A Bone From a Dry Sea

by Peter Dickinson

  His voice throbbed. If he hadn’t told her, Vinny might still have guessed that this was part of a lecture.

  ‘I suppose you’ve got to be lucky to find the right things,’ she said.

  ‘Indeed you have. I know experts in my field who’ve never once had the excitement of picking up a hominid fossil. Others seem unable to step off an aeroplane without finding something new. That’s why I believe in luck. I seriously believe that there are some people who can call out across the ocean of time and summon it to wash its secrets to their feet. I am one, and for all I know you may be another.’

  He gazed at the four-million-year-old fragment in his hand as if he were praying to it, using it for his summoning-magic, then gave it back to Mrs Hamiska.

  ‘See if you can spot where it came from, darling,’ he said. ‘Come on, Vinny.’

  They started up the slope. It wasn’t much of a climb, but sweat streamed down Vinny’s body, making her clothes cling and pull, and she needed a rest half-way up. Looking back over the grey, roasting desert she tried to imagine it when it had been a marshy lake, steaming under this sun, with rivers running in and pigs rootling in the reed-beds, and other creatures, creatures who were almost people, perhaps, making their camp at the water’s edge . . . Mrs Hamiska was drifting along the slope half-way down, quiet as cloud-shadow, with her head bent like a nun in a cloister. Vinny climbed on and found Dr Hamiska measuring and sketching the slanting rock-layers in the cliff. He didn’t really need her to help him, only to be there so that he had someone to talk to, to teach.

  ‘You see this layering, how it’s tilted? This grey band? That’s tuff – remember? And here, just above it, these coarser particles, and then these finer ones and then this thin band of tuff again. So we had a minor volcanic eruption followed by a dry spell – not much flow in the rivers, you see – and then a wetter spell bringing heavier particles down from the hills, and then a really big eruption. That’s a very characteristic section. If it turns up elsewhere in the area I shall know where it comes in the sequence. Now I’m going to see if I can hack out some good unweathered crystals from the tuff. There’s a technique called potassium-argon dating . . .’

  ‘Jane’s found something.’

  He swung to look. Mrs Hamiska was kneeling now, and prodding carefully at the earth with a narrow trowel.

  ‘You want to go and see?’ he said. ‘Come and fetch me if it’s anything worthwhile.’

  Vinny found Mrs Hamiska using a painter’s brush to clear the earth she’d loosened round a shapeless small lump. She glanced up at Vinny’s approach.

  ‘Yes, he’d better come,’ she said.

  Dr Hamiska was still watching, so Vinny simply waved and he came loping down like a schoolboy. He rushed past Vinny, knelt and took the trowel from Mrs Hamiska and prodded it vigorously into the earth around the lump, not bothering to use the brush, hoicking chunks of clay out. In a few minutes he had the thing free and was nudging the last bits of clay off with his thumbs.

  ‘There!’ he said, holding it triumphantly up. To Vinny it looked like a bit of twisted dead branch.

  ‘What is it?’ she said.

  ‘A lower mandible. Some kind of small deer, perhaps. Look, that’s where one of the molars fitted, and another here. Not in itself very exciting, but the point is that it was buried in the original matrix, so there’s every chance we’ve now got the level from which the tooth Jane found was eroded down. Have you brought a cord, darling? Excellent. And a peg and a hammer. Good. Now, Vinny, go back up – oh, to about where I was working, and we’ll see if we can use the angle of strata in the cliff to get a line on how they might run down here . . .’

  Vinny toiled back up the hill, trailing the line, too excited to notice the heat. Dr Hamiska strode up and down lifting the line clear of obstacles, then moved to a point where he could compare its angle to that of the rock-strata. From there he shouted instructions. When he was satisfied, Vinny hammered her peg in and tied the line taut. Using it as a guide the Hamiskas worked along inch by inch, studying every bump or nubble in the earth. Mrs Hamiska found two splinters of bone, leg probably, and Dr Hamiska found the tooth of a pigmy hippo. All three were below the cord, so Vinny had to climb and adjust the top peg. She came back to find him burrowing at the hillside like a dog, showering loose earth down the slope.

