Bone Lines

by Stephanie Bretherton

  Sipping her Sauvignon, relishing its sourness, she wondered how she had come to be so sour herself. It seemed that so much of what the world presented to her lately was cause for complaint (at worst) or a cynical reflex (at best) – even if good manners tended to restrict these to unspoken commentary. Eloise realised this was a corrosive quality that did little to enhance her happiness, or her sociability.

  It was not always this way. Or was it? Was the bitter seed planted early, did it come to her with the hair colour and the curiosity and the ability to sprint for gold? No matter. There was always the work, always the vital demands of adding to the greater good. And tomorrow! The arrival of the most distinguished of VIPs, a thrilling new occupant for the clean room who would require the utmost of care. To strains of The Pearl Fishers swimming on the summer air, her spirits re-surfaced.

  *

  This unexpected valley, a dark and narrow rift through the plateau beyond the wastes, holds hidden life within its deepest soils. A handful of roots with nourishment enough. She has moved on again, despite the spasms that cripple her to a crouch every few hours, but the blood and water have stemmed and should leave no trail on the air. Whenever this tiny, miraculous creature swaddled against her chest attempts to cry, she turns her inward to suckle under the deerskin cape, and lightly smothers her, whether she is willing to feed or not. There must be no sound.

  She pushes on in search of shelter in the valley, more for a sense of safety than in any expectation of true rest. Sleep is a stranger to her now. Before coming upon this strange slice into the land she had stopped only when she could walk no more. The plateau was too exposed. Had she dreamt all those glinting eyes the night before, watching her through the darkness, shining in the night mists? Why had they not attacked? Perhaps she had answered their staring with silent insistence and the pack had understood her need to live. Left her alone. She has never felt more alone.

  The one who had lain with her was heading another way. She remembers how she’d tried to tell him, no, come with me. Why? his eyes had asked. She’d tried to explain, to draw in the snow the tribe she’d seen in a fever, a clan not yet torn apart by madness, still holding to their hearts, to their truth. They are far south and west, somewhere not dying, somewhere still living. But he was born to a tribe unknown to her and they shared few sounds in common. It seemed he had neither the understanding nor the faith to travel with her. How could she be surprised? Even the remainder of her own band had not believed her, this shadow over the earth had hidden too much. Taken too much. Fear had fully consumed them and they had refused to follow.

  In the same mistaken way as the child’s father, her lost and no doubt short-lived lover, her own kind had not trusted her. Oh, but they should have done, they should have come! The women of her line were legendary wayfinders, knowing how to count the un-shifting shapes of the earth, how to keep certain stars at their backs. How to smell and dig for water, how to find the lichens that had soaked up the morning dew, even in seasons and journeys without rain. Yet not one had believed her vision of a place free from the icy hunger, and the hatred it had brought. Not one had followed.

  She is sorry there is no other to see the child’s eyes now fully open, no other to watch her face begin to form. But sadness is an extra weight she has no use for.

  Ahead, there is some hope of shelter under the arched roots of a twisting tree, once a giant, now a hollow corpse. Perhaps it had been the ancient guardian of this stubborn sliver of life, a place that refuses to follow its passage into memory? An act of defiance that she both recognises, and is thankful for.

  Yes, there is a useful enough void within the base of its trunk. It is dank and musty inside, things crawl and wriggle here that may not prove the best company – even if some can be caught and eaten.

  She will build a large fire a body’s length outside the only opening she can climb through, then make a stone pit beneath another small opening to the sky and bring some smouldering charcoal within. That will work. The thick hide of her cloak will cushion against the knotted roots of the black and rotting earth. Her weapons will lie close to hand. She has made more pleasant shelter than this, but they will be warm here, and if not fully dry within its dampness, then at least not so exposed. She will make the best of it. There are some pungent leaves nearby that can be burned in offering to sweeten the smell of her new den.

  Despite the grief that hangs like smoke above this lost and lonely cleft into the earth, despite their solitude, she allows a little hope. Leaving the new shelter a while to venture deeper into the valley she follows a trail of fresh scat to make a shamefully easy kill, and the foraging this way is more fruitful. She will feed long from this good fortune. Sinew from the young buck’s carcass will make a strong sling for when the infant grows heavier. Before long she will need to shift the weight to be carried at her back, although the little one has travelled well so far, tucked under the winding strips of hide and fur that protect them both. The child has had no choice.

  How often has she been tempted to stop and indulge this mysterious melting of her heart, to give her daughter whatever she wants, whatever she needs? But the long travels of her tribe had taught her all too well that newborns must soon understand the need for stillness and silence. The need to stifle their hunger, if they – if their families – were to survive while on the move or in the open. It was so with any creature at risk from any other; it was so with men and women. Those who were not strong enough were mourned as their mothers walked onward – and forgotten in time. Although, now that she has a child herself, she fails to understand how such a thing was ever possible.

