The White Bone (24 page)

Not since before the slaughter has She-Snorts talked this easily and at such length with any of them. Mud looks at her. In the transparent pre-dawn her skin is glossy and her tusks beam white, as Mud’s don’t. Mud’s and everyone else’s tusks have gone dull and stained, but the matriarch’s hoard their white, and the nodular peak of her head and the thick base of her trunk are the same as they ever were. She is thin, they all are, and yet she does not appear diminished by her thinness, and to Mud this seems like a display of mettle, as if for her to have kept her beauty were a feat. In a kind of infatuation she finds herself leaning against the bigger cow. She-Snorts permits the intimacy, and as soon as Mud realizes this, she is self-conscious, and the feeling of being a stranger in the family, of being honoured by rather than entitled to the intimacy, returns. She doesn’t pull away. It would be an impertinence to do so. The thought occurs to her that in She-Snorts’ mind, and in this fragile moment, she could be Date Bed, and so she breathes more quickly, the way Date Bed does, and she lowers her eyes, whose green light is not Date Bed’s. They stand like that, the two of them, while the last of the darkness lifts. A bird starts up a piercing song and they move apart to brace for the scream that comes a moment later.

Mud turns. She-Snorts does not.

She-Screams is charging up and down the riverbed, pulverizing bones.

She-Soothes and Bent scramble to their feet. “Where did they go?” She-Soothes bellows in Mud’s direction.

“Back over the plain.”

“Swamp!” She-Screams gallops up to the bank. “They went this way!”

Nobody moves.

She-Screams whirls around. “They’re only calves!”

Silence.

“Are you going to abandon them?”

She-Snorts sniffs the ground. Bent cowers under She-Soothes, who gapes from the matriarch to She-Screams and sways one forefoot irresolutely. Up on the bank She-Screams tosses her head. Mud longs to tell her what She-Snorts said about Swamp being more resourceful than he lets on, but She-Screams would pretend not to hear. And wouldn’t believe it anyway.

“Cowards!” She-Screams cries. Behind her the sky blazes gold and orange. She looms above them. She looks threatening, magnificent even. “Traitors!” she cries.

And she turns and is gone.

“Shall She-Soothes fetch her back?” the nurse cow roars.

She-Snorts ambles to the water hole and removes the plug. She holds it daintily in the tip of her trunk and appears to study it.

“She’ll track them!” She-Soothes roars finally. “If she stops to send out a grounder, they’ll know she’s coming.” She nods, convincing herself. “She’ll catch up with them soon enough.”

She won’t, Mud thinks. It strikes her that the reason She-Screams was alone in the vision was that she will be alone when she dies. She steps over to the bank and climbs it and lifts her trunk.

There is no wind. There are footprints … three sets, and above them a virtually motionless ridge of dust stretching to the horizon. Beyond the dust She-Screams is not visible but her scent is still strong. And so too, now, is another scent, evil and cloying, drifting from The Spill.

Tall Time plods northwest. Just before dawn he spotted an ostrich running in that direction and now, the farther he goes, the more tracks and dung he comes across. Jackal, hyena, oryx, giraffe, lioness.

It would appear that he is headed for water.

Although not necessarily. The loud scraping of a grasshopper, which pesters his right ear, advertises water not to the northwest but to the northeast. If you pay attention to such things. Tall Time can’t pretend he doesn’t. He is no longer driven to act, that’s the difference. For him the links have become like an ancient matriarch in her final, addled days–your first instinct is to obey her, and sometimes she’s worth listening to. Almost always she isn’t.

The last time he drank was yesterday morning, taking a mad risk at a water hole near a circle of human dwellings. Before that he was dry for two days. Since entering the desert he has eaten only the spines of date-palm fronds. How (he keeps asking himself) did Torrent survive this terrain? Tall Time can’t imagine the old bull surviving it now, in his deteriorated state. Given which, Tall Time wonders if he isn’t a fool to be trusting Torrent’s directions.

He has not planned for failure. He reminds himself that when Torrent first spoke of how to find the Lost Ones, his memory was not yet demolished, and back then he mentioned–as he did again at Blood Swamp–a northern desert that took four days to cross. Well, this is a desert, the
only
northern desert as far as Tall Time knows. And he has been crossing it for three and a half days now.

