The White Bone (17 page)

“No,” he rumbles, but feels fraudulent and turns to She-Booms. “This longbody. Why would you think I had met her?”

“SHE SAID YOU DID. SHE SAID THAT THE TWO OF YOU CROSSED PATHS WHEN YOU WERE AMONG THE SHE-R’S AND THAT YOU SPOKE TO HER THROUGH THE SHE-R’S MIND TALKER.”

“I have never been among the She-R’s.”

“Didn’t I say as much?” rumbles She-Brags. She appeals to the former matriarch, She-Blusters. “Mother, didn’t I say that our Tall Time would never mingle with those dreadful She-R’s?”

“Well, ah–” sputters the old cow, bits of bark dropping from her mouth. “You may … I can’t … ah … you… .”

“What did this Me-Me say she and I spoke about?” Tall Time asks She-Booms.

She-Booms’ odour turns anxious. Without meeting his eye she thunders,
“SHE SAID THAT YOU PROMISED HER OUR NEWBORNS. SHE SAID THE PAIR OF YOU CAME TO AN AGREEMENT THAT IT WAS WORTH SACRIFICING THE NEWBORNS’ LIVES IN EXCHANGE FOR
—” She stops at a slap on her rump from She-Brags.

“Promised her the newborns!” Tall Time is aghast.

“Naturally I didn’t believe her,” She-Brags says. “I said, ‘That is not possible!'”

“Who am I to promise the lives of newborns to anybody?” He gapes at the smallest of the three tiny calves, her thin rump, her meek flickering presence. “The lives of innocents!” he trumpets. He whirls upon She-Booms. “In exchange for what?”

“Calm down,” She-Betters says, as if speaking to a calf. “You are frightening the little ones.”

So he is. The smallest now cowers between her mother’s hind legs and Tall Time is reminded of his first sight of Mud. Looking past mother and calf, he sees that two ostriches have arrived at the water hole but they do not drink and he is overtaken by a promiscuous alarm, as if the ill omens here are so pervasive as to be undetectable. “Don’t linger at this place,” he says.

“I believe I know what’s best,” She-Brags snaps. “As it happens,” she says more amicably, “we do
not
intend to linger. We have heard of green browse to the north.”

“From whom?”

“Rumours abound,” She-Bluffs says slyly.

“The longbody?” Tall Time trumpets. He looks at the matriarch, who looks at She-Broods.

“A shared secret is no secret,” She-Broods mutters. “Thus spake the She.”

“Whom could he tell?” She-Brags says. Turning to him she says, “Me-Me knows where The Safe Place is.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Somewhere on The Domain there is a place called The Safe Place.”

“I know of it.”

She-Brags nods. “I thought as much,” she says. “When we hadn’t heard any news of you, I told myself, he is searching.”

“For the white bone!” a bull calf says rapturously.

Tall Time touches the youngster’s flank. “Speak of it as the that-way bone. It loses power when spoken of directly.” To She-Brags he says, “Does this Me-Me creature know of the that-way bone as well?”

“I am sure she doesn’t. She has never spoken of it to She-Booms. We ourselves learned of it from She-Laughs of the She-L’s-And-L’s. How Me-Me learned of The Safe Place, now … well, she knows where almost everything is. Where there is browse, where there is water–”

“But, Matriarch, she lies!” Tall Time trumpets, affronted that this slanderer should be granted the least credibility.

“It surprises me,” She-Brags says, “that you have never heard of Me-Me. No"–she anticipates his interjection–"I am convinced that you haven’t. It is only that she is notorious for trailing any number of families since the end of the last Long Rains Massive Gathering.”

“How unnatural,” he says.

“Oh, she is quite unnatural. Not only does she not respect territorial bounds, she craves the flesh of newborn she-ones. She couldn’t bring down a newborn on her own, she has no exceptional physical prowess. She says to the mind talker, Your newborn in exchange for the location of green browse, the location of The Safe Place. She asks for the bulls. She appears to be under the impression that we don’t value bull newborns as much as we do cow newborns.”

“But you have given her no newborn,” Tall Time says.

She-Bluffs smiles at him. “Nor,” she says, “have we said that we never will.”

“That is abominable!”

She-Bluffs folds a bundle of twigs into her mouth. “It is strategy, my dear.”

