humans, end up. Already, so many flies encase the corpse that it seems alive again. A quivering, nappy-coated, buzzing little horror. Mud snorts a space through the flies, and the odour of newborn, which can be detected through the death fetor, stirs her to kick dirt over the pathetic creature before moving on.
She has been walking for many hours now. Her shadow pools ahead of her, grit clogs her trunk and cakes the corners of her mouth and eyes, and she is thirsty. All of a sudden she is desperately thirsty.
She lifts her trunk, and a host of memories return to her, each a particular and different blossoming of this place and each fraught with its own atmosphere of feeling. What remains invariable, from memory to memory, is the smell of water behind the outcrop of rock. She quits her straight course, but not without apprehension. To deviate is to solicit more ill fortune, so she feels, and yet she races around theoutcrop to the depression where water wells up in the fruitful seasons but that smells now only of the powdery impala dung nestled within it.
She digs at the depression with her right forefoot. The ground is petrified, and her toes soon ache from the powerful kicks required to break the earth down. Beneath its layer of dust her foot is black with the dried blood of the slaughtered, and it seems dismally fitting to her that she does not bleed but wears the blood of her adoptive family, as if this were the mark of her connection with them: the undeniable distance, the inescapable attachment. She should have left the swamp the moment Hail Stones said that She-Demands was uneasy, they all should have left, but at least she should have gone and persuaded Date Bed to go with her. Thinking this, her kicks become savage. Clods tumble into the hole she is making, and she retrieves them with her trunk and hurls them at the outcrop, something humanly barbarous fermenting within her.
Eventually, too exhausted to go on, she lets her trunk droop to the hole’s bottom. The cool earth down there exhales a wonderful smell that, in her dazed state, takes her a moment to identify. So close is she to the aquifer that she can scrape away the last layer of earth with one final kick.
The water is silty and cold. She bores more deeply until a clear seepage gurgles up. She drinks, showers and dusts herself, then stands there feeling strangely consoled by the wobble of her withered leg, which is at least a known and reliable thing.
“Date Bed!” she trumpets, although trumpeting is useless if nobody has heard her infrasonic calls. Nevertheless she listens, eyes downcast, ears spread, waiting for the shudderunderfoot that heralds a far-off rumble. What finally reaches her are the screams of the calves, and by the time she understands that the screams come from memory, she is reliving the slaughter.
She trumpets and runs in circles. At the part where she climbed up and slid down the bank, she climbs up and slides down the rocks and scrapes her leg badly enough to arouse her to the present.
She finds herself on her knees at the bottom of the outcrop. From overhead comes the roar of a plane, and she sinks onto her right side and weeps, for how long she has no idea, but when she is breathing evenly again the shadow of the outcrop leans over her, and an impala drinks at the hole she dug. Inches from her eyes, balanced magically on its end, a flat blue stone holds its colour against the falling light. The stone puts her in mind of one of Tall Time’s link songs:
Except in the cases of berries and specks
Blue blesses calves and the peak-headed sex.
Eat a blue stone and for two days and nights
Those who would harm you are thwarted, by rights.
And so she swallows the stone, gathers up her limbs and sets off back the way she came.
Her mind is suddenly clear, out of its thrall. She knows now that the purpose of her pilgrimage wasn’t to go to The She-Hill, it was to stumble upon the blue stone. In the stone’s safekeeping she can return
She has been walking for many hours now. Her shadow pools ahead of her, grit clogs her trunk and cakes the corners of her mouth and eyes, and she is thirsty. All of a sudden she is desperately thirsty.
She lifts her trunk, and a host of memories return to her, each a particular and different blossoming of this place and each fraught with its own atmosphere of feeling. What remains invariable, from memory to memory, is the smell of water behind the outcrop of rock. She quits her straight course, but not without apprehension. To deviate is to solicit more ill fortune, so she feels, and yet she races around theoutcrop to the depression where water wells up in the fruitful seasons but that smells now only of the powdery impala dung nestled within it.
She digs at the depression with her right forefoot. The ground is petrified, and her toes soon ache from the powerful kicks required to break the earth down. Beneath its layer of dust her foot is black with the dried blood of the slaughtered, and it seems dismally fitting to her that she does not bleed but wears the blood of her adoptive family, as if this were the mark of her connection with them: the undeniable distance, the inescapable attachment. She should have left the swamp the moment Hail Stones said that She-Demands was uneasy, they all should have left, but at least she should have gone and persuaded Date Bed to go with her. Thinking this, her kicks become savage. Clods tumble into the hole she is making, and she retrieves them with her trunk and hurls them at the outcrop, something humanly barbarous fermenting within her.
Eventually, too exhausted to go on, she lets her trunk droop to the hole’s bottom. The cool earth down there exhales a wonderful smell that, in her dazed state, takes her a moment to identify. So close is she to the aquifer that she can scrape away the last layer of earth with one final kick.
The water is silty and cold. She bores more deeply until a clear seepage gurgles up. She drinks, showers and dusts herself, then stands there feeling strangely consoled by the wobble of her withered leg, which is at least a known and reliable thing.
“Date Bed!” she trumpets, although trumpeting is useless if nobody has heard her infrasonic calls. Nevertheless she listens, eyes downcast, ears spread, waiting for the shudderunderfoot that heralds a far-off rumble. What finally reaches her are the screams of the calves, and by the time she understands that the screams come from memory, she is reliving the slaughter.
She trumpets and runs in circles. At the part where she climbed up and slid down the bank, she climbs up and slides down the rocks and scrapes her leg badly enough to arouse her to the present.
She finds herself on her knees at the bottom of the outcrop. From overhead comes the roar of a plane, and she sinks onto her right side and weeps, for how long she has no idea, but when she is breathing evenly again the shadow of the outcrop leans over her, and an impala drinks at the hole she dug. Inches from her eyes, balanced magically on its end, a flat blue stone holds its colour against the falling light. The stone puts her in mind of one of Tall Time’s link songs:
Except in the cases of berries and specks
Blue blesses calves and the peak-headed sex.
Eat a blue stone and for two days and nights
Those who would harm you are thwarted, by rights.
And so she swallows the stone, gathers up her limbs and sets off back the way she came.
Her mind is suddenly clear, out of its thrall. She knows now that the purpose of her pilgrimage wasn’t to go to The She-Hill, it was to stumble upon the blue stone. In the stone’s safekeeping she can return
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