A Bone From a Dry Sea

THEN

THE TRIBE WERE still straggling out of the water in answer to Presh’s bellows of Come when he limped along the beach to confront the strangers. There was a code for such a meeting. Although nothing like this had happened before in their memory, deep in their instincts, inherited through tens of thousands of generations, was a knowledge of what happened when ape-group met ape-group at the edges of adjoining territories.

The grown males went forward, their leader at the centre. The females and young watched from behind, screaming defiance. The males displayed at each other, fangs bared, manes bushed, bellowing not their ritual challenge-calls, but older ones, a hoarse repetitive bark which till now they had not known they knew. All this happened, much as it once had happened in the forest.

Li had come down with Presh from the rock from which they’d first seen the strangers and had joined the females as they’d gathered behind the line of males. Then, because it was difficult in the crush to see what was happening, she had gone aside and, much as she had done at the shark-hunt, had climbed a little way up a gully behind the bay till she reached a point from which she could watch everything. The two groups of males were confronting each other, Presh with a whole line of them supporting him, but the other leader with only three and those barely fully adult. The leader, though, looked bigger and stronger than any male Li had ever seen.

What would have happened in the forest was that the smaller group, seeing they were outnumbered, would have been cowed and so retreated, and the larger would, if they’d wanted, have followed them until they began to feel they were getting uncomfortably far from their known territory, and stopped. A new frontier would have been established.

This was not how it went on the shingle beach. The three younger strangers indeed looked uncertain, and their manes began to flatten, but their leader gave a louder bellow and took a pace towards Presh with his left arm raised into the fighting-grip but his right swinging loose and low, as if he couldn’t use it. The movement and pose made Li recognize him. He was Greb.

Instantly she was sure he had come for her. Terrified, she turned and scrambled further up the gully, which was still streaming with water after the downpour. The yells from below changed note. She stopped and looked over her shoulder.

Presh had limped forward to face Greb, also in the fighting-pose, both hands raised. They were barely a pace apart. Greb moved a half-step to the left and struck with his raised hand. Presh seized him by the wrist and struck with his other hand to grasp Greb’s neck. Greb swayed away, but as he did so his dangling arm swung back and round. He had kept it till now with its back facing his opponent, concealing the rock he was holding. The blow caught Presh full force on the side of the skull. His head jerked violently away. He staggered half a pace back and toppled over. He didn’t rise.

A moment’s silence. Out of it Greb’s bellow of triumph rose echoing round the bay. He stood punching the air, his right hand still grasping the rock. His three followers moved forwards, their manes fully bushed out once more, and now Li saw that they too each held a rock. This was something that didn’t happen. The whole ritual of challenge and contest was deep in the instincts of the males, preventing the kind of fighting to the death which might leave even the winner too badly hurt to survive, or at least to become a useful leader. But Presh was dead.

The sheer shock overwhelmed the tribe. Even unarmed there were more than enough males to overcome Greb and his small group, but when Greb, still in his triumph-posture, stepped forward to face Kerif, Kerif’s mane at once went flat and he backed away. Greb paraded along the line facing them down in turn, daring them with threatening little movements of his rock to show the least sign of challenge. His followers copied him but stayed close behind him, not risking confrontation with the larger males of the tribe alone. Still further back, the small group of females who had come with him watched apathetically. They looked cowed and miserable. They had no small young with them. Memories of ancient instinct told Li that Greb, somehow taking over the leadership of such a group, would have seen to it that any babies they carried died. This was how it happened in the forest long ago, though it didn’t in the tribe.

As their males retreated in front of them the females of the tribe began to scatter in alarm. Some hurried for the water, others into the caves, others along the shore. Li saw Ma-ma below, with the baby clasped protectively against her and Hooa beside her. She called, and again, and again. Ma-ma heard her, stared around bewildered and at last looked up and saw her. Li beckoned, saw Ma-ma begin to climb, and immediately turned to scramble further up the gully. The nightmare certainty that Greb had deliberately come for her, to take her over and own and control and mate with her as soon as she was ready, filled her mind. She had no idea where she was going, or of what lay above the cliffs. No-one had ever been up there before.

It wasn’t at first a difficult climb, but so steep that soon she was gasping and despite her terror was forced to stop and rest. Ma-ma and Hooa weren’t far below, with others behind. Pursuers? Greb? No, he was still on the beach. He had begun to organize a kind of triumph-ceremony, with his own followers and as many of the tribe as he had managed to round up lined along the shallows and himself getting ready to parade in front of them. Presh’s body lay where it had fallen.

Seeing Greb thus occupied, Li was able to climb on more calmly until she reached a place where the gully ended in a cliff face down which the rain-fed stream fell in a veil of spray. Beside the waterfall hung a mat of gourd-vine. Li climbed the side of the gully with difficulty and found that the cliff face extended either way, almost sheer, without handhold or foothold. By now Ma-ma and Hooa had reached the foot of the waterfall and were looking around, still bewildered with shock. Li joined them and saw Goor coming up the gully behind. She looked at the mat of vine.

Sometimes young members of the tribe would play swinging-games at the bottom of vines, though their mothers discouraged them because it was impossible to be sure how strong the strands were, and there were many falls. Occasionally adults would use the vines as a means of reaching birds’-nests, but always tested them carefully before they did so. It didn’t happen often, as birds along that coast had mostly learnt not to nest in such places. The vine by the waterfall looked skimpy. Li tested it and it stayed firm. Gingerly she climbed. There were occasional jerks when a strand gave under her weight, but the mat as a whole held and she reached the top, panting.

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.