Free The Kin by Peter Dickinson Page A

and it was very good .
    They roasted more and took it to their brothers and sisters and gave it to them. Then the others lusted for roast flesh and said, “Give us the fire log, so that we too can make fire and roast what we catch.”
    Da and Datta said, “First you must come to the Rock of Meeting at Odutu below the Mountain and swear that we are best, because we were cared for by people. And you must swear that henceforth our ways are your ways, because they are the ways of people.”
    Such was their lust for roast flesh that the others agreed. They came to Odutu below the Mountain and swore upon the Rock of Meeting as Da and Datta had told them. Then Da and Datta gave them fire, and they made fire logs, one for each Kin .
    But when An and Ammu learned what had been said and done, they wept .

CHAPTER EIGHT
    A moon went by, and another, with a thunderstorm every few days. The storm season ended and more moons went by.
    Otan could walk. The valley was no longer strange to him. It was as if he had always lived here, being taken down to the pool morning and evening to drink, and at night sleeping in the stinking cave.
    It was the same with Mana and Ko. They quickly learned the ways of these people, and made friends with their children and joined in their games. Ko was a favourite with the women, who spoiled him and told him what a fine boy he was. No one paid much attention to Mana.
    They paid even less to Tinu. They seemed to think that because she couldn’t talk clearly she wasn’t a real person. She didn’t seem to mind. She spent some of her time helping Noli with Otan, but most of it tagging along with Suth, watching what he did and helping him when she could. She set a trap at the warren almost every time they passed it, and usually caught something. She built better traps even than Baga, with delicately balanced rocks that dropped at a touch.
    The men, of course, wouldn’t admit this. They said it was because she was Moonhawk, who preyed upon ground rats. That was why Tinu was lucky.
    (These people told many of the same Oldtales as the Kin, but some were different. In their Oldtales they called Monkey by his real name. It wasn’t Monkey, they said, who’d caused all the trouble. It was Crocodile and Fat Pig, who were jealous of his cleverness because they were stupid. They’d conspired against him.)
    Noli seemed to change much more than Tinu. She remembered the Good Places, of course, and the long journeys between them, but she didn’t mind their loss. After the first few days Mosu allowed her to come foraging sometimes with the rest of them, but once they were back at the cave Noli would spend much of the time sitting with Mosu, listening or talking, or else in what seemed to be a kind of shared half trance, as if they were dreaming the same dream.
    â€œWhat do you do with that old woman so long?” Suth asked her.
    â€œI learn,” she said. “She is very old. She knows much.”
    Suth didn’t like this. He missed Noli. He needed her. She was Moonhawk, not Monkey. She belonged with him, raising their small ones in the true Moonhawk ways. Mosu had power. She must have, to be leader of these people. Ant Mother sometimes had women for leaders, and so did Snake, in the Oldtales, but never since anyone could remember, and never old and blind, like Mosu. Was she using her power to trap Noli, to make her become not Moonhawk but Monkey?
    â€œShe sees nothing,” he said crossly. “Her eyes are dead.”
    â€œIt is because she is old,” said Noli. “It is not the blood sickness. When she was young she saw well. She says long ago tens and tens and tens of people lived in this Place. Some lived here, at this cave. Some lived over there. That is where Mosu was born.”
    She pointed out across the forest to the wide, promising slopes on the far side of the valley. Nobody foraged or hunted there. It was too far to go and return in a day, when