by Morris West
To the ignorant and to the stranger, Willinja was a nothing – a primitive squatting in the dust, toying with childish trifles. To his own people, he was a man of power, a keeper of ancient knowledge, an initiate of the spirit-folk who, at the time of his induction, had killed him, dismembered him and then made him whole again, gluing his parts together with magical substances. When personal or tribal life was disturbed by malignant influences, he alone had the formulas and the power to use them for the restoration of order and well-being. He was not a charlatan. He believed in himself. The spirits had made him what he was and their potency worked in him and through him.
Now the men were coming towards him from the direction of the camp. They came in three groups, the first carrying spears and clubs, the second, bearing sticks and the long, deep-voiced instrument of music which is called the didjeridoo. Behind them, unarmed, lagging and shame-faced, walked the men of the buffalo totem who had been Mundaru’s companions at the killing and who, two hours after sunrise, had returned to the tribe without him.
Questioned by Willinja and the elders, they had told of the killing of the bull, the wounding of the white man and Mundaru’s pursuit of him. They did not think to lie. They knew that Willinja saw the truth with spirit eyes. On this level they were afraid of him. On the lower one, they understood his jealousy of Mundaru and hoped to make it work in their favour.
Willinja watched them through narrowed eyes, feeling the power rise in him, collecting himself for the ritual which must follow.
When the first group came they settled themselves in two files, facing each other to the right and the left of Willinja, the musicians on one side, the spearmen on the other. When the buffalo men arrived, they sat in a line facing Willinja so that between them all was a hollow square of sacred ground. There were no women, no children. They had gone off in the opposite direction, gathering food; for to look on what was done in the secret place meant terrible and sudden death.
They were seated now, and waiting. Willinja closed his eyes and sat rock-rigid under the mantling shadow. He could feel all his vitality being sucked upward and concentrated inside his skull-case. After a long while, he began to speak in the spirit voice, which issued more like a chant than normal speech.
‘There is earth and there is water. The wind blows over the earth, but does not shake it. The leaf floats on the river, but does not harm it. We are the river and the earth. The white man is the leaf and the wind…’
The buffalo men sat silent, but the spearmen and the music-men gave a long-drawn cry of approval…
‘Ai – eee – ah!’
‘We have lived in peace. We have slept safe with full bellies. Our spirit places are untouched because the white man and his people pass by like wind and the blown leaf.’
His voice rose to a high, wailing pitch.
‘Until now…! Until Mundaru and his friends raise the anger of the spirit people – so that the wind is now an angry voice and the leaf grows into a tree and the tree becomes a club and a spear to destroy us.’
Ai – eee!’ cried the spearmen. And the music-men cried louder…
‘Ai eee – ah!’
Willinja leaned forward, pointing at the drawing of the buffalo in the dust.
‘This is Anaburu, the buffalo, which is the sign of Mundaru. This he may kill and eat, and no one would refuse him. But this…’
He scrawled swiftly in the dust a new outline representing the big Brahman bull.
‘This is not Anaburu. This is another thing, a white man’s animal. There is no life in it for Mundaru. But he kills it – and now he tries to kill the white man. If he does that, there is death for all of us. The other white men will come and move us away, to a strange country, where our spirits will forget us and we will wither and die. We will be the wind. We will be the leaf, lost and drifting nowhere. Where then shall we put our dead? Who will sing them into peace? This has happened before. Now it can happen to us, the men of Gimbi.’
He broke off. The buffalo men sat, bowed in guilt; but this time there was no answering chant from the others. They held themselves erect and silent, touched with fear at this imminent threat of expatriation – of exile from the earth which was their only source of life and tribal identity.
Willinja watched them, and knew that he held them in the hollow of his hand. He waited, so that they might suffer their fear a little longer. Then he dropped his voice to a low, soft key.
‘I have talked with the spirit men. I have heard their voices answering. They say there is a hope for us, if the death that threatens us is sung into the body of Mundaru!’
