Musa threw a stone at the badu to draw his attention. ‘Explain what we want,’ he said to Aphas. ‘He’s used to you.’ He watched the old man mime the catching and the slaughter of an animal. The badu did not seem to understand. He grinned and shook his head, until Musa took his ornamental knife out of its cloth and made a motion with its blade across his throat, followed by the hand-sign for a prayer. Then the badu nodded. ‘See, he’s not as stupid as he looks,’ said Musa. ‘How could he be?’
The badu hurried off towards the valey. He’d almost understood. He was to catch a bird for Jesus. The smalest funeral offering. He had mistaken Musa’s praying hand-sign to be a bird, the fingers pressed together like closed wings, the thumbs protruding like a little head. The badu knew exactly what to do. Catching birds was easy. He’d been doing it for years.
He ran down to the tent and hunted through the goatskins until he found Miri’s cooking chest. He popped a little cube of hard salt between his lips, and unravelled a fraying length of green cotton thread from one of Musa’s ruined samples. He wrapped the thread around his finger and tiptoed amongst the goats, which had been let loose to graze on the tattered fabrics and any food that they could find. To anyone that watched it would seem that he was whispering in their ears, more evidence of lunacy. A madman speaking to the goats. What did he want with them? To tether them with his thin thread? To strangle one of the goats for Jesus, perhaps?
The badu searched the goats until he found one with a blood- fi.lled tick in the skin folds of an ear. Easy to see, but not so easy to get out. Some smoke, blown from a burning stick, would usually make a tick detach itself. But the badu hadn’t any smoke. Instead he took the now softened cube of salt out of his mouth. He crumbled it into the goat’s ear and rubbed it into the skin. Salt was better than smoke for catching ticks. A goat with a burning ear would not stay still. The tick, however, hated salt. It contracted, darkened, and fell into the badu’s palm. That was the easy part.
The hard part was to tie the thread around the tick’s abdomen without popping its blood sac, and without the tick attaching itselfto the badu’s finger. But he was practised. He had harnessed hundreds of ticks since he was small. He could have pulled a chariot with them.
The badu took the fastened tick into the nearest stand of thorns. What little rain there’d been in the night had tempted last year’s seeds to hazard their first green shoots. Insects, tempted by the moisture and the exposed sap of wind-snapped branches, competed for a meal. So did the birds. Finches, wheatears, warblers had come from nowhere to gorge themselves. And there were circling hawks, of course, waiting for the plumpest opportunity.
The badu put his tick on an exposed flat rock amongst the bushes, a little grape of blood, and weighed the thread down with a stone, a finger-length from the tick. It could not wiggle away, out of the unforgiving light. It couldn’t even fall very far, but it hadjust freedom enough to advertise itselfwith its struggles. It didn’t like the thread around its abdomen; it didn’t like the sun. The badu backed away, downwind, running the remainder of the thread through his fingers, until he found a hiding place behind a bush where he could not be seen but from where the twisting tick was visible. Now he would fish himself a bird.
He was an expert at keeping still, though anyone who’d seen him in the past thirty days, running in the rocks, tugging his hair and hands unceasingly, would have been amazed that one so plagued by movement and loose limbs could be so quiet and patient when it suited him. Perhaps the truth was this: he was a madman only when observed, the cussed opposite of those who conspired to be rational in company and cultivate their manias alone. The badu, without any witnesses to click their tongues at him and shake their heads, appeared entirely sane. He crouched beneath a thorn bush in the scrub, a blood tick offered on a thread to passing birds. And he was happy, too. He had his plans. He’d do his duty to the Gaily who had died, and then he’d make a rich man of himself
It wasn’t long before a banded wheatear came, a male, on its way north to breed. For al its mating splendour, its damask eye plumes and its black flights, it was tired from its long journey, and glad to have such easy and nourishing prey. The trick, it knew, was not to peck the tick. The bulb ofblood would burst.
Instead, the wheatear turned its head and took the tick whole. It lifted up its head to let the feast fall into its crop.
The trick for the badu was to wait. Ifhe pulled on the thread too soon, before the wheatear’s throat had ended its spasm of swallowing, the tick would pop out of its mouth again, without the blood. If he puiled on the thread too late, the wheatear’s flight might be strong enough to snap the cotton. The badu waited until the wheatear spread its wings, two beats, and then he jerked the thread. The wheatear tumbled in the air, and fell on to its back. The badu was already there. The bird was his. Not quite the perfect sacrifice, of course. Not quite as generous as a goat, not quite as heavy as an ox. But better than no sacrifice at aH.
The badu only broke one wing so that the wheatear could not fly away. He held it, quivering, in both hands. It didn’t peck at him for long. Only its trembling chest showed that it was still alive. He snapped the thread off at its beak and carried the bird to the men, waiting at the grave. They were disappointed. They had hoped that he would catch a little deer at least.
‘If that’s the best that this mean land will offer us, then damn it and so be it,’ Musa said. ‘We’ll make do.’
‘This is, undoubtedly, the meanest place I’ve ever seen,’ said Shim, with feeling, kicking at the stones and waving his hands around at all the unrewarding wilderness, the unremitting sun, the unrelenting landlord. He was already persuading himselfthat it was time to leave.
It was not fair of them to blame the scrub for being stingy with everything except for space and light and stone. Even if it had not displayed much magnanimity towards the men, it had, at least, been generous to Miri. It had not maddened her or lamed her, yet. It had not made her il or thin. In fact, she was the only one of them to put on any weight during the thirty days. It had allowed her to complete her birth-mat; there’d been delights in that, despite the wools. And, in the night, it had even conspired with the wind to free her from the family tent. An act of charity.
But Miri was exceptional. She had bewitched the scrub on her first day. They were equals in their plainness and their endurance. Usually it was a less forgiving, more dogmatic host, despising doubt and mocking faith at once, and favouring the predatory, whatever their beliefs. It was even-handed in its cruelties. It did not no^ally discriminate between the donkey and the mule. It did not prefer the vulture to the crow. It did not favour hennaed hair over blond. It did not hang its trees with food or fil its hoHows up with drink to make life easy for its guests. The scrub required its passengers to take care of themselves or go without. The scrub was economical, as well, like some old man, and boundless in its barrenness and poverty. Its air was thin; its earth was pale; its weeds were frayed; its moods were fractious and despairing.
But there was also something rich, at times, about the scrub, despite itself. Something sustaining, unselfish, fertile even. Perhaps this was because it made no claims. It did not promise anything, except, maybe, to replicate through its array ofabsences the body’s inner solitude and to free its tenants and its guests from their addictions and their vanities. The empty lands — these very caves, these paths, these desert pavements made of rock, these pebbled flats, these badlands, and these unwatered river beds — were siblings to the empty spaces in the heart. Why else would scrubs have any holy visitors at all? Ten thousand quarantiners had come to these parched hills and passed their days, some delirious with iHness; others feverish with god, and guilt and lunacy, unraveHed from themselves by visions of a better and eternal world; the rest made mad by fasting. Yet, at the end of their forty days, the scrub sent al of them away enriched and dryly irrigated. Even Aphas. Even Shim.