A Bone From a Dry Sea

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘Yes, of course. I looked it up in the library. He uncovers fossils very carefully and then he tries to work out exactly how the animal died and what happened to the bones after that. Is that right?’

  ‘Pretty good, Vinny. It’s what I’ve been doing all my life only now they have a fancy name for it. Well, you can watch your father working as soon as there’s that kind of work to be done. Is that all right with you, Sam? Jane and I will take Vinny off your hands while you’re finishing that report.’

  Dad had come back with a bowl of muesli and a mug of coffee.

  ‘Where are you proposing to take her?’ he asked flatly.

  ‘I want to have another look at that outcrop beyond H8.’

  ‘You’ll be wasting your time. Michael and I went over it a month ago. There may have been something there once, but it’s all been eroded down the hill.’

  ‘I know, I know. I just have a feeling about it.’

  ‘You’ll still be wasting your time. If you don’t trust me, you might at least trust Michael.’

  ‘And I also want to take some samples of those tuffs. They’re the clearest sequence we’ve got. All right?’

  ‘It’s your time, and it’ll mean Vinny sees something of the country, I suppose. Don’t forget she’s not acclimatized.’

  ‘Jane will lend her a parasol.’

  Dad grunted and moved off to another table. Vinny fetched herself cornflakes, a banana and orange juice and joined him.

  ‘I don’t have to go with him if you don’t want me to,’ she muttered.

  ‘You might as well now.’

  ‘It’s all right. I’m not going to let him take me over.’

  ‘It isn’t just that – it’s all sorts of things. I bet you for instance he will find something. Or if he doesn’t Jane will – she’s got a fantastic eye. And then he’ll come back and laugh at me for having missed it. Oh, never mind. The important thing is for you to keep out of the sun as much as you can, wear sun-glasses, slap on gallons of lotion, and don’t be ashamed of telling people if you’re finding it too much.’

  ‘I’ve got a big floppy hat, too. I’ll be all right. And we’ll go taphonoming this evening, right?’

  ‘If you like.’

  THEN

  NEXT MORNING LI hunted early for food, and was lucky. With Iggi she levered a flat rock aside on the floor of the bay and found a large crab which they cracked open and shared before any of the adult males were around to come and take their prey off them. Then she went out again to the spit, to wait for the dolphin. She was sure it would come, and it did.

  They played and danced as they’d done the day before. Since the dolphin was so much the better swimmer, so made for the single element of water, it played with her as an older child might play with a younger one, teaching it an easy game, patient with its mistakes and clumsiness. Li’s wonder and joy were no less than before. Laughter burst from her mouth whenever she surfaced, while underwater she became aware that the sea was not silent, but full of whistlings and clicks, which seemed to come from the dolphin itself.

  Then it swam suddenly away, and she realized that there were other whistlings coming from far off, which it seemed to have gone to answer. She waited in the water unalarmed, sure that it would not have left her in danger. She heard the noises returning, watched underwater, saw shadows move and all at once found herself in the middle of a large shoal racing in panic past her. She missed two strikes but grabbed a fish at her third try and surfaced. A big dolphin arched past, ignoring her, and then three more close behind her. The water foamed round her with the rush of their passing, and then a final dolphin rose and tried to take the still struggling fish from her hand. She let go and sank beside the dolphin as it sank, hearing the whistles of the hunt recede.

  The dolphin waited, impatient. Why didn’t she join the hunt? it seemed to be saying. She slid her arm around it and gestured underwater towards the shore. Again it understood and let her lie beside it, streamlining her body along its flank, as it leaped through the waves. Half the tribe were out on the spit, watching and pointing. Presh dived and swam to meet her, but as he approached, the dolphin bucked itself loose from her grasp and swam off.

  This was bad for Presh. To maintain his dominance he couldn’t let anyone else achieve triumphs which he couldn’t either out-do or somehow counter. If Li had been an adult male Presh would at once have displayed at him and faced him down, and if necessary fought him. But Li was a child, and children didn’t have that kind of triumph. There was no ritual, no mechanism, for dealing with what she had done.

