A Bone From a Dry Sea

THEN

FOR THE FIRST time, ever, in countless generations, the pattern of the tribe’s existence changed. Accidents might have varied their journeys before – a storm, or a stranded fish large enough to feed them all for an extra day or so, keeping them longer in one place – but they had always tended to make the time up, reaching the river in the north around the new moon, and returning to the shrimping beaches at the full. Now they didn’t go north at all. The first haul of fish lasted them three days, and then the dolphins came again.

This time the shoal was smaller, but the people knew what to do, so the catch was almost as great. Li hadn’t called to the dolphins in her mind, but Presh assumed she had and took her out to dance with them when the hunt was over. Four days later the people were hungry again, but by then he felt that his leg was strong enough for normal swimming and he took them south.

To Li’s surprise, though the rest of the tribe took it that she’d sent for them, the dolphins brought a shoal to a bay like the one where Greb had danced after his fight with Presh. There was no bar to trap the fish here, so the people lined up in the water in an open-ended ring, into which the dolphins herded the fish to be scooped out on to the shingle. Already these hunts were becoming part of the tribe’s life-pattern, something which happened because it happened, no cause for wonder at all.

Li did wonder. At times she was almost paralysed by the wonder of things – her own shadow, for instance, moving below her as she swam above sunlit sands, or the intricacy of a jellyfish, or why gulls could fly and she couldn’t. She wondered often about the dolphins, though she knew they were so wonderful that she would never understand them, unless, perhaps, when she died and they took her to the place the sun came from.

(There were limits to her wonder. It didn’t, for instance, occur to her to wonder how both people and dolphins had learnt so quickly to help and trust each other – whether, perhaps, in the thousands of generations during which the people had roamed these shores this way of hunting had been evolved, and then for some reason forgotten, but with the memory of how it was done still lying buried among the genes of both species until Li’s chance meeting with the first dolphin had revived it. Perhaps. But all Li knew was that the dolphins felt like friends, and were wonderful.)

The tribe gave her time to wonder. They accepted that she was part of Presh’s glorious feast-providing leadership, so they made a place for her in their life-pattern. Presh took her with him when he visited the families, and shared with her the food they offered him, and that seemed right. They remembered the birth-ritual and insisted again on her presence, demanding a plaited cord of the mother’s hair, to be threaded through the hole in whatever ornament the father brought. (A mother who owned a good ornament, and whose baby was now old enough to be losing its birth-fur, might find two or three males begging and bribing her to pass the thing on.) They showed Li their hurts, which mostly she couldn’t do much for, though sometimes she stanched a bloodflow with a pad of seaweed which they could hold in place till the clot formed. And they gave her space when she chose to be alone, so that a mother might cuff a child who pestered her, as if she’d been a senior male.

But at other times, in squabbles over food, for instance, she might have a morsel snatched from her hand by a senior, as if she had no status at all. This seemed natural to her. She’d be angry, not affronted.

Presh wanted her nearby because he had to use every means he could to enhance his own prestige. His leg had mended crooked, turning his foot under him as he walked. He could swim well enough, but the muscles tired on long journeys and the foot didn’t thrust well against the water. They all knew that he would never be able to perform the confrontation ritual for more than a few exhausting leaps, and that if it then came to a land-fight he would certainly lose. So he had to make his own position so secure that no other male would want to confront him, unless he were half-mad, like Greb.

He didn’t consciously plan this. He was a sociable person, so it was natural to him to pay attention to the other senior males, to visit all the families and so on. Nothing he did was out of the ordinary. Only the result wasn’t ordinary. The nature of leadership had changed. It now depended less upon dominance and more upon consent. The tribe had helped in the change by their refusal to accept Greb as leader, and Presh’s injury forced him to adapt to his limitations, and to control the tribe with the help of the seniors, male and female, and to see that stomachs were seldom empty. This was why Li was important to him. If times had been hard and food scarce, then the tribe would have let him go and accepted whoever had challenged and outfaced him. But with the living easy they were happy with things as they were.

Sometimes the dolphins stayed away from one full moon to the next, and the tribe would return to shore-harvesting, but even then, because they’d had fish to eat last time they passed by, the mussel beds would hold succulent big mussels and the rocks and pools and crannies would be rich in crabs and octopi and other prey that had bred there undisturbed. Then perhaps three times in a journey the dolphins would herd shoals to them. Both sides were learning. A single dolphin would come swimming near the shark-watch, filling the sea with its song, and answers would be heard, far off and faint. The shark-watch would cry their new call, Dolphin, and the single dolphin would leave and Presh would collect everyone to the best hunting-place on that stretch of shore, to wait for the driven shoal.

