the households, the connections between them, create the neighborhoods and the friendships. But when we're nomadic, living lives on the edge of survival, the men rule, and brook no interference from the women. Perhaps that's what civilization means - is the dominance of the female over the male. And wherever that lapses, we call the result uncivilized, barbarian...manly.
They spent a year between the rivers, waiting for Shedemei's baby to be born. It was a son; they named him Padarok - gift - and called him Rokya. They might have moved on then, after the first year, but by the time little Rokya was born, three of the other women had conceived - including Rasa and Luet, who were the most fragile during pregnancy. So they stayed for a second harvest, and a few months more, until all the women but Sevet had completed their pregnancy and borne a child. So there were thirty of them that began the next stage of the journey, and the first generation of children were walking and most of them beginning to talk before they were on their way.
It had been a good two years. Instead of desert farming, they had lush, rain-watered fields on good soil. Their crops were more varied; the hunting was better; and even the camels thrived, giving birth to fifteen new beasts of burden. Making saddles was harder - none of them had ever learned the skill - but they found a way to put two toddlers on each of the four most docile animals, which always traveled in train with the women's camels. When the children first tried out the saddles, some of them were terrified - camels ride so high above the ground - but soon enough they were used to it, and even enjoyed it.
The journey was easy through the savanna along the seacoast; they ate up the kilometers as they never had before, even on the smooth desert west and south of Basilica. In three days they reached a well-watered bay that the men were already familiar with, having hunted and fished there during the past two years. But in the morning, Volemak dismayed them all by telling them that their course now lay, not south as they had all expected, but west.
West! Into the sea!
Volemak pointed at the rocky island that rose out of the sea not two kilometers away. "Beyond it is another island, a huge island. We have as long a journey on that island as we have had since we left the Valley of Mebbekew."
At low tide, Nafai and Elemak tried fording the strait between the mainland and the island. They could do it, with only a short swim in the middle. But the camels balked, and so they ended up building rafts. "I've done it before," said Elemak. "Never for a saltwater crossing, of course, but the water here is placid enough."
So they felled trees and floated the logs in the bay, binding them together with ropes made of the fibers of marsh reeds. It took a week to make the rafts, and two days to take the camels across - one at a time - and then the cargo, and then, last of all, the women and children. They camped on the shore where they had landed, as the men poled the rafts around the island to the southwestern tip, where again they would need the rafts to ferry everyone and everything to the large island. In another week the company had traversed the small island and crossed to the large one; they pushed the rafts into the water and watched them float away.
The northern tip of the large island was mountainous and heavily forested. But gradually the mountains gave way to hills, and then to broad savannas. They could stand at the crest of the low rolling plain and see the Scour Sea to the west and the Sea of Fire to the east, the island was so narrow here. And the farther south they went, the more they understood how the Sea of Fire earned its name. Volcanos rose out of the sea, and in the distance they could see the smoke of a minor eruption from time to time. "This island was part of the mainland until five million years ago," Issib explained to them. "Until then, the Valley of Fires came right down onto this island, south of us - and the fires still continue in the sea that has filled the space between the