“She said white bone!” Bent squeals. “You’re not supposed to say it!”
“Since there is no other reason for her to have come here,” Hail Stones says, “it could be that she learned from some creature that the white prize might be found on The Spill.”
She-Snorts looks toward the black boulders, and everyone except She-Screams does the same. In the mid-afternoon light each boulder is the precise size of its shadow. Here and there, on the highest, vultures perch, backs humped to the wind. “How I would love to think that she has gone to The Safe Place,” She-Snorts says.
She-Screams sprays herself with water. “If she has, I would expect her to turn right around and start searching for us for a change. When I think of everything we’ve suffered for her sake.”
“I’m thirsty,” Bent whispers. She-Soothes nudges him, and he drops to his knees and sips with his mouth.
“Matriarch,” Hail Stones says, “may I presume that it is your intention to cross The Spill?” He knows, as they all do from Torrent, that to the north lies a barren plain and then a desert, and to the south is a mighty wire fence beyond which is a large aggregation of humans.
She-Snorts looks at him.
“At the very least,” he says, “you may find that not all the water has migrated from Feed Swamp.”
“Take your drink now,” she says.
“Ahead of the matriarch?” She-Screams trumpets.
“I am content to wait,” Hail Stones says.
“Go on,” She-Snorts says. “Take your drink.”
So he does.
She-Screams expels her breath in exasperated blasts.
For her part, Mud moves away. She rumbles her litany of infrasonic calls and while waiting for the responses that never come pulls a tangled ball of dead shrubbery and tucks it into her mouth. How will they survive a five-day trek across those boulders? she wonders. How will her leg hold up? And what will they eat out there? She-Soothes is not producing enough milk, and Hail Stones … his wound has scabbed over but he limps badly and is so emaciated that it hurts him to lie down. When he sleeps he remains standing and leans against Swamp, who, for his friend’s sake, sleeps standing as well.
Night finds the She-S’s still on the riverbed. They have cleared a lying-down place, the bones that were in the way now deposited in a stack against the bank. Every once in a while the stack creaks or snaps … the bones settling, Mud assumes, but a little later she decides that a snake or a lizard has entered the stack and is wondering what monstrosity once claimed such a skeleton–the mess of ribcages, the multiple jaws.
Sleep, for Mud, has become the brink of a trap. As soon as she starts drifting off, she jolts awake from a feeling that something terrible is about to happen, and so she takes this as a sign and tries to keep her eyes open. Her writhing newborn feels asif it had scales. What if she is carrying a crocodile? A fish? These are ruthless times, and perverse. Everything seems to have fled for good: water, food, reason. Why should the laws of procreation be excluded from the exodus?
“Please,” she thinks. In the face of so much to pray for, her prayers have dwindled to the one word. The darkness deepens but not by much. It is a bright, cold night. A three-quarter moon in the northern sky, in the south a gauze of stars. “None of those dull shines belongs to anyone from the slaughter” is Mud’s bleak thought. She-Sees, She-Scares, She-Demands and all the rest, instead of living in bliss among the sky cows, float oblivious and tuskless upon The Eternal Shoreless Water.
Now on this holy water
Our blessed dead ones keep.
No scent remains of slaughter,
No sound afflicts their sleep.
And no fear, either, Mud thinks after the last line of the verse has run through her mind, no fear afflicts their sleep. It is such a peaceful prospect that she closes her eyes. When she opens them, it is near dawn. She lifts her head, alarmed to have let down her guard. She hears a soft clatter and twists around.
Swamp and Hail Stones. They are walking away.
She pulls herself to her knees. They have reached the bank. Hail Stones goes first as Swamp nudges him up the incline. At the top, Swamp takes the lead, and Hail Stones starts to follow but then he stops and looks around.
Mud lifts her trunk. Hail Stones does the same, and in that small moment before he turns again she knows he is imaginingwhat she is: their mating. So vivid is the image that she almost has the sensation of falling into a memory, and she is struck by the thought that what could have happened one day–but won’t now (strangely, she is certain of this)–was somehow substantial enough for the very possibility of it to generate a memory.
She lowers her trunk, suddenly shy. Swamp emits a low rumble and Hail Stones turns. Off they go eastward, back over the plain.
