The White Bone (26 page)

From a plateau at the mouth of the cave the We-F cows and calves watch them descend. The eyes of the three cows are so brilliant that they produce funnels of light, casting upon the precipitous slope a swampy luminescence without which Tall Time has no idea how he would have picked his way down. He had made his way
up
by clinging to roots and trees, but he had slipped and scraped his shin where the ostrich had pecked it.

Rain, Sink Hole and Grief trot down. “The earth tilts to meet their footfalls” is Tall Time’s wistful thought. Suddenly his little guides are lost to him. No, he is lost to them, it’s as if he’s not there. The family surrounds the three in what is clearly a reunion ceremony, hushed and exacting, unlike anything Tall Time knows. From what he can see, the calves take turns inserting their trunks into each of the cows’ mouthsand then into the mouth of the one other calf. Meanwhile the cows sway their hips in unison, a honeyed musk seeping from their hides. Two of them have stunningly long, straight tusks. The third has only one tusk, and it is the length of one of his, although much thinner.

When the swaying stops, the matriarch starts bellowing a mourning song–this one with words–about courage and hardship and death and boundless mystery. There is a chorus, everybody joining in, and after some three hundred verses, Tall Time joins in as well. “Fear not!” he roars. “The She conceived it thus! Oh, be ye not dismayed!”

Immediately and without consulting each other or acknowledging him, the cows fall silent and move out of the circle. He has ruined something, or transgressed some protocol. “I beg your pardon,” he rumbles, mortified.

The matriarch steps briskly up to him. She is as small as an adolescent calf but the largest of the three cows, and her tusks are almost the length of her trunk. The green wands from her eyes skim over his body, up to his face, obliging him to squint. “Hello, Tall Time the Link Bull,” she says tersely. “I am I-Flounder.”

“Hello, Matriarch,” he says in the formal timbre. “I do apologize.”

“No need. It is our custom to sing until disturbed by an unpleasant noise or scent. I-Fret was my sister, and had you not interrupted I would have sung until dawn.”

If she is weeping to herself, he can’t tell. He can’t imagine that a creature so contained and direct would ever flounder. He is shattered that she would refer to his singing as unpleasant.

The rest of the family are now behind her. She gives a curt nod and the two cows introduce themselves. They are I-Flirt (who suckles Grief from one breast and her own newborn from another), and the single-tusked nurse cow, I-Fix.

“You are bleeding,” I-Fix rumbles. For some reason she sounds outraged.

“There is not much darkness left,” I-Flounder says. “We shall retire to the cave, and I-Fix will attend to you.”

The cave is spacious and high. At a cow’s glance, lengths of rock flare up, and Tall Time is able to glimpse what he smells–the little mounds of hyraxes that sleep in the creases between floor and wall. The fruit bats. He leans against the west wall as I-Fix deftly applies a lobelia poultice to his leg. It is obvious she resents the task. “I was saving this,” she fumes, referring to the lobelia. The instant she is done she rushes away from him, and he goes to the rear of the cave and drinks from the rivulet.

He feels huge and awkward among these tiny cows. That his welcome has been so cool perplexes him, and he is wondering how he should proceed when he realizes by the corona of light surrounding his shadow that the We-F’s are looking his way.

“We await you,” I-Flounder says.

He hurries to where they are gathered along the east wall. By the salt lick, he assumes.

“For two days now,” I-Flounder says, “I have been envisioning you. But not until I envisioned you in the company of our calves did I know we would meet. Prior to our meeting Torrent the Trunk Bull, no Lost One had envisioned any of your kind. We had heard stories of dull, unsightly giants but we had thought that they no longer lived on The Domain–if they ever lived at all. I-Fix’s visions of Torrent preceded his visit by mere hours.”

“Not all of my kind are dull and unsightly,” Tall Time rumbles quietly. He is more offended than he cares to let on.

I-Flounder makes a dismissive gesture with her trunk. “We have something we must show you,” she says.

