The Kin (17 page)

She looked up and saw Suth gazing along the canyon, still with that look of tense cheerfulness, as if he knew he was in the right place, doing the right thing, and was looking forward to the new day.

“I eat. Then I hunt,” he said. “I look also for fire log.”

“Fire log is difficult, Suth,” said Noli.

“I try,” he said, and shrugged confidently.

“I hear no noises now,” she said, nodding towards the rockfall.

“I think it is animal,” he said. “The rocks fall. They catch it. Now it is dead.”

“Animal is food, Suth.”

“This is dangerous, Noli. One rock falls, many fall. Wait, Ko! I come!”

Ko had been trying to scramble down into the drinking hole to get to the water on his own. Suth joined him, but instead of simply scooping water up and giving it to Ko to lap, he lifted several more rocks clear so that Ko could get water by himself. Ko was delighted.

Noli watched them, smiling at how Ko admired and adored Suth, tried to copy the way he moved and stood, and be as like him as possible.
This is man stuff
, she thought.
This is how sons are with fathers and fathers with sons. Otan also is soon like this
.

She looked at Otan. He had chewed his whitestem to a pulpy mess and was smearing it over his face as he tried to cram it into his mouth. Mana noticed, and at once came and wiped his face for him and gave him the stem she'd just peeled for herself.

Noli smiled again.
And this is woman stuff
, she thought.
Mana is happy to do this. When she has her own baby, she is happy, happy. But this is not my stuff. Otan is my brother. I carry him. I give him food. But it is not my stuff. My stuff is Moonhawk stuff. And Moonhawk does not come again. Never again, never again, never again
.

To distract herself she looked to see what Tinu was up to. She had climbed a little way up the rockfall and was crouching there with her ear close against a cranny. She moved on and listened again. She saw Noli watching her.

“People,” she mumbled. “Rocks fall … Catch people.”

“Suth says this is animal,” said Noli.

Tinu hesitated.

“Is people,” she said unhappily.

She must have felt very sure of herself to disagree with Suth, so Noli called to him and told him what Tinu had said. He came and frowned at the rockfall.

“Tinu, this is dangerous,” he said. “I move one rock, many fall. See.”

With his digging stick he worked a boulder loose and set off a small avalanche of others. Some of the rocks in the pile were huge enough to kill a big man if they fell on him. And the more rocks Suth took out, the more dangerous it would become. Surely Tinu must see that. This was the sort of thing she was good at understanding. But she still looked very unhappy.

“Now I hunt,” said Suth. “Who feeds our fire?”

“Tinu does this,” said Noli. “I fetch more whitestem. Be lucky, Suth.”

He raised his digging stick in the hunter's salute, and left.

Long after Suth was out of sight, Noli could tell where he was by the clouds of birds whirling out to scold above his head. She waited for him to get well clear, and took the small ones off to pick whitestem and look for anything else they could eat.

When she returned she found the fire burning, but Tinu had vanished. She called and heard a mumbling cry from somewhere up on the rockfall, but when she climbed up there, Tinu was nowhere in sight.

She called again, and this time the answer seemed to come from almost under her feet. A moment later, Tinu's head poked out from a gap between two large boulders.

She climbed free, gasping with effort. It was a while before she could speak, and then she was almost too excited to force the words out.

“Noli! … Is people! … I touch … hand!”

She spread her fingers wide to show what she meant, and pointed to the gap she'd come from. Noli kneeled beside it and looked down.

An enormous slab of cliff must have fallen off whole and was wedged in place by the rest of the landslide. It had stopped the rocks above from falling past it, and thus left a sort of slot at its lower side. The opening was very narrow, but the slot seemed to get wider below. It went a long way down.

When Noli straightened she found Tinu scrambling up the pile with several leaves of whitestem. She peeled one, put the pith between her teeth, and squeezed herself down through the gap. Noli kneeled to watch what happened.

It was dark down there, but Tinu seemed to stop before she got to the bottom and then to reach in through a crack at the side of the slot. There was a grunt, deeper than Tinu's voice, the sort of sound a man makes when something unusual happens.

