by Ed Hillyer
A shadowy individual, that he was, and certainly vengeful in spirit, but so far as she knew Druce wasn’t a murderer. Yet what might any man, ‘poor muck-worm’ or valiant spider, prove himself capable of, when fighting for his very survival?
The taste of blood was not so very different from that of dirt: both tasted of iron.
Joseph Druce. George Bruce. Jack alive. Joe-Jack. The villain had two faces. Driven to commit the deadliest of all sins, his soul would then be lost forever.
If Joseph Druce was not a murderer already, Sarah feared he might yet be.
CHAPTER LIV
Saturday the 20th of June, 1868
JACK ALIVE
‘In dreams they fearful precipices tread;
Or shipwreck’d, labour to some distant shore:
Or in dark churches walk among the dead;
They wake with horror, and dare sleep no more.’
~ John Dryden, Annus Mirabilis
The great Spirit Ancestors dwell in the depths of the earth. One by one they emerge, pushing up the earth as they come. Caves, rocks and waterholes formed, these certain sacred places are revisited for all of eternity.
In the feast days of the dry the clans gather to exchange gifts on the Wirrengren plain, a past burning of roots and stumps, or at Banyenong, ‘a possum a long time ago’, for the purposes of a corroboree. The ceremonies they enact include marriage partnership, initiation rites, and the mourning of the dead.
In Brippoki’s fifth summer, he travels there with Old Aunty. Father, inconsolable, stays behind. More than 600 heads from any number of mobs normally attend the festivities. Numbers this season are sorely depleted. Recent disputes and age-old scores are laid aside in their greater need for healing.
As they come near to Banyenong, the young men are sent ahead with the nets of greeting. In the evening, the nets are returned. At sunrise the next day they proceed, to find their hosts seated together in a clearing, patiently awaiting their arrival. The men form a long row, painted for battle and with their weapons arrayed, gins and children clustering some way behind. Warriors of the Wudjubalug form a second line opposite this first, their ranks soon swelled by the arrival of further clans, until everyone expected has assembled. From where the boy Parnko huddles, he watches as the gins advance into the space between the two parties, their heads bowed and coated with lime. Throwing down their possum cloaks and rocko bags, they extract pieces of natural glass, sharpened flint and shell. Hungrily these glitter in the sunshine. Howling, loud and melancholy, the gins slash at the flesh of their thighs, their backs and breasts. Blood pours from their wounds until they are red from head to foot, more blood than the dry ground can soak up. Their shuffling feet splash in the streams. Everyone else sits in silence, except, from each group, a designated bourka. One by one these stride forward, and in terms of violent outrage declaim the losses their people have suffered. At this point, the challenges and wounding thrusts necessary to satisfy the aggrieved parties should take place. Many spears – leipa – are brandished, but none is thrown. There have been too many losses of late for anyone to stomach more. The chief mourners stagger back behind the lines, their many voices raised in chorus. The entire company takes up the death-wail.
The circle of campfires burns brightly through the evening, each group ascribed a place according to the direction in which they have come. In turn, they take up positions at the centre of the circle, to sing and dance. Performances last the whole night through. Swallowed pride drives them on to greater and greater exertions, in their efforts to outdo and outlast one another.
Their bodies are painted with red and white ochre, heads strung with feathers or woolly with down, grass seeds stuck to the dried sacred blood let from their veins. Some carry bunches of feathers or leaves, tree limbs lengthening their own. Basic rhythms are tapped out using two short sticks, or by clashing together their weapons – waddy, leowell, leipa. A bourka of repute sets the time and tune.
‘Kartipaltapaltarlo padlara kundando,’ he sings.
The women sit before the dancers in a line or semi-circle. They wear possum skins, white down banding their foreheads, and horns of cockatoo feather. Removing their cloaks, they roll them tightly into a ball, and strike them with their palms in time to the beat.
Wodliparrele kadlondo.’
Songs are sung in dialects so ancient that all meaning has been lost, and only the melody remains. The dancers shimmer by firelight, moving quick, quick, slow. Their dances portray the animals, the thrill of the hunt, great exploits in love and war. Each black limb painted with a broad white stripe, reanimated skeletons live out past glories, thighs wide apart and quivering madly.
Tears streak the faces of spectators.
He remembers. As part of the ritual call and response, before each repeat of the chorus, different solo performers ‘ride’ into the ring. Some introduce strange new words in English. He remembers the sound. These players of the stranger men are challenged and questioned, beaten down or forced back, or else their opponents collapse to the ground in a dead faint – scenes distressing to the young Parnko. He remembers the sound of their voices, in the night.
‘Kanyamirarlo kadlondo,
Karkopurrelo kadlondo.’
Brippoki stands and sings the curse of vengeance – a song of power filled with all of the righteousness of Bugaragara, with invocations of tjurunga. His enemy is no better than a wild dog. He will sing him to sleep, steal on his camp, and strike to kill him where he lies.
He remembers all of it: the grief, the fury, and the fear.
The songs are wild that night. At certain intervals each dance halts, the entire company raising their hands to the stars, the campfires of their Ancestors.
‘WAUGH!’ their voices cry out as one.