  ‘Look!’ he cried. ‘Here’s our tuff! It’s the same one, I’ll bet my life on it. And the finds are right on top of it. Now . . . !’

  Mrs Hamiska was watching him, amused. Her way of smiling was to try not to, which made her purse her lips as if she were trying to spit out a grape-pip. He jumped to his feet, flung his arms round her and kissed her on both cheeks, lifting her clean off the ground.

  ‘Put me down, please, Joe,’ she said. ‘We’re not twenty any more.’

  She didn’t sound disapproving. As often before, with other married people who seemed totally different from each other, Vinny wondered how they’d managed to stay together when Mum and Dad hadn’t. At the back of the hole Dr Hamiska had dug she saw a faint band of grey crossing the yellowish earth. Then, because her eyes knew what they were looking for, she realized she could see the same band right out on the surface, slanting down nearly parallel to the cord. It was so faint that she had to be standing directly on its line to see it, and looking back up the slope to where it should have run on till it reached a large flat-topped rock, she couldn’t see it at all. When she climbed and looked down from the rock it was there, all the way to her feet. It was something to do with the angle of the light, probably.

  ‘I can see your tuff, Joe,’ she called. ‘If you stand here . . .’

  He rushed to join her and stare, rushed back for more pegs, marked the new line and prowled along it, snorting with excitement and effort, as if he could bully the hidden fossils out into the open, by pure will-power. Mrs Hamiska was already digging at something else. Vinny stared at the earth beside the rock but could see nothing. She knelt and moved her fingertips across the ground, closing her eyes, concentrating on the task of feeling. Ah. No, it was only a pebble. So was that. A faint ridge, like the cut end of a Sellotape reel which you can feel but not see. She picked at it with a fingernail. It was harder than clay.

  ‘Please, is this something?’ she called, keeping her finger on the spot, fearful of losing it.

  Mrs Hamiska stopped working to come and look and feel.

  ‘Yes, that’s probably a fossil,’ she said. ‘Broken, I think.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Oh, I can’t tell you yet. Do you want to dig it out yourself?’

  ‘Is that all right? I’d love to.’

  ‘I brought a trowel and brush for you. Be patient. Don’t lever against the fossil – they can be very fragile.’

  ‘Oh, thank you! Isn’t this exciting!’

  Mrs Hamiska smiled her mysterious smile. Her eyes were invisible behind her sun-glasses, so Vinny couldn’t tell if she was smiling at her or with her. She helped Vinny prop her parasol on the rock to cast a useful patch of shade and returned to her own work.

  Gently, Vinny eased the trowel-tip into the soil and levered the first crumb of clay free. There’d been no need to tell her to be patient. This was the sort of job she did best, with its bit-at-a-time delicacy, and the way her hands learnt the nature of what they were working with, so that they seemed to know almost at once how far to push the trowel in, and how to twist and lever so that another fragment came cleanly away from the ancient bone. Her world narrowed to a square foot of hillside. She forgot heat and thirst and the ache of crouching. Her whole being became the slave of the bone.

  It seemed to be thin and flat and to lie almost level in the hill so that its left edge actually broke through the sloping line of tuff. The outer edge had been snapped off where it reached the surface, and the right corner, about half a square inch, was cracked and loose from the main bit. She was working not down but sideways into the hill, digging out a hollow like a miniature quarry with the bone as its f
loor. Dr Hamiska’s boots crunched on the rock above her. She rose to let him see what she’d been doing.

  ‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to employ you full time.’

  ‘What is it? Do you know?’

  ‘A fragment of scapula, I think. Shoulder-blade to you, Vinny. Some fair-sized beast. Don’t try and lever it out or you’ll break it – you’ll have to undercut it first. Look how the sequence runs at the back there – that’s beautiful.’

  ‘Do you think it was killed in the eruption?’

  ‘Could be, could be. Your father’s here to answer questions like that. The ash would have been soft, mind you, so the creature could have died after the eruption and then the bones partly embedded themselves. Lend me your trowel, will you? I could get a column of the sequence out there – something to show them on Thursday. Blind them with science, eh?’