Must
show him. At last he is being granted a degree of consequence. He sniffs from one cow to the next, expecting to be presented with a fragment peculiar to his region of the world, a type of nut perhaps, or a small animal skeleton, to which they have attached significance.

But prompted by a signal beyond his senses they all turn and face the wall, illuminating it.

“Look there,” I-Flounder says. “At those marks.”

He touches the scored, green-lit expanse. The marks have obviously been made by tusks. He brings his trunk to his mouth and expects to taste salt. When he doesn’t he grunts, surprised.

“Do you see the likeness?” I-Flounder asks.

“What likeness?”

“A Lost One cow. That is her head, her rump, her trunk and tusks.” She is pointing at the marks. “Those are her legs. Behind her is a bull hindlegger. His head, his forelegs. He grips a hack, here, between his forefeet. Do you see?”

Tall Time slowly nods. Briefly he does see, and then doesn’t, and then does again. It requires a trick of mind, as when you discern a likeness in some contour of landscape.

“Think of silhouettes. Imagine it is near dusk or just after dawn and you are looking toward the She-eye.”

He tries this, and instantly the shapes pop out of the rock. “Did you make them?” he asks, amazed.

“We did not.”

“Who, then?”

“One of our kind.”

“Surely more than one,” he says, because of the varying heights of the marks. But why are they here at all? He brings particles of dirt to his mouth again. There is nothing worth digging out of this rock, nothing that he can taste.

“They were not thoughtlessly produced,” I-Flounder says. A faint strain of emotion has entered her voice. “They are the deliberate creation of a single cow intent on preserving her visions.”

“No,” he says. That a cow would intentionally carve likenesses into rock, that she would conceive of such an enterprise, let alone possess the dexterity to execute it, is more incredible to him than that randomly made scratches could so closely resemble real creatures.

I-Flounder turns away. “There are three more,” she says. She and the others move along the wall and halt before a new dispersion of marks.

He tells himself that he is looking at shapes on the horizon, and the scene reveals itself. Two Lost One cows and a calf lie on their sides. The cows have cavities where their faces should be. Nobody has tusks, feet or tails. “A slaughter,” he says. He touches the outline of the calf, and he could be stroking a corpse. He begins to weep, but without tears. “How is it possible?” he asks.

“The marks are very sacred,” I-Flounder says. “And very old. Look here now, at the third one.” She walks along the wall, and her family and Tall Time follow.

This likeness is of a large flying bird. “A sky-diver?” Tall Time asks.

I-Flounder nods.

In its beak the eagle holds what appears to be a curved twig. Tall Time runs the tip of his trunk over the eagle’s outline.

“That’s right,” I-Flounder says. “Keep touching.”

The marks seem to suck his trunk along their lengths, a queer sensation. He feels himself sinking into a memory and tries to pull himself out but the memory has already surrounded him and yet is not familiar, and he concludes that he has fallen asleep. Except that there is nothing dream-like about the perfection and clarity of the blue sky and how it fails to warp into something else as he looks at it. A martial eagle cuts through the blue and idles inches from his eyes. Teetering, it scours the ground. When it dives, Tall Time’s gaze dives likewise. He cannot smell the bird. His sense of smell is absent but his sense of sight is fantastically sharp. He sees the small brilliant white rib in the hollow between two boulders. He watches as the eagle grasps the rib in its talons and flies off. “The white bone!” Tall Time calls and finds himself looking at the cave wall.

He turns to face the cows. “I dreamt–” he rumbles.

“It was no dream,” I-Flounder says. “It was a vision.”

“Bulls of my kind don’t have visions.”

“Nevertheless you did. If you match it against any dream you have ever had you shall find there is little resemblance.”

She is unerring and his superior. If she tells him that despite everything he knows he had a vision, he must believe her. “But I am incapable of having visions,” he says weakly.

“The likeness inspired your vision. Away from these likenesses it is doubtful you shall ever have another.”

He is grateful that she did not urge him to envision the slaughter. “I had a vision,” he rumbles, relinquishing himself to wonder. “I saw the white bone.”

“The that-way bone,” I-Flounder says sharply.

