Corroboree

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by Graham Masterton


  ‘A prayer?’

  ‘He always told me that you were a man of God.’

  Eyre wiped the sweat away from his face. ‘He told you that? When?’

  ‘One evening, when you were sleeping; and we were awake.’

  ‘Well, you could hardly call me a man of God. Especially not now.’

  Minil traced a pattern in the fine white dust that clung to Eyre’s riding-boot. ‘He said that he envied you.’

  ‘He didn’t have any reason to do that.’

  ‘Oh, but he did, He always envied you. He said that you were the kind of man who makes days begin and years go by; whether you want to or not.’

  Eyre coughed, and almost choked on his biscuit. ‘Well, I don’t want to, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘Go on,’ said Eyre. ‘Go on until we reach the water-hole. Then, drink.’

  Minil smiled. ‘Dogger was right. You are becoming a bushman.’

  They rode on, and gradually the sun descended in front of them to scorch their faces and blind their eyes. By five o’ clock, however, they reached a series of deep water-holes in the bed of the dry lake; and there they tethered their horses, and let down their water-bottles and water-bags on lengths of bridle and twine, all knotted together, and brought up gallons of water that was fresher and cooler than any that Eyre had tasted in weeks. They drank until the water poured out of their noses, and they felt as if they would drown in the middle of the desert. Then they watered the horses, and splashed their coats with hatful after hatful of fresh water, and rubbed them, and patted them, until at last the horses shook themselves, and stood calm and refreshed. There was even a scattering of tussocky grass around the edges of the water-holes for them to eat; but Eyre made sure that they were well-tethered before he let them graze. The water-holes were sheer and very deep, and if a horse were to fall down one of them, they would never be able to get it out again, even if it survived.

  His caution proved itself only a few minutes later; for an emu came to the water-holes to drink; and while Eyre and Minil were sitting watching it, it toppled with a feathery squawk of fear and annoyance into one of the narrowest of the holes. It thrashed and cried, but couldn’t extricate itself. Eventually, when it sounded as if it had grown tired, Eyre went across to the hole with his rifle, and shot it. Smoke rose out of the limestone well like a magic trick; soon to be followed by a dead female emu, dangling from the end of an improvised lassoo.

  They had a feast that night. Eyre said it was for Dogger; a last offering from the mortal world. Minil dug a deep pit in the hard ground with a stick; lined it with brush and twigs and burned the wood until it glowed. Then she dragged the emu into the hole and buried it, leaving only its neck and its head protruding. Two hours later, steam began to puff out of the emu’s beak, and Minil pronounced the bird cooked. Actually, it was half-raw; but they were ravenous, and ate the whole breast between them.

  They made love that night, too, out in the open, for they had lost their umpee. And it was love, rather than coupling; warmth and companionship, rather than erotic excitement. Both of them were naked in the warm night air; with nobody around them for miles amd miles; only the scratching of the night-creatures for company, the Kowaris and fat-tailed dunnarts, searching for insects and other small mammals; and the explosive constellations of southern stars over their heads.

  Afterwards, as they lay cuddled together under their horse-blanket, Eyre said, ‘Was it true, that Yonguldye was going to kill me?’

  Minil stroked his face with her fingertips, tracing the outline of his lips, and his nose, and his bristly chin. ‘Did Joolonga say that it wasn’t?’

  ‘He said they wanted only my knowledge. Only what was inside my brains not the brains themselves.’

  ‘And what do you believe?’

  ‘I don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be any way of telling, not for certain.’

  Minil kissed him. ‘You are in the desert,’ she said, softly. ‘There is nothing certain here; only thirst.’

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked her; not for the first time.

  ‘I am someone looking for something that is probably lost for ever,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he answered her. Then, ‘Yes’, again; because at last he began to realise what she meant. There would be no peace for the Aboriginals now; their innocent centuries of living alone in Australia could never return. All that lay ahead for them now was retreat; retreat from their old fishing- and hunting-grounds, retreat from their sacred places, retreat from their magical and mysterious way of life, even a backing-away from their own souls. No wonder such an electrified ripple of excitement had run through the Aborigine community when Captain Henry had announced that the djanga had at last arrived. Eyre had been seen as their very last hope against a bewildering and increasingly destitute future.

