Chapter 49: A Coincidence Long in the Making
While Chen Jian considered how to destroy a nascent civilization, that same civilization was contemplating the opponent it had never met.
On the upper reaches of the Caohe River, more than a hundred miles from Chen Jian's village, a military leader named Badger was examining a feathered arrow. At his feet sat a clay pot, one of the spoils he and his men had taken from a distant tribe, along with more than fifty able-bodied prisoners.
Badger was powerfully built and the tribe's best hunter, which was why he had been chosen as its military leader.
The true leader of the tribe was not him, but a woman named Red Fish who sat on a tiger skin. She was the priestess for the entire tribe.
Red Fish was not her birth name; it was a title passed down to every woman who became the tribe's priestess. According to an ancient legend, the tribe would one day find a place where a great red fish would leap from the river, as if trying to jump over the rainbow in the sky. The legend said that when they witnessed this, they could settle there and would be blessed by God.
Outside a simple tent made of birch bark, the members of Badger's tribe were gathered, including those who had just recently joined. These newcomers had smeared the blood of their former tribe on their faces, a symbol that they had severed all ties with their past.
Badger stood up and drew his bow, using a technique he had only recently learned. He held his posture as the feathered arrow flew out and struck a small tree in the distance with perfect accuracy. He was filled with astonishment.
This method of drawing the bow was incredible. Before, he had to pinch the nock of the arrow, a feat only the strongest warriors could perform steadily. But now, even the tribe's worst archers could hold their aim!
And the arrows with tail feathers could fly much farther. The difference was unnoticeable at close range, but at a distance, he could see the featherless arrows begin to tumble and tilt in the air.
He longed to understand all of this, but unfortunately, he could not understand a word the prisoners said.
When he pointed to the feathered arrows, they would mutter a few words; when he pointed to the clay pot, it was the same. But in both cases, he heard a word that sounded like "Jian."
So, he consulted the priestess, Red Fish. After praying to the heavens for guidance, she told him it was likely the name of the person who had invented these things.
This explanation shocked Badger. In his own tribe's legends, the people who invented the bow or first domesticated animals were blessed by the heavens. They became priests or the most powerful military leaders, and their stories were still told.
Was this person named Jian also blessed by God? A sliver of fear crept into his heart.
Three days ago, his clansmen had found a corpse by the river. It was one of their own, drowned and left tangled in the reeds. He suspected murder, probably by this tribe he had never met. The thought of this man named Jian made him uneasy.
This feeling of panic intensified as he watched the captives, with their strange hairstyles so different from his own, struggling to smash logs into the ground to build a fence. Even Red Fish could not explain their unusual appearance.
A few of the captured warriors had proven to be strong. They had untied their hair and, in a language Badger couldn't understand, begged to live. This led to the ritual sacrifice of their former tribe, a long-standing tradition.
When the previous "Red Fish" was still alive, both Badger and the current Red Fish had learned that their tribe had migrated from the direction where the sun sets.
Their tribe, it was said, had once been very powerful. Many different tribes lived together, raising sheep and horned deer. They would burn the nearby woods, sow seeds in the ash, and harvest the grain in the autumn.
There were twenty tribes living together in their ancestral home. They could count that high because they used their ten fingers and ten toes, creating a system based on twenties. Their tents were woven from reeds, and their priests taught them many different things: to drink the milk of horned deer and goats in spring and summer, to eat seeds in autumn and winter, and to catch fish with reed thorns.
Then, one year, a sudden flood destroyed their village.
The tribes were not discouraged and prepared to rebuild. But the next year brought a severe drought. Countless grasshoppers descended and devoured everything. The following winter was brutally cold, freezing many of their sheep and deer to death, and the hardships continued into the next year.
The priests declared that the gods were angry and demanded blood. They raided nearby tribes and brought back captives to sacrifice, but nothing changed. In their rage, the tribes turned on the priestess who had offered this advice, throwing her into the fire as a sacrifice herself. While some insisted on staying, others began to have different ideas.
Several tribes conspired in secret. One night, they stole the remaining sheep and deer from the others and fled the forsaken land, taking only their able-bodied members with them. They never knew if the years of floods and droughts had forced the other tribes to migrate as well. In their minds, the world they saw before them was the only world that existed.
One night, a meteor shower lit up the sky in the direction of the rising sun. Coinciding with the celestial event, two new lives appeared in the tribe: a boy and a girl.
The priestess prayed for divine guidance and recalled the ancient legend: walk along the river toward the rising sun until you see a red fish leap as if to cross a rainbow. That would be the land protected by the gods, a place where they could finally settle.
So the tribe, with the two children in tow, began its long migration eastward. At every river they came to, they would burn the trees and plant their seeds. But after a few years, the gods would seem to abandon the land. The seeds would no longer grow as abundantly, the soil would erode, and the once-clear streams would turn muddy with every rain. And so, they would head east again.
Time passed, and the two children grew up. The boy became strong and cunning, as tough as a badger; the girl, smart and wise, eventually succeeded the previous priestess, becoming the new Red Fish.
