The White Bone (18 page)

Mud by now was watching him over her shoulder. He approached her warily. He did not want her to run from him, even flirtatiously.

“I am the biggest bull,” he murmured. She did not move. “You glow,” he said. “You are as fat as a water-boulder. You are the blue haze that surrounds the sun at dawn.”

At last he was close enough that he could reach out his trunk and tap her vulva. He stroked her until she urinated, and even before he brought the liquid of her to his mouth he knew that, just then, just as he had touched her, she had entered her radiance.

If she had bolted he would have let her go and would have waited until she felt herself ready, but she was motionless, and unexpectedly quiet (most cows, once they are in their radiance, babble lascivious encouragement, or “zeal”), and he laid his head upon her back and levered himself onto his hind feet and began to dig.

This part of the memory is vivid enough that his legs tremble and he comes to a stop and thinks, uneasily, that he must be having a shadow memory.
*

If you live long enough, your memory leaks right out of you. Before that time, there are ten to fifteen years during which your old memories are almost always shadow memories. Torrent once told him that this is a blessed period because it allows you to look back over your life with a degree of impartiality. “You can’t do that,” he said, “if every time you fall into a memory you are in the thick of every blessed second of it. You have no hope of standing beside yourself, so to speak.”

“What does it matter?” Tall Time said. “Sooner or later you forget everything anyway.”

“Not who you are,” Torrent said. “Who you are is the one thing you can’t forget. It is all you have to take into the hereafter, and if you don’t have it, you eventually crumble andbecome the silt at the bottom of The Eternal Shoreless Water, that’s my belief.” And in his off-key bass he sang:

It is not unheard of for she-ones to have the occasional shadow memory before the age of fifty, and, in fact, those who do are considered precocious and lucky. But who knows any longer what is lucky? Don’t ask Tall Time. To have a shadow memory at his age feels more like a symptom of the chaos in which the hard lines that used to distinguish one thing from another turn out to be shadows themselves. Even
he
conspires in this chaos. Because look at him! Crazed over the fate of a crippled cow who is neither his birth mother nor his matriarch.

Were Mud willing, he would mate with her for life, the way jackals do. He would take her from her family and the two of them plus the newborn would form their own tiny herd. What is to be made of that? Up until today he believed that an inclination so bizarre must have the She’s blessing, and he would indulge himself in intoxicating explanations, his most cherished being that Mud’s calf tunnel shelters the daughter of the She Herself, “the newborn lovely as light” who, the hymns prophesy, will “silence the screams of night, and cruel hindleggers put to flight,” and it is this divine newborn he is meant to safeguard. Oh, he winces to think of this now. Not that he loves Mud any less for no longer knowing
why
he loves her. The truth is, his love for her is one of the few remorseless certainties left to him.

As he approaches Blood Swamp the bleats and whinnies and barks of the creatures there begin to reach him. It is dawn. A huge bull appears on the bank and starts hurrying toward him. Silhouetted against the smoky red hole of the sun the bull looks like a primordial warning, a charred refugee of a carnage older than memory.

It is Torrent.

“I smelled you coming!” he rumbles, out of breath.

So much for Tall Time’s own fine sense of smell. For at least an hour his trunk has caught nothing but the stench of the slaughter.

They twine trunks and bang tusks, after which Tall Time respectfully pokes the end of his trunk into Torrent’s mouth and tastes rotting molars. The greeting stops at that, with Torrent jerking up his mammoth head and saying, “I warn you, the faces are hacked off.”

“Is it the entire family?”

“Which family?”

“The She-S’s,” Tall Time says, perplexed. And then he understands and says, ashamed to have all but forgotten them, “I scarcely knew the She-D’s.”

“The She-D’s. Yes. Three fell, the last three. They survived the slaughter at the Rogue’s web, only to be caught here.”

“What slaughter? Which Rogue’s web?”

“Ah–” Torrent says heavily. He sweeps his trunk northeast to southwest. “A six-day trek from here, there’s a web. Corpses all along it, mostly lunatics, some ribs. Corpses as far as the trunk can scent, every one perished from thirst. But the She-D’s, hindleggers got them, the whole family apart from the few who escaped to this cursed place.” His breath rattles.

“What about the She-S’s?” Tall Time says. “Did any of them survive? Are any of them still here?”

“No, no. They left eight days ago, judging by the dung. I missed them by four days.”

“Who? Who are the survivors?”

“She-Snorts.” This said with an edge of admiration.

“Who else?”

“Let me think.” He touches his trunk to the temporin that runs down his right temple, following the course of a deep furrow, and Tall Time looks beyond him at the arc of the horizon and feels that in that arc a tremendous revelation is suspended.

“These are bad days,” Torrent mutters. “All the old matriarchs slaughtered or deranged and the new matriarchs too ignorant to know where the safe drinking is.”

“Who else got away?” Tall Time asks again.

“Who got away? That squawker, She-Screams. No sign of her bones here. And the nurse cow, She-Soothes. She’s a wide one, I’d know her frame. And her newborn. What’s that calf’s name?”

“Bent,” Tall Time says. With a kind of frigid sadness he thinks, The old patriarch is losing his memory.

“Bent,” Torrent says. “That’s right. He made it.”

“Did Mud get away?”

“Mud?”

“The young cow with the withered hind leg.”

Torrent squints into the distance. He looks suddenly exhausted and ancient. “Mud,” he says.

“Let’s go down to the shore,” Tall Time says.

“It’s a sorrow,” Torrent rumbles. “When you have mounted the She-S cows as many times as I have, and you know the inside of each of them like you know the inside of your own mouth… .”

Despite himself, Tall Time scans the terrain for signs that would have warned of the disaster, or that now warn of further danger. There is only the aftermath: the levelled bushes and, gouged into the bank, the parallel tracks of a vehicle. On the bark of a fever tree a bright green slash flares. Tall Time recoils at the unnatural colour of it, and at the thought that vehicle skin scrapes off like that. He races to the edge of the bank and then halts, startled by the sight of so many creatures–hippos, wildebeests, zebras, gazelles, buffalo, baboons, countless flocks of birds and, out in the middle of the swamp, two small families of she-ones whose scent eludes him. He turns to Torrent. “Who are they?”

Torrent is pulling down a fever-tree branch. He gives the branch a twist and it breaks off with a hollow crack like lightning. “They are–” he says. He strips away the dead ant-eaten leaves and uses the naked branch to scratch inside his ear. “The She-N’s! And the She-N’s-And-N’s!”

His roar has all the cows lifting their trunks. A fine scenter (Tall Time guesses it is She-Needles) rumbles, “Steer clear, Tall Time! No one here is in her delirium!”

“I should think not,” Tall Time rumbles, faintly insulted that she would presume he wouldn’t have smelled oestrus. Besides which, who enters oestrus–or musth for that matter–during a drought? He scans the packed shore for the carcasses. “Why are you still here?” he asks Torrent. Only now has it occurred to him how odd it is that the old bull loiters at this evil swamp when he must know a score of watering places. Places in the hills, for instance, where he should be anyway, searching for the white bone.

“It’s the molars,” Torrent says. “When I think of leaving the soft browse, I say to myself, one more day.” He taps the branch on Tall Time’s rump. “Come along, son. I’ll guide you through the tragedy.”

As they move down the bank, the creatures below start scattering. Torrent has been terrorizing this poor crowd, Tall Time thinks, but he is grateful because with the shore cleared the remains of the slaughtered are conspicuous. At a glance he identifies She-Sees. Her body has been covered with sticks and some of her bones have been pulled loose by the carnivores. These new bones gleam white and release a cruelly sweet smell (Tall Time sniffs her femur) that is indistinguishable from the smell of wilting lilies.

“Now here,” Torrent rumbles, “here is … uh … the one who was always standing over the newborns.” Gently, with a forefoot, he nudges the skull. “Wonderful scent she had … milky… .”

“She-Stammers,” Tall Time says. He is weeping.

“She-Stammers, that’s it.” The old bull’s voice cracks. “That’s right. Daughter of She-Soothes.” From out of the torso he removes a bone as fine as a thorn. “She had a newborngrowing in her. I myself dug the tunnel, I believe.” He holds the bone close to Tall Time’s eye and then carefully puts it back where it was. He scoops up one of the big cow’s shoulder blades and rocks it in the crook of his trunk. He replaces this and sniffs her amputated trunk.

It seems that he is prepared to fondle and inspect all of the remains as he must have done at least once and as he no doubt presumes Tall Time will want to do now, but Tall Time is impatient to learn the fate of Mud. He tells Torrent this, and Torrent fixes him with a keen look and rumbles, “Go on, then.”

It is short work. When he has inspected all the remains on the shore, lingering to weep over the newborn twins, he walks into the water and feels with his feet the bones and hides on the swamp bottom. He then wades over to Torrent, who is browsing on creepers.

“She got away,” Torrent says.

Tall Time doesn’t respond. His relief is dazzling but so is his sorrow, and no reaction seems appropriate except that he stay teetering between these two emotions.

“Drink first,” Torrent says. “Eat.”

“First” meaning before he returns to shore to properly mourn the dead. Tall Time pulls up a slimy rope of tangled roots and as he tucks it into his mouth is gripped by the feeling of having entered somebody’s memory of feeding here in the hours before the slaughter–the heat pushing down, the stamped twinkling surface of the water.

“They’ll fare all right,” Torrent says.

Tall Time is jarred back into the present. “Do you know where they went?”

Torrent shakes his head. “They’re nowhere in this vicinity, I can promise you that. But I wouldn’t worry. She-Snorts will sniff out the watering places.”

“She-Snorts?”

“She’ll be the matriarch, with She-Sees and She-Scares gone.”

“Upon my soul,” Tall Time says, realizing. A cow as flippant and indifferent as She-Snorts taking charge. His fear for Mud flares up.

Torrent is watching him. In a friendly tone he says, “Mud is still a calf, is she not?”

“No, she has had her inaugural delirium. I have mounted her.”

“But she wouldn’t be in her delirium now.”

“Of course not.”

“All the same, you intend to search for her.”

“I do.” He looks hopefully at the old bull. Don’t they have this in common? Isn’t what he feels for Mud an amplification of what Torrent feels for She-Snorts?

“You may be deranged,” Torrent says. “Derangement is a contagion these days.”

“But you love She-Snorts–”

“Love!” He glares over his tusks. “What do you take me for? A suckling calf?”

“Forgive me,” Tall Time murmurs.

“Why aren’t you searching for the white bone?”

“I have been! Throughout this whole drought. I assure you, Torrent, that I have not been idle. And I will not be idle after I leave here. I am entirely capable of searching for the surviving She-S’s
and
of keeping a sharp scent out for the that-way bone, as you yourself told me to refer to it. In any event one endeavour does not annul the other. Indeed, I intend, as a matter of record, to be successful in both. And I should also tell you that I have just now come from my birth family, and they heard from the She-L’s-And-L’s that the that-way bone will be found near a winding riverbed northwest of a range of hills.”

“Is that so?”

“I am only reporting what I heard.”

The glower is slow to leave Torrent’s face but eventually he pulls up a hank of roots and rumbles, “The assumption being that there even is a that-way bone.”

“What do you mean?”

“I haven’t been idle, either, son.” He stuffs the roots into his mouth and gives them only a few soft tamps before swallowing. “You would have thought that some rumour, some trace, would have turned up by now.” He glances at the sky. “The darkness is here, you know. It has come.”

As tall as he is, Tall Time does not reach Torrent’s shoulder, and yet he feels monstrously elongated, adrift in the blue air.