‘It’s the Darkedge.’
The word sent a thrill of something – Dara wasn’t certain what – right through her.
‘The actual one?’ Now she stared openly at Ma Saria in disbelief.
‘Only one I know of. Looks exactly the same as the last time I saw it, too.’
‘How long have you known?’
‘A little while. Once the sun came up properly. Only something built by Nightpeople could be that ugly.’
Dara looked at the distant smear with different eyes. It ran north to south, stretching along the horizon like a giant, resting black snake. It was still too far away to make out in any detail, but the overall impression it gave was of permanance.
‘It’s so big.’
‘Jaman.’
‘But … small, too.’ She didn’t think Ma Saria would understand what she meant. After so many years of hearing the old stories, about the shifting and the skyfall, it felt strange to see this mythical structure, this wall from the stories, with her own eyes. And not to have recognised it immediately for what it was – that diminished it, somehow.
To Dara’s surprise, Ma Saria nodded immediately. ‘It’s just a wall, girl, when all’s said and done. Just a wall and nothing more.’
‘Do you think Eyna might be there already?’
Ma indicated a scuffed patch of sand a metre or two away.
‘No idea. She got this far, though, so we can hope.’
They stared across the sandy plain at the monolithic bulk of the Darkedge. Then Ma Saria took up her bundles and set off again, patiently leading the way as she continued to trace the minute signs of Eyna’s earlier passage.
The sun reached its zenith and then started the long descent into the nightwards hemisphere. Its rays baked the landscape, heat shimmering up off the sand, reflecting a million shards of silver in the chunks of alluvial stone that protruded here and there from the plain, raising a sheen of sweat on Dara’s forehead and arms and making the air so hot in her lungs that talking was impossible.
Towards mid-afternoon, Ma Saria stopped again, suddenly this time, and cast around impatiently, her expression a mix of puzzled and perturbed.
‘What’s wrong, Ma?’
Dropping her gear onto the dirt, the old woman ran both hands through her hair and sighed. ‘She didn’t make it.’
‘Eyna?’
‘Jaman. Look here, here, and here …’ She pointed to three shallow, round depressions in the sand, each half a metre in diameter. ‘Her tracks stop at the edge of this clearing, and there’s only one thing I can think of that’d leave marks like that.’
‘A flyer?’
‘Jaman.’
‘But she wouldn’t just let them take her.’
‘She might. That girl was pretty upset when she ran off. And in any case, there’s not a whole lot she could have done to get away from them, not if they decided they really wanted her.’
‘You managed it.’
‘That was a different time.’
Dara stood for a few moments, considering.
‘You reckon she went willingly, then?’
‘Don’t see any signs of a struggle here, do you?’
Dara looked around. The sand in the clearing appeared undisturbed. There were certainly none of the scuffles or drag marks that she’d have expected to find if the Nightpeople had used force. A feeling of hopelessness spilled over her.
‘What do we do, then?’
Ma nodded towards the distant grey wall.
‘We keep walking.’
‘And when we get there? It’s too big to get over.’
‘I managed it once. Something will turn up. Then Ma Saria offered a rueful smile, ‘With this lot flying around again, it’s even possible we’ll get back in the same way I got out.’
That night, as they crouched beside a small fire and feasted on the half-cooked meat of a small hopper that Dara had managed – more through luck than skill – to kill, they said little. Dara sat with her back to the Darkedge, which was now cloaked by the darkness, but she could still feel its brooding presence – a grey line across the world. Somewhere far off, beyond the daywards horizon, a desert thunderstorm flashed silently, lighting the horizon every few seconds as millions of volts of energy hurled themselves futilely into the empty sand below.
When she’d finished her food, Dara reclined against the warm ground and pushed away the insistent throb of earthwarmth, unwilling to allow it in to her or to sink herself into it.
‘Why you fighting it?’
It was the first thing Ma Saria had said in hours.
‘I’m not,’ Dara replied, but Ma snorted her disbelief.
