When he could not contain himself a moment longer, Twerk shouted to the women: “Who will catch the baby?”

  Oh, how they laughed at him, when at last they understood what he was saying. “Derku will catch him!” they retorted, jeering, and the men around him also laughed, for that could mean several things. It could mean that the god would provide for the child’s safety, or it could mean that the flood would catch the child, for the flood was also called derkuwed, or dragonwater, partly because it was aswarm with crocodiles swept away from their usual lairs, and partly because the floodwater slithered down from the mountains like a crocodile sliding down into the water, quick and powerful and strong, ready to sweep away and swallow up the unwary. Derku will catch him indeed!

  The men began predicting what the child would be named. “He will be Rogogu, because we all laughed,” said one. Another said, “It will be a girl and she will be named Mehug, because she will be spilled into the water as she plops out!” They guessed that the child would be named for the fact that Twerk watched the birth; for the branch that Lewik clung to or the tree that Twerk climbed; or for the dragonwater itself, into which they imagined the child spilling and then being drawn out with the embrace of the god still dripping from him. Indeed, because of this notion Derkuwed became a childhood nickname for Lewik’s and Twerk’s baby, and later it was one of the names by which his story was told over and over again in faraway lands that had never heard of dragonwater or seen a crocodile, but it was not his real name, not what his father gave him to be his man-name when he came of age.

  After much pushing, Lewik’s baby finally emerged. First came the head, dangling between her ankles like the fruit of a tree—that was why the word for head was the same as the word for fruit in the language of the Derku people. Then as the newborn’s head touched the bound reeds of the dragonboat, Lewik rolled her eyes in pain and waddled slowly backward, so that the baby flopped out of her body stretched along the length of the boat. He did not fall into the water, because his mother had made sure of it.

  “Little man!” cried all the women as soon as they saw the sex of the child.

  Lewik grunted out her firstborn’s baby-name. “Glogmeriss,” she said. Glog meant “thorn” and meriss meant “trouble”; together, they made the term that the Derku used for annoyances that turned out all right in the end, but which were quite painful at the time. There were some who thought that she wasn’t naming the baby at all, but simply commenting on the situation, but it was the first thing she said and so it would be his name until he left the company of women and joined the men.

  As soon as the afterbirth dropped onto the dragonboat, all the other women paddled nearer—like a swarm of gnats, thought Twerk, still watching. Some helped Lewik pry her hands loose from the tree branch and lie down on her dragonboat. Others took the baby and passed it from hand to hand, each one washing a bit of the blood from the baby. The afterbirth got passed with the baby at first, often dropping into the flood-water, until at last it reached the cutting woman, who severed the umbilical cord with a flint blade. Twerk, seeing this for the first time, realized that this might be how he got his name, which meant “cutting” or “breaking.” Had his father seen this remarkable thing, too, the women cutting a baby off from this strange belly-tail? No wonder he named him for it.

  But the thing that Twerk could not get out of his mind was the fact that his Lewik had taken off her napron in full view of the clan, and all the men had seen her nakedness, despite their efforts to pretend that they had not. Twerk knew that this would become a joke among the men, a story talked about whenever he was not with them, and this would weaken him and mean that he would never be the clan leader, for one can never give such respect to a man that one laughs about behind his back.

  Twerk could think of only one way to keep this from having the power to hurt him, and that was to confront it openly so that no one would laugh behind his back. “His name is Naog!” cried Twerk decisively, almost as soon as the baby was fully washed in river water and the placenta set loose to float away on the flood.

  “You are such a stupid man!” cried Lewik from her dragonboat. Everyone laughed, but in this case it was all right. Everyone knew Lewik was a bold woman who said whatever she liked to any man. That was why it was such a mark of honor that Twerk had chosen to take her as wife and she had taken him for husband—it took a strong man to laugh when his wife said disrespectful things to him. “Of course he’s naog,” she said. “All babies are born naked.”

  “I call him Naog because you were naked in front of all the clan,” answered Twerk. “Yes, I know you all looked when you thought I couldn’t see,” he chided the men. “I don’t mind a bit. You all saw my Lewik naked when the baby came out of her—but what matters is that only I saw her naked when I put the baby in!”

  That made them all laugh, even Lewik, and the story was often repeated. Even before he became a man and gave up the baby-name Glogmeriss, Naog had often heard the tale of why he would have such a silly name—so often, in fact, that he determined that one day he would do such great deeds that when the people heard the word naog they would think first of him and his accomplishments, before they remembered that the name was also the word for the tabu condition of taking the napron off one’s secret parts in public.

  As he grew up, he knew that the water of derkuwed on him as a baby had touched him with greatness. It seemed he was always taller than the other boys, and he reached puberty first, his young body powerfully muscled by the labor of dredging the canals right among the slaves of the dragon during mudwater season. He wasn’t much more than twelve floodwaters old when the grown men began clamoring for him to be given his manhood journey early so that he could join them in slave raids—his sheer size would dishearten many an enemy, making them despair and throw down club or spear. But Twerk was adamant. He would not tempt Great Derku to devour his son by letting the boy get ahead of himself. Naog might be large of body, but that didn’t mean that he could get away with taking a man’s role before he had learned all the skills and lore that a man had to acquire in order to survive.

