1.3
Manuah’s home was also on a hill, of sorts, although it really only lifted his view enough to see over the whitewashed rooftops of his neighbors. Still, he liked looking out at them. A few industrious people kept potted plants on their roofs—melons and squashes and even the occasional date palm. Some kept dogs up there, who would bark and bark into the night. A few had roof chairs for enjoying the view and the night sky, and some even kept beds and chamber pots. Even the more boring houses, with nothing but whitewash on top, had a certain worldly charm to them that could not be found anywhere else.
Greater than any town or village, The City had laws requiring the ground floor of all buildings to be constructed of stone and sealed in at least a token coating of plaster. The roof planks must be a full hand wide and half a hand thick, and sealed with either plaster or earthen daub. The idea was that a second story could be built upon the first without the whole thing collapsing—a problem that had plagued The City in its early days, and still plagued the mud-brick towns of Larasha and Shifpar up north along the river.
But an unexpected side effect was to make buildings so expensive that few citizens could afford a second story anyway. Often it was the work of two of three generations to put up a proper house in the first place! Ah, but then even in the damp sea air that structure might easily last another ten generations, or twenty, or until the end of time; nobody really knew. Manuah had always liked the idea that The City might stand here forever, but lately he was having a harder time believing that, and his audience with Sraddah had done nothing to lift his spirits.
The best view in the house was from the kitchen, and there he found his wife, Emzananti, engaged in her favorite pastime: cooking. At the moment, she was chopping onions into a cold clay pan full of tallow, fishmeat, and shucked, breaded clams.
* * *
Here, finally, Harv Leonel saw something here that actually looked stone-age; the knife Emzananti used was a triangle of flaked obsidian, fitted into a wooden handle and wrapped tightly with rawhide. Probably glued in place as well, with some tree resin or animal-collagen adhesive. Her feet, too, were clad in extremely simple sandals: just a flat oval of leather with a bifurcated strap between the toes and tied back behind the ankle, like flip-flops designed by a child. The men also wore sandals, but theirs were sturdier and more complex, perhaps because they needed to run and climb and fight in them. Harv supposed some of the other women he’d seen on the streets were shod like Emzananti, but he hadn’t really been paying attention. Quite a few of them had been barefoot, and that had drawn his eye much more strongly. The women’s clothing, including Emzananti’s, was also weirdly plain. It seemed the men in this society were the peacocks, or perhaps there were (again) functional aspects to their more ornate clothing that were not apparent.
* * *
“Oh, yum,” Manuah said, kissing her cheek. Fried clams were his very favorite, and nobody cooked them like Emzananti. Still, he chided her:
“My most darling darling, there’s enough there to feed a household for days. You’re cooking for the servants!”
She turned and smiled at him, just for a moment, with reddened, tear-filled eyes, and then went back to her oniony work. “The servants can clean the bowls, and wash all the juice off your robe.”
“I’m not a messy eater,” he protested.
“With fried clams? Really?” She snorted in a most un-ladylike manner. Then: “How was your meeting?”
“Mmm.”
“Not good?”
“Mmm. Let’s talk about something else.”
She continued chopping, but now somehow reproachfully. “You keep saying The City is in danger. Not talking about it will not make it go away.”
“Fine,” he said, gathering his thoughts. “The king refuses to provide funds for rebuilding the sea walls. He has given permission for me to rebuild them on my own, which of course would beggar our family.” He spread his arms. “Shall I dismantle this house?”
“And why would you do that?”
“I need blocks, woman. Stone blocks. Even the best mud bricks wouldn’t last a week in the ocean.”
“Do the blocks need to be whole?” she asked, still not looking up from her onions. “Cutting stone is messy work, and not very forgiving.”
“Huh,” Manuah said. She was right about that; depending on the quality of the stone, a mason might finish as few as half the blocks he began. Half of those might be suitable as street cobbles, but the rest were sledded away as rubble, to be hammered by rope-ganged criminals into various grades of gravel, with which the mud-brick towns paved their own streets. Manuah had sailed upriver with more loads of gravel than he could count! But it was an interesting thought, because while blocks had value, and gravel had value, the masons actually paid to have their rubble piles sledded away. Not very much, of course, but if Manu were to haul it for free…
He laughed. “Well, that just might just work. Rubble wouldn’t be as sturdy—it would break the waves, but only slow the currents. But perhaps that’s enough. Especially if there’s a buildup of silt.”
“So I’m a genius, then?”
“Perhaps.”
“And I’ve saved The City and all the people who dwell in it?”
He chuckled. “Perhaps.”
“And tonight you will reward me for it?”
To this he couldn’t resist saying “Perhaps” again, but he hugged her around the waist, and kissed her neck. Engaged as children, they’d been married at the seemly age of fifteen, and had loved each other well enough. Three live sons and two dead daughters later, they still loved each other well enough, and while Emzananti’s body did not seem inclined to produce any more children, she still enjoyed the occasional attempt. Which was more luck than many couples had, and for this Manuah was grateful.
