A Bone From a Dry Sea

THEN

THERE WERE NINE of them at the top of the cliffs, all except Goor from the group of females and young who had stood behind and watched the confrontation of the males on the beach. They waited for a while gazing down, trying to see what was happening below, longing to return to the safe, known shore, hoping perhaps that the males of the tribe would somehow realize their combined strength and unite to drive Greb away, as they’d done before. Li was still almost unable to think or move without terror, after Greb’s sudden appearance at the head of the gully. She was convinced he’d climbed the cliffs deliberately to search for her. She didn’t dare even show herself above the cliff edge, but hung back, gazing around, looking for a way of escape in case he came again.

Above the cliff the ground, stony and bare, sloped gently up to a crest, beyond which she could now see the central mountain pouring out its billowing black tumult of smoke. The rain-fed stream runnelled down a shallow dip from the top. She knelt and drank and splashed some water over herself and then climbed beside it. Her main thought was still that if Greb came back she must have somewhere to hide.

The crest was not a true crest. The hill went on up, but then levelled and dipped into a cupped valley. At her feet spread a wide, still pool, collected from the surrounding hills after the torrents of rain, and still being fed from the further slopes and so still sending its overflow out and down over the cliff. Without hesitation she waded in and sank below the surface, and as she did so her terror left her. Greb could not climb the cliff. He was busy on the shore. He hadn’t really come for her . . . The strange, unbuoyant water was like that of the fresh-water pool, the place where the tribe had always felt most itself, most sure, most peaceful. She lay, looking up through the still surface at the blue and brilliant sky, until she had to rise for breath. She sank again and rested, rising and sinking, until the sense of loneliness and separation reminded her of the others and she went to look for them.

They were by the stream, splashing themselves and each other with water. Tilted towards the east, face on to the morning sun, the slope above the cliffs was already becoming hot as noon. Before long its surface would be painful to the touch. There was no shade. Their whole instinct was to try and find a way down to the beach, but their fear of Greb prevented them, and when Li appeared further up the stream, beckoning and calling Come, they followed her back to the pool and waded gladly in.

They spent the middle of the day there, but there was no food of any kind in this transient water, so as the sun slanted west they went back down to the cliff to try and spy out what was happening below.

People were moving around, on familiar-looking activities, foraging and greeting. The sea was almost still, the air windless. Rawi cried Look and pointed not down but along the cliff to where a solitary figure stood, also looking down. A male. Li’s panic surged, then she realized that it wasn’t Greb. Now he had seen them and came hurrying towards them. He turned out to be Kerif’s younger half-brother, Kadif. His head and face were all bloody and his left eye too swollen to open. He must have managed to climb the cliff further along.

As he came he pointed to the shore, and gave the Danger call, but there was no need. Already, twice, the watchers had heard floating up through the afternoon stillness, Greb’s bellow of command, mad but triumphant. They climbed back to the pool and when night came huddled beside it, nursing their hungers.

In the dark the ground shuddered violently and they woke and heard the whole world groan and saw what they couldn’t see by day – that the central mountain was shooting columns of gold and orange up through the massive smoke-cloud, and throwing out immense golden fragments which arched aside and fell flaming on to the slopes below. The night air became colder than the water of the pool, so they moved into the shallows and waited there for the dawn.

When it came the mountain was quiet again, merely billowing smoke. Very hungry by now they went back down to the cliff. The sun rose, blazing across a waveless sea. They listened for the song that should have greeted it but instead heard only a single voice. Greb’s.

It was clear to Li now that they had to get down to the shore. If Greb was still at the water-caves, they must go elsewhere, before the sun became too hot, so that they could travel beyond his reach. She took Ma-ma by the hand, grunted Come and started off, with the others trailing behind. The ground rose steeply towards a ridge which formed the southern headland of the bay. It would have been quicker to cut straight across, but their whole instinct was to follow as closely as possible the tribe’s normal route along the shoreline below, so they continued on round.

On these higher cliffs nested colonies of sea-birds, whose clatter and screams rose louder as the travellers neared, reminding them of their hunger, and of the taste of eggs and juicy nestlings. They stopped and peered over and saw the parents wheel away from the crammed ledges below. There was food there. Their mouths watered. Desperately they searched for a way down, but there was none.

Then, looking along the cliff, Li saw a gourd-vine and remembered how they had used one yesterday to climb the final stretch in their escape. This one was bigger, its main stem half as thick as her own body, but she gave Goor a stone and showed him where to bash and set Kadif to do the same from the other side while the rest of them heaved together at the mat. In the end the stem gave, and they dragged the whole mat along and lowered it down to reach the nests, then climbed down one at a time to feed while the rest of them anchored it at the top or moved it along when a stretch of ledge had been cleared.

Li had just climbed back from her second feed when she heard a grunt of Look and turned. Hooa was pointing out to sea, with egg-yolk dribbling down her chin. The others peered and muttered surprise and puzzlement. There was a strangeness on the horizon. The sea from this height seemed a dead flat calm, as if it had been stretched taut all round its edges, but not as far as the eye could see. Far out, almost at the limits of vision, it changed, but they couldn’t yet make out how.

Now all were staring. No-one climbed down the mat. They muttered. Soon they could see that the whole line of the horizon had become like a low cliff, a far headland seen from another headland. It was strange. For a while it stayed like that, and they half lost interest and went on with their nest-raiding until they realized that the strangeness wasn’t just something that had risen from the sea, a long way out, but was coming nearer.