  Presh solved the problem first by patrolling the shark-watch line and sending the watchers ashore. Then, watched by the tribe, he turned towards the open sea, sank below the surface and shot his body back up until he was visible to the waist. As he reached the top he let out a yell of challenge, and as he came down he slapped his palms against the surface to force two arching sprays of foam away from him. At once the tribe understood what he was doing. This was the first stage of a contest for dominance between a leader and a challenger, but they had never seen it used as Presh was using it now.

  He leaped again and again, but at last turned and gestured to the watchers to prepare for the next stage of the ritual. Puzzled but obedient they went and lined the shallows of the bay, facing the shore. Presh came last of all, swimming and then wading straight to where Li was waiting apprehensively beside Ma-ma. She ducked herself down until her long hair floated out round her and only the curve of her spine showed above the water, the gesture of total submission. He seized her beneath the arms, lifted her up and strode ashore. Watched in silence and alarm by the rest of the tribe, he turned and raised her to sit on his shoulder. Startled, she grabbed his hair to stop herself falling. He punched his free hand into the air, let out a bellowing laugh, and began the triumph-dance.

  He was telling the tribe that he, Presh, Leader, had sent his niece Li out to ride in deep water with the dolphins, and now they were to welcome her home. So he made her triumph into his triumph, telling them to praise both Li and himself as bringers of wonders.

  Now they knew what to do. As Presh moved with a dance-like strut along the shore, turning and stamping on the rocks and punching the air with his hand, they answered with cries of Praise! and as he passed they struck the water with their palms, shooting arches of spray over the pair of them, a salute of glittering foam through which their shining black bodies moved in glory. Li kept her grip on Presh’s hair but with her free hand punched the air, copying his gesture, timing her movements to his, so that the parade was for her like a continuation of the dance with the dolphin, as she moved with a big strong creature through its element. It struck no-one as strange or wrong that she should share in a Leader-triumph, though nothing like this had ever happened before.

  Normally the tribe would have stayed for at least one more day at that bay, but as the sun lost its heat Presh gave signals for a move and took them off northwards under a waxing moon. Perhaps he felt that he couldn’t afford to let Li dance again with the dolphin and not be allowed to join in himself. Or perhaps it was a vaguer feeling, that the bay was for the moment awesome, and that it would be easier for the tribe to go elsewhere until they had come to terms with what had happened.

  Next morning Riff’s family cornered a large eel. It took several adults to heave aside the boulder under which it had hidden and to wrestle it ashore, so Presh had time to take charge, and then to control the share-out. Eels being slow to die and too rubbery to tear apart, this meant passing the squirming body round and letting the favoured ones gnaw what they could from it. Presh spat out his first mouthful and gave it to Li, an extraordinary honour for a child.

  That night Ma-ma started her labour. The females gave birth in water, usually just before dawn. The mother would leave the sleeping tribe and go with one close friend down into the shallows, where the friend would help with the birth and lift the baby to the surface for its first breath of air. Sometimes a younger female, not quite
ready for mating, would go and watch, to learn how the thing was done. It would be a year before Li reached that age but Ma-ma took her all the same, and clutched her to her side as she pushed the infant out of her body, while Hooa caught him and guided him to the surface to wail in the dawn air. His birth-fur was sleek as a seal-skin. His mouth in the bare wrinkled face whimpered and sucked and his hands grasped and grasped at emptiness.

  Ma-ma took him as soon as she was ready and put him to her nipple. As he started to suck, she placed a tress of her hair against each tiny pink palm. Immediately the fingers closed and held. That was right. It was a good birth, all that a birth should be. Hooa was muttering Joy, Praise and Li was doing so too, without noticing, entranced with happiness and wonder. She had never seen a birth close to. The child was inside the mother – all the tribe knew that – and when her time came she went into the sea and pushed it out of her and there it was. This had seemed no more strange or surprising than the swarming of the shrimps at full moon. It happened. There was no need to explain it.

