The White Bone (31 page)

“Date Bed is lost,” the nurse cow mutters. Both she and Mud have excavated their own holes and are waiting for them to fill.

“Oh!” She-Screams lets out a high, crazy laugh. “And we’re not?” She drinks again and showers. “When my skull grew,” she says, squirting water between her legs, “it split open my skin.” She inclines her head to show the nurse cow her crown. “See there? I need one of your water-glory poultices, but what hope is there of that? In my opinion, the wisest course"–she has switched to her sermonizer’s voice–"the only course, as our Matriarch will eventually realize provided she doesn’t die first, is to stop the search right now and have Me-Me lead us to The Safe Place.”

“Suppose Me-Me doesn’t know where The Safe Place is?” Mud asks.

“At The Safe Place,” She-Screams continues as though Mud has not spoken, “we can regain our strength and then go out and search again if we must. For all we know, Date Bed may already be at The Safe Place.”

“Suppose Me-Me doesn’t know where The Safe Place is?” She-Soothes rumbles without betraying, by her tone, that the question has already been asked.

“She knows,” She-Screams answers distantly, and an odd, harsh smell leaks from her hide.

She-Snorts finds only a single scent trail. It either approaches from the northeast or heads off that way.

“She must have left more than one trail,” She-Screams says, but after a quick search complains that she never knew a calf to have such a thin odour. “What was she doing here, anyway? There’s no browse. Not a speck of shade.” She turns to the matriarch. “What’s the plan? I hope it’s not to keep going northeast.” Quoting Torrent, she says, “There’s only empty plain and more empty plain and at the end of it all is a desert.” She starts tapping the warts on her face. “We don’t even know if that’s the way Date Bed went. It may just as easily be the way she came.”

She-Snorts keeps drinking. She is so lean that in the workings of her throat and belly it is possible to track the descent of the water. Her belly is bloated, from hunger or the newborn, Mud can’t tell. She is red. They all are. They have coated themselves in the pan’s red sand. They are another species, Mud thinks–baked and spiny, frail as insects.

“Are we going northeast?” She-Screams persists.

No answer.

She-Screams nods. They are going northeast, she has concluded. She turns to She-Soothes. “It is the worst drought in living memory,” she says. Her measured tone suggests that she and the nurse cow see eye to eye. “And the plan is to head for a desert.”

She-Soothes looks at She-Snorts. “Is there spike weed in that desert?” she bellows. Spike-weed oil stimulates the flow of milk.

“I would not go to The Safe Place,” She-Snorts says, “knowing that Date Bed might still be alive and lost.”

“Nor would I,” Mud says. In her shame she weeps. The matriarch’s allegiance to Date Bed is steadfast while hers has wavered.

She-Screams whirls on She-Soothes. “And what do
you
have to say?” she cries.

“Is there spike weed in that desert?” the nurse cow rumbles.

Behind them, to the southwest, the land smoulders in the low red sun. Ahead is a clarity squandered on so much nothingness. No bushes are visible northeast, no trees except for two poisonous candelabrums. Is this the right direction? As if she can’t believe it, Me-Me keeps glancing around. She roosts on termite mounds to wait for them, her gaze on Bent. She is not the leader anymore, and yet she walks out in front.

They haven’t chased her off because She-Screams has convinced them that she is their best hope of arriving at The Safe Place, whether they make use of her now or wait until they find Date Bed. Before quitting the pan She-Screams gyrated through another consultation with the cheetah and afterwards told them she had led Me-Me to believe that the bargain (She-Snorts’ newborn in exchange for the location of Date Bed’s dung) would be honoured. “But,” she said, “in exchange for taking us to The Safe Place, I had to strike a second bargain. So I promised her She-Spurns’ newborn.”

The matriarch, who hadn’t betrayed that she’d been listening, now looked at Mud.

“Our newborns may drop before we arrive at The Safe Place,” was all Mud said. The possibility had to be mentioned, she felt, that they could actually be forced to honour their bargains or else lose Me-Me and almost all hope of finding The Safe Place. Hearing her own calm voice, in which no objection to the bargains themselves was perceptible, Mud understood that she had declared her position–between Date Bed and her own newborn she chose Date Bed–and she felt vindicated and worthy, and she felt immeasurably vile.

“Bent is not to be bargained with!” She-Soothes warned.

“Don’t worry,” She-Screams rumbled.

For what remained of the afternoon they rested. She-Soothes, Bent and She-Snorts slept. Mud lay on her right side and watched Me-Me. Having eaten the gazelle fawn, she was spraying certain logs with her urine. Choosing a log and a spot on the log seemed to require much deliberation and uneasy sniffing. Here?
Here?
On the burning plain the fawn’s family waited … for an opportunity to mourn the bones, Mud presumed.

She-Screams, who also lay facing the cheetah, whined continuously but at muted volume. Occasionally she glanced at Mud and each time seemed incensed to find her awake, as if Mud were eavesdropping on her torment. She whined about being famished, scorned, sickly, despised, burdened and smarter than everyone else. She said that she was tired of the struggle. “How much longer?” she asked once, and imagining that she was wondering when she would be relieved of this life, Mud silently told her, “Soon.”

