The Kin (18 page)

And this man wasn't much taller than Suth, and the bones of his arms and legs were not much thicker than Noli's. His skin, too, was a rich brown, nowhere near as dark as the Kin. His face wasn't like theirs, but long and narrow, with a hooked nose and protruding lips and teeth.

“This man is not people,” muttered Suth.

“You say he is animal?” said Noli.

“I do not know. People speak. His mouth is not hurt, but he does not speak. I speak. He hears the noise. He does not hear the words. He does not hear the thing I say. He is not people.”

Ko was frowning at the puzzle.

“Is he animal, Suth?” he asked. “We eat him?”

Suth smiled, and shook his head, as much at the puzzle as at Ko's question.

“We do not eat him, Ko,” he said. “But he is not people.”

When he'd finished eating and drinking, the man sat for a while, nursing his broken arm and moaning to himself. Now he raised his head and gazed down the canyon.

A thought seemed to strike him. Painfully he hunkered himself around and turned his head, slowly, as if he knew what he was going to see and couldn't bear to face it.

He stared at the rockfall. His mouth opened and his jaw worked to and fro, but no sounds came. The muscles of his face were hard and knotted, like tree roots.

He tried to get to his feet. Suth put a hand on his shoulder to coax him back down, but the man simply grabbed his arm and used it to haul himself up. He hobbled to the pile and began to tear at the rocks with his good hand.

“No. Dangerous,” said Suth, and tried to pull him away. The man pushed him off, but staggered and fell.

He didn't try to rise. He just lay face down and wailed, a terrible sound, rising and falling in waves. A thought came into Noli's mind, sudden and clear, as if Moonhawk had put it there, the way she used to. Only there were no words in this thought. It was a wordless knowledge, an understanding.

“His Kin are under the rock,” she said. “They are all dead. He is alone.”

The man drew breath and wailed again. The sound echoed along the canyon.

Alone
, it cried.

Alone
, wailed the echoes.
Alone, alone, alone
.

Oldtale

RAKAKA

Rakaka was an earth demon. His teeth were hammer stones and his claws were cutters
.

He lived below ground. He listened to the voices of people as they journeyed to their Good Places. He smelled their smells. Below the ground, he followed them to their camps
.

When a baby was born, he smelled the birth blood. He smelled the breast milk of the mother as she fed it
.

When all slept, he rose. He entered the camp. He took the shape of the baby and lay down beside the mother. He cried with the voice of the baby
.

The mother woke. She fed him from her breasts. Rakaka took all the milk that was in her. None was left for the true baby
.

Night after night Rakaka did this. No milk was left for the true baby. It died
.

Naga fed her baby, Sol. Rakaka smelled the smell of the breast milk. He rose and crept into the camp
.
He took the shape of Sol and lay down beside Naga. He cried with the voice of Sol
.

Naga woke. She said, “My baby is hungry. I feed him.”

Sol woke also. He said, “Who cries with my voice? Who feeds at the breast of my mother?”

He caught Rakaka by the arm and pulled him away
.

Rakaka struck at Sol with his fist. It was not his true fist. It was the fist of a baby
.

Sol caught Rakaka by the wrist. He put the fist to his mouth. He bit with his teeth. He bit through the first finger at the knuckle joint and spat it out
.

Rakaka howled. All the Kin woke. By the light of the fire they saw two babies, two Sols. The babies fought with blows and with cries, as grown men fight
.

Naga said, “Which of these is my own child, my child, Sol?”

Both answered, “I am your own child, your child, Sol.”

At that, Sol was enraged. He was filled with the rage of a hero. He struck Rakaka so fierce a blow that the demon could not hold the shape he had taken. He became his own shape
.

By the light of the fire, all saw him
.

They saw his snout for smelling the smells of people. They saw his hammer teeth for grinding rocks. They saw his cutter claws for digging through the earth
.

They said, “It is the demon Rakaka.”

Sol was still in his rage. He picked up a great boulder and flung it. In the strength of his rage, he flung it
.