At once Tinu clambered back and poked her head into the open.

“Is man …” she gasped. “He take …”

She was too excited to manage the word “whitestem”, but Noli peeled several fresh stems for her, and Tinu took them down and passed them through the gap. The man grunted as he took them, but didn't say anything.

There was a pause. Noli could see Tinu moving around, scrabbling and grunting with effort. Then there was a hammering sound. Peering into the hole, Noli saw that Tinu had somehow braced her body across the slot and was using a heavy rock to bash two-handedly at something beside her hip.

The rock beneath Noli's right hand trembled.

“Danger!” she yelled.

Tinu started to scramble upward. There was a series of crashes from below her, and the hole filled with choking dust as rocks tumbled from the wall where she'd been working. Noli could hear her coughing and spluttering.

Deeper coughs joined in, as the man Tinu had found choked with the dust. And now she poked her head out, grinning with excitement. Noli started to help her clear, but she shook her head and as soon as the dust had cleared a little scrambled back down.

The dust hadn't thinned enough for Noli to see what was happening, but she heard them both coughing, then Tinu's mumbling voice asking a question and the man's answering grunt—a different sort of grunt—a few more questions from Tinu, but still no real answer.

Then Tinu came scrambling up again. This time she climbed right out and stood panting. Her hair was full of dust, and her whole body was grey with it.

“Man hurt,” she said. “Arm hurt … bad … Need help …”

“He does not speak?” asked Noli. “He does not say thanks? His mouth is hurt also?”

Tinu shrugged and made a negative gesture with her hands. She didn't know, wasn't bothered. She studied the opening she had climbed through. It was barely big enough even for her skinny little body.

“Man too big,” she said.

Together they tried to loosen the rocks around the opening, but they all seemed stuck fast, and in the end they gave up.

“I find Suth,” said Tinu.

Without waiting for Noli's agreement, Tinu hurried down the rockfall and ran off.

Noli climbed down more slowly and went to feed the fire. Ko ran to meet her.

“What happens? What happens?” he begged. “I come see? I, Ko, ask!”

“No, Ko. Suth says,
Small ones do not climb on the rocks. They are dangerous, dangerous.”

“But what happens? What happens?” he wailed.

“Tinu finds a man. The rocks fall on him, and he is caught. Suth comes to help.”

Instantly Ko cheered up.

“Suth comes!” he exclaimed. “When, Noli, when?”

“Soon, Ko. He comes from there. You watch.”

She left him looking eagerly in the direction she had pointed, and checked on the other two. Otan was fast asleep, and Mana was building a careful pattern of pebbles on a flat rock nearby. Noli left them and climbed back up the rockfall.

When she looked into the hole, the dust had cleared enough for her to see something dark and round sticking out from near the place where she and Tinu had been hammering. It moved, and she caught the glisten of an eyeball. It was the man's head.

“Wait,” she called down. “Tinu finds Suth. He is strong. He helps.”

The man answered with a pleading half-wail, wordless, but full of pain and despair.

She went to a place where she could sit and see down the canyon, and at the same time watch the small ones. After a little while she saw the usual cluster of birds circling over something that had alarmed them. Gradually they moved towards her.

“Ko!” she called. “Suth comes. See the birds. He is there!”

She stood and pointed, and at once Ko was off to greet his hero. She watched his stubby, awkward, childish run, and shook her head and smiled. He hadn't gone very far before Suth and Tinu appeared, dragging a fair-sized branch between them. Ko, of course, when he reached them, had to be allowed to help, and that slowed them down, but Noli waited patiently while they brought their trophy home.

Suth drank at the water hole and at last climbed up beside her, but didn't at once go and look at the problem. He just stood, frowning.

“Tinu finds a man?” he asked her. “This man does not speak?”

“This is true, Suth,” she told him. “He makes a noise. Not words.”

“He is not Kin?”

“I think no.”

He crouched by the hole and peered down. The man saw him and made his wailing sound, but Suth didn't answer. He studied the hole, the rocks around it, and the huge tilted slab at its side, and rose, shaking his head and frowning more heavily than ever.

