Black Juice (6 page)

It took Booroondoon, our queen and mother, still singing very low, to move into the space, to show us that bodies such as ours
could
move from home into the dark beyond. And as soon as the darkness threatened to take her, to curtain her from our sight, it became not possible for any of us to stay.

And so we moved, unweighted, from the gardens; Hmoorolubnu took my tail, as if that small thing would hold her steady in this storm of freedom. Zebu groaned at us behind their rails, and a goat on the stone hill lifted its head and gave brittle cry. But our bearing is the sort that soothes others; we move with inevitability, as the stars do, as the moon swells and shrinks upon the sky. We brushed aside the wooden gate-house as if it were a plaything we had tired of, and the other animals remained calm. Gooroloom tumbled it to sticks, and our feet crushed it to dust. Above the dark and swollen river of our rage, my delight in our badness hung briefly bright.

His name was something like Pippit. It was too short for
our ears to catch, as all peeple’s names are; twig-snaps and bird-cheeps, they finish before they properly start. But his smell was a lasting thing, and his hand. Pippit of all peeple could tell badness from goodness, as we could. He would know that this was our only choice, he who could still us with a word, whose slender murmuring soothed us when all other voices were pitched too high and madding, who slept fearless among our feet and rode us without spear or switch—whom we missed in a rage of missing, ever since he had been taken from us to somewhere in the dark out-world.

Gooroloomboon spoke through her forehead, wonderingly: ‘How our minds have become circle-shaped, from all our circling, squared from pacing that square! Once we were wild! But I fear I have no wildness any more, Booroondoon; maybe wildness has died in my blood and my feet can move
only
in circle and square. What are we to do for water and for food, mother? And how are we to know where to find our sweet Pippit? And if he be in a place that requires badness to reach him, can we do such a thing, even in his name?’

Booroondoon, her graciousness, heard Gooroloom out. ‘Put away your fears,’ she said, even as she lullabied. ‘Fears are for little-hearts, or the lion-hunted. I have never been wild in my life, yet our Pippit’s track through this world is as clear as a stripe of water thrown across a dry riverbank. What you love this much, you can always find again.’

And our spirits, which had been poised to sink with Gooroloom’s worry, lifted as if Booroondoon’s words were
buoyant water, as if her song were breeze and we were wafted feathers.

We walked out among peeple’s houses, that were like friends standing beside the path. With every sleeping house we passed, I was more wakeful; with every step I took that was not circle-path, or earth we had trodden as many times as there are stars, something else broke open in me. My mind seemed a great wonderland, largely unexplored, my body a vast possibility of movements, in any direction, all new. There would be food and water, good and bad—Gooroloom would smell them, too, when she finished fretting. I wanted to lift my head and trumpet, but there was joy also in knowing I must not, in moving with my fellows through the sleeping town, making no sound but planting feet and rubbing skin and the breath of walking free.

We came to the town’s edge. Without pausing, Booroondoon continued on under the moon towards nothing, only parasol trees that cannot be eaten, only a line that had stars above it, dry shadows below. We followed, and the town smells fell behind. Hloorobn, ahead of me, lifted her trunk. I head-bunted her rump, to keep her quiet, and she grunted low in surprise. Then we settled to a strong pace after Booroondoon, rolling our yearning rage out onto the plain.

Several hours on, we were suddenly among the bones. Heightened as our senses were, we’d not anticipated these. And it is always difficult to move on from such places. Hloorobn, in particular, hung by the remains of her mother,
our sister, Gorrlubnu, lifting and turning the bones, urging us to take and turn them also, tipping the great headbone with a thud and a puff of moon-silvered dust.

Booroondoon went among the bones telling the names once only, touching the heads and leaving us to turn the lesser bones. Then she waited beyond, facing our goal but in all other respects patient, allowing us our youth and rawness and powerful pain, though her own was long ago distilled into wisdom and grace.

We went on, our thoughts like weighted owdas slowing our steps.

We walked far that night. Booroondoon said we should go straight out, for an improbable distance that peeple would not follow.

‘And if they do?’ said jittery Hloorobn. ‘If they surprise us?’

‘What can they do against so many Large?’ said Booroondoon. ‘Cannot herd if we will not listen. Can try, with their spear, but will have to spear us all to stop us.’