  Still chuckling he forced the blade vertically down at the back of Vinny’s quarry, as if he was cutting the first slice out of a birthday-cake. The slice broke in two when he eased it out but he fitted the pieces together and laid them carefully out on the slope.

  ‘Now if you’ll ask Jane for a bag and a label,’ he said, ‘and then we’ll . . . hold it! Hold everything!’

  He pushed his sun-glasses on to his forehead and stared into the slice-shaped cut he had made. His breath hissed between closed teeth. With Vinny’s brush he swept the loose bits from a pale lump which had been exposed on one side of the cut, just above the tuff. He took a magnifying glass from his shirt pocket and gazed intently through it.

  ‘Jane,’ he called. ‘Come here a moment.’

  He’d changed. A moment before he’d been the friendly old professor showing off to the visitor. Now he’d forgotten she was there. Mrs Hamiska came and crouched beside him. Every line of their bodies expressed enthralled excitement. Two terriers at the same rabbit-hole.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs Hamiska. ‘I think so. I really do think so.’

  ‘Whoopee!’ bellowed Dr Hamiska, standing and flinging his cap into the air. It landed half-way down the hillside.

  ‘Let me have a go,’ said Mrs Hamiska. ‘You’re a bit too excited.’

  Without waiting for an answer she started to chip the clay away from the other side of the cut. Vinny fetched Dr Hamiska’s cap, and then helped him measure and peg out an area round the find. Standing on the rock he began to draw a sketch-map. By now Mrs Hamiska had opened the cut enough for Vinny to see that the fossil was a stubby cylindrical bone with a bulge at each end.

  ‘Is it part of someone’s hand?’ she said.

  ‘Their foot, Vinny, their foot!’ crowed Dr Hamiska. ‘It’s a distal phalanx – a toe-bone to you, Vinny. You are looking at the left big toe of a creature that walked on its hind legs five million years ago! It’s going to be datable by the tuff! And either my name’s not Joseph Seton Hamiska or the rest of the skeleton is all there, right under our feet! The oldest fossil hominid yet found! I knew it! I knew it! I knew the moment I woke up that this was my day, and this was going to be the place! Whoopee!’

  You could have heard his shouts a mile across the plain. Mrs Hamiska straightened and watched him, like Mum watching Colin and the boys let the sea run into the moat of their sandcastle, yelling with triumph as it swirled around their ramparts.

  ‘I think you’d better get Sam out here, darling,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. And Fred and the others – as many witnesses as we can. We don’t want any nonsense this time. I’ll call them up.’

  He charged down the hill towards the jeep, where he’d left the two-way radio, but half-way down he stopped and turned.

  ‘Vinny!’ he shouted. ‘Didn’t I tell you, the moment I set eyes on you, you were going to bring us luck!’

  THEN

  NOBODY LIKED GREB. He was a big, surly young male who didn’t keep to the rules. A while ago he’d broken Nuhu’s arm. She and some other children had been playing a splashing-game round a rock-pool when Greb had settled near them with a clam he’d found and a rock to hammer it open. Nuhu had wheedled for a bit of clam. A normal male would have barked a Go away, but Greb had shoved her hard enough to knock her flat, so that she’d banged her head on a rock and started to howl. Greb in sheer bad temper had brought his hammer-stone down on her outstretched arm, snapping the bone above the wrist.

  Mirn had tried to give Greb a hiding, but Greb had refused to be cowed. That was when Mirn had started to lose his leadership, giving Presh the chance to take over. Nuhu’s arm had mended, crooked and short, so that later, when she’d begun to wonder about things, Li had become interested in it and, when Nuhu would let her, had touched and felt and stroked it, comparing it with the feel of the bone in her own arm, wondering how a bone could mend itself, and whether, if it happened again to someone, she could help the bone to mend straight . . . you’d have to hold it straight with something, for a long time . . . difficult . . .

  Now the children gave Greb a wide berth, and the adults had as little to do with him as they could. He paid no attention, and foraged wherever anyone else was finding food, often snatching their catch from them. Males sometimes did this, but Greb seemed to prefer to steal food, rather than find it for himself. And when the tribe settled down for the night he made a point of choosing a place where the bodies lay thickest and forcing himself down among them. He refused to do shark-watch.

