by Morris West
Again the solitary crystalline sound rang through the vault. This time he understood what it was: the fall of a single drop of water into a pool. Behind his matted eyelids a picture formed: the slow seepage of minuscule droplets through the earth; their agglomeration at the root of a rusted stalactite; their slow, trickling course down the spear of limestone; the moment of suspension at the point; the final plunge into a basin where a million other drops had gathered safe from the sun and the thirst of man and beast.
Water…! The last demand of the dying on a world of such varied richness. He waited until the sound came again and fixed its direction in his mind. Then he rolled himself over on his belly and began to drag himself towards it, hoping desperately that he would not find it beyond his reach.
Finally his hands touched the base of the wall and felt it swell into a kind of pillar above him. The next sound of water seemed to come from directly above his head. The problem was to raise himself to reach it. He drew his trunk and feet as close as possible to the pillar of limestone and then grasping the nearest projection, he began to haul himself upward, dragging with his hands, thrusting with his feet, holding himself by friction to the rough surface when each instalment of strength gave out.
Then the pillar broke off and his fingers clung to a ledge. With a last convulsive effort he reached it and threw the upper part of his body across it so that he hung by his torso, with his face dipping into a shallow basin of icy water. The touch of it was like knife-blades on his torn skin, but he lapped at it greedily and felt it burning his gullet as he swallowed. Even when he had drunk his fill he still hung there, waiting for the little infusion of strength to seep outwards to his members.
His fingers explored the ledge around the basin and found it wider than their compass – wide enough perhaps for a man to lie within reach of the water. They found other things too: knobs and shards of limestone fallen from the roof, stalactites, long as daggers and almost as sharp. His fingers brushed some of them into the water, but closed on one, long as a man’s forearm, thin and smooth and pointed like an awl.
Again the cool reminder that he was not to be allowed to die in peace; that the last moment would be one of violence and terror. He had not cared before. But now, in this quiet place, a coal of anger began to glow inside him. He had suffered enough. He had run to the edge of the last dark leap. Why should he wait tamely till they thrust him over it? His fingers crisped round the smooth butt of the stalactite, then slowly relaxed.
First he must haul himself on to the ledge near the water. Here he could lie, husbanding his residue of strength, cooling himself when the fever rose again. From here he could make the final despairing leap at the first of his attackers, the stone dagger in his hand, all the anger, disillusion and regret arming him for the hopeless fight.
It was the last hour of the dark when Neil Adams got up, settled the blanket around Mary and walked down to the river-bank to take over the watch from Billy-Jo.
The black-tracker had nothing to report. The kadaitja men had been silent a long time. They would probably remain so until the first light of day. He shambled up the beach, threw himself down on his blanket and curled into sleep like a bush creature.
Neil Adams sat down on a rock ledge, lit a cigarette and let his mind drift with the smoke spirals, while his body relaxed into the sad sweet contentment that follows after the act of love.
He had known many women, but this was the first with whom possession had seemed more like a surrender than a conquest. The ramparts of egotism had been tumbled down, the barricades of the Book of Rules had been taken without a fight. The legend of impregnability was destroyed for ever. He was a man who had taken another’s wife, a policeman who had betrayed his trust and was open to attainder by any man who cared to dig deep enough into his secrets.
It was a bitter dreg to poison the after-taste of love, but it was there, and gag as he might he had to swallow it. Get it down then at one wry gulp. Adultery and professional dereliction. It is done. There is no way to mend it – and perhaps, after all, there is no need. The odds are all on Dillon’s death, and what’s the harm in a tumble with a new and willing widow? If he’s alive, he doesn’t know; and who’s to tell or care – unless my lady has an unlikely attack of remorse?…
Even as he thought it, he knew it for a cynic’s defence, harder to sustain than the simple truth. For the first time in his life he had come close to love – the pain and the power and the mystery of it. Mary Dillon had come to it too; and even without the consummation, the love would still be there – the pain too, and the haunting questions: Will it look the same when the sun comes up? And if it does, what’s to do about it?
