Instead, in a gesture that made her beloved among us and famous in her generation, she picked more pieces of that fruit and one by one offered them to us, each by each; and each by each we ate; and it was like tasting life after the bitterness of death. Some others among our children joined that first girl and broke apart the strips of shark meat and likewise shared it; and also the herb upon which the meat had lain. And the meat was tough but good and the herb pungent yet sustaining, and we made sure that everyone was given at least a taste of all three. And all the while, how could we not, we scanned the horizon above us for some sight of the stranger women who had given us this gift.
Again we remembered what our old ones had said, both the living and the dead, that we would see things never heretofore seen: for there on that skyline we saw rise up silhouetted before the cobalt sky the forms of women like spirits rising out of darkness into light. Their arms were raised; we thought at first they carried weapons, then we saw their hands were empty, for their fingers were spread wide so that we could see the light behind them; and while we watched they began to move their hands from side to side, to make sinuous movements with their arms, to cause their bodies too to sway, the way seaweed wafts back and forth in the swell of the waves; and their hair was like long black strands of kelp drifting upon the surface of the sea and their voices began as a low murmuring like the tide coming in upon a quiet shore, then grew louder and more strident, though never harsh; and we realised they were singing and dancing for us, or to us; but we did not know what it could mean nor how we should respond. And so some of us gripped our weapons and made as if to attack, while others looked back towards the safety of the shore and, more important by far, the safety of our boats; while still others, especially our children, seemed drawn up towards the singing women as if they wanted to join them in the dance and in the song.
Who can prevent children from doing what they want to do? Ours were entranced by the singing dancing women and also fascinated by the strangers’ own children, who had now joined the line. Here was another prodigy: as our children climbed up to meet the strangers, they began to advance down towards us, so that the two parties merged in with one another, and there were cries of joy and some of the stranger women bent down to embrace our children as if they were their own. As for the rest of us, we now felt afraid and began to fall back towards the shore below; those who might have thrown stones or used their weapons could not now safely do so with our own children mingled with those others, for fear of hurting them, and so they too fell back, though not without muttering, with the rest of us, though we knew as we did so that in our retreat we resembled a battle force defeated by a superior enemy; but at least we were orderly, at least we did not panic.
Our people drew together on the sand towards one end of the cove; the stranger women—there were nearly as many of them as there were of us—a little distance away, and the two parties faced one another in trepidation it may be, or fear, or anticipation. We called to our own children to rejoin us and they did, for even among children nothing, not even the lure of food or song, is stronger than the ties of blood. There was a pause like the drawing in of breath. We saw sunlight shatter into a thousand pieces on the blue waters of the bay where, just then, as if by preordination, the black side of a sea beast, a dolphin or a whale, breached and was gone. One of the stranger women stepped forward. She carried in her hand a stalk bearing the sweet dark fruit we had all tasted, which she held up before us so that all could see what it was. Then she turned and raised her arm and pointed in the direction of the land we had set out for only the day before. Again she touched that branch and again pointed to the north; and we knew she was saying that this was where the trees grew that the fruit came from. A great sigh rose up from among us as we thought of that rich land that was until then only a dream of ours.
Then the woman turned and called back into the mass of people behind her; and out from that mass stepped a child, a boy, perhaps ten years old. She took his hand and presented him to us; then swiftly bent down and took his small penis in her hand, briefly, briefly; and then elevated her hand so as to suggest the growth of a boy into a man; then raised her arm again and gestured, this time towards the west, where the sun set, where other black islands lay upon the sea. Once more she repeated the sequence of signs but we knew already what she was saying: their men lived on an island to the west and, no doubt, when this boy was older he would go and join them there; for we had seen that there were girls among them who were growing breasts and hair on their bodies but no boys above a certain age, which was about the age of the one she had called out of the crowd.
And now many of us began anxiously looking into the west, as if anticipating a flotilla of boats coming across the vacant ocean, as if those men who belonged to the stranger women—or did the women belong to the men? Or did they belong to each other?—might even now be about to descend upon us with spears raised and sharp stones in their hands. And we wondered too how such an accommodation had been arrived at, that men and women should live on different islands, for in the land we came from, the land we had left behind, all lived together, though not in harmony, because men were always taking women against their will or against the will of their people and that was a great cause of fighting; and even among us, who counted ourselves a peaceful not a warlike people, there were men who would, given the chance, steal stranger women, as some of ours had wanted to do that very day. And again, we had left that land and travelled at great cost and privation through the mountains to the sea, not just because we were hungry but also because we did not want to live incessantly at war.