Immediately, the fear went out of them, in a long, audible exhalation. There was no protest, only relief. The victim had been named. With the spilling of his blood, the land and the tribe would settle back to peace and security.
Willinja, the sorcerer, stood up. From the row of objects in front of him, he picked up the stone with its ochre markings and laid it in the centre of the square where all could see it. They knew what it was-the symbol of a man, whose name was Mundaru. What was sung into the stone would be sung into the man. He could no more move to escape it than the stone could walk away across the dust.
Willinja walked back to his place, knelt on one knee and picked up the long, quartzite blade, with its haft of gum and its trailing pennon of hair. Then he flung out his arm and pointed it, straight at the stone which bore the name of Mundaru. The others watched, tense and silent. The blade was a spirit spear, pointed at the victim. The gum was fuel to burn his entrails. The hair would make it fly straight and true towards its target.
Then, abruptly, the singing began – a low heavily-accented chant, its rhythm beaten out on the hollow sticks, its melody counter-pointed by the deep, throbbing notes of the didjeridoo. Every line of it was a death wish, directed against the man-stone in the dust.
‘May the spear strike straight to his heart…’
May the fire burn his entrails…’
‘May the Great Serpent eat his liver…’
On and on it went, a projective sorcery directed against an absent man, an accumulation of malignities, sung over and over again while the sun climbed in the sky and the shadow of the kangaroo rock grew shorter and shorter, until it reached the feet of Willinja.
When it did so, the chanting stopped. Willinja put down the spirit spear, and with a gesture of finality, obliterated the drawings he had made in the dust. The spearmen and the musicians stood up, walked slowly round the death stone, then, by common accord, headed back to the camp. Only the buffalo men remained. They had been partners in crime. Now they must be the instruments of punishment.
They waited, submissive and patient until Willinja showed them how and when and with what sacred ritual they must kill Mundaru.
Naked as Adam in his primal Eden, Lance Dillon lay on a patch of warm mud and looked up at the sky through a meshwork of reeds and swamp-grass. He had slept a long time, and he was still lapped in the languor of rest and warmth and ebbing fever. He felt no pain, no fear, only the genial detachment of a ghost sitting on a fence and looking down on its own discarded body.
It wasn’t much of a body any more – a poor caricature of Lance Dillon, the land-tamer. It was streaked all over with mud, from the midnight climb up the river-bank, scored into weals by brambles and thorn-bushes and the bites of swamp insects. One shoulder was a pulpy red mass, from which the tracks of infection spread out like ganglia. Leeches clung to it, gnats swarmed about it, ants tracked over it with impunity. Its mouth was twisted in a rictus of unfelt pain, its eyes, inflamed and bloodshot, stared up at the morning sky. But it still belonged to him. Life was still pulsing sluggishly under the welted skin, and somewhere, inside his skull, pain and panic and hunger-pangs were beginning to wake again. However unwillingly, the ghost must step down from the fence and enter again into his battered habitation.
But not yet, not just yet. This small suspension of pain was too precious to surrender. He must use it to take hold of reason before
it slipped away for ever.
He had left the river. He remembered that. He had climbed the bank from the dark pool to the bright moonlight, while the myalls slept by the embers of their fires. He had lain a long time under a bramble-bush, husbanding his strength and trying to plot himself a course across the grass country. Beyond the bush was swamp-grass, and beyond the grass, a billabong – a long, narrow lagoon, fringed with reeds, covered with lily-pads, whose bulbous roots would give him food.
Again, his problem was to reach it without leaving tracks. When he crawled out from the bush across a small, clear patch, towards the grasses, he dragged after him a small, dead branch, like a broom, to sweep away the marks of hands and knees. When morning came, there would be dew on the ground, and, with luck, the myall trackers might miss him. Reaching the fringe of grass, he parted the tall stems carefully and stepped over them so that they swung back, an unbroken wall of greenery. He heaved the thorn branch away and began to crawl towards the swamp.
