She stops. She could trumpet for help but her fear humiliates her. It wearies her even, some new part of herself that feels ruthless, and she starts walking again with the thought that she will move through the hyenas’ ranks as she moved through the bullets and humans, like an invincible visitor in someone else’s memory.
The breeze wafts up from the swamp and carries the sweet odour of rot. By the time the hyenas glance over their shouldersshe is quite close to them. A pulse flutters in her throat. “Those who would harm you are thwarted,” she rumbles to herself, and the hyenas skulk away.
She goes to the bank and looks down. There they are, dispersed among the steaming heaps that are the dead. As silent as the dead. A ponderous elation stirs in her belly, but instead of hurrying to greet them she stays where she is to sort out, in the moonlight, who is who.
Hail Stones–that is Hail Stones in the shallows at the carcass of She-Demands. And Swamp is beside him. A few feet from the two bull calves, where She-Scares fell, is … who? She-Screams? No, She-Snorts. And the calf on the shore would be Bent, the only surviving calf. And so the cow next to him must be She-Soothes. Yes, that makes sense, because they are standing over the body of She-Stammers. Behind them, passing one hind foot above the head of She-Sees, is She-Screams.
That’s the lot. Is it? Hail Stones, Swamp, She-Snorts, She-Soothes, Bent, She-Screams. She moves along the bank and peers through the dark with rising alarm, and her withered leg buckles and she starts sliding down to the shore.
She-Soothes gets to her first and, trumpeting incoherently, pulls her to her feet. Mud touches the sticky line of temporin under the older cow’s left eye, which is missing, the socket stuffed with something that smells of blood and hyena dung. “Your eye,” she says, but her voice is lost in the clamour. She-Snorts roars, “Mud!” (not “She-Spurns,” as Mud will later appreciate) and, “Jubilation!” Between Mud’s forelegs Bent shuffles on his knees and whips his trunk, and She-Screams tosses her head and in the moonlight the whites of her eyes give her a demented look.
And then all at once everybody goes still, as if there is a round of gunshot. But that’s not what it is, it is nothing out there. It is a thought they all have. An awareness of the dead.
No one speaks or moves, but when the vultures begin to grunt, a beautiful voice says, “They have fallen into The Eternal Shoreless Water.”
It is Hail Stones, who–Mud only now realizes–hasn’t left the swamp. She also realizes that he is the last of the She-D’s. And that he is right: the descent of the dead is exactly what she sensed. Their vertigo, and the splash.
“Your family is all together now,” She-Snorts says in a kindly tone Mud has never before heard her use, and Mud sees that she is the biggest of the three big cows. And therefore the new matriarch. Nonchalant, irreverent, lustful She-Snorts–suddenly the matriarch!
She-Snorts turns her attention back to Mud. When she doesn’t speak Mud says, “I had hoped she was with you.”
“How did you know what I was thinking?” She-Snorts says, and Mud understands that she is asking, did Mud hear her mind? Because if she did–if anybody, for that matter, is hearing anybody else’s mind–then Date Bed, the family’s mind talker, is dead.
Mud swallows around what feels like gravel in her throat. “Matriarch, I didn’t know.”
“Oh, I really can’t bear it!” She-Screams cries. “After everything we’ve been through, and now to think that Date Bed might be lying somewhere–”
“Piss on that!” roars She-Soothes. “Date Bed will be here before morning.” She looks around in her hearty fashion. She is a burly cow with thick bullish tusks and an appallingresilience. When her firstborn bull calf died, shortly after his birth, she dropped a few fronds over the body and bellowed at everyone else to quit their bawling. “What’s done is done!” she trumpeted. “She-Soothes wants her browse!” And now, only hours ago, her daughter, She-Stammers, was slaughtered, and her left eye is gone, and yet she stomps her foot and roars, “Why imagine the worst?”
When nobody responds, she bellows, “Date Bed is no fool!”
Normally she can arouse at least one of them to her optimistic way of thinking. Not tonight. Date Bed is far from a fool, but she is so small.