  But here, finally, is some safety. Yes, this seems the right place to stop and to rest, to allow the child to suckle more often and for as long as she needs. And, thankfully, she feeds more easily these days. At first she’d questioned how any woman before her had managed the task, or borne the discomfort. Perhaps she should have learned more about such things when she had the chance, but even in other, better times she had enjoyed few close friendships amongst her own sex. Her gifts had set her apart. The destiny that the elders had always impressed upon her had called her away from simple pleasures. How often had she dismissed any idle chatter, scorned any trivial concerns? There was always some deeper wisdom to acquire.

  Now she wishes every other woman she has ever known to her side once more. To leave the child in another’s care for only a few moments. For even one night. But as rare as it is to see signs of other people in these times, she has no trust for strangers. First tracking them, then hiding and watching until she can understand their ways and sense the condition of their souls. Since that brief, surprising, yet sweet time alone with the girl’s father, there have been no others worth revealing her presence to.

  She wonders how well the child will continue to fatten if the ache of hunger ever finds them again. How will she keep the little one alive if the milk refuses to flow? She has fought hard against the swallowing fear that every moment of motherhood brings. Had her own mother felt this way, as lucky as she was to rely on the comforts of her clan? There is no other knowledge for her to call upon now but what little she can recall, or what is granted in her deepest thoughts. She is thankful, at least, that the child is a girl. More likely to stay close and listen as she grows. Yes, this little one will be wise, like her mother. Of that she is sure. In what other ways might the child resemble her? She watches to see.

  And what of the father? What had her daughter gained from him? Yes, the eyes. Those shocking flecks of amber. Perhaps a touch of his sun-dusted hair, those burnt tones like a crab shell left in the fire. She had never seen such colouring in the men of her kind before, and he seemed to be like her in most other ways. Maybe she will have the gift of his speed? She hopes so, that would be a benefit. He was fast, faster than any she had ever seen, but he was not clever.

  He had come from much closer to the rising sun, from where the dust and the dark and the dying was worse than even she had experienced. He was l
ooking for something, heading north. Fool. There was nothing left there, only ash and ice. His wretched coughing, the flecks of blood in his spit, these could only worsen in the cold. He did not carry enough furs and he would need them there. She had given him one of her own, knowing she could replace it more easily than he. Together, she might have ensured his survival, but alone? He could not live like her.

  And yet he was beautiful, oh, breathlessly so. The eyes. It was for those that she had not killed him. He had been easy to track. From the first startling footprint from the east. Fool. Her spear arm raised, she had been ready to strike first. But then… he turned.

  2

  As the dawn tumbled through her tall windows and nestled beside her in the empty spaces of her bed, Eloise awoke, long before her alarm. Even before the plaintive cries of Newton, the belly-bloated old cat that seemed to love her. Although she knew this was also the kind of ‘love’ that was spread liberally around the neighbourhood and to anyone who would feed him. Eloise also knew that this was a sad old cliché. Single woman with cat. Oh well, never mind, she comforted herself in her habitual fashion. She cared little for what anyone thought of her anymore (the sabotage of self-loathing notwithstanding) and she had, for the most part, made peace with her decisions. But perhaps the time had come to consider getting a dog?

  Dogs had been the consistent company of her childhood. Her surrogate sisters and brothers, how could her parents have denied her? Often these had been strays adopted at some foreign archaeological dig, against all advice, against all reason and always with the warning that she (and the poor bewildered hound) would suffer through six months of quarantine to bring it back to England. But Eloise was nothing if not determined when it came to saving things – and it always felt more than worth the trouble in the end. Especially with Won Ton, the mangy but determined little mongrel rescued from a cage at the back of a restaurant in Kuala Lumpur one summer, while on their way home from a sweat-soaked dig in the Bujang Valley.

  This love of animals had been painfully tested along the scientific path and some terrible compromises had been made, even if Eloise had always been persuaded of the ‘greater good’ and, wherever possible, had avoided that kind of research. She could not deny, however, that innocence had been lost – and she felt unworthy these days of all that trust. All that unquestioning love.

  Even when Newton had come into her life and chosen to stay it had seemed like his decision more than her own. Was she ready for a trip to Battersea, for a tour of the adoption cages and the agony of choosing? Oh Lord, she asked herself, how on earth would Newton cope with a canine interloper? Probably by deserting her for good in favour of less treacherous neighbours. No. No dog, not yet. Better not. Not with the start of this exhilarating new endeavour. Eloise knew she would be unable to offer the kind of dedication that such genuine devotion deserved.

  Was it so important to be loved, she wondered? Better to be respected and remembered, surely. To be of service. (If not always agreed with.) Certainly her work as part of the team that had unravelled the human genome had not always been well-received. The full picture had confirmed not only how closely humanity was related but also how recently connected by common ancestry, indicating a global population crash, or series of crashes, in particular between 70,000 and 80,000 years ago. No one cause for this was clear but geological and climatic volatility, or other natural crises, seemed to have reduced humanity to barely viable populations at times. It seemed incredible that Homo sapiens had succeeded as a species at all. And yet, it was these kinds of genetic ‘bottleneck’ and ‘drift’ events that had influenced both DNA and human destiny so profoundly.