He reached it sooner than he expected and, anchoring himself to a small reed-covered bank, began to scrabble for the roots under the broad lily leaves and the sleeping flowers. They were watery and bitter, and at the first mouthfuls, he retched, painfully. But, after a time, he managed to hold some down; then he lay down on the wet mud, and, in spite of the insects and the swamp noises, slept till the sun was high.
Now the sleep was over, the last drugged languor gone. He was no longer free, but burdened with a body, cramped in every muscle, bitten on every inch of skin, with poison spreading out from the festering wound in his shoulder. Painfully, he worked himself to a sitting position and scooped up mouthfuls of the still, swamp water. He crammed a lily root into his mouth and chewed on it slowly until he was able to swallow.
Before him, the water lay bright in the sun. The lily-flowers were open. The green slime in the shallows shone with a sickly brilliance, and the ripples spread out from a brood of cruising ducklings. Against the farther reeds, a pair of egrets stood, contemplating the flat water and waiting for an unwary fish. The lagoon was full of life and full of food; but he was too weak to hunt it, and he dared not raise his head above the high grasses, for fear the myalls might be watching.
This was his chief terror now; that he could not surrender himself to the simplest instinctive gesture. He must think with two minds – the mind of the hunter and that of the fugitive. Every move must be planned and measured to his small strength. He could not think of combat – only of flight and concealment. This discipline of terror made him shut out of his mind every other thought – of Mary, of the homestead, even of ultimate rescue. He could count on nothing and nobody but himself.
Suddenly, out of the blank sky, he heard the aircraft…
Mundaru, the buffalo man, heard it too. He leaned on his spear and looked up, searching the air for the big bird which carried the white men in its belly; but the bird was flying in the track of the sun and for a long while he could not see it. Of the bird itself, he had no fear. He had seen it many times, and wondered at the magic which could command such a messenger. But the men inside it were another matter. These he had good reason to fear.
Earlier in the morning, before his companions had left him, they had warned him of just such a coming. There was a power the white men had to call each other over great distances and, when they called, the big bird always came, sometimes with the policeman, Adamidji, sometimes with the other, who carried a powerful magic in a little black bag. For this reason, they would not stay with Mundaru any longer. They would go back to the camp and – they did not say this, though Mundaru understood it very well – they would seek counsel and protection from the evil that had already been done.
Mundaru had not argued. He had shrugged and let them go. He had expected no better. Once a man stepped outside the tribal framework, he was naked and alone, with only his totem to help. But he was still afraid of the displeasure of the tribe and of the potent magic of Willinja.
But he was committed and he could not turn back. When the others had gone he set himself to search every inch of the farther bank, along the water and the high ground above. So far, he had found nothing. The dew was still fresh in the sheltered places; in the open, the ground was crusted and brittle. There was no depression in the grasses, where a wounded man might have lain. The only thing that puzzled him was a thorn-branch, dried and broken, lying fifty paces from its parent-tree.
The big bird was closer now. He heard its pulsing roar filling the air. Then, as it dived out of the sun-track, he saw it, banking in a high, wide turn over the swamp-lands.
As he followed it, his eye was caught by a movement faraway near the edge of the lagoon. The movement was repeated, and when he turned to it, he saw, diminished by the distance, the head and shoulders of a man and one arm waving frantically at the droning bird.
Mundaru stood, stock still, waiting to see what the bird would do. It swung round slowly, completing its turn and headed away towards the homestead. The head and the waving arm disappeared, but a gaggle of geese and swamp duck was rising and clattering above the lagoon. Before the last sound of the plane had died out of the sky, Mundaru stooped and, silent as a snake, began thrusting through the waving grasses towards the lily-pond.
