The Kin (13 page)

Now Crocodile was lying in wait in the river. She heard what was said, and she put a thought into Celda's mind, who was of her Kin
.

Celda whispered with the other women
.

They said, “Choose, then, Da. Then all choose after you. Which of us women do you choose for your mate?”

Da looked at them all, carefully
.

He said, “I choose Preela.”

Preela answered him, “I do not choose you, Da. You are too proud for a mate.”

Then Da chose among the others, each in turn, and they answered him in the same way, as they had agreed. And when Datta chose among the men, so did they, until there were none left to choose but Datta and Da themselves
.

They looked at each other, and Da said, “Datta, I do not choose you. You are too proud for a mate.”

And so said Datta to Da
.

Then the others chose among themselves until all had mates, and they were satisfied. Only Da and Datta had none. So to this day there are eight Kins only and Monkey has no Kin
.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When Suth and Tinu got back to the camp they found a commotion. All those who were there were gathered by the mouth of the cave, and as others came hurrying in they joined the circle.

Suth wormed his way through and saw that something had happened to Mosu. She wasn't sitting in her usual place, but was lying on her back on a pile of bedding just inside the mouth of the cave. Foia was kneeling, rubbing her feet and calves.

Mosu gasped and twitched. Her mouth worked convulsively, but the sounds she made weren't words. The people watched in silence for a while, but then moved apart and talked in low voices.

Suth and Tinu set off to meet the returning foragers, but the news had reached them too and they were almost home. Suth found Noli and told her what he had seen.

“I think she dies,” he said.

“She said this,” said Noli. “Big Voice also. He shook the place, and spoke. This noon he did it. I told Paro and the women. They also had heard him speak. They did not understand his speaking, and they would not hear me. Gora came from the camp, and then they knew I told truth.”

She spoke gravely but vaguely, as if she was thinking of something else. Suth frowned. He didn't at all like her being able to understand what that wild calling in the forest had meant, when no one else could. Nor did he like Paro and the others knowing that she could do this. Now that the time was so near when he was going to try to sneak the Moonhawks away, he didn't want anyone paying special attention to Noli. But he said nothing.

When they reached the cave they found Mosu was not yet dead, and she was still alive that night when they went into the cave, so they carried her in with them and laid her in her usual place. The next morning she was no better and no worse, so they propped her outside the cave and Foia fed her chewings as if she'd been weaning a child, and spat water into her mouth from cupped leaves, which the women had carried up from the lake.

For ten days and ten more Mosu didn't die. The moon grew to its biggest and back to its smallest and started to grow again. Suth saw little of Noli. They took turns foraging, and even when they were both at the camp she spent all her time with Mosu, rubbing her limbs, cleaning her, or just sitting beside her and holding her twitching hand. When she went down to the lake with the Moonhawks, she moved in a kind of dream, not seeing or hearing anything, dealing with Otan's needs automatically, leaving everything else to Suth.

He hated and resented this, and he only didn't yell at her and perhaps even strike her because he could see that she was miserable too.

On the days when Suth foraged he gathered as much as he could, and saw to it that the others did the same, and on the days when Noli went, he and Tinu carried the surplus out to hide in the new food store that Tinu had built. Once there he hunted. He caught and dried several more lizards, and found a juiceroot in the scrub and marked it with his mark.

Meanwhile Tinu guarded their drying meat from vultures and worked steadily at the task Suth had given her, of finding some way of carrying food other than in their hands, as they would have the cliff to climb down. Tinu found how to fold the big leaves to make a sort of bag, which she fastened with a twist of braided grass. She then made a longer twist, braided and rebraided, and tied several bags along its length. They could be carried like that slung around a neck or hung over a shoulder. The bags, though, were fragile, and it took her all day to find the right grass stems and braid them into a single length. She had finished two lengths, and made and filled the bags and tied them on, by the time Mosu finally died.

