“Fuck,” Kelly said succinctly.
They had fetched up at the edge of a spreading lake, penned by the landslip and visibly rising. De Ramaira and Kelly checked on the prisoners and the lieutenant, and were examining the buckled side of the truck when Sinclair and the others rode up.
Sinclair walked around the truck, then shook his head and ordered the prisoners out. A wind was getting up, raising a chop on the water, blowing rain sideways. Jonthan and de Ramaira lifted the lieutenant down and rigged a shelter with a waterproof poncho while Sinclair started the truck and tried to back it out of the jam of boulders and tree trunks. For a moment it seemed as if he might succeed, but then the damaged skirt blew out in a spray of air and mud and the truck sat down with abrupt finality.
As the prisoners unloaded their looted possessions, Sinclair told de Ramaira and the boy, “We’ll walk out, follow the river back until we can cross it safely.”
Jonthan said, “It would be quicker to go downstream.”
“So we’d be caught when that pile of rock goes? It isn’t going to last much longer, I reckon. Save your advice for keyboarders, boy. I was working in-country way before you got hair on your balls.” Sinclair indicated Lieutenant McAnders, unconscious on her stretcher beneath the orange poncho. “Better figure out a way of carrying her,” he said, and strode off to harangue the prisoners.
Jonthan slung a blanket between two of the horses, stiffened by stays taken from the truck’s canvas roof. When the lieutenant had been lifted onto this improvised stretcher the party set off through the storm.
Sinclair’s plan to keep close to the flooded river until they found a crossing place was soon abandoned. Floodwater was steadily undermining the sides of the valley, exposing a reticulated net of roots which seemed to connect each tree with every other. Trees at the edge of the flood had already fallen, dragging others with them and pulling up ragged tangles of root. The cops could have picked a way through the muddy wreckage on their own perhaps, but not the shackled prisoners or the horses. So, in single file, the party climbed higher and higher up the steep slopes of the valley, people slipping and horses foundering in earth turned to mud by the relentless rain.
At last Sinclair called a halt. Everyone hunkered down as best they could, soaked through and exhausted. All around, tall trees groaned under the lash of the wind. Gusts of rain blew between them like shot, obscuring anything more than a few metres away.
De Ramaira, cold and soaked through despite his poncho, bruised forehead throbbing, boots filled with mud, leaned against a buttress root of one of the tall trees and wondered vaguely what would happen. It came to him that they could all die here. He pushed the thought around in his head, but it didn’t seem particularly relevant. Exhaustion flattened his perception to here, to now, the cold rain blowing into his face, the hard wet shape of the tree root against his back.
Jonthan left the horses which were carrying the lieutenant and came over to de Ramaira. Sam slunk miserably beside him. “She’ll die if we don’t get out of this,” Jonthan said. “I’ve got to do something.”
De Ramaira wiped cold rain from his face; more blew over him an instant later. One of the prisoners’ children sat crying in the mud a little way off, picking at the shackles around his ankles. De Ramaira said, “Those cops were crazy to try and get that truck down the trail, and now we’re headed off in the wrong direction. Do you think they’ll listen to you?”
“I know a place where we can shelter.”
Sam growled, “No goo’.”
Jonthan shook his head. His curly hair was plastered to his skull. He looked twice, three times his age. “There’s no other way,” he said.
“The Source Cave?” de Ramaira asked.
“That’s kilometres to the north. This is something else.”
“No goo’,” the dog insisted, but Jonthan went over to Sinclair and bent to confer with him. They talked a long time. At last the cop stood, rain streaming from his white poncho, and called to his two companions. “Kelly, Mueller! Get the cattle moving. We just might have a place out of this fucking storm!”
With Jonthan at the head of the party, leading the horses which carried the lieutenant’s stretcher, they crossed the ridge and descended into another valley, following the line of a low cliff. Trees leaned out above them, giving a little shelter from the rain. They had not gone very far when de Ramaira realised that they were following a definite path. Then the path turned from the cliff, descending into a wide, tree-circled clearing.
