The Kin (12 page)

“I tell you,” she said. “Words are not good for this, Suth. But see.”

She picked up a small stone.

“I say
Stone
, Suth,” she said. “I see the stone. You see it. You say the word. We see the same. We say the same. Stone.”

“Stone?” said Suth, puzzled.

“Stone,” she said again, and put it into his hand, closing his fingers around it.

“I say
Moonhawk
,” she said. “What do you see, Suth?”

He frowned.

“I see … a great bird?” he said hesitantly.

“Where is this bird, Suth?”

“Where? … In my head, I think. It is like when I remember. Like when I say
Sometimes River
. Then I see the river in my head.”

“Only this, Suth? No more? I tell you now how Moonhawk comes to me. It is night—dark, dark. No moon. No stars. But she is there. Moonhawk. There is a yellow eye. There are wings … I do not
see
them, Suth. They are there. I have no word for this. And I am small. She is big, big. I am afraid, yes. But my heart is happy. This is how Moonhawk comes.”

Suth looked at the stone in his hand. He tightened his fingers around it, feeling its hardness. What Noli was telling him—trying to tell him—was not like that at all. There seemed to be no place for it in his mind.

“You do not see the thing I see?” Noli suggested.

“Noli, I cannot see this,” he said.

“Mosu sees the thing I see,” said Noli. “She lives long, long. Many times her spirit goes from her body. It journeys where the First Ones are. They speak to her spirit, wonderful things. All this she tells me. Mosu knows how it is when Moonhawk comes to me.”

“Moonhawk comes to Mosu?” said Suth, more puzzled than ever.

Noli shook her head, hesitated and sighed.

“Moonhawk does not come to this place,” she said sadly. “He is too strong, Big Voice.”

He grabbed her wrist, appalled.

“Moonhawk came!” he exclaimed. “She spoke in your dream!
Monkey is sick!
She said this to you!”

She eased his fingers away.

“She does not come again,” she muttered. “Big Voice is strong in this place, too strong.”

She paused. He thought she had finished.

“Suth,” she said. “Mosu says this to me,
Big Voice comes to none of my people. They are sick. Now, soon, I die. Then he comes to you, Noli
.”

Now he understood what she had been trying to tell him.

“And you do this thing, Noli?” he said. “No. You are Moonhawk. I, Suth, say this.”

She wouldn't look at him. She was ashamed. She was betraying him, and the others, betraying all the dead generations of Moonhawk. He could feel her shame.

“What is Monkey to you?” he insisted. “We are Moonhawk. Soon, Noli, soon we leave this place. When the moon is big, we go. I saw people in the desert. I told you this. They know a way through the desert. We find that way. We take food, we find water. We cross the desert and find our Kin. We go far from this place. Then Moonhawk comes to you again. I am the father, Noli. You are the mother. We are Moonhawk. I, Suth, say this!”

Still she didn't look at him. His eye was caught by a small figure, tottering up the slope, black against the firelight.

“See, Noli!” he said. “Otan! In the desert Moonhawk came. She said to you,
Go back. Leave Bal and the others. Find Otan. I show you water. Take Otan there
. Do you say,
Otan is not Moonhawk?
Do you say,
Here he is Monkey?”

She looked up and he saw the firelight glinting off her tears.

“Big Voice is strong, Suth,” she whispered. “When he comes, I am small. He is big, big. I am afraid. My heart is sad.”

Suth lay sleepless in the reeking dark of the cave, thinking about Noli. He was full of anger towards her, though at the same time he was aware of her misery. He was angry with Mosu too, for taking Noli away from the Moonhawks where she belonged. And he was angrier still with Monkey, though he knew how dangerous it was to have such feelings about any of the First Ones.

Why didn't Moonhawk help? Why didn't she come to Noli any more? Was she too afraid of Monkey? That must be it.

The mood of his anger changed at the thought. If Monkey was too strong for Moonhawk, then no wonder he was too strong for Noli. That was why she was so miserable. She knew in her heart she was Moonhawk, and that she wanted what Suth wanted, to leave this valley and journey and find the rest of the Kin and be with them and live the old life in the way that they knew. But Monkey and Mosu were keeping her here.

