The White Bone (12 page)

The water is silty and cold. She bores more deeply until a clear seepage gurgles up. She drinks, showers and dusts herself, then stands there feeling strangely consoled by the wobble of her withered leg, which is at least a known and reliable thing.

“Date Bed!” she trumpets, although trumpeting is useless if nobody has heard her infrasonic calls. Nevertheless she listens, eyes downcast, ears spread, waiting for the shudderunderfoot that heralds a far-off rumble. What finally reaches her are the screams of the calves, and by the time she understands that the screams come from memory, she is reliving the slaughter.

She trumpets and runs in circles. At the part where she climbed up and slid down the bank, she climbs up and slides down the rocks and scrapes her leg badly enough to arouse her to the present.

She finds herself on her knees at the bottom of the outcrop. From overhead comes the roar of a plane, and she sinks onto her right side and weeps, for how long she has no idea, but when she is breathing evenly again the shadow of the outcrop leans over her, and an impala drinks at the hole she dug. Inches from her eyes, balanced magically on its end, a flat blue stone holds its colour against the falling light. The stone puts her in mind of one of Tall Time’s link songs:

And so she swallows the stone, gathers up her limbs and sets off back the way she came.

Her mind is suddenly clear, out of its thrall. She knows now that the purpose of her pilgrimage wasn’t to go to The She-Hill, it was to stumble upon the blue stone. In the stone’s safekeeping she can return to Blood Swamp and mourn the slaughtered members of her family, as it is her sacred obligation to do. The vehicle and its humans will have retreated,and (this didn’t dawn on her until now) the She-S survivors will either be at the swamp already or arriving there before morning. Date Bed will be there, if she is still alive. “Let her be alive,” Mud prays out loud. She is certain that she saw the bodies of everybody who died at the swamp, both during the slaughter and during her reliving of it, but she didn’t see who, if anyone, was wounded, and she didn’t see whether the survivors all fled in the same direction once they were up on the plain. Had she been in her right mind she would have immediately searched for dung and drops of blood and gone where they led her, but had she been in her right mind she wouldn’t have been granted the blue stone’s protection.

It is her own tracks she now follows, placing her feet in any depression that has not been obliterated by dust. The dust has died down with the dying of the wind and even though her bad leg wobbles she moves fast and is soon upon the sad little mess of hide and bone and vulture droppings that was the infant monkey. She keeps walking, into the summits of the plunging shadows and straight down their lengths. As it always is following the death of a matriarch–and if you include She-Sees, three matriarchs died this day–the sunset is gory. Mud cannot look at it, its ecstatic red streams. She fixes her eyes on the ground, where occasionally she tusks out a root stock to eat. She counts her steps, a thing she is able to do while her thoughts are elsewhere, and after every two hundred lets out infrasonic rumbles. Twice, mistakenly, she believes herself to be on the verge of a vision. Her bad leg aches. Her skin, sensing the exhalation of shadows,
*
twitches uneasily. For all thatshe is protected by the blue stone from the perils around her, she is not protected from her own mind, and every once in a while she has to shake her head, both to stave off another wholesale reliving of the butchery and to grasp the fact of it. When she passes the remains of the zebra who looked at her before its eye was plucked out, she wonders how far down the vulture’s gullet the zebra’s eyeball preserved her image.

She has come across no she-one dung other than her own from when she set out, and she hasn’t heard a single rumble. But this doesn’t mean anything one way or another. If her family retreated in another direction, as they clearly did, their dung would be elsewhere, and if they aren’t calling it may well be that they have already entered silent mourning. She herself stopped sending calls hours ago out of an unreasonable fear that she would attract hyenas. It isn’t until she sees the hyenas prowling the bank of the swamp that she knows she can’t be the first to arrive. For so many hyenas to be on the plain when there are corpses all over the shore means that at least two big cows must be down there.

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.

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.