MARY STARED at the tattered garments in horror; but Adams spread them on the sand and examined them with professional care. After a few moments, he gave a low whistle and a gleam of admiration showed in his pale eyes.
‘Your husband’s quite a man, Mary.’
‘I – I don’t understand.’
Item by item, he pieced out the deductions for her.
‘We lost his tracks just here, remember? He must have crossed the river and hidden himself behind that driftwood over there. He was wounded in the shoulder…’ Mary gave a small gasp of fear as he showed her the rent in Dillon’s shirt, and the brown bloodstains around it. ‘He got the spearhead out, and dropped it in the pool. He probably tore strips of the shirt to bandage himself…’
‘And then?’ There was tension in her voice. ‘What happened then? Why did he leave his clothes?’
Adams laid a restraining hand on her arm.
‘Take it easy, Mary. Let’s think it out in sequence. He would have reached the river in daylight, yesterday afternoon. He would be wounded and weak. He would know that he had no hope in open country by day. What did he do? Settled himself into this place and waited for darkness. We know the myalls looked for him. They didn’t find him, so they slept on the river-bank and waited till sunrise. Lance probably made a break during the middle of the night.’
‘But why without his clothes?’
Adams rubbed a reflective hand over his stubbled chin.
‘I don’t know. It puzzles me. What would you say, Billy-Jo?’
The tracker shrugged.
‘Boss Dillon cut holes in bank. Climb up. Maybe clothes snag on roots. Maybe wet and heavy for sick man. I dunno. Anyway, big mistake.’
‘Why?’
‘Night-time, no clothes, fine. Daytime, hot sun, white man burn up, finish.’
Adams frowned. The thought had occurred to him, but he would have preferred to leave it unspoken.
‘Maybe. Maybe he hoped to work his way down-stream and take to the river again. We’ll know better when we try to pick up his tracks in the morning. At least we know two things – he was alive when he hit the river. He was alive when he left it.’ He turned to Mary with a grin. ‘Now, can we eat, please? I’m hungry.’
His casualness was disarming, even though she knew he was using it only as a gambit to gain thinking time. But that was his right and she was too tired to dispute it. She began ladling out the meal; tinned stew, thick slices of damper – the bushman’s bread, pannikins of coffee laced with condensed milk. While they ate, Menyan stirred and muttered in delirium. Adams got up to force more water and whisky into her mouth and draw the blankets closer around her. He hoped she would last till daybreak. A death in the night would add the final macabre touch to the complex little drama – and Adams, a good policeman, had no taste for theatre.
When the meal was over, they washed the dishes in the river, spread out the blanket-rolls and lay back, heads pillowed on their saddles, smoking a last cigarette. Mary noticed that Adams chose the place between herself and Menyan and that he was lying without a blanket, on his ground-sheet. She offered him one of her own, but he refused it, smiling.
‘I’ve slept colder than this. Hang on to it. You’ll need it before morning.’
‘Let’s share it then.’
‘Bundling’s a risky pastime. I wouldn’t trust myself.’
To which blunt answer she had no adequate reply, so she lay back against the smooth cool leather of the saddle and watched the smoke of her cigarette drift upward towards the pendant stars. After a while Adams said quietly:
‘You’re probably asking yourself why we’re not doing anything about your husband at this moment. I’m asking myself the same question; but I don’t see that there’s anything we can do. There’s a couple of square miles of swampland over there. The grass is higher than a man’s head. We could blunder about all night and find nothing. We could cross and re-cross your husband’s tracks a dozen times without seeing them. Besides, there’s Mundaru and the kadaitja men – they’d scent us like dogs in the dark…’
‘You don’t have to justify yourself to me, Neil. I trust you.’
‘Thanks, Mary.’
Her face was shadowed, so that he could not read it, but when she spoke again, her voice was shaky.
‘I – I’ve learnt a lot today. Don’t judge me too harshly. I’m mixed up, lost. But I’m still trying to go through the right motions. It’s the best I can do.’
‘You’re doing fine, Mary.’ His voice was gruff but oddly gentle. ‘Go to sleep now. Everything will look different in the morning. Good night.’
‘Good night, Neil.’
He saw her roll over on her side, draw the blanket up around her shoulders and before his cigarette was finished the steady rhythm of her breathing told him she was asleep.
Now that he was free of the problem and the provocation of her presence, free too of the need for constant movement and action, he could begin to pick up the jig-saw pieces and try to fit them into a coherent pattern…
Lance Dillon first. A dour, driving man, tackling a problem bigger than his expectations, gambling beyond his collateral. A man not built for sympathy, who would either tame his land or break himself – but who had not yet learnt the elementary lesson of taming a woman. This was the tally up till twelve hours ago.