Then, twenty full moons ago, as they migrated eastward along an emerald-green river, a heavy rain began to fall. The thunder scared two of their horned deer, which bolted and ran away.
When the tribe went searching for the lost animals after the storm, they were stunned to see a huge red fish leap from the river, its arc tracing a path toward a rainbow in the distant sky.
In that moment, Badger, Red Fish, and every single clansman fell to their knees. They knew their god had protected them once more. This was the promised land where they could settle, finally ending their decades of wandering.
And so they built a small village. The last harvest had been plentiful, the land here was fertile, the weather was mild, and their herds of horned deer and sheep began to grow. That autumn, the mountains were filled with countless oak trees, heavy with acorns and wild fruits, which they saw as another sign of their god's protection.
Both Red Fish and Badger knew that if they could help the tribe thrive here, their names would be remembered forever, just like the ancestors who had invented the tribe's most important tools. Their story—the meteor shower at their birth, the fulfillment of the prophecy—would become legend.
This year, they planted even more seeds and would need more hands for the harvest. Since they were no longer migrating, Red Fish and Badger agreed to build a wooden fence to protect their village.
While out hunting on his horned deer, Badger and his warriors spotted smoke in the distance. The other tribe was small. They charged in, killed the old and the young, and brought back anyone strong enough to work.
After all, their god was protecting them. The endless supply of acorns and wild fruits was more than enough to feed these new prisoners until the next harvest. They could put the captives to work cutting wood and building the fence, and later, harvesting the grain.
The successful raid solidified Badger's position and further convinced the tribe that this was a land bestowed by the gods. An image of a red fish was painted in ocher on a large rock in the village, and two young women were sacrificed to their god in thanks.
Badger was a great hunter and knew how to kill his enemies, but he did not know how to tame them. He went to Red Fish for advice.
Red Fish smiled and told him, "You must only distinguish between fear and anger."
Seeing that Badger was still confused, Red Fish had a man killed in front of the other captives. She watched their eyes, noting who showed hatred and who showed fear.
Just as she had expected, those who showed fear soon unbound their hair and smeared the blood of their own clansmen on their faces in submission. A few of the strongest men and women were selected to be integrated into the tribe, both to ensure future generations and to try and understand the meaning of that word, "Jian."
Now, the tribe's men were learning to glue feathers to their arrows and use the better bow-drawing technique, while the women passed around the captured clay pots, marveling at how perfectly round they were. Their own pots were small, ugly, and misshapen, made by hand. To people of this era, symmetry was the highest form of beauty, and this pottery sparked endless fascination. Even Red Fish, the wisest among them, could not explain how it was made.
She remembered how, the night before, as her clansmen boiled seeds in their small earthenware bowls, the surrendered captives had gestured with their hands to indicate something huge, again mentioning the word "Jian." Red Fish understood: that other tribe possessed massive clay pots.
Her tribe's pots were tiny. She had tried to make larger ones, but they always cracked after drying in the sun. She had devised a workaround for their small pots by building a long, covered ditch of mud on the ground, leaving holes at intervals. When a fire was lit at one end, the heat would travel through the mud flue, baking the rows of small, handmade pots placed over the holes. It saved time, but it was nowhere near as convenient as a single large pot.
"How did that man named Jian make such a huge clay pot?" she wondered.
She stared at her own people's crooked pottery, then back at the perfectly round pot they had captured, and fell into deep thought.
While she was meditating, Badger dared not disturb her. After a long time, Red Fish raised her head and addressed the tribe. "This land was given to us by God! Only we should live here, and only we deserve God's blessing. That person named Jian has taken what was supposed to be ours."
She pointed to the stone painted with the ocher fish. The clansmen, who had seen the fish leap over the rainbow with their own eyes, did not doubt her for a second.
"Do you want clay pots like this?" she asked, holding the captured pot high.
The clansmen roared in unison.
"Then find them! We will plunder this man named Jian, or we will capture the potters from his tribe. There will always be people who fear death, and their fear will return to us the things that God originally gave us!"
Badger nodded in agreement. He, too, wanted to see what this man Jian was like, but he had no idea where their tribe was.
Red Fish smiled again. She knew that making pottery required water. And she knew that people with such carefully braided hair would need water to see their own reflection and appreciate their beauty. But she would not reveal her reasoning to the tribe. She would only say it was a revelation from heaven, and she declared with absolute certainty that the other tribe lived on the bank of the river.
Badger selected five of his best hunters. They armed themselves with bows and arrows, carried flint for making fire, and rode out on horned deer, their makeshift saddles fastened to the antlers with cane. They set off downriver to search for the mysterious tribe, to see how many people there were and what their village looked like.
As they left, Red Fish thought to herself that if it was a small tribe, they would have to be wiped out. She felt an unsettling fear; a tribe with such skill was like a young tiger. One day it would grow up, and when it did, her own tribe might be forced to migrate once more. And she was tired of the migratory life.
Wise as she was, she could not have known that a natural disaster decades ago had caused two tribes, once separated by a vast distance, to begin migrating in different ways until they finally collided in this unsettled land decades later. Nor could she have known that the meteor shower that marked her birth had also brought changes to another, distant tribe.
It was all just a coincidence.
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