Stone spring

9

Chona had no idea how Magho found his way through the muddle to his home; all the houses looked the same to him, just heaps of mud brick rising up in the midden-like town like ugly brown poppies.

Magho brushed aside a gap in the wall covered by a mat of reeds, and led Chona down earthen steps into a kind of pit dug down beneath the level of the ground. Rush mats had been scattered on the ground. A fire burned in a central hearth, banked up and not giving off much smoke, but even so the air was dense and hot. Most of the daylight was shut out, and the house was like a cave. The faecal stink outside was alleviated a bit, but in here there was a more complex aroma of stale food, farts, baby milk, sweat, and a disturbing, almost sweet smell of profound rot.

Two women sat, cross-legged, tying knots in some kind of twine. They wore smocks dyed bright green, with their legs left bare. Chona knew one must be Magho’s wife, but he couldn’t tell which. And three children were here, one older boy who sat sullen against a wall with his legs drawn up against his chest, and two little ones who played with toy mud bricks on the floor. All this Chona glimpsed in the light that leaked through the reed thatch roof.

Magho clapped his hands. ‘Out! Come on, I need to talk to my friend here. Not you, Novu, you little snot,’ and he pointed a finger at the older boy, who didn’t look up.

The women, looking weary, rolled up their twine, gathered their toddlers, and pushed past Chona. The second was much younger than the first, perhaps a younger sister. She was a plump little thing with bare legs, wide innocent eyes, and full breasts whose weight showed through her loose smock.

He felt a stir of interest in his loins. He had been on the road a while. Jericho was a place where the ancient balance between man and woman, of which he had witnessed all manner of variants in his travels, was tipped firmly in the man’s favour. Here a woman hardly dared even speak without a man’s permission. And certainly the body of a female relative would be within Magho’s gift. It would depend how badly Magho wanted Chona’s goods, of course, and how protective he felt of the girl. He might even have his eye on her as a second wife himself – Chona couldn’t remember, nor did he care, what the marriage rules were here. If so, Magho might not want her spoiled. And spoiled she would be, Chona thought, indulging in a faint reverie, if he got his hands on her. As with all things in the human world, it just depended who wanted what, and how badly. Those innocent eyes…

For now he had to concentrate, as Magho was beckoning him to the mats. ‘Sit down, sit down.’ Magho offered him food. ‘Here, have some meat, this is pickled and spiced, have some bread.’

Chona dropped his pack by the door and propped his walking staff up against a wall. He kept his blade hidden at his left side, however. Magho was a harmless sort, but you never knew, and he didn’t much like the look of the boy sitting against the wall. He stepped cautiously through the house’s clutter of clothes and bits of food and clay pots, making for Magho on his mats. Niches had been cut into the dried mud of the bricks in the wall, and small artefacts stood here, like sculptures of human heads, with bulging eyes and flaring nostrils and protruding tongues done in bright ochre paint. Chona knew from his previous visits that these were in fact real heads, the flensed skulls of honoured ancestors coated in mud and painted. Chona never liked to meet the eyes of these ancients, who he imagined might know the deals he was trying to strike all too well.

Magho cracked open one of his loaves, digging big earthy fingers into the thick crust, and tore off a piece to hand to Chona.

The trader bit into it. This ‘bread’, another word Chona had learned here, did fill your stomach, but it was like eating dry wood, and he knew that the coarse gritty stuff wore your teeth down if you ate too much of it.

Chewing, he sat on the mat Magho had indicated, crossing his legs. But something pale pushed out of the dirt before his mat. It was a skull embedded in the ground, its jaws gaping, dust sifting in its eye sockets.

The boy saw him flinch, and laughed. He was perhaps sixteen. He was wearing a robe not unlike his mother’s, not of hide but of woven vegetable fibre, dyed a bright green. ‘Nothing to be afraid of, trader man. It’s just another grandfather, wearing his way out of the ground. We bury our dead in the ground under our houses where the worms can cleanse their bones. So you’re sitting on a big old heap of corpses. No wonder it stinks of rot in here – that’s what you’re thinking, aren’t you?’

‘Shut up, Novu,’ his father said. Chona was startled at the change in his voice. Where he had treated the women with indifference, there was real hatred in his tone towards the boy.

But Novu kept talking. ‘The last trader we had in here was just the same. He threw up in the piss-pot-’

Magho leaned over and punched the boy in the side of the head. Novu went sprawling. ‘I told you to shut up! And if you did what I told you, you wouldn’t be in this plight now, would you?’ Magho took a deep breath, his massive chest expanding. Then he sat up and turned to Chona, his smile returning. ‘Don’t worry about that. I caught him above the hairline. The bruise won’t show.’

