There, over there, she sees something of such value that she can hardly believe it and thinks it must be something else. Yet on drawing closer it is clear, this is a honey hive after all, the first she has seen since the ash fall, perhaps the last in the world. Beautiful bees come and go with little care and no alarm at her presence. She knows how much she needs the sweet sustenance within, its magic, its power. She needs the wax too, its stickiness and its ability to bond and mend, how it burns to help fuel a fire, the way it can seal a wound.
But how can she get to it without risk? Not only to herself or the child, but to the hive itself. This is a rarity that must survive. She ponders the problem, then looks around and searches. There is a leaf, yes, she remembers now. One whose smoke will make the little creatures sleepy and docile, perhaps long enough for her to reach in with a forked twig and pull out what she needs. Only a little. There is also enough water here to make a mud paste to smother over her body for protection.
Tomorrow. She will attempt the task for sure, but not now. They are both so tired. Tomorrow, after food, after water, after rest.
She follows the path of those wild running freshwater streams and there – yes she had caught the scent, she knew it was so – long reaches of sand open out to a wide shallow sea. It is so long since she has stared at such a vast and unbroken stretch of living water. Its colours are dull but it is gloriously clear.
Leaving the child on the shore she removes the wrappings from her feet and tests the gentle waves. Cold but so delicious. All her coverings are cast back to the beach now and she wades forward until her stomach clenches with shock. Beautiful shock. Further, until she can dip her head and still stand. It is safe here to lift her feet and to close her eyes. To float.
Eventually, the young one’s cries call her back to reality, to responsibility and the need to find or make shelter. The wisest choice may be to weave leafy branches together high up in the older trees and bind themselves in. She has not yet seen what walks here come nightfall. She wonders if she will be able to stay awake long enough to see anything at all.
By morning, after the first undisturbed sleep she can remember since the child was born, she is convinced that they should stay. Claim this new home for their own. This is good. This place has seen little dust, although the sky overhead still hides its full light. Yet if they stay she knows (she has felt it) they will be alone. It might be enough for her, perhaps. But for the child?
And if others come, after all, if others find what she has found, would they be welcome? She decides that they will stay for a few days or more to rest and recover a while here. But her heart knows that they have not yet come to safety.
20
Each movement is fluid, unhesitant. The mistrust that Eloise so often felt in her ability to manipulate the physical world – the sense of being at odds with inanimate objects and that each day threw up an obstacle course of hidden hazards – had melted into the suspension achieved only about two miles into a ten mile run. When that frustrating tilting of the world, as she walked through a door and it would malevolently shift its dimensions to move in and bump her shoulder, would dissipate into the grace and lightness she’d always thought should have been hers.
Her lab staff, loyal to her patient support, protected her and compensated for her notorious clumsiness, preparing a path so all she had to do was follow the course of inspiration. Eloise knew that she would have made a terrible surgeon and had suffered horribly as a medical student, dreading any encounter between herself, sensitive equipment and a patient with a pulse. Today felt very different.
‘Would you like me to operate the drill, Dr Kluft?’
‘No thanks, Rory, I’m fine. I want to do this.’
Eloise understood it was irrational to imagine that Sarah should not be handled by any of the others, by anyone not as connected – but if anybody was going to press that probing dentistry drill into the pristine bone then it had to be her. KC had offered no objection. She had chosen her spot in the complex arrangement of bone behind what would have been Sarah’s ear, to reach in for the marrow that, surely this time, must be waiting there for them. A capsule of uncorrupted time.
Time in captivity. ‘In stone, bone, genome’ as she had once heard it elegantly put in a documentary. It was all coming together. The visit to the museum had not only settled Eloise, it had given her an idea. A new project, one that would have to wait and would need substantial funding, but something that connected both the study of Sarah and a long-held idea of her father’s, for which he had never found the supporting evidence.
Eloise had made friends again with that old skull from Qafzeh in the museum, a cast of which Professor Kluft had kept in his study at the university. After her godfather had left her, she’d taken her time to walk around the original as it sat casually on the mezzanine level, ingloriously discreet in a simple glass box and free from fanfare or fuss.
What had happened to the sapiens populations at Qafzeh, 15,000 years before Sarah? Had they completely died out when the Sinai was singed back to desert or did anything of them, their culture, their courage survive? And if so, where?
It seemed unlikely they could have made it back across the Sahara in another long cycle of dry but it may have been possible by hugging the often treacherous route of the Nile. Or perhaps they had attempted to survive somewhere in the refuge of the delta and along the North African coast, once home to much earlier populations of Homo sapiens. An arduous trek across to the Euphrates and Tigris valleys and down to the Gulf coast may have been possible. Certainly some other human-like populations had made it as far as Siberia in the north and also to what is now India and southern Asia, whether leaving Africa through Sinai – or from across the Horn and through the coastal oases of the Arabian peninsula at that time. But might there have been other options for the climate-change refugees from Qafzeh?
