The Foretelling of Georgie Spider

by Ambelin Kwaymullina

  She took us through the tunnels and into a cave, this one with a massive opening onto the trees that flooded the space with air and light. There was a map against one wall, and a pug dozing in the sunshine. The day after Daniel had died, Mr Snuffles had come back, and he’d come back to take care of Georgie. She didn’t miss meals any more, not when Mr Snuffles would bring her dead animals if she forgot to eat. She didn’t map for too long either, because if he thought she was getting tired he’d tear her spare vines into pieces. Georgie had helped Mr Snuffles when he’d been sad, and now he was helping her.

  Georgie pulled Ember and me over to the map, and said, “This is our futures. Look!”

  Em and I both looked. Helper darted across the map. I didn’t yell and leap backwards like I would have done before. I wasn’t so scared of spiders now that I’d seen them through Georgie’s eyes. Helper stopped, then scurried somewhere else, then stopped, then scurried – he was trying to show us something. In all the places where he was pausing there were three riverstones with connections clustered around them. In fact, the entire map was more like a bunch of mini maps joined together, of the stones and their connections, and then another map of the stones and their connections, and then another …

  “Georgie? Are those stones meant to be me and you and Ember?”

  “Yes, and all the links around us are the Tribe. Cassie is here, too, Ash because she’s Tribe as well, even though she died before there was a Tribe, in this life. But that doesn’t mean she always will.”

  My jaw dropped. Our futures. “Are you saying – in different lifetimes? The Tribe is always together?”

  Georgie nodded, and Ember reached out to run trembling fingers over the stones. I knew what this meant to her. Like Leo, she’d once doubted she had a spirit that could take her to the Balance and lives beyond this one. “How many lifetimes?” she breathed.

  Georgie smiled a sad, sweet smile. “All the ones I can See.”

  Daniel would be back again. And Penelope, and Cassie. We would all be back again. That didn’t stop us missing them in the now. But they weren’t gone for always. I reached for Ember’s hand, and Georgie’s – and for a while, the three of us looked ahead.

  Then Jaz’s voice sounded in my mind. Ash! Connor says, Where are you? And Jules says, WHERE ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH EMBER? He’s kind of freaking out.

  Tell Connor we’re in the cave where Georgie’s been making her latest map. And tell Jules – Ember’s awake.

  Oh yeah? ’Bout time!

  Jaz’s voice vanished. Before long there were pounding steps in the passage outside and Jules burst in, followed by Connor and Nicky. Em pulled her hand free of mine to run to Jules and the two of them collided, clinging to each other as if they’d never let go. Nicky circled around them both before settling at Em’s side, pressing against her leg with his tail thumping against the floor.

  She reached down to pat his ears, and Jules asked anxiously, “Do you need anything, Red? Is there anything I can get you? Water, or food, or – your Dad’s in the forest, if you want to see him.”

  Ember glanced at the map, and smiled a bright, open smile. I’d never seen her look so … young. “I want to see the Tribe, Jules. Dad, too, but first, take me to the Tribe!”

  Then Em caught sight of Connor. She ran over to hug him, and he hugged her in return before she darted back to Jules, throwing her arms around his waist. He put his arm across her shoulders and the two of them walked out together with Nicky trotting along behind them.

  There was a snorting sound below me. Mr Snuffles was sitting at Georgie’s feet. He snorted again before waddling off in the direction of the entrance. Georgie let go of me and went after him.

  “Wait!” I said, hurrying across to her. “Are you going somewhere?”

  “Mr Snuffles doesn’t like it when I never go outside,” Georgie answered. “So I’m going outside.”

  “I could come outside as well! If you want me to, that is.”

  She sighed. “You keep doing this, Ash.”

  “Do what?”

  “Worrying, and asking over and over again if I’m all right, and following me everywhere.”

  Okay, when she put it like that it sounded really annoying.

  “You have to let me be sad, Ash,” she said. “You have to let me be sad in my own way, and happy in my own way too.”

  In other words, back off. And if Georgie’s memories had shown me anything, it was how much it mattered to give her the space to be herself. I stepped away, physically giving her room to breathe, and said quietly, “I understand you.”

  Her eyes lit up, and she turned to follow Mr Snuffles out of the cave with a skip to her step.

  I let out a breath I hadn’t even realised I’d been holding. “She’s going to be all right.”

  “Yes,” Connor agreed. “Will you?”

  “I didn’t lose you.”

  “You lost your ability.”

  “That’s nothing!”

  He walked over until he was standing in front of me. “Just because other losses are bigger doesn’t make losing your ability nothing. You’re allowed to miss Sleepwalking.”

  “I do miss it,” I admitted. “It’s like – a piece of me is gone and I don’t quite know who I am yet without it there.”

  He reached out to clasp my hands in his and moved even closer, bending to speak against my ear. “Close your eyes, Ashala.”

  I did, and he said, “Feel what I feel.”

