The Kin (2 page)

Noli looked ahead and pointed. There were the two leaning rocks. This was the place.

She quickened her pace, but Suth caught her wrist. Something had moved, a blue grey shape like a shadow prowling in front of the two rocks. It returned, nosing at the piled stones, sniffing for the flesh behind them. It scratched at the pile with a paw. Some kind of fox-thing, though different from the yellow and brown foxes that had scavenged around the Good Places that the Kin had been driven from.

Suth picked up a stone, weighed it in his hand, put it soundlessly down and chose a heavier one. Noli took another. Side by side but a little apart the two crept forward, moving and pausing and moving as they had watched their elders do, hunting unsuspecting prey. The foxes that Suth knew had learned to be afraid of people, and were shy and quick and hard to catch, but this one was too excited by the smells from behind the rock pile to notice as the hunters crept nearer.

Not until Suth was only two paces away did it sense something, turn and see him. It was not just in colour that it was different. It did not fear people.

Snarling, it leaped for Suth's belly, but his arm was already poised for a blow. He swung as it came, and the rock caught the fox full force on the head, knocking it sideways. Then Noli was on it, pounding down with her rock. It thrashed aside and tried to rise, but before it was on its feet Suth struck it again with all his strength at the point where the neck joined the skull. It collapsed, twitched once, and lay still.

They struck it several more blows to make sure, then left it lying and went to the rock pile. There was no sound from inside.

They are dead
, Suth thought.

“Are you there, Tinu?” he said softly. “Mana? Ko? It is me, Suth. And Noli.”

A faint mumbling sound answered. That was Tinu, who had a twisted mouth and did not speak clearly. There was a wail from a smaller child. With a gush of hope Suth started to pull the pile of rocks down. As soon as she could reach, Noli joined in. The sun rose on their backs. When the wall was low enough they craned over.

Tinu was crouching in the little cave with Otan in her arms. Ko sat huddled beside her, blinking at the light. Mana lay on her side, unmoving, but she stirred and moaned as Suth reached in, took Otan, and passed him to Noli. He pulled more rocks down until Tinu could help Ko and Mana, still half asleep, to scramble out. Tinu came last.

Noli was cradling little Otan to her chest, feeling for his heartbeat and listening for his breath. “My brother lives,” she whispered, shuddering with relief.

The others waited. Three pairs of dark, anxious eyes gazed at Suth. He could see what they were thinking.
Where was the rest of the Kin? Where were the grown men and women? Where was Bal, the leader?
Ko and Mana were little more than babies, though Ko was sturdy and big for his age. Suth had never taken much notice of Mana, a quiet, watchful little girl, with the same dark skin and black, coarse hair as everyone else in the eight Kins.

Tinu was different. Something had gone wrong when she was born, so that her jaw opened more sideways than down and she never learned to speak properly. She was small too, for her age, and extremely skinny, with insect-thin limbs. She hated to be noticed and looked at. As soon as Suth's glance fell on her, she turned her head away.

“Thirsty,” she mumbled.

“Noli knows where water is,” said Suth.

“It is not far,” said Noli. “Suth killed food. You come.”

Suth heaved the dead fox onto his shoulder. Noli settled Otan onto her hip and led the way, with Tinu next and the two small ones scrambling behind her across the stony slope. Suth came last, helping them when they needed him. He felt different now. The fox was heavy, but its weight gave him strength. He had done something. He had killed food. These others, they needed him. Without him, they would die.

Oldtale

THE FIRST GOOD PLACE

Black Antelope was chief among the First Ones. He said, “Now we make a place where we can live.”

He breathed upon the bare ground, and where he had breathed the young grass grew, tender for him to eat
.

Then Snake crawled through the grasslands, making tracks, which he could follow. And Crocodile dug holes and filled them with clean water, where she could lie and wait. And Weaver planted trees, so that his wives had somewhere to hang their nests, and Parrot added sweet nuts and fruits to the trees, because he was greedy, and the Ant Mother chewed the fallen branches from the trees and mixed the chewings into the ground to make good soft earth for her nests, and Fat Pig planted the earth with juicy roots to fill his stomach, and Moonhawk built crags from which she could watch while the others slept
,
and Little Bat made caves in the crags, where she could hide from Moonhawk
.

