A Bone From a Dry Sea

by Peter Dickinson

  Watson straightened from his work, sweating. Michael rose and took the barrow. Watson took a few more thumps with the pick, but as there was nowhere to shovel the spoil to now he laid it aside and climbed out of the trench. Vinny looked innocently up.

  ‘Do you know what these are, Watson?’

  Affably he crouched beside her.

  ‘Bivalves, you know,’ he said. ‘Some kind of Tridacna, this one.’

  ‘What about this big one? I thought I’d try and fit the bits together.’

  He picked up the largest piece and turned it over.

  ‘Don’t know for sure,’ he said. ‘Mytilacea, maybe. Take a lot of comparison, lot of studying, be sure of something like that.’

  ‘Can you tell if it was fresh water or if it came out of the sea? It would be terrific if it came out of the sea. Do you know about Elaine Morgan’s sea-ape theory?’

  Watson laughed, macho-contemptuous.

  ‘That woman,’ he said. ‘Hey! Sam! What you been telling your daughter?’

  Dad hadn’t heard, or was pretending he hadn’t. Vinny knew she’d made a bad mistake. If Watson started teasing him in front of the others about his daughter’s wild ideas he’d clam up completely. Dr Hamiska would probably join in. She was with one part of her mind aware that she ought to try and repair the damage, change the subject or laugh at herself and her own silly ideas, but another part of her mind refused to let her. It mattered, in ways she didn’t understand, that she shouldn’t pretend about this, shouldn’t play the part of an ignorant little girl who couldn’t think for herself. May Anna said the ideas might be wrong, but they weren’t crazy. Vinny was certain she knew more about them than Watson did. Her reaction now was to get angry, the way Mum would have when something like this happened.

  ‘What do you mean, that woman?’ she snapped. ‘What difference does it make she’s a woman? I bet you haven’t even read her book. You tell me why you’ve got a layer of fat under your skin, like sea-mammals, and fur like an otter’s when you were in your mother’s womb, and a rotten sense of smell, and a lot of people have webbed fingers and toes, and all sorts of things land animals don’t need. Go on. Tell me. Don’t bother Dad about it. Tell me!’

  He forgot about the macho bit, hunkered down beside her, shrugged amiably and giggled. She glared at him.

  ‘Don’t know about the fingers and stuff,’ he said. ‘About the fat, I think the idea is you get these cold savannah nights . . .’

  ‘Fur would be much better for that. Yes I know, we lost our fur because we got too hot running after antelopes and things. But in that case why didn’t any of the others? Cheetahs and so on? Losing fur’s a rotten way to stay cool. Look at the amount we’ve got to sweat compared to other animals . . .’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’

  ‘Well, you ought to, and what’s more . . .’

  He laughed again. It was difficult to be angry for long with him. They were still arguing when Michael called to him to empty the barrow.

  ‘Finished?’ muttered Dad.

  ‘I’m sorry. It just came out. I’ll think of something else next time.’

  ‘I thought you were going to try him on the shells.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Here’s some more, anyway.’

  She took the pieces and sorted them through. There were two more from one of the larger creatures, and one of them fitted exactly on to a piece she already had. Now, from the curving growth-lines, she could see how the others might go. Sorting through the bag again, with eyes that knew what they were looking for, she found several chips she had missed first time, making up two complete patches and a few outlying bits. Laid out all in place on the ground they let her imagine the whole shell.

  Feet crunched and a shadow moved on the sunlit slope.

  ‘What are you up to, Vinny?’ said Dr Hamiska.

  ‘I was putting this shell together so that Watson could tell me what it was.’

  ‘I can’t have you distracting my work-force, young lady.’

  Vinny looked across and saw that the barrow was almost full again.

  ‘I was trying to stop him distracting Dad,’ she muttered. ‘Can’t you do something about it?’

  Dr Hamiska crouched to bring himself nearer, and whispered like a spy in a thriller.