Chona watched the boy rise, cautiously, rubbing his head. He wondered why the father thought Chona would care. And why, if the boy angered his father so much, he was keeping him here in the house during this meeting. ‘He doesn’t bother me, Magho. He’s just a child.’

‘A child? A child-man, and that’s all he’ll ever be, I fear. The gods know he’s a difficult one. Here, try some of this tea.’ He handed Chona a clay bowl of hot, steaming green liquid. ‘We’ve business to do.’ He glanced over at Chona’s pack. ‘I take it you have what I want.’

Chona allowed himself to smile. ‘I wouldn’t be here otherwise, my friend.’ He leaned over and unfolded his pack. In with the bits of sky-fallen iron and shaped flint and fragments of reindeer bone carved into elusive fish and lumbering bears, he had tucked small parcels wrapped in the softest doe skin. He made a show of unwrapping them slowly. Magho all but drooled.

Small, precious items, bartered across the Continent, were Chona’s stock in trade. Not for him the heavy work of trading meat or grain, or sacks of unworked flint. What he liked to carry were treasures valuable far beyond their size and weight – and the further from their source you took them the more valuable they became. The fragments of obsidian he unwrapped now, taken from sites in a mountain range far from here, were among the most valuable of all.

He handed Magho one of the smaller pieces. Magho turned the black, shining rock over in his hands, his eyes wide, his mouth a dark circle. ‘I take it you have better examples,’ he breathed.

‘Oh, yes. All from the finest source in the known world. And all yours, if-’

‘If I can pay.’ Magho let out his throaty laugh. ‘I do like you, Chona. Well, I like all traders. At least you’re honest, which is more than can be said for most people in this wretched world.’

‘That particular piece would make a fine axe-head,’ Chona said. ‘Or perhaps something more abstract. An amulet-’

‘Oh, I’ll leave that to the experts,’ Magho said. ‘There’s a man on the other side of town, called Fless, very old now, about forty and half-blind, but he works stone as you wouldn’t believe. My way is simply to give him such pieces as this, and let him see what lies within the stone, see with his cataract-blighted eyes, and then tease it out, flake by flake with his bits of bone.’ He mimed a fine pressing. ‘Marvellous to see him work, with those twisted-up hands and his milky eyes. Yes, he’s the man. If I can get his time, if somebody hasn’t stolen him away.’

Chona took back the obsidian scrap, and handed him another piece. ‘I’m sure what Fless makes of these pieces would dazzle your friends like rays of the sun…’

This was the odd part of trading with the men of Jericho. Everywhere in the world you found men, and sometimes women, of power, who accumulated wealth – maybe trinkets, maybe more functional items like tools or food. But everywhere else you showed off your power by giving your treasure away: the more you had to give, the greater you were. In Jericho’s elaborate, layered society men strutted and showed off what they owned, be it women and children, goats and stores of grain – and pointless, purposeless trinkets. Your status came from what you kept to yourself, not what you gave away.

Well, Chona didn’t care. He never judged a man he traded with. Magho could wipe his arse on his precious obsidian for all Chona cared – as long as Chona got a fair price first.

But the boy, Novu, still nursing his head, snorted his contempt at Chona’s manipulation.

Magho handed back the stone. ‘Let’s do business. How many pieces?’

‘A dozen. I’ll show you the rest when we have a deal.’

Magho nodded. ‘Very well. So let me show you what I have to trade…’ He produced a figurine of a pregnant woman, carved of the tooth of some sea creature, quite fine. And a whistle made from the bone of a bird, delicately carved, so small you would need a child’s fingers to stop its holes, and yet fully functional, Magho assured him. And a bit of iron, small but one of the purest pieces Chona had ever seen. Magho evidently knew Chona’s preference for small, portable treasures, and with one piece after another he built up an array on the rush mat.

Chona kept his face like stone, merely nodding politely. Some of this was impressive, and in the loose map of the Continent he carried in his head he calculated where he might make a decent profit on each of these pieces. Still, when Magho was done arraying his treasures Chona was disappointed. He would win out of the deal, of course, but not as much as he had hoped.

‘I have to be honest, Magho. I’d love to do business with you, you know that. But I’d have to haul away a sack full of pieces like these to compensate me for my obsidian.’

Magho’s face fell, but Chona wasn’t fooled; Magho, while clearly wanting the obsidian, was an experienced trader too. ‘Perhaps we could come to some arrangement. If I could choose the best four or six of your pieces-’

‘I wouldn’t want to break up the set. That way, if I need to take it elsewhere in the town, I’ll have a much better chance of a sale.’ That was true enough, and a subtle threat to take the hoard to one of Magho’s deadly social rivals.

