The Kin (31 page)

He gulped, and managed to speak.

“I, Ko, did this. Yes. I did this. Suth said it. It is true. I … I … was lucky, lucky.”

He sat down, almost weeping with shame at his stupid boast. Everyone was laughing. He bowed his head in misery. He longed to run away, away, far into the dark night. He felt Noli's arm slide round his shoulders.

“Ko, why do you hide your head?” she whispered. “You do well, well. Suth praises you.”

“They laugh at me,” he muttered. “They laugh at my stupid words.”

“No, Ko,” she said. “Your words are good. They are happy for you. They laugh. Listen. Now they laugh at Kern. It is different.”

It was true. There was a new note in the men's voices as they jeered at Kern for letting the lion almost catch him and needing a boy to save him.

“It is you, Kern, are lucky, lucky,” they said.

“This is true,” said Kern cheerfully.

Ko felt better, but he stayed where he was, leaning against Noli, and she understood what he wanted and kept her arm comfortingly round him. Noli wasn't Ko's mother—she was far too young—it was only eight moons since she and Tor had chosen each other for mates, and now she was fat with her first child inside her. But she had acted as mother to Ko and Mana and her own small brother Tan, since all their real parents had been killed or taken when savage strangers had attacked the Moonhawks and the other Kins and driven them out of their old Good Places.

Ko couldn't remember any of that. He could just remember little bits of the time soon after, when the six of them—Suth, Noli and Tinu, Ko himself and Mana and Tan, who had been called Otan then because he was still a baby—had lived for a while with the lost Monkey Kin in a hidden valley at the top of a mountain. He knew the mountain had exploded. He'd been told about that, but all he could remember was running desperately up a rocky slope in the dark and clutching something he'd been told to keep hold of while rocks rained down all around him and a huge hot orange mass roared and boomed below.

He didn't remember a lot of stuff that had happened after that, like meeting the Porcupines—Suth said that had been in a canyon somewhere—and then coming to the New Good Places and finding Tun and Kern and Chogi and the rest of the Moonhawks.

All Ko's real memories were about living in the New Good Places, along with the people who now sat around the two fires. But he still thought of the six who'd done the things he'd been told about as his own family. Suth was father and Noli was mother, although Suth was mated with Bodu and they had their own baby son, Ogad, and Noli's baby would be born inside a moon.

Tinu was a big sister, or maybe an aunt, though she wasn't a woman yet. And Mana was Ko's younger sister and Tan was his little brother, though really they'd all had different parents. So Ko felt closer to these five than he did to anyone else on the outcrop. Just now he was sitting between Noli and Mana, with Tinu on Noli's other side. Tan was running around between the two fires, playing tag with other small boys, both Kin and Porcupines. You didn't need words to play tag.

While the men were still teasing Kern, Chogi stood up and crossed to the other side of the fire and faced Tun. She bent her knees and dipped her head briefly and made a fluttering movement with her fingers in the air. Chogi was senior woman. Nobody expected her to kneel right down and patter her hands on the ground in front of the leader, as a junior woman would have done.

“Chogi, we listen,” said Tun.

Chogi dipped her head again and moved slowly to the gap between the men's side and the women's, so that everybody could see and hear her. It was obvious that she had something important to say.

She was a short, wrinkle-faced woman. Ko had never seen her laugh. He could remember when she'd been rather fat, but now she was skinny with hunger, like everybody else. Her main business was to see that the Kin kept strictly to their ancient customs, stuff to do with childbirth and choosing mates, and things that were done when babies became small ones, or small ones became children, or children became men and women. Ko thought this sort of thing very dull, so instead of listening to Chogi he started dreaming his boast over, with him, Ko, saying the words he wished he'd said. While he was at it he went back and changed the actual adventure, so that he'd found a couple of good throwing stones on his way to the tree …

Something was happening. The men had stopped whispering among themselves, as they usually did when woman-stuff was being discussed. Ko came out of his dream and listened.