  ‘I’m afraid Sam’s going to have to put up with him. Watson’s uncle is Minister of the Interior. But I give you permission to distract him when he’s not actually working. In fact I’ll give you a hand.’

  He winked at her and took out his magnifying glass. Rather obviously play-acting he picked up the largest piece of shell and pretended to study it as Watson came strolling across.

  ‘Vinny’s doing a fine job here,’ he said. ‘She was asking me how the shell came to get broken . . .’

  ‘Rocks rolling around, maybe,’ said Watson. ‘You get a lot of that in earthquakes.’

  ‘But there aren’t any rocks in the fossil-layer,’ said Vinny. ‘Couldn’t . . .’

  She stopped, suddenly aware that something had changed. Dr Hamiska wasn’t play-acting any more. He passed the shell and glass up to Watson.

  ‘Do you see what I see?’ he said. ‘Sam! Can you spare us a moment?’

  Wearily Dad climbed out, ducking under the awning, and came over. Watson whistled astonishment. Dad took the shell and looked at it for a while through his own glass.

  ‘There could be a number of explanations,’ he said slowly.

  ‘Oh, Sam! Sam! You’re impossible! If the skies opened and the host of heaven appeared announcing the end of the world, you’d say there could be a number of explanations.’

  ‘Such as me having gone off my rocker. And I understood the end of the world was scheduled for Thursday.’

  ‘What is it?’ said Vinny. ‘Please can I look? Don’t tell me.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Dr Hamiska. ‘If an unschooled eye can see it, perhaps even Doubting Sam will begin to believe.’

  Vinny focused the magnifying glass on the outside of the fragment, near one edge, where she’d seen the others looking so intently. There were two sorts of markings on the shell, a series of waves or rumples running from the middle of what had been the hinge side across to the outer lip, and then a lot of finer bands running parallel to the lip, like tree-rings, laid down as the shell had grown and grown. With the glass she now saw that these bands were interrupted by three small pits near the corner closest to the hinge, while on the very edge was a place like a chip on the edge of a china plate, when it’s been knocked against something.

  ‘Something hit it,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t just squashed.’

  ‘Or someone,’ said Dr Hamiska.

  ‘You can’t say that yet,’ said Dad.

  ‘I say someone,’ said Watson. ‘Yeah, I’m with Joe. Look, just these three strike-marks, all close, and the one on the break . . . Let’s see.’

  He knelt to inspect the rest of the shell, looking slowly at each piece in turn and putting it back in its place before picking up the next. By the time he’d finished some of the others had arrived, and were passing the first shell-fragment round. The air was full of tension.

  ‘What about the piece the other side of the break?’ said someone.

  ‘I haven’t found it yet,’ said Vinny.

  ‘No more strike-marks on any of these,’ said Watson. ‘Looks like it must’ve been, you know, deliberate, uh?’

  Chatter broke out, excited, wondering. Vinny stared at the broken shell, working out what Watson had meant. Yes. If whatever had caused the marks had been accidental – stones rolling down in a landslip, say – then you’d have expected them to be scattered all over the shell. If just one stone had hit it there’d be only one mark. But if someone had been deliberately trying to break it they’d have hit it several times, near the same spot, weakening it till it gave. Of course it could still be just coincidence, but . . .

  ‘Quiet, everyone, quiet!’ shouted Dr Hamiska. ‘You know who we have to thank for this?’
>
  Without warning he bent and picked Vinny up and set her on his shoulder like a three-year-old. The others cheered.

  ‘That’s twice now Vinny has brought us the sort of luck palaeontologists dream of. Two miracles. One more, and the Pope will make her a saint. Till then the best we can do is call this site officially Vinny’s site, and I shall see it goes into the reports as that.’

  Vinny managed to smile, but it was at this point that she definitely made up her mind she didn’t like Dr Hamiska. He’d been kind to her, and friendly, but that certainly didn’t give him any right to treat her as if she belonged to him. And when he put her down he patted her on the head as if she’d been a spaniel or something. No.

