A Solitary Journey

by Tony Shillitoe

  She obeyed a compulsion to look to her right, towards another charred ruin a few hundred paces from the village centre, and her curiosity drew her from the shade. Approaching the mound of ash and blackened stumps of building poles, she felt as if she should know this place—its familiarity was stronger than any she sensed in the village. Smaller ashen piles suggested that other buildings had stood near the main one. A boy’s corpse, distorted by putrefaction, was lying twenty paces from the main ruin. Fifty paces beyond that, in a half-mown patch of golden wheat, a murder of crows squabbled as they fed on three more corpses. She knew these people. She knew she knew because she was overcome by a profound sorrow welling within that poured out in a wail of grief and made her collapse to her knees, crying into the dry earth.

  There was little of use left in the village as she searched, but she found a shovel on the ground near a corpse and a pickaxe on the bank of the stream behind a pile of ashes and laboured in the late afternoon sun against the hard earth to dig shallow graves for the four bodies. The stench, her hunger and weakness slowed the process, but she finished in a series of working spells and rests as the sun settled on the hilltops. When she looked up she saw a black bush rat sitting in the shadows of a bush watching her and she was certain that it was the same rat that was sitting on her when she woke. She picked up a stone and hurled it in the rat’s direction and it scampered away—and then she collapsed, exhausted, sweating and ill, and stayed on the ground staring emptily sideways along the dust at black ants bobbing and weaving between pebbles.

  When she rose, her hunger drove her from the village into the bush to search for the yams and wild grasses she’d eaten as a child. How do I know this? she pondered, as she tore seed nuts from a bush and dug between tree roots for sweet-tasting yams. The night was seeping through the bush by the time she gathered and ate her tiny feast. A potoroo, thin snout, rounded rodent body and rat-like tail, hopped into her clearing in search of insects, spotted her and hopped away in fear. Sunfire loved hunting them, she reminisced, and then wondered who was Sunfire.

  Hunger sated, she headed back towards the village, stopping at the edge when she spied a dog pack scavenging through the ruins, instinct warning her that the village was not a haven. She retreated, climbing a hillside until she found a protruding rock ledge. She snapped branches from a bush, crawled under the ledge, dragging the branches behind her to shield herself, and curled up to sleep.

  Three children ran towards her—two boys and a girl. The leading boy was eight years old, with red hair, gangly, laughing and calling her Mummy. Behind the children was a man on a crutch, smiling as he followed in their wake across the freshly mown wheat field. She was surprised to see them, surprised that they were calling to her, but she was also happy. And then they vanished in a white cloud, and the wheat field of her dream was empty and dead.

  You need me, the dark voice whispered. She was nowhere. That was how it felt. Yet she also knew the place—she’d been here before. ‘Find your way to me and I will show you how to find your way to them,’ the voice said.

  Where are you? she asked.

  You know where I am, the voice replied.

  When she woke, the world was draped in night and the dreams faded the moment she tried to recall them. Consumed with unfathomable sorrow, she wept against the cold earth.

  Crisp frost crushed underfoot as she descended the hill and entered the ghostly ruins. She startled a small tribe of grey wallabies that bounded into the bushes by the stream from where they gazed at her warily as she headed for the village centre. She stopped at the bridge and climbed down the bank to slake her thirst, rinsing her face with the chilly water and pulling back her unkempt red hair. She needed basic things—string or wire, a pack, a waterbag, food. Yesterday she hadn’t found much of use in the ruins, but then she was thinking of burials. Another scavenge through the ashes might be more fruitful. Food was the only commodity she knew for certain that she would have to forage for beyond the village, but other items might be obtainable.

  By the time the stream was sparkling with morning sunlight, she’d found some of the items that she sought—an old ball of frayed string, a coiled length of wire, a needle and thread. She also discovered a waterbag in a pile of rubbish behind a large ruin, discarded because it was ruptured. She checked that the cork sealed adequately before she used string to tie the ruptured corner and made a string strap to hook the waterbag over her shoulder, cork facing down, so that it would serviceably hold half the quantity of liquid it had originally been designed to contain. When she couldn’t find a pack, she improvised by tearing strips of cloth from the stinking corpses and washing them to expunge the odour before she crudely patched together a bag out of the pieces.