‘Don’t try that shi with me, girl. I’ve spent my life feeling you and all the others. I can tell just as much when you’re trying not to reach as when you can. An’ right now you’re as empty as that wall over there. Feel more like a Nightperson than they do.’
Dara didn’t answer, and when Ma Saria didn’t force the issue, she thought the old woman might have finished with the subject. But after a couple of minutes, Ma crouched beside Dara and placed both hands on her shoulders, and immediately Dara felt the pulse through the old woman’s palms.
‘You think Jaran would want you keeping yourself all caught up inside like this?’ Ma Saria’s voice was gentle. ‘You reckon he’d expect you to turn your back on who you are, just because of what happened to him?’
‘It’s not that …’ Dara began.
‘Reaching in itself’s nothin’ to be scared of, Dara. It’s what you can do with it that can make it dangerous. And the more you fight it, the more it’ll fight you. That’s somethin’ I know for sure.’
‘But every time I do it now it feels … different. That’s why I stop. I have to.’
‘Perhaps that’s just you, eh? Could be it’s you that’s different.’
‘I don’t think so. Ever since …’ She trailed off.
‘Since what?’
‘I had this dream …’ Dara told Ma Saria about the old woman, the snake, the meatbird. When she’d finished, Ma Saria looked perturbed.
‘You ever dream this before?’
‘A couple of times. Never exactly the same, though. Does it mean something?’
‘Dunno. Probably does. Gotta remember that I’ve had to work out most of my reaching as I went along. Tell you one thing, though, I’ve always wondered why we Darklanders used to call our elder men “Dreamers ”. Seems to me that maybe what’s happening to you is what used to happen to them. Maybe you’re the first proper Dreamer in a long time, eh?’
‘You mean the same as Dreamer Wanji? And Dreamer Gaardi?’
‘Could be. We’ll never know for sure, ‘cause they’re long gone back to the Earthmother. But it’s as likely a possibilty as anything else I can think of.’ Ma Saria gave Dara a couple of moments to digest this, then added, ‘One other thing’s certain – if you keep pushin’ back your ability, there’s no way we’ll ever find out.’
Dara nodded. From the sand below her bare legs, the earthwarmth pulsed gently. On her shoulders, Ma Saria’s hands were warm.
‘So, what do you think, girl. You gonna give it a try?’
Dara closed her eyes, drew in several deep breaths and allowed a trickle of earthwarmth in, drawing it up and trembling as the heat of it dispersed up her spine and out.
Dara!
She gasped. Jaran’s voice, in her mind. So clear. So strong. So much a part of her, and yet not.
Dara! It echoed like a call, coming from everywhere, pouring into her, through her. It was so enormous …
‘I … can’t!’ With a shudder, Dara pulled back into her own awareness.
‘Dara girl! You right? What happened?’ Ma’s voice seemed to float above her.
Dara opened her eyes, surprised to find herself no longer sitting by the fire but prone on the sand, Ma Saria crouched above her.
‘Jaran. He’s there.’
‘What?’ Ma Saria gave her a startled look. ‘Where?’
/>
‘Everywhere, I think. In me. It was like a … call.’
As she said the word ‘call’, Ma Saria went very still.
‘A call.’
‘Yeah.’ Dara slowly sat upright again. Her arms were trembling. ‘Just my name. But it was so … enormous. The voice, the distance in it. What’s wrong, Ma?’
The old woman’s face was grave.
‘Only one other person I’ve known could hear their dead family calling them through the Earthmother.’
‘Who?’
‘Me. Not for many, many years, though.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘I wish I knew, Dara girl. Wish I had an answer for you, but I don’t. I guess we’ll have to work it out as we go along.’
From daywards came a distant rumble of thunder. On the horizon, the storm had increased in ferocity.
‘We’re gonna get wet,’ Dara observed.
‘Looks likely. Lotta times these desert storms are all noise and no action, though.’
