A Bone From a Dry Sea

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘Well . . . As a matter of fact Vinny and I were planning to go on a few days’ safari. Not that it looks as if that’s on now.’

  ‘No problem. I’ll fix it for you. You go on your trip, have a good time. I got a lot of sorting out, you know. When you come back, tell me what you think. OK?’

  ‘Oh . . . We were supposed to be leaving today – as soon as you got back, in fact, with the jeep.’

  ‘No problem. You take the other jeep.’

  ‘You mean we can go at once?’

  ‘Just how you like, Sam. This your bag, Vinny? OK.’

  ‘I can’t go without knowing what’s happening to the others.’

  ‘They’re all packing. Soldiers are bringing a truck out, taking them to the airport, putting them on a plane. Just got to go through their cases first, you know, see they’re not taking anything out.’

  He turned to go but Vinny caught him at the door.

  ‘Can you fix for May Anna to come with us?’ she said. ‘If she’d like to, I mean.’

  ‘Sure. I’ll be asking her to stay, too. No problem.’

  He ambled away, carrying Vinny’s bag. A soldier and an official came in and went through Dad’s case. They took out every scrap of paper and made him sign a receipt. When they’d finished, Watson came and accompanied them down to the jeep. May Anna was already there, waiting for them.

  THEN

  LI SAT BY the stream, looking out over the marsh, with the evening sun on her back. She felt exhausted but happy. They had accomplished the double journey, out to the sea for the birth of Rawi’s baby and back with the child, a girl, safely born. Already the flattened reeds had sent up new shoots, as high as her waist in places. Next time a baby was born they would be an impenetrable barrier. A new way would have to be found.

  Rawi had been very restless before the birth, begging the others to come with her, making short forays into the marsh alone, returning and begging again. In the end Ma-ma had agreed to go with her, so Li had gone too and the rest had followed.

  It had been a good birth, at dawn in the shallows below the shrimping beaches, and they had stayed there till evening, not wishing to re-cross the marshes in the heat of the day. The moon had been almost full when they had crossed the night before, so at noon they shrimped experimentally below the old beaches, and to their amazed delight had caught a few transparent wrigglers. Even so there had been no question of their staying for the midnight tide. The stream was now their home, and they must get back there.

  So they had returned, and feasted in the dawn off young chicks raided from the tens of thousands of nests among the fresh-grown reeds. Immense flocks of migrant birds used the marshes as a breeding-place. It was this that had saved their lives when they had reached the stream after that first terrifying journey from the sea. Practically all the life of the marsh – the birds already there, the fish, the crocodiles, the pigs – had been killed by the outfall from the eruption, and then the tsunami, but fresh flocks had already arrived and, having nowhere else to go, had started to nest and lay among the flattened reed-beds, so at least there had been eggs. The water of the marsh had been salt from the tsunami, and sulphurous from the volcano, but the stream they had reached ran from somewhere far inland and was fresh and sweet. All around, everywhere, as far as they could see, the landscape had been the same dead ashen grey. It had seemed at first an impossible place to live. But, just as for the birds, there had been nowhere else.

  Between an evening and a morning the marsh had turned green as the first reed-shoots showed. Li watched a spider building a web between the twigs of a dead bush that stood beside the stream. The stream itself scoured its bed clean and there were shellfish there, fresh-water mussels and a clam-like thing, most of them dead and gaping, poisoned by the fall-out, but a few still sound. The area of the marsh where the fresh water spread out started to swarm with minnows. Bugs of various kinds appeared. And here and there across the hills pockets of flowers bloomed, their seeds germinating in response to the second rains and the stems managing to struggle through the layer of ash where it happened to lie more thinly than elsewhere.

  On the morning of their return after the birth of Rawi’s baby she came to Li with a Beseech gesture and gave her a clamshell with a shiny inner surface, then tugged appealingly at strands of her own hair. Presh was dead, so there was no father to bring gifts of food, or the birth-ornament, but Rawi still longed for one. Li took the shell and turned it over in her hands, thinking. It wouldn’t work without a hole.

  She gathered a handful of shells from the stream-bed and began experimenting. To open a living shellfish you laid it on a rock and bashed it with a flat stone. That was no good. The empty shells simply splintered. A pointed stone, then. She found one and bashed with that, but it was still no good. She was trying pure pressure when the stone slipped and the shell shot away, but starting again she noticed that she had actually managed to scratch the surface. If she could scratch and scratch and scratch . . . After many experiments she discovered a technique of pressing the point down hard with one hand and twisting the shell to and fro beneath it. The process took a long while, but it worked in the end, and by evening Rawi was wearing her ornament, content.

  So now Li was sitting on the boulder round which the stream curled just before it reached the marsh and watching a vast flock of new strange birds which were paddling on stilted legs between the reed-beds. Beyond them the faint layers of mist were starting to rise and spread. The world, she felt, was full of interest, and wonder, and promise. The birth of Rawi’s daughter was as wonderful as anything, because it showed that despite all the changes and horrors things were well, things were as they were meant to be.