Up on the plain the hyenas cackle. Vultures spiral, the occasional soft flap of their wings so like the flapping of their own ears. Mud and She-Snorts continue to look at each other, and it is just as well that Mud’s thoughts can’t be heard because what she is thinking is, “I’m the one who loves her. None of you loves her as I do,” and the uselessness of her love arouses her to such a pitch of anguish that she thinks of returning to the plain and searching for Date Bed on her own. Which is lunacy, she knows. She splashes into the water, backwards, striding clumsily backwards, and when she hits the body of She-Scares she passes one hind foot over the skull as if to release the spirit to oblivion, where it already is. But Mud isn’t yet prepared to see her adoptive mother–a hole where her face was.
* This is how darkness spreads.
Chapter Seven
A bullet from the same round of shots that killed She-Distracts hit Date Bed above her right eye. Instead of the piercing sensation she was braced for, there was a hard smack. She had been struck by a stone, she thought. She touched the wound and felt the hole as a bump. She ran across the shore and up onto the bank, where, blinking through blood, she mistook retreating dust clouds for her family in flight. She chased them for miles, for hours, trumpeting their names and begging them to slow down. They called back, or so she hallucinated, and yet they would not wait. They all ran extraordinarily fast and they took sharp turns in perfect unison, like a flock of birds. The dust buried their tracks, swallowed their scent. By the time she dropped to her knees, on the dazzling white sands of an arid lake, her shadow was streaming out behind her.
She awakens at dawn, famished and parched. A terrible painpulses through the right side of her skull. Out of her left eye she sees the blurred silhouettes of vultures eddying above her. She throws herself to her feet, and the pain in her head rolls like a boulder. The skin on her back and left flank is sunburned. Touching her wound, she now feels the hole as a hole, and she smells the gunpowder. She smells her blood, the sweet wet blood in the hole and the sour crust of blood on her face.
A low mist fumes across the pan. Sunward and some distance apart she spies two dark masses that she suspects are lone male wildebeests guarding their territories until their females return. But they could be hyenas who, because these are abnormal times, have come out to hunt during the day. Or they could be nothing, places where the mist has congested. How abjectly she depends on Mud’s keen eyes she has never appreciated until now.
She walks to the edge of the pan and lifts her forefeet onto a low stone table. Since the onset of the drought she has been conducting experiments into infrasonic rumbles and has come up with two theories. One is that standing on rock improves transmission quality. The other is that during severe droughts the ground dries out so thoroughly that the rumbles get blocked behind walls of impenetrable earth.
In either event she has no choice except to try to communicate. She calls to Mud and to her mother. When no answer comes she calls to each of the She-S’s in turn. Still no answer. Either the rumbles aren’t getting through or… .
Or everybody is dead. In which case she spent all those hours yesterday pursuing a mirage.
She reminds herself that she saw She-Scares and She-Scavenges go down, nobody else. Who knows how manyothers survived? All of them might have, she tells herself as she weeps for the two certain deaths (weeps without tears because she must not waste fluid). All the rest might have survived.
But where are they? Where is she? Nothing about this place is familiar, no combination of scents or sounds. She can’t smell water. Even at the sunken centre of the pan where she slept she couldn’t smell it. She will have to ask for help from somebody. Not from the vultures, those sadistic liars. She starts walking toward the nearest dark shape, sn
iffing the scoured ground as she goes. If it is a hyena, it won’t advise her but it won’t attack her either, now that the sun has risen and she is approaching it in this fearless manner.
While it is still a shimmering obscurity it comes to its feet and snorts, thus revealing itself, and she stops where she is, at that respectful distance, and thinks, “Hello, bull ideal.”*
No response.
“I apologize for disturbing you,” she thinks, walking closer, “but I wonder if you might tell me where we are in relation to The She-Hill.”
He lifts his snout.
“The Ideal Hill,” she amends.
Silence.
She decides to appeal to his sympathy, if he has any. “I am very thirsty,” she thinks. “Could you direct me to the nearest source of water?”