Now…? A man cool enough to take a twelve-inch barb out of his own body, quick-thinking enough to find himself a lair in crocodile water, bold enough – or fool enough – to pit himself naked against the naked land and the naked primitives who lived in it. Where was he now? Half-way home, down the river valley? Impaled on a killer’s spear, like a moth on a pin? Or crouched out there in the swamp-flats, dumb with weakness or terror? The betting was all in favour of the last possibility.
If he were dead the kites would be circling over his remains, but in the last hour of sunlight they had seen no carrion birds. Alive then… But how long could he stay alive? And where could he hide from Mundaru? If he were thinking straight, the swamp was still the best place. But leave him there till daybreak – what would be his condition after twelve hours naked in the sun, two nights of wounds and possible poison?
Let him survive that too. Then ask could he survive the shock of financial ruin and the loss of his wife? Or perhaps he had already faced them, and found them both bearable. But if you, Neil Adams, had bundled with his wife tonight could you face him alive – or, worse, could you face him dead?
Leave him then, a moment, and think about his wife, resentful, discontented, afraid – hungry too, perhaps – yet with a core of honesty and courage that keeps her going through the motions of loyalty if not of love. She attracts you; galls you like a pebble in your shoe. She is frank about her unhappiness – a common symptom of the spring itch. But she is equally frank in blaming herself for it – and how does that weigh in the cynical balance of experience?
You’ve never asked more of a woman than a happy tumble in the hay and a good-bye without any tears. Why should you care what goes on behind the brooding eyes of this one? She offered you a blanket. Was she promising more? When you refused it, were you afraid of yourself, or of her? If Dillon is dead, will you want to take over his wife? Or do you want to see first what is the truth of her? When you find Dillon with his eyes pecked out – or babbling on the edge of the last delirium will you be brutal enough to stand and watch how she reacts?
An untimely thought, perhaps. An uncomfortable indication of what years of solitary living can make of a passionate man. Push this one away too. Turn a policeman’s eye on the drama which is even now being played out on the grass-flats. There is a rapist-killer out there. By law he belongs to you and you must take him. If you fail and the kadaitja men kill him, you must visit vengeance on them and the tribe – even though you know this will be a legality and not justice.
That’s where Dillon complicates the issue. A tribal rape, a tribal murder, you can treat at your own discretion. Your report can say as little or as much as you choose and few will be any the wiser. But with a white man murdered, it is a matter for Headquarters, for ministerial reports, for questions on the floor of Parliament. Your career is at stake. Are you prepared to jeopardise it for the sake of an abstract justice? Twenty-four hours ago life was very simple. But now there’s a woman in it and you can’t read this one from a book of rules…
Suddenly, out of the darkness, he heard the cry of a whip-bird, twice repeated. He sat up, every sense alert. It was night-time and the bush-birds were roosting. The black tracker sat up too and Adams stepped over Mary’s body to squat beside him.
Billy-Jo’s dark eyes rolled in his head. He pointed out across the water.
‘Kadaitja men, boss.’
Adams nodded.
‘I wonder if they’ve found him yet?’
The tracker shook his head emphatically.
‘Not yet. When find him, hear Tjuringa – bull-roarer.’
‘But they know we’re here. Will they still use it?’
‘Sure, boss. Kadaitja magic stronger than white man. Tjuringa make spirit-song for death.’
‘We’ll move in when we hear it. We sleep in turns, an hour at a time. You sleep first. I’ll wake you.’
‘Good night, boss.’
He tipped his hat over his eyes, stretched himself under the blankets, and was asleep in two minutes.
The whip-bird called again, and this time it was answered by the squawk of a cockatoo and the honk of a swamp goose. The cockatoo cry seemed to be the closest of all – down-stream and near the river-bank. Adams picked up the rifle, loaded it and hugging the shadows, began to work his way down towards the ford where he and Billy-Jo had crossed the river earlier in the afternoon.
When he reached it, he stepped in, planting his feet delicately one before the other, so that no splash disturbed the whispered rhythm of the current. It took him ten minutes to cross, and when he reached the other side he wormed his way up the bank and squatted in the shelter of a big thorn bush. The bird-cries were on his left, more frequent now. The man making the cockatoo call was very near the river fringe.
Adams waited, his heart thumping, holding the rifle so that the barrel was covered by his arm, lest the glint of moonlight on the metal betray him to the hunter. Time passed with agonising slowness – five minutes, ten – then the kadaitja man came into view. He was a tall buck, daubed from forehead to knee with ceremonial patterns, between which the sweaty sheen of skin gleamed in the pale light. He moved with a swift, shuffling gait, favouring the right foot, and when he came closer Adams saw that his shins and his feet were covered with parrot feathers and kangaroo fur. In his right hand he carried three spears and a throwing-stick, in his left a short club, carved in totem patterns.