  Whether Yonguldye had really intended to eat his brains or not, Eyre very much doubted whether he would have escaped from Yarrakinna alive. For when he failed to give Yonguldye the great knowledge and power of the white invaders, as he inevitably would have done, the wrath and disappointment of the Aborigines would have been catastrophic, especially for him. In one way, perhaps it was better for the Aborigines themselves that he had escaped, because as long as he remained alive, their hope of standing up against the white man would remain alive with him.

  Eyre slept. When he awoke, there were dingoes prowling around their camp attracted by the smell of the half-charred emu. He called, ‘Dogger?’ and almost at the same time remembered that Dogger was dead.

  Still, he said it again, a whispered name in the vastness of the cold Australian night. ‘Dogger? Can you hear me, Dogger?’

  But of course there was no reply.

  Twenty-Nine

  They had no.choice now but to strike out west. There was little doubt in Eyre’s mind now that Yonguldye was following them; and that it had been Yonguldye and his tribesmen who had destroyed Christopher’s provisions. So if they tried to return to the water-hole at Woocalla, and then make their way south to Adelaide from there, the risk of running straight into Yonguldye would be dangerously high.

  They knew of no more water-holes beyond Mulka, but Eyre could see that the ground was rising ahead of them; and in all probability they would be able to find an aroona, or a water-pool.

  They rode for hours in silence across miles and miles of dry mallee scrub; and as they rode they were smothered in grey sand-flies, in their hair, on their faces, crawling inside their clothes. Eyre tried at first to keep them out of his mouth by tying a handkerchief across the lower half of his face, but the flies always found a way of working their way underneath it, and time after time he would snap it away from his face in disgust.

  When they stopped at a little after one o’ clock to eat as much of the emu as they could manage, and swallow a mouthful of water, Eyre found that he was crunching mouthfuls of flies as well as meat, and spat his food out on to the ground. But Minil seemed to be quite unperturbed by the glistening, clustering insects that clung around her lips; and giggled at Eyre for being so sensitive.

  They rode on and on; Eyre using his compass to tend slightly southwards in the hope that eventually they would reach the coast. He estimated that if they continued on this bearing, they would probably see the Indian Ocean within four or five days, at Fowler’s Bay, or Cape Adieu, or fairly close by; and with any luck at all they would be able to camp there and wait for a whaler or a merchantman to pass, and pick them up.

  Minil said, ‘If we ride westwards, we will come to my home.’

  Eyre wiped the sweat from his face. ‘Home? You mean New Norcia? That must be a thousand miles. I don’t have the slightest intention of riding for a thousand miles.’

  ‘I walked a thousand miles, when I came to Yarrakinna with Yonguldye.’

  ‘You walked all the way across this desert?’

  Minil nodded. ‘There are many places to find water, for those who know.’

  ‘All I
want to do is find a ship,’ said Eyre.

  ‘You really want to go back?’

  ‘Is there anything wrong in that?’

  ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t sound like you; to give in.’

  Eyre slapped flies away from his mouth. ‘What are you talking about? Give in? You saw for yourself that we couldn’t ride any further northwards through those salt-lakes. And if we couldn’t ride through them, certainly nobody could ever run a road through them, or a railway-line, or drive stock through them.’

  ‘But what about this way?’ asked Minil.

  ‘What about this way?’

  ‘You could drive stock this way perhaps. Or just a road.’

  Eyre stared at her. Her bright eyes were giving nothing away; no clues about her seriousness, nor why she was provoking him into thinking about carrying on westwards. But perhaps she saw in him something that he couldn’t see in himself; a stamina and a sense of persistence that only needed the right cause, and a great enough inspiration.

  ‘You can go back to Adelaide with nothing,’ she said. ‘Or, you can go back with a new stock-route to the west. Isn’t that what you told me? That the farmers of Adelaide need to send their sheep and cattle to other parts of Australia, so that they can survive?’

