“The Spill,” he says. “When do you think this was?”
“I had the vision five days ago. I was seeing the near future. I cannot be more precise.”
“How many cows were with her?”
“Three. And only the one calf, the newborn. There was a longbody stretching and meowing nearby. It was exceedingly strange.”
“Me-Me,” he says, alarmed. “It must be her. She is nefarious. A longbody who craves the flesh of she-one newborns.” A startling thought occurs to him. “I wonder if she is descended from the longbody who ate the newborn white one?”
“We know nothing of this longbody,” I-Flounder says. The light in her eyes deepens. “Is it your intention to go directly to The Spill?” she asks.
“Yes, Matriarch.”
“I caution you against it. I caution you to go first to The Safe Place.”
“Why?”
“Once you are there and have gathered your strength, you will be better able to resume your search.”
“I am strong already,” he says, but he understands that her answer is an evasion. He is shaken again by the thought that she has envisioned him in peril … perhaps dead. If so, it doesn’t matter where he goes; his fate will prevail regardless. Why, then, is she warning him? Is she able to envision what might be? Or has she seen not a vision at all but some powerful Lost One omen? In either event, he finds that he isn’t brave enough–or mad enough–to oppose her.
“Very well,” he says finally.
She closes her eyes. Within seconds all of them do. The cave amplifies into blackness.
Chapter Thirteen
The cheetah must see that they are watching her–certainly she can’t doubt that they have caught her odour–and yet she creeps between the boulders in a crouch, as if she is stalking them.
“The damned thing’s deranged,” She-Soothes bellows.
The cheetah freezes mid-stride. When she starts moving again, Mud says, “Matriarch, how close are we going to let her come?”
“As close as she dares,” says She-Snorts.
They stand on the bank of Jaw-Log River where only moments ago She-Screams stood and called them cowards, traitors. It is dawn. Cold and no wind. More out of habit than caution (a cheetah is scarcely a threat to three cows) they have formed a truncated V formation: She-Snorts at the apex, She-Soothes at her left shoulder, Mud at her right. Bent lies in the crux.
“She-Soothes wants to charge,” the nurse cow trumpets. The cheetah is now so close that her nauseatingly sweet odour obliges them to squeeze the tips of their trunks together.
“No,” She-Snorts rumbles.
The cheetah sits. She lifts her right paw and appears to study it. She extends it toward them, and they all swivel their trunks to scent behind themselves. Mud also peers over her shoulder. Nothing, there’s nothing that way. The cheetah stops pointing and licks her other paw and rubs the black lines of “mock head drool”* that run from each of her eyes.
She-Snorts says smugly, “She is not as calm as she pretends to be.”
The cheetah drops her paw and begins to chirp.
“She’s appealing to our mind talker,” She-Snorts says.
“Date Bed’s not here!” She-Soothes roars.
The cheetah stops chirping.
“That’s right!” She-Soothes trumpets. “Shut your stinking hole!”
“How can we know if it’s Me-Me?” Mud asks.
“Me-Me?” She-Soothes bellows.
“Who else would it be?” the matriarch says.
“Well,” She-Soothes roars, “if it’s Me-Me, She-Soothes will tell you what she’s pointing at! She’s pointing at The Safe Place!”
She-Snorts shakes her head. “No, I don’t think that’s it.”
As if her attention has been captured by something over The Spill, Me-Me looks west. She starts circling toward Mud while still faced away, and the three cows step to the right so that the apex of their V remains fixed on her. She halts. When she resumes her approach, she makes no pretence of her ambition. Shoulders bulked, she zigzags her head to catch glimpses of Bent.
“Be off!” She-Soothes trumpets. Me-Me goes still but holds her ground.
She-Soothes rushes her, and Me-Me makes a leisurely swing around and lopes between the boulders. When She-Soothes pulls up, Me-Me turns and sits. She studies her right paw again. Again points it their way. Since they are now faced northwest (the first time she pointed, they were faced due west), she can’t be indicating the way to The Safe Place.
“It’s as if she is saying, ‘You,'” Mud rumbles. “ ‘You are the ones.’ ”
“Which ones?” She-Soothes bellows, trotting back to them.
