Black Juice by Margo Lanagan Page A

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.
    ‘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