  As she stitched the last segment of cloth, a bush rat scuttled across a patch of ground between two ruins, stopped, sat up and stared. The vision sparked a curious memory. ‘Whisper?’ she murmured. The startled rat bolted for cover and disappeared, and she gazed at the hole in the ruin where the rat had gone. ‘How do I know that name?’ she muttered. Why would I speak to a rat?

  The sun was angling into midmorning when she trudged past the last blackened ruin, heading south. She had a simple choice—either follow the road north or south—and she chose south because her feeling was to go that way. A pack of four dogs trailed her for a short distance before they diverted towards a mob of kangaroos and gave chase. She was glad to lose them. She didn’t see the tiny black shape following further back.

  The midday sun’s heat was merciless. She passed incinerated huts along the road that left her pondering what had happened to these places and the people who lived in them. Her waterbag was running low by midafternoon when she reached the charred ruins of a tiny settlement that again felt familiar. The sight of a man’s flyblown corpse dangling by one leg from a branch on a rope beside the largest ruin made her ill, but she steeled herself to retrieve water from the nearby well and replenished her waterbag before moving on quickly.

  Hunger forced her from the road into the adjacent bushland in search of berries and roots and leaves, and while she nibbled on a handful of yams she fiddled with the wire she was carrying to fashion a simple slip-noose trap. She rolled it over in her hands, studying the design, curious as to how she knew how to make it. Then she hunted through the bush for signs of animal movement, until she found a droppings patch and a run for a small marsupial. She carefully positioned her trap on the droppings patch and hid in the undergrowth opposite, waiting for the sun to sink and the animals to come to their common ground.

  The sun was rising and she was walking towards it. The land had no familiarity—the trees were different, there were mountains, the birds were wrong. She was walking with someone, a stranger, and although she couldn’t turn her head to look at him she knew that he didn’t look like anyone she knew. She was compelled to keep heading east, to a place where there were books. What was strange about the dream was that she was an old woman.

  She stood on the ridge, looking south. Smoke drifted across the horizon, the haze a golden brown in the early morning sunlight. Heading in that direction no longer seemed wise, although she had a nagging curiosity to see what was burning. She shrugged and looked in every direction. From where she’d come, to the north, the land gradually rose into distant hills and she had a sense of higher lands beyond them. To the west the land was dark and flat, but it also rose into hills. East, into the rising sun, the land rose again sharply, into mountains, and to the south, where the road led and the lines of smoke rose to form the haze, the land was flat. She’d followed the road from the north, but the southern path was no longer inviting. She descended the ridge, heading east, across country through the bushland. Her decision wasn’t based on logic—only that the world to the east looked lighter and more inviting.

  By midmorning, she was on the bank of a stream, contemplating whether to cross or to follow it a short distance south in the hope of finding an easier way over. She climbed down to the water’s edge and stu
died the depth and flow. It was too deep to wade, but she could swim across easily. That would mean wet clothes and goods and she was reluctant to get her things damp, so she decided to follow the stream for the morning and if she hadn’t found a crossing by midday she would swim. Along the bank she spied a black bush rat drinking. The little animal reminded her of the one she’d seen in the village and the vision filled her with curiosity. She straightened, but her movement startled the rat and it retreated into the bushes. It couldn’t be the same rat, she chided herself, and shook her head.

  Waterbag refilled, having snacked on leaves and berries, she traipsed through the bush, shadowing the stream, watching for narrow or shallow sections. As she walked, she recalled the dream she’d had the previous night, a strange dream that she was moving with a crowd of people, like a great herd of animals journeying across a broad plain. She also dreamed that a voice was calling to her, begging her to come back. A word remained from the dream—glyph—but she had no idea what the word meant, or who had used it. The dreams puzzled her because they lingered, or resurfaced in the daylight as memories.