Her father had wondered if they’d gone north along the Med to the green belts of what was now southern Turkey, to the lands that tens of thousands of years later would offer the ideal conditions for some of our earliest and most persistent attempts at agriculture. But there were no indications that these humans of 90,000 years ago may have gone in that direction (as yet). No tools, no bones to be found elsewhere from the Qafzeh era, only a glaring gap in the archaeological record.
There were teasing hints appearing, however, that survival of some form may have been possible. There was evidence of very early plant cultivation from about 23,000 years ago (much earlier than first presumed) near what is now Haifa. These ‘farmers’ were likely from a much later wave of migration out of Africa, but perhaps they had encountered remnants of an older population along the way? At the very least, such finds implied a more complex and non-linear picture of cultural evolution.
Then, about 9,000 years before present, there appeared the fascinating Göbekli Tepe settlement in Turkey, apparently pre-agricultural but with its curious art and surprising temples. Most intriguing to Eloise were the uncanny similarities between petroglyphs found here and much further afield in places such as Australia, suggesting that various ancient migrating peoples could have been both more enduring and more symbolically and culturally related than previously assumed.
The potential proof to connect these disparate dots remained elusive – without the rare blessing of lasting ice or the preservative of, say, an ancient lake bed. Eloise’s own work on the genome project had suggested that, unless they had gone back to Africa, it was unlikely the Qafzeh populations had played any significant part in the final selection of our ‘founding fathers’. (And Eloise had been a little disappointed at the time, on behalf of her own father.)
But she could not write off the possibility. New theories, new indications both archaeological and genetic, were emerging with frequency to confirm historic admixture between wide-ranging early peoples. Indeed, her father had maintained that despite the inevitable decay of organic remains, meaningful evidence for so much human history must exist but had been lost as se
a levels rose – or drowned under modern dams – especially as key habitation would have been along coasts, rivers and lakes. Some such evidence might be right under our noses, thought Eloise. With improved dating or sequencing methods, a number of fossils now languishing in museums (and about which other assumptions had been made) might warrant new examination? Survival against all climatic and geophysical odds was evident throughout the humanoid saga, perhaps kick-starting certain evolutionary changes.
Event after event, until we were the last men standing. If not quite as ‘special’ as we once believed.
‘Come here LoLo. I know that you must have grown since your last visit. Come stand here against the chart and let me make your mark.’
As she’d drilled into Sarah’s skull, Eloise had imagined her father’s calm, strong hands guiding her own. Imagined him watching with pride over her shoulder as she’d safely transferred the new bone powder samples from Sarah’s skull into a series of waiting sterile receptacles. Now, with the memory of those words, she was drawn back to the life-size chart that had taken up one wall of his study in the university (always a more fascinating environment than her own childish playroom, despite the new worlds opened up by the microscope requested for her twelfth birthday).
That magnificent mural in which the stages and branches of ‘man’s ascent’ were illustrated, emerging from knuckle-dragging ape to Lucy, the Australopithecus, then stretching fully upright into Homo erectus, at each stage with ever-growing skulls, and onwards to heidelbergensis who walked further into the world than any of her forebears. It was believed she had bequeathed two competing branches that would both keep evolving and eventually make their own marks outside of Africa: Neanderthal and Homo sapiens, a sibling rivalry with so much in common apart from destiny. The Cain and Abel of pre-history?
Eloise remembered positioning herself at the place between two figures on the wall where her father had asked her to stand. Professor Kluft had found it amusing to mark out the inches of his daughter’s own ‘evolution’ in red pen along the various stages of the life-size mural. Until she had finally caught up with and then surpassed (in his eyes) the Vitruvian perfection of the final figure on the wall. Yes, Nils Kluft knew about bones – and he knew about beauty, in all its forms. He saw it everywhere in everything. He had taught his daughter to look closely, so very closely, while always maintaining a wide-angle perspective. And how closely she was looking now, in more enthralling detail than he ever might have imagined.
Her father had not lived long enough to see how enlightening the microscopic record of mitochondria would prove to be, the uncanny paradox that living cells would ultimately reveal the most remarkable evidence for a history he’d spent years seeking in lifeless sand and sediment. And how things had come full circle. Choosing the bright, vital future of medicine and all its possibilities rather than her parents’ investigative footsteps, Eloise had not expected to become a detective of the past herself.
Now she wanted to revisit her father’s ideas and hopes, to move them forward with all the new tools and tests at their disposal. In later life he had resisted the prevailing culture-historical theory in archaeology, and then the popular but disappointing systems theory. He suspected the effects not only of ecology, but also the agency of the individual. Diffusion and migration, yes, he accepted those as the key drivers of lasting change, but he’d suspected various significant episodes of localised evolution in both culture and biology, whether it had survived to be passed on or had arisen and then died away.
Eloise decided she would put these thoughts before Darius, but only once Sarah had been fully sequenced. The fragile peace between them these days had teased open the possibility of collaborating with him again. Apart from the support he’d given so willingly in terms of the Sarah project, he was now sending her the odd, overly friendly email that reached beyond their obligatory conversations about the progress of the work. How had the last one gone?
