The Worm King (16 page)

Chapter Twenty-Three

Battle of Kadesh

Z
elda returned from the supermarket with three cans of tuna, a packet
of mixed peel and a jar of Malaysian curried eggs. She’d also thoughtfully brought
back a tray of rotten plastic-wrapped chicken drumsticks which she gave to the
dog. When the food was laid out, they all stared at the booty.

‘Team meeting,’ called the Hat.

David was down in the dumps. ‘Why didn’t
they tell us sooner?’ He’d just been given the Hat’s animated version of what
Dr Zoy had told them at Mulloolaloo. Shortly before David had arrived at Zelda’s,
she’d been informed by a policeman that it
was
most likely an asteroid,
but terrorists hadn’t been completely ruled out. Since then, she and David had
sat in the dark discussing whether the terrorists were somehow using the
asteroids, or whether they were different things altogether, because the
policeman had had to dash off before giving her the full story.

‘All governments will have invariably arrived
at the same decision,’ said Lord Brown. ‘They would’ve decided not to broadcast
the news purely on preservation of the species grounds. If you tell everyone,
then everyone will head for the exit at the same time so it jams up and
virtually nobody succeeds. If you keep your mouth shut, you and your family and
those deemed . . . more important, have a considerably
better chance of success. The trickle-down theory does work, but in reverse. It
should really be called sticky-down. Or tricky-down.’

‘Uppy-down?’ suggested the Hat.

Āmiria shook her head. ‘That’s a big
help. So how do we get away then? How did those Clovis get out of it last time
this happened? If we knew what the people who came after them did, couldn’t we
get a head start?’

‘Exactly!’ agreed the Hat. ‘They couldn’t
all have been flattened. The ones left must’ve hitched up their wagons and
headed for the nearest town, surely?’

‘No. The Clovis were around before “towns.” And
before wheels and wagons were even invented.’

Āmiria wondered how long Ngaruawahia
had existed for. There’d always been wheels there, as far as she knew. It
must’ve been settled a long time, given that’s where the Māori King chose
to live.

‘Nine thousand,’ intoned the old man,
staring at her. His pupils were a chocolaty color and the whites much less
bloodshot than a week ago. It occurred to her he looked far healthier in
general after having had a bit of a cleanup at Nathans.

‘Nine thousand what, Lord?’ asked the Hat.

‘9000BC. That’s when the recovery began
after the Clovis comet landed in 10,900BC. The climate didn’t really warm up again
until after 10,000BC, and by 9000BC things were peculating rather well, so to
speak.’

‘Whereabouts?’ He gazed at her strangely, as
though she’d just uncovered some clue and she thought for an instant it might
even be Ngaruawah—

‘Jericho. That was the world’s first town.’

‘Oh.’ She couldn’t help feeling disappointed
that it wasn’t Ngaruawahia after all.

‘The British first did a proper excavation
of Jericho in 1934. They already knew a tribe called the Natufians lived in
Middle East at roughly the same time as the Clovis existed in America, and the
Natufians were nomadic hunter-gathers very similar to the Clovis. But the
remains the British found at Jericho were different: a lot more advanced. They
found seventy-odd houses surrounded by a wall, and a substantial brick
watchtower with a complicated internal staircase. It’s the first place that mud
bricks appear; neither the Natufians nor or the Clovis had used bricks. From a
technology point of view, Jericho was a massive leap forward.’

‘Didn’t Jericho get a mention in the Bible?’
asked the Hat.

‘It did. It crops up more than fifty times
in various passages, depending on which Bible version you’re reading. But Jesus
definitely healed some blind beggars in Jericho.’ He paused momentarily. ‘Which
I suppose wasn’t a good indictment for the town, if it was chocker full of
blind beggars. The other story you might be thinking of is when Joshua knocked
down the walls of Jericho.’

‘Yeah, that’s the one.’

‘They’ve carbon-dated the destruction of the
main Jericho wall at 1550BC, which roughly tallies with the Bible date so the
Joshua legend probably did occur, but it happened more than seven thousand
years after Jericho was first settled, so was comparatively late in the piece. Joshua
knocked down the wall in the latter half of the Bronze Age, and Jericho had been
permanently settled since the Stone Age.’

