Black Juice (7 page)

‘What is it?’ said Hloorobn. ‘Have they broken some part of him?’

We drew in our breath at the thought.

‘I told you, he is whole,’ said Booroondoon. ‘But he is deep inside this place. Perhaps there are more bars, between us and him; perhaps he is behind a gate too strong for peeple to breach.’

‘But
we
could breach it—’

‘Try, Hloorobn!’ I urged. ‘Get down on your knees and reach in!’

She did so, while we all whispered help and surance, past her head, to Pippit inside.

‘There is nothing,’ Hloorobn rumbled in disgust. ‘Nothing but roof and air as far as I can reach. And there is no light. I can hear no chain—can you?—but their leg-tether may be of rope.’

‘Do peeple leg-tether
each other
?’ I asked astounded

‘What else would keep him from us? Listen to him, poor nubbet—if he could be with us, he would.’ And indeed, I was fighting to listen to Hloorobn and not let my heart be stretched to breaking by the sound of Pippit’s weeping.

We murmured to him, and he called to us, until we were all nearly mad with not seeing him, with not taking him up and placing him as a crown on our heads, with not feeling the pat of his little paws on our faces, or the trill of his song, almost too high for us to hear, as he plied the soapy hardbroom on all our backs in turn. What joy we had had, commanded by a Pippit, who knew no fear of us but only love, who cared for us so closely and so well—it was hard to remember that he was not a Large like one of us, and could not hear our loving head-talk.

‘We must go,’ wept Booroondoon at last. ‘Dawn rushes towards us. We cannot reach him, and it will do him no good to hear us being speared out here.’

‘They would never,’ said Gooroloom. ‘They only spear mad ones, like Gorrl—’

‘We must go. Somewhere we can think, where we are not flayed by our beloved’s sadness. If we stay here, we will fall to mindlessness with our pain, and do him no good.’

And so, suffering and weeping, we drew away.

‘Will he know we intend to come back?’ worried Hloorobn.

‘The child is so close to death, we are no more than a dream to him,’ soothed Gooroloom.

‘And perhaps we can be no more than that comforting dream,’ said Booroondoon. ‘Perhaps we must be content with that.’

By some route I did not see, through a daze of mourning, Booroondoon led us to a cleared part of town. The smell of dead ashes lingered in the place, so a fire must have brought the structures down, but now all the rubble was gone, and the soil beneath was combed flat.

We tried to gather ourselves, but could do little more than sweep our woe back and forth. Was our only choice to turn and follow our own tracks home, and live out our long lives under fearful spike-men, stung by their beatings, nagged by their needling voices?

‘I would rather seek the Forest Hills,’ said Gooroloom. ‘What is a life without Pippit?’ And we mourned and sighed around her.

‘Come, we must put our minds to this,’ said Booroondoon. ‘We must stand in a line as if we were peeple-bid, and let schemes brew in our heads.’

But no sooner had we arranged ourselves than the town began to stir around us.

‘What is this?’ said Hloorobn. ‘Peeple never rise so early.’ ‘Not in such numbers,’ said Gooroloom. ‘Only marketers and street-sweepers come out before dawn.’

‘I do not like the feeling of it,’ said Booroondoon.

As soon as she said it, my bones felt a deep unease, as if they could slip unset somehow, as if we might fall to pieces inside our skins. ‘Nor I,’ I whispered.

Even before the first few muffled peeple passed us, all walking the same way, we could feel that the town’s quiet activity was bent like spring grass under a steady wind, an eagerness like river-water pulling. But instead of the sweetness of water, instead of the scents of bud and pollen and new leaf, this pulling breeze carried a low stink, a tang of chain-metal, a sour-sweet dreadfulness.

We stood close together as dawn came on, trying to find some other scent on the air to disperse the stink. ‘I wish we were home again,’ whispered Hloorobn. ‘Around this time, he would be stirring awake in the straw, our little man … Do you remember when he first saw us, how the child ran to Booroondoon and flung his tiny arms about her leg?’

‘We must go,’ said Booroondoon, ‘for he sleeps not on straw but on stone, and someone is kicking him awake even as we try for courage among our memories.’ And she took a step after the passing peeple.