They watched the storm-rent horizon. Dara’s mind was still reeling with the after-effects of that strange call. Ma was sunk into introspective silence. The distant storm-light flashed across the desert nightscape, lighting the old woman’s features.
‘You think the Nightpeople will be flying in that?’ Dara asked, trying to draw the old woman out of her reverie.
‘Who knows.’ Ma Saria looked very, very old all of a sudden. ‘Who knows anything any more.’
The old woman lay down on her side facing the fire, her back to the storm and her cheek pressed against the soft sand. She appeared to fall asleep, but Dara suspected it was just for show.
‘Shi!’
The Darkedge loomed, just a couple of hundred metres away, blocking the morning. Dara craned her head backwards, peering up that long, smooth grey curve, her eyes drawn instinctively to the dark line where the plascrete met the blue of the morning sky.
Around them, the morning was charged by the storm, the air crackling. Shivering in the cool, Dara clutched the silver thermal blanket tightly around her shoulders.
They’d decamped in the darkness, in the middle of the storm, rushing the final few kilometres to the wall through the night in the hope they’d find some shelter there, or along the way. As Ma had suspected, there was little rain in the storm, just the occasional fat drop, which plopped into the thirsty sand and was swallowed immediately.
But the lightning and accompanying thunder had been one of the most terrifying things Dara had ever experienced. It was as though the air itself had come to life, pouring downwards into the land with such violence that even now, hours later, Dara could feel the numbness brought on by the concussive thunderclaps slapping the air around her.
And trying to reach the wall had been a mistake. They’d realised this when they were only a kilometre or so away, and when the storm was at its most violent.
‘Ma! Look!’ Dara, who’d been leading at the time, stopped dead in her tracks, pointing ahead to where the Darkedge, the only high point in the flat plain of the desert, was being struck by lightning with such repetitive force that it was as though a curtain of light had been drawn along the top of the structure.
‘Shi, Dara girl. We better just stop right here, eh?’ Ma had to shout to make herself heard.
And so they’d huddled together in the sand, while around them the night assaulted the earth and the wall with a power that made the forces harnessed by the Nightpeople seem trivial by comparison. And when the storm finally blew itself out, just before dawn, they’d managed a couple of hours of sleep before Dara woke up in a silence so profound as to be oppressive, and in the long morning-shadow of the wall.
Ma Saria was still fast asleep when Dara rose from her makeshift bed, aching all over and bone-weary. She clutched her thermal blanket around her shoulders and set out to walk the few hundred metres to the base of the Darkedge.
This close, the wall dominated the entire landscape. It reached into the sky so far that it seemed to loom backwards, blocking out all trace of sunrise. Left and right of her it vanished in the distance. Even though she knew it to be curved – a giant circle in the world – from this close up the arc was so miniscule as to be invisible. Instead, the Darkedge ran like a knife edge through the sand.
The sand close to the wall had become packed, forming a hard crust with none of the yielding softness or pliability of just a little way back.
At the base she stopped. The wall wasn’t nearly as undamaged as it appeared from a distance. Its surface was pitted with a multitude of tiny scars and fissures, pock-marked and mapped by the ages as even the supposedly impervious plascrete gave way to the inexorable creep of entropy, the forces holding it there slowly leaching their energy back into the universe.
Dara rested one hand against the grey surface. Then she leaned her whole weight against it, surprised that, despite the incredible bulk, something about the wall lent it a feeling of absurd fragility, as though her tiny weight might be enough to set the whole thing tumbling along its length, back onto the red sand.
The cold set her teeth chattering, and Dara set off back to where she’d left Ma Saria. At the edge of the hard, crusted sand, she stopped. When Ma Saria had first suggested that they needed to return to the Darklands, it had seemed like an adventure, a break in the monotony of her everyday life. Then, after everything that had happened with Jaran and the New Londoners, and they’d finally left the escarpment, she’d expected to feel something more than this. She’d expected the Darkedge to have more of a presence, more malevolence about it.
