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  The Kin

  Peter Dickinson

  Contents

  BEFORE YOU START

  SUTH’S STORY

  NOLI’S STORY

  KO’S STORY

  MANA’S STORY

  BEFORE YOU START

  It is Africa, about two hundred thousand years ago.

  The first modern human beings have evolved. There are other people in the world, earlier kinds of human, but these are the first homo sapiens sapiens, which is what everyone in the world is today. They are probably the first humans to have language. They can speak.

  At first, there are very few of these new people, but they are clever and strong and do well. Their numbers grow, so that they have to move outwards and find fresh lands where they can live. This happens in waves, with long intervals between. This book is about a group of these people, the Kin, just after one of these waves has started. They have been forced to leave the lands where they have lived for as long as they can remember and must look for new ones.

  I have made almost all of it up. The real people who lived in those days left very few traces—the stone tools they made, fossils of their own bones and the bones of animals they ate, the ashes of their fires, and so on. What were they like? How did they live? Even the experts can only guess, using their imaginations and the few facts they do know. So that’s what I’ve done too.

  I have put “Oldtales” between the chapters. I believe that we have always wondered how we came to be here, and why things happen, and whether there is somebody wise and strong and strange who made everything in the first place. One of the ways we wonder is to invent stories. The Oldtales are the stories the Kin have made up, to explain things to themselves.

  Peter Dickinson

  SUTH’S

  STORY

  For Nicholas

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Oldtale: THE FIRST GOOD PLACE

  Chapter Two

  Oldtale: MONKEY MAKES FIRE

  Chapter Three

  Oldtale: HOW PEOPLE WERE MADE

  Chapter Four

  Oldtale: THE CHILDREN OF AMMU

  Chapter Five

  Oldtale: ODUTU BELOW THE MOUNTAIN

  Chapter Six

  Oldtale: HOW SORROW CAME

  Chapter Seven

  Oldtale: DA AND DATTA

  Chapter Eight

  Oldtale: MONKEY IS FOUND OUT

  Chapter Nine

  Oldtale: PEOPLE HUNT BLACK ANTELOPE

  Chapter Ten

  Oldtale: THE CHOOSING OF MATES

  Chapter Eleven

  Oldtale: NIGLU

  Chapter Twelve

  CHAPTER ONE

  Fingers pressed Suth’s cheek, in the corner by the jawbone. He woke. A mouth breathed in his ear.

  “Come.”

  Noli.

  She withdrew.

  Carefully, as if merely turning in his sleep, he rolled himself away from the rest of the Kin, who slept in a huddle for warmth from the desert night. Suth was a child, and now had no father or mother, so his place was on the outside of the huddle. So was Noli’s, for the same reasons.

  He lay still, waited, rolled again and on hands and knees crawled silently clear. There was a half moon rising, casting long shadows.

  “Here.”

  Noli’s faint whisper came from the blackness beside a boulder. Suth crawled towards her. She took his hand, put her other hand to his mouth for silence, and led him away.

  In the shadow of another boulder she stopped and put her mouth to his ear.

  “I dreamed. Moonhawk came. She showed me water.”

  “Where?”

  She pointed back, almost along the line they had travelled all day.

  “In the morning you tell Bal,” whispered Suth.

  “He says I lie.”

  She was right. Bal was their leader. He dreamed the dreams that Moonhawk sent, showing him things he needed to know for the safety of the Kin. But then it had been Noli that had dreamed about the coming of the murderous strangers, who did not belong to any of the Kins, and spoke with words that none of them knew. It had been Noli that had dreamed of the killing of fathers and brothers, the taking of mothers and sisters.

  Moonhawk had not shown these things to Bal, and when Noli had told of them he had struck her and said that she lied. Moonhawk came only to him in his dreams.

  And yet Noli’s dream had come true, and what was left of the Kin had fled from the Good Places they knew, and Bal had led them into Dry Hills, looking for somewhere new to live.