  Air. I could sense the air. Connor was sharing his ability, or at least the way it felt to him. My senses seemed to expand outwards, travelling along currents, and I knew I wanted to fly. The air responded, catching us up and sending us spiralling out of the cave and through the trees to the sky above. We turned in a slow spin above everything, and my eyes were still closed but I didn’t need them to see. The air showed me the Firstwood in a way I’d never seen it before. It swirled through the trees and around the Tribe, here and alive and safe. It shivered over rippling water, swept through the caves, and made the leaves dance. And it travelled beyond the trees to the grasslands where the saurs and the Saur Tribe were teaching the new hatchlings to hunt. Air was in everything, and everything was in air, and to hold it was to encompass the world.

  I opened my eyes to look up at Connor, grinning in sheer delight, and he grinned back at me. Then he bent his head to mine, and we breathed each other in.

  When the kiss ended I rested my head against his shoulder, and we continued our gentle spinning across the skies. This and every other moment was Penelope’s gift to me, and Daniel’s – and I knew I’d been stupidly wrong about something. The story told by Georgie’s memories and mine hadn’t been the one I’d thought it was going to be, because it hadn’t been a tale about what the world had done to extraordinary people.It had been a tale of how extraordinary people had turned the world with their choices and changed it for the better.

  I gazed out over the tuarts, and thought, this is the story of how they lived.

  AUTHOR NOTE

  So we come to the end.

  Anyone following this series from the beginning knows it was originally intended to be four books. But when I came to write this book I realised it was a trilogy, and as the story developed I understood why I’d initially thought this last book was two instead of one. This final story is told in two voices, and that is only the beginning of its dualities, which readers can discover as they like. To me, one of the most interesting parallels is that between Hoffman and Ashala, the heroes of the old world and the new.

  This book is also the story of the three girls – one to look behind, one to look into the now, and one to look ahead. And here at the end, I thought I would say a little about past, present and future in the Tribe series.

  The Citizenship Accords are not really an invention. They are based upon legislation that applied to Aboriginal people here in Australia, and particularly on the Western Australian Natives (Citizenship Rights) Act 1944 (which was finally repealed i
n 1971). This legislation offered a strange kind of citizenship, if it could called that, because what it did was exempt Aboriginal people who obtained a citizenship certificate from the discriminatory restrictions which only applied to them in the first place because they were Aboriginal. These restrictions included being unable to marry without the government’s permission or even to move around the State. Citizenship could be easily lost, for example, by associating with Aboriginal friends or relatives who did not have citizenship. Many Aboriginal people referred to citizenship papers as dog licences or dog tags – a licence to be Australian in the land that Aboriginal people had occupied for over sixty thousand years.

  What about the present? The Tribe series tells of a world in which the young are in danger, and for far too many of the young across our planet, this is not a tale of fiction. It is their every day. So in many ways these books reflect the truth known to every child and teenager who has ever been in real trouble: adults will fail you. I do think that we, the collective adults of this earth, are letting down the next generation to a truly spectacular degree – which is why, in the Tribe series, it is a teenager who saves the world. The hope for the future rests, as perhaps it always has, with those who come after us.

  What then of the future itself? In The Disappearance of Ember Crow, Ashala speaks of a fight bigger than any that has gone before, but it is not a conflict between the privileged of her society and those who are not. It is a fight between those who want to stop the hating and those who don’t. I believe humanity is in that fight now, and it might well define what is to come for our species. In The Foretelling of Georgie Spider, a better future is ultimately created by the global interconnection of those who choose compassion over intolerance, courage over fear, and love over hate.

  Perhaps this could be the real world.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Ambelin Kwaymullina loves reading sci-fi/fantasy books, and has wanted to write a novel since she was six years old. She comes from the Palyku people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. When not writing or reading she teaches law, illustrates picture books and hangs out with her dogs. She has previously written a number of children’s books, both alone and with other members of her family. The Foretelling of Georgie Spider is her third novel. Find out more about Ambelin at

  www.ambelin-kwaymullina.com.au

  Published in 2015

  by Walker Books Australia Pty Ltd

  Locked Bag 22, Newtown

  NSW 2042 Australia

  www.walkerbooks.com.au

  This ebook edition published in 2015

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  Text © 2015 Ambelin Kwaymullina

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Kwaymullina, Ambelin, author.

  The foretelling of Georgie Spider / Ambelin Kwaymullina.

  Series: Kwaymullina, Ambelin. Tribe; 3.

  For young adults.

  Subjects: Young adult fiction.

  Speculative fiction.

  A823.4

  ISBN: 978-1-925126-54-9 (ePub/mobi)

  ISBN: 978-1-925126-53-2 (e-PDF)

  Cover images: Image of girl © stocksy/Guille Faingold, Cobwebs © stocksy/Helen Rushbrook

  For my mother and the generations of Palyku women who walked the hard roads without losing themselves

  And for everyone who dreams of a future for our species that is better than our present