  Something had made all this happen, on purpose, just as she, Li, had made the hole in Rawi’s shell. Something had caused her to be sitting on this rock, this very evening, herself, Li. She felt that she was being watched with the same intentness as she had watched the spider building its web long ago under the leaning tree above the shrimping beaches, or the other spider only a few days back. Yes, like that, that sort of web, herself at the centre of it, all the lines drawing in to her, here, now. No-one else. Nowhere else. No other time.

  It was the dolphins, she knew. They were still with her, still her friends and helpers, wherever they seemed to have gone. One day she would go there too, and dance with them again in their golden seas where the sun was born, and learn the meaning of their song.

  She picked up the shoulder-blade from beside her and studied it, turning it to and fro in the evening sunlight. She had carried it now so long that it seemed part of her, so much so that not having it in her hand made her feel strange, but it would be better if she could wear it on a loop of hair, like a birth-ornament. Then she would always have both hands free. It was much thicker than the shell, but not so hard. She would need to be very careful. There would be no way of finding another one if she broke it.

  She chose a place near one corner, adjusted the bone on to a jut of rock, pressed the point of the stone she had used for Rawi’s shell firmly down and with her other hand began slowly to turn the bone.

  NOW: THURSDAY AFTERNOON

  THEY BROKE THE journey to rest in the shade of a flat-topped tree beside the track. There were no weaver-bird nests in it, but otherwise it could have been the same one where Dad and Vinny had stopped for lunch five days ago, just one tree in the enormous plain which had once been the sea. The sun was half-way down the burning sky.

  The buzz of a helicopter came faintly from the north-west, louder as it neared until they saw it race by about half a mile away, an ordinary commercial machine painted scarlet and silver. Dad laughed.

  ‘Bet that’s Wishart on his way to the camp,’ he said. ‘His flight must have been late. He’s in for a shock.’

  ‘What’ll happen?’ said Vinny.

  ‘Lord knows. The Minister’s still there, unless he’s gone home by another route. I don’t think Joe’s going to be able to make it up with him. Wishart is a thor
oughly nasty piece of work, in my opinion. I’ve only met him once, and he struck me as both prickly and slippery. I doubt if he’ll hit it off with the Minister.’

  ‘Fred will be loving all this,’ said May Anna.

  ‘I think Fred’s going to come out on top,’ said Dad. ‘He’s got the contacts Watson needs. If we’ve got what we think we have, he’ll be able to raise the funds . . .’

  ‘Aren’t you going to help?’ said Vinny. ‘Watson’s not too bad, honestly he isn’t . . .’

  ‘Just think what Joe would make of it,’ said Dad. ‘I set all this up in order to lever him out and take over. The mere fact that Watson promptly arranged for us to keep our visas . . . No, I’m going to look for something with a bit less hassle in it than hominids. There’s plenty of interesting work to be done. What about you, May Anna?’

  ‘I told Watson I’ll come back. I want to finish my skull. It’s getting really interesting. It’s got some fascinating features – clearly hominid, but so small. Male, I think. And, do you know, something fractured it, just behind the left temple. No, seriously.’

  ‘You’re as bad as Joe,’ said Dad.

  He laughed, then sighed.

  ‘I’d like to have finished it,’ he said. ‘Let’s pray Watson manages to keep control of things and get the material into some kind of decent storage. I can just see those soldiers shovelling them into plastic bags and slinging them into some corner, and then . . . You know they took every scrap of my notes?’

  ‘Mine too,’ said May Anna. ‘All gone.’

  ‘I’ve still got my bone,’ said Vinny.

  ‘What bone?’ said May Anna.

  ‘A scapula she was drawing,’ said Dad. ‘Hang on – let’s think about this. Didn’t they go through your bag?’

  ‘Watson carried it out to the jeep, remember?’

  ‘Oh, Lord. Look, I’m afraid we’re going to have to dispose of it for the moment. I’m still a bit jumpy about someone going through our bags again, and we certainly can’t risk taking it out.’

  ‘If May Anna’s going back . . .’ said Vinny.

  ‘The trouble is there’s no documentation,’ said Dad. ‘There’s nothing in my notes.’

  ‘If she just put it back in the H-bag,’ said Vinny.

  ‘Then perhaps someone could notice . . . you could notice, May Anna . . .’

  ‘Please,’ said May Anna.

  Dad laughed.

  ‘See what you think. Show her, Vinny. Don’t say anything.’

  Vinny fetched the fossil and gave it to May Anna, who studied it first with the naked eye and then through a magnifying glass, tilting it this way and that in a patch of sunlight to reveal its faint markings.

  ‘Someone’s bored a hole there,’ she said.

  ‘Possibly,’ said Dad.

  ‘Not just possibly. Look. There’s these drill-scratches this side, and look at the wearing this side. They’ve pressed down on to it with a pointed flake, using a rock as an anvil, but they didn’t turn the flake. They turned the scapula. If you didn’t have a fully manipulable hand and wrist you’d find that easier. You’re telling me this came from your site?’

  ‘Out of the H-layer. The one with the foot-bones in it,’ said Vinny.

