Читать книгу Hap - Lesley Beake - Страница 5

Hap lay on her skin blanket, looking into a white mist that enclosed her and her place. The day floated like a bird on soft water. There was nothing to see but white. There was nothing to smell in the cool, damp air.

Even the sound of the sea on the rocks far below, even the sea was quiet today.

They had eaten a large fish trapped by the tide in a pool, and some berries and bulbs the younger girls had collected. The people were quiet, resting in the white day. Even the children were still. The babies slept.

Hap reached out to the rock surface and touched it gently with the tips of her fingers feeling, with her eyes closed, the rock-feel, the loose flakes of stone, the lichen patches. When she opened her eyes, the rock colours were brighter in the white light than they had been before, glowing in the fine, damp air, soft moss greens and gentle sun colours against the deep, dark grey of the stone.

And there, at the top of the rock where she lay, just where the overhang of their shelter began, she saw the painted hand.

It was faded, almost to the colour of the rock, but it gleamed in the pearled light with a different texture. For a moment Hap studied it. She had seen such hands before … in the mountains where her family travelled in summer to the cool streams and the deep-shade shelters beside the great river. Her people had made them in the time-gone. This she knew; the people who had lived here before. The people who had made the old paintings, the animals and the dancers, the paintings on the rock that her grandfather and his sister still made when they had been to the other side.

Who had made this painted hand? It was a small hand, slender and delicate, a girl’s hand. Had a girl made it? A girl like herself ?

Hap knelt on the smooth earth floor of the shelter, and reached up to it. Gently she placed her own hand over the painting, touching her precious bone bracelet with her other hand, holding her palm against the rock.

It fitted perfectly.