Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [21]
Trawbrij the chanter gave us a beat; I walked with him, behind the twenty-five chosen workers, while Mister Chopes went ahead. The knee-team preceded us, with their chanter and their onlooker; I tried to hold my head as high and my back as straight as their onlooker’s, to look as casual and unselfconscious as he.
We took a safe path wide of the torso, well behind the row of waiting hookmen. Slabs of shroud slapped down and jiggled on the plan, sending wavelets over the hook-men’s feet.
I had watched other incomings, up with the women and children on the hill behind town. What you don’t see from there are the surfaces of things: the coarse head-hair, which is like a great tangle of endless curving double-edged combs; the damp, waxy skin, pale as the moon, hazed with its own form of hair, dewy with packaging-fluid; the eye, the ear-hole and the mouth-slit, all sealed with grey gum by the hunters. What you don’t see from the hills is the size, is the wall of the cheek going up, behind the heaps of the hair, which themselves tower three houses high above the running workers. My eyes couldn’t believe what was in front of them.
‘He’s enormous, isn’t he?’ said Trawbrij beside me.
‘He makes us look like ants,’ I said. ‘Smaller than ants, even. Just look how much of the sky he takes up!’
‘And yet we smaller-than-ants, we little crawling germs, we’re going to set upon him, and pull him apart and bring him down and saw him into plates, and melt him into pots and pints, and there’ll be nothing left of him in three weeks’ time.’
‘Is there any part of him that’s not useful to someone?’ I turned to look properly at the chanter. He was slender and white-haired and wise-looking.
‘I have only ever seen tumour-rocks left lying on the plan, though even these reduce in time, and become parts of people’s walls and houses, though they do not export. And sometimes if an organ bursts, or if the tides delay the incoming and the beast is putrefying on arrival, there may be lumps of dirty gel that won’t melt, that sit about for a while.’
As we came level with the thigh, the first of our team threw up his grappler and shinnied up the rope, chopping footholds as he went. Others followed, each just far enough behind the previous man not to be kicked in the head. In this way we quickly had half a team at the top.
Mister Chopes turned with his foot in the first slot. ‘Where’s my looker? Amarlis.’
‘Here,’ I said.
‘What do you reckon your job is?’
‘Keep an eye out down here.’
‘’S right. Main thing is, teams getting in each other’s ways. So, stand well back, watch how stuff falls and give a hoy before someone gets hurt.’
‘I’m on it.’
I swung around, passed Trawbrij tucking up his robes for the climb, and went back as far as the other onlookers. There I could see right to the edges of my team’s activities, and keep track of Mister Chopes and the team up on top. I blew my whistle, straight away, and the whole ground-team turned as if I had them on strings.
I cleared my throat. ‘Back up,’ I said clearly through the megaphone, and waved them towards me. ‘Back to where these other teams are standing.’ And up they came to safety, which seemed a wonder to me, a great respectful gesture. I tried not to smile, not to look surprised.
The shroud on the side of the thigh, because it was so flat, could be cut away in a single piece. When it came down—with a smack and two bounces that I felt up my spine and in my armpits through the crutches—there above it was the white-clay wall of the thigh, height of a tanker-ship, running with pack-fluid. That clean, warm, newborn-Dochi smell was all there was to breathe now. The fluid ran off, and the skin-hairs lifted from the skin, then separated from each other, gleaming in the early sun. And as I watched, the side-lit skin covered itself with little bluish triangles, bluish scallops of shadow, as if the hairs were not just drying and springing free but pulling