He didn't know how they did this. All he knew was that Monkey was one of the First Ones, and had great power, and Mosu had some of that power because she had served Monkey so long.

A moment later something brushed against his hip. Fingers moved up his side and found his hand, and held it.

Noli.

She too had been lying sleepless in the dark, and had heard his sigh, and had reached out.

This is good, he thought. I am the father and she is the mother and we are Moonhawk still. Noli knows this. Now I see what I must do. I must make ready for our journey. The small ones are strong with the good food they have eaten in this place. When all is ready I will say to Noli,
Now we go to find the Kin
—
Suth, Tinu, Ko, and Mana. Do you come? Do you stay? And Otan. Does he come? Does he stay?
Then for Otan's sake she will come, because he is Moonhawk.

There were things he must do. The next morning, on their way back from the lake, he told Noli. “Today I watch deer. Tinu comes.”

Noli looked at him, started to speak, and stopped, then smiled.

“Fight no leopard, Suth,” she said.

He laughed and she joined him.

Yes, he thought. Whatever Monkey tells her, she will come with me when I go.

He set off with Tinu. Since his fight with the leopard he had been allowed to come and go very much as he pleased, though he was sure that if he'd tried to take all the Moonhawks with him he would still have been stopped. But nobody seemed to mind if he went off with just Tinu.

This time they didn't go as far as the area where the deer grazed, but stopped below the place at which the Moonhawks had first entered the valley. He knew it by the rat warren he had seen.

“We store food,” he told Tinu. “Food for many days. You make a place where we keep it. Tinu, this is secret.”

She nodded and searched around, eventually choosing a place where a huge single flat rock had split in two, leaving a deep crack about as wide as a spread hand. She then collected stones and began to wedge them down into the crack to form the floor of her food store.

Suth left her to it and went to look for lizards. It was still early enough for them to be out, basking away the night chill, and he caught two, slit them open with the cutter and set them to dry in the sun. Well-dried lizard would keep for many days. The Kin had always carried some on their longer journeys. To chew it was like chewing the bark of a tree, but slowly the good juices were released and could be swallowed.

The sun climbed, baking the hillside, and the lizards slid back under rocks. A rat bobbed up at the warren. No point in setting traps yet. Rat meat was too juicy to dry well. Tinu could set some a day or two before they left. He made his way down and cautiously ventured among the scrub, pausing and peering around every few paces. Deep in under a thorny bush, he spotted a yellow bracket fungus of a kind he knew. It tasted of nothing, and had not much goodness in it, but it was plant food and it didn't rot, so he began to work his way around the bush looking for somewhere to wriggle in under the fierce thorns.

Kneeling at a possible gap he found himself face-to-face with a dark grey snake, as long as his arm, gliding towards him.

It stopped and reared its head, jaws wide. He froze. His right hand tightened on his digging stick and raised it slowly towards his shoulder.
Do not attack
, his father had told him.
Soon it turns away. Strike then
.

It turned, and he struck, jabbing at the base of the head, but the tangle of twigs spoiled his aim and he caught it further along the body, where it was too thick for the spine to be broken with a single blow.

Instantly it lashed around. He flung his weight on the stick, pinning the body fast, and then, still bearing down, rolled the stick along the thrashing body until he had it safely held behind the head. Now he could reach in, work his fingers under the stick and grasp the snake behind the jaws, so that it couldn't turn and bite. He dragged it out, laid the head on the ground and pounded it with the butt of his stick until it was dead.

He rose, panting. His head, arms and shoulders were bloody from wrestling in under the thorns, but he didn't care. This was how, many moons ago, watched by his father, he had killed his first snake. It was a good sign. Snake flesh dried well and was better to eat than lizard.

He carried the body up to where Tinu was working and slit it into strips with the cutter, set them to dry beside the lizards, and went to see how she was getting on.

