The White Bone (5 page)

A nightjar has told Date Bed that the stars are falling. “Are you able to see them?” Date Bed whispers to Mud.

Mud cocks one eye skyward. It is a Rogue’s night and she sees only the gaping moon. “Did he say how many?”

“Countless.”

“At least the She-D dead are spared
that
atrocity,” Mud thinks.

“How do you know?”

“In my vision all the tusks were hacked off.”

“But you don’t know when that happened.”

“There was something so desolate about them.”

“Well,” Date Bed breathes, “a slaughter–”

“It was more than the slaughter. I can’t describe it … a hopelessness. I don’t think any of them became sky cows.”

Sky cows are dead cows who have ascended to the sky to join the family of the She. A star is the shine of a sky cow’s tusk. When stars fall it is because sky cows are dropping out of the family of the She and into The Eternal Shoreless Water, where they will bloat and drift insensible among the calves and dead bulls, all of whom fall into The Eternal Shoreless Water directly from this life, the hard truth being that not even newborn calves are granted a spell of bliss in the company of the She. Stars falling in great numbers means that a dead human has slunk out from under the crush of The Domain
*
and, since he is flat now, easily airborne, has wafted up to the sky, where he is hacking off as many tusks as he can before the She awakens. To have your tusks hacked off in paradise is painless, there is that consolation. To have your tusks hacked off while you are on earth is an incomparable physical anguish regardless of whether you are still alive (the notion that pain ends at the instant of death is not taken for granted). It also denies cows entrance into the family of the She, since for a cow to become a sky cow, at least one tusk, or the stump of a tusk, must remain attached to her skull for a full day and night following her last intake of breath. Like bulls and calves, tuskless cows will never know even a second of paradise.

“Listen,” Mud thinks, spreading her ears. The pathetic honking of a wildebeest carries above the rabble of night sounds. The wildebeest is injured. Not by a lioness or leopard, whose choke-hold kills are virtually soundless. By jackals, or wild dogs. Or hyenas. “Do you hear?” she says out loud. “Do you hear?”

“You’ll alarm the She-D’s,” Date Bed whispers. She pulls on Mud’s trunk.

But Mud has fallen into a memory of the hyena that circled her on the night of her birth, and she herself is circling as she attempts to keep the hyena in her sights. At the outskirts of the memory she senses Date Bed tugging her, and gradually the hyena gives way to the silver shaft of moonlight agitating across the surface of the swamp and she comes to a stop. The shaft is the reflected strong tusk of the She. It is meant to be a comfort, but how can it be tonight? “I have such dread,” Mud thinks.

Date Bed is silent.

“So do you,” Mud thinks. “I smell your dread.”

“I cannot tell if the dread is my own,” Date Bed concedes, “or if I have absorbed the dread of those around me. Your dread.” She looks toward the plain. “Theirs.”

Earlier she told the family about talking to one of the wildebeest bulls–an unusually approachable and intelligent patriarch–when she went off with She-Soothes to collect warthog urine. Sixty days ago, in a herd of thousands of wildebeests and zebras, the bull arrived at the wire fence of Mud’s vision. There was a pond less than a mile away, on the far side of this apparently endless barrier, and the bull said that the smell of water is what kept the herd galloping up and down the fence’s length until they succumbed to exhaustion. All of the bull’s cows perished from thirst, all the calves perished. How the She-D’s died, he couldn’t say. He never saw them, which makes sense to Mud. According to her vision, their deaths were more recent.

Mud looks at the She-D’s. They seem beyond dread. They huddle together, removed from Mud’s family, most of whom sleep now, the cows on their feet, the small calves lying in a clump. Normally the She-S’s would have left the swamp at sunset to return to the relatively safe shelter of the acacia bush, but there was no question of abandoning the She-D’s, or of waking them. Even Hail Stones appears to be asleep, one ear draped over his eye and his bad right foot resting on his left forefoot. Galled by urine, the worms have fallen from his wound. Some were still convulsing on the ground hours after the poultice was applied, but a few moments ago She-Demands stepped on them. And then returned to guarding the corpse of her newborn. It lies between her forelegs. Behind her, She-Distracts and She-Drawls-And-Drawls doze leaningagainst each other. All four of them have drunk and bathed and eaten, but they have yet to speak. Even their thoughts are mute. Apart from a bleak cavernous whistling, Date Bed says she hears nothing.

