Them Bones

Leake XI

We had to quit eating late in the afternoon. We waddled back to our huts and lay down and went to sleep.

Just at dark we were wakened by the whistle of the ship.

Took and I, Sun Man, some of the nobles, several warriors, and a couple of the artisans had been invited to the boat. The only Buzzard Cult person there was Moe, who was also head of one of the kinship systems.

We all met at the landing. The ship was dark. Then, all at once, it lit up with a cool blue light like giant glowworms were inside the decks and passageways.

El Hama and his men came down to greet us and led us aboard. They seated us around the largest room, maybe a third the length of the ship, on the second deck.

We ate again, while three of the merchants played on a guitar, drum, and flute. Several of the Northerners did acrobatics for us, like great bears inside their shaggy skins. I was seated on the opposite side of the circle from Took, Sun Man, and el Hama. I followed the conversation as best I could. It was mostly of inconsequentialities, trade, hunting, weather, crops, the surplus of skins and the shortage of bear’s teeth, and (el Hama begged pardon) woodpecker scalps. It was a lot like my idea of what a Rotary Club lunch in Des Plaines on a slow Tuesday would be like.

Then they brought coffee.

I thought I was going to die. I knew what it was before I saw it; I smelled it first. I had not had any since my last pack of instant went into the canteen cup two weeks after I got here, months ago.

Took’s people drink several teas and herb drinks, mostly when it’s cold or they’re under the weather. Some of them, like sassafras and cedar bark, are good. But they’re not coffee.

I stared at the elaborate double urn like it was a metal god.

El Hama said something to Took, watching me all the while.

They served the coffee in a way as elaborate as any Japanese tea ceremony. The water in the lower part of the urn was boiling hot. One of the merchants poured a kilo of dark coffee grounds into the top urn, then put what looked like powdered milk and a half kilo of fructose in with it. Putting another urn under that, he dashed the boiling water into the upper pot.

The smell took me to heaven and back again. A minute later he pulled out the lower pot. It was filled to overflowing with a brown cloudlike froth.

‘Now quickly,’ said el Hama to all present, ‘we must drink while the face is still on the coffee.’ Tiny cups filled with a small amount of liquid were handed, with the right hand, to the right. The cups foamed with a head of cream, sugar and puffed coffee. It was all I could do to keep handing the cups around the circle, instead of drinking them all up as they got to me.

At last, everybody had one, Sun Man being the last. Then the circle filled back to me. My cup, they handed me my cup!

When everyone had one, they all looked at el Hama. He took a tiny sip of the coffee head, rolled his eyes, put the cup back in his saucer. Disappointed, they took tiny sips also.

I wanted to gulp mine down, start a fight, take everybody’s cup away from them. I sipped mine instead.

It was wonderful, but it was only semisweet, and filled with cream. What I wanted was about two liters of coffee with a half kilo of sugar in it. I wanted a caffeine rush that would bring Dwight Eisenhower back to life.

I could hear coffee dripping into the pot, now ignored.

Sometime during the low talk which followed, Took came around the circle to me.

‘El Hama wants to see you afterwards. In the general milling around, go through the passageway to the right, and out onto the aft deck and wait for him there. I’ll see you in the morning.’

I nodded.

Soon there was a giving around of presents, at which I got a bird whistle necklace. The bird was made of something like a cross between hard rubber and anthracite coal. It made a sound like one of those tweeting Christmas tree ornaments when I tried it. I put it on around my neck.

There was general milling around. I went out the right doorway, up a blue-lit passage. There was a guard at the far doorway, a Northerner, who only nodded as I neared him, and I went by.

The blue lights had a faint buzz, like neon. Electricity. In one room off the passage I saw a clerk writing in a big ledger by the light of an oil lamp. He paid no attention to me, and I went out up onto the deck.

The night was dark; there was no moon yet. The next was the planting moon, time of the Black Drink ceremony Took had mentioned, after the crops were put down. It was supposedly only March here, by my reckoning, but it was already warm.

The upper deck of the boat loomed above me, the light in the pilot house a blue box against the starry sky. There were a few crewmen on deck, a few Northerners or Arabs. One was fishing off the lower deck with a long pole.

The first bullfrogs of spring were croaking. I heard an alligator grunt. The aplisade of the village was a darker blot on the sky, with a few firelights showing through the mud chinking.

I had forgotten how big the River was, how full of sounds it was at night, how many mammals, birds, fish, and insects made noises. It all came back to me on the deck of the ship.

Even with the blue lights around me, the Milky Way was a slather of white across the sky, and the stars shone with round flickering brilliance on the darkness.