  Then again Noli had dreamed. In this dream Moonhawk had come to her and shown her the endless desert, waterless and foodless, that they would come to after they passed Dry Hills. And again, when she had told her dream, Bal had struck her and said that she lied.

  And yet it had come true.

  “In the morning we tell the others,” said Suth.

  “No, we go alone. We go now, along the way we came. We find the little ones that were left behind. We take them to the water. All this Moonhawk showed me.”

  She took him by the hand and led him on. He didn’t resist, though for the first time in his life he was leaving the Kin. He was walking away into the night without any adult to lead him, with only a girl for company, even younger than himself. Ever since the fight with the strangers, when he had seen his father killed and his mother taken, he had been in a kind of dull dream. Nothing made sense any more. Moonhawk told Noli what to do, and Noli told Suth. That was enough.

  They found their way without trouble. They were used to wide empty spaces, and their sense of direction was strong. Here and there they remembered the shape of a boulder, or a dry ravine, that they had passed on the outward journey. And the night dews freshened the faint scents that the Kin had left as they had come this way. There were no other smells to confuse them. Nothing lived here. In all the long day they had seen no tracks, nothing that moved, not a lizard, not even a scorpion. At least where there was nothing to eat there would be no big hunters stalking the night.

  They walked at the steady pace that the Kin had used, journeying between one Good Place and the next. It grew colder. Slowly the moon rose. When it was almost halfway up the sky they stopped, without a word from either of them. They raised their heads and sniffed. Water.

  “Moonhawk showed you this?” said Suth.

  “No, not this. She showed me water in the hills.”

  “We came by in the daytime. Why did we not smell this? Why did Bal not smell it? He finds water where no one else can find it.”

  “I do not know. Is it a dew trap, Suth? Like the dew trap at Tarutu Rock?”

  They turned and in a short while came to a wide pit in the ground. As they walked down into it they felt new layers of chill gathering around them. Soon the rocks they trod on were slippery with dew. But this was not like the dew trap they knew, where the moisture gathered at the bottom into a rocky pool, which didn’t dry up until the sun was high. Here there was only a gravel floor and the water seeped away. They kneeled and licked the wetness from a large sloping boulder. It was not enough to swallow, but soothed their sore lips and parched mouths. For a little while they rested and licked and rested, then found their way back to their trail and walked on.

  By the time that the moon was overhead they could see, out across the desert plain, the barrier of jagged hills through which Bal had led them two days earlier. Suth remembered how they had stopped on the last ridge and stared at what lay before them under the evening sun, a vast flatness, mottled yellow and grey, boulders and pebbles and ash and sand, and not a lea
f or stem anywhere, all still pulsing with heat after the burning day.

  Some of the Kin had begun to mutter unhappily. Bal had swung and glared at them, hunching his shoulders and shaking his mane out to show them who was leader.

  “There are new Good Places there,” he had growled. “Water and game. Moonhawk showed me. Moonhawk showed me this too. We must go fast through the desert, or we die. We must carry our small ones. But they are too many. Some have no fathers, no mothers, to carry them. Those we leave here. We build a lair for them. In the lair they have shade. They are safe from animals. We find our new Good Places. Then some of us come back. They fetch these small ones. Perhaps they still live.”

  He had chosen four children who had lost their parents in the fighting—Ko and Mana, who were too little to walk all day, Tinu, who was older but weak from a fever, and Noli’s little brother, Otan, who could stand but not yet walk. The others had helped Noli carry him this far.

  Nobody had argued, though they knew that the children would live for only a day, and perhaps a night, but not another day. They could see that what Bal said was true. The Good Places he promised them might or might not exist, but if they tried to carry these extra children through the dreadful desert below they would never get there.

  So the next morning they had found a place where one rock leaned against another to make a kind of cave and had put the children into it. They walled them in with smaller rocks to keep them safe from animals, and told them to wait there, and left them looking scared and dazed. Noli had let them take Otan from her, and then turned away, weeping. But she’d said nothing.