Changing the subject, he told her, “I need to travel tomorrow. The weavers in Surapp Great Town should have a load of byssa cloth for me by now, and I’m going to need that to pay for the caulking on the new boat.”
“Hmm!” Emzananti exclaimed. “Will you save me a bit?”
Byssa cloth was by far the most precious cargo Manuah ever hauled, and he trusted it to no one but himself. A woven textile, it was thinner and lighter and softer and slipperier than anything else in all the world. It didn’t take color very readily, so mostly it was brown or orange or yellow, and many fine gentlemen wore linen and cotton robes dyed to these same hues, to make themselves look finer still. But byssa was made from the feet-webs of pinnid sea snails, and between the harvesting of the pinnids, the drying and wrapping of the fibers, the setting of the looms and the actual weaving itself, a cubit of the fabric could cost as much as an entire bale of linen, and a bale of it (the largest amount Manuah had ever seen) was worth an entire boatload of linen. Sewing and embroidering it required special skill as well, so a byssa robe could cost as much as the boat that had hauled it east from Surapp.
“All right,” Manuah told her, making a show of reluctance. “And a golden fleece as well.”
“Oh, my. The heart flutters!”
Far north of the land where the Great Sea ended, there were magic streams where the women would lay down ram’s fleeces for a month or two, and the fleeces would turn to gold. Manuah had doubted the rumors until he saw the fleeces for himself; they took on a yellow hue that glittered with countless tiny flecks and sparkles. It warmed him to know that this kind of magic could really exist in the world. Of course, golden fleeces were not as valuable as byssa cloth (and they, too, could be roughly imitated with yellow dye and mica sands), but they were more than valuable enough to be worth the trip. In this case, he didn’t even have to go all the way to the world’s end; he’d received word that some foreign stranger had made that journey, and all Manuah had to do was get there before the new moon, and offer a better price than anyone in Surapp Great Town, and he could claim virtually the entire shipment.
Emzananti was not a greedy woman, nor one who drew attention to herself with garish, mannish clothing. He wasn’t sure what she wanted with these items, other than perhaps to make a wedding coat for their middle son, Hamurma. But that was her business, and in any case, it wasn’t lost on her that Manuah stood to make a great profit from this rather short voyage, or that he planned to invest the entire profit into tree rosins, asphalt, birch tar and oil sands with which to caulk his newest boat. Four layers of caulk! He’d been talking about it for weeks, ever since the hull had started taking shape, and the wooden decking was laid down. This would be the largest boat in his fleet—perhaps the largest boat in the world—and sealing it against the corrosive ocean was not going to be cheap. But the alternative was to let the thing slowly rot out from under him, like a common fisherman. This he would not do.
“I’m going to bring Hamurma with me this time,” he told her. “He’s overdue for his first voyage.”
“As you wish,” Emzananti said, equably enough. Indeed, the boy was nearly fifteen, and though he was already captaining Manuah’s smallest boat for measurement trips, back and forth across the harbor with a weighted sounding rope, he needed a better profession than that if he was to marry well. Manuah could let him man the steering oar on the way out and the sail on the way back, and thus acquaint him with the real ocean. If they hit bad weather, he’d move the boy to a paddling bench. He was a fine paddler, strong and with good form, and what he lacked in endurance he more than made up for in determination. When the wind was too weak or too strong, it took six paddlers to drive one of Manuah’s boats, or eight if you really wanted to get anywhere, and they needed to be tough men.
Or women; Manuah actually had three of them in his crews—spinsters almost Emzananti’s age—and while they weren’t quite as large or as strong as the men, they tended to be very good about staying synchronized, or setting the pace if they were in front. They were tough as well, in a female sort of way—sun-shriveled and leathery and sharp-tongued when crossed. They didn’t eat as much as the men, or weigh as much, but they also didn’t generate as much force against ocean waves, and there was the unseemly issue of performing bodily functions in front of the men, so he tended to keep them in the harbor or on very short trips upriver.
Truth be told, Hamurma wasn’t much stronger than the women at this time, but that would come with practice.
“Does he have a good raincoat? Just in case?”
“Good enough for now, yes. It’s Sharama’s old one, and he’ll wear it to rags before he outgrows it. Jyaphethti will need a brand new one when he’s old enough to sail, but I think we can afford it.”
“Hmm.” Manuah knew she was right, but a jacket of stiff, waxed wool did not come cheap, and thrift was a family tradition. Where money did get spent, it was generally in the service of making more money! On the other foot, it was bad business to let his sons be seen in rags, or to let them catch their death of cold, or to disregard the advice of Emzananti, whom his parents had engaged him to largely on account of her cleverness.
He considered telling her that King Sraddah was planning to attack her childhood home in Surapp Great Town, but thought better of it for several reasons. First, because they would be in and out long before Sraddah’s army got anywhere close. Second, because Sraddah might regard that fact as a military secret, and might take an extremely dim view of Manuah blabbing about it, even to his own wife. Third, because it would cause her to worry more than she already did. Oh, she hid it well, but what mother could be complacent about watching her sons depart for the open ocean, much less for war?