But now, standing in its shadow, Dara realised that it was, as Ma Saria had pointed out the day before, just a wall.
Dara!
The call shuddered out of the earth and air around her.
‘You all right, Dara girl?’
She hadn’t heard Ma Saria approaching. Shaking her head to clear the lingering call, Dara turned to the old woman.
Saria’s face was even more lined and creased than usual, Dara thought. She moved gingerly, her old body worn out after so many nights spent on hard ground and exposed to the elements. But in her eyes was an odd twinkle, one Dara hadn’t seen in ages.
‘Yeah, Ma, I’m fine. Just been taking a close look at that.’ She waved her hand towards the Darkedge.
‘What do you think?’
‘You’re right. It’s just a wall. Buggered if I know how we’re gonna climb it, though.’
‘I’m still hoping we won’t have to,’ Ma replied, but didn’t say anything more.
After a sparse breakfast of hard bushnuts, they packed up their gear and stood facing the wall.
‘Which way?’ Dara asked.
‘Doesn’t really matter, so far as I can see. You pick.’
Dara thought for a moment, then pointed right, towards the south.
‘That way.’
‘Suits me.’
They headed off, their course winding slightly to avoid any obstacles, and with the wall a half-kilometre or so to their left. As the morning progressed and she grew accustomed to the unchanging grey bulk of it, Dara was surprised to find that she was able to block it out, blot it from her mental landscape.
Every few kilometres the upper lip of the wall would be broken by a small tower, box-like and topped with a tall mast, but from these there was no sign of life. Once they diverted from their course, bringing them closer to the base of the wall, to see if the towers allowed any entry or egress at ground level, but the expanse of plascrete there was as unbroken as at any other point.
In the late afternoon they stopped, hunted, lit a fire, set up camp and slept through the night.
Then at dawn the following morning they set out again, the wall, as usual, looming into the sky on their left.
Occasionally Dara tried to reach, but the moment she touched the Earthmother, the call would shudder into her, gripping her and leaving her gasping with the sensation of something giant and writhing, neither good nor bad and yet both, lurking below a
nd around her. And so each time she quickly withdrew, pushing the insistent pulse away again, and Ma Saria would watch, saying nothing.
On their second night of following the wall, Dara woke up screaming.
The dream had been so vivid, so terrible. But as soon as she woke, it faded, sliding into the vagaries of forgotten memory.
‘Nightspirits, girl! You okay?’
Dara, trembling, hadn’t been able to reply. She just huddled in Ma Saria’s embrace until the sun came up again.
Dara!
This time she pushed it back, shoving the call away, pouring her energy out in a sharp wedge of brightness.
Go away! I don’t want you!
‘That won’t help, child.’ Ma Saria seized Dara’s shoulders and shook her gently. ‘It’s like trying to blow down that wall over there with a sneeze.’
‘But I don’t want it, Ma. It’s too big.’
‘It’s who you are, girl. You’re a Dreamer. The first one to walk this country in a long, long time. And you’re gonna have to accept that. ‘Cause this land here owns you now. And it’s going to keep pushing at you until you let it in.’
Dara didn’t reply. They packed up their camp and walked on, silently following the grey curve of the Darkedge into another day.
In the late afternoon they came to a section of the wall that was topped by another tower, but this one was more like a small cluster of buildings clinging to the top of the grey expanse and crowned by an array of domes and masts.
And below it, on the desert floor beside the wall, a tangle of pale, dome-shaped bubbles and walkways squatted, the afternoon light making them slightly luminescent against the grey wall behind them.
‘It’s them,’ said Dara.
‘Jaman.’
‘Do you think they know we’re here?’
‘No idea. Looks like they’re waiting for something, though, and if it’s not us then I can’t think what else.’
‘What do we do?’
‘Only two choices, so far as I can see. Either we turn around and go back the way we came, or we go and deal with that lot once and for all.’
Behind her, Dara could almost feel the welcoming expanses of the desert, space in which they could lose themselves.
Daywards Page 27