Already, so early in the morning, the soles of his feet burn. No relief comes from spraying himself with sand as hot as this. Flies buzz at his anus, in his ears, in front of his eyes, colossal ticks rummage through the cuts on his skin. To fend off thirst he sucks on a stone. He hums nonsense songs, hymns, they are the same to him. He keeps his eyes on the ostrich track, which seems to tow him along. When it suddenly ends he flinches as if the ground itself gave way.

A scuffle has taken place here between the ostrich and a lioness. The lioness’s tracks approach from the north. The blood has the odour of both creatures and is only now beginning to coagulate. Whatever the lioness’s wounds may be, they cannot be very serious because she has dragged the ostrich away, and in so doing has made a wide path that blots out her prints. Down the centre of the path the smeared trail of blood is a pink ribbon.

The path leads northwest, and Tall Time follows it. The landscape undulates. At the top of every crest Tall Time expects to see, in the gully below, the lioness, and perhaps several members of her family, eating the big bird. But on thepath goes, incredibly. For any lioness, let alone an injured one, a grown ostrich would be no small burden to lug up and down these hills.

What he does finally see is so unexpected that he growls.

The ostrich turns to look at him. It is alive, and upright. The lioness is the one who is dead, sprawled before the ostrich who is … mourning the corpse? That crazy explanation seems to be the only one available to Tall Time until he is a few yards from the pair and sees that the ostrich’s left foot is embedded in the lioness’s chest, and then he realizes that the ostrich must have kicked its attacker with a blow that cut straight through the ribcage and probably caused instant death. But the foot remained snared.

“You dragged her all this way,” Tall Time says, flabbergasted at such a display of strength.

The ostrich, who of course doesn’t understand, gazes up with its heavy-lidded eyes, apparently too exhausted to be frightened.

“I may be able to help,” Tall Time says.

The ostrich opens its beak and lets out a dreary whistle.

“I shall try not to hurt you,” Tall Time says. He side-steps splats of blood. When he is close enough, he twines his trunk around the rosy strip below the ostrich’s knee. The skin there is loose and ringed, the leg itself a twig. The miracle now is that the ostrich is allowing this to happen. “Here we go,” Tall Time murmurs and gives a tug.

Simultaneous with the snap is a lion-like boom. Tall Time releases the leg and gapes at the carcass, but it is the ostrich who boomed. And does so again, while desperately pecking at Tall Time’s shin.

“Forgive me!” Tall Time says, aghast. The foot is still stuck but now the leg is broken.

The ostrich booms and flaps its useless wings.

Tall Time turns and runs … northeast, where the grasshopper advised he should go, although he is scarcely aware of direction other than that he must have been going the wrong way if it led to such a calamity. “I’ve killed it” is his one thought, and it’s true, he has. Even if the ostrich frees its foot, as a cripple it won’t live another day. Weeping, Tall Time lumbers up the sandy hills, slides down on his haunches and feels the gist of existence in this enterprise: the slog, the respite, the slog. The relentlessness. The end … at midday, the sun drilling straight down, and his leg throbbing where it was pecked, his body like a boulder that will roll no farther, his throat a charred crater, and his mind falling into memories, slipping from one to another down through his life by way of holes that at the time were pauses and mysteries and misapprehensions.

He believes that he is experiencing the descent into “heat sleep,” and he is resigned, but when he comes to the memory of his first meeting with Mud he fights himself into the present and to his feet.

When he left Blood Swamp twenty-eight days ago, his hunch was that the She-S’s had gone to one of several remote watering places known to their extended family. The dung trail was so dry and reduced he was unable to detect any individual scents. There was only the bittersweet She-S scent, which ended after some fifty miles, but he thought he knew where it led. He was wrong. And then wrong again, and again. Wherever he went, not only were the She-S’s not there,nobody was, and what signs of she-one life he came across–denuded and fallen trees, trampled thickets–were never recent. At least once an hour he sent out infrasonic calls. None was answered.