The night slides through itself. That avalanche down the bank is the hippos returning. At the shore the two lead hippos stop and crack open their jaws and a dull light flaunts their canines. When She-Scares charges after them, their jaws clamp shut and the whole pack turns and trundles to the end of the swamp where crocodiles throng under a froth of mist.

The giraffes come next. Passing the two families, they dip their necks and look down at the tiny corpse. Giraffes She-Scares tolerates, although barely.

“She-Soothes is as dry as an old teat,” She-Soothes roars, and She-Scares jolts around, startled, it seems, by this call to matriarchal duty, and trumpets, “Drink! Eat! Bathe!”

It is not for She-Scares to direct the She-D’s, but they, too, head for the water, She-Demands leading them downshore from the She-S’s. Hail Stones limps behind the cows, and She-Soothes rumbles to him, “Try not to soak that foot! She-Soothes will bring you all the tail grass you can eat!”

“Let’s not overdo it!” cries She-Screams. “What little food there is left is going to have to last us until who knows when!”

“That hasn’t stopped you from feasting like a bull,” She-Snorts rumbles.

“Or you!” She-Screams shrieks. She tosses her trunk.

She-Screams is an ugly cow. Her face bubbles with warts, her tusks are blunt and chipped, and yet she carries herself with the arrogance of a beauty. Like She-Snorts (a true beauty), she sways her rump and tosses her trunk, except that in her case the intent is not always clear, especially to strangers, who have been known to back away in alarm from her haughty greeting gestures.

“I have my suitors to consider,” says She-Snorts. She lolls her trunk at Swamp, who–an odd thing for a fourteen-year-old bull calf, especially such a handsome one–shows no interest in the females. Far from attempting to mount them he scarcely sniffs them, and it is this unnatural but welcome passivity that has allowed him to remain in the family well past the age of expulsion. “Oh, don’t rebuff me,” She-Snorts says as he ducks away from her, and although pretending to pine for him is a relentless amusement of hers, to which he has never paid any attention, there is, today, a note of melancholy in her voice, and he looks around at her and rumbles, “I am not rebuffing you. I am withdrawing from you.”

“Hurry up, son,” brays She-Screams. “I feel a spell coming on.” She grabs the end of his tail but he pulls free and enters the water on his own, with his customary torpor.

Most of the She-S cows make their way toward the sedge grasses. She-Sees has given up trying to chew the coarse browse, and she stays in the shallows to feed on the thinner grasses and creepers. With her are She-Soothes, She-Scavenges (named for her habit of eating whatever falls from anyone else’s mouth) and the three small calves. The She-D’s keep to the shallows as well, She-Demands frequently lifting her trunk in the direction of her dead calf, where She-Stammers lingers as if she wouldlike to stand over the body. Eventually She-Stammers moves into the water and contents herself with standing over her brother, Bent, and after that She-Demands appears less fretful.

For an hour or so the two families bathe and feed. The She-D’s lean into each other and caress each other with their trunks but still maintain their strange silence, and consequently when She-Demands trumpets, although it is a thin and rattled sound, the She-S’s are so alarmed that they start up a chorus of “Help!” and “Beware!” before they know what the danger is.

It’s a spotted hyena. Up on the bank, trotting back and forth above the corpse of the newborn. She-Scares sloshes to shore. By the time she reaches it, She-Demands has chased the hyena onto the plain, but for good measure She-Scares chases it farther.

Back on the beach She-Demands walks over to the corpse. She turns and raises a hind foot. Looking off to one side she brings the foot down on the torso.

The whoosh of impact carries out onto the swamp. She lifts her foot again. Whoosh!