Then we became aware that the leader woman had not finished; she had one other thing to show us. From a pouch in the girdle she wore about her waist, of plaited bark or braided out of some kind of grass, she took an instrument made, we thought, of bone and held it up before us in two hands so that light caught in the markings inscribed upon it and flashed in our eyes; and we did not know what it was. The leader woman held the bone up high and tapped it once, twice, three times with one finger, by which we thought she meant: three days; and then pointed to the west; so that we thought, in that time the men would come. And then she held it high again, tapped it once and pointed to the north; as if to say, in only one more day’s sailing we could reach that shore where the fruit trees grew. And then she put that bone down upon the sand before us, spread her arms low and wide in front of her and bowed her head and stepped back among her sisters and their children.
Again we conferred and again we could not agree. Clearly the stranger women wanted us to leave and go on to that other shore; and why not, since that had been our plan anyway? And if, as she said, it was the place where fruit trees grew, what else might we not find there? Why did we not go down immediately to our boats, launch them and set forth for that land of plenty? And then there were the men who might fall upon us at any time … But the more suspicious among us pointed out that we had no way of knowing whether what the woman had told us was true; it might have been a clever lie or, if not a lie pure and simple, then a strategy: first they had given us food, though not enough to sate our hunger; then they had told us where that food could be found; then advised us to go there. What if that further shore was as barren as the one we had left behind? What if others were there already who would not welcome us? What if the fruit really came from the island of men, just across the water? And if that land was so rich in food, why did the women not go there themselves?
There were no answers to any of these questions and, gradually or suddenly, we began to understand that our choices were few indeed. We could stay or we could go, that was all, and staying was as uncertain as going, going as staying. If we stayed we would sooner or later have to fight, and what would we be fighting for? This barren shore? Or were there riches concealed in the brown jagged hills behind the bay? We did not think so. If we went … who knew what we would find? The stranger women drew back and sat down on the sand to wait; the swirl of thought, the murmu
r of argument and counterargument, swept through our people. We were like boats eddying in a whirlpool, seeking some way out into the currents of the sea that would bear us onwards And the more we contended with each other, the more some said stay and others said go, the more danger there was that we would fragment and scatter, that our little group would fall apart; until one woman, who was the mother of the girl who had first seen the stranger women, stood away from the rest of us and gave a great cry.
She addressed herself not to us but to the stranger women; and she told them in her own words the story of how we had come and why and what we had suffered along the way; and when she had finished she stepped forward and picked up from the sand the bone the stranger woman had left there as a gift for us; and taking it went down to the boats drawn up on the shore, found the one that belonged to her man and her children, and began to haul it down towards the sea; and her man watched and waited but their children, of which there were three, sprang forward to help her, and together they launched their boat into the water.
We did not know why she had taken up the bone laid upon the sand; we thought it was a strange thing to do, a mistake. Perhaps that bone was haunted or perhaps there was a spirit in it who was not one of ours, that when and if she got to the new land, where she was evidently intending to go, that spirit would go with her and who could say what might then eventuate? But some of the stranger women came forward and, as our woman was standing waist-deep in the water beside her boat, calling for her man to join her, and he did, they went down the sand towards her and also waded out into the sea and helped her and her children into their boat and began to push it out into the water; and we saw them transform instantly into the sea creatures we had seen the night before—they became seals, they became otters, they swam as if their arms were fins and their legs were tails, they circled the boat with their round dark wet heads upraised or dived and went under it and came up on the other side; and their children swam with them.
And we on the shore felt again as one; we gave a great shout and all ran to our boats and began to drag them down the sand into the sea; and the stranger women leapt forward and helped us to launch them, as they had helped the woman and her children launch theirs, and soon our flotilla was under way; we were paddling out of the bay with our escort of the swimming people; we were sailing for that further shore, away from all that we knew, with our only cargo our souls and those few things we carried. And there would be nothing more to say about this if some of our rogue men, those who had lost their women to the sea or to the sharks, had not done an evil thing, which was to take some young girls from among the swimming people, to drag them into their boats and to carry them away with us. Though afterwards those men said the girls wished to go with us; they had shown by signs that they wanted to leave behind everything that they knew, to see the new land we were going to. But if that was so, why the blood on the water? Why the raising of weapons? Why the killing that happened out there at the mouth of the bay?
And then the sharks, attracted by the blood, came around our boats, and the stranger women turned and swam as fast as they could back towards the shore, leaving those who were wounded or too slow as food for the sharks; and we went on with a great wailing following in our wake, because of the thing we had done; for those stranger women had given us food and we had repaid them by killing and by taking away their young. And the girls we had taken, who were just on the verge of womanhood, were tied up and left in the bottom of the boats of the rogue men, where they lay desolate and ungovernable, huddled in weeping and yet spitting and snarling if any tried to touch them, whether for comfort or some other reason; but the men were exultant as such men are; they were proud of what they had accomplished, and also pleased that they now had women where formerly they had none.