‘Ah,’ said el Hama as he came on deck, ‘let’s sit near the stern.’ Pillows were brought out and we sat ourselves down. ‘More coffee?’ he asked.

I could have kissed him.

‘I have already sent for it,’ he said, smiling. ‘I noticed how much you enjoyed it. And now, we have many questions of each other?’

‘Too many, I think,’ I said.

‘And I. Please begin, for I am host tonight.’

‘What year is this?’

‘By our calendar,’ he said, ‘it is the 1364th year since the capture of Mecca by the followers of Ibram the Prophet.’

Mecca checks out. Who’s the Prophet Ibram? 1364? All the Islamic turmoil was in what, the 600s? This is what? Late 1900s? Maybe even 2000 A. D.?

‘Do you know of one named Mohammed?’ I asked.

‘The father of the Prophet? Not much is written of him in the Book.’

‘Uh, what about Jesus?’

‘I am not as much of a scholar as our physician – Send for Ali,’ he said to another merchant, then turned back to me. ‘Jesus? I think he was worshiped near Galilee, a small sect perhaps? I think he was stoned by his people. The Prophet lived near Galilee for some months during his exile, I think, when he was cast out of Medina.’

Another man came out, bringing his own pillow, and seated himself next to us. He was introduced to me as Ali the physician.

‘He asks of people mentioned in the Book,’ said el Hama, ‘but he asks strangely.’

I sighed. ‘What about Egypt?’

‘The mother of all nations,’ said el Hama. ‘Old before the stone fell from the sky at Qabba.’

‘Well, that’s a start. We share that. What of Greece, Athens, Sparta?’

‘Seats of learning and manliness,’ said Ali. ‘Light-giver and conquering state, of unparalleled achievements, whose glory lasted for centuries. You speak its language.’

‘What of the Romans and their empire?’

‘Who?’ asked el Hama.

‘I have heard of them,’ said Ali, shifting his spectacles. ‘They are barely mentioned in the histories. They were city dwellers who made war on their neighbours and conquered their peninsula. They fought mother Carthage. Twice, I think.’

‘What happened to them?’

‘The second time, Carthage, who only wanted free trade with all her neighbours, defeated these Romans and all their allies. I am told they made wonderful shepherds and farmers.’

‘So there was no Roman Empire?’

‘An empire of wool,’ said Ali. ‘We trade dearly for it.’

‘And Carthage?’

‘Oh, mother Carthage is still there. Only a minor seaport now. It was captured in the eighteenth year after the Prophet’s death. And all Africa north of the River Congo.’

‘What of Europe? The Church?’

‘Europe?’

‘The land north of the Mediterranean, west of the Bosporus. Uh, Dardanelles.’

‘Oh. A land of barbarians. The True Religion of the Prophet took it wholly and easily. What parts the Northerners did not already hold.’

‘What did you do when you met with them?’

‘We offered them forty percent,’ said el Hama. ‘They were great sailors and navigators. They knew the lands of the north from raiding them so often. One of them had already traveled to this land when the True Religion spread over the north.’

‘But there was so much land there,’ said Ali, ‘so much produce and trade that our merchants thought of coming here again only thirty years or so ago, when we developed power enough to make the journey easily. And now we have this whole new world of trade to manage.’

‘It seems so simple,’ I said. ‘Was there a Great Plague? Did the followers of the True Religion put the people whom they conquered to the fire and sword?’

‘Plague? There are always plagues of one kind or another,’ said Ali. ‘Little can be done with them. But a great plague, no. Hippocrates says that nations and cities must reach a certain size before the plagues become endemic. We have very few truly large cities.’

‘You kept Greek learning, then? What about all the lost books? What about the library at Alexandria? Weren’t all the books burned?’

‘Burn all those great works! What a horrid idea!’ said Ali. ‘But where is this place Alexandria? The great library is in Cairo, in Egypt.’

‘Alexandria the Great? Philip of Macedon? Darius the Persian?’ I said.

‘These names are unknown to me,’ said Ali. ‘Hamilcar established the great library at Cairo. Through the many contacts of carthage’s trade network, he had books brought there. They were there when the True Believers took the city. There they remain, though they have been endlessly recopied, and, I am afraid, many errors have crept into them.’

‘Then this ship,’ I said, ‘the lights? These are all applications of Greek science?’

‘Well, yes,’ said el Hama. ‘That, and knowledge of our own, through many centuries of experiment and change.’

I drank my coffee.

‘This will take some getting used to. You say it was thirty years ago your ships first came here?’