So they all worked together to make the First Good Place, according to their needs
.

Only Monkey did nothing
.

He watched the others at work, and then he climbed Weaver's trees and ate Parrot's fruits and nuts, and he dug in the Ant Mother's earth and ate Fat Pig's roots, and he slept in Little Bat's caves and drank from Crocodile's water holes, and he set traps in Snake's tracks, and scrambled over Moonhawk's crags. But he did not often go into Black Antelope's grasslands because he was the strongest and Monkey was afraid of him
.

CHAPTER TWO

The water was a thin trickle, oozing down a narrow crack in the cliff. They couldn't get their faces in to lap, so all they could do was slide a hand and wet their fingertips and suck. The water had a strong taste and a faint smell of foul eggs, like the water at Yellowhole, where the Kin used to drink. Before she had any herself, Noli gave her fingers to Otan to suck. At first nothing happened, but then the small dry lips moved faintly, and a hand clenched and unclenched. It was the first sign of life that anyone but Noli had seen in him.

After a while, Tinu found that if she put her fingers into the crack at a certain angle the water ran along the lower edge of her palm and gathered into drops on her wrist bone, where she could suck them off before they fell. The others copied her.

As soon as he'd drunk enough, Suth looked for the right sort of rock, so that he could try to make a cutter and butcher little pieces of meat off the fox carcass for the small ones to chew. He had often watched his father stoneworking, and had tried to copy what he did, but it was men's work. Boys didn't get taught it. His father had known which were the right stones, and where to strike them, but he couldn't say how he knew. His eye and his hand had told him
this one
and
here
. So all Suth had been able to do was watch, and then try for himself. He'd learned that it wasn't as easy as it looked.

Besides, good stones were only found in some places. There might be none on this hillside at all. Suth chose several and squatted down by a flat boulder. Steadying one stone on it, he hammered down with another, using a slanting blow, trying to chip off a large flake.

Nothing happened. He tried again and again, but the target stone kept twisting in his grasp. Between their turns at the water the others watched him, as he tried different stones and different angles of strike. Sometimes he broke off a few chips, but nothing large enough to grasp and nothing with a cutting edge to it.

Without warning the stone he had been using as a hammer shattered as it struck the target. The pieces flew apart. The shock numbed his arm to the elbow. He was rubbing the feeling back into it when Tinu, always shy and uncertain, anxiously showed him a flake that had fallen at her feet, a round sliver so thin in places that when he held it up he could see light through it. Testing it with his thumb he found that along one edge it was as sharp as anything he had seen his father make, though he knew his father would have thrown it away because it was so fragile. A good cutter was thicker than this, but he thought it might do if he was careful. He laughed at the luck of it, and the small ones laughed too, not understanding why.

Thirsty again after the work, he went back to the crack. While he was slowly drinking, Tinu came up holding a stick she had broken from one of the scrawny bushes that grew in the gully below. These were the first plants Suth had seen in three days.

Tinu waited till he had finished, and then edged up, as if she was expecting him to bark at her to go away, and eased the end of the stick into the crack. Suth watched her, puzzled, as she tried it at different angles. Then, wonderfully, a drop of water appeared on a side twig beneath it, and another and another. She cupped her free hand under them and caught them as they fell, until her palm was full. She lapped the water up and looked at him, still as if she expected him to yell at her or strike her.

“Good, good,” he said, smiling. “Now you show Noli.”

While the others were learning how to use the stick, he picked up the fox and laid it on its back. Holding the flake of stone between thumb and forefinger he drew the cutting edge slowly along the seam of the belly, again and again, never pressing hard for fear of breaking his cutter but gradually slicing through the tough skin.

The three girls watched in silence, but Ko squatted by his side, jaw set, frowning, longing to join in, longing to help. Suth was about to snarl at him to keep clear when he thought,
Ko saw his father die. He saw his mother taken. He was walled in a dark place for a day and a night. He does not understand any of this. He does not understand there is no Kin now for him to belong to. I understand all this. With Noli's help I am leader now. We are their father and their mother
.

So he told Ko to hold the fox's tail clear while he worked. It didn't need holding, but it gave Ko something to do, and they both felt better.

Slowly a scratch formed. The scratch became a cut, and then Suth was slicing into the fat beneath the skin. He sawed at the ends of the cut, widening it until he could plunge his hand through and pull out the guts. Still very careful of his precious tool he cut the liver free.

Suth was the leader now, so he ate first, cutting himself a mouthful before hacking off pieces for the others while he chewed. Fox meat was better roasted, and even then had a strong, rancid taste. Still, it was food, and none of them had eaten cooked food since the fight, when the strangers had taken away their fire log along with the women.

They chewed in silence. Noli put her mouth to Otan's and forced some of her chewings between his lips. He sucked them in and gaped for more.

“That is enough,” said Suth, when they had eaten the liver and the heart, though his own stomach still ached with hunger.

“Yes,” said Noli. “It is strong meat. Too strong.”

The Kin were used to empty stomachs. Sometimes a Good Place would fail. They would find no game, or there would have been a bush fire that destroyed the plants they'd expected to harvest. Then they would have to travel on, foodless, to the next Good Place. Even the little ones understood that cramming a starved stomach with meat ended with a bellyful of burning stones.

Suth cut away the parts of the fox that people do not eat and told Mana to carry them well away along the slope and leave them there. The rest of the carcass he laid against the foot of the cliff and piled rocks over it to keep it safe. Then he drank again and sat looking out over the burning plain below. Somewhere out there what was left of the Kin was moving further and further away. Soon they would be dead, in the waterless desert. He would never see them again.

Another thought came to him. No. We six children, on this hillside—we are what is left of the Kin.

He looked at the others. Tinu, so skinny and small, so ashamed of her odd face and speech that she had never dared be anyone's friend. But smart all the same—the trick she had done with the twig in the crack showed that. Little Ko, who had always made everyone laugh—almost as soon as he could walk he was trying to swagger like a man. Mana. Suth realized he knew almost nothing about Mana, had barely noticed her before now, she was so quiet, though he had known her since she was born. Otan, lying asleep in Noli's lap. He was still too small to know or guess much about. And Noli herself …

When had Moonhawk begun to visit her in her dreams? Suth wondered. He had never heard of any of the First Ones coming to a child, not in any of the Kins. He knew Noli well. His father and hers had been brothers. He had played with her since they were babies, walked beside her as the Kin journeyed from one Good Place to the next. She'd never said anything about Moonhawk visiting her in her dreams. But then, half a moon ago, she'd woken them all where they lay by springing to her feet in the darkest part of the night and shrieking about the strangers, the cruel fighting, the blood …

And Bal had cursed her, and said she was only a stupid child having a nightmare. When her shrieks had gone on, he'd struck her. He had seen nothing.

But three days later, as they gathered for their evening meal, the strangers had attacked.

Suth thought of a time when he had been small. The Kin had come to a place called Ragala Flat, and had found another Kin, Weaver, already there. There had been great feasting, and giving of gifts. But while the fire had still burned bright, Bal and an old man from the Weaver Kin had gone off together into the dark.

“Where does Bal go with that old man?” Suth had asked his father.

His father had made a sign, putting his palm to his mouth.

“They go to talk dream stuff,” he had muttered. “It is a thing that is not spoken of. It is secret.”

As he had grown older Suth had realized that in each of the Kins there was one person like Bal. Their own First One came to that person in dreams. It didn't need to be the leader, though Bal was. It could be a man or a woman. But it was never a child. How could it be? And yet Noli …

She was looking at him as if she'd guessed his thoughts, but all she said was, “What must we do now, Suth?”