And so we turned the prows of our boats again to the north and began the weary work of paddling them onwards; and many of us thought that we would have somehow to pay for what our rogue men had done but we did not know how; while others said no, they have acted well, it is for the best, we needed more women and these women are good, strong and healthy, they will bear fine children who will grow up among us and be our own children. And perhaps both parties were right.
For the moment, though, it seemed our luck had changed. Instead of an escort of sharks, dolphins accompanied us, leaping grey-sided from the blue water to splash back before the prows of our boats; or ghosting like shadows of shadows below our keels until they surfaced beside us and blew noisily into the air. When a school of fish turned the water ahead to a turmoil of jagged foam, and the seabirds made arrows of themselves and dived, the dolphins scythed in amongst them and it seemed to us that they were herding the fish in our direction, where we took them with spears and nets and kindled fires in the bottoms of our boats and cooked and then ate them; but some among us were so hungry they ate those fish raw. And then, much invigorated, we set to paddling on towards the pale horizon ahead that might have been land but might equally have been a bank of cloud.
Nothing further worth remarking upon happened during that voyage until, towards evening, when the land ahead no longer resembled clouds but veritable hills, perhaps mountains, and we could smell its sweet fragrance on the air, and were encouraged and bent our backs to our paddles, one of the lookouts gave a cry and pointed into the east; and we looked and saw there a black portent heavy and sullen on the sky: the face of a storm approaching. The sea had gone still and oily-looking, reflecting the orange light of the declining sun; there was no wind at all and then there was, just a gentle eddy that ruffled in the hair of our children and barely disturbed the surface of the ocean; but we knew what this meant and doubled and redoubled our efforts, so as to make land before the storm broke.
We could not do it. That thin riffle of a breeze came again, stronger, and then again; we heard a sound along the water which was a whisper with the mother of a scream inside. The sky darkened behind us, the tall black clouds loomed up as if about to topple over us, and we all felt that dread and loneliness that comes before a storm. First the cold slanting rain began to fall on our backs, then the hurtling wind arrived and for a moment we thought that it had come to our aid and would push us onwards to that beautiful shore ahead where the evening sun still shone down on green valleys and blue mountains, on the yellow shore where rivers ran to the sea …
Now the waves that we were trying to surf in to shore, whipped up by the wind until they were higher than our boats, began to break to white foam around us and sometimes over us; it was so dark we could barely see one another, so loud, with the whistling wind, the stinging rain, the crashing sea, that we could hardly hear the cries of the distressed, those pitched into the sea from their boats, those lost in the water as their boats sank, those who cried out in fear of what had not yet occurred and those who cried out in terror for what had. Mother could not save daughter, father could not save son, everyone had to look to themselves, to cling to the boat if the boat still floated, to swim for the shore if the shore was still there in that world of water and darkness, of the screams of the drowning, the torrents of wind, the vast anger of the sea.
The storm blew over at last, as storms do, leaving those who had not drowned a scattered remnant on a darkened shore. We who managed to escape being thrown upon the rocks crawled up the sand to shelter in the grasses of the dunes, or in groves of unknown trees growing along stream beds. We called out to each other in the night and when we heard an answering hark, made our way towards each other and huddled together for warmth and also for security; for who knew what wild beasts, or wild humans, lived upon this coast? And we counted up those who had survived and then counted those who had been lost, those we had seen go under, those we did not think could have endured except through a miracle: the names of our children, the names of our fathers and mothers, our aunts and uncles, our sisters and brothers and cousins.
That night seemed to last forever; we stared into the east for the first glimmer of the returning sun, unsure that light
would ever come again to this world; and when ebony began to fade towards pearl, as if a shadow might come out of the heart of darkness, we did not know if this was dawn or just an illusion made out of hope and fear; but the light gained and soon we could look about us to see what kind of place we had come among; and with light came sound: we heard along the shore the cries of others of our people who had escaped the maw of the sea; and ran towards each other and embraced, weeping. And among the survivors were some of the stranger women we had taken from the island, who had been untied by their captors as the storm gained and allowed to take their chances; for they were like water creatures themselves, the sea held no terror for them; but of the men who had taken them, most had drowned.
And so we gathered together on that foreign shore, knowing that we could never go back, that our old home was lost to us forever; and we looked around to see what kind of place we had come to; and all our grief at what it had cost us fell away when we saw the high tall green grasses that grew on the plains behind the beach; the groves of palm trees with their load of sweet dark fruit, in valleys where springs rose out of the ground and ran in silver streams down to the shore; the wooded hills behind and the high forests on the flanks of the mountains.
We saw deer, we saw kine, we saw animals we had no names for grazing in flocks upon the plains; the air was full of the sound of birds calling, which did not resemble the birds we had known in the desert we had left behind. And all agreed that the place we had come to was good; and our only anxiety was that some other people might have come there before us and would try to prevent us making our home there; but we saw no one.
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