He was born of two worlds. Mum was a Yolngu beauty, a dancer. Dad was a ranger, son of an officer, forbidden to love her. His mother’s hands, his father’s eyes, his skin a blend of both, just pale enough in a bind if he spoke English carefully.
His hands had always been strong. Skilled. Gifted, his aunties said, his hands made to tell stories, to dip into the stream of dreaming and bring the mysteries into being.
Stolen, his family dispersed, his father sent back to the Home Country. Without his size, he’d have had nothing at all, but shoulders like this matched to hands like these found work as a roustabout, managing the sheep round shearing time. A brutal job, paid half what it was worth, his thick nose and wooly brow enough sign of his heritage to keep him from rising to anything better.
And so he accepted his lot. Made himself the best in his class, until his strength and his calm themselves became a threat, until his mere existence made other men—white men—nervous.
A slur. A fight. A lie, and the man who lied was English-born, and so Cary was given a choice. Prison then the curtailed life of a man who’d done hard time, or obedience.
“They gave me a notebook and a heavy stick and a badge with a number on it. Called me a corrections officer. Fancy way of saying bounty hunter. I went where they sent me and took who they wanted and if I did a lot of damage in the taking, it was in service of the law. But it made me sick to my stomach. It’s one thing to bring in a bushranger who’d been robbing mail coaches. It’s another to track down a man you used to know, put him in irons and throw him in jail all because he stole a side of bacon from a farmer’s wife to keep his family from starving.”
“That’s why you took work as a guide,” Jaime said.
“It felt cleaner,” Cary replied said in the same soft drone in which he’d told his story. “Instead I brought the poison with me.”
“You’ve come here to make amends.”
His voice dropped, the subterranean grind of stone on stone. “And yet look what I’ve done to you.”
“You’ve kept me safe.”
“I should have let you go.”
“You had good cause not to.”
“Are you trying to forgive me?”
Jaime rolled to face him though he could no more see Cary in the dark tent than on any other night. “I already did. This is more. This is me wishing you’d forgive yourself.”
“What’s the good in that?”
“I’d ask what’s the good in carrying around all that weight. If you wish to be kinder in life, you might practice by being kinder to yourself.”
“Hm.” He fell silent, save for the gentle wheeze of his breath. The crew had turned in and the night was very still, and it occurred to Jaime that he had never shared a bed with another soul until knowing Cary. Not even in hospital, though other patients had endured all manner of indignities in the crowded wards. Perhaps his mother had held him while he was a babe, before her death at sea. A death he’d been told was impossible.
“You still cold?” Cary murmured when Jaime shuddered.
“No. Just…sad.”
“Don’t pity me.”
“I have none to spare from pitying myself. Cary, I don’t want to die here. Not for that spiteful shit Sandover.”
“I won’t let that happen.”
“It might not be up to you.”
“Jaime…what did you see?”
“Of the…creature? Very little. I was too busy swimming for my life.”
“We ought to feed it you-know-who,” Cary murmured, and it sounded like he was smiling.
“Be our luck it’d spit him out.”
“Reckon he’s nothing but skin and bones under all that lace and lavender.”
“And bile, don’t forget the bile.”
Biting back a laugh, Cary snorted, and then Jaime could not help himself, and they laughed as quietly as they could until his stomach ached. Despite the day, despite the cold and the danger they faced tomorrow. Comrades in arms, sent to martyr themselves for some grand cause.
“Bless you, Cary. I count on you more than you know.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I’ve had so few friends in life. I’ve learned not to rely on anyone. You can only be betrayed so many times before it’s not worth the bother.”
“Jaime…”
“Hush. Just know that you’re my friend. I have faith in you. I know you’ll do all you can to protect me.”
“I will.”
“I know. I know you will.”
“You’re the bright star on my horizon. The one good thing left in my life. I won’t let you down.”
The morning dew had scarcely dried from the grass when Sandover ordered them back to the lake. Midday had done little to warm the water, so Jaime supposed it made no difference when he dove.
“Too bad we got no bear grease,” Patrice said, trailing his paddle to turn the canoe.
“To feed that thing?”
“No, for you. That’s what I heard, get all greasy before you get in, so the water doesn’t stick to you so.”