  Before midday, she faced a conundrum. The stream broadened and met a larger body of water—a river three times the size of the stream—and she was caught at their junction. She should have crossed when she first encountered the stream. Now she would have to backtrack to a narrower section to cross over.

  She sank in the shade of the gum trees and drank from her waterbag, and rested, watching black-and- white pelicans drifting in the current on the rippling water. The day was hot, like all of the days since she woke beside the stream in the burned-out village. Why can’t I remember any days before then? she wondered. Why was I in that village? Was it my home? Who did I know there? She recalled a name—Button Tailor. It must have meant something important to her. And other names came spinning out of her memory—Dawn, Tiler, Pace, Jon, Peter, Mykel, Daryn. Why were those names coming back? To whom did they belong? She brushed an ant from her grey trousers and studied the dark bloodstains on her khaki tunic. There were two holes in the shirt; one by her left rib and another on her left shoulder. What made them? she wondered.

  At the crack of a twig she turned her head to discover a flock of emus sheltering deeper in the bush. Their elongated necks bobbing, camouflaged in ochre-brown feathers, the big flightless birds were studying her with dark shiny eyes. Then she was aware of a buzzing noise, so she searched the trees until she spotted a bee circling erratically. Several paces on was a hive in a tree trunk knot, thick with bush bees. Fresh honey, she thought. I need a fire for smoke. The problem was that she had nothing with which to light a fire. But honey would be so tasty—if she was quick and calm enough.

  She approached the hive, registering carefully how the bees reacted to her presence as she got closer. The hive was nestled in a natural crack in the gum trunk and honeycomb jutted from it. The bees swirled around her, some alighting on her arms and face and shoulders, but she relaxed, ignoring them, and reached the tree. Slowly, she reached for a chunk of white honeycomb protruding from the main mass and casually brushed away the black-and-yellow bees clinging to it without making a fuss. Then she broke off the portion of honeycomb and walked calmly back towards the river, feeling the raw golden honey oozing along her hand and her arm, and ignoring the crawling, buzzing insects clinging to her as they retrieved what they could of her plunder.

  She sat on the yellow grass bank and gently brushed aside the persistent bees to suck on the sweet honeycomb. She knew that the bees would only sting her if she acted rashly—if she tried to hurt them or agitated them. Who taught me this? she wondered. How do I know these things? She savoured the refreshing sweetness after her constant diet of yams, berries and leaves, and when she put the honeycomb on the grass the remaining bees swarmed over it in a desperate salvage operation.

  Dark moving patches on the river caught her eye and made her wary. She crept into the bushes to observe four water vessels—two rafts, a rowing boat and a boat with a rudimentary single grey patched sail—packed with people paddling upstream against the steady current. As they drew closer, she saw that the people were mainly women and children, with a scattered handful of men. The pelicans swam away from the craft, while children yelled and pointed at the elegant waterbirds. The people were strangers and her instinct warned her to remain in hiding, but she was also compelled to call to them, her loneliness crying out. She emerged from the green-and-gold-leafed bushes onto the river bank as the first vessel, the boat with the sail, drew alongside, less than thirty paces across the river. A young girl pointed at her until others looked in her direction, and a woman gesticulated and waved, calling, but her words were lost and the sailboat kept going, as did the first raft, its passengers staring like the girl on the sailboat. The second raft followed the first, several people waving as they poled past, but the last boat turned and as it came towards the bank she was filled with trepidation. She didn’t know these people. From where had they come and to where were they going? What if they intended to harm her?

  An older woman balancing at the prow of the boat called, ‘Do you want to come with us?’

  She had to make a decision. What were her choices? I can go on my own, she considered, but where? I don’t know where I’m going.

  The boat crunched against the muddy bank and the woman, her greying dark hair tied in a ponytail, said, ‘You’re welcome to come with us. It’s a tight squeeze, but it’s better than walking.’ She offered a hand, while two men steadied the boat with their oars. ‘Well?’ the woman asked.

