A Far Country
Page 13
Gavin stared at her, angry but knowing better than to argue when Asta was in this mood. He turned and went out into the gathering dusk.
Asta stood in the dark hut. Slowly her anger ebbed. In truth she did not believe Gavin would abandon her, whatever Ian might have done. Thank God, the two men were totally different. As for the white youth living with the blacks … She stood with clasped hands, eyes staring at mystery. Conviction was a cool flood through her body.
The strange white boy. That was what Ian had called him: a boy, not a man, yet old enough to talk like a man. The boy who had come to them out of the sea.
She followed her husband outside. The sun had set beyond the rising ground and the western sky was awash with the deepest rose. Someone had lit a fire. Its flames cast shifting orange and black shadows over the faces of the men gathered about it and glinted on the dull steel of the firearms they carried. Mary and Alison were there, their white aprons patches of brightness against the sombre clothes, the firelight, the gathering darkness. She walked over to them.
‘Sinbad will guide us,’ Gavin was saying as she arrived at the group. ‘When we find them we shall form up and fire one volley into the camp before we go in. Only one, mind, or we may end up shooting ourselves. Cato, you stay here to guard the women.’
‘Aw, come on …’ Cato was indignant.
But Gavin’s mind was made up. ‘I’m not arguing about it. You stay.’
‘We expectin’ trouble?’ Luke Hennessy asked.
‘Not if we’re careful. Catch them by surprise, they’ll be too busy trying to get away from us.’
‘What about the white bloke they’ve got with ’em? What we goin’ to do ’bout ’im?’
‘Reckon ’e’ll die jest as easy as a blackfeller.’ Blake’s voice was like a rasp.
Asta stared at Gavin’s back, willing what he must say. He said, ‘I want him alive. We won’t get rid of more than a handful of them. He’ll be able to tell us where to find the rest.’
‘Sinbad’ll find ’em for us,’ Blake said, teeth grinning white in the firelight.
Asta watched, hating him. A mad dog she had called him and a mad dog he was. She hoped that there would be resistance, that a spear would find Blake Gallagher. A mad dog needed to be put down before it could infect the rest.
The men lined up, the black shepherd Sinbad in the lead, then Blake with Gavin next to him, the others behind. Only the clink of weapons, the occasional murmur, disturbed the silence.
‘I wish I was coming with you,’ Asta said.
‘Well, you’re not.’ Gavin was impatient to be gone and indignant, still, over what had been said. ‘You’ll be safe enough with Cato here to look after you.’
It is not because I am afraid that I want to come. She wanted to scream the words at him, her nerves wound tight by his obtuseness, the tensions of the night, the thought that out there, somewhere, the white boy lay unknowing while these men made ready to kill him and his friends. She said nothing, as she had said nothing so often before in her life. Ultimately, she thought, we are all alone.
She stood back. The outflowing of her will faltered and ceased. Her spirit drew back within herself. What was destined would be.
After the men had gone the three women looked at each other, the firelight staining their faces with flickering orange light.
‘Best get in the ’ouse,’ Cato Brown was sour at being left behind. ‘Anythin’ happens to any of you, the captain’ll have my skin.’
The captain: it was what the shepherds called Gavin, although he had no right to the title.
‘The blacks do not move around at night,’ Asta said. She wanted to stay outside. In the open she felt closer to what was happening out there in the bush.
‘Who knows what them savages might get up to?’ Cato grumbled.
It made sense, of course it did. And it seemed that the boy had threatened something, at least.
‘Very well,’ she conceded. ‘We shall wait indoors, as you say.’
But indoors the tension was worse, as Asta had known it would be. Perhaps they were safer but she did not feel safe. She felt suffocated by the stagnant air, the walls of the tiny room cutting her off from life.
‘What do you think about what they’re doing?’ Mary asked.
Asta hated the idea but would not say so. ‘It is a way to protect us from being attacked.’
