was rising upcloser and closer to the smooth shelf along which
he ran. On the first clear morning he saw that there was no more
distant shining on the still waters of the Salty Sea--the plain was
now higher than the level of that water; he had behind the only sea
that the Derku people had ever seen. The Heaving Sea lay yet ahead,
and so he ran on.
The plain was quite high, but he was still far enough above it that
he could see the shining when it came again on a clear morning. He
had left one sea behind, and now, with the ground much higher, there
was another sea. Could this be it, the Heaving Sea?
He left the shelf and headed across the savannah toward the water.
He did not reach it that day, but on the next afternoon he stood on
the shore and knew that this was not the place he had been looking
for. The water was far smaller than the Salty Sea, smaller even than
the Sweetwater Sea up in the mountains from which the Selud River
flowed. And yet when he dipped his finger into the water and tasted
it, it WAS a little salty. Almost sweet, but salty nonetheless. Not
good for drinking. That was obvious from the lack of animal tracks
around the water. It must usually be saltier than this, thought
Glogmeriss. It must have been freshened somewhat by the rains.
Instead of returning to his path along the shelf by the route he had
followed to get to this small sea, Glogmeriss struck out due south.
He could see the shelf in the distance, and could see that by
running south he would rejoin the level path a good way farther
along.
As he crossed a small stream, he saw animal prints again, and among
them the prints of human feet. Many feet, and they were fresher than
any of the animal prints. So fresh, in fact, that for all Glogmeriss
knew they could be watching him right now. If he stumbled on them
suddenly, they might panic, seeing a man as large as he was. And in
this place what would they know of the Derku people? No raiders had
ever come this far in search of captives, he was sure. That meant
that they wouldn't necessarily hate him--but they wouldn't fear
retribution from his tribe, either. No, the best course was for him
to turn back and avoid them.
But a god was protecting him, and besides, he had been without the
sound of a human voice for so many days. If he did not carry any of
his javelins, but left them all slung on his back, they would know
he meant no harm and they would not fear him. So there at the
stream, he bent over, slipped off the rope holding his javelins, and
untied them to bind them all together.
As he was working, he heard a sound and knew without looking that he
had been found. Perhaps they HAD been watching him all along. His
first thought was to pick up his javelins and prepare for battle.
But he did not know how many they were, or whether they were all
around him, and in the dense brush near the river he might be
surrounded by so many that they could overwhelm him easily, even if
he killed one or two. For a moment he thought, The god protects me,
I could kill them all. But then he rejected that idea. He had killed
nothing on this journey, not even for meat, eating only the grain he
carried with him and such berries and fruits and roots and greens
and mushrooms as he found along the way. Should he begin now,
killing when he knew nothing about these people? Perhaps meeting
them was what the god had brought him here to do.
So a slowly, carefully finished binding the javelins and then slung
them up onto his shoulder, being careful never to hold the javelins
in a way that might make his watcher or watchers think that he was
making them ready for battle. Then, his hands empty and his weapons
bound to his back, he splashed through the stream and followed the
many footprints on the far side.
He could hear feet padding along behind him--more than one person,
too, from the sound. They might be coming up behind him to kill him,
but it didn't sound as if they were trying to overtake him, or to be
stealthy, either. They must know that he could hear them. But
perhaps they thought he was very stupid. He had to show them that he
did not turn to fight them because he did not want to fight, and not
because he was stupid or afraid.
To show them he was not afraid, he began to sing the song of the dog
who danced with a man, which was funny and had a jaunty tune. And to
show them he knew they were there, he bent over as he walked,
scooped up a handful of damp soil, and flung it lightly over his
shoulder.
The sound of sputtering outrage told him that the god had guided his
lump of mud right to its target. He stopped and turned to find four
men following him, one of whom was brushing dirt out of his face,
cursing loudly. The others looked uncertain whether to be angry at
Glogmeriss for flinging dirt at them or afraid of him because he was
so large and strange and unafraid.
Glogmeriss didn't want them to be either afraid or angry. So he let
a slow smile come to his face, not a smile of derision, but rather a
friendly smile that said, I mean no harm. To reinforce this idea, he
held his hands out wide, palms facing the strangers.
They understood him, and perhaps because of his smile began to see
the humor in the situation. They smiled, too, and then, because the
one who was hit with dirt was still complaining and trying to get it
out of his eyes, they began to laugh at him. Glogmeriss laughed with
them, but then walked slowly toward his victim and, carefully
letting them all see what he was doing, took his waterbag from his
waist and untied it a little, showing them that water dropped from
it. They uttered something in an ugly-sounding language and the one
with dirt in his eyes stopped, leaned his head back, and stoically
allowed Glogmeriss to bathe his eyes with water.
When at last, dripping and chagrined, the man could see again,
Glogmeriss flung an arm across his shoulder like a comrade, and then
reached out for the man who seemed to be the leader. After a
moment's hesitation, the man allowed Glogmeriss the easy embrace,
and together they walked toward the main body of the tribe, the
other two walking as closely as possible, behind and ahead, talking
to Glogmeriss even though he made it plain that he did not
understand.
When they reached the others they were busy building a cookfire. All
who could, left their tasks and came to gawk at the giant stranger.
While the men who had found him recounted the tale, others came and
touched Glogmeriss, especially his strong arms and chest, and his
loincloth as well, since none of the men wore any kind of clothing.
Glogmeriss viewed this with disgust. It was one thing for little
boys to run around naked, but he knew that men should keep their
privates covered so they wouldn't get dirty. What woman would let
her husband couple with her, if he let any kind of filth get on his
javelin?
Of course, these men were all so ugly that no woman would want them
anyway, and the women were so ugly that the only men who would want
them would be these. Perhaps ugly people don't care about keeping
themselves clean, thought Glogmeriss. But the women wore naprons
made of woven grass, which looked softer than the beaten reeds that
the Derku wove. So it wasn't that these people didn't know how to
make cloth, or that the idea of wearing clothing had never occurred
to them. The men were simply filthy and stupid, Glogmeriss decided.
And the women, while not as filthy, must be just as stupid or they