  This was all fine with Naog. He knew that he would have his place in the clan in due time. He worked hard to learn all the skills of manhood—how to fight with any weapon; how to paddle his dragonboat straight on course, yet silently; how to recognize the signs of the seasons and the directions of the stars at different hours of the night and times of the year; which wild herbs were good to eat, and which deadly; how to kill an animal and dress it so it would keep long enough to bring home for a wife to eat. Twerk often said that his son was as quick to learn things requiring wit and memory as to learn skills that depended only on size and strength and quickness.

  What Twerk did not know, what no one even guessed, was that these tasks barely occupied Naog’s mind. What he dreamed of, what he thought of constantly, was how to become a great man so that his name could be spoken with solemn honor instead of a smile or laughter.

  One of Naog’s strongest memories was a visit to the Great Derku in the holy pond at the very center of the great circular canals that linked all the Derku people together. Every year during the mud season, the first dredging was the holy pond, and no slaves were used for that. No, the Derku men and women, the great and the obscure, dredged the mud out of the holy pond, carried it away in baskets, and heaped it up in piles that formed a round lumpen wall around the pond. As the dry season came, crocodiles a-wandering in search of water would smell the pond and come through the gaps in the wall to drink it and bathe in it. The crocodiles knew nothing of danger from coming within walls. Why would they have learned to fear the works of humans? What other people in all the world had ever built such a thing? So the crocodiles came and wallowed in the water, heedless of the men watching from trees. At the first full moon of the dry season, as the crocodiles lay stupidly in the water during the cool of night, the men dropped from the trees and quietly filled the gaps in the walls with earth. At dawn, the largest crocodile in the pond was hailed as Great Derku for the year. The rest were killed with spears in the bloodiest most wonderful festival of the year.

  The year that Naog turned six, the Great Derku was the largest crocodile that anyone could remember ever seeing. It was a dragon indeed, and after the men of raiding age came home from the blood moon festival full of stories about this extraordinary Great Derku, all the families in all the clans began bringing their children to see it.

  “They say it’s a crocodile who was Great Derku many years ago,” said Naog’s mother. “He has returned to our pond in hopes of the offerings of manfruit that we used to give to the dragon. But some say he’s the very one who was Great Derku the year of the forbidding, when he refused to eat any of the captives we offered him.”

  “And how would they know?” said Twerk, ridiculing the idea. “Is there anyone alive now who was alive then, to recognize him? And how could a crocodile live so long?”

  “The Great Derku lives forever,” said Lewik.

  “Yes, but the true dragon is the derkuwed, the water in flood,” said Twerk, “and the crocodiles are only its children.”

  To the child, Naog, these words had another meaning, for he had heard the word derkuwed far more often in reference to himself, as his nickname, than in reference to the great annual flood. So to him it sounded as though his father was saying that he was the true dragon, and the crocodiles were his children. Almost at once he realized what was actually meant, but the impression lingered in the back of his mind.

  “And couldn’t the derkuwed preserve one of its children to come back to us to be our god a second time?” said Lewik. “Or are you suddenly a holy man who knows what the dragon is saying?”

  “All this talk about this Great Derku being one of the ancient ones brought back to us is dangerous,” said Twerk. “Do you want us to return to the terrible days when we fed manfruit to the Great Derku? When our captives were all torn to pieces by the god, while we, men and women alike, had to dig out all the canals without slaves?”

  “There weren’t so many canals then,” said Lewik. “Father said.”

  “Then it must be true,” said Twerk, “if your old father said it. So think about it. Why are there so many canals now, and why are they so long and deep? Because we put our captives to work dredging our canals and making our boats. What if the Great Derku had never refused to eat manfruit? We would not have such a great city here, and other tribes would not bring us gifts and even their own children as slaves. They can come and visit our captives, and even buy them back from us. That’s why we’re not hated and feared, but rather loved and feared in all the lands from the Nile to the Salty Sea.”

  Naog knew that his father’s manhood journey had been from the Salty Sea all the way up the mountains and across endless grasslands to the great river of the west. It was a legendary journey, fitting for such a large man. So Naog knew that he would have to undertake an even greater journey. But of that he said nothing.

  “But these people talking stupidly about this being that same Great Derku returned to us again—don’t you realize that they will want to put it to the test again, and offer it manfruit? And what if the Great Derku eats it this time? What do we do then, go back to doing all the dredging ourselves? Or let the canals fill in so we can’t float the seedboats from village to village during the dry season, and so we have no defense from our enemies and no way to ride our dragonboats all year?”

  Others in the clan were listening to this argument, since there was little enough privacy under normal circumstances, and none at all when you spoke with a raised voice. So it was no surprise when they chimed in. One offered the opinion that the reason no manfruit should be offered to this Great Derku was because the eating of manfruit would give the Great Derku knowledge of all the thoughts of the people they ate. Another was afraid that the sight of a powerful creature eating the flesh of men would lead some of the young people to want to commit the unpardonable sin of eating that forbidden fruit themselves, and in that case all the Derku people would be destroyed.

