Camp was sitting at a huge, roaring fire next to the elder, Muluwari, while Maljarna and the other aborigines, the men who had saved him, chattered away in their native tongue behind him. Dozens of others, unknown to him, talked and laughed in low voices, in an aborigine tongue sprinkled with bits of English which Joe could still not piece together. At first he found it disconcerting that he was the only white man in the entire group, but soon, as hospitality was lavished upon him, he felt that discomfort drop away. Everything was very relaxed and informal, and a strong feeling of family permeated the camp. Children were smiling and happy, laughter was the predominant display of emotion—but underneath it all was something Joe Camp could not put his finger to. Something dark. And then there were the weapons.
Several dozen men in the gathering held guns, some of them modern automatic weapons of British design. Others were armed with traditional weapons, boomerangs and wari wari spears. It looked to Camp like the tribe was preparing for war, or at the very least self-defense.
Old Muluwari barked something in his native tongue and a boy rushed to gather what Camp assumed was food from a large, flat bowl, but the boy ran off into the dark, clutching the bowl to his spindly chest, disappearing down the hill.
The tribal gathering, or corroberrie as it was called by the aborigines, was positioned on the near-empty, drought-ravaged Lake Woolomber in a small depression in the artesian basin, with a good view out to the north of the Gibson Desert, which the aborigines had been watching with some diligence since their arrival. Joe Camp had gained no answers since his arrival, but had figured that the Ngaanyatjarra would fill him in when the time was right. During his time among the Kachins he had learned not to question the natural order of things, but to become a part of that order through patience. Camp was nevertheless amazed at his surroundings. It all astounded him, both the circumstances which lead him here and at the comfortable feeling he gained by watching the smiling tribesmembers as they laughed and talked.
It all seemed so unreal but so right at the same time.
An hour before, night had suddenly fallen like a curtain and the temperature had plummeted more than twenty degrees to a balmy eighty. By then the fire had been raging and all the tribe had gathered around it.
Old Muluwari let out a cough and the entire gathering fell quiet. Only the roar and crackle of the fire could be heard. All eyes were drawn, somber and expectant, to the old man as he shifted his frail form forward closer to the fire.
“I am talkin’ about the Nulla,” Old Muluwari croaked in a feeble voice. The boy returned from the dark with the wood bowl filled with clear, cool water, from what remained of Lake Woolomber, Camp assumed. Muluwari took a long sip with shaking hands and then placed the bowl near his callused feet. The elder turned to Camp and smiled again. Joe suddenly realized Muluwari had chosen to speak in English for his benefit alone.
“The Nulla come before all this here. He come before Ngadjon come to the world. Afore everything. The Nulla is the uncle to time.”
Joe Camp watched the eyes of those listening and they were all transfixed, staring at Muluwari with religious awe. The little boy sat down next to the old man, who placed a loving hand on the boy’s head. The little boy smiled. Muluwari continued:
“I saw ‘im once or two. Back in my day when I was a young one, like this here one. The Nulla lives in the Mija Norambu, his home of rock.” Muluwari pointed to the north with a hand wracked by arthritis. “His great weight sinks him down in the earth and he can not come out. He chews the stones of the earth for his food, and those ‘at are too hard he spits them out. But he not forgotten the upper world. Not at all. He is clever, the Nulla.”
“He find the men which he wantin’. Men with no souls. They come to the Nulla, they are drawn to the Nulla like water run down the mountain in the wet season. Men who give what they got from the Yamani away without thinkin’. Those men thinkin’ they can outsmart the Nulla, but no man can outsmart time. And the Nulla, he older than time.” Muluwari drew some more water from the bowl at his feet and coughed.
“The Nulla, he can call the wind down on his enemy. He can take his mind away. The Nulla is what you come to when you got nothin’ left inside you.”
The little boy piped up suddenly, drawing several quick smiles from the others:
“Why can’t the Nulla leave the Mija Norambu, father?”