  She hesitated, looking at the dirty, saddened faces and staring eyes of the women and children huddled in the boat. ‘I’ll come,’ she said, and took the woman’s hand. Squeezing into the space between two women, a boy curled at her feet, she smiled with embarrassment at the strangers who smiled in return. The men heaved on the oars and the boat drifted away from the bank until the river current turned the prow. She glanced at the receding bank and drew a deep breath. Squatted on its haunches beneath a leafy bush at the water’s edge, a black rat stared at her and she felt a strange longing for the creature.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘The fact of the matter is, as Your Majesty has always known, we cannot be held responsible for the political foolishness of our brethren. We stay here, in the Holy Jarudhan temple, because we have no wish to be embroiled in the political machinations of secular people.’

  The Queen stared impassively at the old man, and when she did not respond to Seer Diamond’s speech another of the white-haired men in light blue robes cleared his throat politely to say, ‘Your Majesty, Seer Diamond speaks for us all.’

  ‘As always,’ Queen Sunset muttered, knuckles whitening as she clenched her hand on the arm of the chair. ‘Thank you, Onyx, for your explanation of what I just heard,’ she added, sending Seer Onyx a withering glare to convey her disgust. ‘So, gentlemen, you will not obey the direct order of your sovereign queen. Is this what you are saying?’ She looked directly at Diamond as she asked her pointed question.

  Diamond glanced at his four colleagues, all seated at the long table in the temple meeting room, before he replied, ‘We are servants of Jarudha, Your Majesty. It is not—’

  ‘Answer the question!’ Sunset snapped.

  Diamond raised an eyebrow. ‘We will not forsake Jarudha for politics. We have no choice in this matter.’

  Sunset’s anger erupted as she stood and glared at the Seers. ‘Neither do I!’ she declared. ‘Gather what few possessions you have. As of this afternoon, you are all under arrest.’

  Diamond’s anger flared in his eyes. ‘On what charge?’

  ‘Treason.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’ Onyx said.

  ‘Failure to obey the queen’s direct instructions is treasonous,’ Sunset countered.

  ‘You can’t just accuse us without evidence and a lawful trial,’ Diamond protested.

  ‘Your refusal is all the evidence I need, and since you’ve forgotten this small detail I re
mind you that I am the law,’ she replied. ‘Gather your things, gentlemen. Goodman will be here shortly with my Elite Guards to accompany you to the Royal Gaol.’

  ‘The Bogpit?’ Seer Vale gasped.

  ‘This is outrageous!’ Diamond protested. ‘You can’t do this!’

  ‘I am doing it, old man! You are not the authority here. I am. I am your queen and you will obey me or live the rest of your life in my gaol.’

  ‘You will regret this sacrilegious lunacy!’ Onyx scowled.

  ‘Not before you regret your disobedience,’ Sunset retorted. ‘Goodman will be here before sunset—unless you decide to change your attitude and your decision. I have spoken.’

  She left the chamber, followed by her bodyguard, and passed along the curved corridor of the temple, ignoring the bowing Jarudhan acolytes in their yellow robes with their shaved heads as she strode into the garden, heading for the palace. Torches lit the white gravel path. At the gateway separating the temple enclosure from the palace grounds, she halted and gazed up at the night sky. The moon hung in its third quarter, casting a pale glow over the stone palace buildings. To be queen, she told herself silently, I have to be decisive. To stay queen, I have to take risks. The thought wasn’t hers. It was the advice of her uncle, Kingly Royal, when she succeeded to the throne after her father’s untimely death.

  ‘You can’t be anything but ruthless to rule this kingdom,’ he had said, the morning before her coronation. ‘Others will see a girl and they will think you are weak. Some will see a young princess, untried in politics, and think you weak. You can’t be weak. Neither a king nor a queen has time for weakness. Remember this, Sunset Royal, and you will not fail your father.’