At the point when Mud can no longer smell them, She-Snorts comes to her feet. Mud stands as well, and the matriarch hears her and swivels her trunk behind herself and then goes to the bank, moving over the bones as quietly as the bulls did.
Mud joins her. “Did they tell you they were leaving, Matriarch?” she murmurs.
She-Snorts doesn’t answer. She is scenting, she can still smell them. Presently she drops her trunk and rumbles, “No, but I knew. Hail Stones wouldn’t have been able to manage even half a day on The Spill.”
“Where do you think they are headed?”
“One of the hill ranges, perhaps.” She lowers her head.
She is weeping, Mud guesses. Weeping not for Swamp, who is her blood relation, but for Hail Stones. Mud begins to weep as well, tearlessly and in silence.
“Hail Stones has trunk,” the matriarch says.
Yes, Mud thinks. He does. What other bull calf ever mourned the death of his matriarch so deeply and reverently? Or walked over a thousand miles, without complaint–without flinching!–on a septic foot? Hail Stones has trunk. He is soulful and valorous. Whereas Swamp is anything but. Still, Swamp recognizes trunk and is drawn to it, unlike many who are threatened by trunk in other bulls of their approximate age and size.
“Have you envisioned the death of either of them?” She-Snorts asks.
“No,” Mud says, startled. Her thoughts go to She-Screams, who sleeps in innocence of her own doom and her son’s departure. She says, “She-Screams will be frantic when she wakes up and finds–” She stops, realizing that she has spoken the banished cow’s name.
She-Snorts doesn’t seem to be listening. She is scenting toward The Spill. Mud lifts her trunk. Vulture dung, carrion … Mud picks up nothing worth lingering over.
“A longbody is out there,” She-Snorts says.
Mud still can’t detect it.
“It has been following us for two days, staying just out of scent.” She gives a self-congratulatory snort. “Or so it thinks.”
“How very odd,” Mud says. Cheetahs have limited ranges, none as large as a two-day trek.
“I suspect it is Me-Me,” She-Snorts says.
Instantly Mud’s mind is back at Blood Swamp on the day of the slaughter … She-Demands saying that Me-Me may know where The Safe Place is. “Why do you think so?” she asks.
“Because longbodies don’t track she-ones.”
“What does she want?” Mud asks.
The matriarch shakes her head.
“She knows where The Safe Place is,” Mud says.
“She may know.”
“Or may not,” Mud concedes. How weary she is of ambiguities. She says, “I wonder if she was here when Date Bed was. Date Bed could have mind talked with her.”
“I’ve thought of that.”
“Do you suppose Hail Stones was right? That Date Bed came here looking for the white prize?”
“It is possible. It is possible she came here aimlessly. Hail Stones is a good bull. He says the comforting thing.”
“I shall miss him,” Mud says, and the image–the memory?–of the two of them mating returns to her and she waves her ears, abashed.
She-Snorts is quiet. Presently she says, “I have been moun
ted by all of the living She-D bulls and four who are now dead, and except for Torrent there isn’t a bull in any other family to compare with them. I know what Hail Stones might have been had he not been lamed.”
“He won’t lose the limp?” This hadn’t occurred to Mud.
“She-Soothes says there is no hope of that.”
“He’ll be like me,” Mud says pityingly, but in some abysmal part of herself she is comforted.
“Fortunately he has Swamp to take care of him.”
“Swamp,” Mud says doubtfully.
“Swamp is fit, and more resourceful than he lets on.”
Mud tries to picture somnolent Swamp felling trees, scenting danger. She guesses that as far as water goes, the two of them will avail themselves of the holes She-Snorts excavated.
She-Snorts lets out a rueful chuckle. “Swamp the heart-breaker,” she says in her old deadpan, “impervious to my charms.”
Not since before the slaughter has She-Snorts talked this easily and at such length with any of them. Mud looks at her. In the transparent pre-dawn her skin is glossy and her tusks beam white, as Mud’s don’t. Mud’s and everyone else’s tusks have gone dull and stained, but the matriarch’s hoard their white, and the nodular peak of her head and the thick base of her trunk are the same as they ever were. She is thin, they all are, and yet she does not appear diminished by her thinness, and to Mud this seems like a display of mettle, as if for her to have kept her beauty were a feat. In a kind of infatuation she finds herself leaning against the bigger cow. She-Snorts permits the intimacy, and as soon as Mud realizes this, she is self-conscious, and the feeling of being a stranger in the family, of being honoured by rather than entitled to the intimacy, returns. She doesn’t pull away. It would be an impertinence to do so. The thought occurs to her that in She-Snorts’ mind, and in this fragile moment, she could be Date Bed, and so she breathes more quickly, the way Date Bed does, and she lowers her eyes, whose green light is not Date Bed’s. They stand like that, the two of them, while the last of the darkness lifts. A bird starts up a piercing song and they move apart to brace for the scream that comes a moment later.
Mud turns. She-Snorts does not.
She-Screams is charging up and down the riverbed, pulverizing bones.
She-Soothes and Bent scramble to their feet. “Where did they go?” She-Soothes bellows in Mud’s direction.
“Back over the plain.”
“Swamp!” She-Screams gallops up to the bank. “They went this way!”
Nobody moves.
She-Screams whirls around. “They’re only calves!”
Silence.
“Are you going to abandon them?”
She-Snorts sniffs the ground. Bent cowers under She-Soothes, who gapes from the matriarch to She-Screams and sways one forefoot irresolutely. Up on the bank She-Screams tosses her head. Mud longs to tell her what She-Snorts said about Swamp being more resourceful than he lets on, but She-Screams would pretend not to hear. And wouldn’t believe it anyway.
“Cowards!” She-Screams cries. Behind her the sky blazes gold and orange. She looms above them. She looks threatening, magnificent even. “Traitors!” she cries.
And she turns and is gone.
“Shall She-Soothes fetch her back?” the nurse cow roars.
She-Snorts ambles to the water hole and removes the plug. She holds it daintily in the tip of her trunk and appears to study it.
“She’ll track them!” She-Soothes roars finally. “If she stops to send out a grounder, they’ll know she’s coming.” She nods, convincing herself. “She’ll catch up with them soon enough.”
She won’t, Mud thinks. It strikes her that the reason She-Screams was alone in the vision was that she will be alone when she dies. She steps over to the bank and climbs it and lifts her trunk.
There is no wind. There are footprints … three sets, and above them a virtually motionless ridge of dust stretching to the horizon. Beyond the dust She-Screams is not visible but her scent is still strong. And so too, now, is another scent, evil and cloying, drifting from The Spill.
Chapter Twelve
Tall Time plods northwest. Just before dawn he spotted an ostrich running in that direction and now, the farther he goes, the more tracks and dung he comes across. Jackal, hyena, oryx, giraffe, lioness.
It would appear that he is headed for water.
Although not necessarily. The loud scraping of a grasshopper, which pesters his right ear, advertises water not to the northwest but to the northeast. If you pay attention to such things. Tall Time can’t pretend he doesn’t. He is no longer driven to act, that’s the difference. For him the links have become like an ancient matriarch in her final, addled days–your first instinct is to obey her, and sometimes she’s worth listening to. Almost always she isn’t.
The last time he drank was yesterday morning, taking a mad risk at a water hole near a circle of human dwellings. Before that he was dry for two days. Since entering the desert he has eaten only the spines of date-palm fronds. How (he keeps asking himself) did Torrent survive this terrain? Tall Time can’t imagine the old bull surviving it now, in his deteriorated state. Given which, Tall Time wonders if he isn’t a fool to be trusting Torrent’s directions.
He has not planned for failure. He reminds himself that when Torrent first spoke of how to find the Lost Ones, his memory was not yet demolished, and back then he mentioned–as he did again at Blood Swamp–a northern desert that took four days to cross. Well, this is a desert, the only northern desert as far as Tall Time knows. And he has been crossing it for three and a half days now.
Already, so early in the morning, the soles of his feet burn. No relief comes from spraying himself with sand as hot as this. Flies buzz at his anus, in his ears, in front of his eyes, colossal ticks rummage through the cuts on his skin. To fend off thirst he sucks on a stone. He hums nonsense songs, hymns, they are the same to him. He keeps his eyes on the ostrich track, which seems to tow him along. When it suddenly ends he flinches as if the ground itself gave way.