  * * *

  Vinny cooked supper out of cans and Dad at least pretended to think it was delicious. They ate in the tent by the light of an oil-lamp, with the netting down over each end, because without that all the insects in Africa would have been swarming round the light. As it was, Vinny could hear the continuous faint flutter of tiny bodies batting against the net and the sides of the tent. It was wonderfully peaceful, and cool enough for a sweater. Dad was transferring the rough notes he’d made on the site into his main notebook, and Vinny was having another go at drawing her fossil, though her eyes were tired and the light was too poor for her to see the fine detail. Neither of them had spoken for half an hour. Dad closed his notebooks and looked up.

  ‘Early bed for me,’ he said. ‘I’m knackered.’

  ‘Me too. And I can’t see to draw.’

  ‘I think I’ll have to tell Joe about those scratch-marks you spotted.’

  ‘Oh. I suppose you’ve got to.’

  ‘What’s troubling you?’

  ‘Well, you see, I found it in the first place. I’m afraid he’ll say it’s the third miracle. I hate it when he makes a fuss about me like that.’

  ‘I thought you were relishing it.’

  ‘Well, I’m not. And I’m not his lucky mascot either.’

  ‘Um. I’ll sit on it till you’ve gone. I can pretend to notice the marks then. I can certainly do without another bout of wild speculation.’

  ‘Thanks. I warn you, Dad, you’d better tell him as soon as I’ve gone. Otherwise I shall use it to blackmail you.’

  ‘Oh huh? What will be your price of silence?’

  ‘I’m going to buy the sea-ape book and send it to you, and you’re going to have to read it and tell me what you think.’

  His mood changed. He had been stretching and half-yawning, relaxed, happy with her companionship, with being her father, but as she spoke she saw him shrink into himself and go cold.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know I shouldn’t have talked about it to Watson. It was stupid of me.’

  ‘It’s done now.’

  ‘May Anna says . . .’

  She stopped, knowing she’d put her foot in it again. She’d been going to tell him what May Anna had said about the sea-ape theory being wrong, but not crazy wrong. That would be a disaster now.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘May Anna says it’s no use trying to pretend with you. I must just be what I am, and hope. So must you.’

  He looked at her and nodded.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope.’

  THEN

  FOR THE FIRST time, ever, in countless generations, the pattern of the tribe’s existence changed. Accidents might have varied their journeys before – a storm, or a stranded fish large enough to feed them all for an extra day or so, keeping them longer in one place – but they had always tended to make the time up, reaching the river in the north around the new moon, and returning to the shrimping beaches at the full. Now they didn’t go north at all. The first haul of fish lasted them three days, and then the dolphins came again.

  This time the shoal was smaller, but the people knew what to do, so the catch was almost as great. Li hadn’t called to the dolphins in her mind, but Presh assumed she had and took her out to dance with them when the hunt was over. Four days later the people were hungry again, but by then he felt that his leg was strong enough for normal swimming and he took them south.

  To Li’s surprise, though the rest of the tribe took it that she’d sent for them, the dolphins brought a shoal to a bay like the one where Greb had danced after his fight with Presh. There was no bar to trap the fish here, so the people lined up in the water in an open-ended ring, into which the dolphins herded the fish to be scooped out on to the shingle. Already these hunts were becoming part of the tribe’s life-pattern, something which happened because it happened, no cause for wonder at all.

  Li did wonder. At times she was almost paralysed by the wonder of things – her own shadow, for instance, moving below her as she swam above sunlit sands, or the intricacy of a jellyfish, or why gulls could fly and she couldn’t. She wondered often about the dolphins, though she knew they were so wonderful that she would never understand them, unless, perhaps, when she died and they took her to the place the sun came from.

  (There were limits to her wonder. It didn’t, for instance, occur to her to wonder how both people and dolphins had learnt so quickly to help and trust each other – whether, perhaps, in the thousands of generations during which the people had roamed these shores this way of hunting had been evolved, and then for some reason forgotten, but with the memory of how it was done still lying buried among the genes of both species until Li’s chance meeting with the first dolphin had revived it. Perhaps. But all Li knew was that the dolphins felt like friends, and were wonderful.)

  The tribe gave her time to wonder. They accepted that she was part of Presh’s glorious feast-providing leadership, so they made a place for her in their life-pattern. Presh took her with him when he visited the families, and shared with her the food they offered him, and that seemed right. They remembered the birth-ritual and insisted again on her presence, demanding a plaited cord of the mother’s hair, to be threaded through the hole in whatever ornament the father brought. (A mother who owned a good ornament, and whose baby was now old enough to be losing its birth-fur, might find two or three males begging and bribing her to pass the thing on.) They showed Li their hurts, which mostly she couldn’t do much for, though sometimes she stanched a bloodflow with a pad of seaweed which they could hold in place till the clot formed. And they gave her space when she chose to be alone, so that a mother might cuff a child who pestered her, as if she’d been a senior male.

  But at other times, in squabbles over food, for instance, she might have a morsel snatched from her hand by a senior, as if she had no status at all. This seemed natural to her. She’d be angry, not affronted.

  Presh wanted her nearby because he had to use every means he could to enhance his own prestige. His leg had mended crooked, turning his foot under him as he walked. He could swim well enough, but the muscles tired on long journeys and the foot didn’t thrust well against the water. They all knew that he would never be able to perform the confrontation ritual for more than a few exhausting leaps, and that if it then came to a land-fight he would certainly lose. So he had to make his own position so secure that no other male would want to confront him, unless he were half-mad, like Greb.

  He didn’t consciously plan this. He was a sociable person, so it was natural to him to pay attention to the other senior males, to visit all the families and so on. Nothing he did was out of the ordinary. Only the result wasn’t ordinary. The nature of leadership had changed. It now depended less upon dominance and more upon consent. The tribe had helped in the change by their refusal to accept Greb as leader, and Presh’s injury forced him to adapt to his limitations, and to control the tribe with the help of the seniors, male and female, and to see that stomachs were seldom empty. This was why Li was important to him. If times had been hard and food scarce, then the tribe would have let him go and accepted whoever had challenged and outfaced him. But with the living easy they were happy with things as they were.

  Sometimes the dolphins stayed away from one full moon to the next, a
nd the tribe would return to shore-harvesting, but even then, because they’d had fish to eat last time they passed by, the mussel beds would hold succulent big mussels and the rocks and pools and crannies would be rich in crabs and octopi and other prey that had bred there undisturbed. Then perhaps three times in a journey the dolphins would herd shoals to them. Both sides were learning. A single dolphin would come swimming near the shark-watch, filling the sea with its song, and answers would be heard, far off and faint. The shark-watch would cry their new call, Dolphin, and the single dolphin would leave and Presh would collect everyone to the best hunting-place on that stretch of shore, to wait for the driven shoal.

  There was, for instance, a beach with a sand spit running out into the sea and the sea floor almost level beside it, drying right out at low water but excellent when the tide was half-full. The best swimmers would go out to help herd the shoal into the trap, others with Presh in command would wait on the sand spit while everyone else lined up opposite it, standing close together in the water. The dolphins would herd the shoal in, the people on the spit would plunge in and close the trap, and then the line would carefully tighten, body against body, forcing the fish into a packed and threshing mass in the shallows where those no longer needed in the shorter line could wade, grabbing and flinging the helpless fish up on to the beach. Sometimes the line broke under the pressure. Sometimes the fish were small enough for many of them to slip through. But when the hunt went well they could catch all they and the dolphins needed in a single drive.

  Days, times, seasons passed. The rains came for their usual few blissful days, heard first as thunder out to sea, then seen as banked clouds on the horizon and at the same time sensed in tension and waiting, the sky losing its blue and the air sticky, heavy to breathe, as if it were half-way to water. Finally the downpour smothering sea and land. A few days of that, leaving the sky sparkling, while the cliffs clothed themselves in green and the dunes behind the shrimping beach became a brief astonishment of flowers before the world settled back to heat and drought.