‘Will it not be dangerous?’
Except for hoping that harm might come to Blake she had not thought about it. ‘I suppose it might be.’
‘If anything happened to Ian I would die.’ Mary’s voice full of terror and self-pity. She took no notice of the child at her shoulder, what her words might be doing to her.
‘Why should anything happen to him? Our men have guns. The blacks don’t.’
‘They have spears.’
‘Gavin would not have gone if he had thought there would be danger.’
They both knew it was a lie but the pretence gave a form of protection more easing to the spirit than Cato Brown and his gun.
How strange it was, Asta thought. Here was Mary terrified for Ian’s survival whereas her own fear was not for Gavin at all. Gavin was strong, the rock upon which she had based her life. Without his granite strength she would never have come to this far country. It was unthinkable that anything might happen to him. In a trivial night skirmish with a group of tribesmen armed with spears? Never! No, her concern was less for her husband than for the unknown boy whom she had never seen.
There is a resonance in my soul, she told herself. I felt it when Gavin first told me about him. The child taken by the sea; the youth emerging unexplained from the sea. From infancy I was brought up to believe that the sea settles its debts. When I see this unknown youth I shall feel the same pang of recognition I would have experienced had he in truth been Edward returning from the waves. Fate will not permit anything to happen to him; the idea is unthinkable.
But feared for the boy, nevertheless, and for herself.
Let him be safe, she prayed, but was uncertain to whom the prayer was addressed. It should be to Odin and Thor, she thought. Odin with Gungnir, his magic spear, and Thor of the double axe. They had embarked on war tonight and it was the war gods of the north they needed now, not the muling Mediterranean Christ. The gods of Valhalla had always understood the need for death, the ritual of cleansing inherent in the spilling of blood. But how powerful could these gods be, so far from their own land? And felt abandoned by them, as by so much else. She would be better off praying to herself, she thought, but could not, acknowledging her helplessness.
She knew better than to say any of this to Mary and Alison. Instead said, ‘It is not right that we should sit here frightening ourselves over what may never happen. We should start preparing some food so that when the men come back we shall have something for them to eat.’
Doing something would occupy their minds as well as their hands, help to keep the shadows away.
As soon as they had returned to camp Nantariltarra went off by himself. He sat cross-legged on the bare earth, eyes staring across the land that for countless generations had been theirs. The breeze rattled the leaves of the trees but he did not hear them. Parrots flew in the undergrowth and he did not see them. Magpies, emboldened by his monumental stillness, hopped closer, preening their black and white plumage, cocking their heads to one side and watching him with beady eyes. He did not see them, either, or hear their bubbling calls. People eyed him cautiously and walked in a wide circle around him, knowing that he spoke with the spirits. Finally, shortly before dark, he summoned the Council and told them what he had seen, what the white man had said to them.
‘We should kill them while we can,’ Minalta said, and several others agreed.
‘They are few. It would be easy. And once they are gone their flocks will give us enough to eat for a long time.’
‘If we kill them, others will be frightened to come here after them. Things will continue as they have always been.’
‘We shall seek to be friends with the kuinyo,’ he said. ‘We shall not kill them or attack them. We shall help them in every way we can. Jay-e-son will act as our spokesman.’
‘How do we know we can trust him?’ Yarnalta demanded.
‘We know,’ Nantariltarra said. ‘I know.’
‘How do we know we can trust them?’ A more telling question than the first.
‘Because I have seen them. They want peace, as we do. We are many more than they. Their animals are scattered. They cannot hope to defend them all against us. They would not be able to defend even themselves. I shall talk to them again, in the morning.’
He was stiff and tired by his long vigil. He rose without another word, went to his wurley and slept.
‘We must get away from here as quick as we can.’ Jason was exasperated by the inaction. ‘Wait any longer, it’ll be too late.’
‘The Council says that the kuinyo means no harm.’ Mura, trained in the ways of obedience, was alarmed by Jason’s independence.