Tall Time feels the coarse trunk of She-Blusters rasp across his hide. He twists around and she brings her face close to his, her ancient bloodshot eyes fairly howling. “Don’t,” she growls. “I … we … all these… .”

“SHE’S TRYING TO SAY,” SHE-BOOMS ROARS, “THAT THESE ARE TERRIBLE TIMES AND WE DO WHAT WE MUST TO SURVIVE. OF COURSE WE WOULD NEVER GIVE ME-ME ANY OF THE NEWBORNS. BUT WE LED HER TO BELIEVE WE MIGHT IF SHE PROVED HERSELF OUR ALLY.”

“It is to her advantage,” She-Betters says, “to lead us to soft browse that the newborns can eat so that they remain fit.”

“It is to her advantage,” She-Broods says morosely, “to tell us where to go so that she knows where to find us.”

“OUR HOPE,”
She-Booms continues,
“IS THAT WE COME ACROSS THE … THE THAT-WAY BONE, AND THEN WE CAN GO TO THE SAFE PLACE ON OUR OWN AND HAVE NOTHING FURTHER TO DO WITH HER.”
She opens her ears.
“HAVE YOU ANY SUGGESTIONS AS TO WHERE WE SHOULD BE SEARCHING?”

“Torrent said to go to the most barren places and the hills and to look for an extremely large standing feast tree. What were you told?”

“NOTHING LIKE THAT. THE SHE-L’S-AND-L’S SAID IT WILL BE FOUND NEAR A WINDING RIVERBED NORTHWEST OF A RANGE OF HILLS.”

Tall Time is taken aback. After a moment he says, “Torrent’s information came directly from the Lost Ones.”

This creates an uproar and a great many questions and speculations, at the finish of which She-Broods mutters, “We had better widen our range.”

“I’ll find it,” says She-Brags.

“Have you really told us all you know?” She-Bluffs asks Tall Time.

“Dash it all, Mother,” he says. Her gleeful refusal ever to take him at his word is the reason (it occurs to him now) that he allows himself to lose touch so completely with the entire family. “Why would I deceive you? If I knew anything more, you would be the first cows to hear of it. And if I find The Safe Place, you will be the first cows I lead there.”

“THE SECOND,”
She-Booms says, apparently without intending to, for she startles and then seems embarrassed to have divulged his thoughts, which were, it is true, that he would go first to Mud. Quickly recovering herself, she asks,
“WHICH MUD? FROM WHICH FAMILY?”

The question annoys him. She-Booms is too free with her mind listening, and while he is anxious to learn whether there is any news of the She-S’s, he does not want his family–his adoptive mother–to know which Mud is so dear to him. Or even that there
is
a creature outside of his birth family who is so dear to him, although it is probably too late to conceal that. “I will lead you there,” he growls. “By my troth.”

“It is more likely,” She-Brags rumbles, “that
I
will lead
you
there.”

Tall Time looks at her, wondering if he can bring himself to ask the unthinkable question.

“What is it?” she says.

He exhales a long breath. “Has any family given the longbody a newborn?”

She-Brags turns her back and says briskly, “Me-Me claims that the She-R’s gave her an injured one. In exchange for an island teeming with green grass.”

“No!”

“They are a lowly herd. I wouldn’t put it past them.”

“But there is no such island.”

“Don’t be so certain. Me-Me’s knowledge of The Domain rivals my own.”

It is intolerable to him, the admiration in her voice. “How can you trust her?” he trumpets.

“She can’t fool me,” rumbles She-Bluffs.

“Where and when did you last see her?” he asks.

“Four days ago,” She-Brags says, shaking dirt from the roots of the bush she has excavated. “At the huge Rogue’s web southeast of here.”

He looks at the water hole. The ostriches are gone and a flock of sand grouse hops indecisively at the hole’s edge. He is grateful that Mud is at Blood Swamp, where the water never migrates in its entirety and where, for more than twenty years now, the signs have been favourable. He would be there himself were he not searching for the white bone. And from now on he’ll be keeping a scent out for that revolting cheetah as well. He tries to picture doddering old She-Sees (he thinks that she is still the matriarch) contending with Me-Me. Considering how well fed the She-S’s are, Me-Me is bound to attach herself to them sooner or later. He looks at She-Booms–he is about to ask her which families the cheetah has been harassing–and finds her gaping at him and is overcome by the dissevered feeling of watching himself and therefore knows that he is living a moment already witnessed, days ago or hours ago, by some visionary cow. He knows that the moment is portentous. Later he will even imagine that he knew what She-Booms would say. Which is,
“OH, MY DEAR TALL TIME! THE SHE-S’S ARE DEAD!”