‘WAUGH! WAUGH!’ he cries, until the approach of dawn, until his voice is cracked and gone.
They are off to see the King of Corsica.
Sarah walks the graveyard. Hand-in-hand with her mother she walks, although desperate to run. No birds sing. The light itself is smeary. Heavy rains have fallen all night, and through the best of the day. The air does not smell sweet and fresh, as it should after a storm. It stinks. What is that smell? On her left, and on their right, the topsoil has been washed away.
She sees for herself what the dreadful smell is. Sticking out of the ground, at their feet, are mottled green hands, stiff as claws. Her mouth and nostrils fill with the stench of rotting flesh…
Sarah Larkin woke to the sound of her own screaming. Her throat felt raw and tight, her tongue swollen like a slug.
She lay sweating, hot, then cold, and unable to move her head. The atmosphere seemed electrified, filled with bursts of strange light, although the room was in total darkness. It was early morning still – after midnight, but not yet dawn.
Nightmare soaked her pillow – no, not nightmare, childhood memory. Her mother, Frances, had taken her to visit William Hazlitt and Theodore, King of Corsica; in their graves in St Anne’s churchyard, Soho. The cholera epidemics crowding London’s cemeteries beyond capacity, the latest victims were stacked six-or seven-deep in shallow interments. It only took a rain shower to expose the bodies.
She had been walking with her mother, mottled green hand in her hand, through the graveyard.
Pulling herself together, Sarah rose to fetch a glass of water. Lingering at the doorway to Lambert’s room, she heard the wet struggle of his lungs.
The night is thick, the brutal sort of darkness one can feel. A light moves about in the house opposite. Brippoki shifts position on the roof to gain a better point of vantage.
Thara moves about her gunya, carrying a candle. It lights up the white of her nightdress like the flame of a torch. From her chamber, she moves downstairs. The firefly hovers in between floors for a time, and then disappears to the back of the house. Brippoki scrambles up. He is about to make his way around to the farther side when it reappears, hovering down another flight.
Thara enters the room he k
nows best. She stands, looking into the large mirror above the mantelpiece. She studies herself in the glass, at great length, as he has seen her do before. He is too far away to make out the expression on her face. She takes up scissors, and begins to attack her silver-streaked hair, throwing great chunks of it into the unlit fireplace.
Something then – a noise? – makes her freeze. She grasps the candle and runs up the stairs, and into her father’s bedchamber. The curtains there are drawn.
She does not emerge again.
He creeps back to his former position, concealed within the eaves. The night is chill. His bones are weary, his head heavy. Brippoki dares not sleep.
Instead he scans the night for the glitter of predatory eyes.
The first tracks they discover are beneath the stony cliffs of Merri-merri-winnum. Soon, more are found, where the swamps of Engottene-nurmwurm fringe the plains of Cattiong nyam nyam. These are still fresh.
Their corroboree over for another season, his party returns home, to their lands further to the southwest, where Emu’s egg rolls away.
A small stream waters the valley in which they camp. The turf around the banks is heavily scarred, the soft clay, at points, churned into a white and liquid mud. They are greatly disturbed by the tracks of mysterious Ngamadjidj. The No men have yet to see a white man. They consult with the womenfolk who survived that fateful night at Worrowen.
Ngamadjidj are horrific creatures, having two heads, as many legs as a beetle, and running just as fast. Their long and dragging footprints lead right up to the water’s edge. There are also marks of a great many two-pointed toes – the white man’s women, so their own gins say, are exceedingly ugly and smelly.
A finger of smoke rises from the far country spread before them. Some of the younger warriors are all for following the trail and taking their revenge. The wise men advise against it. So they set up camp in a hollow next to the stream, careful to keep the smoke of their own fire low.
A call from the surrounding brush alerts them. When they look up, they see white faces. Everyone scatters, shrieking at the tops of their voices. They leave behind bags and weapons. Parnko, he shits in terror. The stranger fellows stand their ground and cry ‘cooey’. Everyone stays silent, in the trees or crouched behind them, until long after the evil has gone.
A few darks later and they meet the same party again, standing on the opposite banks of the broad Wimmera. Feeling safer, they take the time to study the curious whitefellows. Spears are brandished – threats, and furious reproach – and, as evening falls, a war dance performed. The whites sit impassive throughout. In the morning, following a sleepless night, envoys from either side meet mid-river and exchange intimacies. They say they come from the sea, and present many useless gifts for which his people are obliged to give up their nets and a few weapons. They want to know where to find fresh water in the regions ahead. Directions are given to Keyinga, the lake.
Everyone is glad to have made peace. For the ghosts of their dead to return from the grave, and not know them, is a terror they wish ended.
The sky to the east grows lighter. Soon Emu’s egg will roll around, and it will be time again for Brippoki to move on – aimless, alone, and in fear.
CHAPTER LV
Saturday the 20th of June, 1868
BECOME AS LITTLE CHILDREN
‘And that inverted Bowl we call the Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop’t we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to It for help – for It
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.’
~ Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
Mother is close by. Father dumbfounds him with a string puzzle.