‘I went to Jericho once,’ said Zelda. ‘I
didn’t see any Natufians but they had Arabs firing home-made katusha rockets around
the place.’

‘Indeed. Of course, after inventing the
brick they haven’t done much and it’s probably a place best avoided.’

Zelda gave him a quizzical stare. ‘Are you a
schoolteacher?’ His leathery face twitched ever so slightly but he didn’t reply.

The Hat persisted. ‘There must’ve been some
kind of . . . magic or whatever you’d call it, if Jericho
was the first town. As well as getting a nod in the Good Book, more than once
too. I mean, you never hear people say, “Jesus went to Griffith, and bought a
pie.” It’s always, “Jesus went to Jericho and healed some blokes and that sort
of thing.” There must have been something special about the place?’

Āmiria could certainly see the Hat’s logic.
Whatever the initial spark was that Jericho must’ve had, they should be looking
for spots like that now. That’s what she needed to do. After finding her Dad
that is. Maybe the situation is much better in Tamworth and they could all stay
in the office building he was putting up there. Or perhaps the flat he and the
gang were living in while they did the job? She knew the flats address: 47
Lambert St, three kilometers north-west of the town centre. Whenever he went
away on a job he always made sure she had exact details of where he’d be. She
was confident he’d either still be there, or at least one of the other builders
from his gang would be, or failing that they’ll have left word where they’d
gone. And it wouldn’t be fucken Jericho.

‘There was no magic,’ said Lord Brown
finally. ‘Not back then, anyway. The whole planet had just emerged from a
severe ice age, people were looking for somewhere warm and Israel is about the
first place the monkeys hit when they emigrated up out of Africa. Jericho was
an oasis lying on the main salt and flint routes as you head inland from the
coast, and it has an excellent natural spring. There were plenty of wild sheep
and goats in the hillier areas nearby, and wild wheat and barley growing around
too, so they could’ve made bread. And beer. They could’ve sat beside the spring
and had mutton sandwiches and a jug. For a brief period, Jericho was simply the
most pleasant place in the world to live.’

‘So why did they move then? asked Āmiria
impatiently.

‘Well, after they’d lived there for a while
they worked out how to use the stream for irrigation and the wheat growing
became a more organized affair. It wouldn’t have been long before someone out
hunting would’ve discovered that a few weeks walk to the west was a really
big
river. Two of them in fact, very close together: the Tigris and the
Euphrates in the south of Iraq. These rivers carried an enormous amount of silt
from the north of Iraq and Turkey, and where they spilled into the Persian Gulf
was absolutely perfect for irrigation. The fishing was excellent too. This is
where the world’s first city started.’

‘Who decides whether it’s a city or a town?’
asked the Hat.

‘I know! I know!’ replied Āmiria. She’d
asked her Uncle Monty that exact question when she’d been home last year. It
cropped up because he’d said, “I’m going to town” and she knew he was going to
Auckland, which she’d been told at school was a city, not a town.

‘There’s no concrete definition,’ answered
Lord Brown. ‘It varies from country to country. I believe in some circles they say
a city must contain a university and a cathedral, whereas a town does not, but
that seems rather vague.’

‘So what’s the Girl Guide ruling? said the
Hat.

‘Ranger.’

‘What?’

Instead of elaborating on the confusing Ranger-Guide
distinction, she quoted exactly what her Uncle Monty had said: “A city is a
gathering of people of sufficient size, such that if you rob someone who you
don’t know, chances are you won’t run into them again. In a town, if you rob
someone, chances are you’ll cross them again.” ‘My Uncle Monty says that
changes the mechanics a bit.’

‘Indeed,’ agreed Lord Brown.

‘So what do you reckon was the first city
then?’ asked Zelda.

‘Eridu. Beween 5400BC and 2000BC nearly a
dozen little cities sprung up in southern Iraq, which at the time was called
Mesopotamia. They were all constantly at war with each other, and Eridu was the
first one to officially make it to city-size. Cities like Uruk, Ur, and Eridu rose
and fell and were just piles of rubble by the time the Romans came on the
scene. At various stages these places had up to 50,000 people each. The biggest,
by far, ended up being Babylon, which was eighty kilometers south of where
Baghdad stands today. Sargon of Akkad created the world’s first empire from
Babylonia in 2350BC, covering most of Iraq and Israel and Syria, and parts of
Turkey and Iran. Babylon was the first city to pass 200,000 people, which would’ve
made it about the same size as Hobart these days.’

