Peter Dickinson - A Bone From a Dry Sea

‘Colour’s got nothing to do with it. But it takes an expert, black or white, to know where to dig. I’ve worked with excellent black colleagues – Dr Azikwe, your nephew, I think, shows every sign . . .’

‘I am not interested in your opinion. Dr Azikwe will now be in charge of these excavations.’

‘Are you serious? In that case – no, I will not be silent—Let me tell you that it’s perfectly obvious to me that this so-called boundary on this map has been recently drawn in. A child could see that it’s been done with a different pen, in another sort of ink . . .’

He stopped because a gunpoint had been thrust against his throat but he kept his dignity as he backed away. Mr Multan spoke with one of his aides, who came forward and clapped for attention.

‘Everybody will go to his hut, please, and wait there. We are sorry for the inconvenience. We will not be very long.’

‘I don’t understand,’ whispered Vinny.

Dad glanced at the door.

‘It was always a risk,’ he muttered. ‘I must say I’ve got a certain amount of sympathy for them. Suppose a lot of – oh, I don’t know – Martians turned up and said they wanted to excavate a site on Salisbury Plain where several ley-lines meet, and we could have a few token humans on the dig but we mustn’t interfere because we didn’t know enough about it. How’d we feel? This country is still finding itself. For years it has been regarded as a kind of pariah by the rest of the world. Now it can do with all the prestige it can get, including (the Minister evidently thinks) the prestige of taking charge of the excavation of a really important early hominid site. They’ve got something no-one else has got – why should they hand it all over to a pack of Europeans and Americans?’

‘But they don’t know how.’

‘They can hire people. Fred for a start. And I didn’t say I thought they were right, I just said . . . Hold it.’

He’d been talking in a low voice so Vinny had already heard the approaching footsteps, but it was only Watson. He looked almost as cocky as usual, now that he was out of his uncle’s presence.

‘Hi, Vinny,’ he said. ‘Hi, Sam. Sorry about all this happening. Didn’t mean it this way.’

Dad grunted unencouragingly.

‘They’re saying you been fired, Sam,’ said Watson. ‘That right?’

‘I have resigned over a disagreement with Dr Hamiska, if you must know.’

‘Right. Well now you’re unfired, if that’s what you want.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You hear the Minister saying I got to take over everything? Can’t do that all by myself, you know, so I’m going to need help. Experts. Pros. How d’you feel about that?’

‘Heavens. I’ll have to think. Have you asked Dr Wessler?’

‘Sooner have you, Sam. Came to you first.’

‘Well . . . As a matter of fact Vinny and I were planning to go on a few days’ safari. Not that it looks as if that’s on now.’

‘No problem. I’ll fix it for you. You go on your trip, have a good time. I got a lot of sorting out, you know. When you come back, tell me what you think. OK?’

‘Oh . . . We were supposed to be leaving today – as soon as you got back, in fact, with the jeep.’

‘No problem. You take the other jeep.’

‘You mean we can go at once?’

‘Just how you like, Sam. This your bag, Vinny? OK.’

‘I can’t go without knowing what’s happening to the others.’

‘They’re all packing. Soldiers are bringing a truck out, taking them to the airport, putting them on a plane. Just got to go through their cases first, you know, see they’re not taking anything out.’

He turned to go but Vinny caught him at the door.

‘Can you fix for May Anna to come with us?’ she said. ‘If she’d like to, I mean.’

‘Sure. I’ll be asking her to stay, too. No problem.’

He ambled away, carrying Vinny’s bag. A soldier and an official came in and went through Dad’s case. They took out every scrap of paper and made him sign a receipt. When they’d finished, Watson came and accompanied them down to the jeep. May Anna was already there, waiting for them.

THEN

LI SAT BY the stream, looking out over the marsh, with the evening sun on her back. She felt exhausted but happy. They had accomplished the double journey, out to the sea for the birth of Rawi’s baby and back with the child, a girl, safely born. Already the flattened reeds had sent up new shoots, as high as her waist in places. Next time a baby was born they would be an impenetrable barrier. A new way would have to be found.

Rawi had been very restless before the birth, begging the others to come with her, making short forays into the marsh alone, returning and begging again. In the end Ma-ma had agreed to go with her, so Li had gone too and the rest had followed.

It had been a good birth, at dawn in the shallows below the shrimping beaches, and they had stayed there till evening, not wishing to re-cross the marshes in the heat of the day. The moon had been almost full when they had crossed the night before, so at noon they shrimped experimentally below the old beaches, and to their amazed delight had caught a few transparent wrigglers. Even so there had been no question of their staying for the midnight tide. The stream was now their home, and they must get back there.

So they had returned, and feasted in the dawn off young chicks raided from the tens of thousands of nests among the fresh-grown reeds. Immense flocks of migrant birds used the marshes as a breeding-place. It was this that had saved their lives when they had reached the stream after that first terrifying journey from the sea. Practically all the life of the marsh – the birds already there, the fish, the crocodiles, the pigs – had been killed by the outfall from the eruption, and then the tsunami, but fresh flocks had already arrived and, having nowhere else to go, had started to nest and lay among the flattened reed-beds, so at least there had been eggs. The water of the marsh had been salt from the tsunami, and sulphurous from the volcano, but the stream they had reached ran from somewhere far inland and was fresh and sweet. All around, everywhere, as far as they could see, the landscape had been the same dead ashen grey. It had seemed at first an impossible place to live. But, just as for the birds, there had been nowhere else.

Between an evening and a morning the marsh had turned green as the first reed-shoots showed. Li watched a spider building a web between the twigs of a dead bush that stood beside the stream. The stream itself scoured its bed clean and there were shellfish there, fresh-water mussels and a clam-like thing, most of them dead and gaping, poisoned by the fall-out, but a few still sound. The area of the marsh where the fresh water spread out started to swarm with minnows. Bugs of various kinds appeared. And here and there across the hills pockets of flowers bloomed, their seeds germinating in response to the second rains and the stems managing to struggle through the layer of ash where it happened to lie more thinly than elsewhere.

On the morning of their return after the birth of Rawi’s baby she came to Li with a Beseech gesture and gave her a clamshell with a shiny inner surface, then tugged appealingly at strands of her own hair. Presh was dead, so there was no father to bring gifts of food, or the birth-ornament, but Rawi still longed for one. Li took the shell and turned it over in her hands, thinking. It wouldn’t work without a hole.

She gathered a handful of shells from the stream-bed and began experimenting. To open a living shellfish you laid it on a rock and bashed it with a flat stone. That was no good. The empty shells simply splintered. A pointed stone, then. She found one and bashed with that, but it was still no good. She was trying pure pressure when the stone slipped and the shell shot away, but starting again she noticed that she had actually managed to scratch the surface. If she could scratch and scratch and scratch . . . After many experiments she discovered a technique of pressing the point down hard with one hand and twisting the shell to and fro beneath it. The process took a long while, but it worked in the end, and by evening Rawi was wearing her ornament, content.