  Eyre said, ‘Who was your teacher, at New Norcia?’

  ‘Mrs Humphreys. She was teaching me ever since I was a baby.’

  ‘Well, she taught you remarkably well. But your intelligence is your own; and you’ve got plenty of that.’

  She said, ‘Do you love me yet?’

  ‘Do I love you yet? What a peculiar question!’

  ‘I will stay with you for ever,’ she said. ‘If you want me to.’

  Eyre laid his hand on her shoulder, and then brushed away the flies and kissed her. While they kissed, the flies crawled all through their hair and over their faces, but they did not part their lips from each other until they had shared everything they had grown to feel for each other since they had first met, in Yonguldye’s shelter.

  ‘No matter what happens to us, I will always love you,’ said Eyre.

  ‘You don’t have to make that promise. I don’t expect it.’

  ‘Nonetheless, you have it.’

  They rode on through a long and hazy afternoon. Now and then Eyre looked behind them, to see if there was any sign of Yonguldye and his warriors; but there was none. He wished very much that he had Dogger’s telescope with him, and Dogger’s long gun; and he wished very much that he had Dogger, too. But their lives were now reduced to nothing more than riding westwards, and surviving. There was no time for sentiment, and very little time for mourning. They were a dark, emaciated white man and a naked Aborigine girl, riding through a world of scrub and dust and relentless beige, and that was the sum of their existence.

  Days passed; more days of dust; and they found no more water-holes. Every morning the sky-spirits lit the sun-fire; and every afternoon the scrub wavered with heat so great that the goannas and the skinks remained motionless, as if stunned by the 120 degree temperature, and even the vultures looked as if they were flying through clear syrup.

  Still there was no sign of anybody pursuing them, and they were now as far from Parachilna as Parachilna was from Adelaide, and Eyre was sure that they would soon reach the coast.

  But every morning the sun came up behind them, and there were no more water-holes. Their bottles were almost empty, and they had no water for the horses. They threw away everything they could, to save weight. They left their saddles behind in the dust, like abandoned tree-stumps. They left the two extra rifles, and Eyre’s spare boots and even, at last, Eyre’s copy of Captain Sturt’s Expeditions.

  They lay at night under their blanket, shaking with cold, and scarcely speaking to each other.

  ‘When we reach the coast,’ Eyre told Minil one morning, ‘if we don’t see a ship straight away, we’ll turn back eastwards towards Adelaide.’

  Minil said nothing. But both of them had begun to accept that staying alive was their only priority, and that the route to Western Australia could wait for another explorer, at another time.

  By noon that day, they had run out of water completely. Eyre turned his water-bottle upside-down, and a drop fell on to the palm of his hand, as precious as a diamond, and gradually evaporated in the heat. Minil looked up towards the sun, her eyes squeezed almost shut, and said, ‘We have to go on.’ The shine which fresh meat and fresh water had given her skin had now faded to a dull cocoabrown; and her ribs and pelvis were showing, as if death were making a premature announcement of his imminent appearance.

  They went on. Their last pack-horse was close to collapse, but Eyre was reluctant to butcher it in case they needed it later. Fresh meat lasted only a day or two in this heat, with all these flies; and although blood might see them through one more waterless day, it quickly congealed and went bad.

  The following day was Christmas Eve. Eyre sat silent on his horse, his eyes closed, feeling the sun drum and drum and drum against his skull. Even inside his eyelids, the day was vivid scarlet, and too bright to look at. He thought: I shall probably die on Christmas Day, and that will prove what an Anti-Messiah I turned out to be. Everybody expected so much of me: destiny, history, the opening-up of a continent; and here I am, stupid with sunstroke, lolloping through the scrub on a half-dead horse without a saddle. Brayvo, Hicks! Dogger had cried, as the deathspear slammed into his forehead and right through his brainful of memories and laughter and drunken nights. At least he had died quickly; at least he had gone without any chance to grumble or regret, a cantankerous invalid on Hindley Street, without beer or horses. But he never got to see Constance again, and when he had been sitting on his horse dying in those last few instants he must have realised that; and what a woman Constance was.