‘I know what will make him cough up the obsidian,’ said Novu, the son, still cradling his head, but speaking slyly. ‘I saw the way he looked at Minda. Give him a bit of time alone with her and-’

This time the blow he received from his father was to the back of his neck. The boy recoiled, obviously shocked.

‘I apologise again for the boy,’ Magho said. ‘But… Minda.’ He grinned at Chona. ‘You couldn’t help noticing her, and I couldn’t help noticing you. Fifteen years old and sweet as a peach. Virgin, of course.’

‘Your wife’s sister?’

‘Niece, actually. Promised to another. I couldn’t help you there, my friend. And besides I already owe my wife’s brother, her father, a favour.’

Chona shook his head. ‘I have no interest in the girl,’ he lied, but he hoped it didn’t show. ‘We were speaking of trade.’

‘Yes, yes.’ Magho eyed him, and Chona realised he was about to come to the nub of his offer. ‘I do have one more item for you to consider. Something unusual – I merely ask you to have an open mind.’

‘What item?’

Magho stood, heavily. And he reached over, grabbed his son by the scruff of the neck, and hauled him to his feet. ‘This!’

Novu, obviously dizzy from the blows he had taken, whimpered, staggering. ‘Father? What are you doing?’

‘He’s no use to me,’ Magho said. ‘Far more trouble than he’s worth. But in the right hands he could be invaluable.’

‘I don’t take slaves.’ Chona was confused by the whole situation. ‘Invaluable how?’

‘He can make bricks,’ Magho said, almost proudly. ‘You’ve seen them being baked on the hillside yonder. There’s something of an art to it, you know, getting the right proportion of mud and straw and water, mixing them just so, drying them. Get it wrong and they crumble in your hands. Get it right and they last for ever, nearly. This boy has the knack of doing it. Ask anybody, it’s a gift of the gods, it’s nothing to do with me. I mean, he’s useless at everything else.’

Chona snorted. ‘Bricks might seem valuable to you. But this is an unusual place, where bricks are prized. You know that.’

‘But not unique. Come on, man, I’ve heard you talk. There are towns in the north and west-’

‘Far from here. Many days’ walk.’

‘You’re not going to have to carry him there, are you? You can walk him to wherever you want to sell him. He can even carry your pack for you.’

‘Why do you want rid of him, Magho?’

Magho glared at the boy. ‘Because of an incident that won’t make any difference to you. He’s a thief. He took a jade piece I particularly treasured, and hid it. I won’t have a thief in my house. I can’t afford it. A man in my position in this town-’

Novu protested, ‘You told mother you forgave me for that!’

‘So I lied. You’re no son of mine. You don’t have to sell him for making bricks, of course. He’s not bad looking, and he’s still young.’ He pinched the boy’s biceps and thighs. ‘You can see that. Feel for yourself. His balls have dropped.’ He cupped the boy’s groin; Novu flinched. ‘And he’s a virgin, of course, except for his close relationship with his right hand.’

‘I don’t run slaves,’ Chona repeated.

Magho heaved a sigh. ‘You strike a hard bargain. Suppose I had a word with Gorga. My wife’s brother. If I could persuade him about Minda, you know… A night with her?’

‘Well…

Magho clapped him on the shoulder again. ‘Just don’t ruin her for her husband, you bull. Look, I’ll leave you with the goods. I’ll come back after I’ve seen Gorga. And you,’ he said, pointing a finger at his son, ‘show some respect or I’ll break every tooth in your head, no matter what it does to your selling price.’

He stalked out. The boy sat again, shivering. But he stared defiantly at Chona. ‘He set it all up, you know. My father.’

‘Set what up?’

‘Minda. Do you think it was an accident she was here when you came?’

‘You know this, do you?’

He snorted. ‘I know my father. I know how he works. Why, once, my mother, his own wife, he made her-’

‘Shut up. I don’t want to know.’ If Magho had set up Minda as a way to swing the deal then he was a better trader than Chona had imagined. But again he felt the blood surge in his loins. Breaking the girl would do him good. Magho had a deal, he decided. An unusual deal, but a deal.

‘Get dressed to travel,’ he said to the boy. ‘Pick out your best clothes. I know places where such clothes will fetch a good price. I’ve some old skins that will do for you on the trail.’ The boy stared. ‘You’re taking me? You can’t be serious-’

As Novu protested, Chona leaned over and absently picked at the edge of the boy’s smock, fascinated by the detail of how the fabric had been woven.

And he coughed suddenly, a deep rasping cough that came out of nowhere and tore at his throat.