The Kin (60 page)

Noli and Mana were alone at the camp. Noli had stayed to soak and pound a blueroot she'd found, so that it would be ready for the Big Moon feast next night—a serious feast, because tomorrow would be Nar's last day as a child. The morning after, he would have the first man scars cut in his cheeks, and become a man, and he and Tinu could then be mates.

Mana was there to keep Noli company, something she specially needed just now because Tor had been away so long. He and Goma had gone to make their way south and see if they could find any more of the Porcupines lingering around the edges of the marsh. This was their second expedition. The first time they'd found a man and a woman, mates, and their two children, who'd somehow managed to survive.

Noli was sure there must be more. Mana didn't really understand why she said so—it was First One stuff. When Mana had confronted the old demon man at the Place that was not Spoken of, Noli said Porcupine had been there. The demon men had brought Goma and the other women to the valley to look after the old man, but the demon in the cliff had been too strong for Porcupine, because all his people were scattered in different places. But he was still around, and with Moonhawk to help him he had come back. He couldn't have done that, Mana said, if everyone had been dead except Goma and the other two women.

So now Mana was helping with the blueroot, and Amola was also helping after her fashion, pounding a bit of rind with a stone Noli had given her. Okern had to have a stone too, of course, but he didn't care what he pounded, provided he could do it good and hard.

Noli paused in her work to regather the blueroot on the flat stone she was using as a mortar. Amola heard the break in the steady rhythm of pounding and looked up. Her lips moved. Mana could see she was trying to ask something. Noli laughed delightedly.

“Mana, Amola has words!” she cried. “She says,
Ma?
She asks,
Mother, why do you stop?
Oh, she has words, Mana, she has words!”

This was a question the Kin had discussed endlessly from the moment Amola had been born, but more especially since she'd stopped being a wrinkled little blob of a baby and got a face of her own. Then it became easy to see that she was like Tor in some ways, with his fine bones and high cheeks, but had Noli's mouth and chin, while her skin colour was in between theirs. So would Amola be like Noli, and have words, or be like Tor, and have none, or be somewhere in between, with just a few?

Noli, after that single syllable, was certain of the answer.

Mana laughed with her, happy in her delight. Then her eye fell on Okern, who had taken his stone to the cave and was hammering away at the cliff beside it. He would hammer the whole hill away if he could, she thought. Yes, and he could do that before he could speak to me. He can never say
Ma
to me. She bowed her head, biting her lip.

“Mana, you are sad,” said Noli. “Why is this?”

“Okern does not have words,” said Mana.

“He is clever. He is strong. He is brave. He is beautiful,” said Noli.

“Noli, this is true,” said Mana. She was in fact very proud of Okern's good looks. But she shook her head again.

“Hear me, Noli,” she said hesitantly, thinking it through as she spoke. “Say in your heart,
Okern has words
. Now say this.
One day Okern is a small one. Then his name is Kern. He understands little. He gets big, he is a boy. Now he understands some things. Now Mana says to him, ‘Kern, I am not your true mother. She is dead. She did such and such things. Your father is dead. He did such and such things.'
(Noli, I do not say,
Your mother was a demon woman. Your father was a demon man.) Then Mana says, ‘I found you. Moonhawk took you in. Now, Kern, choose. Which are you? Are you like your father and mother? Are you like me, Moonhawk? Think, Kern. Then choose.”

“Noli, I can never say this to him. He can never choose. He does not have words.”

Noli put down her stone, and came and squatted beside her and took her hand.

“Mana,” she said. “Okern is people. One day he chooses. Now, see Goma. She is good, good. She says in her heart,
This is good. I do it. This is bad. I do not do it
. She does not need words for this. She is people.

“Mana,
good
is a word.
Bad
is a word. But they are more, more. They are … I do not know what they are, but they are people stuff.”

Mana looked at Okern. Yes, he was people, she thought. And Noli was right. She remembered the sudden rage that had surged through her at the Place that was not Spoken of, at the thought that the demon men had chosen to be what they were. That rage had come from Moonhawk, she thought. It was what had allowed her to stand up to the old demon man, and shout defiance to his face.

Yes, good or bad—whether he learnt the truth about his own parents or not—Okern would one day choose.

That was people stuff.