She had made a good-sized hollow and was wedging the cracks with pebbles, but when Suth appeared she stopped work, laid a flat rock over the top, and scattered a few smaller ones on top of it, so that it looked like just a pile of loose stuff that happened to have jammed into the crack.

“This is good, Tinu,” he said.

She smiled, pleased, and didn't try to hide her face.

While she finished what she was doing, he went and turned the lizards over, then found a patch of shade and rested, staring out over the forest and brooding over the question of leaving the valley. Not this next big moon—he wouldn't be ready. The one after. Till then, forage for extra food. All the families kept spare supplies—they would ask no questions. Every second day, bring some of it out to put in the food store Tinu was building. Set the meat he had caught to continue drying. Tinu could guard it from scavengers while he hunted for more …

Then the biggest problem—how to sneak all the Moonhawks away, to get far enough ahead for them not to be hunted down …

The ground trembled, and with it the rock against which he was leaning. He was so used by now to these quakings that he would barely have noticed, but before the shock was over he heard Tinu cry out.

He looked up and saw her backing away with her mouth open and her arms half raised in fear or astonishment.

Snake!
he thought.

He snatched up his stick and ran. She saw him coming and pointed to the crack in the rock.

Her food store had disappeared.

He frowned, bewildered.

“Rock … break …!” Tinu gasped.

Now he saw that the crack was wider than it had been before, almost twice as wide. He peered in, expecting to see the rocks Tinu had used lodged further down, but no. The cleft had no bottom. It was part of a crack in the hillside, and went right down into blackness. Out of it rose, stronger than he'd ever smelled it, the strange reek that always hung over the lake and wafted to and fro across the valley.

He backed away and looked around. Nothing seemed to have changed. The sun was high, and beneath it the immense bowl lay green and still. Then, down in the forest, a Big Voice called, and another answered, and another and another, until the steamy air rang with their wild voices.

Slowly the clamour died into silence.

Suth frowned again.

This didn't happen.

Big Voice called in the morning, and again in the evening, one first and then the next, waiting for each other to finish before they replied. Sometimes one or two might call in the rest of the day. But never like this.

Never with one mad voice together in the heat of noon.

Oldtale

THE CHOOSING OF MATES

When An and Ammu saw that all their children had gone from them, they said, “Our time is over,” and they went into the desert and lay down, and their spirits left their bodies and wandered through the desert, mourning for their lost children
.

The First Ones heard their groanings and weepings, and went and carried them up the Mountain above Odutu. They gave them stoneweed to drink, so that they might forget their sorrow
.

As they drank they spat the seeds down the mountain. The seeds fell in the desert, where they grow to this day
.

Thus An and Ammu forgot their sorrow
.

But their children foraged and hunted in the new Good Places that the First Ones had made for them, and learned their paths and their seasons, and their water holes and dew traps and lairs. So they grew to be men and women
.

Then Nal, who was of the Kin of Moonhawk, met
with Turka, who was of the Kin of Little Bat, by the salt pan beyond Lusan-of-the-Ants
.

Turka said, “Now I ask the blessing of Little Bat to leave her Kin, and be your mate, and become of the Kin of Moonhawk.”

Nal said, “This is my thought also.”

They took salt from the pan and mixed it with spittle and smeared it on each other's forehead, to show that they were now chosen
.

Datta came to Nal and said, “Why is there salt on your forehead? Who has chosen you before I have made my choice? I must have first choice of the men. I am the best, as you swore at Odutu below the Mountain.”

Nal said, “Not so. Two must make choice of mates. Each chooses the other. I do not choose you, Datta. You are too proud for a mate. I choose Turka.”

Datta went to Da and said, “Nal chose Turka for his mate before you took your choice of the women. You are wronged by him, as I am by Turka.”

Da was angry. He called the children of An and Ammu to meet him beside Sometimes River, and said, “We are wronged. Nal and Turka chose each other for mates before we took our choice. We must choose first. We are the best, as you swore at Odutu below the Mountain.”

The others had no answer, because they had sworn as he said
.