The White Bone (20 page)

She fails to find one, although she makes a wide search. She returns to the Thing and picks it up. Now it is almost too hotto hold. Cradling it in her trunk, she looks at herself. “There is not a single sharp stone in this vicinity,” she says. Her eye blinks. The dark circle in the centre contracts to a dot and her sense is that the reason for the contraction is so that the eye may fetch an idea from within itself. And here it comes, the idea, leaping from the image of her eye into her actual eye and from there into her head where she hears, “Use the Thing.”

Of course. Use the Thing, its keen edge that hurt her foot. She turns the Thing so that she can draw the edge over her tusk. Back, forth. Just the once and she has her scratch. Day twenty-six.

She holds the Thing to her eye. The dark circle shrinks and plucks from its abyss another idea. “Oh!” she breathes. The idea is so inspired that her heart starts pounding. She nods and repeats what she hears. Without realizing, she speaks in the formal timbre.

As far as she knows, her kind have never doubted that who they see when they see themselves in water
is
themselves. Monkeys don’t doubt it either, nor do cats. Of the other creatures who are able to see themselves (plenty aren’t; wildebeests, buffalo, warthogs, rhinos, hippos and zebras look into an unruffled pond and see nothing but water) most think that they’re catching a glimpse of the spirit of somebody who drowned or was killed at that very spot. With birds, it’s hard to know what they think. Some of the bigger birds–hornbills, spoonbills, storks–reportedly laugh or take umbrage if you say, “That’s you.” They say it’s a fish, obviously, or a shadow. The smaller flocking birds can scarcely be talked to at all, they’re so high-strung and scatterbrained. Solitary gliders–the eagles, the hawks–have a reputation for being thoughtfuland articulate but they’re aloof. In the three years that Date Bed has been a mind talker she has spoken with only two hawks and a single martial eagle, or “eminence” as that breed calls itself. This one was sickly and earthbound, and when Date Bed asked if there was anything she could do for him, his startling answer was that she could keep him company.

Perhaps because he was doomed he was unusually forthcoming. He advised her that if her kind were to eat flesh, curb their appetites and flap their ears they might stand a chance of becoming airborne. He then told her about guardians, or spirit twins.

At the hatching of every martial eagle there is the hatching of a spirit twin whose fate determines the eagle’s fate. The twin lives underwater and feeds on fish and carcasses, but otherwise the events of his life are identical to the eagle’s. When the twin ails, the eagle ails. When the twin mates, the eagle mates, and so on. When the twin dies, the eagle dies. The spirit twin can be heard calling during high winds and storms and can be seen in hundreds of bodies of water, since he moves from lake to river to pond by way of underground aquifers. Frequent sightings of the spirit twin are essential. Without these contacts the twin loses faith in his own existence and begins to wane and act carelessly, and if he should deteriorate, so will the eagle. The clearer the sighting, the more the twin is reassured, the more vigorous he is, and viceversa. So it is that in high winds, when the surfaces of water are turbulent, or during the dry season, when the water isn’t there, the eagle’s life is imperilled. “I haven’t seen my guardian in four days” was how the eagle Date Bed met accounted for his condition.

It never occurred to Date Bed to suggest that his reflection was merely himself. That would have been tactless and pompous and, besides, she was far from certain that his reflection
wasn’t
a guardian. Or even that
her
reflection isn’t a guardian. After her talk with him she would sometimes peer at her face in Blood Swamp, just in case. To tell the truth, it has crossed her mind that she owes her survival, in some measure anyway, to the fact that a few hours before the slaughter she had studied herself in the flat water within the sedge-grass beds.

And now that she has the Thing to see herself in, she must admit that she feels … not recovered, far from that, but pluckier.

She looks at herself again, at her liquid eye, which alerts her to her thirst, and she sets the Thing down and kneels at the pit she dug last night and tusks the bottom until water seeps up. She drinks, comes to her feet, has a dizzy spell, tosses dirt over her back, then feeds on the thicket and the tufts of dead grass between the bushes. She would prefer to continue to feed and then, a little later, to sleep, to always feed and sleep during the day and travel by night, out of the sun. But since the slaughter she has a terror of night, every blurry shape transfiguring into a human, and she never moves from a safe spot after dark. Today, before setting off, she climbs onto the rock and sends her infrasonic rumbles. There is no response, there is never a response. She curls the Thing into her trunk and rumbles, “The She is nigh,”
*
and starts walking.

The inspired idea depends on her attracting the attention of a martial eagle. She will try to do that while she walks, buther priority is to get to the giant water hole she was on her way to yesterday, before this place enticed her to stop. She heard about the hole from a gerenuk who claimed to have seen fresh she-one boluses in the water hole’s vicinity. It was news Date Bed wept to hear. In twenty-five days, twenty-six now, she hasn’t once come across the dung of her own kind. Their bones are what she comes across, their carcasses. Even though there is little likelihood that the she-ones are still at the water hole (the gerenuk disparaged the nearby forage and said that the hole itself, while it yielded fresh water, was eerily deserted) she would make the trip ten times over simply for the dung. For evidence that she is not the last of her kind.

The land she walks through is one great burn. Black ground, scorched black thorn trees, black boulders, black ash that she flings over her back and between her legs. Without slowing her pace she sends the Thing’s light into the sky where, as she had anticipated, it attracts birds. Not an eagle, unfortunately, but kites, who swoop down and scream, “What is that?” and flare up before she can answer. Hooded vultures drop hissing from the trees and jump in front of her and bob their obscene heads.

