Stone spring

15

They walked every day, Novu and his owner, the trader Chona, at a steady, ground-eating pace, following water courses and well-worn tracks, generally following the river north from Jericho. Sometimes they even walked by night.

Generally they walked in silence. In fact Novu got more slaps from Chona, stinging blows on the back of the head, than he did words, for every time he got something wrong, a slap. He quickly learned what was wrong and what was right.

And for the first few days, as he shuffled along in the filthy old skins Chona had given him, a heavy pack on his back, Novu was hobbled by bark rope tied tightly around his ankles.

Novu was a town boy. He had never walked far in his life. He had boots, but his soft feet blistered. Every joint seemed to ache as he shifted the mass of the pack, trying to favour one shoulder and then the other. The hobble made it much worse. He couldn’t make Chona’s big strides; he had to make two steps for every one of Chona’s, and he felt perpetually out of breath. He didn’t have a knife, but his hands were free, and he could unpick the knots – but they were tied expertly and he would need time, which Chona, ever vigilant, was never going to give him. But he longed to be free of the hobble, and to be able to stretch his legs.

Sometimes Chona stayed the night with those he traded with. But Novu always had to stay outside, huddled under a skin or a lean-to. Such people didn’t live as Novu had in Jericho, but in communities of a few dozen people, in houses that might be shaped like bricks or like pears or like cowpats, maybe with a few herded goats and a scrap of cultivated wheat. They could be very strange, these isolated folks – people who went naked or with feathers sticking up from their topknots, or who tattooed themselves and their children red and black all over, or who stretched their necks or ear lobes or their lower lips, or who wore bones through their cheeks and necks. Chona said it was possible that traders like himself were the only strangers these people ever saw. No wonder they were odd.

It was worse when they stayed out in the country, away from people altogether. Chona carried skins in his backpack, remarkably light and supple, that he would use to make lean-tos in stands of trees. It wasn’t long before he had taught Novu how to make a dry and warm shelter.

But when the dark came Novu always found himself curling up in the dirt like an animal in its den. It was not like being at home, snug in the belly of Jericho with the warm bodies of hundreds of people all around him. Here he was outside, and there was nothing around him but the wind, and the howls of distant wild dogs – and, occasionally, the snuffling and tread of some curious visitor in the dark. At times even the rope tether by which Chona attached Novu to himself at night was a comfort, of sorts.

Every day he was taken further away from Jericho. But in a way he was glad of it, glad when after the first few days they got far enough from Jericho that there was no chance of encountering anybody who might know him, and laugh at his shame – or, worse, turn away in pity. After many days of walking they came to a lake. Chona had Novu make camp in a stand of willow, while he sat and bathed his bare feet in the stagnant water at the lake’s edge.

‘So,’ Chona said at length. ‘Do you know where you are?’ He spoke in Novu’s own tongue, his words lightly accented.

Novu had tried to follow the route, with the vague idea of running back home if he got away. After the first couple of days he had run out of familiar landmarks, and since then he knew only that they had kept moving north. He admitted, ‘No.’

‘Good.’ Chona, sitting on the ground, was a slim silhouette in the light of the low sun that reflected from the still water. He looked calm and strong. ‘Now, if you ever got away from me, you’d run south, trying to get back to Jericho.’

Novu shrugged. That seemed obvious.

‘But if you did flee, I’d run you down easily. Even if you had a day’s head start. You know that, don’t you?’

‘I suppose-’

‘And when I did catch you, I’d hamstring you. Do you know what that means? Probably just one leg. You could walk with a crutch. You could still make bricks. But you’d never run anywhere ever again. Do you believe me?’

‘Yes. Yes, I believe you.’

Chona folded his legs under him, stood easily, and came over to where Novu was sitting. He dug a stone blade from a fold of his tunic. The boy flinched back, but Chona bent down, and held the blade to the rope hobble at Novu’s ankles. ‘Then we understand each other.’ He cut the attaching rope with a single swipe of the blade. ‘Get those bands off your ankles, and bathe your feet. Then go catch some fish.’ He coughed, wiped his nose on the back of his hand, and walked away.

