A Bone From a Dry Sea (17 page)

Ma-ma came next, with the baby clinging round her neck. As soon as she was clear of the bottom Hooa tried to follow, but Li barked
Stop
to her and Goor echoed the call and pulled her back. Ma-ma was in any case a good deal heavier than Li. When she was almost up, strands began to give and the mat swayed in towards the waterfall. Li grabbed at the tangle and managed to cling on till Ma-ma came over the lip and lay gasping.

There
, Li called, and signalled to Hooa to climb in a different place, close against the fall. Hooa was frightened, so Goor shoved her aside and took her place. He was heavier still, but the vine held and he reached the top, soaked by the spray from the fall.

Hooa followed, but there were several people now at the top of the gully waiting their turn. The panic of their flight from the beach was still strong in them. Despite yells of
Stop
from above, two of them had begun to climb before Hooa was
half-way
up. Others followed. With a series of crashes the whole mat gave. Hooa was swung sideways, right into the waterfall, clinging to the remains of a main stem, while the rest of the mat tumbled down on the people below.

When the mat gave, Li had tried to grab it as before and had almost fallen with it. Now, craning over the edge, she could see Hooa hanging in the fall, unable to move. The stem, she clung to snaked over the edge and inland to a shapeless corky mass which was in fact the base-stock of the vine from which each year it sent out fresh strands to clothe the cliff. Li went and studied the stem and guessed it was strong enough, but found Hooa’s weight too much to allow her to move it sideways along the cliff.
Come-help
, she called. Goor came, and then Ma-ma, and together they simply hauled on the stem, dragging Hooa up through the streaming water, until she reached the top.

The others were still below, calling anxiously. Without the vine the gully was a dead-end. There was no way out, except back down to the beach. Li tried lowering the stem which Hooa had used over the cliff in a fresh place, but its end dangled out of reach above the grasping hands below. It would need to be longer. She followed it inland to a point where it branched from another stem and started to bite her way through. The sap was bitter, shrivelling lips and tongue, like the juice of the gourds themselves, but she persisted until she could break the stem free. She washed her mouth out in the stream and tried the stem over the edge.

It reached, but the people didn’t know how to climb a single stem. Their ancestors in the
forest
would have done it easily, but in their long sea-centuries their feet had evolved, become paddlers and standers and lost the ability to grasp. They had to cling with their hands to the stem, making no attempt to climb, while their friends above hauled them to the top. Rasping on the cliff edge the stem quickly lost strength and broke when the third trip had scarcely started. They needed a mat of vine, not a single stem. Li went and inspected base-stock.

She found that the vine began as a single stem, twice as thick as her arm. This branched into other stems, which branched in turn and so on, forming the mat. The first stem was far too thick to bite through, but the wood where she felt it seemed fairly soft. She picked up a stone and began to bash the main stem, then turned, called to Goor to help and gave him the stone. While he hammered steadily at the stem, she and Ma-ma and Hooa hauled at the vine itself until it gave. They dragged it to the cliff edge and lowered it. The broken strands now reached to the people below.

Again, of course, they tried to climb several at once, but this time they felt the mat giving, not because it was breaking but because the four people at the top weren’t strong enough to hold the weight. They leaped clear. Li and the others just managed to cling on and reposition the mat, and now those below realized they had to wait their turn, and though they jostled to be next in line, climbed one at a time. The last of them, Rawi, pregnant with Presh’s baby, was half-way up when a new figure appeared in the gully. It was Greb. He must have heard the commotion up on the cliff and climbed up to drive these
escapers
back down on to the beach and under his control.

In terror Li tried to haul the mat out of his reach, yelling
Help
. The others joined in and the mat came up with a rush, bringing Rawi with it. Timidly Li returned to the edge of the cliff and peered over.

Greb was standing below, staring up, with his face snarling and his mane bushed out. Rapidly he scrambled up the side of the gully, as Li had done, and saw that there was no way further. He went back, pushed through the waterfall, and found that it was the same that side. By now all the escapers had lined the cliff and were staring down. He balanced himself, displayed ferociously at them and yelled his challenge, so terrifying a figure that despite being for the moment safe from anything he could do to them, several of them backed away out of his sight beyond the cliff edge.