“… The moon is big,” Chogi was saying. “We feast. This is good. This is happy time. But now we go to new places, dangerous, dangerous. Do we find food? Do we feast again? When is another happy time? I do not know. So I, Chogi, say this. We do happy time stuff now. We do it here. I see Nar. I see Tinu. Soon Nar is a man. Soon Tinu is a woman. Soon they choose mates. Nar chooses Tinu. There is no other woman. Tinu chooses Nar. There is no other man. They smear salt on their foreheads. This is good. It is happy time stuff. So I, Chogi, say, they do not wait. They do this now. I, Chogi, say this.”

She stopped, but stayed where she was, with the firelight wavering across her old, lined face, and the big moon halfway up the sky behind her. Everyone seemed too surprised to speak. Even Ko understood that what Chogi was suggesting was a break with custom. No one had been surprised when Suth and Bodu had chosen each other. There hadn't been anyone else for them to choose, and besides Bodu was from Little Bat, which was one of the two Kins from which Moonhawk men were allowed to choose.

Even so, they'd waited until they'd both been through the correct customs for becoming man and woman. Then, at a full moon feast, they had stood up from each side of the fire and crossed to the place where Chogi now stood, and touched palms, and said the words of choosing, and smeared salt on their foreheads, just as Nal and Turka had done long, long ago, at the first ever such choosing, by the saltpans beyond Lusan of the Ants—one of the Old Good Places, where none of them would ever go again.

Now chatter broke out as everybody began to talk about Chogi's idea. Even the men were interested. It wasn't just the business of Nar and Tinu choosing each other before they were man and woman. Nar was Monkey. He and his mother Zara had somehow escaped when the mountain where Monkey used to live had exploded. There'd been other people with them, but they'd all died, wandering lost in a desert somewhere. Only Zara had struggled through with her small son, Nar, and come at last to the New Good Places and joined up with the Moonhawks. Now they were the last of the Monkey Kin, and nobody knew who Monkey were allowed to mate with.

The adults thought this sort of thing was very important, though as far as Ko could see it didn't make much sense any more. Who was he supposed to choose when his turn came? The only girls the right age were Mana, who was Moonhawk (Chogi wouldn't like that at all) and Sibi, who was almost a small one still, and besides that she was Parrot, and Moonhawk wasn't allowed to mate with Parrot—and anyway Sibi made it obvious she thought Ko was stupid.

Ko leaned forward and looked to see how Tinu was taking Chogi's suggestion, but she'd shrunk back into Noli's shadow with her hands over her face—her strange, twisted mouth always made her try to hide like that when anyone drew attention to her. Ko hoped she didn't like the idea. He didn't want Nar becoming part of his family, the way Tor and Bodu were now.

Ko didn't really have any good reason for making Nar his enemy. Nar was just another boy, a bit older than Ko himself. Perhaps they should have been friends. There were no other boys anywhere near their age among the Kin. Nar was taller and stronger than Ko, but that was just because he was older—he wasn't a bully or a loudmouth. Other people seemed to like him, but that only made it worse.

The real reason why Ko didn't like Nar was his smile. Nar smiled a lot, almost whenever anybody spoke to him, and when Ko made one of his boasts—claiming he'd done something he hadn't, really, or promising he would when everyone knew he couldn't—Nar would smile that smile and look at him for a moment, a look that said, “I am almost a man, and you are nothing but a stupid little boy …”

Ko stood up, pretending he needed a stretch and a yawn, but really to get a look at Nar and see how he was reacting. He couldn't see him. Where was he? Ah, that must be him, just beyond Zara, but Ko couldn't see his face. Zara was saying something to him. He must have answered, because she shook her head and made a furious gesture with her left hand, as if she were trying to sweep the whole idea away.

Good—Zara didn't want it to happen either. Ko couldn't imagine Tinu really wanted Nar for her mate. Chogi was just a silly old woman. Why didn't Tun stand up and say so …?

As he settled down again, Ko realized that something was happening to Noli, beside him. She was shuddering, and breathing in slow, deep lungfuls. Now her body went stiff. Her eyes were open, but rolled so far up that he could see only white below the bulging lids. Froth gathered at the corners of her mouth.

