Rubber, softened by heat, peels along the scolding dirt of a forgotten road, as the rover comes to a halt in the broad shadow of an acacia. The engine cuts as dust hurries by the windows, eager to catch up to the halted vehicle. She waits for it to pass, then steps out of the hot interior into the hotter evening. The acacia is a long, umbrella-like tree that occludes the tangerine sky with its webbing branches which are covered in thick thorns. There were smaller cousins of these alien flora on the outskirts of the city where she grew up and around them circulated a cadre of cautionary tales, involving children who would become ensnared in their thirsting boughs.
From the passenger side, she retrieves the small bundle she is employed to deliver. It is a neatly folded sack of cloth tied together with a piece of string wrapped many times over. A humble assembly of material to contain a precious cargo. Most families are similarly practical in this final stage of ritual, though there have been a few wealthy clients that have indulged in bolts of silk and golden fastenings for sake of their own pride. Doing it this way, with a porter, the package is only ever seen by its creator and she, the deliverer. In her hands, the small bundle is heavy for its size. It feels as though it should be wet, though it is as dry as the earth at her feet. It folds easily between her fingers, flopping over the edge of her palm, as if willing itself into the earth. Soon, she thinks.
She looks out towards her destination. Across the weather-beaten bonnet of the rover, the land dips down into a long flat stretch until it reaches a range of red-orange mounds that are between a hill and a mountain. There is a small valley that runs between them, not far from where she stands now, that grants the sole southern passage into the basin beyond. This is why she has stopped the rover here. The interior of the basin is like a kiln, surrounded on all sides by the dusty mounds, the hot air is trapped in the centre by some freak vortex that is all but imperceptible to humans. The cancellation of forces makes for an area of dead wind that serves to bake the interior of the basin and anything within it. Any passing vehicles must keep moving through it. If they stop, the engines will not start again.
The cargo is packed into her bag, then she retrieves the rifle from the rack above the front seats. The top receiver has been replaced to accommodate larger calibre rounds, intended for scaring off lions, buffalo and elephants, and to give her a chance to put them down, should the massive bark of the weapon fail to instil the necessary fear.
Her true defence comes from the small box she unclips from its mooring on the roof of the rover. The gloves stop her hands being burned by the metal casing as she drops it into an insulating pouch on her belt. You can get plastic ones, but in this heat they would just melt onto the rich complexity of the components within.
Eight black, glass eyes peer up unblinking at her. Each measures some spectrum of light, or detects shifts in gravitational pulls or sends out waves of high-frequency vibrations for echolocation. In truth, the porter does not know the details of what the eyes see or how the box processes the information they ingest. She knows exactly as much as she needs to know; when the box is silent, she is safe. Well, as relatively safe as organic life can be in the churning entropy of the cold universe.
The box is simply an early warning system. The rifle can do nothing for her beyond what rifles usually do.
Crossing the small stretch to the valley, she sticks to the short, bronze grass, avoiding the shoulder-high reams of golden grasses and the islands of thorn bushes and sheltering acacias where easily-startled rhinos may be snoozing. The valley itself reveals the short breadth of the mounds that encircle the basin and she feels the sizzling breeze being sucked past her, into the basin, as if inhaled by some great toad at its heart.
But the only living things waiting for her are some kudu, their spiralling horns twitching skyward as she enters their perception and tilting down again when they see she is just passing by. The porter is relieved to see them. For all the genius of mankind, the kudu serve as a better warning system than the box at her hip. They’ve been known to scatter a full minute before the little box beeps its omens. Small wonder.
The river is not hard to find. Is is the sole depression in this flat bowl of sand. There are some dying patches of grass here and there, but none surround the water. This is not a place for living things, which is why they send the bundles here. Traditionally, the families would make the journey for themselves. But the world being as it is, they’d rather pay her to take the risk for them.
Kneeling by the banks of the river, her skin already tightening and crying under the remorseless heat, she unwraps the string from around the bundle. She lays out the contents on the pan-hot sand; the tough flesh of a heart, cut and unfolded to its full length, a lower jaw bone, teeth largely intact, wrapped in the tendons from the hands that fed it and finally a pair of eyes, fresh enough that they might still see, skewered on splinters of bone from the fingers of the deceased. The only thing not from the dead is the wooden idol, in the shape of the family patron-god. The kudu watched, looking bored, perpetually grinding flavourless cud in their long mouths.
In simpler times, there would have been a dozen more components. Effigies that pulled together the many mechanisms of a life and celebrated their function, now ceased. The idol was buried with them, in the hope that the patron-god would recognise their own kin and cart them off to whatever lay beyond this coil. There were a lot of words to say, herbs to burn and gestures to make. The porter stuck to the burial and said a small prayer. No one but the gods, if they were around, would know any better. Besides, the family had only asked that a small portion of the deceased be committed to this deathly place. Clearly, they knew that the line between pragmatism and tradition had to be drawn somewhere. Certainly, they understood the sliding cost of more elaborate ceremonies.
The porter pulls the last mound of sand over the buried organs and sits back, knees against the bank. That’s when the kudu freeze, halting even their chewing, listless gazes, then bolt across the sand away from her, springing across the sliding grains.
The porter is stuck staring after them and for a moment, does not understand the heavy pull of dread that balls up inside of her. Then she feels the low vibration in the depths of the earth below her. The river hisses at the fringes of her hearing. Tiny shadows extend around her, as pale grains of sand begin to slowly rise into the air, saturated with sunlight.
The box beeps.
Paddy Dobson
21st July 2020