After that they walked on, still as master and slave, Novu still bearing the bulk of the load. But now at least they went side by side, for Novu, without the hobble, was able to keep up with Chona’s long stride, and Chona no longer bothered with the demeaning tether at night.

Novu got less things wrong, and less slaps to the back of the head. Chona helped Novu repair his soft town boots when they started to wear out. He even taught him a few words in the traders’ tongue, which he said was spoken from one end of the Continent to the other.

And he began to talk more openly to Novu.

One night he sketched a kind of plan of his world in riverside mud. ‘Here is Jericho, at the eastern end of a great ocean that runs far to the west. There are lands to the north of the ocean, lands to the south, as you see. I know little of what lies south, but to the north there are many people, much trading to be done. A vast, vast area. This is the land we call the Continent.’

Novu was used to drawings and plans; they were used all the time in Jericho in building work. But he had no clear idea of what an ‘ocean’ was, or how far this body of water stretched. It was only when Chona used his thumb to indicate how far they had walked in comparison that he began to grasp its scale.

‘That ocean’s huge.’

‘Yes,’ Chona said. ‘But I, and other traders, walk its coasts, and have seen the gates of rock in the far west where it opens out into a greater ocean still. Now, I had been thinking of taking you to the north, here…’ This was a fat peninsula between the middle ocean to the south, and a lesser sea, still a great body in its own right, to the north. ‘There are communities that live like you do in Jericho. All heaped up in boxes of mud. There, I am sure, your skills as a brickmaker will be worthy of trading – if your father wasn’t lying about you.’

Novu said hotly, ‘My father lies about many things, but not about that.’

‘But the year is wakening.’ He waved his hand over the sketched Continent. ‘The trade routes are opening. There are many mountains and forests in the way, but rivers span the Continent east to west, north to south. Trade flows along these great channels, as sap rises in a tree in spring, as the blood flows in a young man’s cock. Hah! There are great gatherings here and here, where the rivers rise or cross, and much business can be done.’ The places he indicated with stabs of his muddy finger were dauntingly far to the west. ‘These gatherings are soon. I would go there. You can carry my trade goods there, and my bounty back. Then, in the autumn, I will return you to the villages of mud and brick and find somebody who will trade for your skill.’

Novu grunted. ‘You use me as my people use cattle, with heavy goods laden on their backs.’

‘I use you any way I choose,’ Chona snapped. ‘Anyway, by the autumn you will be in better condition. Less of this flab.’ He poked Novu’s belly, not hard. Novu flinched back.

In the morning, they walked on. Day by day, with the steady walking and his sleep deepened by exhaustion, Novu felt his body changing, growing more lean, the soles of his feet toughening, the muscles of his legs tightening. Once he glimpsed his reflection in a flat pond. His face had grown dark in the sun, dark and tough like Chona’s.

He wouldn’t say he liked Chona; he was too alien for that. But he came to admire the man’s self-reliance, his inner strength, his composure, his competence. And now that he was over the shock of his departure he had no desire to go back to Jericho, save on his own terms. He didn’t even have any wish for revenge over his father, who, now he thought back, struck him as a murky, worm-like figure, wriggling and jostling with other worms in the crowded, worked-over dirt of the town.

But he was wary of Chona. For one thing he was aware of the way Chona looked at him, at times, when he was washing, or walked ahead. He’d seen Chona’s lust for his cousin Minda. The two of them were alone much of the time, sometimes spending days without seeing another human being. Novu had no wish to be the object of that angry passion.

And then there was the coughing. It was getting worse; sometimes it woke Chona in the night, and then Novu. Clearly Chona was growing ill. Maybe he’d caught something back at Jericho. If so, Novu didn’t want to share it.

Life could be worse. In many ways Novu’s life back at Jericho had been worse than this. But Novu knew that if he ever got the slightest chance he would get away from Chona. If he had to kill the man, he would do it.