Her Disturbing Presence, Part One

Thrust into his father's profession long before he is ready, Pyrq must navigate the trade routes in the West. What he finds there challenges the beliefs he clings to: that women are a weak liability and that men must be dominating like the formidable patriarch of his home village, the Bael.

But the West is restive, and Pyrq himself unwittingly becomes a key figure in a major shift in leadership among two communities. While one community succumbs to the changes brought about by the Neolithic Revolution, another desperately cleaves to the ways of its mothers. Pyrq surprisingly finds himself seduced by the customs of the latter, and he struggles between the allure of its sensual priestess and the forceful, masculine domination he has come to accept as normal and rightful.