He shakes his head, which she takes to be a warning rather than a refusal, although it is possible that he has no idea wherewater is, considering that wildebeests can go for hundreds of days without drinking.
“I am wounded,” she thinks. Her smell will have conveyed as much, but she wants him to understand that she has no intention of challenging him over his patch of scrub. “I have become separated from my family,” she thinks, and her throat constricts in self-pity.
He sweeps his stubby horns. And then he charges her with that awkward, stiff-legged gait they have.
She holds her ground. He is no match for her. When he is close enough that she can feel the gust of his stagnant breath, he stops and looks her up and down and she knows he is gauging her vanity. Wildebeests are under the impression that each species determines its own relative size. Bigness in comparison to other creatures is, they believe, conceit. Whereas smallness is excessive humility and therefore no less prideful. The perfect size, the “ideal” size, is wildebeest size.
“Big and ugly,” he concludes. Like the lunatic he is, he starts bounding on the spot, tossing his head, slinging saliva. “Ugly,” he grunts. “Ugly, ugly… .”
Her wound throbs. Half-blinded by the pain she turns and walks away. She takes care not to step in his dung and she lets out a desperate laugh because she knows fastidiousness to be mad under the circumstances. Mad she may be, but he and his entire species are demented. Most fallen species are, if you ask her. Humans, who are fallen she-ones. Snakes, who are fallen mongooses. Wildebeests are fallen warthogs, hence their slab heads and preoccupation with size.
Through the pearly mist the stones and bones flash with a counterfeit whiteness. She thinks of the white bone, how tragicit would be if one of these countless gleams was her salvation and she passed it by. Not that there is much likelihood of that. Hail Stones said the white bone is almost always dropped within a circle of boulders or termite mounds to the west of whatever hills may be in the region, and there are no hills or boulders here, at least none that she can see. Neither are the bones she picks up very white. Close up they are dull. And cool … the day is not yet as torrid as her burned back would suggest.
She kicks dirt into the end of her trunk and flings it over her back and between her legs. It is the longest drought in at least sixty-five years. We are being punished, she thinks. Either that, or tested. And then, recalling She-Demands’ final sermon, she thinks, “We are being remembered,” and this strikes her as a more terrible prospect than the other two because it is unassailable, and she says out loud (appealing to the She, who knows she’ll say it, who is recollecting–perhaps with regret–what in some frivolous or barbarous state of mind She once imagined), “I must find water.”
But the morning is half over before she finds even another creature. A secretary bird it smells like. For all that they have a reputation for pomposity and standoffishness, the two secretary birds that she has ever spoken with were cordial, although difficult to draw out, it’s true.
She hurries toward it. She is still too far away to scent its sex when she detects it turning to look at her.
“Hello, majestic,” she thinks.
The bird high-steps in a circle.
“I wonder if you might help me,” she thinks.
If the bird thinks something in reply, she doesn’t hear. A creature who is not speaking must be looking roughly in herdirection for her to hear its mind. She keeps walking, slowly now, until she is near enough that she could touch its stunningly long tail feathers. It is male.
“Hello, bull majestic,” she thinks.
He is fixed upon a pile of stones. She refrains from sniffing the pile but believes that she smells rodent dung. She is in terrific pain and her throat is so dry it feels embedded with thorns and yet pleasure leaps up in her because she has never before been this close to a secretary bird. He is majestic, she thinks (thinks it hard enough for him to hear). “The fit of his name,” as the saying goes. She herself would not have called such creatures “kick flies.” (This she thinks privately.) Her kind take it for granted that the backward kick is a strut, a disdainful gesture, whereas she suspects that it is a way of scraping the ground for insects.
The bird’s right claw swipes down and comes up clutching a brown snake, which he begins to bash on the stones. After a good dozen blows the snake finally stops writhing, and the bird inclines his head so that he is looking up at Date Bed. “I very nearly failed, thanks to you,” he thinks.
“I beg your pardon,” Date Bed thinks. The snake is the same breed of puff adder that, over the years, has killed two She-S calves. “Would you know,” she thinks, “where there is water in the vicinity?”