He stared across the water at the driftwood pile behind which Lance Dillon had hidden only twenty-four hours ago. Again he was touched with reluctant admiration for the endurance and resource of the man, naked, wounded and alone, pitting himself against the primitive to whom the bush was an open thoroughfare. How long had he lasted? How had he died? Had he known beforehand that his wife was lost to him? Did he end hating her or regretting his own failure to hold her? What would he have done in Neil Adams’s shoes? Fruitless questions all of them – except one: Where was Dillon now? If anyone knew the answer, it was Mundaru, the buffalo man, and he was coming nearer to death with every minute that ticked away towards the dawn.
Neil Adams listened to the night, waiting for the calls of the kadaitja men. None came. If Billy-Jo was right, none would come until the death-chant began and the banshee howling of the bull-roarer. He tossed his cigarette into the river and watched the current whirl it away into darkness. All his other loves had been like that – a swift enjoyment, a swift extinction. But who could tell how long this one might last and what fires might blaze up from its still warm embers?
At the sound of a footfall in the sand he turned sharply to find Mary standing over him, her face pale but smiling in the moonlight. He stood up, took her in his arms and they held to each other for a long quiet moment of renewal. Then they sat down together on the flat rock, hands locked but faces averted from each other, lapped in the tenuous content of new lovers.
‘Neil?’ Her voice was soft and solicitous.
‘Yes, Mary?’
‘There’s something I want to tell you.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Remember the old gag: “The hardest thing about love-making is knowing what to say afterwards”?’
He turned at the hint of mockery in her voice, but there was no mockery in her eyes, only a smiling tenderness. He grinned and nodded.
‘I remember it. Is that your problem?’
‘No.’ The denial was emphatic. ‘And if it’s yours, Neil, forget it. There’s nothing to say and nothing to pay. I’m glad it happened and I’ll always remember. But if you don’t want to remember, I’ll never remind you. That’s all, darling.’
‘Is it?’
‘From me, yes.’
‘Is that a dismissal?’
Her face clouded. She shook her head slowly.
‘It’s an act of love, Neil. It’s the only way I can tell you that you’re as free now as – as you were with any of the others.’
‘I may not want to be, Mary.’
‘Then you’re free until you find out.’
‘And then?’
‘Then perhaps I’ll be sure too.’
He gripped her arms brutally and slewed her round to face him. His eyes and mouth were hard.
‘Understand something, Mary! This isn’t a bush meeting where you can back ‘em both ways and hedge your bets on the outsider!’
‘You think that’s what I’m trying to do?’
‘Yes.’
Her head went up proudly and she challenged him.
‘All right, Neil! Here it is. What happened tonight was real for me. I wouldn’t take back any of it, even if I could. If Lance is dead, I’m free. If he’s alive and well, I was going to leave him, anyway… And I love you, Neil. Now, what do you want to do about it?’
>
His grip on her arms relaxed. His eyes dropped away from hers. His voice lost its harsh commanding note.
‘I – I think we should both wait and see.’
‘That’s all I was trying to say, Neil,’ she told him coolly. ‘I love you enough to leave you free. But don’t ever tell me I’m hedging my bets. I did once, but never again.’
‘I’m sorry, Mary.’
‘I don’t blame you. But I can’t let you blame me, either. If I blame myself it’s a private business, and I’ll never ask you to carry the load of it. Now kiss me, darling – and let’s not talk any more.’
But even in the kiss there was still the sour taste of regret, the comfortless revelation that guilt is a lonely burden – and that a man needs a special kind of courage to carry it in silence. Mary Dillon had it, but he wished he were half as sure of himself.
When the grey of the false dawn crept into the eastern sky, Mundaru the buffalo man halted, just inside the fringe of the grass-lands. He was cold, weary, hungry, and above all confused. All night long he had been creeping in the tracks of the white man. At every moment he had expected to come up with him, living or dead: but still he had not found him.
