Corroboree

by Graham Masterton

  Winja called back something in return which sounded to Eyre like mockery. He couldn’t understand any of the words, but Winja’s tone was ‘Come on, then, puffed-up one, come and fight if that’s what you’ve walked all this way for.’

  Yonguldye stopped screeching and crossed his arms over his chest. Then he said in broken English—English which Minil must have taught him, ‘You, djanga, have killed many. You too must die.’

  ‘You would have killed me first, Yonguldye. You and Joolonga.’

  ‘Joolonga led you to find me. But now you must die. The story must finish.’

  ‘The story is only a story, Yonguldye. I am not the djanga.’

  Yonguldye shook his head, and all his skulls and his beads shivered as he did so. ‘The message came. I was in Woocalla; two men came from Tandarnya and spoke.’ For a moment he couldn’t think of the words; but at last he said, ‘The djanga has returned, they said. He is here and he will come to find you. The story has come to be.’

  ‘Why do you want to kill me?’ Eyre asked him.

  ‘You must not go back to the land of tinyinlara.’

  ‘But I have not yet told you what is in my head.’

  ‘You kill too many,’ said Yonguldye. ‘In your head is death. I will learn what is in your head when you are killed.’

  ‘So it’s true; you want to eat my brains.’

  ‘The story says that you will give your head. The story must come to be.’

  Eyre lifted his rifle and pointed it straight at Yonguldye’s chest. ‘I am not the djanga. And I am telling you now, unless you go back to where you came from, you and all your warriors, I will shoot you, and kill you, right here, and right now.’

  Yonguldye looked at Eyre with eyes as dull and primaeval as grey creek-washed pebbles. Then he lifted a single finger; and immediately, one of his warriors leaned back, his spear poised in his woomera, and launched it towards Eyre’s head. Eyre caught sight of the flash of movement out of the corner of his eye, and heard the whistling called bimblegumbie, and dropped smartly to one knee, and fired his rifle towards the knot of warriors. The shot was overcharged, and deafeningly loud; and a cloud of blue smoke rolled through the Aborigines like a frightened ghost. One of them cried out, and spun to the dust; and then Eyre was running back towards Winja and Ningina, shouting, ‘Back! Back!’ and waving his arm at them to retreat.

  Winja ran back towards the rocks straight away; but Ningina hesitated. Two spears whistled dangerously close to him; but then Eyre seized his arm and pulled him along after him, into the ambush they had prepared. Winja had already scrambled up on to the rocks and was standing there with his spear drawn back to catch the first of Yonguldye’s men as they came running and whooping after them.

  Eyre leaped up on to the rocks beside him, and picked up the stone-headed club that Ningina had lent him. Yonguldye, startlingly, was right behind him, and swung at him with a kangaroo-bone axe, tearing the leg of his britches and grazing his left calf. Then the rocks were crowded with howling, keening warriors, and a sudden burst of spears clattered down all around them like a hailstorm, followed by racketing stones and tumbling axes.

  Eyre leaped higher up on to the rocks, but Yonguldye climbed up after him, his sharp teeth bared, his face contorted with concentration and anger. His huge emufeather head-dress fluttered and blew in the afternoon wind, and the skulls around his buka set up a shaking, shattering noise, like the death-rattle of a dying man. Carefully, feeling the rocks behind him, Eyre backed away until he was right up against a sheer wall of eroded limestone.

  Yonguldye hit out at him again; once, twice, and the kangaroo-bone axe made a soft whew sound as it flew past Eyre’s arms. Eyre swung back at him; and their weapons jarred and clashed together, and for one moment they gripped each other and wrestled hand-to-hand. Then Eyre let himself drop back against the rock, and as Yonguldye lunged towards him, his axe raised, Eyre pressed his back against the rock to support himself, and kicked out at Yonguldye with both legs. His boots hit the medicine-man hard in the pelvis; and with a desperate shout, Yonguldye fell backwards off the rocks, and tumbled like an overbalancing emu on to the dusty ground. Eyre jumped after him, and struggled astride him, pinning him down. Then he lifted his club threateningly over Yonguldye’s head, and shouted at him, ‘Yonguldye! Listen to me!’

  Yonguldye stared up at him, wild-eyed. Eyre’s heart was galloping, and he felt that he could hardly breathe.