Late afternoon, with only water and dirt in their bellies, they left the pan. The matriarch set a slow pace for the sake of Bent and She-Soothes. For the sake of all of them. To keep her mind occupied, Mud counted steps. Now, as the light leaves, she finds herself nodding off. At any sudden sound she jerks awake, amazed that while she dozed she did not veer from the course. Lions are nearby, and wild dogs. When a pride passes on their left flank, Me-Me moves back between She-Snorts and She-Screams. The dogs come in close and look around with their twinkling eyes. Dogs tend a low fire in their skulls.

Fires are on the ground, set by fireflies (She-Snorts suspects) because neither she nor She-Screams can smell humans, although it is difficult to pick up scents through the smoke. Like a thousand fallen blossoms the scattered flames flutter wherever the stubble of some despicable vegetation has survived. Between the flames, gangs of hornbills run. “They drive me mad!” She-Screams shrieks, it is not clear why. The hornbills pursue the scorched insects whose odour (She-Screams alone is able to distinguish it from the overall smell of the smoke) also drives her mad. The heat drives her mad. She wails that it is more than she can bear. Later, when the firesare behind them, the cold is more than she can bear. “My feet!” she wails. You would think she’d welcome the rest stops, but when they are called she cries, “Again? Already?”

After the seventh stop, in the middle of the night, Mud offers to carry Bent for a while. She is hauling him up when She-Screams trumpets that she has caught the scent of tubers. Everybody waits while she investigates. Mud falls asleep. And awakens to find Bent trying to suckle her. She pushes him away and, as she does, smells milk. She touches the nipple and brings the wetness to her lips. “I have milk!” she trumpets. Bent latches onto the other nipple.

She-Soothes and She-Snorts hurry to her. They nuzzle her breasts.

“Early milk!” the nurse cow roars.

She-Screams, chewing tubers, comes over but does not touch Mud and does not speak.

“How is it possible?” the matriarch says. She squeezes a breast, and milk jets out.

“It’s early milk!” the nurse cow trumpets. “Early milk! You heard She-Cures speak of it.” She rears up on her hind legs (and Me-Me, who has crept closer, scuttles away). “Early milk!” She spins in a circle. She is beside herself. “Early milk!”

“Yes, but during a drought,” She-Snorts says.

“The She has blessed us!” She-Soothes trumpets. “The She is good. The She is great. Jubilation! She-Spurns is the saviour!”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” the matriarch says with some of her former drollery. She drops her trunk on Mud’s head. “But it is true you have saved
him.”

“Little Bent,” Mud says. The tugging sensation, which extends far into her chest, doesn’t feel unpleasant, but it doesn’t feelentirely harmless, either. She is being drained, after all. It is only milk, she tells herself. It isn’t blood. It isn’t memory.

The sun and moon are warring, although that is not yet known. When a great blessing and a great tragedy happen within hours of each other, then you know. In battles between the holy Mother and Her dissolute son these extreme occurrences are the incidental consequences, the smithereens.

So far this night there have been only blessings. The milk. The tubers, enough to ease their hunger cramps. Later, after they have walked another five thousand steps (with She-Soothes hauling Bent because when Mud takes over he tries to feed), the ground softens and in a sandy ditch they dig water holes. While Mud waits for hers to fill, Bent nurses. Already, by the strength of his tugs, she can feel that he is hardier.

Patches of bitter but edible fire grass are in the vicinity, and the matriarch calls an early halt to the night’s trek so that they can forage and celebrate. They sing as they eat. “The Bursting Breast Song” and a hymn of thanksgiving: “Come, Thou Fount of every blessing! Fill my trunk to blare Thy grace… .” Strangely, She-Screams, whose off-key shriek usually dominates any chorus, doesn’t join in. She feeds apart from them, on thorn bushes, and she talks to herself in an unintelligible whimper. Not far from her Me-Me sits and makes a sound in her throat like breaking twigs.

The fire grass is a sedative, a potent one for cows as debilitated as they are, and Mud, She-Soothes and She-Snorts are obliged to lie down while it is still dark and they are stillfamished. Bent lies between Mud’s legs with his trunk resting on her right teat. She-Screams continues to feed on the thorn bushes. She’ll keep a scent on Me-Me, Mud thinks and yet is uneasy and rumbles to She-Snorts, “Matriarch, I’m going to try to stay awake.”

“I’ve got that feeling behind my eyes,” She-Snorts murmurs.

Mud recalls Hail Stones telling them–only hours before the slaughter–that She-Demands had a feeling behind her eyes. “That warning feeling?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“What does it mean?”

But the matriarch is already snoring.

Alarmed, Mud hauls herself back onto her feet, determined now to fight sleep. She drifts off anyway. She dreams about Date Bed: She and Date Bed are wading among water lettuces in a swamp that transforms into a meadow of consimilis grass, and Date Bed says in her earnest way, “You must understand, we aren’t where we think we are,” and when she turns, Mud sees that she has no trunk, and out of the cavity where the trunk should be a wind blasts, and a newborn cries, “Mama!”

She wakes up. Bent is gone. A vagrant wind blows, it scatters his cries, which come from the north, then the west, then the northeast.

“Bent!” she trumpets.

She-Soothes and She-Snorts awaken.