The White Bone (9 page)

“You met them?” Tall Time asked now.

“I did,” Torrent said. His tone was conjectural, as if questioning the event himself.

“When?”

“At the outset of the drought, those first torrid days. I had a sense that the short rains weren’t going to arrive, and I was looking for fresh sources of water. Where the big burn is, to the west of it, I came upon a Rogue’s web and had to detour north, fifty miles out of my way. I continued to walk north-northwest, in and out of two riverbeds. Then came a cluster of hindlegger nests, and then a desert, a four-day trek that was. At the end of it all were hills. East and west and north, range upon range, and at the base of the hills were forests.” His voice rose in a kind of indignation. “Huge feast trees. The leaves still green! I ate until my gut groaned. By the She, I did!”

“I dare say,” Tall Time rumbled.

“By the She!” Torrent bellowed. He made another test of the air. Shut his eyes. But he stayed where he was.

“I’m surprised you didn’t remain,” Tall Time said.

“Are
you, son?” An insane shine in his eyes.

“With all that lush food–”

“On the seventh day,” Torrent roared, “I heard the singing of the Lost Ones! And do you know
what
they were singing?”

Tall Time carefully shook his head.

“It was not a glad song,” Torrent said, infuriated, sarcastic. “It was not a welcoming song.” And in his tuneless bass he thundered:

“Gut swill!” Tall Time said, appalled by the butchery, of course, but also that a song would contain such uncouth lyrics.

“You doubt me?” Torrent trumpeted.

“No, no, not at all!” Which wasn’t quite sincere. Yet even with the gut swill there was nothing addled or suspect about the story, and Tall Time was beginning to entertain the staggering notion that Torrent had indeed met the Lost Ones.

“I found them in a big-grass grove,” Torrent said. “A family of eight, which is large by their standards, but they had been near to twice that number before hindleggers massacred seven of them in a pit. A dreadful way to go is a pit slaughter. Dreadful. Have you ever witnessed it?”

“I’ve heard stories–”

“Not the same thing. Cows dropping out of sight ahead of you. They’re running on the path and then they’re gone, you think they’ve dropped over the edge of The Domain. You stop just in time, at the very brink, you almost fall in yourself, you don’t see because … because… .” He broke off, agog.

“The hindleggers camouflage the pits with branches and leaves,” Tall Time offered softly.

“You’re all running, your mother in the lead. She falls in first. Your newborn sister falls on top of her. Your mother screams. You see that one of the sticks has pierced her through the neck. Those sticks that they plant in the bottom of the pit, the sharp ends pointing upwards. Do you know about them?”

Tall Time nodded.

Torrent nodded. “She is still alive,” he said in wonder. “Your mother. Pierced through but still alive. She screams. Your sister"–he started to weep–"screams. Blood shoots up. You have to save them. How? Nobody knows what to do. Your mother is the matriarch, she’s the one who knows what to do but she’s down in the pit, and the hindleggers, you can hear them, they’re right behind you.”

Tall Time was now weeping, all of his uncertainty about Torrent’s having met the Lost Ones transformed into wrath and grief that seven of them perished in the same way that Torrent’s mother did. “I didn’t know you had a sister,” he sobbed.

Torrent blinked.

“Did she also die?” Tall Time sobbed.

“Quit your blubbering!” Torrent bellowed. He tossed his head, and Tall Time cringed–here came the tusking–but Torrent threw his trunk behind himself and went still. He shut his eyes, inhaled with rapturous concentration. His penis flung urine, which in this late-afternoon light twinkled orange, and then his trunk swung to the front and took on a gentle undulation while he regarded Tall Time with a demented look of friendly interest. “It is true what you’ve heard,” he said conversationally. “The Lost Ones
are
calf-like, except for the length of their tusks. A bull your age wouldhave tusks twice as long as yours, that’s no exaggeration. Not nearly as thick, though. And they all have those green eyes but brighter than our visionaries’ eyes by a hundred times. Like little green suns, they are, beaming light.”

“Extraordinary.”

“So they are. So they are. They call themselves We’s, as you’ve no doubt heard. We-B’s, We-S’s. Individuals prefix their names with ‘I.’ ”

He hadn’t heard this. “Why?” he said.