  But now Li stared at the baby as if it had been she herself who’d just been thrust into the world. Where had he come from? The mystery wasn’t the neat body, with fur to keep it warm through the chill of night. Ma-ma had somehow made that inside herself after mating with Tong. (The tribe were aware that females like Liai who refused to mate had no children.) The mystery was the person. This new other. Himself. How could he be made? If he wasn’t made, where had he been? How did the lips know to suck, the fingers to grasp Ma-ma’s locks so that when she was foraging in the water, using both hands, the baby would float safely beside her?

  The baby sucked, then slept. Ma-ma crooned. Li squatted beside her, still as a rock in the trance of wonder. Perhaps he had come out of the sea. Yes, perhaps the dolphins had brought him from the place where the sun rose, and when Ma-ma had pushed the body out of her he had slid, transparent as a shrimp, under the water and in through the mouth, to make its home in the body like a hermit-crab taking over a new shell. Perhaps.

  Carrying a baby with its birth-fur still on it brought Ma-ma great prestige. She was already one of the senior females, but now for a while she became the second most respected person in the tribe, after Presh. Females, and some males, competed to hold the baby. Tong brought food and a birth-present, a shining shell. The shell had a hole in it so Li threaded some of Ma-ma’s hairs through it and tied them so that it dangled against her shoulder. The hairs soon wore through, but Li experimented and invented a form of plaiting which lasted well. The ornament was much admired and added to Ma-ma’s prestige.

  The next child was born in a family not close to Li’s but still she was woken and went down to watch over the birth. The father had already found a piece of shell with a hole in it for Li to make into a neck-ornament like Ma-ma’s. Over the months this became a custom in the tribe, something they did because it felt right, as though it had always been done. The plaits tended to wear through at about the time the babies lost their birth-fur, which added to the feeling of rightness.

  Probably Li was the only one who ever thought back to how the custom had started.

  NOW: MONDAY MORNING

  MRS HAMISKA WAS a small quiet woman with a flat face and pale blue eyes. Her skin looked like soft leather. She said nothing the whole journey, but she didn’t get much chance because Dr Hamiska barely stopped talking. The landscape reeled by, grey-brown, flat, battered with heat, with hardly a tree, hardly a tussock of grass, just here and there patches of low thorny scrub which looked dead but in fact had tiny leaves like fish-scales. These were the badlands Dad had talked about, and the scrub was almost the only plant able to grow there. Again, it wasn’t the Africa you saw on TV.

  Vinny sat in the back of the jeep, craning forward to listen to Dr Hamiska explaining about the badlands. This was where they had found most of their fossils. When the plain which you saw from the camp had been sea, and the hills where the camp was had been an island, this had been the channel between the island and the mainland. Then, slowly, the land had risen, and it had become a great marsh, and creatures had lived and died there leaving their bones in the marsh. Rivers had fed the marsh, bringing down silt from the hills, layer after layer after layer, covering the bones. Then the coastline had risen, cutting the marsh off from the sea, and slowly it had dried out, evaporated, becoming saltier and saltier as it did so. It was badlands still because of the salt. The plates of the earth had ground against each other and there had been earthquakes, tilting the edges of the plain into new young hills, where the layers of silt compacted into clay and fresh soft rock, while the buried bones became fossils within them.

  Time had streamed by, hundreds of thousands of seasons, wet, dry, wet, dry, wet, dry, each wet softening the surface of the earth and each dry baking it hard again. Sometimes rain washed whole mountainsides away. Sometimes things barely changed at all.

  ‘I’ve seen sites which were explored thirty years before,’ said Dr Hamiska. ‘You could still see the old beer-cans. But not one new fossil had been exposed – barely a millimetre of erosion in thirty years. But then a man I know was digging out a dinosaur from the side of a gully. Tanzania, this was. A dinosaur can be a big thing – you don’t get it done in a day. He’d got it half done when there was a thunderstorm and a flash flood down the gully, and the whole dinosaur was washed away. He’d lost it completely.’

  ‘He must have been furious.’

  ‘Not at all. The flood had exposed an even better specimen below the first one. Now, look, that’s where we’re heading for.’

