He lifted his almost freakishly small, coarse-bristled head and sniffed the air, as if he was smelling the arrival of an unfamiliar scent – Isserley’s, not the vodsel’s.
‘Uhr-rhum,’ he said. It was the language of neither humans nor vodsels. He was simply clearing his throat.
Isserley had stepped out of the lift, and it had closed behind her. She waited to be challenged or greeted. The men did neither, carrying on with their activities as if she was invisible. Ensel rolled a small metal trolley of shiny instruments into Unser’s reach. The two cronies undressing the vodsel were huffing and puffing with effort, but the sound was smoothed over somewhat by the music all around.
Real music, human music, was being piped into the hall by loudspeakers nestled in the walls. Soft singing and the strumming of instruments imparted a reassuring flavour of home, a pervasive smell of melodies half remembered from childhood. They hissed and hummed soothingly.
The men had already managed to pull off the new arrival’s fleecy jumper and were struggling with the rest. The pale flesh was wreathed in many layers of clothing, like layers of cabbage or radish. There was less actual vodsel inside than Isserley had thought.
‘Careful, careful,’ muttered Unser as the men scrabbled clumsily at the vodsel’s ankles to remove tight woollen socks. An animal’s shanks were close to where its faeces would fall once it was in the pens; any lacerations would be liable to fester.
Panting from exertion, the men finished their task, tossing the last tiny garment on top of a pile. All these years, Isserley had always been handed the vodsels’ clothing and personal effects in a bag, just inside the steading door; this was the first time she’d seen how that bag came to be filled.
‘Uhr-rhum,’ said Unser again. Using his tail for balance, he waddled up against the Cradle on his hind legs, still holding his arms aloft. His arms were shiny black, as black as Amlis’s, in contrast to the rest of his fur, which was grey. However, this was only because his arms had just been washed right up to the shoulders, and the fur was saturated with water, slicked flat.
He looked sharply at Isserley, as if noticing her presence only now.
‘Can I help you?’ he demanded, squeezing the fur on his forearms a bit smoother still with his encircling hands. Drops of water pattered on the floor at his feet.
‘I… just came to watch,’ said Isserley.
The Chief Processor’s suspicious glare burned into her; she realized she was hunching over, her arms folded over her breasts, trying to look as human as possible.
‘Watch?’ Unser repeated in bemusement as the men struggled to lift the vodsel off the floor.
Isserley nodded. She was only too well aware that she had avoided coming here for four years, had only ever spoken to Unser in the dining hall. She hoped he would at least have noticed, from their rare conversations, that she respected him, even feared him a little. He, like her, was a true professional.
Unser cleared his throat again. He was always clearing his throat; he had a disease, the men said.
‘Well… keep well back,’ he advised her gruffly. ‘You look as if you’ve been crawling through the muck.’
Isserley nodded, and took a step backward.
‘OK,’ said Unser. ‘Put him on.’
The vodsel’s lolling body was flopped onto the Cradle, then turned to face the fluorescent ceiling. His limbs were arranged neatly, his shoulders fitted snugly into a special shoulder-shaped indentation which had been sculpted into the metal of the chute. His head came to rest on the lip of the chute, his loose red hair dangling just above the great metal trough.
Throughout all this the vodsel, though placidly flexible, made not the slightest movement himself, except for the autonomic squirming of his testes inside the shrinking scrotal sac.
When the body had been arranged to Unser’s satisfaction and the tray of instruments pushed against the edge of the Cradle, the butcher began his task. Balancing on his tail and one hind leg, he lifted his other hind leg up to the vodsel’s face and hooked two fingers of his foot into the vodsel’s nostrils. An upward tug pulled the animal’s head right back and opened its mouth wide. Pausing only to make sure of his balance, Unser flexed his free hands. Then, from the tray beside him, he selected one silver tool shaped like an elongated letter q, and another shaped like a tiny sickle. Both of these instruments were immediately inserted into the vodsel’s mouth.
Isserley strained to see, but Unser’s big wrists and the twisting motion of his fingers obscured the view as he carved out the vodsel’s tongue. Blood began to gurgle out onto the vodsel’s cheeks as Unser turned to drop his tools on the tray with a clatter. Unhesitatingly he snatched up an electrical appliance resembling a large star-point screwdriver and, squinting with concentration, guided it into the vodsel’s mouth. Flashes of light glowed through the gaps in Unser’s nimble fingers as he searched out the incontinent blood vessels and fried them shut with a crackling buzz.
He was already busy sluicing out the vodsel’s mouth with a suction pump by the time the smell of burning flesh had permeated the air. The vodsel coughed: the first real evidence that, far from being dead, it was suffering from nothing more serious than icpathuasi.
‘That’saboy,’ murmured Unser, tickling the Adam’s apple to make the creature swallow. ‘Uhr-rhum.’
As soon as he was satisfied with the state of the animal’s mouth, Unser turned his attention to the genitals. Taking up a clean instrument, he sliced open the scrotal sac and, with rapid, delicate, almost trembling incisions of his scalpel, removed the testicles. It was a much more straightforward job than the tongue; it took perhaps thirty seconds. Before Isserley had registered what had happened, Unser had already cauterized the bleeding and was sewing the scrotum closed with an expert hand.
‘That’s it,’ he announced, tossing the needle and thread onto the tray. ‘Finished. Uhr-rhum.’ And he looked to his guest.
Isserley blinked back at him across the room. She was having a lot of trouble keeping her breathing under control.
‘I didn’t… realize it would all… be over so soon,’ she admitted hoarsely, still crouching and cringing. ‘I was expecting… a lot more… blood.’
‘Oh yes,’ Unser assured her, combing his fingers through the vodsel’s hair. ‘The speed minimizes the trauma. After all, we don’t want to cause unnecessary suffering, do we? Uhr-rhum.’ He allowed himself a faint smile of pride. ‘A butcher has to be a bit of a surgeon, you know.’
‘Oh, it’s… very impressive,’ complimented Isserley miserably, shivering and hugging herself all the while, ‘the way you do it.’
‘Thank you,’ said Unser, dropping back onto all fours with a groan of relief.
Ensel had made the Cradle tip sideways, and the other men were already hauling the vodsel off it, manoeuvring the body back onto the pallet so it could be rolled to the lift.
Isserley bit her insensate lips to stop herself crying out with frustration. How could it be over so soon! And with so little violence, so little… drama? Her heart was hammering in her chest, her eyes were stinging, her fingernails were clawing holes into her clenched fists. She had a need for release raging inside her, swollen to explosion point, and yet the vodsel’s ordeal was over; he was already on his way to join his kind down in the pens.
‘Don’t drag his feet over the fucking step,’ exclaimed Unser irritably as the men dragged their burden into the lift. ‘I’ve told you a thousand times!’
He cast a knowing glance at Isserley, as if to acknowledge that she, of all people, should have a pretty accurate idea of how many times he could have scolded the men in this way. ‘OK, hundreds maybe,’ he conceded.