Chapter 8
The Two Towns
Jabir
June 15, 1005 CE
Shane watched the man as he set fires in the large tree trunk, thinking that this seemed a lot of work and, worse, it would probably be really heavy when he was done. The man was making a dugout canoe, like the two others already in the village. It looked like an awful lot of work, and Shane as well as two of the local girls were watching the work.
By now, movement between Jabir and Camp Peterbilt was common and the children of both villages played together, often watching the adults work on this or that. Shane tried to explain that she was worried about the weight, but while she was learning the local language, she wasn’t all that good at it yet. So they watched as the trunk was burned, then the char was cut away and it was burned again to hollow out the log. It was hard work, and the girls got bored long before it was done. They decided to go back to Camp Peterbilt and talk to Alyssa about the canoe and how it was built. They reached that agreement through a combination of words and hand signs.
* * *
Arriving in Camp Peterbilt, the children found Alyssa sitting on one of the chairs that they had collected from the country store. It was set in front of a table that had been made from shelves that had held baked goods in the store. On the table sat Alyssa’s computer. The Peterbilt was comfortable, but it was a cramped space. By now they all spent most of their time outside, assuming it wasn’t raining and the bugs weren’t too bad.
Running up to the table, Shane shouted, “How do you make a canoe?”
“Use your indoor voice, Shane,” Alyssa corrected. Then, looking around, added, “Well, speak with a bit less volume, anyway.”
“Sorry, Mrs. Jefferson,” Shane said in a quieter voice. “So how do you build a canoe?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never made a canoe,” Alyssa said, then continued after a quick moment of thought, “There are several ways. There are dugouts like our friends use, there are kayaks like the Eskimos used back in our time, and I assume they use now. Those are made with a wood framework covered by skins and the skin is wrapped around the whole body of the canoe, so that only the kayaker’s body sticks out. I think, but can’t be sure, that Native Americans, our friends’ descendants, made canoes out of tanned and treated hides over a framework of wood. Modern, twenty-first-century canoes are made from aluminum or fiberglass, neither of which are available to us. Wait a minute . . . I think there are also birchbark canoes or at least there used to be and . . . ” She trailed off. “Why do you want to know?
“Tarak is making a dugout,” said one of the other girls. “What about birchbark?” She was learning English or trying to and one of the words she knew was “birch.” Her people used birch trees for quite a few things, so if you could make canoes out of birch that might be useful. Lots of the things the demon people knew were useful.
“What Makas said,” Shane clarified. “He’s chopping holes in a big log, then lighting fires in it and chopping out the ash . . . ” She went on to explain how the dugout canoe was being made, which fit quite well with what Alyssa knew about the process. Then she finished with, “But their canoes are really heavy. And making them seems like a whole lot of work.”
Alyssa considered. She knew that dugouts were among the oldest known boats. It was probable that birchbark canoes would be an improvement, and the locals used birch trees already. Unfortunately, that was about the limit of her knowledge of the construction of canoes. “Go see your mom and dad and suggest a birchbark canoe. But don’t try to build a full-size one at first. Make a scale model first, a couple of feet long to test the concept and get practice.”
An hour with Mom and Dad gave the girls the basic parameters for the two-foot-long, four-inch-wide-at-the-center birchbark canoe. After that, they returned to Jabir and started building their toy.
It took them two weeks and five tries before they had something that they were happy with. Then they showed it to Tarak.
Tarak looked at the model boat and at the dugout he’d just finished and wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. What he really wanted to do was punch someone, preferably one of the demon people. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to punch them for showing the kids how to make a birchbark canoe or for not showing them how to do it before he spent over two weeks digging out the dugout.
Takiso Village
June 30, 1005 CE
Tarak rowed the dugout up to the shore of the river. Then he climbed out and with great effort pulled the heavy boat up onto the shore. Then he started to brag on the boat, telling the people of the Purdak clan how long he’d worked on it.
Takiso village was on the other side of the Talak River and the people were sharp bargainers. But there was no way that Tarak was going to try to sell the canoe to a tribe of his own clan. He sat with them and ate fish and corn stew, then let them steal his brand-new canoe for not much more than half of what it was worth. Then he went back to Jabir and built a birchbark canoe.
Camp Peterbilt
July 4, 1005 CE
Michael Anderle looked at the device with amusement and a little trepidation. It had taken a while, but they’d learned the date of the last winter solstice and actually measured the summer solstice just a couple of weeks ago. Alyssa Jefferson had calculated based on information in their computers and determined the date. It was July fourth.