She meant that such a spearing was not likely. But then, their taking Pippit had not been likely, either, yet it happened. In this night of walking in the wild, nothing was certain as it used to be.

Towards dawn, we found water. There was no town behind us, no town ahead, only grassed plain, and rounded rocks like friends browsing. When we had drunk, we moved straight on, slower for a while to try the wild grass, pulled up
sweet and still living. Booroondoon sang no longer, for we did not need to be led by that means now; we had seen our own courage and were rallied and moved and unstoppable.

So the day passed, and several others like it. There was a night and day of terrible thirst, born of the need to walk a straight line from our starting point. Then we came to a broad, clear river, and we swam it, and stood in the shallows on the far side, and the water was magnificent in our throats, a delight across our backs.

Late that day, when we had satisfied our thirst and settled the fears arising from it, Booroondoon said, ‘The place we want is not far now.’

We sensed it, a big, rubbishy restlessness far down-river, a swarming movement in the ground that made our feet unhappy.

‘We must go into the midst of that?’ said Gooroloom.

‘They will not bring him out to us,’ said our wise mother.

We walked awhile on the thought.

Then, ‘I have it,’ said Booroondoon. ‘We will walk into the town as if we were led, so as to calm the little-hearts. We will go in a line, trunk to tail, and with care where the way is narrow. We must move slowly, for our Pippit’s smell may be easily lost among all the others, markets and meateries and skinworks and the like. But if we go graciously and let neither dogs nor peeple fright us—do you hear me, Hloorobn?—if we stay together in our line, we cannot be thwarted.’

‘As you say, mother and queen,’ we replied.

We decided we would go into the town just before day hurried out of night, when the smells and peeple-movements would be less. Until that hour we lurked at a distance, in a bad place—stenchful, with death-birds crowding sky and ground.

Their headwoman flapped to the top of the rubbish nearest us. ‘Any of youse sick?’ she skrarkled, eyeing us all.

Hloorobn rumbled too low for her to hear.

‘Anyone dropping a baby soon? Youse all look pretty big,’ said the bird hopefully.

Booroondoon swung up her trunk, and the bird staggered away: ‘Just asking, just asking!’

‘Disgusting,’ said Hloorobn.

‘Shudderable,’ Gooroloom agreed.

‘Take no notice,’ said Booroondoon. ‘We are Larger.’

There was nothing to eat in this place, so we began, in the night, to feel wretched, all bulk and no bone, our minds spinning like the moon on its wheel.

‘If only he were here,’ said Gooroloom, ‘if only we already had him! This venture frightens me, now it is near to finishing.’

It was good that she spoke, or my own fears would have bubbled up into my forehead and made themselves known. I could not keep Gorrlubnu out of my head, how after months of uncanny stillness, where Pippit soothed and Booroondoon leant and all of us huddled around her, she had slipped her mind as your foot slips a loose tether-loop, and gone crashing from our lives; how she burst the gates with her head and bent them
underfoot; how, unthinkably, she left Booroondoon’s commands ignored upon the air. We stood voiceless and mindless, as peeple leaped and twinkled after her. At Booroondoon’s knee, tiny Pippit jolted as Gorrlubnu struck about her; he cried out when she roared. She swam away through the market. Fruits sagged out of their pyramids and broke on the ground; chicken cages tumbled and sprayed feathers.

The marketers came to the gate-opening, yabbering and shaking their fists at Pippit, but we had ears only for the receding commotion of our sister, Gorrlubnu, the drumbeat of her madness, and the lesser impacts and explosions around it. Until a single blunderbuss shot saved her from worse rampage, bringing all other sounds to stillness, so that across the town, through all its wreckage and outrage, we heard clearly the thunder-crash that was Gorrlubnu striking the ground; her lips shuddering on the breath thus crushed from her; the dry scrape of her feet dying in the dust.

She has found the Forest Hills of legend
, breathed Booroondoonhooroboom, our queen.
She is pressing her forehead against the first browsing-tree
.

Only singing brought us through that hungry night amongst the refuse, a tether of rumbling song through the slowest part of the sun’s race round. Whenever my thoughts made me fall quiet, the singing strengthened into my hearing, and drew me in again.

‘Very well,’ said Booroondoon in the deepest hour. We all heard her; none of us were asleep.

We walked a nightmare road. The cold breeze blew peeple-rubbish and rattled rotten paper. Would we lose our nose for Pippit, amongst all this ordure? Booroondoon moved ever queenly ahead.