  “The small ones are dead,” Suth said.

  “No,” said Noli.

  They walked on. Now the moon moved down the sky. Day would come before it set. Slowly the hills loomed nearer and higher and they began to climb. As they did the moonlight paled and the shadows lost their sharpness. Day came almost at once, a clear grey light still fresh with the night chill and the dew. To their right the sky turned pale gold. Every detail of the dry and rocky slope stood sharp and clear.

  Noli looked ahead and pointed. There were the two leaning rocks. This was the place.

  She quickened her pace, but Suth caught her wrist. Something had moved, a blue grey shape like a shadow prowling in front of the two rocks. It returned, nosing at the piled stones, sniffing for the flesh behind them. It scratched at the pile with a paw. Some kind of fox-thing, though different from the yellow and brown foxes that had scavenged around the Good Places that the Kin had been driven from.

  Suth picked up a stone, weighed it in his hand, put it soundlessly down and chose a heavier one. Noli took another. Side by side but a little apart the two crept forward, moving and pausing and moving as they had watched their elders do, hunting unsuspecting prey. The foxes that Suth knew had learned to be afraid of people, and were shy and quick and hard to catch, but this one was too excited by the smells from behind the rock pile to notice as the hunters crept nearer.

  Not until Suth was only two paces away did it sense something, turn and see him. It was not just in colour that it was different. It did not fear people.

  Snarling, it leaped for Suth’s belly, but his arm was already poised for a blow. He swung as it came, and the rock caught the fox full force on the head, knocking it sideways. Then Noli was on it, pounding down with her rock. It thrashed aside and tried to rise, but before it was on its feet Suth struck it again with all his strength at the point where the neck joined the skull. It collapsed, twitched once, and lay still.

  They struck it several more blows to make sure, then left it lying and went to the rock pile. There was no sound from inside.

  They are dead, Suth thought.

  “Are you there, Tinu?” he said softly. “Mana? Ko? It is me, Suth. And Noli.”

  A faint mumbling sound answered. That was Tinu, who had a twisted mouth and did not speak clearly. There was a wail from a smaller child. With a gush of hope Suth started to pull the pile of rocks down. As soon as she could reach, Noli joined in. The sun rose on their backs. When the wall was low enough they craned over.

  Tinu was crouching in the little cave with Otan in her arms. Ko sat huddled beside her, blinking at the light. Mana lay on her side, unmoving, but she stirred and moaned as Suth reached in, took Otan, and passed him to Noli. He pulled more rocks down until Tinu could help Ko and Mana, still half asleep, to scramble out. Tinu came last.

  Noli was cradling little Otan to her chest, feeling for his heartbeat and listening for his breath. “My brother lives,” she whispered, shuddering with relief.

  The others waited. Three pairs of dark, anxious eyes gazed at Suth. He could see what they were thinking. Where was the rest of the Kin? Where were the grown men and women? Where was Bal, the leader? Ko and Mana were little more than babies, though Ko was sturdy and big for his age. Suth had never taken much notice of Mana, a quiet, watchful little girl, with the same dark skin and black, coarse hair as everyone else in the eight Kins.

  Tinu was different. Something had gone wrong when she was born, so that her jaw opened more sideways than down and she never learned to speak properly. She was small too, for her age, and extremely skinny, with insect-thin limbs. She hated to be noticed and looked at. As soon as Suth’s glance fell on her, she turned her head away.

  “Thirsty,” she mumbled.

  “Noli knows where water is,” said Suth.

  “It is not far,” said Noli. “Suth killed food. You come.”

  Suth heaved the dead fox onto his shoulder. Noli settled Otan onto her hip and led the way, with Tinu next and the two small ones scrambling behind her across the stony slope. Suth came last, helping them when they needed him. He felt different now. The fox was heavy, but its weight gave him strength. He had done something. He had killed food. These others, they needed him. Without him, they would die.

