Yag Country - 13,000 years ago

Yag Country - 13,000 years ago

“Tulu,” called Ka-Teth, “Tulu are you there.”

Tulu woke with a start. Had he fallen asleep? But there was no time, with the sky flickering dark to light so rapidly, the spring flood could not be far away. No time, and so much to do, the planting, the trenches to divert waters to dry fields, and then the ponding, to keep it there.

“I’m here my friend,” he called, stumbling from his hut to examine his calendar pole.

Tulu was very proud of his calendar pole, it stood almost six feet high at the center of a small circular clearing. Over a dozen years, Tulu had placed carefully selected stones to mark the position of the sun by the shadows it threw. The calendar pole was carved deeply with spiralling lines winding up its length, punctuated by complex notches only Tulu himself could interpret.

He stared at the pole, at the sun hanging teasily over the horizon. Then, ever so deliberately, he selected a stone and placed it at the end of the shadow that cast by the pole. His friend Ka-Teth had arrived, and watched him do this with respectful silence.

“Well?” Ka-Teth asked when it was finished.

Tulu held up a hand for silence, but beckoned him over to a place just outside the circles of stones in the clearing. Together, the two men sat.

“It’s beautiful,” Ka-Teth said. Tulu smiled, Ka-Teth was an artist, or perhaps a romantic, ever finding beauty in things.

And yet, there was an elegant simplicity to it that appealed to Tulu. With the stones laid out, with the lines and notches inscribed in the pole, a dozen years work had begun to reveal patterns. Relationships of events. Consider the elegant series of short loops, the gradual procession of them over the years. At their shortest, the waters had come earlier and earlier, the floods gentle. But then there’d been a gradual lengthening, and with it, the flood had grown stronger, almost fierce. This year was making the second longest loop he’d recorded. He glanced at the set of notched sticks, making their gentle arc across the clearing.

“Not for another week,” Tulu said.

“Ahrz says two more settings of the sun, at most,” Ka-Teth said. “And low elevation, with waters sluicing up Irya way.”

Ahrz had his own calendar pole, though more accurately, it was a calendar rock, all scratched up and inelegant. He used different markers than Tulu, and the two men often argued about the efficacy of their methods.

Actually, over time, Tulu considered the argument over, his system clearly superior at charting and prediction. Ahrz, being stubborn, would never agree, of course. But despite himself, Tulu did admit that there were aspects to Ahrz that were at least intriguing. Every Calendar man had his own methods.

“I see.” It was the imprecision that haunted all of them, the difficulty in finding an accurate way to mark the passage of time.

During the summer day, the light remained eternally bright, the sun rolling around the sky. During winter night, there was only darkness. In between, were the flickering alterations of spring and winter, their patterns changing ceaselessly as one season gave way to the other. Tulu had heard of a wise man far upstream, who had been seeking ways to measure time’s motion accurately. He needed to go there sometime and consult. Perhaps after the floods....

“The elders have called a debate, the whole community gathers before sunset, you and Ahrz.”

Terrific. A debate.

“Anyone else?”

“Some Calendar men from the villages downstream are coming, they’re here to look for signs. They may participate.”

Tulu nodded.

“So, either the floods are soon and soft, in which case, we need to finish deeper trenches, and saturate the dry stands. Or the floods are late and high, in which case the trenches are adequate, and we should look to diversions to the new pastures?”

“That’s about it.”

“I hate debates,” Tulu groused, “I just wish everyone would do what I told them. The world would be so much simpler then.”

Ka-Teth laughed. “Then you’d never change your mind about anything. We’d never ever learn anything new. You’d grow mad with boredom.”

Tulu laughed and shoved his friend, tousling his hair. “True enough.”

Off they went to the village commons, a rolling hill, proof against even the most disastrous flooding. A generation ago, a Calendar man had saved them all predicting just such a flood. Tulu, barely a boy then, had decided that he was the wisest man in all the world.

Now, decades later, having studied his methods, he was vaguely amazed that the Man had been able to get his penis to piss in one direction.

Wryly, Tulu wondered if some future Calendar man, would find his methods equally crude.

So it goes, he thought.

“Any other news?”

“Over by the dry wash, Huhzu’s bunch captured some wanderers.”

“New slaves?”

“Maybe. It’s very late in slaving season. They might just crush their heads.”

“I guess its something that will be decided at the debate.”

Abruptly, Tulu realized his friend had stopped.

He looked around. They were in the drowning basin, a low point of bare rock. All around them were scattered, sunbleached human bones. The remains of generations of slaves sacrificed to the spring floods.

For an instant, Tulu wondered what it must be like to be tied down, anchored in the basin, unable to move as the flood waters came, rising to drown them one after another. He imagined the desperate struggles, to take that one more breath of air, to seal lips and nostrils against water.

He shrugged. At least they quieted. “What?” Tulu asked.

Ka-Teth was staring at the bones.

“It seems a waste, isn’t it. Every fall, capturing and crippling, breaking in new slaves. Putting them to work, and when its all over, we drown them all and start over.”

Tulu shrugged.

Slaves were a noisy, whiny bunch. It made his skin crawl to think of putting up with them all year long.

“What use could we have for them after the spring digging,” he asked.

It was Ka-Teth’s turn to shrug.

“Still, it seems a waste.”

“They’re slaves,” Tulu told his friend. “It’s not like they have any other purpose. I’m sure they don’t mind.”

“Yes, you’re right....”