The Fringe of Leaves
Page 30
As the light was gathered in, the trampling increased, the coming and going, the stench of ants and bruised leaves and human bodies. The women had begun lighting fires, not to cook a meal, but rather to illuminate a ritual of some kind. The slave was expected to contribute fuel. Carrying her bundles of sticks she had resumed her habitual state of mind, of dull indifference. The darkening scrub was alive with male figures, prinked with feathers, streaked with clay of various colours. She now understood why she had been put to grubbing clay on the days preceding their departure from the island; her own tribesmen were white-streaked. Some of the men, when she came across them face to face, were wearing slender bones stuck through the cartilage separating the nostrils. The bones made them look especially fierce, but there was no reason why their fierceness or splendour should impress her. They were none the less superb, as their women did not fail to recognize, while humbly building, then kindling, and stoking the fires.
In a pause from her labours Mrs Roxburgh had gone into deeper scrub for the simple purpose of urinating. She had barely finished squatting when, to the embarrassment of each, she saw the great pseudo-black approaching. In the dusk the axe-head resting on his belt was more than ever a focus point. It convinced her that the man was some escaped prisoner who had taken up with a black tribe and probably acquired their more horrid ways to add to his natural propensities.
At the same time the longing to speak again with someone of her own kind (if such he could be called) produced in her throat and side a felted chuffing almost as distressing as more dangerous symptoms.
The man came straight towards her, and when they were but a few yards apart, was brought to a halt. She saw that, in spite of his size and strength, his shanks, his dangling hands, were trembling.
To help him out of his difficulty she said to him in her native tongue, ‘Where’s tha from, eh?’ then, on remembering who she was supposed to be, she sternly asked, ‘Are you a Christian?’
The man stood mouthing sounds, like an idiot, or one in whom time or shock had destroyed his connection with the past.
Her hopes shrank. Where she had glimpsed for an instant the possibility of rescue, it now seemed as though it was she who must become the saviour, not of a rational being, but a lost soul.
‘If you can’t tell me who you are,’ she babbled breathlessly, ‘perhaps you will still be able to help me’ and stepping forward, she took him by the hand.
The man might have been struck. His formless mumbling loudened, in the course of which saliva flew out from between his lips, almost as though he were taken by a fit. But she had reached a stage where she could not have felt frightened, nor disappointed, only detached from everything that had ever happened or might still be in store for her. She had been rendered as impervious as lead, and would sink, if necessary, without a qualm.
When she thought she could detect in the man’s gibberish the first semblance of an intelligible word. ‘Gee—a—jur—juk—juk—tch—ar—tchack!’
‘Your name is Jack?’ She all but wrung his hand from him.
‘Jack—CHANCE!’ He pronounced it ‘Chaunce’, and there followed a smile which the effort and a battered face could not prevent looking misshapen.
Gratitude and relief threatened to spill out of her eyes and mouth, but she managed instead, ‘My name is Ellen.’
He had withdrawn inside his leather mask, through the slits in which, eyes of a pale, drained blue were looking at her suspiciously.
‘We shall have to trust each other,’ she persisted. ‘Only bring me to Moreton Bay and I promise they’ll give you your pardon.’
The mask in wrinkled leather immediately set into a rusted-iron visor. ‘No—ppardons—for the likes a’ me. A stripe for every day since I bolted!’ He produced a noise which may have been intended as a laugh.
She realized she was still holding his hand and how cold and hard it felt in hers. He must be hard; the life he had been forced to lead could only have made a brute of him, if he were not one by birth.
Then the brute began shivering, and she dropped the hand lest his anguish should prove contagious.
‘They can’t refuse you a pardon—Jack—if you bring me to them. It would be unjust and unnatural.’
‘Men is unnatural and unjust.’
She was so desperate she cried out in anger. ‘They won’t dare! I am Mrs Roxburgh!’ Had she not temporarily lost her detachment she might have heard herself and disbelieved.
The convict evidently had. He looked her over quickly in the manner of a professional who could have made his first mistake, and disappeared through the trees in the direction of the hubbub and fires.
She had scarce time enough to indulge in self-pity, for two of the women came in search of her and dragged her with them, back to the scene of the festivities.
It was by now fairly dark, so that the fires, behind which the female blacks were seated in rows, burned more brilliantly. Somewhere about the middle of the dark assemblage the captive recognized the women of her own tribe. Here her companions led her, after considerable trampling between the rows of seated figures, and vocal protests and outright blows from those who were trampled over. The errant three were squeezed at last into the conglomerate, sweating mass.
From where Mrs Roxburgh found herself she saw there would be no opportunity for escape, either alone, or accompanied by the convict were he to experience a change of heart. If anything, she felt relieved. To have started screaming in a drawing-room would not have been worse than to return by the way she had come, between the rows of correctly seated black women.
As yet, there was not a man in sight, although from the surrounding dark, voices could be heard whenever women’s chatter and the roar and crackle of the fires allowed. As the fires heaved and resettled the sparks shot upward towards a sky pricked with their counterpart in early stars.
The women were growing impatient: they sighed, groaned, some of them shouted; the rows of seated figures swayed with what looked like an early stage in drunkenness.