Āmiria felt this was getting off track.
She’d been to Hobart once, and somehow didn’t think it was likely to become the
new Jericho. ‘So did Sargon the Akkad—’

‘Sargon
of
Akkad.’

‘Did this Sargon come up with anything more
useful than bricks?’

Lord Brown paused, considering. ‘Writing?’ Nobody
replied so he continued. ‘Once everyone started living in cities, they found
divvying-up the workers and distributing the food became a lot more
complicated, so they invented writing. Right back as far as 3500BC, the
Arcadians were using writing in Mesopotamia to keep track of inventories and
whatnot. It was a gradual process of course, starting with scratchy lines going
in all directions, but they probably snuck in just before the Egyptians and
Indians with the writing.’

Āmiria folded her arms, unconvinced. She
could write already and it’d been shit-all use in the last few weeks.

Lord Brown tried again. ‘The wheel? The
Mesopotamians probably invented the wheel. Pictures of wheels first date to
3400BC in Uruk in the south of Iraq. The oldest
actual
wheel anyone’s
found was in a marsh in Slovenia dated to 3200BC. It’s made of ash and oak. A
hundred years after that, wheels began to appear all over southern Germany and
Switzerland. The theory is, the Mesopotamians invented the wheel and exported
the idea north where people around the Black sea and Turkey and up as far up as
the Russian steppes did the actual wheel-making and developmental work per se.’

‘We do need wheels,’ said Āmiria
thoughtfully.

Zelda tapped her finger on the table. ‘I
know someone who has a bus?’

‘Who?’ Lord Brown asked.

‘Jerry someone-or-other. A school bus
driver. He lives down the end of this street. The bus is awfully old and he
keeps it behind his house and fixes it himself, I heard. I’m not sure if they
even let him work anymore, but I saw the bus was there, not long after it went
dark when I was out trying to find food. Wandered down his drive by mistake. After
that we heard it drive down the street a couple of times, didn’t we Davey? Not
in the last few days though.’

‘Do you think he would consider driving us to
Tamworth?’

‘I would’ve said no, but the funny thing is
Jerry’s Turkish, which is what reminded me. And that’s why I can’t remember his
last name: it’s got about fifty letters in it. I didn’t know his ancestors
might’ve actually
invented
wheelmaking, so I suppose you never know.’

‘It’s worth speaking to him at least.’

‘It must’ve been a monster day,’ said the
Hat, ‘when the first bloke came home with one. The wheel, I mean. “Bugger me,
this round thing’s handy!” he would’ve said to the wife. “What’ll we call it?” She
would’ve just looked at it, wondering where the hell she was going to put it in
their crappy little cave, and said, “welllll . . . ”

‘“Okay then,” the bloke would’ve said. “I’ll
call it a w’hell.” Apparently that’s how the wheel was born. It stemmed from
the beginning of man’s first argument about having come home with a new toy,
when he was supposed to be out working. “Hi honey. Didn’t get no antelope or
nuffin today, but had some grog, and bought this off a mate. It’s like the squares
your cousin Thûg uses on his cart two valleys over, but this has rounder edges
and should be totally faster. Looks bitchin doesn’t it? Smoother ride too. Speaking
of smooth rides, how ’bout it sweet-chops? Up for one?” You can imagine how
that
went down with Ĥer-Indoors!’

Zelda shook her head. ‘What
are
you
talking about?’

‘Yes,’ agreed Lord Brown. ‘I believe that’s
exactly how it may’ve unfolded. We should still speak to Jerry though.’

Jerry and his mate Ken were finishing the
last of Zelda’s tuna. ‘Look, I’m really sorry,’ said Jerry. ‘But I’d rather
wait till it gets light, then head south and see me sister.’ Āmiria knelt
at the table holding an empty tin because there weren’t enough chairs. The
label swore no dolphins had been harmed and she was tempted to lick the can but
knew she’d probably cut her tongue, so made do with running a finger around the
inside then sucking it.