At last Presh decided that he wasn’t going to overawe Greb by mere display and he would have to fight him. He climbed out on to a flat platform of rock and fell into his combat pose, erect, arms braced, fingers half-clenched like the talons of a sea-eagle, teeth bared between snarling lips. He shook his hair around him so that it would dry into a glossy black mane and crest. He bellowed, challenging Greb to match his-display.
Greb didn’t bother. Neither the display, nor the fact that the whole watching tribe were on Presh’s side, seemed to affect him at all. He climbed out on the other side of the platform and immediately flew straight at Presh. The impact flung them both off the rock and into the water.
The tribe yelled their excitement. Challenge fights were a break from the day-to-day. They wanted to see Greb humiliated and punished, but they wanted a good fight first. It would add to Presh’s prestige if he won with courage.
The combatants rose apart, climbed out and rushed at each other. This time they fell on the rock and rolled about, locked together, biting and clawing. They separated, stood, circled, grappled and fell once more, rolling across the rock till they tumbled over the edge, bouncing off a jut of barnacled rock on their way down. Greb was underneath and must have caught the side of his head on a jag, because when he climbed out blood was pouring down his neck and shoulder. Such a hurt would have allowed any normal challenger to give in without loss of prestige, but Greb ignored it and rushed at Presh once more.
The nature of the tribe’s interest changed. Now they realized that for Greb no rules applied. This could be a fight to the death.
The pair battled repetitively on, exhausted, bruised, cut, blood-smeared. Greb’s first wound was still the only serious one. The sea would wash him clean, but before the fighters grappled again his neck and side would be streaked with scarlet and then as they fought the blood would blotch both of them until they tumbled once more into the sea. Greb was weakening faster than Presh, who now at the start of each bout fell into his challenge pose again, inviting Greb to submit. Greb ignored the offer and every time flung himself into the attack, blinder, madder, ever more hopeless. But still he fought on.
At last the end came. Once more they climbed on to the rock, once more Presh took up his pose, once more Greb attacked. They stood wrestling together. Presh began to force Greb to the edge, meaning to fling him into the sea and stand in triumph over him. The movement stopped. The rock surface was invisible to the watchers below, but they could see that Presh had caught his foot in something. For a moment he and Greb poised together until Presh in his effort to free his foot unbalanced them both and Greb wrestled him down. The whole tribe heard the leg-bone snap.
Presh screamed. Greb rose dazed and gasping, wiped the blood from his eyes and stared around, not understanding that the fight was over, looking to see where his enemy would rise from the water. Then he saw him lying moaning at his feet. He bent. Presh yelled with agony as his foot was wrenched from the fissure that had trapped it, and was still screaming when Greb tumbled him into the water.
Strength seemed to flow back into Greb. Still bleeding he stood erect, surveyed the platform and saw that it was too small, too uneven and too high above the water for a good triumph ritual. The tribe watched him, dazed, seemingly without minds of their own, and when he made a gesture of command and plunged into the water they followed him, but reluctantly and with many stragglers, down beside the steep dark cliffs to a shingly bay between that headland and the next.
Ma-ma stayed with Presh, buoying him up and crooning comfort. He had fainted now, and without her help might have drowned. Li took the baby while with Hooa’s help Ma-ma towed Presh along after the others. By the time they reached the bay, Greb was well into his triumph-dance.
Lined along the shallows the tribe cried Praise and dutifully flung their arches of water towards him, some so half-heartedly that the splash barely reached his ankles. If he noticed he would pause in his dance and come menacingly down, frightening the offenders into showing him more respect. This had happened twice before he reached the place where Ma-ma had joined the line.
The baby had woken and was crying. Li was trying to soothe him, Ma-ma and Hooa were busy with Presh. None of them attempted a splash. Greb glared at them and came stamping down. Alerted by the sudden hush Ma-ma looked up, saw him coming, and then slowly, deliberately, turned her back on him. Without thought, Li copied her.
Greb bellowed and gave Ma-ma a buffet that sent her floundering. He seized Li by the nape. She screamed and dropped the baby. She thought he was about to fling her on to the shingle and trample on her, but instead he crammed her on to his shoulder and stamped back up the beach to continue his parade, just as Presh had paraded with her after her dance with the dolphin. He would show the whole tribe that Li and her prestige were now his, to command and control.
She was terrified. She screamed and struggled. He struck at her with his free hand and she screamed louder still. Ma-ma was there, facing him, with Hooa beside her, both yelling – more of them, females, and then males, all crowding out of the water, thronging round Greb screaming their outrage, refusing his triumph after all. It was over. They wouldn’t accept him. He had broken the challenge-rules, won the fight by an accident, struck a mother who carried a baby still in its birth-fur, tried to own and control Li, who belonged to them all. He was not their leader.
Being Greb he tried to fight them all, but they were too many and too angry. The scrum milled to and fro. Li rocked above it, yelling with terror and clutching Greb’s mane to keep herself from falling. He loosed his hold on her to fight, and then she was grabbed from behind and wrenched free and passed back over the heads of the crowd, till they set her down. Whimpering she staggered down to Ma-ma, who was crouched in the shallows, clutching her screaming baby to her. Presh lay inert beside her, half in and half out of the water. Shuddering with sobs, Li clung to her side and watched the end of the fight.
The milling mass dwindled as the females worked themselves free, leaving the males to finish Greb off. The cliffs echoed and re-echoed with yells and bellows. Some fell and were trampled on until they crawled free. Then the scrimmage stilled and moved apart, forming a ring around the single body which lay inert in the middle. Silence fell. Li thought they must have killed him, till he moved.
He rose to hands and knees, lifted his head and snarled. His blood smeared his whole body. One eye stayed closed. Watched by the males he staggered to his feet and lurched towards Kerif as if he meant to start the fight again, but when Kerif moved aside he lurched on. The tribe watched him limp down the shingle and wade into the healing sea. Followed by their hoots of Shame! he swam awkwardly away, using only his left arm, out along the cliffs of the further headland, and disappeared.
NOW: MONDAY AFTERNOON
VINNY WASN’T FEELING well. It was partly the argument between Dad and Dr Hamiska, and partly the heat. The heat was appalling. The sun seared down on to the windless hillside and then seemed to bounce back up under her parasol, making her feel she wasn’t in the shade at all. The plan had been to go back to the camp for lunch and rest under the awnings till it got cooler, but instead everyone had rushed out to look at the new fossil, and now Dad and Dr Hamiska were arguing about it.
Dad stood on one side of the little hole, his body stiff, his gestures short and tense. Dr Hamiska lolled against the boulder on the other side, laughing with excitement half the time. Before Dad had arrived he’d lost patience with Mrs Hamiska’s finicky picking round the fossil, and had taken over in order to explore further into the hillside, hacking whole trowelfuls of clay out at a time. Just before Dad and the others had arrived he’d found a second fossil – in fact he’d broken it in half with the trowel – and now while he talked to Dad he kept fitting the two pieces together and turning them over to look at and then holding them up as if they had magic in them, giving him power, like one of Tolkien’s rings.