A scuffle has taken place here between the ostrich and a lioness. The lioness’s tracks approach from the north. The blood has the odour of both creatures and is only now beginning to coagulate. Whatever the lioness’s wounds may be, they cannot be very serious because she has dragged the ostrich away, and in so doing has made a wide path that blots out her prints. Down the centre of the path the smeared trail of blood is a pink ribbon.
The path leads northwest, and Tall Time follows it. The landscape undulates. At the top of every crest Tall Time expects to see, in the gully below, the lioness, and perhaps several members of her family, eating the big bird. But on thepath goes, incredibly. For any lioness, let alone an injured one, a grown ostrich would be no small burden to lug up and down these hills.
What he does finally see is so unexpected that he growls.
The ostrich turns to look at him. It is alive, and upright. The lioness is the one who is dead, sprawled before the ostrich who is … mourning the corpse? That crazy explanation seems to be the only one available to Tall Time until he is a few yards from the pair and sees that the ostrich’s left foot is embedded in the lioness’s chest, and then he realizes that the ostrich must have kicked its attacker with a blow that cut straight through the ribcage and probably caused instant death. But the foot remained snared.
“You dragged her all this way,” Tall Time says, flabbergasted at such a display of strength.
The ostrich, who of course doesn’t understand, gazes up with its heavy-lidded eyes, apparently too exhausted to be frightened.
“I may be able to help,” Tall Time says.
The ostrich opens its beak and lets out a dreary whistle.
“I shall try not to hurt you,” Tall Time says. He side-steps splats of blood. When he is close enough, he twines his trunk around the rosy strip below the ostrich’s knee. The skin there is loose and ringed, the leg itself a twig. The miracle now is that the ostrich is allowing this to happen. “Here we g
o,” Tall Time murmurs and gives a tug.
Simultaneous with the snap is a lion-like boom. Tall Time releases the leg and gapes at the carcass, but it is the ostrich who boomed. And does so again, while desperately pecking at Tall Time’s shin.
“Forgive me!” Tall Time says, aghast. The foot is still stuck but now the leg is broken.
The ostrich booms and flaps its useless wings.
Tall Time turns and runs … northeast, where the grasshopper advised he should go, although he is scarcely aware of direction other than that he must have been going the wrong way if it led to such a calamity. “I’ve killed it” is his one thought, and it’s true, he has. Even if the ostrich frees its foot, as a cripple it won’t live another day. Weeping, Tall Time lumbers up the sandy hills, slides down on his haunches and feels the gist of existence in this enterprise: the slog, the respite, the slog. The relentlessness. The end … at midday, the sun drilling straight down, and his leg throbbing where it was pecked, his body like a boulder that will roll no farther, his throat a charred crater, and his mind falling into memories, slipping from one to another down through his life by way of holes that at the time were pauses and mysteries and misapprehensions.
He believes that he is experiencing the descent into “heat sleep,” and he is resigned, but when he comes to the memory of his first meeting with Mud he fights himself into the present and to his feet.
When he left Blood Swamp twenty-eight days ago, his hunch was that the She-S’s had gone to one of several remote watering places known to their extended family. The dung trail was so dry and reduced he was unable to detect any individual scents. There was only the bittersweet She-S scent, which ended after some fifty miles, but he thought he knew where it led. He was wrong. And then wrong again, and again. Wherever he went, not only were the She-S’s not there,nobody was, and what signs of she-one life he came across–denuded and fallen trees, trampled thickets–were never recent. At least once an hour he sent out infrasonic calls. None was answered.
Where is everybody? Dead, yes, hundreds are dead, in Tall Time’s estimation as many from the drought as from slaughter. You can tell the drought deaths by the absence of bullet holes in the hide, or by the presence of feet and tusks, or (since humans are scavengers) by the absence of bullets among the bones. Still, the number of corpses doesn’t add up to annihilation. Either all the remaining families have found their way to The Safe Place–and there is no evidence of such a mass exodus in any single direction–or they have scattered in every direction to wait out the era of darkness at the fringes of the world.
The White Bone Page 17