A Bone From a Dry Sea (21 page)

‘Go and get some breakfast.’

He squeezed her hand before he picked up his pen and started to write again.

The others had mostly finished eating, so Vinny got herself muesli and canned milk, fruit juice and a mango, and ate alone. Dad, she guessed, didn’t feel like facing anyone. She could see May Anna working on her skull. Mrs Hamiska was talking to her. Dr Hamiska bustled into the eating area, glanced around for someone and bustled away, pretending not to have noticed Vinny. He was just like Mr Potterson, she thought, on the day of the school play, rushing around as if everything
depended
on him and everyone would forget their lines if he wasn’t there.

To her surprise Mrs Hamiska came across and sat down opposite her. Vinny said ‘Good morning’ and Mrs Hamiska answered, but then sat looking at her with her head on one side as if she was trying to decide what sort of person she was. Vinny managed a few mouthfuls before she looked up. Their eyes met.

‘I’m truly sorry things have turned out like this,’ said Mrs Hamiska.

‘It’s not your fault.’

‘No. You know, I used rather to enjoy these academic rows. They can be almost addictive, like a drug. But now I’m tired of all that.’

‘I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do now.’

‘No. I’m afraid not. I’ve been talking to May Anna.’

‘It wasn’t true! He wasn’t trying to keep the site for himself! He wasn’t trying to slow things up! He isn’t like that!’

‘I don’t believe he is. I don’t believe anyone seriously thinks that. Ah, well. I’ll do my best . . . Will you tell him, please?’

‘Yes, of course.’

Mrs Hamiska bowed her head and sat studying the backs of her hands. Vinny went on eating until, in a lull in the bustle of the camp, she heard a distant faint drumming sound.

‘There’s a helicopter,’ she said.

Mrs Hamiska jerked up, startled, and listened.

‘Goodness,’ she said. ‘It’ll be Dr Wishart! He must have caught an early flight! We’re not nearly ready for him!’

She rose. Others had heard the sound. As it
came
closer they moved into the open and stood watching the sky. Hands pointed. Vinny moved to where she could see. It was a big machine, with two rotors, and not the bright dragon-fly thing which important people get ferried around in, but fat and painted in camouflage colours.

‘Army chopper,’ said someone. ‘Not for us.’

But it neared and neared, its racket now battering the hillside. It hovered, sank and settled in an explosion of blown dust on the flat ground beside the truck and jeep a hundred yards down the slope. Dr Hamiska was already loping down the path with Dr Wessler trotting nervously behind.

A door opened. Four soldiers leaped out, guns at the ready. Then steps were lowered and a tall man wearing an embroidered pill-box hat and a long white robe came slowly down and stood between the soldiers gazing round him. Dr Hamiska strode up with his hand outstretched in welcome, but two of the soldiers raised their guns and barred his way. He stopped, held his hands half up and said something, protesting or questioning, but the tall man ignored him and came slowly up the path to the open space in the middle of the camp, where he stood looking proudly round him. He had a small neat beard. His face was dark brown, with rounded muscles on the cheek-bones below the impenetrable black sun-glasses.

He spoke at last, an order, with a gesture of the hand. One of the soldiers fetched a folding table out from under an awning and another of the group who’d followed the man up the path spread what looked like a map on it. It was at this point that Vinny saw Watson standing at the
back
of the group, looking for once as if he didn’t specially want to be noticed.

‘Where is Dr Hamiska?’ said the tall man, in English, with a strong, throaty accent.

‘Here,’ said Dr Hamiska calmly, as if all this was normal. ‘Mr Multan, isn’t it? Honoured to welcome you, Minister. How can we help you?’

He moved to face the visitor across the table. Mr Multan gazed at him from behind his shielding glasses, obviously trying to do his own trick of facing him down, but Dr Hamiska gazed confidently back. At length Mr Multan tapped the map three times with his forefinger.

‘You have been digging outside the area for which you have your licence,’ he said.

‘If we have, it’s an oversight. Or a misunderstanding. Fetch the licence, will you, Jane? Forgive me, Minister, but I believe you gave us a licence covering the whole of the Dunahil district.’

Mr Multan tapped the map again, barely glancing at it as he spoke.

‘This
(tap)
is the Dunahil district, here
(tap)
. Here
(tap)
is the boundary. You have been digging
(tap)
here.’

Dr Hamiska looked at the map, peered more closely, started to say something about it, stopped and straightened.

‘I’m afraid it’s an oversight. There wasn’t a map with our licence.’

‘That is your affair.’