“Noli, this is dangerous, dangerous,” he said. “The small rocks hold the big rock. We move them, perhaps it falls. Why do we do this, Noli? This man is not Kin.”

Noli understood what he was talking about. There were rules for this sort of thing. If people from your own Kin were in trouble, you would certainly risk your life to help them. If they came from other Kins, it depended on questions like whether the trouble was their own fault and how great the risk was. But for somebody who wasn't Kin at all, who couldn't talk, so perhaps wasn't even people—just some kind of animal who happened to look like people …

Tinu would be disappointed, of course, after all her efforts, but if Suth decided it was too dangerous, she'd accept that …

But …

But they had to help.

The feeling was really strong.

It didn't seem to come from inside Noli, but from outside. It was all around her, a kind of pressure.

She put her fingers on Suth's arm. “Suth, we help this man,” she said. “I, Noli, ask this.”

Her own voice sounded strange to her. Suth looked at her for a while, then nodded. His face cleared. “Good,” he said. “First I make the opening bigger.”

Using his digging stick as a lever, Suth worked at the rocks around the opening. As soon as one shifted a little, he stood back and waited. Nothing happened.

“Noli, you go to the big rock,” he said. “Put your hand on it. Good. You feel it move, you cry out. Tinu, you go down. Make this man go back where he comes from. Perhaps rocks fall.”

Tinu nodded and slid herself into the hole. They heard her voice and protesting grunts, but in the end she got the man to understand somehow and came scrambling back.

Suth prodded among the rocks again and heaved sideways on his stick. Noli stood with her hand held lightly against the enormous slab, tense for the faintest movement. Tinu kneeled by the rock Suth was working on, with a smaller one ready in her hand. As soon as a crack opened, she jammed the small rock in, while Suth found a fresh hold for his digging stick.

A rock came loose. Suth rolled it clear, stood back, and looked at Noli.

“I feel nothing,” she said.

Suth worked another rock clear and started on a third. As he heaved on his digging stick, the slab trembled beneath Noli's hand.

“It moves!” she shouted.

The three of them scrambled clear. Before they'd stopped moving there was a grinding sound followed by a crash and rattle. Dust smoked up from the opening. A couple of rocks came banging down from further up the pile. They waited, holding their breath. When everything seemed still, they crept back to the opening.

It was much larger now. Several rocks must have fallen in. Suth kneeled and called down, and the man's voice answered.

They waited.

“Why does he not come?” said Suth.

“Arm hurt … broken …” said Tinu. “Suth … we help …?”

Suth climbed down, and Tinu followed.

Noli stayed by the opening with her hand on the slab, ready to cry out if it stirred. There was more light down there now, and she could see the man's head clearly. Suth spoke to him and climbed below him. After trying several places, he managed to wedge his digging stick firmly across the hole and give himself something to stand on while he and Tinu helped the man out.

Slowly they worked their way up. Noli could see that the man's left arm was horribly broken, and Tinu was doing her best to support it so that he could use his right arm to climb with. Once or twice he shouted with pain. Suth was mostly out of sight, trying to support him from below.

At last Noli was able to reach in and help drag him out into the open, but when she tried to help him to his feet, he couldn't stand. As well as the broken arm, he had a ghastly bruised wound in the back of his right leg.

Suth and Tinu climbed out, gasping with the effort. They rested for a bit, and then all three working together helped the man down to their fire.

They fetched him water in their cupped hands, and he lapped it eagerly, while Mana peeled whitestem for him and popped it into his mouth piece by piece as if he were a baby.

And all the time he said not a word of thanks, though each time anyone did anything for him he made a quiet double grunt of acknowledgement.

The Moonhawks studied him curiously. He was different from them, different from anyone they'd met. He was young, but a man, with bushy face hair along his jaw and around his mouth, and a deep voice. But he wore no man scars. All the men they knew had two curved scars on each cheek, where the leader of their Kin had sliced carefully into the flesh as a sign that they were no longer boys.