Neither hot dogs nor watermelon were available, but they did have turkey sausage wrapped in corn flour, leavened with baking powder that Alyssa had come up with. They also had barbecued deer. And, of course, corn on the cob. Only the early corn. The more active harvest would be in a couple of weeks and “their” corn, the corn from the general store, wouldn’t be ready until August.
The sun set, the fuse was lit and a few seconds later the flame gushed out of the clay volcano and sparks flew off the device.
The children oohed and awed.
* * *
Shane was impressed and not impressed. It wasn’t a spark on the fireworks from her last Fourth of July, but for Missus Jefferson to do it in the here and now, making the flame burn in different colors, that was impressive.
Jogida’s little brother Faris had to be grabbed to keep him from trying to grab the fire.
With her little brother firmly in hand, Jogida came over to Shane and asked, “What adwhsik is for?”
Adwhsik was a new word or at least one that Shane didn’t remember off the top of her head, but from Jogida’s finger-pointing and the burning clay mountain that Missus Jefferson had made she guessed it meant strange fire or . . . no. She knew the word for fire and it was nothing like adwhsik. Maybe ceremony. Yes, that was probably it.
“It’s the birthday of the country we come from.”
“What is country?”
Shane spent the rest of the evening talking with Jogida, then with Jogida, Oaka and Achanu; then with Jogida, Oaka, Achanu, Hamadi, Gada and Kasni about what a country was and how it differed from a village or a clan.
* * *
Over the next weeks and months, the women’s council and the chiefs of Jabir discussed the concepts of country and nation and how they differed from village and clan or clan and grouping of clans that looked to Hocha and sometimes called themselves the Hochi and which the plains tribes called the river people or the settled people.
Kadlo Mound, Hocha
July 8, 1005 CE
Roshan smiled at his nephew. “What are the demon people talking about now?”
“Birchbark canoes and nations.” Rogasi smiled back.
“I know about canoes. What is a nation?”
For the next few hours, Rogasi explained to his uncle what a nation was and even the basics of democracy. The idea of democracy wasn’t completely strange to Roshan. Decisions were often made in villages by consensus, where the minority went along with the majority without actually agreeing. The idea that it could be used indirectly and in larger groups? That was new.
Overall, he was more interested in the drawing of the birchbark canoe and Rogasi’s description of how it was made.
Camp Peterbilt
July 8, 1005 CE
Michael attached the leather flap to the wooden tube. This was his third attempt to create a bellows. He’d learned a lot in the first two. But it turned out there was a whole lot to learn. The bellows, based on their combined memories of western movies and tv shows, turned out to be a lot more complicated than they expected.
The only reason the women of the village maintained an interest in the process was what the locals had used before. The locals had used pit firing, and pit firing has many drawbacks. It uses a heck of a lot of fuel and it doesn’t get the pots quite hot enough. It’s also a heck of a lot of work, even aside from all the work of gathering up the fuel. There’s a lot of work in just manning the fires. Then there was the mess it made. The pottery wasn’t vitrified by hot air. It was actually in the fire, so it came out of the pit covered in ash and had to be scrubbed. While the fire was burning, you were working in heat and smoke. And then there was this huge pit full of ash and soot to clean up.
The one-way valve needed to be bigger. At least, some of the one-way valves needed to be bigger. In the first couple of versions, they’d spent a whole lot of labor sucking air into the leather sacks.
“We should use wood,” Jogida said. “For the one-way valve we should use wood, not leather.”
“It won’t make a good seal,” Oaka complained.
“So we put leather on the wood,” Jogida insisted.
It was a good idea, Michael agreed. The wood would let them make a larger flap, which would let in more air more easily. They had bricks made in a fire pit using oil-soaked wood, so they had their kiln, and even that was making better pottery faster. But it still wasn’t getting quite hot enough, according to Alyssa. Certainly not hot enough to turn bog iron into wrought iron.
Back to the drawing board, and next time they would use a piece of wood for stiffness.
* * *
A few hundred feet away, an older woman sat at a table with a rotating wheel built into it. She dumped a chunk of clay onto the wheel and started spinning it with her foot. This was doable because the potter’s wheel was actually two wheels, one on the top with the clay on it and the other connected to it by a rod. She turned the lower wheel with her foot, which turned the upper wheel. It was all held in place by a framework and there was grease on the rod so that it would spin easily.