Ko wasn't alarmed. He understood what was happening, and was ready when Noli took an even deeper breath and shot suddenly to her feet. She didn't scramble awkwardly up, as she usually did now because the baby inside her unbalanced her. This time it was more as if something had taken hold of her and just jerked her upright.

Everybody stopped talking and looked at her. None of this was strange to them. They waited in silence.

She raised her arms and stood as still as a tree for a while. Then a voice came out of her, not her own voice, not any man's or woman's, but a big, soft voice like an echo from a cave, the voice of Moonhawk, the First One.

“Wait,” said the voice. “It is not the time.”

As the last whisper of the voice faded into the night, Noli crumpled. This sometimes happened, so Ko was already kneeling, ready to catch her, but she went the other way, into Tinu's arms, and now by the firelight Ko could see Tinu's face. Her twisted mouth was open, with her jaw working sideways and down as if she'd got something stuck there. Her cheeks were streaming with tears.

Mana had seen too. By the time Ko had helped ease Noli down onto the rock, Mana was kneeling on Tinu's other side with both arms round her, hugging her close. Tinu huddled beside Noli's sleeping body, with her head in her hands, sobbing bitterly.

Ko moved round to hug her from the other side.

“Do not weep, Tinu,” he begged her. “Why do you weep?”

Mana made a face at him to be quiet, but Tinu answered, mumbling through her sobs.

“No man … chooses … Tinu … No man … ever.”

Ko, desperate to comfort her, said the first thing that came into his head.

“I find a mate for you, Tinu. I, Ko, do this.”

She took her hands away from her face and looked at him, and he could see that she was trying to smile, but the tears still streamed down. Mana, behind Tinu's shoulder, was frowning at him, shaking her head. He sighed and moved back to the other side of Noli's sleeping body and sat with his chin on his fists, staring at the small, wavering flames as they danced over the heap of glowing embers.

What had he said wrong? What did Tinu mean, saying no one would ever choose her for a mate? There wasn't anything wrong with Tinu, anything that mattered. Her face wasn't like other people's, with its broken, twisted look, and she couldn't talk right. But she did have language—you just had to get used to the mumbling way she spoke. And she was clever, clever with her mind and her hands. She sometimes found good new ways of doing things, which people had never thought of.

Anyway, he told himself, as soon as she was a woman some man was going to choose her for a mate. What man? As Chogi had said, there wasn't anyone except Nar. Forget about Nar. He, Ko, was going to find someone.

Oldtale

FALU'S PRAYER

Falu said to Gata, “Stay with my father. Pound grass seed. Mix bloodroot paste.”

Gata said, “My sister, where do you go?”

Falu said, “I follow Tov. He seeks the tooth of Fododo, Father of Snakes. Tov is clever. Perhaps he gets the tooth. But I set traps in his path. I lead him astray.”

Gata said, “My sister, this is good.”

Falu went first to Dindijji, the place of dust trees. As she went, she gathered nuts. She dug gumroot from the ground and chewed it, and spat the chewings into her gourd
.

She came to Dindijji. She made paste from her chewings and spread it on a rock in the sun. Soon it was very sticky. She smeared it on the branches of the dust trees, and so stuck the nuts to them. Parrots came to eat the nuts, the little grey parrots with the yellow tail feathers
.

They stuck to the paste. Falu caught them. From each she took a yellow tail feather
.

She gave nuts to them and set them free
.

She said, “Little grey parrots, fly to the First One. Say to him, Falu is our friend. She gives nuts to us.”

She stuck feathers to her buttocks, the yellow tail feathers. She rolled herself beneath the trees, and poured their dust over her head, the grey dust. She said, “Now I am a parrot, a little grey parrot with yellow tail feathers.”

At nightfall she climbed a tree. To its topmost branches she climbed. The little grey parrots came and roosted around her. They woke at the sunrise and flew hither and thither and sang their song. It was the time of the parrots
.

Falu sang also. These words she sang:

Parrot, First One
.

I am your nestling
.

You brood over me
.

You bring me sweet-fruits
.

Give me Tov for my mate
.

Five nights Falu stayed in the tree, neither eating nor drinking. Each morning she sang with the parrots
.