  What no one pointed out was that in the old days, when they fed manfruit to the Great Derku, it wasn’t just captives that were offered. During years of little rain or too much rain, the leader of each clan always offered his own eldest son as the first fruit, or, if he could not bear to see his son devoured, he would offer himself in his son’s place—though some said that in the earliest times it was always the leader himself who was eaten, and they only started offering their sons as a cowardly substitute. By now everyone expected Twerk to be the next clan leader, and everyone knew that he doted on his Glogmeriss, his Naog-to-be, his Derkuwed, and that he would never throw his son to the crocodile god. Nor did any of them wish him to do so. A few people in the other clans might urge the test of offering manfruit to the Great Derku, but most of the people in all of the tribes, and all of the people in Engu clan, would oppose it, and so it would not happen.

  So it was with an assurance of personal safety that Twerk brought his firstborn son with him to see the Great Derku in the holy pond. But six-year-old Glogmeriss, oblivious to the personal danger that would come from the return of human sacrifice, was terrified at the sight of the holy pond itself. It was surrounded by a low wall of dried mud, for once the crocodile had found its way to the water inside, the gaps in the wall were closed. But what kept the Great Derku inside was not just the mud wall. It was the row on row of sharpened horizontal stakes pointing straight inward, set into the mud and lashed to sharp vertical stakes about a handsbreadth back from the point. The captive dragon could neither push the stakes out of the way nor break them off. Only when the floodwater came and the river spilled over the top of the mud wall and swept it away, stakes and all, would that year’s Great Derku be set free. Only rarely did the Great Derku get caught on the stakes and die, and when it happened it was regarded as a very bad omen.

  This year, though, the wall of stakes was not widely regarded as enough assurance that the dragon could not force his way out, he was so huge and clever and strong. So men stood guard constantly, spears in hand, ready to prod the Great Derku and herd it back into place, should it come dangerously close to escaping.

  The sight of spikes and spears was alarming enough, for it looked like war to young Glogmeriss. But he soon forgot those puny sticks when he caught sight of the Great Derku himself, as he shambled up on the muddy, grassy shore of the pond. Of course Glogmeriss had seen crocodiles all his life; one of the first skills any child, male or female, had to learn was how to use a spear to poke a crocodile so it would leave one’s dragonboat—and therefore one’s arms and legs—in peace. This crocodile, though, this dragon, this god, was so huge that Glogmeriss could easily imagine it swallowing him whole without having to bite him in half or even chew. Glogmeriss gasped and clung to his father’s hand.

  “A giant indeed,” said his father. “Look at those legs, that powerful tail. But remember that the Great Derku is but a weak child compared to the power of the flood.”

  Perhaps because human sacrifice was still on his mind, Twerk then told his son how it had been in the old days. “When it was a captive we offered as manfruit, there was always a chance that the god would let him live. Of course, if he clung to the stakes and refused to go into the pond, we would never let him out alive—we poked him with our spears. But if he went boldly into the water so far that it covered his head completely, and then came back out alive and made it back to the stakes without the Great Derku taking him and eating him, well, then, we brought him out in great honor. We said that his old life ended in that water, that the man we had captured had been buried in the holy pond, and now he was born again out of the flood. He was a full member of the tribe then, of the same clan as the man who had captured him. But of course the Great Derku almost never let anyone out alive, because we always kept him hungry.”

  “You poked him with your spear?” asked Glogmeriss.

  “Well, not me personally. When I said that we did it, I meant of course the men of the Derku. But it was long before I was born. It was in my grandfather’s time, when he was a young man, that there came a Great Derku who wouldn’t eat any of the captives who were offered to him. No one knew what it meant, of course, but all the captives were coming out and expecting to be adopted into the tribe. But if that had happened, the captives would have been the largest clan of all, and where would we have found wives for them all? So the holy men and the clan leaders realized that the old way was over, that the god no longer wanted manfruit, and therefore those who survived after being buried in the water of the holy pond were not adopted into the Derku people. But we did keep them alive and set them to work on the canals. That year, with the captives working alongside us, we dredged the canals deeper than ever, and we were able to draw twice the water from the canals into the fields of grain during the dry season, and when we had a bigger harvest than ever before, we had hands enough to weave more seedboats to contain it. Then we realized what the god had meant by refusing to eat the manfruit. Instead of swallowing our captives into the belly of the water where the god lives, the god was giving them all back to us, to make us rich and strong. So from that day on we have fed no captives to the Great Derku. Instead we hunt for meat and bring it back, while the women and old men make the captives do the labor of the city. In those days we had one large canal. Now we have three great canals encircling each other, and several other canals cutting across them, so that even in the driest season a Derku man can glide on his dragonboat like a crocodile from any part of our land to any other, and never have to drag it across dry earth. This is the greatest gift of the dragon to us, that we can have the labor of our captives instead of the Great Derku devouring them himself.”

  “It’s not a bad gift to the captives, either,” said Glogmeriss. “Not to die.”