‘The Council is wrong. I was there. I saw how he was.’
‘He will live in peace with us.’ Mura was not prepared to accept that the Council might be mistaken.
‘There’ll be peace, all right,’ Jason scoffed. ‘After they’ve killed the lot of us. I’m not staying in camp tonight. You won’t, either, you got any sense.’
Apprehensively, Mura eyed the darkness. ‘Where will you go?’
‘Out in the bush somewhere.’
Mura hesitated.
‘The darkness won’t hurt you, for heaven’s sake.’
The darkness itself, no. The spirits that walked in the darkness were another matter.
‘I’m going, anyway,’ Jason told him. ‘Stay behind if you want. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
Mura did not want to go but if he stayed he would be unable to keep his eye on Jay-e-son, as Nantariltarra had directed. What would the Council say if Jay-e-son went off alone and in the morning they found that he had joined the other kuinyo? Mura shuddered, the thought of the Council’s anger too awful to contemplate. If the two of them stayed close together, perhaps Jay-e-son’s magic would keep him safe from the quinkan.
‘I shall come with you,’ he said.
The camp was settling to sleep. The fires had burned low. The leaves of the hunched trees reflected hardly any light. Jason leading, Mura taking care to stay close at his heels, they walked out of the firelight into the darkness of the bush. Two hundred yards from the fires Jason paused and looked about him. Eyes used to the darkness, he could see that they were in a shallow hollow ringed by trees.
‘This’ll do,’ said Jason.
They lay side by side. The stealthy noises of the bush enclosed them: the rustle of leaves, the creaking of branches, the chirruping fidget of possums and other small animals in the undergrowth.
They slept: Jason deeply, despite his concerns, Mura with one eye partly open, as always. When he heard something he was instantly awake. Quietly, he shook Jay-e-son’s arm.
‘What is it?’
‘Listen …’
A faint crunching, too regular to be the random movement of the tree branches. A clink of metal. A murmur, shushed at once into silence. The slightest breath of air as dark shadows stole through the undergrowth.
ELEVEN
Kudnarto was five years old and the youngest of her mother’s three daughters. When she had first seen the kuinyo she had been frightened. Such a strange creature, like a man yet not a man, skin pink and brown, legs a different colour from the body, body from the face, harsh and rough all over, with lumps and flaps where real people had nothing like that. His face was wrong, too, not like the face of a real person.
Kudnarto had watched him from the corner of her eye when Mura had first brought him to sit among them by the fire. He had been clumsy, not able to walk as a real man would. She had watched him, wondering what he would do.
To begin with she thought he might be dangerous but he did nothing. At last she summoned up her courage and got close enough to look at him, to touch him, though always ready to run for her life if he became angry. He did not seem to mind her so she climbed into his lap and found that what she had thought was skin was a covering, like the aprons and cloaks that old people sometimes wore in winter. His real skin was underneath. How stupid she had been to think the brown covering was his skin!
Jay-e-son: his name was as strange as his looks. She would never have believed it had she not heard people call him that. Jay-e-son; she practised the sound when no-one was listening.
She asked Mura where Jay-e-son had come from but he would not tell her. She thought perhaps Mura did not know either, although it might be because he was too big to be bothered with girls as little as she was. Yet not all the time. There were times when he teased her, pretending to chase her, so that she laughed and ran away as fast as she could, her whole body hot with tingly fear and laughing, always laughing.
After a time she grew used to seeing Jay-e-son among them, used even to his looks so that he no longer seemed strange to her, just Jay-e-son. She still did not understand what he was or where he had come from, but that did not matter any longer.
When he saw her he smiled at her, sometimes he ruffled her hair as he passed by; she liked him.