We joined on behind her, some silent, some wittering (‘To that death-place?’ ‘Oh please, my queen!’). We moved after her, deeply against our will, in our orderly line, through the main town. The peeple in flood around us were too intent upon the dreadfulness to realise we went uncommanded. They flowed past full of fear and excitement and relief, their faces always towards their destination.

The place was crowded, with an itch in the air; it was the stuff of bad dreams, to have to pick one’s way among such close-packed flimsies. But the platform at the centre, sweet
with fresh-sawn wood, was empty, except for two men holding rattle-guns, which smelt not of death but of pride and show. What stank was the blade lying like a moon-sliver on the dark, raised box before them. Through all the crowd there was a craning and a yearning towards this weapon.

Peeple had brought food baskets, seating, children. As day brightened further, parasols began to open and twirl throughout the crowd. A man close by was selling burntsugar. One boy carried a small white rat on his shoulder.

‘What breed of wrong-hearted festival is this?’ I asked it.

‘I don’t know, but the food is good.’

The crowd was such that we could only form a line, Booroondoon by the platform and the rest of us sheltering behind her from the full force of the blade’s stink. She rumbled a message:
Hold Hloorobn
, and I renewed my grasp on Hloorobn’s tail. We were trained to be serene among peeple; their chatter stirred habitual serenity from our bones. But they were not our peeple, and this was not our town, and we were hungry and thirsty and afraid.

A macao-bird shrieked from the far side of the square: ‘Here comes the fun-man, to start off the fun!’

Up the wooden steps climbed a much-bedizened person, with a head-plume, and sparkles on his shoulders. He stood tall between the two guards and spread his arms. The crowd quieted, and the plume-man spoke, his high voice carrying to all corners and every crowded balcony of the square. As he spoke, the peeple grew quieter, and their tides of feeling
changed from puzzlement, to disappointment, and finally to alarm and unsettlement.

The macao gave an idiot laugh. ‘No whippings today, folk! The monkeys have got out of their cage! The monkeys are running all over town, teasing the watchdogs and busting out the pantries!’ Peeple began to pack away belongings, and to edge away from the platform through the crowd. The plume-man made a staying motion with his hands, and kept on speaking, but peeple leaked away, until there were perhaps only half their number remaining. Now we could all move up alongside Booroondoon, and Gooroloom and I could press the excitable Hloorobn between us, flank to flank, and hold her steady.

‘Here comes the chopper!’ shrieked the macao with glee. ‘And the choppee! Say goodbye to your head, bad monkey!’

‘There,’ said Booroondoon. ‘At the great door.’

Raising my head above Hloorobn’s I saw a little one, all filthy, being stumbled towards us by two men, also in the sparkling uniforms. Peeple spat on him and squeaked at him as he came. An eddy of breeze brought us his dirt and distress, his being undone by fear, but beneath all that, the familiar, fresh-straw smell of our mahout.

They pushed him up onto the wooden place; they thrust him to his knees there. And someone else had arrived. His close-suit, entirely blue-black, was like a slice of starless night. It covered his face, and stank. Peeple always move too quickly, but this happened in the taking of a single breath. No
sooner had we seen him than the blue-black man was making the light flash from the blade, into all parts of the crowd. We were a row of confusions, locked in our mass, as self-less as boulders of the plain.

Then our little ragged one, our Pippit, lifted his head. His hair like dirty ribbons fell back from his face, and he saw us through his staring tear-filled eyes, and knew us.

His knowledge clanked closed upon us like the most welcome leg-iron. His mouth moved on the beloved sound of his command. All of us—in a vast sudden relief at having someone to obey, after our weeks of being chivvied by frightened peeple with sticks, after our days of wandering in the wilderness—all of us lowered our haunches and hoisted our heads and forelegs, to stand giant, to show our true height.

The peeple cleared around us like dust from a sharp blow of breath. Pippit commanded again, and I spoke back as he told me, as did my sisters and our mother our queen. The peeple ran farther away. We spoke with our entire hearts and our full bulk, and every arch and column shook with the noise.

Pippit’s voice singled out Booroondoon. The rest of us stood giant, proclaiming our hugeness, trumpeting our obedience and our love.

Their eyes were all in a row
, says Booroondoon now,
like children peeping over our garden wall, the men’s who held him. The blade-man, he saw me coming; he knew what Pippit
was commanding. It happened all so fast—he lifted his sword—he leaped, he was upon Pippit!—and what could I do?

