Free The Kin by Peter Dickinson Page B

there was enough within reach to give them all a good living here. And how would they be safe outside the cave with the big night prowlers around?
    The mere sight of those empty spaces made Suth restless. Like the others he had grown used to the valley, but only in certain ways. Almost every day he felt the earth tremble, but now he no longer paused in what he was doing. If it happened at night, it didn’t wake him. And he barely noticed the wafts of foul-egg odour that drifted to and fro on the breeze.
    On the other hand, the cave still stank in his nostrils. Every evening he entered it with reluctance, wishing there were other places to lair, and in his dreams he walked and walked and walked, and would wake with his legs aching from the imaginary journey. All the life he had known had been moving from one Good Place to the next, following the rains as they moved across the parched land. He could not get used to staying in this one place, going out in the same direction every day, never more than half a morning’s journey, to forage the next patch of ground and smell the same smells and see the same horizons as yesterday.
    And time and time again something happened to remind him that Noli had been right: he and the Moonhawks were prisoners in this valley. Nobody seemed to bother much about them while they were separated from each other, but as soon as they were all together they were watched. They weren’t allowed to forage at the end of the line, where they might drift away unnoticed, but were made to stay in the middle. And if by any chance they got out of sight somebody came to look for them.
    Suth tested this the first time he had a chance. They had hardly started to forage one morning when a storm brewed up and everybody crowded under a clump of trees for shelter. Suth deliberately took the Moonhawks aside to a sloping boulder where there was just room for all six of them to huddle out of the wet.
    Almost at once Dith came striding through the rain, seized Suth by the arm and dragged him out.
    â€œWhat do you do here?” he snarled. “You stay where we are. Come, all of you.”
    He hauled Suth across to the trees and in front of everybody flung him to the ground as if he’d been punishing a misbehaving child.
    That too was typical. It was another reason why Suth knew he couldn’t belong here. He didn’t fit in among these people. He was supposed to be the father of a family. Mosu had said so. He had made himself a good digging stick and sharpened its point and hardened it in the fire, as a man was supposed to. He carried it with him wherever he went, but apart from using it to kill a snake, the way his father had shown him, he didn’t do any hunting with it. For that you needed to go in a group with the men, and they wouldn’t let him, any more than they let him join the game they played under the trees while they were guarding the foragers. Suth wasn’t a man. He didn’t have the man-scars on his cheeks. So the men made a point of treating him as a child. He hated this.
    There were three boys of about Suth’s age, but Suth didn’t want to play with them. He was supposed to be a man. Besides, they didn’t want Suth in their group. It suited them better to copy the men and ignore him.
    The eldest of the boys was called Jad. His father was Jun, who was Mosu’s eldest son. One evening at the end of the rains, there was a buzz of excitement and the women started to prepare a feast. As they did so they kept picking on Jad, and ordering him about, and scolding him when he hadn’t done anything wrong. It was a sort of joke, but at the same time they took it seriously. It mattered.
    Suth sat and watched and felt sick in his heart. He understood what this meant. He knew what was going to happen.
    When they went down to the lake for their evening drink, Jad took a fresh leaf and folded it into a shallow bowl. He filled the bowl with water and carried it cupped