Then, using her hand, she started shaping the clay into a bowl. It took her about five minutes to shape the medium-sized bowl, a job that would have taken the better part of two hours before the demon people had brought the potter’s wheel to them.
Bowl finished, she used a copper wire to cut it off the table and carefully set it on a shelf to dry. Then she grabbed another clump of clay and started the process again.
* * *
Another woman was seated a couple of feet away from her, using her feet to pedal a pedal-powered lathe. It wasn’t complex, just a round chunk of wood with pedals on it, attached by cord to another round piece of wood that was, in turn, attached to one end of the lathe. Push the pedals, the end of the lathe spun, spinning a piece of wood. And using a piece of the demon people’s steel sharpened to a cutting edge, she cut the wood in an intricate pattern. It wasn’t anything that she couldn’t have done by hand with stone tools. Flint was actually sharper. But this was a lot easier, and a lot easier to control. This piece would be the leg of a chair.
All over Jabir and Camp Peterbilt, these changes were making life better and easier for the people of Jabir. Come harvest time, they would help even more.
Jabir fields
August 10, 1005 CE
The wheelbarrows were out in force, moving among the rows of corn, collecting ears as they matured. It was handwork, cutting the corn with stone knives. No John Deere reapers here. But the locals were absolutely thrilled with how well it was going and how fast.
Melanie was watching the locals and her fellow time travelers. By now all of them were mostly used to the long hours of work that were so common in this time. These people didn’t work and play. They went from heavy labor to light work, then back to heavy labor. Light work was often accompanied by discussion and gossip, but folks kept their hands busy even then. It was only when watching Jesus Christ Superstar and attending religious services that they weren’t chatting. That, and hunting.
Using a camp knife, Melanie cut another corncob from a stalk and went on. Even with the new tools, harvest was an “all hands on deck” time. She put the corncob in the wheelbarrow and went on to the next stalk.
* * *
Three hours later, they gathered in Jabir for a feast, and it was a good feast, though Melanie really and truly missed butter and all the other milk products. The ice cream had made some of the locals sick because a high percentage of the locals had never developed the lactose tolerance of western Europeans. No milk products meant no reason to change the gene.
No butter, no cheese on the table, and Melanie missed it. Surprisingly, she missed it more than she missed processed sugar. Though perhaps not quite as much as she missed salt. These people had some salt, but the Gulf Coast was a long way away and while they did trade that far, it made such things expensive and used with moderation.
Not that there weren’t spices. The natives did trade up and down the Mississippi, which they called the Talak. The river that the natives called the Talak was the Missouri River down to its confluence with the Mississippi, then the Mississippi. Spices were small and easy to carry, so there were spices from a fair chunk of the continent mixed into the stews and slathered onto the barbecued meats and vegetables.
Camp Peterbilt
August 20, 1005 CE
The harvest was in, even the sweet corn from the country store, which had larger cobs and produced a corn with sweeter kernels than the locals’ corn did. Also, just about every kernel of corn had sprouted, which was a whole lot better than the local corn managed. Those three things meant that the sweet corn was a prized commodity. Which, oddly enough, meant that there was going to be less of it to eat, at least for now. Just about all of it was being set aside to be planted next spring.
Kadlo Mound, Hocha
August 24, 1005 CE
Roshan sat in the main living area of the family house, eating a corn stew that was made with food from Jabir. The corn was sweet and there were other plants, tomatoes and squash. It was squash, but a different sort than they had.
It was an interesting meal and Rogasi had explained that it was a special gift from Hamadi, to show Roshan what the demon people had been growing from the seeds in the general store. “That’s what the demon people call the building that was in the place where they entered the world.”
Rogasi was wearing a cord around his neck, and on the cord was an emblem. It was two sticks, a longer vertical one with a shorter one crossing it horizontally about two-thirds up from the bottom.
When he asked about it, Rogasi explained with enthusiasm about the TV and the movie Jesus Christ Superstar, even singing some of the songs. Rogasi had a smooth tenor voice and he sang well. He also sang in the demon people speech, then translated each line.
The meal and the discussion were interesting and, to an extent, compelling. The style of the songs were different than Roshan was used to, but not too different. Not so different that they lost their magic.