It is five hours later, and Tall Time is halfway to Blood Swamp. Telling his family only, “I have an obligation,” and refusing to linger with them overnight, he set off.

There is a full moon. In its pallid light birds swoop as they do at sunset, and there are shadows holding at lengths suggesting early afternoon. For Tall Time, these “Rogue nights” have always been unsettling. He knows them now to be mad. Profane. Wind-slanted bushes, termite mounds, bones, carcasses lit up and telling him nothing. His faith in the links is suddenly and utterly gone. Thirty years of aligning his every move to what he believed was a world trembling with mystic revelation … what was it that sustained such a mountainous delusion? He no longer knows. He is stunned to think that only hours ago he believed. But if it can happen that in a matter of seconds an entire herd of cows is annihilated by a round of gunshot, he supposes it should be no surprise that an entire faith (which, he reminds himself, was wavering anyway) has been annihilated by four words.

All of them? he asked, and She-Booms said yes, according to the She-L’s-And-L’s all of the She-S’s perished in the slaughter, as did all of the She-D’s. According to Me-Me, however, some of the She-S’s got away, and Tall Time is inclined to believe this version because, plainly, the world has entered an epoch where the liars are to be trusted and the trustworthy are to be doubted.

To abandon your faith in the signs and superstitions is to abandon your faith in the She who made them. Still, Tall Time prays in case the absurdity of faithless prayer is precisely what the times call for. “Let Mud be alive,” he says. “Let her be alive.”

He interrupts the prayer only to send out infrasonic calls to the She-S’s–each of them in turn, since he doesn’t know who may have survived–and eventually the sound of his ownvoice takes on the aspect of an incantation necessary to troll him through the night’s clamour. He accepts as simply another unfathomable occurrence that his sense of smell has become fine. Beyond the putrefaction of the carcasses littering the plain he can smell, he would swear, the debacle at Blood Swamp. If Mud is alive and within a day’s trek of him, he will pick up her scent.

She has three scents, as all cows do. A regular or she-one scent, a “delirium” scent and a “radiance” scent. Because she has come into oestrus only the one time, he holds just the one memory of her delirium and radiance scents, but he has summoned both to mind so often that he wonders if they haven’t been adulterated by too many retrievals. Tonight he fights any thought of them. They compel him to re-enact the mating, and even if he had the heart for that now he hasn’t the time.

The scents arrive anyway. Strangely, they don’t overtake him. They trail behind the actual odours of the night, and further back than that–behind the memories that those odours generate–so that the memory of the two of them mating fails even to interfere with his prayers, it is too diluted, more like somebody else’s recounting of that day when the first pulse of her delirium song released him from the hindquarters of the loathsome She-Wheedles, whom, in the grip of an embarrassing infatuation, he had been attempting to mount.

The song had come from the southwest. From Creaker Pond, he soon ascertained. Between himself and the pond was an expanse of muck that by the middle of the short rains would be Long Water. There was a hard rain falling that day, it pelted the muck into a field of eruptions he felt cheered on by. As he hurried along, his engorged penis bumped splashing on theground, and believing himself to be experiencing something akin to Mud’s lifelong affliction–the dragging along of a dumb, undisciplined limb–he was profoundly moved. He imagined her running in that pathetic kicking-out way of hers from whatever aroused bulls were already there, and this so maddened him that for the rest of the journey he rumbled infrasonic threats, with the result that when he got to the pond he found Mud standing alone at a distance from three bulls who, the instant he arrived, moved even farther away from her.

“Twig-tusks!” he roared, immensely relieved to find himself the largest bull present.

Meanwhile the She-S big cows were crowding around him and trumpeting a wild chorus of “Digger Bull! True Digger!” which cows do when a bull they judge to be of sufficient girth finally appears on the scene. A morsel of reason reminded him of the decorum: he must halt and let each big cow sniff his temporal glands and his penis. This he did, and when the last of them was satisfied they all sang: