A Bone From a Dry Sea Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Then

  Now: Sunday Morning

  Then

  Now: Sunday Evening

  Then

  Now: Monday Morning

  Then

  Now: Monday Morning

  Then

  Now: Monday Afternoon

  Then

  Now: Tuesday Morning

  Then

  Now: Tuesday Afternoon

  Then

  Now: Wednesday Morning

  Then

  Now: Wednesday Morning

  Then

  Now: Wednesday Afternoon

  Then

  Now: Thursday Morning

  Then

  Now: Thursday Afternoon

  Note

  About the Author

  Also by Peter Dickinson

  Copyright

  About the Book

  One small body curled among the mass of sleepers. Different. Yes, I’m different . . .

  Four million years ago, then, a young girl – Li – lives with her tribe along the shores of a mothering sea. But Li is different. A thinker, a questioner, her sense of wonder and intuition could help shape the future of her race.

  In Africa, now, on the site of that very same plain – Vinny visits her father who is working as part of a team searching for fossil remains of our ancestors. Fascinated by the tiny fragments of bone that are painstakingly dug out of the ground, Vinny’s curiosity helps lead the team towards a major discovery . . .

  PETER

  DICKINSON

  A BONE FROM

  A DRY SEA

  Myth in all tongues credits the dolphins with

  Making the bays they visit happy, waking

  Song in flint cottages that lacked it long.

  Man haunts what shores he can.

  THEN

  THE CHILD CLUNG to the rock, letting the broken waves of the bay wash over her, cooling the fierce sunlight. She was not afraid. The sea was her home.

  Light dazzled off the water, but she kept her head above the surface and gazed steadily towards the mouth of the bay. She was on shark-watch. Out on the open shore grown males would keep watch, but a submerged rock-shelf barred the entrance to this bay, so it was safe to let the children learn the duty.

  She was hungry. For days now the wind had blown hard from the south-east, driving the ocean rollers before it. The tribe used the bay because there were caves in the low cliffs, deep in two of which fresh water trickled down the rock. But food inside the bay was scarce, so normally they would have hunted the rocky inlets beyond for shellfish and shrimps and crabs and the little octopi that hid under boulders.

  But with a wind like this the dark green rollers pounded in, hurling their foam to the cliff-tops and then dragging anything loose back seaward in their weight of water. Anyone who tried to feed out on the open shore would be swept away to where the sharks cruised, or break an arm or leg, or crush a foot. So by now all the tribe were hungry.

  A hand touched the child’s flank beneath the water. She glanced down, grinned a greeting as her mother rose beside her, and returned to her watch. Her mother had brought her two mussels, barely the size of a fingernail. Her mouth watered as she heard the crack of shells being pounded open, and she was putting her hand down to take them when she froze, pointed, yelled the warning Big wave, and immediately added the snapped-off hoot that meant Shark!

  When each roller reached the submerged shelf at the bay’s mouth it rose to a wall, ridged with foam, and seemed to hang for an instant before it crashed into the bay. In that moment before wave-break the sun lit it from beyond. Now a giant wave, two waves in one perhaps, had come. It seemed to rise as high as the cliffs behind the bay and then poise at the entrance for longer than an ordinary wave. In its green-lit depths hung a darker, curving shadow as big as four grown males. Then it crashed down and its foam creamed over the bay.

  The noise was enough to startle even people used to the surprises of the sea, so many of the tribe surfaced to look. The child was standing on the rock now, pointing and yelling. Her mother was racing for the shore. As the wave-thunder died and before the next wave crashed in they heard that the yell was Shark!, but mostly stayed where they were – it was only a child, mistaken, probably, or mischievous. Then the mother reached the shore and joined in the cry, and the whole tribe streamed for safety.

  The shark had vanished. It must have been swimming along the shoreline, hunting perhaps for someone desperate enough to go foraging out in the open, when the monster wave had picked it up, a moving mass of water too powerful for it to be able to fight its way against, and so it had been tossed into the bay.