A round piece of bark, rolling along – pretending it an animal and they the hunters, some of the older boys try to spear it. One of their teipas strikes his outstretched arm. The tip, padded with grass, stings sharply, but does not pierce the skin. He cries and cries, and no amount of hugging will make him stop.
He climbs a tree. He falls, and does not cry. He hits the bark with a tiny, balled fist, and then sets to climbing again.
Ngamadjidj in these days is nothing more than smoke and ugly rumour. Warri the wind carries fire-talk down from the north, stories of trees sprouting up out of the sea, and huge winged birds. The dead return from Pindi, far to the west, on the backs of giant swans.
At the sight of them, the bravest warriors run away. The women hide their babies in the bushes. In their time away the dead have gained knowledge of another sort, and much of what they knew in life is forgotten. They speak a new tongue, no longer recognising family or friends.
He likes to hear Father tell these stories, but Mother shakes her head and covers her ears. Her people lived nearer the coast, where there has been long time plenty fighting. Talk of Ngamadjidj aches her liver.
Marriage is mostly with the Jardwadjali, a people ranging alongside Wudjubalug lands, partnerships approved according to yauerin – skin, or clan – and goobong – totem. Yauerin, goobong and miyur flow from the mother, and it is not good for menfolk to marry women of the same yauerin as their mother.
Brippoki’s father marries late. His mother is found wandering the desert. Still very young, already she carries a child in her belly, a child belonging who knows where – taken one night, against her will, by a wicked wembawemba fellow, passing through her country with a party of white men. In revenge her people spear one of the no good one whites. It is said the spirit of the twice-dead man lodges in her. She wants to keep the child, and so is cast out.
No one wants her, until his father takes pity.
He, Parnko, is said to be the result.
And that is but one version of the stories told about him – later, with both his parents gone. All he knows for sure is that Mother was unlike the others. She kept herself and her boy apart, because, she said, they were better.
Brippoki remembers being carried, strapped across her back between her kangaroo cloak and two rush mats. Slung by his side is a bag of root, and, waving under his nose, tips of sandalwood. He is swaying back and forth very agreeably. The air fills with seedlings, blowing in the breeze – the smell of herb and lush grasses. The back of her head he knows very well, the honey scent and colour of her neck.
Of her face, he is unable to recall the slightest detail.
Sarah parted the heavy curtains.
The sun rose red and angry, all else concealed from view by a dense, caramel-coloured vapour. Only the very tops of the houses opposite were visible, and even then as dark outlines in the fog. London exhaled an atmospheric dust-cloud thick as pea soup; the recent fine weather having dried and powdered the dirt, the traffic kicked it up in vast quantity. Billowing from below, the street sounds seemed amplified – an effect, perhaps, of lost visibility, or simply greater cause to curse and blow one’s horn.
An antipodean calenture: Sarah pictured herself adrift on a filthy brown sea. Distant island crags, only the tops of taller buildings pierced the veil. Spires, cut loose from context, slipped anchor to crest the waves – stone galleons, spectral and graceful.
‘Darkness,’ croaked a voice behind her. ‘“A day of clouds, and thick darkness.”’
She turned towards Lambert, and then, back to the window, the featureless view. That was certainly the way things looked. He couldn’t possibly see from where he lay in the bed. He must smell the laden air.
‘Morning…spread upon the mountains,’ said Lambert, ‘people…great and strong. A fire!’
‘A…’ Sarah hesitated. ‘You want a…?’
‘“A fire devoureth before them,”’ he spat, ‘“and behind them a flame burneth. The land is as Eden before them, and behind…desolate wilderness. Nothing shall escape.
‘“The appearance… The appearance of them is of horses, and as horsemen, so shall they run. Before their face the people shall be much pained. All faces shall gather blackness.”’
Beyond sense, he was still raving, as he had been half the night. He clutched at her and laughed,
carefree as a small boy, calling her Emily and Fanny and even a few foul names, and seemed not to know her.
Night, for day – the air itself aglow is filled with smoke, as from a great fire.
Every street is a blind alley. The shifting mist forms a sheer cliff face, a wall that retreats at each step forward, even as its cousin, behind, advances. Brippoki stumbles along within the cloud, more calmed than confused by the lack of detail.
With a silent belch the foul smoke parts. A figure strides purposefully into view, only to disappear again a few paces further on – another, and then another. Each trails darkness. Occasionally they pause to fix and stare at one another, only for a moment, and are then swallowed up, a trick of light. Brippoki knows he walks in the midst of thousands. He can bear the measureless crowds for not seeing them all at once.
Gnowee, Mityan – somewhere in the sky lurks sun or moon. Brippoki has to take it by faith. Everything has the same colour, neither light, nor dark. The air is ash.
The air is a lie. His chest burns. He feels the weight of shadow, settling there.
‘He is old,’ shrugged Dr Epps. ‘His mind wanders.’
Poised on the landing just outside the door to Lambert’s room, they spoke in hushed tones. Lightly, and for the briefest instant, the fingertips of his right hand brushed against Sarah’s sleeve.
‘You’ve changed your hair,’ he commented.
‘What?’
The doctor looked a little discomfited.
‘What can you do?’ she asked, matter of fact.