‘In any case I would of course be willing to take out a fresh licence to cover this outlying site, where we have, as you say, started a minor exploratory dig. I must explain, Minister, that we are expecting other visitors today, the Director of
the
Craig Foundation, which . . . ah, thank you, Jane . . .’

Dr Hamiska took the paper and was beginning to unfold it when Mr Multan snatched it from his hands, refolded it and tore it twice across. He dropped the pieces on the ground.

‘Your licence is taken away,’ he said. ‘Your visas are taken away. You will leave the country within forty-eight hours.’

‘This is ridiculous . . .’

‘Be silent. You think this is a tin-pot country. You think you can come here and do what you wish. You think you can take the treasures out of our soil and we will not know what you are taking, because we are savages. You think your Craig Foundation and its dollars can bribe my officials to look another way. I make it clear we are not your children, we are not your donkeys, we are not your servants. We are your equals. I ask, does it take a white man to dig a hole in the ground?’

‘Colour’s got nothing to do with it. But it takes an expert, black or white, to know where to dig. I’ve worked with excellent black colleagues – Dr Azikwe, your nephew, I think, shows every sign  . . .’

‘I am not interested in your opinion. Dr Azikwe will now be in charge of these excavations.’

‘Are you serious? In that case – no, I will not be silent—Let me tell you that it’s perfectly obvious to me that this so-called boundary on this map has been recently drawn in. A child could see that it’s been done with a different pen, in another sort of ink . . .’

He stopped because a gunpoint had been thrust against his throat but he kept his dignity as he
backed
away. Mr Multan spoke with one of his aides, who came forward and clapped for attention.

‘Everybody will go to his hut, please, and wait there. We are sorry for the inconvenience. We will not be very long.’

‘I don’t understand,’ whispered Vinny.

Dad glanced at the door.

‘It was always a risk,’ he muttered. ‘I must say I’ve got a certain amount of sympathy for them. Suppose a lot of – oh, I don’t know – Martians turned up and said they wanted to excavate a site on Salisbury Plain where several ley-lines meet, and we could have a few token humans on the dig but we mustn’t interfere because we didn’t know enough about it. How’d we feel? This country is still finding itself. For years it has been regarded as a kind of pariah by the rest of the world. Now it can do with all the prestige it can get, including (the Minister evidently thinks) the prestige of taking charge of the excavation of a really important early hominid site. They’ve got something no-one else has got – why should they hand it all over to a pack of Europeans and Americans?’

‘But they don’t know how.’

‘They can hire people. Fred for a start. And I didn’t say I thought they were right, I just said . . . Hold it.’

He’d been talking in a low voice so Vinny had already heard the approaching footsteps, but it was only Watson. He looked almost as cocky as usual, now that he was out of his uncle’s presence.

‘Hi, Vinny,’ he said. ‘Hi, Sam. Sorry about all this happening. Didn’t mean it this way.’

Dad grunted unencouragingly.

‘They’re saying you been fired, Sam,’ said Watson. ‘That right?’

‘I have resigned over a disagreement with Dr Hamiska, if you must know.’

‘Right. Well now you’re unfired, if that’s what you want.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You hear the Minister saying I got to take over everything? Can’t do that all by myself, you know, so I’m going to need help. Experts. Pros. How d’you feel about that?’

‘Heavens. I’ll have to think. Have you asked Dr Wessler?’

‘Sooner have you, Sam. Came to you first.’

‘Well . . . As a matter of fact Vinny and I were planning to go on a few days’ safari. Not that it looks as if that’s on now.’

‘No problem. I’ll fix it for you. You go on your trip, have a good time. I got a lot of sorting out, you know. When you come back, tell me what you think. OK?’

‘Oh . . . We were supposed to be leaving today – as soon as you got back, in fact, with the jeep.’

‘No problem. You take the other jeep.’

‘You mean we can go at once?’

‘Just how you like, Sam. This your bag, Vinny? OK.’

‘I can’t go without knowing what’s happening to the others.’

‘They’re all packing. Soldiers are bringing a truck out, taking them to the airport, putting them on a plane. Just got to go through their cases first, you know, see they’re not taking anything out.’

He turned to go but Vinny caught him at the door.

‘Can you fix for May Anna to come with us?’ she said. ‘If she’d like to, I mean.’

‘Sure. I’ll be asking her to stay, too. No problem.’

He ambled away, carrying Vinny’s bag. A soldier and an official came in and went through Dad’s case. They took out every scrap of paper and made him sign a receipt. When they’d finished, Watson came and accompanied them down to the jeep. May Anna was already there, waiting for them.

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.