Muluwari thought about this for a little while and then looked at the boy.
“The Nulla, he been here since the beginning of everything, and he has the knowing of the whole world in his head. He grown to fit all this knowin’ until he could not move no more. Out in the ranges. But slowly, even though he did not want no more, more knowin’ came to him, even as he lay still out there. The color of the sky each day, the way the birds move through the air, the coming and going of the first men. They weigh him down more and he sink into the ground. Even now, through his men the Nulla learn more and sink deeper. Some day he fall through the earth.”
A muttering from the crowd, followed the last comment, and the little boy’s eyes were filled with fear.
“When will this happen, father?”
“Some say this’ll not happen ever. Others say sooner than that.” Muluwari rubbed the child’s head with a gnarled, arthritic hand in a reassuring manner and the boy looked lost in deep thought.
“The Nulla, he not too smart, though. He got his weakness. We. The Ngaanyatjarra. We been set on this task by the Yamani since the Ngadjon come to this place. We watch ‘em, when they go to the whites, or when the whites come out here into the flats. Some mean well and know nothin’ of the Nulla and we let them be.” Muluwari’s ancient eyes fixed on Joe for a second. “Others get caught up by his song and turn to his service. And some of them were always his servants, since time started.”
Muluwari finished the water in the bowl in one long gulp and looked up again. The wind had grown, coaxing the fire up into the night in shower of a million tiny sparks.
“You wonderin’ why the Nulla do all this, eh? Why he send his men out into the world if what he learn from them will sink him deeper?” Muluwari shrugged his thin shoulders and searched the eyes of the tribe.
“Why? Don’t know. No one but the Nulla know that. But I think he want to find a way out of the ground he in. A way to get him free of the hole. That’s why he send the men out, I would think.” Muluwari’s eyes flickered over the rippling fire.
“He know all about time, before, after, it was part of him, ‘cause he uncle to it. So he send his men out on strange errands, hoping to find what he need to get free of the hole. Knowin’ before it happen what is to happen.”
The little boy interrupted again: “Then why don’t the Nulla know when he going to get free from the hole, father?”
“Knowin’ is a trick. Knowin’ what come next in time is the trick of the Nulla. He buy men with this trick. The Nulla pretend to know it all. But he don’t. He know what time want him to know. He pretend to be more than he is, but time is trickier than the Nulla and he change things on his uncle when he is not lookin’.” Muluwari giggled, and snorted as he thought of this prospect. Others in the crowd smiled and joined the elder in his revelry. But the group sank back into former mood, the humor disappearing from their faces quickly.
“But we must never think he is gone. The Nulla pays no mind to age and time, for he come afore it all. He will always be there out in the ranges, waiting, until the end of the world. And we will keep him in the ground ‘til the end of it all.”
“What is a Nulla, exactly?” Joe Camp inquired politely, and all eyes in the crowd fell on him with the same heavy feeling of expectation old Muluwari’s speech had brought. Almost like his inquiry, though spur of the moment, had been expected the whole time.
“You Joe Camp?” Muluwari asked with his eyebrows raised, turning his body around to face him. Joe found himself reflected back in the fire’s glow within the old man’s eyes. He had not been introduced to the elder, but he assumed Maljarna ha
d informed the old man of his name and how he came to be there.
“Yes,” Camp answered, his mouth numb. Over in the dark, past the elder, Joe could see Maljarna’s face, dire, watching him.
“You come here to find a man not known to you, but who is your brother?”
“Yes...sir.”
“Then don’t you worry, Joe Camp. You find out about the Nulla soon enough.”