Four times she steps on her dead newborn. She kicks sand over the remains, walks to where the sand is dryer and blows two trunkfuls over herself. Her daughters and Hail Stones go to her as the rest of the She-S cows start moving out of the swamp, and She-Scares–who watched the spectacle from up on the bank–slides on her haunches down to the shore and herself kicks sand over the body.

“Mud,” She-Demands says.

Mud is coming out of the water a little behind her family, who now surround and sniff the corpse. Surprised at beingsingled out, she nudges her way through the big cows until she is in front of the She-D matriarch. She-Demands used to be one of the more forbidding cows, famous for her spiritual sermons and the wideness of her head. Now her head slings forward from her shoulders and is so deflated that Mud wonders how it is possible she scented the hyena. Temporin leaks down her face, and respectfully Mud touches the exudate and then slips her trunk into the old cow’s mouth but quickly withdraws at the stench of despair and decaying molars. She-Demands dips her head to look at her. In those milky eyes, behind whatever accretions of misery have killed all expression, Mud sees the glitter of a cow alight with visions.

“My newborn I named Mud.” Her voice is grainy and soft, as if she has suffered damage to her throat. “Scratch would have been the more appropriate name; there was no mud in the vicinity. However, I prefer the ring of Mud, and I had been dreaming of wallows.”

Mud can’t think how to respond. Next to her, She-Scares rumbles, “Our Mud just acquired her cow name. She is now She-Spurns.”

She-Demands seems not to hear this. To Mud she says, “You have the third eye.”

“Yes.”

“It will not show you your mother’s death or the death of any of your calves. Did you know that?”

Mud did not. That she is unlikely to be shown
herself
is the only prohibition she has ever heard. She turns to look at She-Sees, who also has the third eye, and the old cow looks back at her and mutters, “Knowing things is only a dream of having known them.”

Again She-Demands seems not to hear. “You might foresee the deaths of your sisters and aunts,” she continues, “your adoptive mother. I foresaw all these deaths in my own family. But you will not foresee the death of the one who gave you life or of the ones to whom you will give life, although you might be offered a glimpse of whatever it is that kills them. Two hundred and ten days ago I foresaw the Rogue’s web and the hindleggers dropping out of the belly of the roar fly. I said to myself, we must steer clear of webs. But this web was not known to me. And, in any event, it was not the web that shot us.”

“Oh, you were shot,” Mud says. “I couldn’t see any sting holes.”

“You envisioned the slaughter?”

“Just as you were arriving here. I saw the lunatics and ribs, hundreds and hundreds of corpses, and then … your family. I counted twenty-three.”

“Did you return?” She-Scares asks the She-D matriarch. Not all survivors of a slaughter return to mourn their dead.

“The ne … xt a … fter … noon.” This from She-Drawls-And-Drawls, whose peculiar habit of stretching out each word makes it sound as if she is calling from far away. “The tusks we … re go … ne, and so … me of the fe … et.”

She-Screams begins to weep out loud, and then all the She-S’s, even She-Snorts, even Swamp, are weeping out loud, urinating and defecating, streaming temporin. The She-D’s step aside from the commotion and are silent until She-Scares recovers herself enough to ask, “How is it that you were spared?”

“We ran,” She-Demands says simply.

“We ran and ran,” She-Distracts sing-songs.

It is She-Distracts’ first utterance. There is a silence as everyone waits in case she has more to say. Instead she breaks into a mad little running-on-the-spot dance, a parody of flight, ears wide, tail out, kicking up her legs.

“Don’t,” Hail Stones says. “Please.” He lays his trunk across her haunches, and she lowers her head and goes still. “Matriarch, I think she is overheated,” he says to She-Demands in the formal timbre.

His voice is the musical rumble of a courteous old bull. That beautiful, that unfitting. The She-S’s now turn their attention to him, and despite the reek of his wound Mud picks up his savoury odour of fresh dung and fermenting fruit. He is eleven years old. Far too young to properly mount a cow, she thinks, and she looks at his poor foot to account for her sudden desolation.