She-Snorts says, “There is a second odour.” Her eyes are shut, she is scenting hard. “It’s very insistent but faint. Something she has brushed against, I would imagine. I can’t quite catch it. It is too corrupted by her odour.”
“She-Soothes could chase her out of scent completely!” the nurse cow roars.
“She’ll only come back,” She-Snorts says.
“What does she want with Bent, anyhow?” She-Soothes rumbles. “Longbodies don’t eat she-ones.”
“Not normally,” She-Snorts says. She opens her eyes. “We’ll keep our trunks on her while we browse.”
The heat on The Spill will be terrible in a few hours, impossible for Bent to walk in, so the plan is to wait until dusk before setting off for Feed Swamp. Mud asks about the underscents. (If they travel by night there is the risk ofunderscents masking any odours leading to Date Bed.) But She-Snorts doesn’t think they’ll be very strong out there, it’s too barren.
“What about Me-Me?” She-Soothes roars.
“She’ll follow us,” She-Snorts says.
“Follow us!”
“I would imagine so.”
“Follow us!” the nurse cow roars again. She picks up a log and hurls it.
“She-Measures advised us to indulge her,” She-Snorts rumbles. “Indulge her we shall. For now.”
She sounds exhausted suddenly. Defeated, even. Mud thinks, Why wouldn’t she be? In only a few hours the family has dwindled from seven (including Hail Stones) to four, one of them a calf with rickety knees and no stamina. Five days it took Torrent to cross The Spill. How long will it take the four of them to cross, half-starved as they are? How is it possible that Date Bed made the trek? Probably she didn’t. But since she somehow found her way here, and since there is no sign of her anywhere to the east, and since to the north is desert and to the south a vast wire fence and a huge aggregation of humans, what alternative do they have except to head west?
They start to forage, alert to Me-Me, who sits facing them. They scour the savaged ebony trees and Phoenix palms for strips of bark. They tusk the riverbank to unearth roots. Mud has the guilty thought that it is just as well that Hail Stones and Swamp and She-Screams went away, there’s little enough to eat here as it is. And yet she already misses Hail Stones: her fellow interloper and cripple, her would-beand longed-for suitor. She frets for him, and for Swamp, too. Not for She-Screams, who may already be dead and in any event is past saving. “Poor She-Screams,” she thinks, to muster pity, but the silence in the wake of the big cow’s absence is such a relief that she can’t pretend to miss her. She looks east, half-expecting to see the dust squall that would signal one of them returning. She-Soothes and She-Snorts occasionally scent that way. Nobody mentions the departed. For an hour or so She-Soothes mutters about the perils of family rifts, but then she roars, “What’s done is done!” and beams at Mud and She-Snorts as if this conclusion, her habitual one, were a great revelation and a great relief.
A little later, the water hole that Date Bed excavated dries up, and She-Snorts digs another, whose weak seepage requires them to kneel and drink with their mouths, as Bent does. Bent stays close to his mother and glances wild-eyed at Me-Me. Once, he turns to Me-Me, opens his ears and bleats a feeble “Be off!” and Me-Me responds with a curiously tender chirp that terrifies him. He ducks under
She-Soothes and tugs on her breasts, but she has had no milk for three days now, so she pulls away and prepares to feed him the contents of her stomach. It is nothing anybody wants to witness. As her shrivelled hide sucks at her ribcage, she yanks up his trunk and puts her mouth as close to his as she can, but most of the vomit lands on his face. Today he refuses to swallow. Breathing hard in the awful heat, She-Soothes doesn’t scold him. She showers him with dirt. Showers herself. The flies lift as the dirt falls. The flies fall back down, thick as the dirt.
From where they are, against the relatively cooler south bank of the river, Me-Me is in their sights. Far more tolerant ofthe heat than they are, she lolls and stretches. Mid-afternoon she takes off north and returns dragging a still-living warthog. She eats it languorously and playfully, pretending to catch it anew, lunging at it, throwing the trotters into the air and batting them down, all this while barely using her right paw. She-Snorts speculates that the paw is injured.
As if hearing her, Me-Me points the paw toward them, and She-Soothes bellows, “Damned if she doesn’t want She-Soothes to attend to it,” and She-Snorts rumbles, “I’ve caught the second odour again, what is it?” and she snorts, frustrated.