CHAPTER 21:
Death stands in the background, but do not be afraid
March 13, 1943: Somewhere near Itoko, Belgian Congo
When the team woke on the morning of the thirteenth, Thomas Arnold had already known for hours that they were on their own. Deep down, he had sensed it was coming since they had crossed the last, wild river (the Salonga) a day back. Their guide, a half N’Bangu native from the area, had offered a bit of his own blood at the water’s threshold before hesitantly crossing it. This thin, defiant man they had hired at Loto had become like a scared child in a matter of minutes when they came upon that river. It was a cursed place to him and his tribe, a boundary which was not to be passed except by those who wished to disturb the spirits and enter the world which lay beyond. It was obvious the guide never believed the whites would venture so far into the interior, or would dare to cross the threshold to the spirit world, but they had continued onward, unmindful of the magic. To his credit, the guide went on—but only long enough to escape undetected. All the other natives stole away along with him. The spell of melancholy the place wove on the natives proved too strong for even those born of the cities.
The other team members had remained oblivious to the growing tensions among the natives, who the DELTA GREEN and PISCES men saw as somehow less significant than real people. But to Arnold, the signs were there and completely obvious. Rai, the Gurkha, seemed to sense the unease as well. When they crossed the Salonga the bearers, mostly men from the deep interior, had gained a look Thomas Arnold knew well. He had seen it in Barnsby’s eyes when he clutched Peaslee’s missive. He had seen it in the faces of his men on the Nez de Joubourg cliffs. He had seen it in the blank, dead eyes of Bruning. It was the look of men who have fallen into a dream and cannot wake up.
Arnold knew exactly what had started the natives on the path of slowly growing hysteria. On the morning of the fourth, two days out of the tiny outpost of Loto, which they had come into by train, their guide had come upon the first huge piece of masonry, overgrown and vine eaten but still mostly intact, sticking from the ground like a giant’s discarded plaything. On one side, shielded by the overgrowing trunk of a huge tree, a portion of the sculpture and writing on its surface had remained unspoiled. Humungous, curvilinear letters which everyone in the party claimed they could not identify covered the surface in complicated patterns. The guide would not touch it, and began mumbling to himself in French and his native tongue when prompted with questions about the stone’s origin. With a knife, the guide made a series of complex ritualistic movements in front of his ashen face before moving on. He refused to stay near the block as the group investigated it. The stone made Arnold think of the late Professor Peaslee’s manuscript, and a million blocks like it in the sandblown deserts of Australia, half a world away.
Since that day they discovered the rock, the natives had become irritable.
Other, smaller stones with writing on them were found from time to time as they journeyed inland, and with each new discovery the morale of the natives grew worse. At one point the N’Bangu guide honestly pleaded with Arnold in broken French not to travel any further into the interior. Arnold could say nothing to allay the man’s fears, and could offer him no reward to brighten his spirits.
They continued for nine, tension-filled days without omen.
When they woke on the morning of the thirteenth, the camp, which had contained more than twenty men, was empty save for the members of the DELTA GREEN team and Dr. Smith. The natives had crept off in the night, leaving all that they carried behind—food, fresh water, equipment. Arnold did not need a guide to tell him that this was unusual. Usually a mutinous group would kill their masters, steal everything they could carry and head deeper into the interior. Instead the men had slunk off, leaving a camp rich with valuable weapons and explosives behind, as if everything in the camp, having crossed some invisible boundary had become tainted. Arnold, awake but feigning sleep, let them go when he realized they wished only to escape. He almost hoped they would take the explosives with them. Who could blame them? A fight with them over their attempt at self-preservation would serve no purpose. It seemed fitting to Arnold that someone should survive this mess.
On the morning of the thirteenth, after the five men divvied up a small amount of the supplies, they secured the rest of the equipment within a deadfall near the rapid-filled Lomela River. No one in the group, Arnold imagined, was foolish enough to believe that they would live long enough to see those supplies again.
Rai had taken over as guide, navigating them north and the east to where the grey city called Thule was rumored to be, as it was marked on the vague maps recovered from Observation on the Several Parts of Africa. They trudged through endless vaults of giant trees, cutting their way through the seven-foot-high underbrush in the dark, navigating the tricky, slope-filled terrain. A few shafts of light shone unobstructed to the jungle floor like spotlights, illuminating tiny patches of plants so brightly that they appeared to be artificial. For six hours they were hounded by clouds of biting bugs so thick that they obscured vision, but the team had pushed on relentlessly. Following the inexhaustible Rai, no one wanted to show weakness by admitting fatigue.