  The child yelled again and pointed with her web-fingered hand. She had glimpsed the long shadow gliding beneath the ruffled surface a few paces from her rock. A moment later the dorsal fin broke the surface as the rising sea-bed forced the shark upwards.

  The people yelled. The shark veered along the shoreline through a spatter of hurled rocks, and away down into deeper water. It vanished for a while but circled round by the rock again, and again the child yelled and pointed, and again the fin emerged. This time the people were ready, and larger rocks hailed round it. And again. And again.

  At first they were trying to drive it away so that they could return to the water, but soon they realized it was trapped. Except in the moment when a wave came pounding in, the entrance to the bay was too shallow for it to pass. So now the tribe were the hunters and the shark the prey, if they could find a way to kill it. They spread along the shore, harrying it on.

  The child watched from the rock. Now that her eyes understood what they were seeing she could trace the shark’s movements all round the bay, except through the turmoil at the entrance. She turned steadily, one arm raised to point, helping the others follow the track of their enemy. They surged along the shore, leaping from rock to rock, hurling anything they could lift. Cushioned by water few of these missiles can have hurt the shark much, but it grew half-mad with fright and began to break from its circuit and make dashes across the bay, sometimes actually rubbing against the rock where the child stood. She kept to her task, unalarmed.

  A shark must swim to keep water moving through its gills, or it will die, so this one couldn’t lie in the deep centre of the bay, out of the tribe’s reach. Round and round it had to go, enduring their attack. Now they grew bolder, some dashing into the water as it went by with rocks in their hands to pound at the passing flank. These blows too did little damage, but the sense of dominance increased, infecting them all. Excited young males ran into the water ahead of it, ready for their attack. The cliffs echoed with the tribe’s yells.

  On the far side of the bay, a male plunged in and followed the shark’s path towards the rock. It looked like more bravado, but when he reached the rock he climbed out and stood beside the child. He was her uncle, a senior male, already beginning to challenge the aging leader, and he was taking this chance to increase his prestige by directing the shark-hunt. He watched the shark make two more circuits while the child pointed its path, but next time, as soon as it was safely past the rock he grunted Go away and pushed her into the water. She swam quickly ashore, glad to be out of the sun and free of the ache of pointing all the time.

  She didn’t join the others along the shoreline, but climbed to a patch of shade beneath an overhang, where she could sit and watch the hunt, while the tribe dashed in and out of the water, screaming and smiting, and beating the surface into gouts of spray. She alone seemed not to be swept up into the frenzy. She wanted to see.

  A wild yell rose, on a different note, not rage or excitement, but pain. Those in
the water rushed ashore. Two of them dragged a third. Blood streamed down his side. His left arm was missing, almost to the shoulder. The shark had attacked. Hunter and hunted had changed places again.

  Sharks can smell blood a long way off. They race towards its source. The odour drives them mad.

  All its terror forgotten, the killer threshed round the bay. It sensed the male on the rock and circled below him. It drove its snout into the air almost to his feet. Then it broke off and dashed towards the place where the water reeked most strongly. Though they were safe on shore, the tribe scattered before it.

  Quietly, the child watched. There was no answer, she saw, until either the shark died, or escaped. For it to escape there must be a big tide and no wind. But the tribe were also trapped until the wind dropped. And now they couldn’t even forage for the scant pickings in the bay. Unless they could kill the shark they would starve before it did.

  Out of nowhere the answer came into her mind.

  The shark’s mad rushes had a pattern. It surged towards the patch of blood-tainted water, found nothing there, sensed the live meat on the shore and slid along beside it, then remembered in its slow brain about the other meat, trapped on the rock, almost in reach, and hurtled out there, circling for a while until a waft of blood-smell drew it on another frenzied rush towards the shore.