The sunset that day is particularly vivid and symmetrical. Three straight bands of equal width and brilliance–purple on top, then red, then orange–across the whole of the western horizon.
“She-Soothes wonders who she was,” She-Soothes bellows. (You get a sunset like that only when a matriarch has been slaughtered.)
She-Measures, Mud thinks because of the symmetry, but she doesn’t say so. She doesn’t want the thought confirmed.
They have already set off. Normally Mud would place herself abreast of She-Soothes, but to travel in a line is easier through this maze of boulders and she walks behind the big cow. To their left, Me-Me’s small head, lit up in the low sun, sails between the rocks like a moon. Whenever she begins to veer closer, She-Soothes trumpets and she angles back to where she was.
Despite the impossibility of holding to a straight path, they manage a brisk enough pace with She-Soothes nudging Bentalong ahead of her. Scents are scarce. There is the ashy smell of the boulders themselves, the blood-sweet smell of Me-Me, the stench of vultures and the prickly fragrances of smaller creatures: of jackal, barbet, lizard. Each of these odours hovers in discrete ribbons above the underscents, which, as She-Snorts predicted, scarcely arrive.
The moon arrives not at all. Aside from the winking of fireflies the night is black. Mud nevertheless scans for the white bone because it is possible that the bone’s fabled gleam defies darkness and because who can tell which boulders, among so many, form part of a larger circle? She is alert to the shape of what she steps on. A stick is not a rib. She moves silently. They all do, Me-Me as well. The five of them are a grim thought moving through an immense mind–so Mud imagines. Or she imagines that she is alone, the odour of the others being merely what lingers of them. She herself, in all her booming pain, feels conspicuous. Her withered leg throbs. It doesn’t seize, though … there is that blessing. Her belly is what seizes, from hunger or the newborn, and she strokes the rungs of her ribs and wonders whether the newborn feels it. She feels the newborn’s heart pulsing two beats to her one. She counts the heartbeats, her footsteps–she is able to count up to three things at once. After some ten thousand steps She-Snorts says, “Stop.”
They have come to a teclea thicket, and since it would be mad to pass up anything digestible in this wilderness, they begin to forage. South of them, Me-Me paces and yelps.
“Shut your stinking hole!” She-Soothes trumpets, and Me-Me does, but only for a moment. Twice she darts closer and She-Soothes charges her.
Both times She-Snorts smells that elusive odour but fails toidentify it. She says to She-Soothes, “Don’t chase her off next time. I want to get a better whiff of her.”
Before resuming the trek, while She-Soothes is eating gazelle dung (a brand of her so-called drought fruit), She-Snorts and Mud move to a slight rise of land and from there transmit a series of infrasonic rumbles, to Date Bed, Torrent, Tall Time and then to Hail Stones and Swamp. When no responses come, Mud says, “I was hoping that at least Hail Stones or Swamp would answer.”
“They are being assailed by somebody else’s grounders,” She-Snorts says.
By She-Screams, in other words. “I had a vision of She-Screams dead,” Mud says.
She-Snorts expels a slow breath.
“She was alone.” Already Mud knows that she has made a bad mistake, mentioning the banished cow. “She was at the bottom of a hill,” she says quickly, hoping that the details will somehow absolve her. In her anxiety she uses the formal timbre. “Near a pool of muck. Nothing of the place was familiar.”
Silence.
“Her hide was clean.” She is weeping now. “There weren’t any sting holes. She looked as though she had been lying there for several days.”
Silence.
“I think it was the near future,” she says in a final pitch of anguish.
“Did she have her tusks?” She-Snorts asks. Her voice is without inflection.
“Yes! Yes, she had her tusks!”
She-Snorts turns and ambles back to the thicket.
They have been walking about an hour when a large pack of spotted hyenas shows up and cavorts close behind them. Mud moves beside She-Soothes and fights hard not to fall into her memory of the hyena that stalked her on the night of her birth. “Ignore them,” She-Snorts tells She-Soothes, whose bellows of “Be off!” only provoke manic cackles. Are we so reduced that they think they can get to Bent? Mud wonders. Or perhaps it’s Me-Me they want. Mud has never heard of hyenas bringing down a grown cheetah, but in this devious landscape no behaviour seems fantastic. When the hyenas cackle, Me-Me hisses and discharges a bitter odour like bullets. Toward morning she runs away south, and the hyenas give up their pursuit and fall back out of scent.