“Well, for one thing, cow calves choose their own cow names. Out of a number of names offered by the big cows.”

“That is a terrible responsibility to place upon a young mind.”

“It panders to the calf’s vanity. They think very highly of themselves, the Lost Ones do, every one of them, even the newborns. The family I am speaking of now, the We-F’s, they may be exceptional, but I got the sense that self-importance is a trait common to the whole breed. It tried my patience, as you might imagine, all that preening and talking-down. As if I were a suckling calf! But the matriarch, I-Flounder, she was cordial enough, despite her sorrow and my being so gigantic, compared to them especially, and here I was a bull, sneaking up on them in the middle of nowhere, the first of our kind they’d ever encountered. Naturally, one of them had had a vision of me. It’s hard to surprise that lot.” His expression became one of amused remembrance. “I said to I-Flounder, ‘With a name like that I don’t hold out much hope of your finding what you’re searching for, not straight away, anyhow.’ But she has her talents.” As if reminded of She-Snorts he lifted his trunk her way and his penis elongated and shot urine everywhere, and then he backed into a termite mound and gave his rump a vicious scratching.

“What were they searching for?” Tall Time asked.

“The white bone,” Torrent said agreeably.

“Whose white bone?”

“Let me ask you this. Have you ever heard of a race of white she-ones? By which I mean
all
white.”

“No. Never.”

“Nor had I. But according to the We-F’s such a race lived on The Domain up until twenty generations ago.”

“Is that so?” Tall Time murmured, becoming doubtful again.

“The White Ones, they were called,” Torrent said.

Tall Time waited.

“At any rate,” the old bull continued, “they are long gone. Long gone.” He sighed. He might have been weeping. “Their bones, too,” he said. “Their bones are dust. Except–”

The pause continued until Tall Time realized that he was supposed to speak. “Except what?”

“Except for one bone. The magical white bone.”

“It survived,” Tall Time ventured.

“Perfectly intact, not a mark on it after all this time, not a hole. And it never dulled. On the contrary, it bleaches whiter all the time. By now it would be the whitest thing you’ve ever seen. That’s how you’ll know it. It’s not big, mind you. It’s only a rib, and a newborn’s, what’s more.”

“Have the We-F’s seen it?”

“No, not them. Their ancestors.” He twined his trunk around a clump of grass and pulled it out by its mucky roots. Absently he knocked the clump against his leg, a wistful look on his face.

“When you say magical–” Tall Time prompted.

Torrent peered at him sidelong. “The Link Bull perks up when magic is mentioned,” he said. “The Link Bull is greedy for magic.”

Tall Time braced himself.

“The Link Bull!” Torrent roared. He stopped. Shook his head as if struck by an extraordinary notion. He turned in circles, rumbling incoherently. Sniffed the ground, the air, uprooted a poisonous angel’s trumpet shrub and hurled it over his head, wove back and forth twirling his trunk, and at last collected himself and in a measured voice said, “The white bone has the power to direct you to The Safe Place. The Safe Place is a paradise. No droughts there, ever. No perils. To be accurate, it is The Second Safe Place, but as I’ve never known a First Safe Place, I’m thinking of it as
The
Safe Place. At any rate, you throw the white bone, and when it lands it points you in the right direction. For two nights and two days, which is how long the newborn lived, it is in your possession. After that, it disappears, gets scooped up by a sky-diver or a trunkneck who takes it somewhere else and drops it in order to lead others to The Safe Place. So you’d better have figured out your route in those two days and nights.” He blew out a contemptuous breath. “By the She,” he bellowed, “if you can’t hold to a true course by then you don’t deserve to find The Safe Place to begin with!”

“I dare say,” Tall Time rumbled. He was being won over again by Torrent’s conviction.

Scowling, the old bull kicked at the earth. “This very bone is what saved the Lost Ones from the hindleggers generations ago. It was not by accident that the Lost Ones disappeared. Theywere directed into that forest, The First Safe Place, as they call it, which accounts for all this first and second business. As soon as they arrived there, the white bone disappeared, but they weren’t too distressed, not then, because they thought that there were no hindleggers in their new territory. And there weren’t for centuries, not until a hundred and eighty days ago.”

“Which end of the white bone points you–?”

