A Bone From a Dry Sea

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.

So now Li was sitting on the boulder round which the stream curled just before it reached the marsh and watching a vast flock of new strange birds which were paddling on stilted legs between the reed-beds. Beyond them the faint layers of mist were starting to rise and spread. The world, she felt, was full of interest, and wonder, and promise. The birth of Rawi’s daughter was as wonderful as anything, because it showed that despite all the changes and horrors things were well, things were as they were meant to be.

Something had made all this happen, on purpose, just as she, Li, had made the hole in Rawi’s shell. Something had caused her to be sitting on this rock, this very evening, herself, Li. She felt that she was being watched with the same intentness as she had watched the spider building its web long ago under the leaning tree above the shrimping beaches, or the other spider only a few days back. Yes, like that, that sort of web, herself at the centre of it, all the lines drawing in to her, here, now. No-one else. Nowhere else. No other time.

It was the dolphins, she knew. They were still with her, still her friends and helpers, wherever they seemed to have gone. One day she would go there too, and dance with them again in their golden seas where the sun was born, and learn the meaning of their song.

She picked up the shoulder-blade from beside her and studied it, turning it to and fro in the evening sunlight. She had carried it now so long that it seemed part of her, so much so that not having it in her hand made her feel strange, but it would be better if she could wear it on a loop of hair, like a birth-ornament. Then she would always have both hands free. It was much thicker than the shell, but not so hard. She would need to be very careful. There would be no way of finding another one if she broke it.

She chose a place near one corner, adjusted the bone on to a jut of rock, pressed the point of the stone she had used for Rawi’s shell firmly down and with her other hand began slowly to turn the bone.