  ‘Call your people off!’ Eyre demanded. ‘Call them off! Tell them to put down their weapons!’

  Yonguldye spat, and struggled, and cursed Eyre in a hissing stream of Wirangu that Eyre began to think would never stop. All around them, Winja men battled with Yonguldye’s warriors; and even as Eyre knelt in the dust, pinning Yonguldye down, a spray of warm blood spattered over them both, and a man shrieked with agony, and fell heavily to the ground close beside them, bleeding and jerking.

  Without any further hesitation, Eyre knocked Yonguldye in the side of the face with his stone club as hard as he could. Yonguldye grunted with pain, and twisted his head away, in case Eyre hit him again.

  ‘Tell your people to drop their weapons!’ Eyre shouted at him. ‘Tell them to stop fighting! Otherwise, damn it, I’ll beat your brains out!’

  Yonguldye hesitated for a moment, and then closed his eyes; and let out a hoarse, commanding roar. It was so harsh and so supernaturally loud that it made Eyre’s head ring; but then he had heard about medicine-men who could simply shout their victims to death. He looked up, and the fighting had suddenly stopped. The Aborigines eyed each other cautiously; and then Yonguldye spoke his command again, more softly this time; and one by one, clubs and spears and fighting boomerangs dropped to the ground.

  Eyre climbed up off Yonguldye’s body, and brushed down his shirt. ‘That’s it.’ he said. ‘That’s the finish of it. No more story. No more coming after me with those kurdaitja shoes. It’s finished, do you understand?’

  Yonguldye was helped to his feet by two of his warriors. He stood and faced Eyre with undisguised malevolence; scowling like Kinnie Gerthe cat-demon, whose single pleasure was to eat men alive. Winja came forward and stood next to Eyre, as protective as before, holding his bloody club raised as an obvious warning that the battle was over; and that Yonguldye’s men should not make any attempt to renew it.

  ‘Are any of your people hurt?’ Eyre asked him.

  Winja said, ‘Ningina has been wounded in the leg, but that is all. We have killed two of theirs.’

  Eyre said to Yonguldye, ‘This is what happens when you try to make a story come true. Men die. This bloodshed is your responsibility.’

  Yonguldye held his hand to his reddened cheek. ‘Truly you are the djanga.’

  No, Yonguldye, I am not the djanga.’

  ‘It is spoken that the true djanga will always deny his real name,’ said Yonguldye, in Wirangu this time. Winja translated as best he could, into his own language.

  Eyre said to Winja, ‘Tell this medicine-man that he must go now and never trouble me again. Tell him that I am not the djanga, but that I will kill anyone who suggests that I am; or comes anywhere near me. Tell him that if he continues to track me, he will meet an extremely sticky end.’

  ‘Stick-ee end?’ frowned Winja.

  ‘Yes. Tell him I will turn him into a grub and eat him for breakfast.’

  Winja explained all this to Yonguldye, shouting to make himself understood in the same way that an English traveller would have shouted at a French douanier. Yonguldye listened with rage and mystification, glaring at Eyre as if he wished that death-spears could fly from his eyes and strike Eyre dead where he stood. At last, with an irritable chop of his hand, he indicated to Winja that he had heard enough. Then he limped forward two or three paces, and inspected Eyre even more closely, his face smeared with sweat-runnelled wilga, his eyes bloodshot.

  ‘You are the djanga of the story even if you will not say so. You are the dead one who has come to give us knowledge. But you will not. Wh
y?’

  ‘Yonguldye, I am not the djanga. I am a perfectly ordinary human being, not a ghastly white spirit from beyond the sunset.’

  ‘You have betrayed us!’ screeched Yonguldye, with spittle flying from his lips. ‘I curse you! I curse you! I curse you!’

  Shaking with anger, he plucked a shell-bladed knife from out of his possum-fur belt, and brandished it under Eyre’s nose. Winja immediately stepped closer, his spear raised towards Yonguldye’s chest, but Yonguldye waved him away again with that same impatient chop. ‘We have waited for your coming for countless years,’ he said, half in English and half in Wirangu. ‘Now you have betrayed us; and left us naked in the face of the white-faced people who would steal our lands and break our fishing-traps and take our women. You have the secret. Why will you not give it to us? Is this a punishment? What have we done?’