  It had found its victim below and to the left of where the child was sitting. Here a ridge of rock sloped down into the water and became the bar at the mouth of the bay, with a wide shelf running beside it for some distance below the surface. It had caught its prey in the corner between the shelf and the shore. This was the place it made for each time.

  Unnoticed, the child made her way down to the water’s edge and waited, watching the fin circle the rock. The snout nuzzled up towards her uncle. The toothed mouth gaped. Then the fin came slicing through the water towards her. She ran down on to the submerged shelf to meet it.

  The tribe screamed. The shark saw her. The fin curved from its path, heading straight at her. At the last instant she flung herself aside.

  All her life, since she could paddle, she’d played catch-as-catch-can in and out of the water. She knew what she could do, but hadn’t realized the shark’s speed and power. If its charge hadn’t been slowed by the slope of the rock, it would have caught her. As it was, she was knocked flat by the rush of its attack, which carried the streamlined body on up the slope right to the water’s edge where it lay stranded, its gills in the air, its tail thrashing at the shallows behind it.

  Gabbling and calling, the tribe gathered to watch it die. The child’s uncle came swimming across to stand with one foot on the still twitching body, shouting triumph and punching his fists into the air, as if it had been he who’d steered it on to the rock and killed it. The tribe shouted Praise. Gulls gathered above, joining their screams to the racket.

  Without tools, apart from the stones they used to break crabs and shellfish open, it took time for the tribe to gnaw and claw their way through the tough skin of the belly, but they did it in the end. Their leader wanted to organize the sharing-out of meat, but the child’s uncle outfaced him and drove him back, taking the honour himself, allotting big pieces of liver to senior males and the mothers of new-born young. Then the families squabbled around the carcase, but without anger because they could see there was enough for everyone. Even the children slept that night with crammed stomachs.

  The child who had watched from the rock got her share. Her mother had cuffed her for her stupidity and she had whimpered Sorry because that was expected of her, but as she lay among the crowded bodies in one of the caves, unable to sleep because of the mass of meat inside her, she relived the adventure. She knew what she had done, and why. She understood that it had not been an accident. She realized, too, that the others would not understand.

  She had no words for this knowledge. Thought and understanding for her were a kind of seeing. She showed herself things in her mind – the rock-shelf, the shallow water, the need to lure the shark full-tilt on to the slope so that it would force itself out too far, and strand, and die; then her uncle triumphing and her mother scolding and herself cringing while she hugged her knowledge inside her.

  Now she seemed to herself to be standing apart in the cave, seeing by the moonlight reflected from the bay one small body curled among the mass of sleepers. A thought which had neither words nor pictures made itself in her mind.

  Different.

  She’s different. Yes, I’m different.

  NOW: SUNDAY MORNING

  THE TRUCK WALLOWED along the gravelly road, if you could call it a road. Often there was nothing to mark it off from the rest of the brown, enormous plain, but Dad knew where he was because then there’d be tyre-ruts making the truck wallow worse than ever. Vinny clutched the handgrip on the dash to stop herself being thrown around. They’d done two hours from the airport, though it seemed longer, when Dad stopped by a flat-topped tree with a lot of grassy bundles hanging among the branches. Weaver-birds, Vinny guessed. She’d seen them on TV.

  ‘Ready for lunch?’ he said.

  ‘I’m starving. How much further?’

  ‘We’re a bit over half-way. But look.’

  He pointed and Vinny stared through the shimmer of heat. Far off there were blue hills. Much nearer something moved, changed shape, vanished as the wavering air distorted the distance, and then was there again, steady for a moment – three long, slightly arching necks with small heads. She’d known them since she was tiny, from the Noah’s Ark frieze round her room.

  ‘Giraffes,’ she said.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Are there any lions?’

  ‘They’ll be resting till it gets a bit cooler. Take a good look. We don’t get much wildlife round the camp, because we’re on the edge of the badlands.’

  ‘Why’s it all so flat?’

