The White Bone (10 page)

He had somehow known about the locusts. Or so Tall Time imagined.

More than a year has passed since that day, and only recently has it dawned on Tall Time that when Torrent said, “The darkness is coming,” he had not meant that a flood of locusts was about to wash across the sky and create a sudden twilight.

He had meant this. This landscape of corpses and dust above which the roar of planes pours down from an illimitable emptiness.

He had meant these quailing acacias… . Tall Time brushes them with his trunk. “Nothing left alive,” he finds himself thinking as if it were an omen.

Another plane passes high overhead. As the sound of it shudders through his skull, his craving for a safe place flames to a certainty that there
is
a Safe Place. And therefore a white bone. He asks himself, Who is he to doubt the legends of arace prescient enough to have foreseen the devastation none of his kind even suspected? That the Lost Ones trusted Torrent with the secret of the white bone and that Torrent, in turn, trusted him … this alone, he thinks, is reason enough to believe.

He decides to head south toward a treeless waste overrun with wire fences. It is a region that, until now, he hasn’t had the heart to explore.

In the wake of Hail Stones’ story there is another spell of silence, broken finally by Hail Stones himself announcing that in three days he hopes to be strong enough that he and the She-D’s can resume their search for the white bone. He says that despite the water and browse, She-Demands is not at ease here.

“Is it an odour?” She-Scares asks, because the fine scenters are sometimes able to smell danger several days before anybody else does.

“Not an odour,” Hail Stones says, answering for his matriarch. “Not a premonition either.”

“It’s a fee … ling be … hind her eyes,” says She-Drawls-And-Drawls.

At which She-Snorts, the other fine scenter in the group, says, “I know that feeling. I have it myself occasionally.”

She-Scares whirls on her. “Do you have it now?”

“I don’t think so, but I’ll make certain.” She bats her long eyelashes. “No, it’s not there.”

“Still,” She-Scares rumbles, “if She-Demands is not easy… .” She swings her trunk and jabs her little tusk. A flock of ibises circles Blood Swamp and lands in eerie silence before She-Scares faces Hail Stones again. “We shall join you!” she trumpets, and all of the She-S’s (except for She-Screams, who wails that her constitution is too delicate to undertake a journey) bellow, “We shall join you!”

By now it is mid-morning, and once the commotion has died, both families begin moving out from under the fever trees and down the bank to the swamp. The She-D cows wade in deeper this time, up to their bellies. Hail Stones lingers at the shore and holds his injured foot above the water until Swamp ambles back to the shallows and says in his listless manner, “It appears you have been abandoned,” and then Hail Stones plunges in, not toward Swamp but in the direction of the She-D’s.

She-Soothes watches Hail Stones’ laboured slog and says nothing. On land he risks “heat sleep,” which could kill him, frail as he is. She lifts her trunk toward the plain, and Mud guesses that she is scenting out the warthogs and wondering whether they can be persuaded a second time to donate urine for a new poultice. Or, now that the worms have dropped from the wound, perhaps she has another sort of poultice in mind, one calling for vulture dung or zebra entrails, Mud wouldn’t be surprised. She-Soothes is a good nurse cow, zealous and devoted if not shrewd, but in Mud’s opinion she is overly fond of the vulgar cures.

“Trunk-neck dung relieves loose bowels, believe it or not,” says Date Bed, who is feeding next to Mud.

“I’d prefer loose bowels,” Mud thinks, and then glances at She-Screams, but the big cow is facing the other way.

Lately She-Screams has been scolding Mud for thinking, rather than speaking, her end of a conversation with Date Bed. “I know what you’re doing!” she shrieked two days ago when Mud was silently responding to Date Bed’s explanation of how she classifies plants (edible and inedible, the edible broken down to scrumptious and tolerable, these each broken down to regional and seasonal availability and then to texture and chewability). “You’re slandering us!” She-Screams cried.

“Slandering?” Mud said.

“Warty and evil-smelling,” She-Screams said, parodying Date Bed’s antiquated inflections. She swept a raving glance past the other big cows and shrieked, “Whose ears might those be, I wonder.”

“We were discussing the carrion plant,” Mud said.

“I scent deception!” She-Screams cried.

“The calf is no liar,” She-Scares said severely.

“A thought worth thinking is worth speaking!” She-Screams cried. “It’s the rule of tongue! A thought worth thinking!”

Reliving this exchange, Mud now wades farther from the big cows, walking on the bone-strewn swamp bottom. Date Bed follows her. Both of them feed for a while and then Mud thinks, “I wonder if he told us about the white prize out of gratitude or because he knows that your mother is a fine scenter.”

“Both, I would imagine. The She-D’s benefit as much as we do if we find it.”

“They benefit only if the two families stay together.”

“We’ll stay together. Matriarch just now vowed that we would.”

Mud glances at She-Scares. “What is she thinking?”

Date Bed blinks. It is forbidden for a family’s mind talker to listen to the mind of the matriarch.

“Go on,” Mud urges.

Turning toward She-Scares but squinting beyond her as if interested in the calves playing in the shallows, Date Bed splays her small ears. A moment later she leans into Mud and rumbles in a surprised tone, “She is less inclined to leave than she was a moment ago. She is reluctant to abandon a certain source of water and green food.”

“She is wrong,” Mud thinks.