With their guide and bearers gone, the tiny group wound its way through the jungle in nearly perfect silence, surrounded by the alien sounds of untamed nature, listening to the cries of distant, unseen animals lost up in the tangled web of the dark canopy.
It was nearing three o’clock when Rai hunkered down on the crest of a small rise, still beneath the endless canopy. The little Gurkha was there one moment and then vanished into the underbrush as rapidly as a rabbit going to ground. Rai let out a quiet whistle and held his hand, palm flat, up above the plants for the entire group to see. Behind Arnold, Jackson and Hauellwell placed the crate of the explosive compound, Composition B, on the ground between them and carefully unslung their submachine guns. Arnold cocked his Thompson slowly, hoping not to make too much noise; the bolt clicking seemed very loud in the stillness of the stifling heat. The DELTA GREEN team hunkered down and listened to the jungle.
Everything was silent beneath the normal sounds of the forest: the shrill cries of birds and monkeys, water running in rapid falls as it spilled down the crests of hills from high above, the arrhythmic occasional crashing of something bigger moving through the bush. Their ears sorted through this chaos, searching for something deliberate and man-made—and then Arnold heard the first footfalls.
People were moving through the underbrush. Arnold could hear them, a group crashing through the undergrowth without apparent concern, a short distance away but growing closer by the second. Arnold poked his head up and looked back at Jackson and Hauewell, who were hunkered down, guarding the explosives. Behind them the PISCES intelligence analyst, Morgan Kitely, squatted clutching his Delisle carbine, his eyes as big as saucers. Dr. Smith was nowhere to be found. He had been walking behind Kitely just minutes before, but now he was gone. The alien was gone and an unknown force of men was approaching them.
Shit.
Arnold trotted up the slope towards Rai, his Thompson submachine gun clutched to his chest like a prayer. Rai’s eyes met his in the dark of the underbrush. The little Gurkha held his Sten in one hand and grip of his sheathed kukhri in the other. He raised his thick eyebrows in a questioning expression. The racket in the jungle grew closer.
“Rai,” Arnold whispered. “C’mon.” Arnold, in a crouch, dashed over the crest of the slope towards the noise, head safely below the plant cover, and Rai followed. The only thing to mark their passage was the ghostly whisper o
f the plants that parted in their wake. They crossed a small ravine and then went up another rise, pushing their way quietly through the brush. When they reached the crest of the second hill, Rai touched Arnold’s shoulder and pointed through the openings in the undergrowth to the bowl-shaped, vegetation-choked terrain beneath them, a small portion of which was illuminated by a break in the canopy. From where they were, about a quarter mile from where they’d left their team, Arnold and Rai could see a small troop of natives heading straight for their comrades. Beyond those men Arnold could also spy singular intruders, nothing more than wakes in the high grass, converging on the slope on the far side of which Jackson and the rest of team were hunkered down.
“Shit,” Arnold said and then they heard the harsh reports of submachine guns, a Sten and then an M3. The chatter intertwined and sent hundreds of small animals crashing through the underbrush, letting loose a wave of colorful birds from their near-perfect hiding places, each racing for the safety of the sky. Arnold leapt up, poking his head over the plant cover as he saw the natives running for the sound of the gunfire, which was coming from where they had left Jackson and Hauellwell. The natives wore the garb of the local tribe, the N’Bangu, but moved with no grace through the jungle. Instead they bolted forward, oblivious to the racket they were making. They held no recognizable weapons, but something like dread slipped into Arnold’s heart when he saw the cylindrical metal shafts each held in his arms. The featureless gleam of the silver devices spoke of untold advancement.
Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Page 23