  May Anna whistled.

  ‘And you didn’t tell Joe?’ she said.

  ‘It was tricky,’ said Dad. ‘By the time Vinny noticed those scratch-marks – I told you she was drawing it – we were already having trouble with him.’

  ‘It was my fault,’ said Vinny. ‘I asked Dad not to tell him. I hated the way he kept making a fuss, pretending I was his lucky mascot and so on.’

  ‘It was partly that,’ said Dad. ‘Anyway, I wasn’t as sure as you are about the significance of those scratches – in fact I’m still not. Furthermore, if you’re right, then it’s going to cast considerable doubt on our dating. You’re not going to get a lot of palaeontologists believing in an artefact four and a half million years old, for a start.’

  May Anna sat silent, still turning the bone to and fro.

  ‘What do you think it is?’ said Vinny. ‘I mean, what sort of animal did it come from? Dad doesn’t know.’

  ‘Just what I was thinking about. Were you ever at Pechabar, Sam?’

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘It was the first real site I worked on. Pakistan. Harry Blakey ran it. It was amazing, a sort of cetacean graveyard. There must have been one almighty stranding incident. When I was still a student I’d handled more cetacean fossils than most guys see in a lifetime. That’s whales and dolphins, Vinny.’

  ‘I know. It would be neat if it was a dolphin.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean – “neat”?’ said Dad. ‘I can’t think of anything more untidy than an early hominid drilling a hole in a dolphin scapula.’

  ‘We came from the sea, Dad. Like I keep telling you.’

  He laughed cheerfully and hardly at all with scorn, and May Anna joined in.

  ‘You haven’t cured her of that bug yet, Sam?’ she said.

  ‘It isn’t a bug,’ said Vinny. ‘You said you didn’t think it was complete nonsense. I bet you really think there might be something in it!’

  ‘Me? A poor girl with a career to make? I can’t afford to . . . What do you want me to do, Sam?’

  ‘Do you think you could find this tree again?’

  May Anna looked around, checking landmarks.

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  ‘Then I think we’ll bury it here for the moment. When you get back – if you get back – you can check out how things are. Maybe you’ll simply be able to tell Watson what happened. Maybe you’ll be able to sneak it into the H-bag somehow. Maybe things won’t work out and it’ll have to stay here. If necessary I can send you a note about it once I’m out of the country. All right?’

  So they measured a distance from the trunk and hacked a good deep hole and wrapped the fossil in plastic and laid it in the bottom and stamped the earth back firm above it. Vinny rose, dizzy from bending, and stood and swayed with the world dark and her ears drumming. It was strange knowing where the fossil was hidden, and knowing that she and Dad and May Anna were the only ones in all the world who had that knowledge. It gave her a sudden sense of her own uniqueness, her singleness, as if she was a particular point where various lines, drawn right across the universe, came together, focusing here, now.

  The drumming left her and her vision cleared. Around her the plain which had once been sea stretched into its unknowable wavering distances, like time.

  THE END

  NOTE

  There were apes, walking on four legs, and millions of years later there were our human ancestors, walking on two. What happened in those millions of years to bring that about is still largely guess-work.

  The Sea-ape theory is one of those guesses. Professional palaeontologists have tended to call it crack-pot, but some of them are beginning to agree that it at least needs a serious answer. Vinny mentions some of the arguments for it (our hairlessness, the fat beneath our skins, our hearts slowing when we dive, and so on). The chief arguments against it are that there aren’t any fossils, and there doesn’t seem to be enough time to fit that amount of evolution in. I would like to have written more about it, but I found it held the story up too much. Readers who are interested should look for Elaine Morgan’s books (The Descent of Woman; The Aquatic Ape; The Scars of Evolution). There is a discussion of it in The Aquatic Ape: Fact or Fiction? edited by Machteld Roede and others.

  I have of course made up everything that Li and her people do in this story. There’s no evidence for that at all.

  P.D.

  About the Author

  Peter Dickinson was born in Africa, but raised and educated in England. From 1952 to 1969 he was on the editorial staff of Punch, and since then has earned his living writing fiction of various kinds for adults and children.

  Amongst many other awards, Peter Dickinson has been nine times short-listed for the prestigious Carnegie medal for children’s liter
ature and was the first author to win it twice. His books for children have also been published in many languages throughout the world. His latest collection of short stories, Earth and Air, was published by Small Beer Press.

  Peter Dickinson was the first author to win the Crime-Writers Golden Dagger for two books running: Skin Deep (1968), and A Pride of Heroes (1969). He has written twenty-one crime and mystery novels, which have been published in several languages.

  He has been chairman of the Society of Authors and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2009.

  Also by Peter Dickinson

  Eva

  Tulku

  Shadow Of A Hero

  Chuck and Danielle

  A BONE FROM A DRY SEA

  AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 448 17261 0

  Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,

  an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK

  A Random House Group Company

  This ebook edition published 2012

  Copyright © Peter Dickinson, 1994

  First Published in Great Britain

  Corgi Childrens 1994

  The right of Peter Dickinson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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