* * *
The next morning, after Rogasi was on his way back to Jabir, Roshan told an acquaintance from the village of Pasire about the food and even a bit about the beliefs of the demon people, at least the part about the cross god arranging things so that no one ever needed to be sacrificed again.
Eldladi was a chief of the Gruda clan, and Roshan was trying to get his support against the rumor that the high priest of Hocha was going to demand a larger sacrifice this year.
* * *
Eldladi wasn’t convinced by Roshan, mostly because he didn’t like Roshan. What he was persuaded of was that Camp Peterbilt would be an excellent place to raid for quite a lot of wealth, and for young women. If the priesthood were going to ask for more sacrifices this year, he wanted those young women to come from the Kadlo, not the Gruda. It would also please the high priest, who had been trying to persuade him to attack the strangers because the priests of Hocha saw the big dragon demon as a challenge to their authority.
Camp Peterbilt
September 3, 1005 CE
Over the spring and summer, the Peterbilt, and especially the pickup, had helped the village of Jabir carry earth and dig ditches and canals to get the water to the crops of maize, squash and beans, which were the mainstays of the local diet. The Kadlo, and other clans associated with Hocha, did hunt and fished rather more than they hunted, but the majority of their food was crops grown in the earth without the aid of horses or oxen. They gardened, instead of farming.
But for the village of Jabir, the pickup truck pulling a plow changed that. The villagers were restricted to the soft ground on the alluvial plain of the Talak River and its tributaries, because the stone hoes they used didn’t work well on the heavy soil of the grasslands. Also, all the Pilgrim stories notwithstanding, these Native Americans didn’t do a lot of fertilizing. It was use a field until the crop diminished, then switch to another for a couple of years to let the first field recover. But with the plows pulled behind the Peterbilt, the fields not in the floodplain could be plowed and planted. That was where the seed corn from the general store had ended up.
Alyssa’s composting pits had provided fertilizer for the fields of Jabir. The effect was that more maize, squash and beans were sown and what was sown grew better and produced more. It all made for the largest and lushest crop that Jabir had had in living memory. Totally aside from the extra field that had been planted with twenty-first-century sweet corn, which had shorter stalks and larger ears, not to mention quite a bit more sugar in each kernel of corn.
Melanie climbed into the cab of the Peterbilt on the driver’s side, because Alyssa was comfortably sprawled on the passenger seat and Michael and Shane were perched side by side on the lower bunk. In times past, she would have locked the door behind her but they no longer bothered with that, even at night. That wasn’t simply because the settlement that had grown up around the truck was absent from crime; it was also because at any time of day or night two young men maintained an unobtrusive guard over the Peterbilt. That was true whether it was occupied or not.
The Americans weren’t sure, but they thought that was being done at the command of Hamadi. Achanu’s uncle was the one chief who resided in the new settlement. The others visited from time to time, but they kept their residence in the village of Jabir.
“They’re still at it,” said Melanie, gesturing with her head toward the window. “I mean, Jesus, how many times can you watch Jesus Christ Superstar?” On her way into the cab of the truck, Melanie had walked past the shaded area next to the tanker where their TV was set up on a chair. At any given time, half a dozen to a dozen people would be gathered sitting on the ground and watching the musical. Not far away, a somewhat smaller group was listening to the gospels.
“I know one girl who’s watched it forty-nine times so far. She says they really like being able to run the subtitles at the same time.”
“Did she tell you in English or in Kadlok?” asked Alyssa.
“English.” Shane shook her head. “It’s like pulling teeth to get them to talk Kadlok to me—and I try. The only ones who will do so more or less readily are Achanu and Oaka.”
“The kids our age mostly talk Kadlok to us,” said Norman. “I’m getting pretty good at it,” he added proudly. Then, a bit grudgingly: “So’s Miriam.”
His older sister sniffed. “I speak it better’n you. It’s ’cause you’re too quick to slide back into English.”
Michael was frowning; in puzzlement, not disapproval. “What do you think accounts for the difference? I’ve noticed it myself. Every Kadlo I try practicing their language with almost always makes me switch to English, except the little kids. It makes things easier, sure, but sooner or later we’ve got to learn their language. There are only six of us, and probably sixty thousand of them when you include Hocha, the big city north of here.”