“The end of the white bone that points you–!” Each word an over-enunciated explosion. He paused. “That points you in the right direction,” he continued calmly, “is, naturally, the pointed end. But without the white bone, there can be no throwing and no pointing. So the search is on everywhere, all the Lost Ones–not only the We-F’s, all of them–searching. I myself am searching, or I was before this … before this"– he flailed his trunk at his temporin, his flagellating penis–"madness,” he said miserably.

“But why are you searching?”

“The hindleggers have renewed the slaughters!” Torrent roared.

“In the hills where you say the Lost One are, yes, I understand, but not here.”

“Are you a visionary, then? Are you prescient?”

“Of course I’m not,” Tall Time murmured.

“Then stop interrupting and listen. I-Flounder said to go to the hills and the most barren places and to look for an extremely large standing feast tree. The white bone is invariably dropped near an extremely large standing feast tree. So here’s the plan: I go to the hills, you go to the most barren places.”

“I?”

“Why do you imagine I am taking this risk?” Torrent roared.

Inches in front of Tall Time’s face Torrent’s monstrous trunk writhed.

“What risk?” Tall Time asked finally.

Torrent’s trunk drooped. “Every time the white bone is spoken of directly it loses some of its power.” He was back to his conversational voice. “That is why I-Flounder says it is better to refer to it as the that-way bone.” He looked uncomfortable, as if he should have taken this into account before now.

“The that-way bone,” Tall Time said.

“Tell nobody,” Torrent said. “Not yet, at any rate. If we have this cow whispering to that cow, the power of the thing will be gone before we know it. I myself have told only three other bulls. Master trackers.”

“Who?”

“What does it matter who?” Torrent trumpeted. “Now you,” he said gruffly, “you’re no master tracker but you wander far afield and you generally keep your mouth shut. If we fail to find the that-way bone over the course of the next year, then we’ll be obliged to tell others. Widen the search. Bear in mind that there’s always the possibility of one of us stumbling upon The Safe Place itself, with or without the that-way bone.”

“Are there no hindleggers there?”

“There are, but they are of a different breed entirely. Peaceful. Entranced.”

“They don’t covet our tusks?”

“They don’t covet our tusks, our feet or our flesh.” He beamed a maniacal smile.

“I can’t believe it,” Tall Time said without thinking.

“You
can’t believe it!” Torrent trumpeted, but almost immediately his trunk sank, his eyes extinguished. “It
is
hard to believe,” he muttered. “I hardly believe it myself, come to that. And yet there’s something familiar about the whole story. As if I’d dreamt it. The entranced hindleggers.” He looked at Tall Time. “Do you know what they do all day? Gape at the she-ones. All day long. Some sit in mighty sliders, it makes no difference, they’re as quiet as rocks.”

“Whatever for?”

“Well, I-Flounder believes they have recovered their memory from before the Descent, suddenly recollected that they used to be she-ones. And they’ve got it into their furry little heads that if they stare at us hard enough, they’ll inflate back to what they were. Grow their ears and so on.”

“Who told the We-F’s of this Second Safe Place?”

“It was
fore
told,” Torrent muttered.

“By a link?”

“No doubt.”

“Was it the Lost Ones who said that the links may be infinite?”

But Torrent’s trunk was up and sniffing. He flung his head at the low sun and rumbled, “The darkness is coming,” and then he was stomping through a line of sweet-scented shrubs from which brown rabbits squirted and zigzagged across the shadows, one soaring over the back of a warthog who was the largest of a tribe of warthogs fanning out of Torrent’s way, tails skyward, and the sky itself suddenly a flickering purple corridor of locusts whose thin crackle sounded like the aftermath of the big bull’s earth-quaking passage, like the shattering of everything fragile. But within seconds the corridor had swollen across the sky and the crackle was a solid din.

Tall Time was exquisitely conscious of the She-S’s greeting Torrent, their delighted, frenzied bawls breaking through the din. He was conscious of the soft earth and the runnels of water and plump roots underfoot.

Suppose there was a place where humans left you alone. Why look for it now, when no sign predicted drought or massacre? Even the locusts, high up as they were and flying northeast on their way to somewhere else, were no threat. Paradise was here. Why abandon it to travel to the most barren places in search of a bone? If the bone even existed. How could Torrent know for certain?