A Biography of Peter Dickinson

Peter Dickinson is a tall, elderly, bony, beaky, wrinkled sort of fellow, with a lot of untidy gray hair and a weird, hooting voice—in fact, he looks and sounds a bit like Gandalf's crazy twin, but he's just rather absentminded, thinking about something else, or daydreaming.

He was born in the middle of Africa, within earshot of the Victoria Falls. Baboons sometimes came into the school playground. When people went swimming in the Zambezi they did it in a big wooden cage let down into the water so that the crocs couldn't get at them. For the hot weather the family went south to his grandfather's sheep and ostrich farm in South Africa.

When Peter was seven the family came back to England so that he and his brothers could go to English schools, where they taught him mostly Latin and Greek. He didn't have an English lesson after he was twelve, and nobody ever told him to write a story. He was fairly good at games.

He's led an ordinary kind of life—not much by way of adventures, but some silly things. Such as? Well, when he had to join the army just after World War II, they managed to turn him into two people, so he was bashing away at infantry training at a camp in Northern Ireland when two seasick military policemen showed up and tried to arrest him for being a deserter from a different camp in the South of England, where his other self was supposed to be bashing away.

He was tutoring a boy in a huge old castle in Scotland when the butler (it was that sort of household) said to him at breakfast one day, “Ah, sir, it's a long time since we heard screams coming from the West Wing!” (Peter's screams, not the boy's.)

And he was knocked down by a tram on his way to the interview for his first job with the magazine
Punch
and arrived all covered with blood and dirt, but they gave him the job because he was the only candidate. He stayed there seventeen years.

He and his first wife had two daughters and two sons, and he now has six grandchildren. He and his second wife, the American writer Robin McKinley, live in an almost-too-pretty country town in the South of England.

Peter says he didn't
become
a writer. He just is one and always has been, ever since he can remember, the way a goldfish is a goldfish and can't be anything else. Go to a zoo and look at one of the big birds, a condor, say, a creature made to soar above the Andes. They've probably clipped one of its wings so that it can't hurt itself trying to fly around its cage, but it's still a creature made to soar above the Andes. If you somehow stopped Peter writing, he'd still be a writer.

But he was a poet and a journalist before he started on books. He tried a murder story first, but got stuck halfway through. Then he had a science fiction–y kind of nightmare and decided to turn it into a children's story, mainly to see if writing it would unstick the other book. (It did. That book won a prize for the best murder story of the year, and the children's book was made into a TV series.)

Since then Peter has written almost sixty books, most of them on a little old portable typewriter—one draft to see what he's got and what else he needs to know and so on, then a bit of research, then a complete rewrite, beginning to end, and then, if all's well, only a bit more tinkering. Sometimes it used to take a few months, sometimes a year or more. A few years back he moved over to a PC. It makes writing seem a very different kind of process—easier in some ways, harder in others.

The ideas come from all over the place—daydreams, sometimes, or a kid on a long car trip saying, “Tell us a new story, Dad.” Or something he's heard or read—a voice on the radio saying, “Even a hardened government soldier may hesitate a fatal half second before he guns down a child.” For the best of them it feels as if the book had knocked on the door of Peter's mind and said, “Write me.” Then he'll spend half a year or more letting the stranger in and finding out who or what it is.

Peter has written all sorts of books—crime mainly for adults, though some of these are almost straight literary novels. For children, he has written fantasies, historical fiction, modern adventure, science fiction, and so on. There won't be many more. They used to come gushing out of the hillside like a mountain stream. Then he had to lift them up bucket by bucket from deeper and deeper wells, but now the wells are empty. He says.

Peter Dickinson was the second of four sons of a British colonial civil servant and a South African farmer's daughter, born December 16, 1927, in the middle of Africa, in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

Here are Peter and his brother Richard as children in Africa, where many of Peter's books take place. In fact, he used this photo as a pivotal clue in
Perfect Gallows
.

The family came “home” in 1935 so that the boys could go to British boarding schools, but within a few months, when Peter was seven, their father died suddenly of a strangulated gut, leaving their mother with very little money. Their British relations were close knit and supportive, and in 1936 Peter was sent to Saint Ronan's, a prep school in Worthing with a charismatic headmaster named Dick Harris. Pictured here are Peter (in the red jersey), age eight, with his mother, elder brother, Richard, and younger brother Hugh.