The town began gradually, with rubbish-pickers’ shelters, the children sleeping as if thrown down, bare on the bare ground. Then wood-walled houses sidled up to the road, which widened and hardened, and finally, along the cleanest avenues, brick and stone palaces rose higher than ourselves, textured with carvings. And after days of golden grass, and trees nearly black in their thirst, here were green vines and hanging plants spilling over the palace walls, their flowers set like jewels among their bright, water-fat leaves.

We came to a circle that seemed purpose-made for owda rides, within a ring of empty stalls. There we joined trunk to tail and became still, to listen and breathe, to arrive at the knowledge we needed.

And there Booroondoon said to us, at her lowest, at her farthest from peeple’s hearing, ‘He is close, very close.’ She listened further, then spoke softer, no more than a gentle buzzing in our heads. ‘And in sore distress.’

We took pains not to give voice, but anyone who knew us would have heard the trouble in our breathing, the creak of the strong will restraining our movement. Our rage squirmed and whimpered like a creature pinned underfoot, that must be kept from flight, but not be harmed.

‘We could break down the place,’ rumbled Hloorobn.

‘Hush!’ we said.

‘It would crush Pippit within,’ Gooroloom remonstrated.

‘We could tear off the doors,’ Hloorobn whispered.

‘But remember those peeple that took him,’ I said, ‘with their bright spears. How quick to anger they were! He had real fear of them, so we should, too.’

‘There is a terrible smell on him,’ said Booroondoon. She tilted her head a certain way, and some of us dropped tail from trunk, and Hloorobn even shifted one foot that way, for the smell was among us for a moment, a flash of fear-sweat, a shaft of some worse thing.

‘We know that smell,’ said Hmoorolubnu. Booroondoon grunted and twitched her head. All around, trunk rasped on flank, seeking and giving help. ‘Our sister Gorrlubnu, remember?’

‘No one has forgotten Gorrlubnu,’ I hissed, from one of those moments when my tusks gleamed before my eyes, and my whole self seemed funnelled into them.

Others were at my sides, leaning.

‘Do you mean Pippit is mad?’ asked Gooroloom of the queen, and lifted her trunk and sniffed carefully.

‘Is dying,’ said Booroondoon. ‘Is moving towards death, sure as winter follows summer.’

‘He is ill? He is beaten?’ I said out of the deep woe that was like mud grasping us, sinking us down to death ourselves. I could not breathe to draw in the scent of him, my trouble was so great.

‘Neither of those. He seems whole in body and strength. Only, that smell—’ And again it was there, making me want to rear and run. ‘I cannot puzzle it.’

‘Can we find him?’ I said in quiet agony. ‘Is it safe to seek him?’

‘Let us go and see,’ said Booroondoon. She must have known we were about to break bond and rush in all directions. She knew well that it is better to give a little, early on, than to lose all at the last.

We took our places and went in line through trade streets that smelled of paint and spices, shaved metal and wood. Booroondoon brought us among palaces, grimed and wearyfeeling. Low in a brick wall there, she found a hole, barred like the one in our night-house. From this one poured the cold stinks of fear, some of them stale when our mothers’ mothers were birthed, and some fresh as just-pulled plains-grass, full of juice and colour.

Among them was Pippit’s fear—even I could smell it. ‘Little man, little man!’ I heard myself croon, ‘Day’s light, night’s peace, to what have they brought you?’ And we were all around the barred hole, our feet puddling in the fears, and we all spoke, mostly only in our heads, but some in our throats where peeple might hear us, danger or no, we were so pained and grieved.

Then, wonder of wonders, from within the hole came a tiny voice that we knew, calling our names, those chips of bird-cheep he gave us. And we could not help but answer, in our woe.

Gooroloom fluttered a breath into the hole, and there was an immediate ruckus of many peeple in there. Hloorobn grasped one of the window-bars and plucked it out like a twig, and all the peeple inside went silent. She plucked out the other bars, laying them neatly as she had once laid cut logs in her forest work.

And as she pulled the last, peeple boiled out like ants, terrified peeple climbing over Gooroloom’s trunk, crawling among our legs, smelling all of filth and illness, but none of them was Pippit. And when they had finished boiling, still Pippit was weeping and calling us from within.