She follows a course she remembers from when this was all new grass and She-Sees was leading the family to a soda lake. She and Mud were calves then. They were so devoted to each other that they walked with Date Bed grasping Mud’s tail, and they said “we” instead of “I"–"we are tired,” “we want,” “we can’t"–as if they were a single calf. When She-Screams slapped Mud, it was Date Bed who squealed.

The burn ends at the lake, which is now an arid pan. Date Bed puts down the Thing and kicks loose a chunk of salt, crushes the chunk to granules and grasps these with the tips of her trunk. As she drops them into her mouth she falls into a clear memory of the shine of the water that was here and the thousands of flamingos, her first acquaintance with them. Because she took for granted that no large creature could be that spectral colour, she saw the blur of birds as an exotic reed bed and thought that their twanging call must be some deployment of the air.

Why is it, she asks herself now, coming out of the memory, that she recalls some things perfectly while others are hazy or lost to her entirely? By what criteria is the selection made? To relive a moment from seven years ago, lovely as the moment was, is a luxury when what she needs is to remember the journeys that would tell her where she is in proximity to Blood Swamp. Whenever she tries to link up those journeys, however, her mind races along until it skids to a stop at a place of nothingness.

She envies birds their sharp eyes and panoramas. She wishes she could seduce one into scouting the landscape on her behalf but she has a hard enough time getting one to talk to her. Even the normally friendly nightjars keep their distance. She blames the drought. There is a gloom to the light, and little charity in creatures. She has resigned herself to being an unwelcome presence to all birds who don’t think of her as food.

She
had
resigned herself.

She picks the Thing up and holds it to her face. She is black from the ash she threw over herself. In its sooty surroundings her eye has a spooky aspect. She turns the Thingand a white disc bolts over the plain. She continues on her way, throwing light into the sky.

She smells fresh water but not fresh dung nor any kind of creature. She hears, far off to the west, the cry of geese, nothing else. The gerenuk warned her, but she didn’t really believe him, she thought he might merely have regretted telling her about such a valuable find.

It is the same day, high noon, when even the foulest of water holes are swarming with birds and grazers. Only humans can vacate a place so absolutely, and yet there is no smell of them here. She sets the Thing down and sniffs the dirt, which is weirdly empty of dung, even vulture dung. The dirt vents a smell of date palms. How can that be, when there are no date palms in the vicinity? She picks the Thing up and consults her eye. The thought within it seems to be that she has come all this way, she may as well investigate.

Slowly she moves forward. To her left, a ball of dead shrubbery tumbles by. A good sign. She picks up her pace. The water hole is beyond a tumult of toppled thorn trees, and as she approaches, the thin odour of old dung wafts her way. Ostrich and patas-monkey dung. She-one dung!

She hurries to the source of the craved smell. There! And there! Piles of dark, dried-out, trod-on boluses between the logs. Dropping the Thing, she greedily sniffs. It is She-B-And-B dung. She-Brags, She-Bluffs, She-Booms, She-Bluffs again. A fine family, the She-B’s-And-B’s, Tall Time’s birthfamily. The boluses have been polluted by flies and raided by beetles but she eats several anyway, she wants the taste of them at the back of her throat.

She-Broods, She-Betters … all She-B-And-B dung. Every bolus summons memories of its cow, and despite the menacing queerness of this place she lets herself swoon into the memories, some of them shadowy, some clear. She weaves among the logs. She is at the far side of them when she comes upon the boluses of Tall Time.

She lifts her head, alert again. So he was here. She sees the glint of the water hole and thinks that if the Link Bull foraged at this place, there can be no ill omens, or at least there weren’t four or five days ago. His fragrance, his regular bull fragrance, has a quality she associates with perfect safety, and she eats one of the boluses and has a clear, happy memory of meeting him for the first time. She emerges from the memory weeping and with the timbre of his voice caught in her ears and then the thought of the Thing jolts her and she rushes back and retrieves it and returns to the far side of the logs and stands there.

The dark surface of the hole indicates a depth that may account for the hole’s existence in a drought: a source far underground constantly replenishing the migrating higher levels. She shifts the Thing under her chin and starts forward, scenting, ears tensed. Here also the ground is empty of dung and even of sticks and crevices and it vents a fruity odour incompatible with the landscape. The water is like a hallucination. She has not drunk since this morning. She has not smelled water so fresh in hundreds of days. At the edge of the hole she confers with herself in the Thing but her eye has astranded, don’t-ask-me look. She sets the Thing down and drinks, little sips at first, then trunkfuls. She showers and coats herself with dust, after which she squints about and inhales the unfitting odours. Should she stay to eat and sleep or should she leave? If she leaves, where will she go?

She picks up the Thing and points it at the white crater of the sun and almost instantly a half-dozen oxpeckers arrive and flutter above her, chattering in the embryonic language of their species: “That! It! What! Look! Where!”

“Scat!” she trumpets and they zoom away. What use are those imbeciles to her? An eagle would be a stroke of luck, but she has failed to attract one so far and now she simply wants to talk to some reasonable creature. Find out whether she is safe here, and why there is no evidence that Tall Time or any of the She-B’s-And-B’s drank.