The White Bone (21 page)

Her belly growls. Even if she decides to leave she will have to eat. She goes over to the logs, wedges the Thing in the fork of a branch and tears free a bunch of roots. Thorn-tree roots are, for her, a duty food: their saltiness calms her stomach but she despises the aftertaste. She eats them now only until her belly settles and then she peels a strip of bark and rolls it into her mouth … and hears munching. So much about this place is out of kilter that her first thought is that the sound of what she is doing must have jumped ahead of the act of her doing it, that while she munches she will hear swallowing and while she swallows she will hear herself ripping another piece of bark and so on. A moment later, however, the smell of a black rhino reaches her and she squints downwind and a dark mass is there.

Date Bed has a soft spot for rhinos because of their weakeyes and fabulous ugliness, and because of how rare they are. When she was a calf, there was always at least one black rhino mother and calf at Blood Swamp. In the last five years none has shown up, so many have been slaughtered by humans, and in fact it is very odd that one should be here, close to a water hole but not
at
it and nowhere near a mud wallow. The munching grows implausibly loud. For a reason nobody understands, you can hear rhinos eating a hundred yards away and sometimes, such as now, the sound seems to issue from your own throat. As she starts walking forward, Date Bed thinks about her theory that the sound is transmitted from the rhino’s “tusks” by some means having to do with the peculiar placement of the “tusks” on the snout. “Hello, bull peerless,” she thinks, forcefully to be heard above the chewing. “What an honour and surprise it is to come upon a peerless in this wasteland.”

Snorting, the rhino bustles over to her. It is only a few feet away before Date Bed scents that it is not a male. So here is another oddity: a lone female. Like herself. “I beg your pardon,” she thinks. “Cow peerless.”

The rhino turns sideways and as if addressing somebody off to the west squeals, “Go away! Scat! Are you crazy? Are you a crazy defective half-wit?”

“Certainly not–”

“Then get away from here!” She jabs the air with her horns. “Why did you come?” She puffs and trots around in a circle and when she is facing Date Bed, squeals, “You must be a stupid crazy simpleton!”

“I apologize for trespassing,” Date Bed thinks, flattening her ears and hunching so that she appears less of a threat. “I camefor the water, and because I was told that my kind had recently been here.”

The rhino goes still. Her hog-like ears twitch.

“I am separated from my kind,” Date Bed thinks. “From my family.”

The rhino steps right up to Date Bed’s forelegs. Date Bed lowers her trunk and smells the expiration of pure misery. She can’t say what comes over her–compassion, loneliness, or perhaps she is simply reckless with curiosity–but she touches the rhino’s back, the scored skin there, the wrinkle of an old wound, and the rhino stands still and lets herself be dabbed, which is stranger than what Date Bed is doing, and in the midst of this unlikely moment, the rhino grunts, “Poor witless ignoramuses. They have been killed.”

Date Bed draws up her trunk. “Who have been killed?”

“Your kind.” She steps back and cocks her head. “They were here. Yes, yes, they were. A small meagre herd of ten or fifteen, and they were killed.”

“All of them?”

“All? Yes, yes, I think so. Well, perhaps not all. I don’t know, I don’t know. But that is what happens at this place. Know-nothing demented dunderheads come to drink, and vicious brutal hindleggers come to slaughter them. Why do you imagine there is a huge enormous water hole in the middle of nowhere? Who do you imagine dug it?”

Date Bed sways on the verge of fainting. “There is no blood, no scent of–”

“They cover their tracks.” She snorts the ground, all at once distraught again. “Go away!” she squeals. She squats, and urine fans out behind her. “Don’t be a stupid raving numskull!”

The sharp smell of the urine brings Date Bed out of her dizziness. “When?” she thinks, meaning when were her kind slaughtered.

“Immediately! Straight away! At once!”

“But you are here.”

“I can’t leave!”

“Why not?” Date Bed is weeping.

The rhino goes still again. “They killed my calf.”

“No.”

“Yes, yes, they killed him, slaughtered him, butchered him, and took him away.”

“Oh, how dreadful.”

“I am waiting for his breath.”

Date Bed has heard about this, how rhinos believe that after an interval of anywhere from ten to thirty days the breath returns from wherever the spirit has gone. For an hour or so it lingers above the place where the death occurred, and if a female rhino happens to inhale the breath she will one day give birth to a calf in whom some portion of the spirit of the deceased is preserved.

Date Bed thinks, “Aren’t you afraid that the hindlegger will kill
you?”
but far enough back in her mind that the rhino won’t hear. It is not for her to question the rituals and compromises by which somebody stumbles through monstrous loss. “Thank you for the information,” she thinks at audible range. She gives a brisk nod and heads back to the water hole.

“Not that way!” the rhino calls after her. “Dolt-head lunatic moron!”

At the water hole Date Bed has a drink and a shower and collects the Thing. She looks at herself in it. Red, witless eye. Lunatic moronic dolt-head eye. Against whom, against what breadth of experience, can she measure herself out here? She throws dust over herself and starts off with “Get away from here,” the only directive in her head.

It could be that she has travelled across this landscape before but she doesn’t remember. She prays, out loud and immoderately. All these slaughters have been conceived of and are now being remembered by the She, who is not vindictive or mad–unless She is, in which case She might be bargained with, but Date Bed does not believe this. If the One in whose image all she-ones were created is mad, then they themselves are piecemeal madness. And they aren’t, not yet. Date Bed will not accept that the living, however many remain (all the thousands of them or all ten of them), are mad. But enough suffering may drive them mad, and if that happens, if all of Her best creations go mad, it will be the reshaping of Her. The maddening of
Her.
Which, of course, She knows. Praying, “In the name of mercy, let Tall Time be alive,” Date Bed has only the tiniest hope that she can influence what has already taken place.