There was, for instance, a beach with a sand spit running out into the sea and the sea floor almost level beside it, drying right out at low water but excellent when the tide was half-full. The best swimmers would go out to help herd the shoal into the trap, others with Presh in command would wait on the sand spit while everyone else lined up opposite it, standing close together in the water. The dolphins would herd the shoal in, the people on the spit would plunge in and close the trap, and then the line would carefully tighten, body against body, forcing the fish into a packed and threshing mass in the shallows where those no longer needed in the shorter line could wade, grabbing and flinging the helpless fish up on to the beach. Sometimes the line broke under the pressure. Sometimes the fish were small enough for many of them to slip through. But when the hunt went well they could catch all they and the dolphins needed in a single drive.

Days, times, seasons passed. The rains came for their usual few blissful days, heard first as thunder out to sea, then seen as banked clouds on the horizon and at the same time sensed in tension and waiting, the sky losing its blue and the air sticky, heavy to breathe, as if it were half-way to water. Finally the downpour smothering sea and land. A few days of that, leaving the sky sparkling, while the cliffs clothed themselves in green and the dunes behind the shrimping beach became a brief astonishment of flowers before the world settled back to heat and drought.

As the year went by, Li felt the changes in her body begin which would make her ready to mate. Having watched slightly older friends go through the change she was aware what was going to happen. It would be soon after the next rains, when all the land was clean, shining, new-made in the wetness, like a baby when first lifted from the mothering sea.

But those rains came early and different, without wait or tension or warning thunder. Instead the smoking mountain rumbled, and then there was a night when the cliffs where they roosted seemed to quiver and rocks tumbled into the sea. At the caves the water had a strange taste. The dolphins didn’t come.

Two nights after they’d left the caves, without warning, thunder crashed overhead. A huge wind lashed the coast. Lightning blazed from horizon to horizon with barely a blink of dark before the next dazzling shaft. Even that glare was veiled as the rain slammed down, loud as the pealing thunder. The world drowned. They breathed water as much as air. Dawn came, and they saw the sea churning against the cliff below in a broad, slow swell, ugly but swimmable. To them it seemed much more friendly than the racketing air. They made their way down and found that once below the surface they could forage easily enough, though the water itself felt strangely chill.

By mid-day, though they couldn’t see the sun, the waves were beginning to rise and the rain and thunder were no less. These cliffs were dangerous in such a sea, tricky to leave or land on, or to forage along. They would have to go elsewhere. South lay more cliffs, some of them safer in a storm, but only ledges to roost on as exposed as these. That was why, when Presh went round the families making signals to leave, they were ready to follow him back north to the water-caves.

They came there without more trouble than could be expected from such seas, and though it was still light, crowded into the caves and huddled together shuddering from the unfamiliar rain-chilled air. That night the cave trembled and rocks fell from the roof and they woke and rushed in panic out into the open, but the rain was still belting down, so when the trembling had been still for a while they went back in and slept until dawn.

They woke to the rising sun, a clear sky and no wind, the only sounds the call of birds and the slow churn of waves against the bar. The water at the back of the caves was now too foul to drink, but rain-fed streams and waterfalls were running down the cliffs outside. As the sun rose the air stayed cool and fresh. But despite the calm and beauty of the day there was a fretfulness in the tribe. They hadn’t yet forgotten their fear – fear not of something they knew as a familiar danger, like sharks or wave-lash on rocks, but of things that were strange, different, wrong. These rains, so soon, so short. This quaking earth. This stinking water in the caves. Wrong.

They looked to Presh for leadership and Presh looked to Li for help and she had none to give. So they spread out and began to forage for food, as usual without much reward on this scant shore, but Presh stayed by the bay. More than once he climbed out and scrambled up the rocks to a vantage point from which he could gaze seaward, sniffing the wind and staring out for signs of some fresh danger. From there he could also see the central mountain, no longer gently smoking but sending up a black tumultuous cloud which rose high in the sky before it was blown away southward.

He had climbed there again, taking Li with him this time, still trying to make up his mind whether it was now safe to lead the tribe south, when suddenly he shouted and pointed north along the shoreline.

Li looked. The tribe had all stayed fairly close, waiting for Presh’s signal. Well beyond them she saw a number of black flecks in the water. She knew them at once. Not dolphins, not birds, but the heads of people swimming towards her. Strangers.