  Winja translated as much of Yonguldye’s fulminating speech as he could follow. Eyre listened with apprehension; and with some sadness. There was nothing he could do for Yonguldye. There was nothing he could do for any of the Aborigine people. He was barely surviving himself.

  He said at last, ‘Go, Yonguldye. I will take your message to the white people; and do whatever I can.’

  Yonguldye roared at him in utter frustration and fury. Then, turning the shell-bladed knife towards his own body, he ripped a deep diagonal cut all the way from his left nipple to his right hip, almost cutting the nipple right off. Blood ran down his belly in a bright red curtain, and rivered down his thighs. But then he transferred the knife to the other hand, and cut himself again, slicing a cross from one side of his body to the other.

  The pain of his cuts must have been mortifying; but he threw down his bloody knife and stood facing Eyre with raw, defiance on his face and both fists clenched like a madman. The lower half of his body glistened with running blood, as if he had been wading in it.

  ‘If this is the end of our people; if we are betrayed even by the spirits; then so be it. We will fight to the very end of our existence, and that is the word that you can carry back with you to Ngurunderi.’

  Winja translated a little of this, but very perfunctorily. Winja himself believed that the fight against the white man was already lost; and that Yonguldye was trying to live in a world which had long ago come to an end. He also respected Eyre, and was anxious not to upset him by saying anything slighting about white people, or (if he did happen to be a spirit) about spirits.

  But Eyre approached Yonguldye, trying hard not to look down at his terrible self-inflicted wounds, close enough to shake hands with him, and said, ‘You are a proud and terrible man. You are a great wizard and a great chief. The greatest of all Mabarn Men.’

  Yonguldye stared at him with those dark, unreadable eyes, and said nothing. Out of his shirt pocket, Eyre produced the mana stone which had been given to him by the Aborigine warriors on Hindley Street. With considerable ceremony, he held it out on the open palm of his hand, and offered it to Yonguldye.

  ‘Your people gave me this totem. Now it is imbued with my magic. Let it now be your totem, as a gift from me. I cannot give you any more.’

  Yonguldye swayed. The blood on his body had now begun to congeal; and Eyre could see that the cuts, although gory, were not fatally deep. They had not been an attempt at suicide. Rather, they had been meant as a gesture that Yonguldye could inflict on himself greater pain than anything that Eyre could force him to suffer; that he was master of his own fate.

  Eyre continued to hold out the mana stone, and said, ‘Please.’

  Yonguldye took the stone, and held it up between finger and thumb, turning it over, and examining it, although at the same time never letting his eyes stray very far away from Eyre. At last he slipped the stone into a small bag he was carrying around his waist, and bowed his head.

  ‘The future has now been altered,’ he said. Winja translated this as, ‘from tomorrow, all the days will not be the shape they were expected to be.’ Yonguldye went on, ‘There will be storms. This has been foretold. There will be rain in places where there has never been rain before. The moons which live beyond the horizon will appear whole; instead of being cut up into stars by the giant who watches over them; and they will circle the world. But what these days will hold for my people, that is uncertain. The story did not happen as it was meant to happen. Therefore, everything will be different.’

  Eyre realised that in his anger and his humiliation, Yonguldye was trying to rationalise what had happened. He could not bring himself to believe that Eyre was not the expected djanga after all; because when would a white-faced man ever again cause the death of an Aborigine boy, and come journeying through the outback looking for absolution as Eyre had? Not for years, perhaps not ever, whereas Yonguldye badly needed to believe that his people would learn the magic knowledge of the white people now, and have the strength and the knowledge to stand up for what they believed to be rightfully theirs.

  He was still furious at Eyre; still bitter and grieved about the men who had died; but in spite of his anger he had to accept his defeat at the hands of the djanga, or else he would be unable to believe in the djanga at all, and that would mean despair.

  ‘I will go now,’ he said to Eyre, with terrifying gravity; and still bleeding he turned and beckoned to his warriors. The sand beneath his feet was speckled dark with blood. But without any further ceremony, he limped away towards the east, under the hot mid-afternoon sun. Neither he nor his warriors looked back; and none of them made any attempt either to pick up their weapons or to bury their dead. Let the dead bury their dead. Let the djanga take the responsibility for the havoc he had wrought.

