to Blood Swamp and mourn the slaughtered members of her family, as it is her sacred obligation to do. The vehicle and its humans will have retreated,and (this didn’t dawn on her until now) the She-S survivors will either be at the swamp already or arriving there before morning. Date Bed will be there, if she is still alive. “Let her be alive,” Mud prays out loud. She is certain that she saw the bodies of everybody who died at the swamp, both during the slaughter and during her reliving of it, but she didn’t see who, if anyone, was wounded, and she didn’t see whether the survivors all fled in the same direction once they were up on the plain. Had she been in her right mind she would have immediately searched for dung and drops of blood and gone where they led her, but had she been in her right mind she wouldn’t have been granted the blue stone’s protection.
It is her own tracks she now follows, placing her feet in any depression that has not been obliterated by dust. The dust has died down with the dying of the wind and even though her bad leg wobbles she moves fast and is soon upon the sad little mess of hide and bone and vulture droppings that was the infant monkey. She keeps walking, into the summits of the plunging shadows and straight down their lengths. As it always is following the death of a matriarch–and if you include She-Sees, three matriarchs died this day–the sunset is gory. Mud cannot look at it, its ecstatic red streams. She fixes her eyes on the ground, where occasionally she tusks out a root stock to eat. She counts her steps, a thing she is able to do while her thoughts are elsewhere, and after every two hundred lets out infrasonic rumbles. Twice, mistakenly, she believes herself to be on the verge of a vision. Her bad leg aches. Her skin, sensing the exhalation of shadows, * twitches uneasily. For all thatshe is protected by the blue stone from the perils around her, she is not protected from her own mind, and every once in a while she has to shake her head, both to stave off another wholesale reliving of the butchery and to grasp the fact of it. When she passes the remains of the zebra who looked at her before its eye was plucked out, she wonders how far down the vulture’s gullet the zebra’s eyeball preserved her image.
She has come across no she-one dung other than her own from when she set out, and she hasn’t heard a single rumble. But this doesn’t mean anything one way or another. If her family retreated in another direction, as they clearly did, their dung would be elsewhere, and if they aren’t calling it may well be that they have already entered silent mourning. She herself stopped sending calls hours ago out of an unreasonable fear that she would attract hyenas. It isn’t until she sees the hyenas prowling the bank of the swamp that she knows she can’t be the first to arrive. For so many hyenas to be on the plain when there are corpses all over the shore means that at least two big cows must be down there.
She stops. She could trumpet for help but her fear humiliates her. It wearies her even, some new part of herself that feels ruthless, and she starts walking again with the thought that she will move through the hyenas’ ranks as she moved through the bullets and humans, like an invincible visitor in someone else’s memory.
The breeze wafts up from the swamp and carries the sweet odour of rot. By the time the hyenas glance over their shouldersshe is quite close to them. A pulse flutters in her throat. “Those who would harm you are thwarted,” she rumbles to herself, and the hyenas skulk away.
She goes to the bank and looks down. There they are, dispersed among the steaming heaps that are the dead. As silent as the dead. A ponderous elation stirs in her belly, but instead of hurrying to greet them she stays where she is to sort out, in the moonlight, who is who.
Hail Stones–that is Hail Stones in the shallows at the carcass of She-Demands. And Swamp is
It is her own tracks she now follows, placing her feet in any depression that has not been obliterated by dust. The dust has died down with the dying of the wind and even though her bad leg wobbles she moves fast and is soon upon the sad little mess of hide and bone and vulture droppings that was the infant monkey. She keeps walking, into the summits of the plunging shadows and straight down their lengths. As it always is following the death of a matriarch–and if you include She-Sees, three matriarchs died this day–the sunset is gory. Mud cannot look at it, its ecstatic red streams. She fixes her eyes on the ground, where occasionally she tusks out a root stock to eat. She counts her steps, a thing she is able to do while her thoughts are elsewhere, and after every two hundred lets out infrasonic rumbles. Twice, mistakenly, she believes herself to be on the verge of a vision. Her bad leg aches. Her skin, sensing the exhalation of shadows, * twitches uneasily. For all thatshe is protected by the blue stone from the perils around her, she is not protected from her own mind, and every once in a while she has to shake her head, both to stave off another wholesale reliving of the butchery and to grasp the fact of it. When she passes the remains of the zebra who looked at her before its eye was plucked out, she wonders how far down the vulture’s gullet the zebra’s eyeball preserved her image.
She has come across no she-one dung other than her own from when she set out, and she hasn’t heard a single rumble. But this doesn’t mean anything one way or another. If her family retreated in another direction, as they clearly did, their dung would be elsewhere, and if they aren’t calling it may well be that they have already entered silent mourning. She herself stopped sending calls hours ago out of an unreasonable fear that she would attract hyenas. It isn’t until she sees the hyenas prowling the bank of the swamp that she knows she can’t be the first to arrive. For so many hyenas to be on the plain when there are corpses all over the shore means that at least two big cows must be down there.
She stops. She could trumpet for help but her fear humiliates her. It wearies her even, some new part of herself that feels ruthless, and she starts walking again with the thought that she will move through the hyenas’ ranks as she moved through the bullets and humans, like an invincible visitor in someone else’s memory.
The breeze wafts up from the swamp and carries the sweet odour of rot. By the time the hyenas glance over their shouldersshe is quite close to them. A pulse flutters in her throat. “Those who would harm you are thwarted,” she rumbles to herself, and the hyenas skulk away.
She goes to the bank and looks down. There they are, dispersed among the steaming heaps that are the dead. As silent as the dead. A ponderous elation stirs in her belly, but instead of hurrying to greet them she stays where she is to sort out, in the moonlight, who is who.
Hail Stones–that is Hail Stones in the shallows at the carcass of She-Demands. And Swamp is
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