  Oldtale

  THE FIRST GOOD PLACE

  Black Antelope was chief among the First Ones. He said, “Now we make a place where we can live.”

  He breathed upon the bare ground, and where he had breathed the young grass grew, tender for him to eat.

  Then Snake crawled through the grasslands, making tracks, which he could follow. And Crocodile dug holes and filled them with clean water, where she could lie and wait. And Weaver planted trees, so that his wives had somewhere to hang their nests, and Parrot added sweet nuts and fruits to the trees, because he was greedy, and the Ant Mother chewed the fallen branches from the trees and mixed the chewings into the ground to make good soft earth for her nests, and Fat Pig planted the earth with juicy roots to fill his stomach, and Moonhawk built crags from which she could watch while the others slept, and Little Bat made caves in the crags, where she could hide from Moonhawk.

  So they all worked together to make the First Good Place, according to their needs.

  Only Monkey did nothing.

  He watched the others at work, and then he climbed Weaver’s trees and ate Parrot’s fruits and nuts, and he dug in the Ant Mother’s earth and ate Fat Pig’s roots, and he slept in Little Bat’s caves and drank from Crocodile’s water holes, and he set traps in Snake’s tracks, and scrambled over Moonhawk’s crags. But he did not often go into Black Antelope’s grasslands because he was the strongest and Monkey was afraid of him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The water was a thin trickle, oozing down a narrow crack in the cliff. They couldn’t get their faces in to lap, so all they could do was slide a hand and wet their fingertips and suck. The water had a strong taste and a faint smell of foul eggs, like the water at Yellowhole, where the Kin used to drink. Before she had any herself, Noli gave her fingers to Otan to suck. At first nothing happened, but then the small dry lips moved faintly, and a hand clenched and unclenched. It was the first sign of life that anyone but Noli had seen in him.

  After a while, Tinu found that if she put her fingers into the crack at a certain angle the water ran along the lower edge of her palm and gathered into drops on her wrist b
one, where she could suck them off before they fell. The others copied her.

  As soon as he’d drunk enough, Suth looked for the right sort of rock, so that he could try to make a cutter and butcher little pieces of meat off the fox carcass for the small ones to chew. He had often watched his father stoneworking, and had tried to copy what he did, but it was men’s work. Boys didn’t get taught it. His father had known which were the right stones, and where to strike them, but he couldn’t say how he knew. His eye and his hand had told him this one and here. So all Suth had been able to do was watch, and then try for himself. He’d learned that it wasn’t as easy as it looked.

  Besides, good stones were only found in some places. There might be none on this hillside at all. Suth chose several and squatted down by a flat boulder. Steadying one stone on it, he hammered down with another, using a slanting blow, trying to chip off a large flake.

  Nothing happened. He tried again and again, but the target stone kept twisting in his grasp. Between their turns at the water the others watched him, as he tried different stones and different angles of strike. Sometimes he broke off a few chips, but nothing large enough to grasp and nothing with a cutting edge to it.

  Without warning the stone he had been using as a hammer shattered as it struck the target. The pieces flew apart. The shock numbed his arm to the elbow. He was rubbing the feeling back into it when Tinu, always shy and uncertain, anxiously showed him a flake that had fallen at her feet, a round sliver so thin in places that when he held it up he could see light through it. Testing it with his thumb he found that along one edge it was as sharp as anything he had seen his father make, though he knew his father would have thrown it away because it was so fragile. A good cutter was thicker than this, but he thought it might do if he was careful. He laughed at the luck of it, and the small ones laughed too, not understanding why.

  Thirsty again after the work, he went back to the crack. While he was slowly drinking, Tinu came up holding a stick she had broken from one of the scrawny bushes that grew in the gully below. These were the first plants Suth had seen in three days.