  ‘Because it was sea until a few million years ago. Those hills used to be the shoreline. In fact the section the camp’s on seems to have been an island. Seen enough?’

  He drove into the shade of the tree and fetched crates from the back of the truck for them to sit on while Vinny unpacked the lunch. Crisps, Coke, chicken sandwiches, mangoes and a Mars Bar.

  ‘I hope that’s the sort of thing you like,’ he said.

  ‘I like anything.’

  She sensed that he was as nervous as she was. They hadn’t seen each other for over a year, and never before like this. It had always been London hotels, visits to the zoo or the planetarium, jerky talk about school and her friends and what she liked doing, both of them jumpy with having to watch what they said because of the anger between him and Mum, still there, still no better, eight years after the split.

  He ate in silence. Vinny was ready for this. That was one of the things Mum couldn’t cope with, his silences. Whole days sometimes, she’d said. A complete skiing holiday once. The obvious thing was to be silent too, but Mum wouldn’t have known how.

  The cooling engine clicked. The weaver-birds accepted their presence and began to move and chatter. An ant the size of a button came and dragged away a crumb of bread.

  ‘You’re not tired?’ he said for about the fifth time.

  ‘I’m fine. But listen, Dad. It’s going to be all right. And if it isn’t, then it’s my fault. It was all my idea.’

  ‘So I gathered. Your mother . . .’

  He didn’t try to keep the sourness out of his laugh.

  ‘Colin talked her round,’ she said. ‘It makes going to Grasse a lot easier for them, you see – they don’t have to bother about what I want, only them and the boys. You know, Mum was still trying to make me join an Outward Bound course or something till you said we couldn’t go on a safari after all because you’d got to go on working, and you thought I’d be bored. That made it all right.’

  ‘Because it was a nuisance for me?’

  ‘Not just that. She wouldn’t mind so much provided I was bored. Look, Dad, I’ll tell you what I think about Mum and then we d
on’t have to talk about it any more. It’s a bit like Grandad and his bad leg – you know, there’s things he just can’t do because of it, but otherwise he’s the same as anyone else. Only with Mum it’s inside her. She just can’t be sensible about anything to do with you. Apart from that she’s the same as my friends’ mums. She can be lovely, she can be a pain in the neck, you know? I’m lucky she fell for Colin. I really like him. The boys can be pests, but that’s the age they are. But honestly, I’m a lot happier at home than some of the kids I know. You needn’t worry – I’m not going to try and sucker on to you from now on.’

  ‘You’ve thought it all out?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose I’m like that.’

  He grunted and went into another of his silences. Vinny ate the half-melted Mars Bar, quite wrong for Africa but she knew he’d got it because she’d asked for one on a bitter winter day in London once. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eyes. Not like a dad, somehow – short, broad-chested, round-faced, dark-haired once but now more than half bald.

  ‘It doesn’t always work,’ he said.

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘Thinking things out. Oy oy – we’re going to have to move. This lot are biters.’

  Out of nowhere troops of shiny orange ants had appeared, obviously intending to carry off not just the crumbs and leavings but the untouched food as well. Vinny helped pack up and climbed into the truck. Dad got in the other side but didn’t start the engine.

  ‘That’s a good image of yours,’ he said. ‘Pop’s duff leg, I’m talking about. You’ve got your head screwed on . . . Look, I’d better explain one or two things about the set-up at the camp.’

  ‘I thought I’d just keep my mouth shut till I found out.’

  ‘Still, it’ll be easier if . . . Things aren’t too good, you see. For a start, we haven’t been lucky in our finds. That’s always a risk. Any expedition has its ups and downs – you go a few weeks without significant finds and everyone gets short-tempered and bitchy – it’s been such an effort to get here and you don’t get that many chances, so you feel you’re wasting your time, and the food tastes foul and stupid accidents begin to happen. But then someone comes up with something really worthwhile and everybody’s on a high, and they start seeing things they’d missed, and meals don’t matter . . . you understand?’