“The that-way bone. Quite right.”

“It loses power when it is spoken of directly.”

“Yes, of course. Forgive me. I must say I’m concerned about how much power it has already lost. In my part of The Domain alone, I suspect that quite a few families know of it.”

“Are all your kind as careless as you?”

“Among my kind I am considered unwholesomely cautious,” he says apologetically.

She is quiet, and then her eyes flash, and all the We-F’s lower their heads. Guessing that some observance is under way, he lowers his head as well. At the back of the cave the rivulet ticks out an agitated rhythm. The sound is like that of two small bones tapping together, and he finds himself thinking of the delicacy with which Torrent fondled the bones of the She-S calves at Blood Swamp. He glances at I-Flounder.

Her eyes are burning centrums. “Pardon my absence, Tall Time. I, too, had a vision.” She says this kindly. She sounds like somebody else entirely.

“Of what?” he asks.

Her gaze veers to the wall. “There is one more likeness.”

“Was it of me?” Her manner has given him the idea that she saw him in peril.

“The visions of the matriarch are confidential,” she says, brisk again, “unless she herself chooses to divulge them.”

He looks at Rain, who is looking at I-Flounder and plainly hearing her thoughts. In the gloom the little calf’s expression is indecipherable. He sniffs the air for some prevailing emotion, but the musk of the cows is muffling their more subtle odours.

“In this likeness is one of your kind,” I-Flounder says. “A cow calf.”

“How’s that?” He whirls around to face the wall.

“The tusks are stunted.” She points to the marks. “The ears are oversized.”

His fear relaxes to wonder. “How curious.”

“More curious still is that it will not yield. When we touch it, we fail to enter a vision. As you can see, the calf is holding the that-way bone from the third likeness.”

He traces the tip of his trunk along the mark that is the calf’s rump. To enter a vision of this scene would be to take in the location. And to take in the location would be, with luck, to find it. But will the calf and the white bone still be there, waiting to be found? Apparently the We-F’s think so. Apparently they have been hoping that the likeness will yield to one of the calf’s own kind. So far he feels nothing of the sucking sensation he felt from the third likeness. He moves his trunk to the enormous acacia the calf is standing under. “This is certainly very large,” he says.

“We wondered if it was common to your part of The Domain,” I-Flounder says.

“I have never seen one this size,” he says.

“It is grotesque,” I-Fix says with mystifying passion.

“I do not find it so,” I-Flirt says, looking at him. “I am partial to bigness.”

I-Flounder says, “Every day we touch this likeness and hope it will yield. Searching aimlessly for the that-way bone seems foolish when the answer to its location is right here. I imagine that the calf is in the midst of throwing the that-way bone. If, in a vision, one witnesses how it lands, then one can find the way to The Second Safe Place.”

“Yes, I understand,” Tall Time says, and now he does. The We-F’s aren’t depending on finding the calf or the white bone. They need only determine where that acacia is and in which direction the white bone lands once the calf throws it. They are the masters of the master trackers. From a single indication they will be able to find The Safe Place, or The Second Safe Place, as they call it. Provided that the calf really
is
in the midst of throwing the white bone and that there really
is
a Safe Place. He tells them about Torrent’s doubts.

“Torrent the Trunk Bull,” Sink Hole says contemptuously.

I-Flounder slaps the calf hard across his rump. “There is but one Torrent the Trunk Bull,” she says. Which surprises Tall Time, this defence of a member of his kind. Turning to him, she says, “We have none of us envisioned The Second Safe Place. To our knowledge no Lost One has. Has any of your kind?”

“Not that I’ve learned.”

She nods, and he suspects that this failure on the part of his kind relieves her. “Nevertheless,” she says, “we have envisioned the making of these likenesses by the last white cow on The Domain. We have heard her sing that when the hindleggers had annihilated and crushed the bones of all of her kindexcept for herself and her newborn, she offered the newborn to a longbody in order to preserve the rib that, in future eras of darkness, would lead she-ones to a–” And she lifts her head and booms: