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—’