  They had been steadily approaching the range of hills which millions of years before had been the coast of mainland Africa. From far off they’d seemed to rise sheer from the desolate flat plain, but now Vinny could see that there were foothills reaching out, brown and hummocky, below the ragged peaks. Dr Hamiska pointed towards a shapeless lump rising like a small island almost straight ahead, separate from the rest of the range.

  ‘Was it an island in the marsh?’ said Vinny.

  ‘It wasn’t anything. What seems to have happened was that there was a series of earthquakes which made those lower hills. They’re a real geological mess, but for some reason to do with the underlying rock-structure that outcrop was pushed up all of a piece, so that where the old strata are exposed they lie in the same order as that in which they were laid down. I’m not a professional geologist, but I know enough for my immediate purposes. If I can get a complete sequence of strata-deposition in this locality, then I may be able to match up partial sequences which I find elsewhere.’

  ‘Like tree-ring dating.’

  ‘Exactly. For instance, the skull May Anna is working on was found in association with a layer of tuff – that’s fossilized ash from a volcanic eruption. There are a whole series of tuffs in the strata, and I’m hoping that by sequencing the tuffs on this outcrop I can find out which is the one the skull belongs to, and hence get a line on the dating.’

  ‘Are there any fossils here?’

  He laughed.

  ‘There were fossils here, Vinny. Some were brought to us from a point at the foot of the outcrop, eroded down the hill. Your father and a very experienced African did a survey, and they say there are no more to be found, but you and Jane and I are going to prove them wrong.’

  He laughed again, but Vinny could hear it was only half a joke. Then he had to stop talking. They had been travelling so far along a sort of track, reasonably level, winding between the scrub and pits and hummocks of the plain. Now he left it, changed into low gear and edged down into what looked like a dry river-bed with soft, gritty sand in the bottom. There was no track at all on the other side. Still in low gear he took the jeep twisting and lurching along below the outcrop, so that Vinny had to clutch the back of the seats, though Mrs Hamiska sat calmly swaying, with her hands folded in her lap, as if on a church outing.

  They stopped and climbed out, and now the heat of Africa smote them. Already, before they’d left the camp, Vinny had foun
d it so hot that she’d been picking her way round through patches of shade rather than cross direct through the sunlit areas. The journey had been better with the breeze of movement blowing in under the jeep’s canvas roof. The badlands were hotter than she’d dreamed, even under the parasol, the green sun-brolly which Mrs Hamiska had lent her. (She’d thought she’d feel silly using it, but it made sense now.) Mrs Hamiska wore a sleeveless cotton frock and a straw hat, still looking as if she were on a church outing, while Dr Hamiska put on an old corduroy cap with its peak turned backwards to cover his neck. He should have looked a complete clown, but he didn’t.

  ‘The eroded finds were a couple of hundred yards along that way,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a look there later. But first I’d like you to come and help me measure the tuffs on that section of exposed rock. That’s where they’re clearest.’

  He pointed up the slope to the left. The hill was a dark rusty brown with yellower patches, and here and there the dead-looking thorn-bushes. The odd boulder jutted out of the soil, but the only real difference was a section of low cliff two-thirds of the way up. He was starting to climb towards it when Mrs Hamiska bent and reached in under one of the thorn-bushes. Vinny hadn’t even noticed her looking. She rose with something in her hand.

  ‘Look at this, Joe,’ she said.

  He turned and took the object from her, chuckling as he held it up between finger and thumb. From the ones she’d seen under the awning, Vinny recognized it as a fossil tooth.

  ‘Sam didn’t find everything, then,’ he said. ‘That’s about four million. Four point two. Somewhere round there.’

  ‘It makes my skin prickle, thinking about all that time,’ said Vinny.

  ‘And so it should. I tell my students that the past is an immense ocean which we can neither sail on nor dive down into. We are stuck to our shore, which is the present. Out on the surface we can see the past of the history books, the storms and the shipwrecks, but of what happened in the far past, down in the deeps of that ocean, we have nothing to go on except the shells and bones it chooses to wash up at our feet. Why do we bother, then? What does it matter? It matters because that ocean is where we come from. Those seas are in our blood.’