Ten paces ahead the grass-land faded out into tussocks and stunted mulga trees, a wide waterless area limited by the limestone ridge where painted poles were grouped around the sacred bottle tree. The whole space was empty of life or movement. The white man had disappeared and Mundaru lapsed into the final despairing conviction that he had died long since and that what he had followed was a spirit-shape, luring him to destruction.
With the conviction came a kind of calm. Death was already lodged in his carcase. He could hope no more, run no further. When the kadaitja men came, as soon they must, they would find him waiting for them, a passive participant in the ritual of propitiation.
Stiffly he got to his feet and pushed through the grasses into the open space beyond. The light was spreading now, the stars receding to pin-points in the grey firmament. A little breeze was beginning to stir in the leaves of the mulga trees. The bull-frog chorus died slowly into silence and the first bird of the morning rose, a black sinister shape in the sky ahead of him. It was a kite, and soon there would be more of them, many more, wheeling above him, waiting for him to die.
Half-way to the ridge he halted, laid down his spears, unwrapped his fire-sticks and squatted down on the ground to coax a little flame into a handful of dry, spiny grass. It was a meaningless action. He had no food to cook. The fire would have no warmth in it. But the motion of twirling the stick between his palms, spinning its point against the hard wood of its mate, blowing the first spark into a tiny flame, required a concentration that took his mind from the men who were stalking him.
When he himself had worn the kadaitja boots, he had found his victim crouched like a frightened animal, vomiting on the ground. He did not care to die like that. He could not fight. There was no challenge to the sacred spears, but at least he could go through the last motions of manhood, with the first gift of the dream-people flowering into flame under his hands.
Eastward the sky brightened, blood-red, as the sun pushed upward towards the rim of the world. The point of the spinning stick ran hot against the hollow of hardwood and a thin whiff of smoke rose from the tuft of grass. Mundaru grunted with satisfaction and blew steadily to coax out the first spark. A long shadow fell across the ground in front of him, and he looked up to see six men, painted and motionless as rocks, standing in front of him. In their upraised arms they carried throwing-spears, and the long, barbed heads were pointed at his breast.
The fire-sticks fell from his hands. The smoke was extinguished. Mundaru’s arms hung slack to the ground and his eyes searched the painted faces above him. Between the bars of yellow ochre, their eyes looked down at him, cold as granite.
Then from behind him the bull-roarer began, a thin howling, growing in volume and tone to a deep, drumming roar. The air was full of it. The ground vibrated to it. It hammered at his skull and crept into the hollows of his bones and filled his entrails like wind. It stuffed his ears and seared his eyeballs and choked his nose so that he could not breathe.
The kadaitja men watched and listened immobile, their spear-points ready. The roaring went on and on for nearly twenty minutes, then stopped abruptly. Blind, deaf and shivering in the silence, Mundaru waited. There was a sound like a rush of bird-wings at his back and he pitched forward with the sacred spear in his kidneys.
Long before the bull-roarer began, Billy-Jo had the horses saddled and the pack-pony loaded. Mary Dillon and Neil Adams were standing by the fire drinking pannikins of scalding coffee. The tension between them had eased and they talked gravely and companionably of the day ahead.
‘I’d like you to understand my reasoning, Mary. It could be wrong, but it’s the only logic I can see.’
‘You can’t ask more of yourself than that, Neil. Go ahead ’
‘Strictly speaking, I should forget about the myalls and concentrate on a search for your husband. The tribal blood-feud is secondary, I can deal with that any time. But the fact is, we could cast about all day and still find no trace of your husband. Billy-Jo’s the best tracker in the Territory, but even he can’t work miracles. You understand that?’
‘Of course.’
‘So I’m working on the assumption that your husband is dead. All the signs point that way. This is the third day, and we know he was quite badly wounded. The only man who can give us any information is the man who’s been tracking him - Mundaru. The kadaitja men are after him, and they’ll get him – sure as God.’