  Though still young, Greb was as strong as any male in the tribe, and if he’d known how to make allies everyone would have realized that one day he’d become leader. Presh was quite different, friendly and easy-going. He liked to visit the families every day, and not just because they would offer him any food they’d found, out of deference. Usually he’d take a mouthful and give the rest back. If children disturbed him while he was snoozing in the shallows his Go away was more laughter than anger, and they weren’t afraid of him. Only when his dominance was threatened did he make the hair on his head and nape stand out, and snarl and bare his teeth, and hunch his shoulders, big-muscled from swimming. Then he could look really dangerous.

  When Greb had made trouble before, Presh had taken Tong and Kerif to help give him a thrashing, reinforcing their authority over their own groups of families, so though one of them would have been the natural challenger they remained content as things were. In fact a challenge from any male in the tribe would have been a surprise, so complete was his acceptance. That it should be Greb – young, disliked, without any authority beyond his own strength – broke all the rules.

  A challenge should have been built up to in a series of confrontations, testing the leader’s self-confidence and his support from the rest of the tribe. It should come like the start of the rains, slowly, with tension in the air and days of waiting and far-off thunder, until everyone was ready for the outburst, longing for it, to get it over.

  No-one realized at first that anything was happening. Greb chose a place where a headland ended in a series of shelving rocks, with deep fissures between them. A seaweed grew here whose young fruiting-fronds were good to eat. Juicy sea-snails fed on the weed, and crayfish could be poked out of crannies, so the tribe was spread along the headland, mostly out of sight of each other, foraging between the rocks. Many of them missed the challenge ritual and only arrived to watch when the actual fighting had begun.

  This may have been clever of Greb. A popular leader drew confidence from the support of the tribe, and at first Presh was partly deprived of that. But some, including Li, saw everything that happened. Ma-ma was still carrying her baby and so had a right to the best feeding places, and Li foraged alongside her. She had eaten as much as she wanted, and was now floating in the gentle swell, eyes closed, looking as if she were asleep but in fact wondering about the dolphins. They hadn’t returned, but they still haunted her thoughts. Last night, waking on a roosting-ledge and seeing the moonlit sky, she’d found herself wondering why the sun was hot and the moon cold, why the moon changed its shape and the sun didn’t, and then she’d slept
and dreamed of dolphins playing with the moon and sun. Now, remembering that dream, she told herself that they all came out of the sea, the dolphins as well as the sun and the moon and the stars. Perhaps they all come from the same place. Perhaps one day a dolphin would take her there. It couldn’t be far, at the speed a dolphin swam.

  A hoot of challenge broke into her musings and she rolled over to look. A few yards away Greb shot vertically out of the water, visible almost to his knees, bellowing as he reached the top of his leap and flailing his spread arms down as he sank back to arch two huge jets of spray at his opponent. It was a terrific display. Li paddled swiftly clear – fighting males had no time to watch out for children.

  Her move brought Presh into view, rising, bellowing, flailing in rhythmic answer. His voice was far more commanding than Greb’s but his leaps not quite so high. It didn’t cross Li’s mind that he wouldn’t punish Greb easily enough. He was in his prime and had the whole tribe behind him.

  The challenge ritual was exhausting. (It was meant to be, so that if it came to a full-blooded fight both combatants would already be very tired and the weaker would quickly give in. That way neither of them would get seriously hurt.) Gradually the tribe gathered to watch. Li moved to be close to Ma-ma among the rows of bobbing heads. The baby floated asleep by Ma-ma’s shoulder with his hands twined fast in her hair, and occasionally she’d scoop up a little water and wet the smooth round face. She looked worried. Presh was her brother and they had always been close.

  At last Presh decided that he wasn’t going to overawe Greb by mere display and he would have to fight him. He climbed out on to a flat platform of rock and fell into his combat pose, erect, arms braced, fingers half-clenched like the talons of a sea-eagle, teeth bared between snarling lips. He shook his hair around him so that it would dry into a glossy black mane and crest. He bellowed, challenging Greb to match his-display.