Changing the subject again, he said: “Where is Sharama? I’ll need him to take charge of the seawalls while I’m gone.”
“I believe he’s crabbing. He was carrying traps when he left this morning.”
“Again? Damn it, he won’t rest until all my boats reek of fish. I’ll have to sell my cloth to cooks and clammers!” He was partly joking, but also genuinely annoyed. This was a conversation he’d had with his eldest son more than once. He hadn’t strictly forbidden fishing and crabbing from his boats when they were idle, but he’d pointed out logically all the problems associated with it, and trusted Sharama to draw the right conclusions. But Sharama was nineteen, and had a wife to impress, and harbor crabs brought in good money.
* * *
Here, Harv Leonel felt some confusion, because money was a thing very much on the mind of Manuah Hasis, but Harv had yet to see any coinage, or any formal system for recording transactions or savings. Kingdom clearly had a barter system, where goods had fixed values in relation to one another—ten chickens to a goat, ten goats to a cow, et cetera—but there also seemed to be some nebulous concept of credit that Harv couldn’t quite pin down. These people must have good memories and a high level of trust, so that Manuah could worry about “money” without having any way to store it. Without even translating the concept into specific numbers or goods.
And again Harv felt a touch of smugness, because this system, too, was primitive and silly—hardly the stuff of civilization. And on the heels of that, he felt a wave of protective worry, because the assholes on Wall Street could bankrupt Kingdom in a month by figuring out which animals had the best calorie-to-value ratio or flavor-to-growth-speed ratio, and then executing a series of increasingly rigged trades. No one here had figured this out yet, but that didn’t mean no one could. And the fact was, Harv was an amateur historian of sorts, and Kingdom was simply not a part of any historical record he’d ever come across. Something had laid these people low, and erased them from history, and their society seemed increasingly brittle to his modern sensibilities. What did they do about fires? Plagues? Floods? They were, in some ways, like babies not yet toddling—unaware of pain or the possibility of harm.
But they were clever. With no real history of their own to fall back on, without horses or wheels or bronze tools, they’d nevertheless figured out how to build a great stone city, with paved roads and gutters, with towers and sea walls and firmly established trade centers. This place was the size of a major international airport, or twenty big shopping malls. Stone age, indeed.
* * *
“It might be a ploy,” Emzananti pointed out. “Sharama’s been wanting his own boat for quite a while now; this may be his way of telling you. You had one at his age, if I recall.”
“Yes, well, stinking up my boats isn’t getting him any closer to my heart. Or my money.”
“Well, then perhaps he’s saving up to buy his own. How many crabs would he have to sell?”
“A lot. Confound it. If we can’t stop him crabbing, let’s at least have him put the catch in pots rather than baskets. Will he be home for dinner?”
“I would think so,” she said. “You can lecture him then. Or have a real conversation; it’s your choice.”
With a bow drill, a plank and some wood shavings, she deftly started a little kindling fire and gently set it into the stove—a slab of slate over a square fire pit, with a square hole though the outer wall of the house serving as a sort of chimney. Her motions were as quick and as natural as chopping vegetables; something she barely needed to think about. She then carefully piled sticks into the pit, and set the clay pan on top of the slab.
Being the daughter of an aristocratic family, she also possessed a burning crystal—a type of rock that was as clear as water, and shaped by magicians so that it was capable of transmuting the light of the sun back into the fire that had spawned it. It was one of her most prized possessions, inherited from her mother and easily worth as much as a new boat. Manuah felt it was impractical and a waste of good magic, but Emzananti had been known to light a little torch with it and carry the torch indoors to the kitchen, just to prove a point. She also owned a thing called a fire tube which involved a hollowed out cylinder of wood and a thin, greased wooden plug and a little dab of wood dust, that somehow created fire without friction. It was an amazing device, and possibly also magical, but it required a lot of patience to operate correctly, and was really more of a hobby than an actual utensil. She had experimented with sulfur and sandstone as well, on the rumor that these could also produce fire, but she’d never gotten it to work. Emzananti loved her fire starters, but eleven times out of twelve she settled for the bow drill like any laborer’s wife.
“You know,” Manuah said, “you could just bang two flints together like a wildman.”
“Oh, hush.”
“You could cook like one, too. They drop their pots into an open fire, and lift them out with gloves and rods. Everything is roasted or boiled, or sometimes steamed. They don’t fry anything, and since they never have salt, they load everything up with fennel and garlic.”
“Nauseating,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
“It’s not the only nauseating thing they do.”
She held up a hand. “Enough, husband. You seem bored. If this is what a day off the water does to you, then it’s good you’re voyaging tomorrow. The sun doesn’t set for another three hurta; why don’t you go find a stone mason and get your son some rubble for his new project?”