“And that works?”
“Beats me. I hate swimming.” Whistling a snatch of song, he resumed paddling.
Jaime peered at the water. Summoning the repelling energy he had used in that hotel in Toronto to keep his hand dry, he dipped his fingers into the water. Drew it out again, the droplets beading on his skin but not wetting it. Emboldened, he knelt on the board and dipped his whole hand in then withdrew it: nothing, his skin dry to the touch and glassy feeling. If he could sustain that across his whole body he’d stay much warmer.
Sandover was resplendent in pale green, his tricorn sporting a preposterous plume which kept striking other people in the face. He minced across the raft to where Jaime was disrobing. “Alors, Mr. Skye, have you recovered your senses sufficiently to speak of yesterday?”
The air seemed to thicken as Cary stepped nearer, glaring at Sandover as though he hoped he’d catch fire. Jaime wished much the same.
“I was following the edge of this platform we’re moored on when I came to a gap,” he told Sandover. “A crevice in the rocks, quite deep. I smelled something like that thing of Eckhart’s—”
“You are able to smell underwater?”
“I am. I decided to come back, and when I swam past the crevice again, something was stirring in the bottom.
“What did you see?”
A stream of noxious bubbles, a pale, reaching arm, an explosive splash and an echoing undersea wave that had blown him to the surface. “I don’t know. Things happened very quickly. It was churning the water terribly. I really had no thought but getting back to the raft.” Yet here he was, about to face the monster again.
“You will descend this crevice,” Sandover said with a pointed smile. “I wish to know what it was you saw.”
Dressed down to his shirt, another of the glowing spheres in its harness slung around his chest, Jaime stood at the edge of the raft and thought of that same subtle shield spreading up his hands, his arms, across his shoulders and down his back. Up his spine and around his forehead and down, a slow prickling heat which built across his skin until his whole body glistened with glassine shimmer.
“You right?” Cary asked, appearing beside him. “What’ve you done to your skin?”
“Can you see it?”
“I can. Dunno about them. What is it?”
“A substitute for bear grease.” Giddy, he grinned at Cary then boldly stepped clear of the edge of the raft and dropped into the water. He swam forward at once to not pop up under the raft. The cold didn’t nip so fiercely as yesterday, and with something approaching optimism he struck out for the crevice, the bubbles of his last breath streaming behind him.
Enveloped in the shimmering field, he glided sleekly through the water, the pressure diffused, as if a soft, heavy blanket surrounded him. Sooner than expected he had reached the crevice. The smell was worse than yesterday even through the field. Clumps of half rotted weed washed back and forth on the rocky plateaus to either side of the gap. A good six feet wide at the top, the ridged limestone walls narrowed as they dropped.
Jaime sank lower, until he floated just above the rocks. Rather than the usual growth of small plants, the flights of minnows he had seen nearer the raft, the rocks here were covered in bones. Mainly the tiny bones of fish, here and there the skull of a bird or pelvis of a small animal.
His eagerness waning rapidly, he approached the gap with care, jerking back as a stream of tiny bubbles came swirling from below. One of the clots of weed had been carried closer by the gentle rock of the water, a different push and pull than the insistent suck of ocean waves. The weed was blackish-brown with long pulpy tendrils that swayed above a mat of lesser leaves, and as the water carried it even closer he kicked upwards to let it roll past rather than let it flop against his leg. The wake of his movement stirred the pulpy fronds, which stiffened like the trembling leaves of a touch-me-not plant. Except this was no plant, as the pulpy appendages abruptly lay flat, exposing a fleshy mouth-like slit surrounded by a ring of coiled, snakelike arms.
If there was breath in his lungs he would have screamed aloud. He kicked up harder, his horror multiplying as he surveyed the swarm of the loathsome creatures converging on the place he had been. One of the nearer now levered its crawling body off the rock, winnowing through the water briefly as if leaping at him. Sandover be damned, Cary be spared, but Jaime wasn’t going any nearer that--
Fixated by the peculiar creatures swarming over the rock, he had turned his back on the crevice, and so he never knew what it was that grabbed him. Only that he was suddenly being violently dragged by a crushing grip around his right ankle, the cold weight of the water collapsing upon him as his spell fell apart.