Then somebody found a stone and threw it. It missed, but others did the same, forcing him to retreat down through the waterfall into the gully. Yells rose. They kept up a hail of clods and stones, hitting him several times, until he backed out of range.

Some kind of commotion was happening on the beach. He looked, displayed once more, briefly, and then went scrambling down to re-establish his dominance over his unwilling followers.

NOW: WEDNESDAY MORNING

THE TENT WAS
like an oven, so Vinny dragged her cot into the shade of the big awning. It was still roasting there, and it seemed impossible that she could sleep, but almost at once she did.

Vinny’s dreams were dreams of heat, of a shimmering marsh which somehow she had to lead the others across. There was one safe path. If you stepped off, the crocodiles would get you. She was the one who knew the way. She walked confidently between the reed-beds and the others followed. (What others? They were vague in her mind, but she knew they were there, though she mustn’t look round.) Something on the path. A flat white bone with a hole in it – a sign someone had left for her. She stared into the mists ahead for her helper. No. And when she looked down again the bone was broken. And she’d forgotten the path. If she looked through the hole she would see it again. Someone behind her was reaching to take it away and she would be lost and the crocodiles were coming nearer. They knew . . .

She woke rigid with terror, heard the crunch of boots on shale, Dr Hamiska’s jovial laugh, and then they were standing round her, great black figures against the glare beyond the awning. There was a sense of tremendous good humour
about
them, of things going really well, but still half in her nightmare she had a certainty that it wasn’t real, that any moment it was going to break down into shouts and rage. She wanted to be alone, but they were all around her, too big, too black against the glare, staring, laughing, plotting something . . .

She forced herself properly awake and sat up.

‘Lunch ready then?’ cried Dr Hamiska. ‘Roast goose and all the trimmings? Cherry pie? Champagne?’

‘I’ve been asleep,’ said Vinny crossly, as she stood up, looked for Dad and moved to his side.

‘Feeling better?’ he muttered.

‘Yes, thanks. Have you found anything else?’

‘A pig mandible. More shells for you to sort. Jane’s brought in a deer femur with what could be butchery marks on it.’

‘
Are
butchery marks,’ said Dr Hamiska. ‘Have faith, Sam. And that second shell of yours, Vinny – that’s excellent. With the first, it is clear that the blows were deliberate. You can show them to Wishart tomorrow.’

‘Oh . . . but . . .’

‘No need to be shy. Sam will explain the technicalities. Listen, everyone – I might as well get this clear now. Our most important guest tomorrow is not a palaeontologist – in fact, before he became an administrator John Wishart specialized in early Flemish art. My spies tell me that if it weren’t for the terms of the Craig Foundation he’d have closed the Palaeontology Department down years ago. Now he’s going to be glad he didn’t, because we’ve got a really big find for him, which will help him put Craig on to the map. What we’ve got to do is make him understand that. We’ve got
to
show him that he can sell our find to all those people out there who never knew they could get excited about a few old bones. And it’s no use looking at me like that, Sam.’

‘I’m hungry,’ said Dad.

‘And so am I, but this is next year’s bread I’m talking about. You want to go hungry next year? What I’m saying is that it’s worth doing anything we can to show John Wishart how he can make this find into big news for Craig. People out there – the slobs in front of the goggle-boxes – show them a few old bones and tell them they are two distal phalanges and a metacarpal from a plantigrade simian four-and-a-half million years old, and they’ll switch channels. But show them a group of shells that have been deliberately smashed with a primitive tool, and tell them it was a schoolgirl on a visit who put them together – let them see her doing just that – and that’s news. That’s something they can imagine their own daughter doing. That’s the sort of line we’ve got to take with Wishart’s visit. You may not like it, but we’re working in a field where salesmanship has to go hand in hand with scholarship. So as soon as we’ve eaten I’m going to go through with each of you exactly what you’ll be doing, and what you’ll say, when I bring Wishart round. I’ll photograph you with the shells later, Vinny, when the sun’s at a good angle. Right, folks, let’s eat.’