Now they knew what it was. There was a call used in the tribe at seasons when rollers came steadily in from the ocean but foraging was still safe provided the foragers were aware of their rhythm and could judge the come-and-go of surges. The danger was that occasionally a pair of rollers would somehow double up and produce between them a monster, so at those times watchers were set at vantage points along the shore to call a warning when they saw a wave like that coming. Big wave they muttered to each other. Yes. Big wave. Only, at first, seeing it from this distance and this unfamiliar height, they couldn’t realize how big.

A hundred miles out across what is now the Indian Ocean, below the deep sea floor, the plates that carry the continents had moved. For ages they had been still, jammed, and so the tensions between them had grown and grown, and now at last something had given. In the continents either side of the rift there had been earthquakes and eruptions, signalling the change. Then, as the plates had juddered to their new positions a whole section of the ocean floor had buckled into a line of underwater hills, and as it had done so it had set up an earthquake wave in the sea itself, the wave that is like no other wave and is called a tsunami.

It neared and neared, until even the watchers on the headland began to grasp something of its size and speed, and to realize the danger the rest of the tribe were in. They could see the others still, small dots in the distant bay, moving around. They began to call at the tops of their voices Big wave! Big wave! Perhaps the tribe had already heard, like underwater thunder, the sound of its approach. They were coming ashore, lining the beach, safe from the largest waves of any normal sea.

Now those on the headland could make out the shape of the wave, a black steep hill, ridged and hummocked, though the ridges and hummocks were themselves enormous waves. White foam glittered along the moving crest. And now as its roots touched land it changed and rose and the hill became an inward-curving wall, black, hard, with a white mane of foam along the hanging ridge, poised to fall but not falling because the rush of the wave itself caught it up before it could do so. In front of it, along its length, was a trench or gulf where it sucked the calm ahead back into it, and now this too broke into roaring foam as its own roots touched land.

They cried aloud and pointed. Tiny with distance, ahead of the wave in the still silky calm, dark specks appeared and vanished and came again a few heartbeats later. A pattern of dolphins was racing to escape the wave, but for all their speed they were too slow. The watchers wailed in terror as they saw the wave engulf them. But now they knew its speed, and from that its distance and from that its size, and realized that even up here on the headland they might not be safe. They ran for the ridge behind, reached it panting and turned.

By now the people in the bay had seen the wave, understood their danger and were trying to escape. Some were perched on rocks, others climbing the gully which Li had used yesterday, but it was clear to the watchers that they would be too late. The wave was almost ashore. But time had slowed and it seemed for those last few pounding heartbeats to be loitering on its way, to be climbing as it came, to be reaching up and up, and forward too, as if it was deliberately leaning to claw the watchers from their hill-top. It reached the headland opposite and they saw it tower into the sunlight in an immense and glittering white column, growing and growing as the power that had driven it landward was forced to spend its unimaginable energy in upward motion, climbing until it seemed to be reaching for the sun.

Then it struck the headland on which they stood. Huge though it was, its crest had come below these higher cliffs, so first they heard its thunder and at the same moment the blast of air expelled from between the wave-front and the cliff hammered them to the ground. They wailed, and with the instincts of sea-creatures who had learnt to survive on storm-battered coasts they limpeted themselves to the boulders which strewed the headland. Some closed their eyes, but Li was impelled to watch. Terrified, numb, certain of death, her need to know and wonder still had power.

She saw the white wall shot skyward at the headland, saw the wave pass by, rising as its mass was funnelled into the bay, surging above the cliffs where they had passed, so that it would fling itself far up the slope beyond, where the stream had run, right over the pool and on up the mountain-side, but before it did so the world around her went dark as the water of the wave’s first onslaught began to crash back down.

Land creatures would never have survived it. It fell not as foam, not as ordinary wave-strike reaching a shore, but as solid immense slabs of the black, cold inmost ocean, slamming down. There would be a moment to breathe, and then another mass of water hammered against them, swirled round them, dragged at them where they clung and roared away. Li felt the big rock to which she had anchored herself stir in its ancient bed and readied herself to loosen her hold if it rolled away, but it settled back and she was able to fasten herself to it again.

The first was worst. The higher the water had been flung the more it broke apart in the air and fell back no longer in solid slabs but first as a foaming torrent then as a downpour, half air, half water, then as rain, and at last, for a long while, as a fine salty drizzle, icy cold.

Bruised and gasping Li let go of her hold and sat up. Ma-ma was already sitting, huddled over the whimpering baby which somehow she’d managed to shelter beneath her through the onslaught. Around them the others rose, those that were left, for two had vanished, either battered from their hold or because the boulders to which they had clung had themselves been rolled down over the cliff. This must almost have happened to Goor. He came limping up the slope, shaking his head, having been knocked loose and then by a miracle found somewhere else to cling before he was washed away. Below them the sea was a cloudy turmoil heaving to and fro in an immense and shapeless swell whose hummocks were only the ripples set up by the shock of the tsunami striking the continent, but were themselves large enough to send columns of spray squirting against the cliffs far higher than any wave Li had ever seen.

Look called someone, pointing. They saw, and gasped. Behind the bay the last of the tsunami was still sheeting back from the mountains beyond, but the ground over which it fell in foam had changed. There were no cliffs there any more. The weight of the wave had smashed them down into a tumbled slope of boulders, right across the shore, right across the bay and out beyond the bar that had sheltered it. Unreachable beneath that mass of stone the tribe, and Greb, and the strangers he had brought, and the water-caves too, lay buried.