Ellen Gluyas swayed with them as a matter of course. Pressed in amongst the black women, her body had begun, not disagreeably, to sweat.
The darkness erupted at last, hurling itself in distinguishable waves into the firelit foreground. White-ribbed men were stamping and howling the other side of the fiery hedge as they performed prodigious feats related to hunting and warfare.
The rows of women swayed in time with darkness, slapping their thighs, or in the case of the older, croaking grannies, the possum-skin rugs covering their string-and-paper thews.
Ellen Gluyas was swayed with them, although she would rather have joined the men, the better to celebrate what she was re-living. She was again dancing as they carried in ‘the neck! the neck!’ at harvest, and as she danced she twitched the corner of her starched apron. (It was, in fact, her recently renewed fringe of leaves.)
One of her neighbours looked at her askance, but only for an instant. They were all swaying seated melted together in runnels of light and sweat.
The dance performed by each successive tribe made its own comment. Now there was a great snake uncoiling, at first slowly, then in involuted frenzy. Arms worked so hard their elbows threatened to pierce the ochre-stippled chests behind them; black thighs in motion were all but liquid with reflected light.
The women swayed in time, and bowed, and swung their too-heavy heads, and righted themselves, and clapped or slapped, either with a smart sting of flesh or the muffled thump of opossum fur.
Dust rising made the captive sneeze. But she bowed her head and swayed in time. She slapped and moaned, and was carried away. She might have been carried further still had it not been for the sudden vision of Mr Roxburgh: his beard failed to conceal the wound in his throat through which the blood continued welling. (Or had they burnt him? In her drunkenness she could not be sure.)
She clapped and thumped and moaned, and bowed her head until it hung between her thighs. It inspired her neighbours to increased frenzy.
Now when the great luminous ochre-scaled dripping snake had almost driven itself into the dust by its exertions, she saw upon raising her head that the tail’s hindmost vertebra was becoming detached.
There it was, wriggling and contorting of its own free will.
The women’s voices climbed, ‘Ulappi! Ulappi!’ to acclaim the dancer of everybody’s choice.
The captive woman bowed her head upon her splayed thighs, buried her face in her fringe of leaves, from which she might never recover herself.
When at last she sat up, her eyes were closed, her lips parted to receive—the burnt sacrifice? the bread and wine?
She knew that the man, this Ulappi, was dancing for her the other side of her clenched lids.
Possum tails attached by strings to his belt flumped and cavorted against his buttocks; even at a distance they stroked her skin with such delicacy she could barely distinguish fur from the wind in which it danced. There was less doubt about the hard chest she bumped against (‘what is “paps”, Mamma?’) the pig’s-bristles got by singeing, the channel down which the sweat poured, as far as the bronze cauldron where it was seethed and evaporated. As they whirled.
When she opened her eyes she saw her wishful partner submerged by a rushing wave of fresh dancers.
She lost interest, unless in the gristly neck of one seated in the row ahead, an old woman made conspicuous by red markings. Mrs Roxburgh thought to recognize the grandmother of the girl who had been killed for love. The day following the girl’s death, after the secret ceremony in the forest, the woman had blossomed red in mourning for her grand-daughter. Mrs Roxburgh might have felt more resentful, that her widowhood had not been formalized in red ochre, if widowhood, as she saw it embodied in Aunt Tite and old Mrs Roxburgh, were not a formality in itself. (Well, wasn’t it but another figure in the formal dance?)
Ellen sat picking at her fringe of leaves. The corroboree was over, except for the embers, the ashes, and the continued exchange of hoarsened voices. As the tribes detached themselves from one another she knew that her hoped-for rescuer would not re-appear.
Thus she was again saved from undertaking the hazardous journey to Moreton Bay. As her owners claimed her and led her away, she was persuading herself it was reason for relief rather than dejection to remain their chattel, when they came face to face with a second group advancing upon them as though by arrangement. She recognized by his topknot and the dilli containing the magic stone carried under one armpit, the physician, or wise man, or conjurer, who had failed to resurrect the dead child.
The two parties halted. Had she not been so closely confined by those surrounding her, the chill which swept over Mrs Roxburgh might have betrayed itself after some grotesquely physical fashion; for she could tell that her keepers and the physician-conjurer were entering upon a contract of which she was the principal, perhaps even the sole clause.
The outcome was that this ‘Turrwan’, as the others constantly referred to the magician, took charge of her, and she could but presume that she had become his property.
The new owner behaved respectfully towards her, less from thoughtfulness she felt, than because he was an elderly man. The hut he occupied was in almost every respect similar to the one from which she had been given away. The eyes of two other women dozing beside a fire were kindled by the newcomer’s entry. No doubt resigned to custom they gave no indication of active resentment.
As the slave prepared herself for the night by easing a hip into the ground not too far distant from the fire, a child started crying, and she thought how she might console herself eventually by caressing and consoling this child. But for the time being it was Turrwan who distracted her attention in that she was the object of his. Although of an advanced age he was wiry enough to be reckoned with and had an eager eye which she must quell by a coldness in her own.
