Peter Dickinson - A Bone From a Dry Sea

Dad said nothing on the journey. Vinny could almost feel him thinking, the same exasperated ideas churning round and round in his head as he drove. She dozed a few seconds at a time, was woken by a jolt and dozed again. Then she must have slept longer because when she woke the angle of the sun had changed and they were driving along with hills on the left. They must be nearly there. She gazed around and saw a pale blue fleck far up the hillside.

‘There’s May Anna,’ she said.

Dad slowed to look and braked. Vinny leaned out and waved. May Anna waved back and began to pick her way down. Dad gave a sigh of exasperation.

‘Can’t we go and meet her?’ said Vinny.

‘I want to get back. I’ve got a load of work to do, and I’d like to finish it and go while Joe is still busy with Wishart. We’ve got a major discovery, and I’m not having Joe tell people I mucked it up by going off in a huff leaving everything in a mess. On the other hand, as soon as he’s finished with Wishart, he’ll be wanting to pick it all over – just keep us hanging around to show he can.’

Vinny could hear that these were excuses. Half-excuses, anyway. They might be true, but just now he didn’t want to talk to anyone, even May Anna.

‘You go on,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait for her. Can I tell her what’s happened? She’ll have to know.’

‘Yes, of course. Thanks.’

He sounded relieved. As Vinny watched him go she realized it wasn’t a case of not even May Anna. It was especially not May Anna. He’d actually faced up to Dr Hamiska for Vinny’s sake, but then he couldn’t face telling his girl-friend about it. People are impossible to understand, she thought. They’re just what they are.

It was late afternoon and still hot, but so much cooler than it had been out in the badlands that she decided to go and meet May Anna. It looked like an ordinary climb, with plenty of open spaces between the scrub, but the sun was in her eyes so that she couldn’t pick her path more than a few paces ahead. She found some kind of an animal track going in the right direction, but it ended in a wall of thorny bushes, and when she turned to pick her way round she saw, only a few paces in front of her, coiled on a shelf of warm rock, a large brown snake.

She froze. It must have heard her about the same moment she’d seen it, and raised its head and hissed. They stared at each other. Vinny’s heart thumped for action but she seemed unable to move until the snake lowered its head and slid away quietly into the scrub.

‘Where are you?’ called May Anna.

‘Here, I can’t get any further.’

‘Go back down to the road. Meet you there.’

Vinny pulled herself together. It was silly. The snake had been the only bit of wildlife she’d seen close up, and she ought to have been thrilled, not terrified. May Anna reached the road a few minutes after her.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘What are you doing, back now? Thought you were stopping out there.’

‘Dad’s resigned.’

‘Oh, my! How’d that happen?’

Vinny started to explain. She thought she was in control but before she finished she began to cry. The stupid, childish sobs shook her, and she could feel her tears trickling through the layers of dust on her cheeks. May Anna crouched and put an arm round her shoulders.

‘Joe can be a real bastard,’ she said. ‘I guess Sam’s right – that’s what he’s been trying to make happen. It wasn’t your fault, Vinny.’

‘But I started it.’

‘And your dad backed you up.’

‘He didn’t have to. It wasn’t really important.’

‘I bet it was, too.’

The sobs came under control. Vinny blew her nose and let May Anna clean her face for her. They walked back slowly towards the camp, with Vinny talking about what had happened in bits and pieces, as they came to her. May Anna clucked and muttered sympathy.

‘And Sam left you to tell me,’ she said sadly.

‘He wants to get his notes written up so we can leave tomorrow.’

‘I guess so.’

At the camp May Anna went and kissed Dad and patted his shoulder. Vinny had stayed out of earshot, so she didn’t hear what they said, but it was only a few words. Then May Anna fetched drinks for all three, and she and Vinny went and watched the shadows stretch as the sun went down behind them. They didn’t talk much. May Anna was obviously shocked and depressed by the news, and didn’t pretend about it.

‘Can’t you come with us?’ said Vinny. ‘You’d cheer Dad up. Me too.’

‘And me, but I can’t, Vinny. I have to earn my own bread. Joe’s not a forgiver-and-forgetter. Either you’re for him or you’re agin him. And this is really exciting stuff here – if I’m in on it, that’s my career made. I want to come back next year. I’m sorry.’

In the last light they heard the engine of the truck, then saw its dust-cloud, grey in the shadow of the hills and golden as it rose into the sunlight. As it neared, its horn began to sound a triumphant, sneering da-didi-da-da.

‘Bastard,’ muttered May Anna. ‘And he’ll be jolly Joe Hamiska too, all evening, I bet.’

She was right.

THEN

THEY CROUCHED TOGETHER, too shocked to stir, moaning over their hurts, gazing at the terrifying change and then turning their heads away. Or they peered out to sea, in case another monster wave might be preparing. For a long while the upshot spray fell over them, like the finest of fine mist, but at last it thinned and blew away and the sun began to beat down full strength on the headland, forcing them to move. They crossed the crest and looked south to see the same weird ocean churning down the shore, familiar only in its broadest outline of headland beyond headland, but with all its detailed landmarks – outlying pillars, known cliffs, rock islets – changed and gone. In the end they made their way back down to the place where the bay had been, because they could see that at least they ought to be able to climb down there to nearer sea-level.

The cataract which had been the backwash of the tsunami had diminished now into separate streams and falls, foaming down the tumbled rocks. In a crevice high up, Rawi found a huge fish, as large as her own body, stranded there by the wave. They heaved it out and dragged it to a place where a fall tumbled on to a boulder and sent a continuous pleasant spray across a flat shelf beside it, and stayed there through the middle of the day, eating when they wanted, touching and stroking each other often, watching the dreadful swell slowly subside and restore itself to a steady pattern of waves, and gradually as they did so becoming used to the idea that they at least had survived, that the tribe was not gone, because they themselves were now the tribe, and that tomorrow would come.

Towards evening they started to explore, visited the sea and found it weirdly cold with the in-mixing of waters heaved from the sunless deeps, scrambled about the rockfall, discovered enough stranded fish to feed the whole tribe many times over, and came to a place where a section of cliff had fallen away whole and become propped across two other pieces, making a kind of cave where they could sleep. There they spent a restless night, waking each other by the cries of nightmare, clutching together for comfort and then moaning themselves back to sleep.

Li woke a little before dawn. She too had been re-dreaming the tsunami, but this time not with terror. The terror had come before, had been Greb. She had been alone on a shore and he had been advancing on her, his mane immense, like a black sun with his snarling face in the middle of it, and in her nightmare she’d cried to the dolphins, and the sea had simply risen round her at their bidding and swept Greb away, leaving her alone and safe on the beach. She had been waiting for the dolphins to return and dance with her, and woke with a pang of grief that they hadn’t come. Yes, she thought as she woke, that was what had happened. It was the dolphins who had sent the wave. They had done it to save her from Greb. Hadn’t she seen them racing in front of it, not, as she’d first thought, trying to escape it, but leading it on, showing it the way, having arranged for her to be safe on the headland? She didn’t know why so many of the others had had to die too, but she accepted it because the dolphins had thought it was necessary, and they were wiser than she was. Still, it made her feel strange.