  Eyre thought: Christmas Day, whoever would have believed it? All these years, all through childhood, all through catechism, all through college, I’ve been destined to die on Christmas Day. By God, if I had known, I would have dreaded each succeeding Christmas, instead of merrymaking, and eating too much, and dancing like a damned doomed marionette.

  He saw Minil pitch off her horse like a falling shadow out of the corner of his eye. She dropped face-down on to the scrubby ground, and lay there still, while her horse came to an exhausted and obedient stop.

  Eyre slid down from his mount, and walked quickly across to her in sweat-filled boots. He knelt down beside her, and gently turned her over, and she looked up at him with flickering eyelids, muttering and chattering with blistered lips.

  ‘Minil,’ he croaked. ‘Minil, what’s the matter?’

  She lapsed into unconsciousness again, twitching nervously now and then as if she were dreaming.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said to himself, out loud. ‘That’s it, that’s damn-well it. She’s going to die.’

  He stood up, and took off his hat, and he was so dehydrated that he couldn’t even bring tears to his eyes. But then he knelt down again, and slapped her face, one way and then the other way, and shouted at her in a high, broken voice, ‘Minil!’

  She wasn’t dead; but he knew that she must be close to it. Her breath fluttered as delicately as a zebra-finch caught in a thorn-bush. He rolled back her eyelid and her eyes were white. She muttered, and jerked, but she didn’t wake up.

  He bent over her for a long time, fatigued and trembling and stricken with the pain of losing her. But then he sat up straight, and thought: I must find water. Where am I going to find water? If I try to take her any further, she’ll be dead by the time the sun goes down. She’ll probably be dead within the hour, in this heat. But supposing I leave her here, and go looking for water on my own?

  He knew how desperate a chance it was. His only experience of bush-craft was the experience he had acquired on this one expedition. There was a high risk that he would go looking for water and never be able to find her again. And there was also a risk that when he was away, Yonguldye and his warriors would catch up with them, and kill her.
But all he could do was trust in God, and his own judgement, and try to survive.

  Carefully, he rolled her over on to a spread-out blanket. Then he propped up their second blanket on a dry branch, so that it formed a canopy over her head. She lay still, her mouth open, breathing faintly and roughly. God, he thought, how can I leave her? This may be the very last time I see her alive. But I must.

  He remounted his horse, and rode westwards again; turning around from time to time to fix his bearings on the improvised shelter he had made. But after an hour, it was out of sight; and there was nothing but the rippling heat and the mallee scrub and the sky like a punishment above his head.

  He thought of nothing sensible: the heat was too powerful. He rode with his thighs chafing against his saltcaked britches, his hat pulled low over his eyes. He didn’t even have the strength to curse any more. He was sure that the sun was actually driving him mad, and that if he survived this journey it would only be as a lunatic, kicking and gibbering and nagging forever about roasted emu and weeks without water.

  In a wandering, discursive way, he began to wonder what he was actually doing, riding westwards under this pitiless sun looking for water. Surely the most sensible thing to do would be to keep on going. Even if he did manage to find a water-hole, it would take him at least another two hours to ride back, and by then Minil would be dead. She was probably dead already.

  It disturbed him that he could think about Minil so callously. But then it occurred to him that he must be very close to death himself, to be thinking so selfishly about his own survival.

  He peered ahead through the sloping, glistening heat. There were imaginary lakes all around, lakes which could never be reached. He began to think that even when he eventually reached the sea, he would find out that it was nothing but a mirage, and that he would still be riding across dry sand.

  What he didn’t yet know was that he was riding thirty miles too far north to reach the sea, and that he and Minil had entered the eastern extremities of the land which the Aborigines called Bunda Bunda, and which the Europeans would one day christen the Nullarbor Plain; Nullarbor being dog-Latin for ‘no trees’. The plain stretched all the way from Southern Australia, eight hundred miles to Western Australia, treeless, relentlessly flat, and with no running water from one side to the other. In the heat of Christmas Eve, it was more than the human imagination could bear.

 

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