‘LoLo, how the devil are you, my love? Devoted greetings from the slopes of Mount Kenya! You really must come out here soon, you know, if you can. I would love to show you Sarah’s site. It gives me no end of pleasure to visualise your delightful face lighting up when walking in her footsteps. It would be like old times, LoLo, wouldn’t it? All those long holidays from uni that you spent at digs with your father and me. Then perhaps a tour of the rather wonderful watering holes that I have now discovered in Nairobi? Bring your safari gear! I recall how fetching you always looked in khaki…’
Eloise had found this particular invitation a little too tempting for comfort, which gave her some cause for concern as to her fortitude when it came to Darius. Were these conciliatory epistles merely the tentative steps towards a renewed friendship, or were they something more? They had been friends once. Very dear old family friends, before becoming lovers. But how could such a friendship be possible now, wouldn’t that require much deeper levels of unadulterated trust?
Perhaps this was something more after all – and Eloise could not help feeling flattered and vindicated if so. Was Darius experiencing a new and unfamiliar kind of loneliness, were the vulnerabilities of impending age creating a rheumy nostalgia about all they had once built together (all they had torn down since in bitterness and anger)?
Even if she were right about any ulterior motives, Eloise hoped that she would not be weakened by her own (much more familiar) loneliness into looking backwards as Darius seemed to be doing. There were too many fresh and varied possibilities in all the virgin territory ahead.
*
And so, there it is. She had not been wrong to push forward. By following this coastline and its remarkable gift of freshwater streams, by carefully using their hoard (the fallen nuts, the honey from the tiny section of comb that she’d been able to break away, the bounty of shell-flesh at low tide) they have grown strong again. Now the strip of the silty channel that she has sought for so long sparkles with reflected light.
Yes, there is definitely more light now, it’s real not imagined. The haunting haze is thinning. Here, from this small inland hilltop (careful not to send any more loose stones skidding down, careful) she can see so much. Beyond the narrow waters, the beginnings of a wide and beckoning new world. A land of opening skies and rising hope.
They rest and wait. The little one needs to move, to keep trying out her weight on her hands and knees, to know that she is in her own body and not merely a part of her mother’s. For her own sake, standing tall and lying free of her load is necessary before attempting the crossing.
Over two days, well-disguised by the rocky cover of the hilltop, she watches the tide cycles and knows when it will be low enough to walk at ankle deep, perhaps waist level at most. But before she can get to the vast shallows – so exposed – she will have to avoid the campfire she has seen on this side. The smoke, the movement, does not suggest a clan, more likely a couple of marauders. It’s possible, she realises, these are the same men who slaughtered that unfortunate family of Others – the ones she had tried to honour where they had fallen. It is so long since she has encountered the living but she senses these two are not worth the risk of discovery. She cannot tell what is roasting on their spit – and feels it is better not to find out.
Even before all of this, she had known. She had known that there was darkness in the world. Not the blackness in the beauty of a night with no moon. Something else. She understood that everything lived because something else had died, but beyond the natural ripples and circles, beyond the waves that broke upon one shore and then returned to another, there were deeper places. And in these deep places angry, vengeful fractures might occur and through these fractures something might slip and fall and become lost. What had fallen would sicken, but before it died it would drag other things to death, and it would enjoy the death that it delivered.
It would seek power. Not in the natural way, to stay alive and to ensure that anything it loved would also survive and thrive, but rather it would seek the power of fear and of pain. Its fur
y would feed on what it did not even need. Did not really want. She had always known this despite most of her childhood seeing only peace, bar a few forgivable and fleeting acts of anger or desperation and that one unforgettable battle. She had understood that shadow existed in the world, no matter how well her father and mother protected her. Most days as a child she would choose to forget this knowledge, but in dreams she had seen it and had recognised it. She would know its smell when it came.
It is clear that they cannot hide from whatever waits for much longer. The burrow that she has dug into the denser sand provides some warmth, and the cold here has diminished, but a fire is too great a risk. Their rations are beginning to run out and the shallows may contain vital nourishment – but she must not be seen. And yet she cannot go around them, there is no better place to cross. They must travel by night. Soon.
*
Why did it have to be raining? It was all too prosaic, a graveyard in the wet, a dislocated umbrella, soggy grass staining her new suede boots. Not even proper rain, more that sorry, misty excuse for precipitation so beloved of the British climate. Dripping marble that should have shone, weathered tombstones nursing damp moss in their craters. Lilies wilting towards mulch. No, she did not want to be sad. There was too much to be hopeful for, her mood was rebounding and she wanted to share it.
Eloise had taken the morning off to visit her father’s grave, as she did three times a year. Their birthdays. His last day. Her mother had been cremated after every organ, tissue or cell that might have been useful for study (whether cancer-ravaged or not) had been donated as instructed, but Eloise had needed something else for her father.
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