Mrs Roxburgh would not have believed that she could act so cold.
Turrwan seated himself at last on the opposite side of the hut, and after taking out his magic crystal from the dilli, and polishing it awhile to impress, he lay down, if not to sleep, to watch.
She composed herself, but did not sleep, or perhaps she did; for how else can Ulappi have entered? to be standing over her. She has nothing to fear. He is a tinner from near Truro, deported for taking a donkey from Hicks’s field, at Michaelmas.
Herself was the donkey. She must have slept in spite of her intention not to lose consciousness. She lay and listened to her ‘husband’ the magician having a nightmare or pleasuring one of his true wives the other side of the dead fire. Ellen ground her cheek against the twigs with which the floor was littered, and wished for morning.
The following day was a drowsy one filled with haze. Her improved station relieved her of some of the drudgery. She was kept company by a handful of older ladies who would have taught her how to spin a thread out of hair or stitch together an opossum rug had she shown any inclination. Instead she could now afford to feel bored, or within reason, give way to anger. She lay beneath a tree, her back towards them, idle to the elbows and the ankles. Had she known the language she might have commanded somebody to fan her or tell her a tale.
Incidentally she realized that most of her life at Cheltenham had been a bore, and that she might only have experienced happiness while scraping carrots, scouring pails, or lifting the clout to see whether the loaves were proved.
It was in consequence a relief as evening approached to join her inferiors in the preparation of fern-root. All around them was the sound of chopping. It soothed her somewhat, until she cut her finger on the sharp edge of the shell she was using. She sucked the wound, before remembering to rub it with charcoal.
Some expectancy, evening smoke, or the men’s return from hunting, made the women restless.
A kangaroo was put to roast.
Turrwan appeared and squatted but too visibly beside his acquisition. She did not so much as avert her eyes since the film of coldness she was learning to assume made this unnecessary.
Whatever entertainment might have been devised for the evening, she soon realized it would not take place according to plan. A discordancy was arising, nothing audible in the beginning, nor were there visible signs of dissent. She was aware of it, however, in puffs of smoke, through currents of air, in the sound of sticks breaking underfoot.
Suddenly the surrounding scrub exploded. A fight was on. She had no means of discovering what had caused it. As dusk fell, warriors came and went in the clearing where the women continued at work. Blows were exchanged, to the meaty sound of thwacked flesh and the stubborner thud of wood upon bone. A spear whirring and hissing through leaves was arrested in flight by the trunk of a great, shaggy tree.
A second spear met with what must have been its intended target: a man fell headlong into a fire, from which the women dragged him not to safety, but to a less-agonizing death. The black buttocks quivered an instant, twitched, and contracted.
The fact that this was in earnest did not make the occasion more real than the corroboree of the night before. The rites of each were equally inebriating, or so it seemed to one spectator, as the man who had danced their way through the maze of dreaming now made the more direct approach to death, which in her own experience was but another figure in the dance.
Some of the women had started screaming; they were pulling one another by their short hair.
In what was becoming a darkness, of night, dust, heaving branches, and a soft, sticky rain of what she did not have time to discover, she might have made some contribution of her own, and went so far as to indulge in an initial twirl when she was stopped short by running against a human being.
Before she could evade the consequences of this too-precipitate encounter, she was seized by the hand, and whether she liked it or not, forced to depend on her abductor for any further step she might take in the savage dance. For
the moment there was nothing for it but to mark time amongst the milling bodies involved in this orgy of bashing and blood, until he saw an opportunity for making his intentions clear by extricating himself and his prize from the scrimmage. She was dragged behind him like some inanimate object, away at least, until she collided with a sapling, when both of them, because joined, were unavoidably halted. Had it been daylight still, she would most probably have been temporarily blinded by the blow. In the circumstances she was only deafened by the drumming in her ears.
She might have continued rooted like the sapling, had he not dragged her away. It was the only outcome for hands which were welded together.
He was as steel to her more passive lead, but when she was not a painful lump condemned to bumping behind, and at intervals, against him, she thought to hear an insubstantial tinkling as she flitted over the uneven ground.
Always joined: it was ordained thus by the abductor become her rescuer.
That he had chosen to play the latter role was doubtless the subject of an unintelligible mumbling such as she remembered from their first meeting. On this present occasion she felt too dazed to help him out, but he succeeded at last in breaking into speech of a kind through his own efforts.
‘The crick,’ she heard. ‘… leave no tracks i’ the crick—’
Shortly after, she stumbled, and felt water round her ankles, at times up to her knees as she floundered in unsuspected potholes; sand, soothing to the feet, gave place to more deceptive mud, with the occasional rock or log against which she stubbed herself. She imagined the rosy veils the water must be weaving from her blood.
‘Do you know the way?’ she asked in the course of their silence, and thought he mumbled back, ‘I oughter know unless I forgot.’
If allowed, she would have been happy to subside anywhere in this dark world, since exhaustion was making their journey, finally her life, pointless. But he forced her on, and by degrees, sensing that it was neither will nor physical strength, but a superior mechanism which drove him, her mind and clockwork limbs learned to cooperate with his.