“I think that’s on Hamadi’s orders,” said Alyssa. “And I think Kasni backs him up. Which means probably the whole women’s council, too. From what I’ve been able to see so far, the chiefs will squabble with each other fairly frequently, but not the women on the council. They stay disciplined, always speak with one voice.” She sniffed also. “Don’t let their egos run the show like some other gender I can think of.”
Michael chuckled. “I’ve always known women were natural conspirators. But to get back to the question, why do you think Hamadi is being so strict about it?”
“I think there are two reasons,” answered Alyssa. “First, Hamadi is smart—very smart. Having his people learn English opens up a lot of resources and possibilities for them, while teaching us Kadlok doesn’t, beyond personal convenience.”
“How does that work? I mean, there are only six of us and a lot of them. It would seem that having us learn their language would be easier.”
“Easier, yes. But less useful,” Alyssa said. “Learning a new language is learning a new way of thinking. I think Hamadi has decided that our way of thinking will buy them more than just having us explain how some tool works in Kadlok.”
“That, and the fact that English amounts to a secret language as long as they speak it and the other tribes don’t,” said Michael. “And their language isn’t written down yet. He’s been especially keen on having them learn to read and write, once he figured out what literacy was.”
“Which took him maybe five minutes,” said Melanie. “And I think it didn’t take much more time than that for Kasni and Achanu’s mother Etaka to grasp what he was explaining to them later. What’s the other reason you think he’s doing it, Alyssa?”
Her brow furrowed and her eyes narrowed. “Well, this is conjecture, but from what I’ve been able to piece together—mostly from the women, not Hamadi himself—there’s a lot of tension between the people here in Jabir and the Kadlo who live in Hocha. More precisely, between the chiefs and the priests who seem to have a lot of influence in Hocha. I’m not sure, but I get the feeling that a lot of the chiefs in Hocha aren’t very happy with the priests, either.”
“I’ve gotten that same impression,” said Michael, nodding. “In my case, from talks I’ve had with that friendly young shaman whose name I can’t pronounce.”
“Aegluniket,” said Melanie. “It’s a tongue twister, all right.”
Michael spread his hands. “I won’t swear to it, mind you. Agel-whazid and I talk a weird pidgin polyglot that mashes Kadlo and English together and probably mangles both.”
“I can’t figure the shamans out at all,” said his wife. “That old one, Priyak, seems hostile to us.”
“As near as I can tell,” said Alyssa, “the relationship of the shamans to each other—and the lay population—is more analogous to Jewish rabbis than Christian priests. Outside of maybe Israel, rabbis don’t have a hierarchy or a central authority. The influence they have is mostly whatever esteem and respect they have with the people around them. So, some shamans are allied with Hocha priests—Priyak’s clearly one of them—whereas others stay independent of them or are allied with the chiefs.”
“Who aren’t themselves necessarily unified, am I right?” That came from Michael.
“Certainly not to the extent the women’s council seems to be,” said Melanie. There came another sniff. “I refer you back to my comments—okay, wisecracks—about gender differences. That said, I get the impression that most of the chiefs lean the way Hamadi does, including at least some of the ones in the big city, which I’m pretty sure is what archaeologists called Cahokia.”
“Does that city have a name?” asked Michael.
“They call it Hocha, but I’m not sure if that’s its name or if it’s just their word for city,” said Alyssa. “Or maybe ‘the big city.’”
Alyssa shrugged. “Or it may just be that it doesn’t have a name because it grew up as a conglomerate of small towns.” She smiled. “Except for some of the people who live in Manhattan, I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone from New York say they came from there. It’s always ‘I’m from Brooklyn’ or ‘I’m from the Bronx.’ But to come back to my point, I think the chiefs—most of them, anyway—don’t like the growing power of the priesthood. Whether that’s for what you might call ideology or just a power struggle, I don’t know.”
“Could be both,” said Michael.
“Yes, it could. Probably is, in fact. That’s the way politics usually works.”
“Interesting times we live in,” said Melanie. “Which is a Chinese curse, if I recall correctly.”
“What concerns me is the fact that all the priests are men,” Alyssa said. “Remember when I pointed out that this was a matrilineal culture?”
She got nods all around.
“Well, there should be women shamans, or wise women, if you prefer. But there don’t seem to be. There are the women’s councils, but all the ‘magic’ seems to be the province of the shamans or the priests.”
“Is there a difference between the shamans and the priests?” asked Shane.
“There seems to be,” Alyssa said. “They use different words for the priests in the city and the village shamans.”