The rock struck Rakaka in the chest and carried him away. A full day's journey it carried him, and he fled to his own places beneath the earth. Far and far he fled, beneath the desert where no people live
.

The rage left Sol. He looked around. He saw the knuckle joint of Rakaka that he had bitten from his hand. That too was now in its own shape, the shape of a cutter
.

Sol picked it up
.

He said, “This is my cutter. Its name is Ban-ban. No cutter is sharper. It is mine.”

As for the rock that Sol threw, it is at Ragala Flat. No rock at Ragala Flat is of the same kind. The marks of Sol's two hands, the hands of a child, are clear upon it
.

CHAPTER THREE

Noli slept badly. The man they had rescued kept moaning with pain, and from time to time he crawled to the rockfall and cried out, still without words but saying as clearly as if he'd spoken, “Is anybody there?”

Then he'd wait and listen to the silence, and come back and lie down, grieving.

His Kin are beneath the rocks
, Noli thought.
It was night. They slept there. The rocks fell on them
.

She wasn't sure if the thought was really her own thought, or if it came to her somehow from the odd pressure still pushing against her mind.

And when she slept, her dreams were broken and meaningless, but she had a feeling that they weren't the dream she was supposed to be having. It was as if Moonhawk were trying to come to her, and couldn't. She woke in the morning so tired that she might as well not have slept at all.

The stranger's arm was horribly swollen. He hugged it to himself and winced at a touch, but he let Tinu bathe it for him and lick the wound in his leg clean, since he couldn't reach it to lick himself. He ate and drank a little, but mostly sat huddled by the fire, with his back to the rockfall.

“Tinu,” said Suth suddenly, “I remember this. When I was small a man in Parrot broke his arm bone. His name was Vol. An old woman in Parrot—I do not know her name—laid two sticks along his arm. One was here. One was here.”

Suth held up his right forearm and with his left hand outlined two straight sticks laid along it on either side from the elbow to the palm.

“She wrapped the arm in leaves,” he went on. “She bound all together with tingin bark. A moon passed, and another moon. The bone mended. It was bent, but it was strong. How do we do this? I do not see tingin trees in this place.”

“I think …” mumbled Tinu.

She sat, frowning, and then picked up a few discarded strips of whitestem peel, tested them for strength, and started to braid three together.

Suth watched her for a while and then said, “First I hunt. Then I make a fire log.”

He picked up his digging stick and strode off. Noli finished feeding Otan, then took Ko and Mana foraging, leaving Tinu to mind the fire and the stranger and Otan.

This time Noli knocked down as many wing nuts as the three of them could carry and took them back to the camp before setting off again to collect whitestem. She found Otan awake and toddling down towards the water hole, and the stranger tending a dying fire while Tinu sat totally absorbed, frowning at broken lengths of braided whitestem.

“Tinu, what do you do?” she cried. “The fire dies. Otan runs away. This is bad, bad!”

Tinu looked up like somebody waking from a dream, and brushed the whitestem fibres off her lap with a disappointed gesture.

“This stuff … no good …” she muttered. “Noli … you say … what?”

There was no point in yelling at her again. Tinu was like that when she got absorbed in anything, so Noli left Mana to cope with Otan while she took Ko for the whitestem.

They came back to find that Suth had returned. He had caught no game but had dug out a double fistful of fat yellow grubs from a rotted tree trunk. So they roasted these and popped the wing nuts in the embers of the fire and feasted contentedly. The stranger ate dully, not noticing what they gave him.

When they had finished, Suth settled down with the branch that he and Tinu had dragged home to make a fire log. For this he needed a piece about as long as his forearm and as thick as his leg. But he'd hardly started to chip his way through the branch, using the cutter one of the men had given him back in the valley, when he gave a cry of dismay.

“This is bad, bad,” he said. “I break my cutter.” He held it up and showed them that most of the sharp edge had snapped away.

He rose, shaking his head, and started to search the canyon floor for stones of the right size to make a new cutter.