“She’ll return,” She-Snorts says.
The sun rises. They are nowhere near water and so they keep walking and after several hours arrive at a salt lick. A little beyond the lick She-Snorts finds a cavity she has only to prod with her foot before a small fountain gushes up. “Jubilation!” she trumpets. They all twine trunks and defecate and then they drink and spray each other, exhilarated not only because the digger might have been Date Bed (although there aren’t any signs of her) but because their expectations of locating clear water on The Spill had been so dismal.
They eat the desiccated brush and shreds of grass surrounding the lick, and when that is gone they tusk the ground for roots. When there are no more roots, they eat salt and earth and then they lie in the shade of giant termite mounds, andwhile everyone else sleeps, Mud worries about having divulged her vision … although how could she have guessed that even it would not penetrate the banishment? She prays her one-word prayer–"Please"–and shapes her thoughts into a Date Bed spirit. (She has come to believe that provided it is perfectly imagined–that as long as it is capable of being perfectly imagined–the spirit not only sustains Date Bed, it is the proof that she lives.) She keeps her eyes open, watches the shade ebbing from the bodies of the others and falls into memories of shade sliding off skin, of sun-grilled corpses. At intervals she says, “We’d better move out of the She-eye,” and they all get up and drink and spray themselves with water and dirt and scratch their hides on the mounds before lying down again. Every few hours She-Snorts sends infrasonic calls and Mud makes a careful scan of the horizon, especially to the north, which is directly upwind and on which dust tornadoes sit like the smoke from a line of fires. Wavering shapes that could be Me-Me turn out to be ostriches, oryxes. No shape as big as a she-one materializes, and nothing, certainly no bone, is blinding white.
Mid-afternoon She-Soothes wanders off to collect hyena dung for her eye wad, and Mud says to She-Snorts, “I am sorry, Matriarch.”
She-Snorts glances at her. “It matters less that you spoke about a banished cow, She-Spurns, than that you spoke of
your vision. A death vision is the burden of the visionary alone. Never again tell me about such a vision.”
“I won’t,” Mud vows in the formal timbre.
“Unless,” She-Snorts says, “it is of Date Bed.”
They travel through another black night, this one uneventful and quiet. Just after dawn they arrive at a parched streambed in which they dig six holes before striking a seepage of muddy water. It will have to do. Long, dry thatch grass crackles in narrow rows along the banks. So much untouched grazing, while it is a find, is not good news–no one has been here since before the drought.
“There’s more than one way to peel a tree!” declares She-Soothes. In other words, Date Bed might have veered north or south of this place and still held a course leading to Feed Swamp.
She-Snorts breathes in short puffs that blow the dust from the grass. “I am so tired,” she says finally, and her scent plummets to bleakness.
“Take a whiff at all the browse!” roars She-Soothes, as if they have only this moment arrived.
She-Snorts suddenly raises her trunk. She points it behind herself.
Mud, She-Soothes and Bent do the same.
“What?” She-Soothes bellows.
All of them turn around. Perk their ears.
“Is it that stinking longbody?” She-Soothes bellows.
No answer. Presently Mud sees the huge disturbance of dust on the eastern horizon. A she-one, it must be.
“Well, what do you know,” She-Snorts murmurs, dropping her trunk.
From her tone–scornful, disappointed–Mud guesses who it is. A moment later she catches the odour.
“Jubilation!” She-Soothes trumpets. Wheezing and weeping, she dashes up to She-Screams and the two big cows twine trunks and clang tusks, and then She-Screams tries to go after Bent, but he quails under She-Soothes’ belly. Mud is utterly ignored, although she lifts her trunk toward She-Screams in a hesitant salute.
“She-Soothes knew you would return!” She-Soothes hollers. “Matriarch–” She looks over her shoulder and only now appears to grasp that the matriarch isn’t taking part in the greeting, and she steps back from She-Screams and shakes her head, flummoxed, or protesting the matriarch’s behaviour, probably both.
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