They woke in the morning and found her spirit gone. They propped her body in its usual place by the mouth of the cave and piled rocks around it to keep it safe while they went down to the lake. Foia and a few of the elders stayed at the camp, while the rest went foraging.

Suth had thought that Noli would want to stay behind, but she joined the foragers and worked in a kind of daze, not hearing, not speaking, as if her spirit was far away—wherever Mosu's spirit had gone, perhaps. Everyone else was silent and troubled. The men didn't hunt, but worked quietly alongside the women. There was none of the usual chat, and when they rested, the men didn't play their game.

Before they started work again, a porcupine came scuttling past, climbing the open hillside in the full heat of the day. This was not a thing that happened. Porcupines are night animals, and in any case keep to dense scrub. Three of the men leaped on it and beat it to death with their digging sticks, but with none of the cries and boastings that usually went with a good kill.

Hardly had they finished when another one came past. That too was killed and brought in. Then a group of deer nosed out of the scrub, and another one further off, and another one, not stopping to graze but pausing every now and then to gaze anxiously around, and then trotting on. There was no point in trying to hunt them when they were as alert as that, so the people simply watched them go, but with steadily growing unease.

Without much discussion they decided not to forage that afternoon, and made their way back to the camp to prepare the death feast for Mosu. As they wound their way in a silent line through the scattered scrub of the foraging grounds, Big Voice started to howl, one far off, and another nearer by, and another to the right, and more and more, their wavering hoots rising and falling and floating away across the hot, still valley.

Suth looked at Noli. He'd noticed one or two of the others watching her, as if they'd expected something from her, but she'd stayed completely withdrawn, wrapped in her own thoughts.

“He sings for Mosu?” he suggested.

For once she seemed to hear him, and answered, frowning.

“I do not know,” she muttered. “I hear no words in his singing. He sings only.”

Back at the cave, though it was only mid-afternoon, they built up the fire and set the porcupines to roast and trooped down to the lake. Normally at this time of day the forest was still, but now the whooping of Big Voice went on and on, untiring, and flocks of birds rose from the treetops and flew to and fro, and then, instead of settling back among the branches, gathered and rose higher and headed away towards the south.

Then, when they were in among the denser scrub, the leading men came face-to-face with a leopard and two half-grown cubs, padding along the path towards them. The men raised their digging sticks. The leopard hissed, backed off, and slipped away under the bushes with the cubs gliding behind it.

Warily they trooped past the place where the leopards had disappeared, but nothing happened. Suth, near the end of the party, looked back over his shoulder and saw that as soon as the people were gone the three animals had come back onto the path and were gliding away up the hill. It was very strange. What were they doing? Where were they going?

Nothing was stirring under the trees, but the cries of Big Voice rang all around them. When they drank at the lake, the water was very warm.

They returned to the cave, many of the women carrying leaf bowls of water. The men unpiled the rocks from around Mosu's body, and the women poured the water over her, weeping as they did so. Her first son, Jun, cut a leg from a porcupine and laid it in her lap, and the chief women brought offerings of nuts and seed paste.

They ate a little, and then Jun stood and wept praise. In a quiet voice, with many pauses, he spoke of Mosu's wisdom, and the power of her dreams, and named her children and their children one by one.

As the sun went down the women formed two lines for the death dance to help Mosu's spirit on its way. They did it differently from the Kin, who danced where they stood, with stamping and clapping. Here the two lines moved together and apart with shrilling, wavering cries, while the men clapped the rhythm and made deep groaning noises through closed lips.

The Moonhawks watched, sitting a little to one side, until Noli, who had so far sat with dry, staring eyes, heaved herself convulsively to her feet and cried, in a huge voice that was not her own, “He is gone! Big Voice is gone!”

The dance stopped. Heads turned. In the silence they heard that the forest was silent too. The howling of Big Voice, which had filled the valley all afternoon, was still. Even the clatter of the parrots settling into their nests for the night was missing. Not a bird twittered.

They looked at each other, and back to Noli.

She raised both arms, shuddering, and then stretched one out and pointed.