All the Moonhawks were aware of his problem. Stoneworking was a knack. A father would start teaching his son as soon as his hands were strong enough, but it still took a lot of practice to learn which were the right stones to use, and where and how to hit them so as to chip the flakes away and leave a sharp edge. Some men never learned, and so far Suth had had no luck when he'd tried.

He returned and hammered away at several stones, but nothing happened. He barely made a mark on them.

“These stones are too hard,” he said dispiritedly, and went back to trying to bash his way through with the blunt cutter. It was hopeless. His fire log would be a splintered mess before he was done. He got up again and started to search for different kinds of stone.

Noli wasn't aware that the stranger had been watching, but now he struggled to his feet and hobbled down to Suth, supporting his broken arm with his good one.

Noli watched curiously. Suth was collecting a pile of stones to try. The stranger looked at them, pushed them aside with his foot, and gave a contemptuous shake of the head.

Suth said something. He was too far off for Noli to hear, but he looked surprised and angry. The stranger hobbled a few steps up the canyon, stopped, and gestured with his head for Suth to follow.

“Noli, I go with this man,” called Suth.

She waved to show she understood. He caught up with the man and put his arm around him to steady him. Slowly they disappeared beyond the rockfall.

“Noli,” said Tinu pleadingly, “I go too?”

Noli nodded, and Tinu scampered off.

They were gone longer than she'd expected. When they came back, Suth was carrying a small armful of stones, and Tinu a whole sheaf of different sorts of leaf and stem and bark, which she laid by the fire and began to sort through. Meanwhile, the stranger sat beside Suth, showing him how to hold the stone he'd chosen and where and how to strike it. It was slow, and Suth made a lot of mistakes. By the time he'd finished, the hand he'd been using to hold the target stone was bruised and bleeding, but he had a cutter of a sort. A skilled stoneworker would probably have thrown it away as a failure, but Suth held it up in triumph.

“This is the first cutter I make,” he said. “I, Suth, make this cutter.”

“I, Ko, praise,” said Ko solemnly.

Suth put his hand on the stranger's shoulder, a gesture of brotherhood.

“I, Suth, thank,” he said.

For the first time since they'd rescued him, the stranger smiled. Carefully he laid his broken arm on his lap and returned the gesture. As he did so, he made a soft barking noise up in the roof of his mouth, repeated three times.

“This man is people,” declared Suth. “We take him into our Kin. He is Moonhawk. His name is …”

He looked at Noli. Names were very important. Always, among the Kins, it was the one to whom the First One came who chose them.

Noli didn't hesitate. The name seemed to be there, in her mouth, ready.

“His name is Tor,” she said.

“Good,” said Suth.

He pointed around the circle of Moonhawks and said each of their names in turn.

“Noli. Otan. Tinu. Ko. Mana. Suth … Tor.”

Tor smiled and frowned at the same time. He looked pleased, but puzzled, as if he almost understood the idea, but not quite. Noli felt extremely sorry for him. He was still utterly miserable about what had happened to his people, and no wonder. But he'd really taken trouble to help Suth with his cutter, though it must have hurt him, hobbling all that way. And he had a sweet smile.

That night Noli slept badly again. She had the same sense of something pressing against the edges of her mind, and in her dreams she heard thin, high voices wailing in the desert above the canyon, wailing in the same way that Tor had wailed, without words.

She woke and saw the stars and the moonlit cliffs, but the voices were gone.

They are dream voices
, she thought.
Spirit voices, the voices of Tor's people who are dead under the rocks
.

In the morning she told Suth. He accepted what she said without questioning her.

“We move our camp,” he said.

Everyone knew that it was unwise to camp too close to a place of death. Demons might come there.

They chose a new place further down the canyon, and shifted the fire there by stages, as before. Tor seemed relieved by the move, though for the next three evenings he hobbled back to the rockfall alone and mourned there for a while.

When they'd moved, Suth returned to the rockfall to finish cutting the log to the length he needed. He brought it back to the new camp to begin the slow process of burning out the centre. Meanwhile Tinu had found a large coarse leaf whose fibres were a bit tougher than whitestem. Even when she braided them into lengths, they weren't as strong as she'd have liked, but they'd do.