The White Bone (13 page)

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, sniffing 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.

Fire.

Warthog urine or hyena dung scald the wound, that is their therapeutic function. Why scalding should help, Date Bed doesn’t know, unless, as she used to hypothesize to the nurse cows, it “burns the badness.” Would an ignited stick, then, or a hot stone, not do the same job?

She hurries toward the river of black smoke and low flames. No sticks are there, none that she can see. Plenty of stones and rocks are strewn about, but how can she pick one up without singeing her trunk? If there was a green leaf, a palm frond, she would have a buffer.

Squinting, scenting, she surveys the terrain. A pulse batters her skull, and her thoughts will not align themselves. “Water,” she thinks into the void, and a crew of vultures plummets from the sky and hops behind her squealing, “Water! Water!” and when she turns on them they open their wings and lift with improbable grace.

Tornadoes spin behind her eyes. She teeters a few steps and sinks to her knees at the verge of the rattling flames. She remains like that for how long? A minute? An hour? Elapsed time is apparent to her only in the cramping of her joints. When her mind clears enough for her to distinguish the smoke in her head from the smoke outside it, she curls her trunk under her chin, presses her ears against her skull and positions her face above a scallop of flame.

Perhaps because the pain is expected it is not as awful as expected. It is, at last, the piercing of that bullet–what the bullet should have felt like–and then it is cold and quite bearable. Not until she smells herself burning does she lift her head. She comes to her feet and walks away, and near a place where there are no rocks or bones she lowers herself to the ground again.

The burn gathers into itself all her other discomforts, even her thirst, and incinerates them down to nothing, and although she can’t bring herself to stand, she feels recovered.

She murmurs a song of thanksgiving:

And then she falls into unconsciousness.

When she awakes she notices, inches from her eyes, a pile of her own dung, the sweet known smell of which is so appetizing she would eat it had she the will to move. Her near vision is superb, and she watches the flies that scramble over the boluses. Wings like slices of blue light. Green gibbous eyes. How nervous they are! They seem to be at their wits’ end, maddened by the loss of some necessity they hope to find in her dung, and despite appearing to take no notice of each other they produce a unified buzz that makes for an impression of a single multi-eyed, multi-winged, overwrought creature.

What does this creature call itself? Mind talkers and insects don’t communicate, so there is no point asking. And yet she does ask … she thinks, “Which breed of speck are you?” and the buzz seems to configure into a sound that says, “Vital.”

“Vital,” she thinks, amused because all creatures go by such vainglorious names, and because (since it is impossible that the flies answered her) she must have thought up this name herself. She decides that the creature is female. “Hello, cow vital,” she thinks.

All the flies rise up and settle back down on the bolus closest to her right eye, and she has the feeling that the entirety of her is too much for them to grasp and that they suppose her eye to be a creature all on its own whom they call the Shine. What is curious is that while it is her mind that is formingthis narrative, she is dependent upon the buzzing for inspiration. She hears no words. She hears an oscillation that seems to enter the hole in her head and within that cavity make itself intelligible to her. “In what respect,” she thinks, “are you vital?”