In fact, in that heat all anyone wanted to do was nibble, and drink. They sat around, passing the latest foot-bone from hand to hand. Michael, who usually spoke very little, told a story, about another dig a few years back, when a really important visitor had brought a girl-friend who wasn’t at all interested in fossils but was determined to
photograph
a lioness with her cubs. It had been a different part of Africa, with more local people around (there were almost none here), and they’d got used to the idea that these foreigners would pay for news about places where you could find the right sort of old bones. Michael, who could speak the language, had been told to spread the word that now the foreigners wanted a suckling lioness, and one was found, and the girl got her photographs, and the important visitor was absolutely delighted, but for weeks afterwards locals were coming in with reports of a lioness who’d just given birth – sometimes they’d walked two days to get to the camp – and weren’t at all pleased to be told that the foreigners were only interested in old bones again.

He was a first-class story-teller. There were lots of sly jokes along the way. He made you see what everyone in the story was like – the pompous visitor, the slinky girl-friend – so it took Vinny a little while to notice that Nikki, sitting slightly aside as usual, with his pad on his knee and his pencil in his hand, was actually drawing her. Their eyes met as he glanced up, and he laughed and passed the pad across. The drawing wasn’t in his careful, exact, fossil-style – it was more like a cartoon. It showed a sort of ape-child sitting cross-legged and bashing a huge clam-shell with a stone she held in her fist. The body was half-way between ape and human, but the head was completely human, only too small.

‘Is that me?’ said Vinny.

‘Best I can do,’ said Nikki.

‘Look, Dad. Portrait of your daughter.’

‘A perfect likeness.’

‘You should have given her webbed fingers,
Nikki,’
said a soft voice behind Vinny’s shoulder.

She turned. It was Dr Wessler. He was smiling amiably, but she knew that behind his sun-glasses his eyes must be glinting with malice.

‘Or do you think they’d have got as far as fins?’ he added. ‘Eh, Sam?’

Dad stiffened. Vinny cringed. So Watson must have told the others about their argument.

‘Yes, indeed, Sam,’ said Dr Hamiska. ‘What is this perverse nonsense you have been allowing your daughter to propagate? I can hardly think you are showing a proper parental responsibility, you know.’

Several of the others laughed. If Dad could have done so too it would have been all right, but he couldn’t.

‘It’s nothing to do with Dad,’ said Vinny. ‘It’s a book I found in the library at home, and as soon as I asked Dad about it he told me it was nonsense.’

‘Don’t you believe it, Vinny,’ crowed Dr Hamiska. ‘Sam’s a secret believer. He’s going to set the scientific world ablaze by finding a fossil hominid thigh-bone with unmistakably frog-like elements about it.’

‘And write a best-seller,’ said Dr Wessler. ‘Have you got a title yet, Sam? What about
Me and My Gills?
’

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ said Dad. ‘Didn’t you hear what Vinny said? She found the bloody book in the library.’

They were just like kids at school, just like the ones who’d found out Vinny’s real name and cornered her in corridors and chanted it at her. You know it doesn’t matter. You know it’s stupid.
You
know if you could laugh about it they’d leave you alone, and the worst thing you can do is burst into tears, which was what Vinny had done, or lose your temper, which was what Dad did.

He didn’t swear or shout. He simply went ultra-cold and looked directly at Dr Hamiska and said, ‘The book may be nonsense, but it is no more nonsense than some of the theories I have heard propagated about our finds in the last three days.’

For a moment it was as though he had actually hit Dr Hamiska – no, as if he’d spat at him. Then the big laugh bellowed out, and everyone pretended to relax as though it hadn’t happened. Vinny stared at Nikki’s cartoon, not enjoying it any more. She’d been thinking how Colin would have liked it – hung it in the downstairs loo probably, with his other favourite joke pictures – but now she knew she wasn’t even going to show it to him. She felt miserable. She’d really let Dad down. It wasn’t because they all thought the sea-ape theory was stupid – the actual cause didn’t matter – what mattered was that she’d landed him in a corner where he found himself behaving in a way he was ashamed of. She guessed he was the kind of person who lay awake at night remembering moments like this and feeling sick about them. Now, she thought, he was probably wishing she’d never come.