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:
Refuge where no
Breath of slaughter
Stains the breeze, where
On the water
Blessings rain.
“Torrent the Trunk Bull,” she finishes, “has not heard this.”
“I dare say he has not,” Tall Time rumbles.
She gestures at the wall. “Keep touching the marks.”
Tall Time hears her brittle voice behind a cacophonous twittering. Another voice–a familiar one–says, “The white bone.” He is drifting into a vision and wants to tell I-Flounder but he cannot speak. He is looking at the dead foliage of the huge acacia from the fourth likeness. It swarms with derelict weaver-bird nests, they swing in the wind. He is unable to direct his gaze downward. He feels, as he did not the first time, that he is seeing through an eye in the centre of his forehead. With torturous slowness the eye travels to the horizon–a range of low blue hills–and then back to the base of the tree and a pile of she-one dung. Past the tree is a jumping mongoose, more mongooses, all of them jumping and twittering. And now a she-one’s foot, a suppurating shin. His gaze draws back. It is Date Bed. He hardly recognizes her, she is so emaciated. Where are the rest of the She-S’s? Where is Mud? “Mud!” he bellows within his head, and it seems that Date Bed hears. She turns to face him and he sees her pitifully narrow skull and the purple wound above her eye. She sways. In her trunk she clutches something. The white bone! She has it! She curls her trunk under her chin, twists as if to look over her shoulder and then jerks forward, flinging her trunk open, releasing the bone. Where it hits the ground dust sprouts and arcs off and his third eye closes in on a single speck. The speck sails, and his eye rides it for miles, for days, over the blue hills and then along a riverbed to a plain and across the plain to an escarpment, across the escarpment, down the far side to a swamp, and surrounding the swamp the land is all green. Grass, papyrus. A delirium of green… .
The eyes of the We-F’s are aimed low to protect him from the glare. He says that he was gone for a long time and I-Flounder tells him, No, only moments. Did the calf throw the that-way bone? she asks. Yes, he answers, she did. Did he mark how it landed? No. No? But–listen to him–he saw The Safe Place itself, he was led to it from the spot where the that-way bone landed! Is he certain? As certain as he can be, if he indeed had a vision and not a dream. You had a vision, I-Flounder says. Very well then, he says, he saw The Safe Place. What is it like? Green, green. Could he locate the vicinity where the that-way bone was thrown, where the calf is? He believes so. He is an inferior tracker, is he not? Not a master, it is true, but no, not inferior. Is it far away, this vicinity? Ten days away. Beyond the desert.
Silence.
“Ah, the newborns,” he says as it dawns how treacherous it would be for the small calves, doughty as they are but forest dwellers, after all, to try to cross the desert, let alone the plain.
I-Flounder says, “If we set out and find that the journey proves too arduous, we shall return and await the rains. The Safe Place won’t disappear before then.” She glances behind her at the white mouth of the cave. “We shall leave tomorrow evening. Now let us drink and weep for my sister. And then we shall rest while you describe the vision in all its particulars so that we ourselves may imagine the route.”
There are beds of mulch at the rear of the cave. His is large and fresh … evidently it awaited him. The calves and I-Fix lie in a row at
his tail end, Sink Hole and I-Fix pressed against the wall as if to keep as much distance as possible between themselves and him. I-Flirt’s bed is next to his, and once he is settled she lowers herself down, sighing, grunting, shifting and finally going still with her rump against his back, a most provocative and inappropriate position, but he fears offending her and doesn’t move away.
On his other side I-Flounder lies facing him. During his recounting of the vision she frequently interrupts to ask about bird calls, the shape of the horizon, the exact placement of bushes, rocks, the texture and incline of the ground, the light. She does the same as he is describing how to get from here to the blue hills. He says that at some point during their journey, if dung or any other practical sign indicates that Mud and the She-S’s are in another direction, he may be the one to part company. He confesses that he is sorely worried to have found Date Bed alone in the vision, and I-Fix says harshly, “Your Mud is not dead.”
He cannot speak, he is so overcome. Why did he not think to ask if any of them had envisioned the She-S’s? That they had envisioned only himself and Torrent he took for granted.
“The big cows call her She-Spurns,” I-Fix says, as if no name was more odious.
“Is she well?” he asks.
“She is lame. She is gaunt.”
Her tone implies that these afflictions are self-imposed, but he is too full of emotion to retreat from her bewildering hostility, and he asks, “Where is she?”
“She was in a region of black boulders. Five hundred miles south of here, judging by the shadows and the light.”
The White Bone Page 19