Then came a day when things were different. The men of the Council sat for a long time, talking, talking, no-one smiling, then they called Jay-e-son to them and talked some more. Some of the men were angry, you could hear it in their voices, feel it in the air. When the talking was finished the clan moved north. They travelled for two days along the edge of the sea. Kudnarto played in the surf with the other children. It was fun. When they reached where they were going they made camp. Jay-e-son went away for a while. When he came back Kudnarto could not believe her eyes. Jay-e-son had long ago given up the strange clothes he had worn when she first saw him but now he was wearing an apron. It was not an apron like the old men wore in winter but a woman’s cloak they had got from the people who lived by the mouth of the great river.
Kudnarto laughed, fingers over her face, wondering if Jay-e-son knew he was wearing a woman’s cloak, but no-one laughed with her and she wondered what had happened that everyone should be so serious.
Jay-e-son went off with Nantariltarra. They were away a long time and when they came back their faces were more serious than ever.
All the children watched, all the women watched, no-one said anything. Whatever had happened must be very bad. For the first time Kudnarto felt fear in the air about her. It frightened her: it was not the nice fear she felt when Mura pretended to chase her but something quite different, cold and horrible. By the looks on their faces the grown-ups felt it, too.
Nantariltarra came, talking harshly to the men around him. His face was angry; everyone was angry. Some of the men shook their spears, the fighting spears with the notched edges and sharpened flints on the tips. Others carried shields and boomerangs. They talked together for a long time.
It grew dark. The fires were lit. The sunset was sung. Everything was normal yet nothing was normal at all. Grown-ups murmured to each other, nervous sounds in the gathering dark. The children crept about, eyes wide, mouths shut, keeping out of the way. Even the dogs slunk with tails between their legs, bellies cringing close to the earth.
Kudnarto was frightened, too. She found her mother, clung close, smelling fear on her also, the tremble of terror beneath the skin.
‘Mama?’ Voice high, close to panic.
‘Hush now, child.’
‘What is it? Why are people frightened?’
‘It is nothing, nothing.’
Kudnarto was stabbed by the terror she felt in the air and was not comforted. She clung close, arms around her mother’s neck. Nothing happened and eventually weariness
at the day’s end weighed more than fear. Kudnarto fell asleep.
Blake Gallagher was a youth filled with hate. He hated the people he knew, believing they despised him. He hated the countryside. He hated those born above him in the world. Above all he hated the black people of the country with a passionate intensity that had nothing to do with wrongs, real or imagined. He hated them for existing, would have killed the lot of them if he could.
The present expedition was right up his street.
He was a good shot and knew it; was not easily frightened by darkness or danger and knew that, too. Except for Sinbad, the black tracker, he was better in the bush than the other men. Excitement made his heart beat fast as they moved silently through the undergrowth on the way to the aborigines’ camp. He was eager to kill, could hardly wait to get on with the job.
The blacks were vermin. He would shoot them as cheerfully as he would a pack of rats. It was his duty to do it.
They had been walking for twenty minutes when, two paces in front of him, Sinbad paused. Blake’s ears had caught the same sound: the faintest creak and rustle, little different from the hundred other sounds with which the bush was filled yet out of harmony with them. Whatever had caused it was as much an intruder in the bush as they were themselves.
Behind him the rest of the party stumbled to a stop.
Blake could have screamed at them for their clumsiness. His head turned slowly, eyes probing the darkness. He saw nothing and the sound was not repeated. After five minutes Sinbad began to move forward again. Blake followed him. Perhaps it had been an animal, he thought, not believing it.
Another five minutes and Sinbad paused, holding up a cautionary hand. Blake looked over the black man’s shoulder as he pointed silently through the tangle of branches. They had arrived at their destination.
There was a fire at either end of the camp; the dying coals glowed red in the darkness. In the faint light Blake could just make out the humped shapes of the shelters in which the blacks slept. Nothing moved. Blake’s eyes ranged carefully, systematically, over the camp. There seemed to be no guards; his lip curled contemptuously. They knew the whites were in the area and still had done nothing to protect themselves. They deserved everything that was coming to them.