“See!” she croaked. “They go!”

They turned and looked. A little way off, but clearly visible in the half-light of dusk, a few spindly shapes were scrambling rapidly towards the ridge. They had thin, angular limbs and long tails, which they carried curled over their short bodies. Their heads were small and round. They went on all fours but used their front limbs more like arms than legs as they scrambled over the tumbled rocks.

The watchers knew at once what they were seeing, though few of them had ever caught more than a glimpse of one of these creatures in its home, high in the dense canopy of leaves.

“He goes!” they whispered. “Big Voice goes!”

They danced no more that night. Many wanted to copy the animals and leave at once, but the thought of lairing out in the open was too alarming, so in the end they carried Mosu into the cave and walled themselves in, as they had done every other night of their lives.

Suth had to take Noli by the elbow and guide her in, as she seemed not to know where she was or what she was doing, and when he pushed her down into her place she fell at once into a deep, slow-breathing sleep. Everyone else seemed restless with unease. Even the small ones picked up the general feeling and whimpered or cried, but they all slept in the end.

They were woken by screams. A harsh, croaking yell.

“Fire!” it cried. “Out! Out! Go! Fire comes!”

Suth jerked up. The yelling voice was close above him. Somebody, something was moving between him and the pale patch of sky above the wall. He reached out. Noli was not in her place. His searching hand touched flesh, a leg. It shuddered violently. The clamour began again.

“Fire! I see fire! It comes! Out! Go!”

Noli.

He stood and grappled her to him. Her body jerked and thrashed, like the body of a snake after its back is broken but before it is truly dead. Otan yelled with terror. The cave was full of shouting.

Suth was a lot stronger than Noli, but tonight trying to hold her was like wrestling with a trapped animal. She wrenched herself free. He followed, trying to get a fresh hold on her, as she struggled to the mouth of the cave and started to tear at the wall.

“Out!” she screamed. “Fire comes! Moonhawk is here! She says,
Go! Out! Fire!”

A man grabbed and held her.

“Witch dream,” he grunted as she struggled and bit.

Suth seized the man's forearm and tried to wrench it from its hold.

“No!” he shouted. “This dream is true! Monkey is gone! Now Moonhawk comes! Moonhawk sends true dreams to Noli! I, Suth, say this!”

The man didn't seem to understand. Suth turned and heaved a rock down from the wall, but already others, filled with panic by Noli's cries, were pulling it apart. In another few moments they were crowding out into the huge night silence. There was nothing but sky, and the moonlit forest, and the far, dark ridges of the valley.

Then the ground trembled. A long, hoarse sigh came from below, louder and louder, and a pillar of whiteness rose above the trees, rose and rose, far above where they stood, far above the horizon, gleaming in the light of the low moon, curving over as the mild east wind moved it away.

Again the ground trembled. A huge boulder, dislodged from somewhere above the cliff, thundered down, leaped over their heads, black against the stars, and went crashing on into the scrub below. From over to their left rose the deep rough grumble of an avalanche, as a whole hillside shifted. Still the ground shook.

Ko and Mana huddled against Suth's legs. Noli was quiet again, deep in her trance. Tinu held Otan, merely whimpering. Suth took him. His mind was made up. This was the chance he'd been waiting for.

“Bring Noli,” he said. “Come, Mana. Come, Ko. We go.”

Without waiting for anyone else he led the way across the moonlit slope. To their left another great column of whiteness soared out of the lake. A warm gust, like a vast moist breath, flowed up the slope. Further off, with an immense coughing roar, dark orange flames spouted among the trees, with great black lumps hurling up and falling aside, and smaller fiery ones shooting out beyond.

Then it fell quiet for a while. Suth heard the calls and cries of the people scurrying in the other direction towards the nearest place where they could climb the cliff. He ignored them and led the way steadily on towards Tinu's food store.

They were halfway when there was another roar, another uprush of flame from beyond the forest, and the ground shook again, more violently than they'd ever felt it before. Rocks clattered down the slope around them.