In the middle was a symmetrical grassy mound, fenced by poles which each raised into the pouring rain a skull marked with a broad red stripe. Everyone stopped, prisoners bunching together, cops looking around as if expecting an ambush. De Ramaira went past them to Jonthan, touched the boy’s shoulder. “The aborigines?”
“Something my father found.”
“I can’t remember anything like this described in Webster.” A mixture of anger and excitement fizzed in de Ramaira’s blood. Anger because he was certain that the boy wouldn’t have told anyone about this place if the lieutenant’s life had not been in danger; excitement because of the implications, the possibilities…
Jonthan said, “The aborigines don’t use this place very often. My father—” He broke off as Sinclair stalked up.
The cop asked, “What is this shit? Where’s that shelter you promised?”
“Just up ahead.”
In the shadow of the hood of his poncho, Sinclair’s face was congested with blood. He thrust his face close to Jonthan’s. “So show us, for Christ’s sake!” he said hoarsely, then spun on his heel and began to shout at the prisoners.
“Ba’,” Sam said. “Ver’ ba’.”
A narrow path led out of the clearing, so narrow that the lieutenant’s stretcher had to be unshipped from the horses and carried by two of the prisoners. It climbed and turned, revealing the stream in the valley below, and then widened into another clearing, this one in the embrace of a sheer cliff. A narrow cave entrance broke the cliff face, its arch smoke-blackened, and in front of the cave were neat rows of plants so unexpectedly familiar that it was several seconds before de Ramaira could put a name to them: potatoes.
The cave was long, dry and sandy-floored, a rubble slope in back rising up into darkness. Jonthan reached into a crevice and fetched out a lantern, lighted it and held it above the lieutenant’s wet white face as the prisoners set her down. De Ramaira shucked his poncho and checked the lieutenant’s pulse and temperature.
Mueller herded the prisoners to the back of the cave, began to link them to an alarm wire. “Cuff the kid too,” Sinclair said.
Sam rose, his wet hair bristling in points, but Jonthan muttered, “Easy.” Sinclair and Kelly had both unholstered their pistols.
“I had to,” Jonthan said to the dog. He looked at de Ramaira, gave a little shrug, as of resignation, and sat down on the sandy floor.
De Ramaira started to protest, but subsided when Sinclair glared at him. Might, here, was right. The cops broke out self-heating cans and passed them around. While they ate just outside the cave entrance, sheltered from the rain by the lip of an overhang and passing a flagon of wine back and forth (loot from the homesteaders), de Ramaira sat with the boy and the other prisoners.
De Ramaira had little appetite. With one eye on the cops, he asked Jonthan about the raised mound, the skulls.
“My father found it,” the boy explained. “He followed them here just as Webster followed them to the Source Cave. They have places all over their territory, he used to say, like we have rooms in our houses. But he never told me what they did. I think it’s something to do with the scarred one.”
“The shaman.”
“Maybe they initiate a new one here when the old one dies. Most aborigines only live a dozen or so years, but the scarred ones live much longer. Those skulls have been there as long as I can remember, and there are piles of them downslope, I guess the old ones are thrown out when the place is used again. An aborigine w
ill come by now and then, put up any poles that have fallen over, clear back the grass. I do that too, when I can.”
“A ritual, a ceremony, for a specific purpose. Do you understand what it means, Jonthan? It could prove that the aborigines really are intelligent. Your father told no one?”
“Only me. And he didn’t tell me very much. Maybe if Webster had been around my father would have told him, but Webster died before Broken Hill was founded. He used to live out here sometimes, my father—he loved this place, Doctor. I buried him here, flowers on the grave, from Earth. They don’t need to be tended like the potatoes because his body in the ground keeps off the native plants.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“You can leave the city whenever you want, can’t you? I thought maybe you could come here once in a while. Check it over.”
“Well, I’d like to help—”
De Ramaira was interrupted by the hoarse whisper of the white-bearded patriarch. “You’d like to help?” He and the other prisoners, even the children, were looking at de Ramaira. The man repeated. “You like to help, I know a way.”
“I don’t even have a knife, let alone a gun,” de Ramaira was whispering too. “Are you crazy?”