“You don’t want to be parted from Hail Stones,” Date Bed says.

Mud snorts, but then considers whether this is at least partly true. She pivots her trunk in Hail Stones’ direction and picks up his wonderful scent, and something in her seems to creak open and breathe and she even has a brief notion of what it is Tall Time experiences when he scents her, but she shakes her head.

“There isn’t anything untoward about wanting to remain with him,” Date Bed says primly. “He is still only a calf.”

“I am aware of that.”

“If I should be killed, whom would you talk to?”

“If you should be killed?”

“One day I might be. It is not an impossibility.”

“I want us to leave with the She-D’s because I have dread,” Mud thinks crossly. “I don’t know why, but I do. So do you. So does She-Demands.” She churns her trunk in the water and her withered leg gives out and she falls and goes under. When she resurfaces, she thinks, “I wish we could leave right now.”

“What I wish,” says Date Bed, “is that Tall Time was here.”

“Why?” Mud thinks, annoyed. Her attention descends to her bloated belly, the newborn there.

“It would help us all to have him translating the landscape.” She squints across to the far shore. “There may be links everywhere advising us to stay here until the swamp goes.” Delicately she sniffs the air. “You can appreciate why Matriarch would be having second thoughts.”

“My leg was seizing up constantly yesterday,” Mud thinks. She has suddenly apprehended what a bad omen this is.

“So it was,” Date Bed says quietly, turning to look at her.

“If it didn’t mean I would have to part with you,” Mud thinks, “I would leave on my own.”

“Mud!” Date Bed cries, and She-Scares and She-Screams raise their heads.

“Date Bed!” She-Screams trumpets. “Date Bed, you had better start calling her She-Spurns! Do you hear me?”

“Leave your family,” Date Bed rumbles, scandalized.

Mud thinks, “The bulls leave.”

“Have you ever heard of a cow leaving?”

Mud hasn’t.

“What about …” Date Bed says, and Mud can tell she is thinking about hyenas but is afraid to speak of them in case Mud falls into her birth memory again and becomes terrorized.

Mud looks at her steadily.

Date Bed looks back, blinking. Eventually she closes her eyes, lifts her trunk and scents a place between Mud’s eyes.

Mud doesn’t question the oddness of this. It occurs to her that Date Bed may be trying to listen beyond what she, Mud, is thinking. To the source of the visions, perhaps, the pulse or clot that allows Mud to see into the distance. She finds herself remembering something Torrent said, years ago, about nothing wanting substance until it is envisioned–"Once envisioned,” he said, “it is obliged to transpire"–and she wonders whether, by staring at Date Bed and imagining the two of them leaving Blood Swamp together, she is forcing substance upon her, fixing her in some way that removes possible futures. She thinks this, knowing that Date Bed hears. Knowing that Date Bed hears, she thinks that she will not leave Blood Swamp without her, and yet she feels as if the two of them have already become separated. She is nostalgic for Date Bed, nostalgic for right now. She feels remotely observed, which almost certainly means that she is living a moment seen by some other visionary (and that the moment is of consequence), but it is also possible that she herself is the observer of the moment. That she is an old, old cow returning to this moment in her mind and that she has already returned to it so many times it ripples with the memories of those previous visits.

And at its frontiers, in visit after visit, is the question of hyenas. Even within the sanctuary of the moment the thought of them starts her quaking.

“I would still leave,” she says out loud.

Date Bed opens her eyes.

“That is how great my dread is.”

Late morning Mud notices that She-Demands has left Hail Stones and her daughters and is wading toward the She-S cows. In water She-Demands moves with the grace of a hippo,her huge wizened head scarcely bobbing. Why isn’t her family following her? Mud wonders, and then as She-Demands goes past the She-S’s she realizes that the big cow must be coming to see her.

“She-Demands,” Mud greets her, and in the formal timbre Date Bed says, “Matriarch.” Both of them extend their trunks toward the big cow, who turns away and begins to feed.

Date Bed glances at Mud, inviting a silent response, but Mud suspects that She-Demands has become the She-D’s mind talker and so she tries to conceal her perplexity. She resumes feeding, as does Date Bed. The sun is at its meridian before She-Demands speaks.

“Every
moment is a memory,” she says.

Mud and Date Bed look at each other, astounded. The big cow is responding to Mud’s thoughts of several hours ago, which means that not only has she become the She-D’s mind talker, she heard Mud’s mind from fifty yards away.

“Everything has been ordained by the She,” she goes on in her soft, battered voice. “Therefore everything must already have been imagined by the She. We live only because we live in Her imagination. Your life, as you experience it, is the She recollecting what She has already imagined. We
are
memory. We are living memory.” Her glittering eyes fall on Mud. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Mud says, although she doesn’t, not entirely. It sounds so reconciled, so hard-won, the sermon of a matriarch who has lost twenty-three members of her family.

“What’s that?” She-Demands growls suddenly. She swings up her trunk.

Mud and Date Bed do likewise.

The three of them spread their ears. The absence of bird call is wrong. Mud’s withered leg starts to tremble and she looks to her right and sees that She-Snorts is also scenting. And now She-Scares, taking her cue from She-Snorts, lifts her trunk. Up go the trunks of the other big cows, the trunks of Hail Stones and She-Distracts and She-Drawls-And-Drawls rising seconds later.