  At first, colleagues in China had not been best pleased with some of the revelations from the genome project, local orthodoxy preferring to believe they had evolved entirely separately, from a much older stock of humanity. But most had acknowledged a more recent shared heritage with stoicism, if not complete conviction. For apart from tiny traces of DNA from archaic hominins who’d made earlier explorations, it was clear that all modern humans owed the majority of their blueprint to those few Homo sapiens in Africa who’d survived such crises, before spreading out once more.

  Yet controversy arose with each new piece of the archaeological puzzle. Eloise was given to despair on several occasions as fringe elements found excuses in the latest evidence to interpret or justify some cherished belief. And as for the die-hard racists, how could they ever accept that we all owed so much to a handful of African mothers? That we remained so similar, so brotherly bound and demonstrably equal in potential. The New Age fantasists, although well-intentioned at least, were little better in her estimation, with their hare-brained hallucinations about extra-terrestrial or angelic intervention.

  To Eloise, the knowledge of our tightly knit kinship was priceless. Mere fractions of differentiation. She might be growing increasingly grumpy with each diminishing ovum, but she remained a humanitarian at heart. Obviously the fundamentalists, of any faith, were out of the equation before you could say Darwin (or Dawkins) but ultimately, with time and the opening up of minds, she hoped that this molecular siblinghood would bring only good. Unity in diversity, the Galapagoan bequest. Perhaps in only another generation or so?

  Eloise peeled herself away from the creamy tangles of her bedlinen, keen to prepare for a momentous day. Newton, aware now that something had shifted in the mood of this large and well-loved but little-changing home, followed her around with an insistent curiosity.

  *

  This was a river, once. It had curved and turned, widened and narrowed, swelled and flowed, as all rivers do. Now the water has fallen and hardened into ice and the banks are cruelly steep, but she must cross here. There is no time to seek out a better place, soon it will be dark. It is too open on the shrivelled and stony land that has led upwards to this unwanted and unnatural cliff. The lower bank on the sheltered inner loop of the other side has deeper sand and still some scrub. It is the better place to rest.

  She unwraps the skins from her feet, switches the papoose to her back and tightens it. Edges over. Stops, waits, closes her eyes and concentrates, then thinks her way down, wills her toes into footholds, fingers into sturdy nooks. Slowly.

  But these banks are not dry enough, after all, and they betray her. The rock is both sharp and soft at once, cutting into her palm as it crumbles away. In losing both footholds she is suddenly swinging, digging in with the nails of the only hand that still clings to the cliff. Her stomach has already made the fall ahead of her. Her feet will not permit this, however, they have paid too high a price already and will not surrender now. Kicking and scrabbling, they find some kind of grip that gives her a vital pause. A moment, only a moment, but enough time in which to choose a different outcome.

  She waits with the slow silence of this second chance and breathes. She can feel the child’s heartbeat light and fast against her ribs. She closes her eyes to focus on it. When she opens them a moment later, she notices in quiet amazement that a tiny flower is somehow growing from a cleft in the rock in front of her. Frail, white, fragile, the wishful fruit of some blowing seed that has found a way to flourish where it should not, while all its cousins waste away. Now she knows for sure that they will reach the ground below with safety. She begins to climb again, leaving behind smears of blood from the gash in her palm and giving away one shredded fingernail as a fitting sacrifice.

  She needs to jump the last few feet but turns her ankle with it. Hobbling down to the serpent of ice that rests at the bottom of the river bed, she scrapes some of it away to soothe the swelling in her foot, to ease the agony of her torn hands, and to carry some of it onwards in an oiled bladder. But as she shaves away frosted slivers with her flint, leaving drops of her own blood to bloom over the ice, something else appears to be held beneath. She wipes away the scrapings to examine more closely. The backwards spring comes without her choosing as the pain in her ankle is momentarily forgotten. Under the ice she sees a young woman’s face. Long frozen
but as though still awake, as though still calling out.

  She will not look again. She packs tight the ice shavings and limps away.

  3

  Darius had retrieved the remains. Darius. Oh god, she thought, it had to be him, didn’t it? But there had been a crucial advantage in this coincidence, a direct line to applying for the project. When he had delivered the bones, personally, triumphantly, to the Institute, they had been polite to each other. The thrill of this discovery had transcended the nonsense for a while. They left the Institute together to drink coffee in one of those characterless clone shops. Awful swill, it made her queasy for little reward, but at least this was easy neutral ground.

  Despite the streaks of silver in his goatee and at the temples of his full black hair, Darius looked ridiculously fit for his age. So unfair. While never the archetype of handsome, he’d always been so confident, so controlled in wrapping his mental wrestle-hold over her. When they had been together, Eloise had found herself wondering whether some of his more outrageous opinions about humanity might not, perhaps, be right, before returning to the core of her own, more compassionate philosophy.

  Of course he would have aged well, she acknowledged. Darius would bully that bastard time into submission.

  They talked about the Mount Kenya dig for a while, and all the politics involved, before admitting that they were more to each other than casual colleagues.

  ‘So, are you seeing anyone?’

  Was that a hint of hope in his voice? Eloise thought it surely could not be. Darius would never expose a vulnerable flank, and caring about her love life would seem like a weakness to him.