‘How can he help you then?’
‘In a kadaitja killing, the victim lives for some hours. That’s the point of it. He dies by a magical power, not by a man’s hand. If I can come up with him before he dies, I may be able to get something out of him. But I can’t promise…. If we fail there, then Billy-Jo and I will beat the swamp for the rest of the day.’
‘Neil?’ There was tenderness in her voice and a curious touch of pity. ‘You’re a good policeman. Believe it always.’
‘I’m glad someone thinks so.’ He bent and kissed her lightly, tossed the dregs of his coffee into the fire and turned away towards the horses, just as the first booming sound of the bull-roarers sounded across the swamp. The three of them froze: Billy-Jo in the act of tightening a girth, Adams in mid-stride, Mary with the tin mug half-way to her mouth. Even in the cold light of morning, the primitive terror held them strongly.
Billy-Jo cocked his head like a hound listening. He flung out his hand in an emphatic gesture.
‘Over there, boss. Long way. Outside swamp.’
Adams nodded.
‘We’ll try to skirt the billabong. No point trying to hack our way through.’ He turned to Mary. ‘Before we go, Mary…you ride between Billy-Jo and me. No matter what happens, no matter what you see, keep your head. And do exactly as I tell you. Understand?’
‘I understand.’
‘Let’s get moving.’
He hoisted her into the saddle and they moved off, Neil Adams in front, Mary behind him, with Billy-Jo last and leading the pack-pony. They splashed across the ford, struggled up the steep bank and began to work their way up-stream along the narrow strip of clear ground between the bushes and the grass-fringe.
They had gone perhaps a mile when the bull-roarer stopped. Neil Adams reined in and they waited while he stood in his stirrups and scanned the swamp-lands, stirring lightly under the morning breeze. After a couple of minutes he lowered himself into the saddle, dug his heels into the pony’s flanks and set off at a canter with the others trailing behind him.
For the next mile Mary Dillon found herself moving in a kind of waking dream, conscious of all her surroundings yet absorbed in an inner contemplation. She felt everything, saw everything: the thrusting muscle of the pony, the twigs and branches that whipped at her, the wind rushing in her face, the new light spilling over the land and the sky, Neil Adams a galloping centaur ahe
ad of her. Yet her thoughts were all bent backward: to the river-bank, to the homestead, to the swift passion that had driven her into the arms of Neil Adams, to the slow death of her love for Lance, to the one vaulting moment in which the world and her relationship to it had changed completely.
She had seen the change before, in other women; but she had never understood it until now. There was an alchemy in the act of union. The transmutation for better or for worse was terribly final. One emerged from it curiously free; yet free in a new country, the contours of which hid mysteries unguessed at in the time of wholeness or fidelity. It was the old drama of Eve and the Tree of Knowledge, when the world changed overnight at the first bite of a strange fruit.
She was a wife, but not the same wife. From a creditor in marriage she had become a debtor. Her rights in law had been forfeited. The wholeness of herself had been broken and parcelled out, valueless to one man, to the other worth only what he cared to pay for it.
How much would he pay? How much was his hesitation dictated by fear for himself, how little by concern for her? How much did she care whether he paid or not, provided she could still read love in his eyes and a respect, however reluctant? And Lance? Was it only because he was dead that she could still think of him with tenderness? If he was alive, could she still face him with dignity? Even the most merciless self-security told her that she could. Few marital contracts were breached without fault on both sides and the moralist’s finger often pointed in the wrong direction.
Ahead of her Neil Adams reined in suddenly and her own horse reared up on its haunches, and it took all her strength to hold and steady him. Adams turned in his saddle and pointed out across the grass-land to where a thin column of brown smoke was rising into the sky.
‘What do you make of it, Billy-Jo?’
The black-tracker called back:
‘Kadaitja men, boss. Takeum man. Burnem spirit snake in back.’
Adams nodded and turned to Mary.