Nothing but what you did
, we reassure her—although, when we saw her fling that blue-black rag out among the peeple, we knew it was a terrible thing she had been driven to.

And then I could just push the others away. Them I did not injure, those ones, did I? They stepped back quietly; they had no swords, you see, and they had seen what I did to the first—so in hurting one I saved at least two—

Also, you had him—

‘I have him!’ she rumbled to us, and Pippit called us in his bird-voice, even as she swung him onto her head. We moved towards our accustomed order. But seeing Pippit so small and unprotected at our head, and knowing the peeple wished him dead, I pushed forward to precede Booroondoon, as I would have for no other reason, and others came up to shelter him from peeple who might leap up from the sides. Out of the square we went, while the peeple foamed and cried and parted to let us through, and fell back farther as we left the paved part of the town, as we left the housed part, until there were only a few wide-eyed rubbish-pickers’ tinies by the road to watch us pass, with our prize on our head, our live, sweet Pippit, chattering and laughing and greeting us by our bird-names over and over.

W
HICH IS HOW WE COME TO BE HERE
, on this long walk away from all we know. Since we left the road and the land
began undulating, ‘Our Pippit may be leading us to the Forest Hills of legend,’ Hloorobn says eagerly.

Booroondoon in her sadder moments says, ‘He may indeed be leading us into death, for I have never been this way before.’

‘And you have been near everywhere there is to be, our queen,’ says Gooroloom, ‘from the log-camp mountains, to the ports, to the road-making settlements all up and down.’

Says Booroondoon, ‘Yet I know nothing of this place, not its rocks or its creatures, nor how Pippit chooses the way among ten hundred sandhills all the same.’

‘Who knows? Who minds?’ says Hloorobn happily.

‘None of us, that’s sure,’ says Gooroloom.

And none of us does. For each evening our sweet Pippit brings us to water and good browsing, and each morning we wake to a spray of his hot little voice, to the blessing of his kisses and his touch as he walks among us. And he lifts us without spike and leads us without wrath. Singing, always singing, he moves us onward, into each brightening day.

D
OT WAS VERY YOUNG
. He was in the Bard’s house, asking about things, watching his manners.

‘This?’ said the Bard, taking it down from his shelf. ‘This is the House of the Three, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, Bard Jo.’ Dot sat himself to listen.

The Bard sat, too, placing the worn brown box on the mat between them.

‘Can you tell me the names of the Three, boy?’

‘Anneh, Robbreh and Viljastramaratan.’

The Bard nodded, and Dot glowed inside. ‘Anneh, she’s the one who wears the pants. She chops all the wood, she hoes the fields, picks the greens and cooks, and leads the animals around. We don’t know how she fits all that into her days, but she does, and all the time she’s humming and thrumming.’

Dot saw the women bent to the vegetable fields, saw his mother’s hands, fine and strong and always busy.

‘Robbreh, he’s a typical man,’ said the Bard. ‘He wears the comfortable robes, and he spends all his time in the tea-tent
talking wisdom with the Bard. He’s happy with very little, as everyone should be. His voice is like a heartbeat. It’s so low, it’s hard to hear, but it’s there all the time.’ He raised his gaze from the House of the Three to Dot’s face, and nodded reassuringly.

‘And Viljastramaratan?’ said Dot politely.

The Bard rolled his eyes and made a bitter laugh in his throat. ‘Viljastramaratan? That one’s a mystery child. Viljastramaratan is not boy and is not girl, or is boy and girl together. Very high, like a mosquito, and distracting like that, and unrestful. Viljastramaratan is always bothering the other two to come and dance. They never do, of course; they just go about their ways and ignore him. So Viljastramaratan weaves song-stuff around them, crazier and crazier, finishing every time in a giggling heap. And when that’s quieted, we can hear Anneh and Robbreh again, steady in their song.’

Dot had already heard the Three singing, of course, in snatches of breeze as he lay, sleepless nights, under the starry eye of his house’s smoke-hole. But he would not meet them properly until he got to his middlehood, and was allowed to stay up later in the tea-tent. Till then, he was only to hear them accidentally: Anneh thrumming, Robbreh pulsing, Viljastramaratan in wild play around them.