‘Oh, they’d been coming, one or two at a time, for centuries, by mistake or accident or foolhardy venturing. Sail was fine for the Indian Sea, or what you call the Mediterranean, or northern coastal trade, and West Africa. But for this western trade, you need something you can depend on. Steam. So it was only after we had dependable steam that the Consulate of Merchants sent trading expeditions here.’

‘And Took-His-Time was captured twenty years ago by one of them? Which is why he speaks Greek?’

‘What can I say?’ El Hama spread his arms. ‘As with all frontier operations there were unscrupulous things done in the name of commerce. Many of the unregulated traders carried out similar actions to gain advantage. Take young people, hold them in virtual slavery, use them as interpreters and so on.’

‘What is this place like, the whole continent, now?’

‘I’m sure Took has told you as much as we know. In the northeast, small hunting, fishing, farming groups. In the south – your east – are the mound-builders, like Took and his people. They go from the southeastern peninsula to just west of the Big River we are on. To the northwest, people poorer than the poorest nomads of the deserts of Egypt, a few of whom were brought back to our lands as curiosities by the unprincipled.

‘To your west, and southwest for a long way, is the country of the Huastecas. They are the meanest people we have met in this world, though they have a culture nearer to ours. We have a few trade stations to the south, but we really don’t like to deal with them much. Neither do your people. But they make such fine jewelry.’

‘And you trade up and down the River each spring?’

‘That is my mission now, though there will soon be others. The trade is so profitable, on both sides, that there is plenty for all, and the trade is so novel to each side that it will remain so. Other markets change, prices come and go. I’m told that right now you can burn cotton in Africa before you can give it away. But bring knives to the New Lands, or take furs back to Egypt, and your market finds itself.’

‘Yet you restrict your trade in certain ways.’

‘You speak of firearms, explosives, certain animals?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not through lack of profit, I assure you. But the Consulate of Merchants learned a great lesson in western Africa. Within twenty years of unlimited trade there, we were fighting ten wars, caring for thousands of refugees, and looking at denuded lands unfit for anything. The place had become desert, which year by year creeps farther into the jungle. That was six centuries ago, and we now know better than to do it again.’

‘That is why we were so surprised to see your horse,’ said Ali. ‘It is, as far as we know, the only one on the continent. If it is the only one, there will never be more.’

This was the first time they had come around to a question for me. I prefaced my story by saying I didn’t understand all that had happened, and certainly didn’t expect them to.

I told them what had happened in the world I came from as best as I could remember my history. I told them of Alexander, of Rome, of the rise of Islam (with the father of their Prophet as its leader), of Christianity, and of a Europe at first united then split by religion, of plague, wars, of science, everything I could think of.

The more I told, the more it began to sound to me like a story of greed, folly and misfortune, like a tale told by a crazed and vindictive storyteller with a grudge against humanity.

I told them of that last, terrible war, of the death and dying, and of that last valiant attempt, of which I had been part, to change all the terrible things that led to the war.

When I finished, I thought they were going to applaud. Their faces were a little sad, but awed, as if I were an entertainer with a trick that had outdone all others they had ever seen.

‘Allah works with each of us in his own way,’ said Ali the physician.

‘Come back with us!’ said el Hama, suddenly. ‘There is a man they tell of in Baghdad who appeared one day years ago with a tale such as yours. He is dead now, but some of the learned who talked with him are still alive. Come back with us to the lands of learning, and speak with them.’

‘I doubt I could do anything but confuse them,’ I said. ‘Your invitation is tempting. Ask me again when you come back downriver. I’ll think about it till then.’

I wondered if others in the Project had been tossed into this world. Or were there others from somewhere else, some other time than mine, or from the future or past of this world, or yet another?’

I was tired. My mind could hold only so many things in it. I had reached my limit on novelty and culture shock.

False dawn tinged the sky over the River.

‘You have been very helpful,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how to thank you enough.’

‘If you wish to go with us when we return, you are welcome,’ said el Hama. He shook both my hands with his. ‘We will return halfway through the next moon awash to the line with goods. And perhaps we can ride your horse again? One gets so tired of the ship.’

‘At any time,’ I said. ‘Thank you. And thank you, Ali.’

‘Take this when you go,’ said el Hama. One of the Northerners handed me a three-kilo bag of ground coffee.

I felt like crying as I left – for myself, for losing my way, for ending up in this other, crazy world, for mankind. For the coffee. It was all too much.

As they let the ramp down for me to get ashore, I heard one of the Northerners sneeze.