CHAPTER FOUR
IT IS ONE of the ironies of existence that a man’s life may hang on the humour of his surgeon’s wife, or the state of a taxi-driver’s liver, or the angle of sight from a bucketing aircraft. At the precise moment when Adams might have seen Dillon waving from the grass, his attention was caught by Billy-Jo, shouting in his ear and pointing out through the perspex window.
‘Look, boss! Kirrkie come up! Bird belong dead thing.’
Sighting along the black-tracker’s hand, Adams saw, high above a sandstone saddle, the wheeling flight of hundreds of kite-hawks, sure sign to the bushman of a carrion kill. He leaned forward, tapped Gilligan, the pilot, on the shoulder and shouted in his ear.
‘Over to the right – behind the ridges!’
Gilligan gave him the thumbs-up sign, banked and headed for the red hills. As the aircraft came in, low and lurching through the air, the kites rose, screaming, and Adams looked down to see the green valley, the brood cows cropping contentedly with their calves at heel, and, in the centre, the mangled carcase on which the kites had been feeding.
The next moment he was flung violently back in his seat, as the plane climbed steeply to clear the saddle. When he levelled off, Adams tapped him again.
‘Any chance of putting her down in there?’
Gilligan shook his head and shouted:
‘Not a hope. It looks flat enough because of the grass, but we’d probably tear the undercart off!’
‘Can you make another circuit?’
‘Sure!’
As he banked and turned again, Billy-Jo turned to Adams.
‘Boss! I know this place! Spirit caves for Gimbi tribe!’
‘You sure of that, Billy-Jo?’
‘Sure, boss! White man’s cows in spirit-place. Maybe Gimbi men make trouble, eh?’
Adams nodded thoughtfully, staring out at the red scoriated rocks and the rich pastures between them. It was, at least, a working hypothesis. Half the trouble in the territory began with the clash between the pragmatic philosophy of the whites and the dream-time thinking of the aborigines. The small aircraft rocked again as Gilligan lifted it over the ridge. Gilligan turned back and shouted:
‘Where to now?’
‘Head for the homestead. See what we can pick up on the way.’
‘Roger!’
The Auster lurched and shuddered in the air-currents that rose from the hot earth, and Adams sweated and battled against the nausea that threatened him at every moment. Billy-Jo called to him again:
‘Stockboys, boss!’
They were riding in line abreast, strung out across half a mile of grassland and sparse timber. When they saw the aircraft they reined in and waved their hats in greeting. Adams counted them – five in all. They would
be the riders from Minardoo, and they had still not found Lance Dillon. Again he questioned Gilligan.
‘I’d like to talk to ’em. Any hope at all of a landing?’
‘Look for yourself! Rocks and ant-hills! I daren’t risk it – unless you want to walk home…’
Adams grinned and shook his head.
‘No, thanks. Cruise around for a bit. Let’s see if we can spot any myalls.’
He was not sure what he was looking for; he was simply going through a routine – assembling the sparse human elements in this big country, setting them in their geographic location, in the hope that the geographic relationship might develop into a human one. A man, black or white, was in a given place for a specific reason. His reason and his attitudes were, normally, predictable. There was no place for strollers and vagabonds in the outback. The country was too harsh, the loneliness too oppressive, to coax them outside the familiar circuits of water-hole and game-land and grazing areas and sacred places.
In the next fifteen minutes, he saw nothing that deviated from a work-a-day pattern of primitive life: a dozen women, waist-deep in a lily-pond, another group digging for yams on a river flat, three bucks flushing an old-man kangaroo out of the paper-bark trees, a lone man squatting in the lee of a conical rock, a deserted camp, with lean-to shelters made of bark, and thin smoke rising from the sand-covered fires.
The things he needed to see were hidden from him: Lance Dillon crouching in the swamp-reed, Mundaru, working his way through the six-foot grasses, the buffalo men in a limestone cave, burning their small toes with a hot stone, then dislocating them, and, afterwards, putting on the feathered kadaitja boots which are always worn in a ritual killing.