A Bone From a Dry Sea (8 page)

‘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 floor. 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.

Greb didn’t bother. Neither the display, nor the fact that the whole watching tribe were on Presh’s side, seemed to affect him at all. He climbed out on the other side of the platform and immediately flew straight at Presh. The impact flung them both off the rock and into the water.

The tribe yelled their excitement. Challenge fights were a break from the day-to-day. They wanted to see Greb humiliated and punished, but they wanted a good fight first. It would add to Presh’s prestige if he won with courage.

The combatants rose apart, climbed out and rushed at each other. This time they fell on the rock and rolled about, locked together, biting and clawing. They separated, stood, circled, grappled and fell once more, rolling across the rock till they tumbled over the edge, bouncing off a jut of barnacled rock on their way down. Greb was underneath and must have caught the side of his head on a jag, because when he climbed out blood was pouring down his neck and shoulder. Such a hurt would have allowed any normal challenger to give in without loss of prestige, but Greb ignored it and rushed at Presh once more.

The nature of the tribe’s interest changed. Now they realized that for Greb no rules applied. This could be a fight to the death.

The pair battled repetitively on, exhausted, bruised, cut, blood-smeared. Greb’s first wound was still the only serious one. The sea would wash him clean, but before the fighters grappled again his neck and side would be streaked with scarlet and then as they fought the blood would blotch both of them until they tumbled once more into the sea. Greb was weakening faster than Presh, who now at the start of each bout fell into his challenge pose again, inviting Greb to submit. Greb ignored the offer and every time flung himself into the attack, blinder, madder, ever more hopeless. But still he fought on.

At last the end came. Once more they climbed on to the rock, once more Presh took up his pose, once more Greb attacked. They stood wrestling together. Presh began to force Greb to the edge, meaning to fling him into the sea and stand in triumph over him. The movement stopped. The rock surface was invisible to the watchers below, but they could see that Presh had caught his foot in something. For a moment he and Greb poised together until Presh in his effort to free his foot unbalanced them both and Greb wrestled him down. The whole tribe heard the leg-bone snap.