  Ningina came hobbling up. The spear-wound in his thigh was now wound tightly with bloodstained hide. He shaded his eyes and watched the wobbling black figures of Yonguldye and his warriors grow steadily smaller.

  ‘You should have killed that medicine-man,’ he said. ‘You would have been a great hero.’

  ‘No,’ said Eyre. ‘This is not a time for heroes.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Eyre took off his hat. Behind him, there was the pick-pick-pick of digging-sticks, as Winja’s people dug graves for their dead enemies. It was 109 degrees, out here on the treeless plain called Bunda Bunda, and it looked as if the heat had liquefied the whole world. A molten blue sky, and a desert that rippled like the surface of a muddy lake. Through the liquidness, Yonguldye and his men walked and walked and walked, heading towards a new destiny; and leaving littered behind them the remains of their very last dream.

  Thirty-Two

  They journeyed west through the desert, following the kangaroo. Week after week, under skies that were devastatingly blue, living on charred meat and half-cooked lizards and whatever water they were able to suck out of the mud.

  Eyre discarded his soiled and tattered shirt; and his back reddened and peeled and burned and then tanned as dark as wood. He was surprised to see, one morning, the birth of an Aborigine baby, slithering out of its mother’s vulva as pale as a white baby; and he realised then how close to the European races the Aborigines were. Just because they had migrated to this strange desert continent, millions of years ago, and just because they had adapted to heat and drought, and a nomadic way of life, that had not denied them their ancestry, nor their intelligence, nor their racial heritage.

  Eyre, as he rode along with them, thought of the words that Captain Cook had written, only seventy years ago, when he had tried to describe the natives of ‘New-Holland’ to his English readers:

  They may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far happier than we Europeans. The Earth and the sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life, they covet not Magnificent Houses, Household-stuff &c, they live in a warm and fine Climate and so they have very little need of Clothing, for many to whom we gave Cloth left it carelessly upon the Sea beach and in the woods as a thing they had no manner of use for. They think themselves provided with all the
necessarys of Life and that they have no superfluities.

  For Eyre, these weeks of journeying across the land of Bunda Bunda with Winja and his people was like an extraordinary but revelatory dream. He hardly ever thought about Captain Sturt, or Christopher, or even of Charlotte. He was completely preoccupied with hunting kangaroo, with helping to skin and roast whatever game they could find; with digging for water and building fires. After five weeks, he went naked, and tied his trousers around his neck to protect his shoulders from the sun. There seemed to be very little point in being the only dressed-up man in a friendly company of people without clothes. Winja’s women laughed openly at his white bottom; until Winja shouted at them, and threatened to prod them with his spear. Winja still thought a great deal of Eyre; especially after the way he had defeated Yonguldye; and he would not have him insulted.

  Eyre and Minil grew closer all the time; for both of them were discovering the simple truth of survival in the outback; and at the same time the complicated truth of Aborigine beliefs. A love developed between them that no longer required explanations or understanding. It consisted of touches, and close embraces, and looks, and kisses, and of holding each other in the night, when the moon was high and the wind was freezing cold. Sometimes it expressed itself in affectionate silence, when they rode together during the day, with their last solitary packhorse following obediently behind them. Two naked people, a man with a wide-brimmed hat and a girl with a tight kangaroo-skin headband and wild black hair, on horses, on the hottest of all imaginable days. At other times, it expressed itself in violent lovemaking; when Eyre would force Minil on to her back and raise her legs high in the air and lance her and lance her deep into her vagina until she tore at his hair and screamed out loud, regardless of who could hear or who could see.

  It was a life of incendiary passion and unreal tranquillity; when the days and the weeks no longer mattered, and were no longer counted; when Eyre rediscovered his basic thirsts and his fundamental hungers, his throat and his stomach and his penis; but with a force and a dignity that gave new meaning to everything he felt. Nothing could be cruder than to have to squat in the sand, in front of the girl you loved and the people you knew, and excrete. But nothing could be more spiritual than to sit with them around their various wind-blown fires; just before the sun had set across the plain; and offer prayers to the greater Gods who had created the world, and all the abundance that it could offer.