“I would.” He stretches his neck imperiously.
“Where?”
“Where is what?”
“The water.”
“The water is where it is.”
“I do not know this region.”
“Which fact does not alter the location of the water.” He opens his wings and runs in a zigzag, dragging the adder through the dirt and producing a sinuous tube of brown dust whose resemblance to the adder itself is not lost on her.
She heads off in the opposite direction. Sweeping her trunk across the ground, she inhales the discouraging odours of old dung, old urine, old bones, dead flesh. The wind is up. Every time she sprays herself with dust, most of it blows away before it hits her skin, and soon the heat will be unbearable. Already the egrets alighting on her back feel like licks of flame. Where will she shelter? For the first time in her life her memory has failed her. Somehow she got herself here, and ordinarily all she would have to do is picture that journey in her mind’s eye and retrace her steps, but yesterday is a haze, as deteriorated as her eyesight.
She walks aimlessly, since no scent guides her. The dung is that of ostriches, hyenas, leopards, warthogs, giraffes, golden jackals. Vultures, naturally. Her own boluses, when she comes across them, lead nowhere. Instead of marking a trail they mark loops, as if she defecated careening. Not all the dung of the other creatures is old, and sometimes she catches whiffs of life–hyenas and wildebeests mostly–amid the carcasses. Whenever she comes to rocky ground she sends out infrasonic calls to Mud and her mother, and where there are dried streams she digs for water. During one of these excavations she discovers a glut of tubers whose juicy pulp takes the desperation off her thirst. It is a day as hot as any she remembers. She hasn’t the will to stop herself from reliving all the most torrid days of her life, and so she imagines shade where there is none or attempts to drink at pools that aren’tthere. Skirting the flaming ground of a memory, she just misses stepping on real flames that, in places where there is still enough dead grass to fuel them, ruffle under whirlwinds of smoke. Black kites hover above the smoke and pretend not to hear her asking for help. Once, she sees what she thinks is a range of low hills but they turn out to be dust clouds created by a flock of vulturine guineafowl who cock their tiny heads at various angles and cackle “Scat!” and she finds herself absurdly frightened.
Her skull throbs ceaselessly now and it is becoming clear to her that she will have to tend to the wound or risk infection. A poultice is required, made either from warthog
urine and fever-tree bark (similar to the one She-Soothes applied to Hail Stones’ foot) or from hyena dung and fever-tree bark. There are only these two remedies for bullet wounds, as every nurse cow knows.
As Date Bed knows. For her, the momentous times at the Long Rains Massive Gatherings are when somebody falls sick or is injured and the nurse cows from every family–She-Soothes, She-Heals-And-Heals, She-Restores, She-Cures and all the rest–gather around the patient and debate how to proceed. Before she learned not to, she would ask the cows why one treatment was chosen over another, why the ingredients deviated from the standard mixture, and the answer was always a variation of “That’s what works,” which even as a small calf Date Bed heard as a variation of “Thus spake the She.” To her frustration nobody, not even the eminent She-Purges, was interested in the logic behind the remedy.
Date Bed is supremely interested. As early as her second Massive Gathering she would suggest possible explanations:the dung suffocates the pus; the hollow sticks swallow the fever. The nurse cows would listen with apparent interest but never did their eyes light up, and eventually Date Bed began to understand that they were afraid. You don’t wonder about the cures, you don’t look too hard at them. To do that is to tamper with their power and offend the She. Offend Her how? Date Bed has never asked, appreciating, as she does, that the nurse cows’ fear is itself a breach of faith, which none of them would like to think about, let alone admit to.
In any event, she knows what she needs for her wound. But where in this forsaken territory will she find a fever tree?
She sniffs the air and turns in a circle. So that her eyes will water and temporarily clear her vision, she refrains from blinking. (She wishes there was a remedy for poor vision. A liquid that, unlike tears, did not wash way. A transparent jelly or mucus you daubed on your eyeballs.)
Anywhere is as unprofitable as anywhere else. Bush, stones, fire.
The White Bone Page 9