She loves Tall Time, she can say that now. She can admit to herself that she wanted him to dig her inaugural calf tunnel and that she has always been a little jealous of his adoration of Mud, although she understood it from the start. It has much to do with
why
she loves him. At the Long Rains Massive Gathering when he said to Mud, “We are alike,” she thought, “No,
we
are alike, you and I,” and wondered, purely baffled, how somebody as observant as he could fail to recognize whom he resembled. Like her, he is inquisitive and fastidious and lean. They both categorize information, they gather factsthat nobody else can be bothered with. They both have a fondness for the old language … she its inflections, he its turns of phrase. They both love unnaturally. The thought of him dead is terrifying because she loves him but also because what he knows should have protected him. If the Link Bull can be caught off guard, who is safe?

A high wind flames the dust. She walks straight into it, eyes shut against the grit, smelling and hearing her way, which is no way, no direction. Where there is forage she eats. Roots, twigs, they taste like dirt to her. She trumpets prayers, mutters to herself and feels ancient and crazy. She sings hymns:

And:

That she is carrying the Thing she forgets until she sets it down to feed and then she thinks fretfully, “I mustn’t go off without it,” and she never does although every time she puts it on the ground she can never remember having picked it up again. She ambles through hallucinations: the interior of a cave, straight white walls, green stone floor as shiny and flatas a still pond, miniature suns in the roof of the cave spreading a cool white light. Another wall, twice as high as she is and three times her width, it stands alone on a web of silver sticks, and life unfolds against it in jerks and flashes as if it were the shifting scene of someone else’s memory. And this: a male human holding bunches of aromatic yellow fruits in his forefeet and offering them to Date Bed while saying something that her mind cannot translate. But the sound of his voice–a throaty cooing such as a dove makes–is soothing.

Four days later she finds herself under the shade of a huge acacia close to the bank of what was once a river. No other trees still stand, only this solitary giant with its splintered trunk that holds most of its bark and supports a miraculous crown of foliage, withered however, crackling in the wind, and in any event too high for her to reach. From almost every branch forsaken weaver-bird nests dangle like a moribund harvest, and farther up is the immense dish of a vulture’s nest but it, too, looks vacated and the splats of white dung on the ground directly underneath smell old.

She has excavated a seepage in the riverbed and has eaten three strips of bark. Now she lies on her side and gazes at herself in the Thing. “Don’t fret, spirit twin,” she says several times. “I am here.” Presently, from her eye’s dark circle, she feels prodded to recall her inspired idea. “I haven’t forgotten,” she says, but as she considers the idea she begins to tinker with it.

The idea is this: she will attract an eagle, and as soon as he (or she) is hovering close enough to hear her mind she will saythat his spirit twin, his guardian, is resting in “this oasis of impenetrable water” and yearns for a glimpse of him. He will be curious enough to drift lower, he may even land on a bush or a termite mound, and when he does she will show him not only the clearest image of himself he has ever seen but in all likelihood the
only
image he has seen in many days. He will be riveted.

She will offer him a bribe.

In exchange for glimpses of his guardian he must patrol the land for the white bone. She will direct him to concentrate his search to the west of hill ranges and to pay particular attention to any boulders and termite mounds that form a circle.

Initially the plan also involved getting him to hunt for others of her kind, and she will still ask for sightings, but if the sighting is farther away than a two-day trek and the cows aren’t She-S’s, she won’t pursue it. In a drought, nobody stays in one place very long unless the place is a body of water, and except for Blood Swamp and the evil water hole, most bodies of water seem to be gone. She has decided not to imperil herself by returning to Blood Swamp even though it is her sacred duty to mourn the bones. Her family, those of them who returned to the swamp, probably won’t be there now anyway. They will be on the move, as she is, looking for a white bone, looking for her. If her mother hasn’t died, she will be the new matriarch and the one leading the search.

At the thought of She-Snorts trying to locate her, scenting the air with her sensitive trunk, Date Bed’s eyes well up. In the Thing she watches the warping of herself, and a part of her mind wonders whether tears seep up from under the lower lidor from minuscule holes in the eyeball itself. It is only now occurring to her that in order to help her mother, the best thing she can do is to stay put in one spot for a while.

This is as good a spot as any. Near a riverbed, plenty of bark on this tree, scrub thorns. She inhales and squints in all directions. Overhead she spies a bird. Probably a vulture, but seconds later she is overcome by acute self-awareness and realizes that she is living a moment already experienced by a visionary, which means that it is a moment of consequence. With the sense that she is being directed by a need more distressed even than her own she angles the Thing at the sun.

A great n1umbness hits Mud’s heart. She peers through the darkness, sniffing. Except for Bent, who now lies beneath his mother, everyone is scraping the ground for roots.

She-Screams stands near Swamp and doesn’t seem upset, and that can only mean that while Mud was lost in her vision, nothing happened. She-Snorts must have held her peace. Why? Why would she after She-Screams had declared Date Bed a lost cause? There were all those inhalations of the calming underscents, but Mud can’t believe that they alone would have stopped She-Snorts from reacting to what must be the most unforgivable thing She-Screams has ever come out with.

Mud goes over to the matriarch and brushes her rump. As if Mud wasn’t there She-Snorts continues to pull on a root cord, and Mud can’t bring herself to speak. She moves beside She-Screams and starts to tusk at the earth while weeping silently over the image of She-Screams dead–her crushed skull, her bloated torso. She-Screams, smelling her sorrow(and no doubt considering it, whatever its source, less justified than her own), lets out irritated breaths, and this strikes Mud as almost cruelly pathetic–that She-Screams, in ignorance of her fate, should behave exactly as she always has.