Where is everybody? Dead, yes, hundreds are dead, in Tall Time’s estimation as many from the drought as from slaughter. You can tell the drought deaths by the absence of bullet holes in the hide, or by the presence of feet and tusks, or (since humans are scavengers) by the absence of bullets among the bones. Still, the number of corpses doesn’t add up to annihilation. Either all the remaining families have found their way to The Safe Place–and there is no evidence of such a mass exodus in any single direction–or they have scattered in every direction to wait out the era of darkness at the fringes of the world.

It would seem that among his kind he is alone in having chosen this particular route. Which is as he would expect. Only the mad try to cross deserts during a drought. If he makes it to the other side and locates a family of Lost Ones he is not even certain what he wants of them. Naturally he’ll ask about the white bone, but will they be able to tell him more than Torrent already has? At the least, they’ll know where
not
to look. And perhaps they’ll advise him about how to find the She-S’s. An entire race of master trackers should have a few tricks he’s never heard of. It is possible, in fact likely, that they will elude him. It is possible that they have found the white bone and gone to The Safe Place and are being stared at by the entranced humans. In either event he will have their forest to feed on while he plans what to do next.

The thought of the browse starts him walking. Not northeast, which is too great a diversion from his original destination,and not northwest, he won’t go that way again. He heads due north. By attending to where the sun hits his skin, he holds a steady course. Eventually he is aware of his shadow leaking out from his feet to his right. Of the world growing. He dreams and hallucinates, and the fierce patch of heat creeps across his back. When the air cools and a breeze comes up he thinks he imagines these comforts. When the landscape begins to change he ignores it for miles. He see the rocks, the clumps of bush, he hears within the bush the rustling of tiny creatures. What memory is this? He has to stroke the rough brown trunk of an acacia before he accepts that he is in the present. Awed and suspicious, he peels free a piece of the bark and puts it into his mouth and then spits it out because his mouth is too dry to swallow.

He is in a grove of acacias. Ghostly, most of them, their bark torn away. None is particularly large … the white bone won’t be found here. But water will be. He smells it. That silver glare through the trees is a pond bed then, and that darkness beyond the bed is not the horizon. It is a forested hill so high he cannot see the summit.

He hurries to the bed and in the depressed centre he digs. Not too far down there is water, and as the seepage gurgles up he sobs and gives thanks to the doomed ostrich, because if not for the ostrich kicking the lioness and if not for his breaking the ostrich’s leg, he would have kept going northwest.

Within the acacia grove is a line of termite mounds. They are no longer visible from where he is but he saw them as he came here: four mounds ascending in size from the southernmost to the northernmost. “Hasten to the hill” is their arcane message, and although he wants to feed on the acacia bark andalthough the message irritates him with its self-important urgency, he hastens–after he has drunk himself into a mildly nauseated state and then drenched and dusted his hide–to the hill.

Why? He can’t say. Obscurely he feels that to heed a message he no longer respects is to submit to the same capricious luck that doomed the ostrich and is therefore penance for his clumsy intervention. As he walks, the water sloshes in his belly. He swipes his trunk along the trees but resists stopping to feed.

The woods thicken, the wind becomes erratic. There is dead calm and then a brief blast, and on one of these blasts the odour of she-one calves reaches him. He halts and swivels his trunk, opens his ears. The smell is gone. Heart galloping, he keeps going. Another gust carries the heavier odour of an adult cow, and this time the smell stays long enough for him to locate it, and he starts to run, skirting huge multi-spurred termite mounds and red boulders, dried vegetation crackling under his feet.

They are about a third of the way up the hill. A small bull calf, a smaller cow calf and a newborn. And a cow, lying headfirst on her side, and behind her the path she made as she fell–toppled trees and long swaths of pinkish dirt smoothed to a sheen, like exposed muscle. The youngsters look at him with the glittering green eyes of visionaries.

“Hello,” Tall Time rumbles. Despite the obvious tragedy, he is exhilarated to be addressing Lost Ones. “I am Tall Time the Link Bull of the She-B’s-And-B’s.”

The three are silent.

“I am a friend of Torrent’s, Torrent the Trunk Bull. You may have heard of him.”

“We know who you are,” the bull calf says, the gruff timbre of his voice adding a good three years to the eight that Tall Time had guessed as his age.