“We aren’t talking violence,” the man said. “Just feel in my pocket, the left one. It’s okay, the cops aren’t looking. Just be casual. Okay, you got it?”
A twist of paper. De Ramaira unfolded it, spilled a dozen black, slippery seeds onto his palm.
The man told de Ramaira, “Was saving those in case things got too bad. Want you to put one in that wine of ours the cops are drinking.”
“You are crazy.” De Ramaira turned his hand over, tipping the seeds to the floor. “See that, now. I won’t be a party to murder. Not even of those three.”
“We aren’t talking murder. Just one in all that wine will knock them out, is all. We won’t do anything to them after, just slip away. I’ve never told a lie in my life, and I don’t aim to start now. You don’t mind knocking those fools out a while, right? Or you want the boy to go to the mines? Not a nice place, Earthman.”
“’ucking well righ’,” Sam growled.
De Ramaira asked Jonthan. “You want to take a chance on this?”
The boy looked at the lieutenant, looked back at de Ramaira. “The man is right, about the mines.”
De Ramaira sighed, then began to pick the seeds from the sandy floor. The patriarch smiled.
When de Ramaira sat beside Sinclair, the cop clapped his shoulder and said, “We’re about to have a goddamn shooting contest! You shoot?” The wine had made him loose and foolish. Beside him, Mueller was thumbing fat cartridges into the breech of a hunting rifle.
De Ramaira moved from under Sinclair’s hand and said, “I’ll leave the shooting to the professionals.” He could feel the shape of the seeds in his clenched hand.
Outside, the rain had gentled. The storm was almost over. Out in the middle of the potato patch, Kelly was setting the last skull on its uprooted pole. Strung out in a line, the vacant grins of the skulls glimmered through the settling dusk. De Ramaira started to protest about the desecration, but Sinclair only said, “If the abos did stick them up, they can always find plenty more.” He pushed the jug of wine toward de Ramaira. “Go ahead, take a drink. It’s okay, we shook it up with a Sterilin tablet.”
The wine’s thick sweet taste was cut by a burning chlorine tang. Sinclair and Mueller were watching Kelly finish his work. Quickly, guiltily, de Ramaira thumbed a seed into the narrow neck of the jug, set it down and said that he ought to check on the lieutenant.
Sinclair shrugged, and took the rifle from Mueller. “One gets you five if I don’t hit it first time,” he told her, then yelled, “Goddamn it, Kelly, move your body out of the way!” and without waiting loosed a single round. Echoes of the discharge rolled around the high cliff. Kelly had dropped to the ground; now he picked himself up, smiling. None of the skulls had been touched.
As Mueller took the rifle for her turn, de Ramaira went back and sat beside Jonthan. The patriarch leaned over and asked, “You did it?”
“I did it. You’re sure it won’t kill them?”
“Probably not. What are they shooting at? The horses?”
Dr Ramaira jerked around as Mueller fired two shots in quick succession. “They set up those skulls we saw along the trail. Some sort of game.”
“You see?” one of the women whispered to Jonthan. “You see how it is?”
The lieutenant was still unconscious, but her fever had burned out. De Ramaira settled beside her and waited for the seed to do its work, while the cops took potshots and passed the jug of wine back and forth. He didn’t remember falling asleep, but suddenly Sam was tugging at his sleeve.
“Come see,” the dog said, when he saw that de Ramaira was awake. “Come see. They slee’ like ’ucking babes.”
Sinclair was curled around the almost empty wine jug just inside the cave, snoring loudly. Kelly and Mueller sprawled on wet grass a little way beyond. Moonlight flooded the clearing, made luminous the few skulls which still stood on their poles among the potato plants. His heart beating in his throat, de Ramaira bent over Mueller and pulled the keyring from her belt.
Once freed, Jonthan went straightaway to the lieutenant. The patriarch looked over the sleeping cops while the others stretched and rubbed their chafed ankles, murmuring to each other and glancing sidelong at de Ramaira. The other man said, “Thanks for this, Earthman. We’ll be on our way, now.”
“May I ask where you are going?”
One of the women laughed softly, gathering the youngest child to herself. “Well,” she said, “you may ask.”
