Read Online Stone Spring by Stephen Baxter - Free Book Online

was turning to grey. He wore a skin tunic, but tied around his ample waist was a belt of green-dyed spun yarn.
    If Magho had been keen enough to haul his ugly bulk all the way out to the river trail to meet him, he must want Chona’s goods rather badly, and Chona, an instinctive trader, began to smell a deal, and his fear receded. ‘You know me well enough, Magho. Only the promise of your hospitality lures me on.’
    ‘You have the obsidian.’
    ‘I have it.’
    Magho’s grin widened.
    As they walked on, Magho kept up a steady flow of chatter. Chona had no family, no children, and preferred not to talk of his life, which consisted of walking to places Magho had never heard of, to make deals with people he didn’t want Magho to know about. So he let Magho speak of his own family, his wife, their home, their three children, of whom the eldest boy Novu was such a disappointment. It was all a tactic to keep Chona on that fish hook, of course, but Chona endured it politely.
    Now, following a track that curved around to the north-west, they were passing through the gardens that surrounded the town. They were a patchwork of shapes, lopsided circles and rough squares marked out by wicker fences. Here women and many children laboured, bent over, plucking weeds from the meadows of wheat and barley and pulses. They didn’t look up at Chona and Magho.
    The men passed a field where bricks of mud and straw had been laid out in rows to dry in the sun. Another extraordinary sight.
    And as they neared the town that pall of smoke spread a dirty brown stain across the sky ahead, and Chona could already smell meat roasting, and human ordure.
    Then, approaching from the west, the trail led them over a bluff, and at last Chona saw Jericho itself. It sprawled across the landscape, a mass of round, brick-built houses pressed together in a plain of dirty mud. Beyond lay the river valley and its reed beds, brilliant white and yellow. Even in the heat of the day smoke seeped up from the reed-thatched roofs of the houses, for the people of Jericho were always busy, busy.
    But even stranger to Chona was the wall that faced him, standing in front of the town at its western end. Built of stone pressed into dried mud, the wall ran for dozens of paces, cutting the town off from the country to the west, and looping around like a moon crescent to enclose the buildings, though the loop was not completed. The people of Jericho, or their ancestors, had built this wall to save their town from floods and mud slides from the western hills. Strangest of all was the ‘tower’ that had been built against the wall, a round structure like a vast tree trunk, wider than it was tall, and likewise made of stone blocks pressed into mud. Chona had seen this before. The tower was so wide you could walk inside it, and climb steps up to the top.
    As far as Chona had travelled he had never seen such a structure as this. He believed it must be unique in all the world. Why, even the ‘tower’ only had a name in the language of Jericho itself, a word that was needed nowhere else. Yet the wall was very ancient; you could see how the stones were worn and cracked, and the wall itself looked half-buried by mud drifts and accumulated garbage.
    They walked on, rounding the wall, and the crammed-in houses of Jericho were revealed. Chona recoiled from the crowd and the clamour, and the rank stench. But Magho led the way boldly, treading between the piss puddles, ignoring the stinks and the shouts of children and the bleating of goats, shouting greetings to friends or relatives.
    A mob of people crushed through narrow, tangled lanes, some carrying baskets of grain or heavy bread loaves. Children, skinny, pale creatures, ran everywhere, playing and yelling as children always did. And there were animals in with the people: goats, hairy, long-legged sheep, even cattle, adding to the filth around the houses. Birds hovered overhead, gulls roosting on the house roofs or swooping down to