The patriarch returned, stooping under the low cave roof. “We’ll take the horses and the rest of our stuff, though the truck will have to stay where it is. Then we go back to where we hid our stock, and after that I hope you don’t mind if I don’t tell you. But we won’t be staying this side of the mountains. Leave that cop, boy. She’ll live or die without you. You come with us.”
“I’m no part of your thing,” Jonthan said. “This is my place.”
“The mine will be your place, you stay.”
“He’s right,” a hoarse voice said. It was the lieutenant.
De Ramaira’s heart stumbled. How much had she heard? How long had she been awake? He was no longer the cool observer, no longer separate, aloof. Because he cared so much for the boy he had floundered into something he didn’t understand.
The lieutenant raised herself on her elbows. Her face was a puffy mask bleached by harsh lamplight. When she smiled, bloody cracks opened in her lips. She said, “I’m not going to stop you people. It’s not my place to say anything, except to Jonthan. Listen, boy, I know this is your place, and your father’s, but you won’t serve his memory in the mines. Take it in your heart and go. I’ll look to his grave, though I can’t promise to do it regularly. And don’t worry, Doctor, I won’t tell on your part.”
The patriarch put away the pistol he had taken, and told his people to get the horses ready. “Why are you doing this?” de Ramaira asked the lieutenant.
“You live here long enough, you’ll understand.” Her grin was ghastly. “Now listen,” she told the patriarch, “I can fake I’ve been under all the time, but the doctor here can’t. He doesn’t get any blame, you should take care of him. See what I mean?”
“Sure,” the man said, and with a sudden motion swung his arm at de Ramaira’s head. He had wrapped a set of ankle cuffs around his big fist. De Ramaira barely had time to flinch.
De Ramaira and Lieutenant McAnders returned to the aborigine village two months later. The fall rains were over and the grass of the plain had turned, a flawless green sea now, stirring in the cold wind which blew from the Trackless Mountains. De Ramaira dismounted when they were in sight of the village, and drew the wrapped package from his saddlebag.
As he walked toward the village, the unravelling seeding heads of the grasses brushing the hem of his j
acket, de Ramaira felt a quickening nervousness. But he couldn’t leave it undone; he owed it to Jonthan.
The aborigines were motionless as he walked between their huts to the centre of the village where the shaman sat, a crooked wire-thin statue marred at the forking of its folded legs. “I brought this to show you what had been done, to show you what needs to be replaced,” de Ramaira said. “I’m sorry, for what has happened.”
He laid the package on the ground and unrolled it to show the pieces of shattered bone. Some were still touched with red. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, and waited, his whole skin tingling, for some token of understanding.
A move.
A sound.
A blow.
Anything.
But the aborigine sat as still as ever, and after a while de Ramaira left the village and walked empty-handed through the long grass to the waiting woman.
“I don’t think I’ll ever know about them,” he said as they rode off, “nor ever really know if they’re intelligent. When I saw the mound, what Jonthan told me, I thought I knew then. Now…well, it could have been set up by Jonthan’s father, for all I know.”
“That’s a crock of shit and you know it,” the lieutenant said. She twisted to spit out the butt of her cheroot, wiped her mouth on her wrist. “Never thought I’d say this, David, but who can tell with those critters. We’ll break through to them, talk with them. Maybe not soon. But eventually, I can feel it.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever understand you, lieutenant, let alone the aborigines,” de Ramaira said, and laughed. “All I know for certain is that you’re all of you aliens. I don’t think I’ll ever understand any of you.”
He was wrong, but more than a dozen years would pass before he finally learned the truth.
PART ONE
1. The Body in the Beach
When the helicopter rounded the point of the bay, Miguel had barely enough time to grab his pack and reach the cover of a patch of quaking vine, in a deep saddle which broke the ridge of the dunes. He was settling himself among white flowers and shivering loops of leaves when the helicopter turned sharply, almost standing on its nose above the sea’s chop, the bubble of its cabin flaring with Tau Ceti’s last light. The cops had seen the overlander, all right.
Secret Harmonies Page 3