Adams was not a superstitious man. He had lived a long time in the outback. But the sight of the painted man woke in him the old atavistic terror of the unknown. Death had many faces and this was one of them. He held his breath as the kadaitja man came abreast of him and passed on, his feathered feet soundless in the powdery dust. Twenty yards ahead he halted, at the sound of the whip-bird call. Then he turned aside, parted the tall grass stalks and disappeared. Adams waited a few moments longer, then eased himself out of his cramped position and slid down the bank to the ford.
Half-way across it, he heard Mary’s cry, a long hysterical scream of pure terror. Heedless now of the noise, he splashed through the last twenty yards of water and went running to her along the sand.
Mundaru, restless on the border of sleep, heard the scream, and the marrow clotted in his bones. He knew what it was: the spirit essence of Menyan, haunting the place where he had killed her, because there was no one to perform the ceremonies of singing her to rest. She would be looking for him now, eyeless in the night, ranging over the swamp. She would not be alone. The ‘wingmalung’ would be with her – the malignant ones who strike illness into the bodies of those who neglect their debts to the departed.
He was lost now, without recourse. He had heard the calls of the kadaitja men, but he had counted on time to find the white man before they came to kill him at sunrise. Now he knew that even this hope was gone. There was no escape from the dead, no remedy against the malice of the ‘wingmalung’ except the tribal magic and from this he was forever cut off.
The terror grew on him like a palsy. Death was all around him. But even against the terrors of the spirit world, the primal instinct of self-preservation asserted itself. Menyan’s spirit voice had come from the river. The kadaitja men were at his back. But all of them were still a distance away. If he ran, he might gain a little time – even though everything he knew told him he could not escape them utterly.
He picked up his spears, and bending double, began to work cautiously through the grass, away from the river, away from the kadaitja men. His limbs were cramped, his belly knotted, his entrails full of water. He moved slowly and with great effort as though he were hauling against a heavy load. He knew what it meant. Magical influences were at work on him, draining his life fluid, dragging him back.
He fought against them savagely, and after a while they seemed to grow less, although he knew this was an illusion. They were still there, still potent.
Eastward the moon rose higher in the sky and its radiance filtered through the mesh of fibres, lighting up his course. But even this held no joy for Mundaru. Menyan was named for the moon. The moon was an eye spying out his movements, reading them back to the spirit essence and the ‘wingmalung’.
He dropped to his knees and began to crawl, close to the ground, as Lance Dillon had done before him. He was a primitive without understanding of irony. He was doomed and beyond the temptation of triumph. But a faint hope sprang up inside him when, after an hour’s progress, he found that he was crawling in a set of tracks made by another man – a man bleeding, vomiting sometimes and leaving scraps and snippets of himself on the razor-edges of the grass leaves.
Billy-Jo was piling a small mound of sand over the body of Menyan, the moon-girl. Neil Adams was sitting on a blanket, cradling Mary in his arms, soothing her like a child after a nightmare. Her shirt was stained with blood, her eyes stared, her whole body was shaken with rigors. The words tumbled out of her in disjointed narrative.
‘…Asleep and dreaming…I seemed to hear a cry. When I woke up, she was lying across me…her face on mine. She…she must have died just at that moment… It was terrible…
She clung to him, hiding her face against his breast as if to blot out the memory.
‘Easy, girl…easy. It’s over now.’
‘Don’t leave me again, Neil! Please don’t leave me!’
‘I won’t.’
‘…Billy-Jo was down by the river. I thought you’d both left me… I screamed and…’
‘I know…I know. Now forget it, like a good girl. Did you bring any clean clothes?’
‘There’s a shirt in my saddle-bag, but this cardigan’s the only one I have.’
He laid her down on the blanket, found the shirt and then peeled off his own cardigan and handed it to her.
‘Get out of those things. I’ll rinse them in the river.’
But when she tried to take them off her hands would not obey and her fingers fumbled helplessly at the fastenings. Adams knelt beside her and undressed her to the waist. She shivered as the cold air struck her and he drew her white body against him for warmth, while he buttoned on the clean shirt and drew the heavy cardigan over her head. She surrendered herself like a child to the small intimate service, and Adams was glad of the dark that hid his own face from her. If love were anything but a fiction of the marriage-brokers, he was close to it now in this rare moment of tenderness and pity.
Billy-Jo came ambling back from the crude obsequies and Adams tossed him the bloodstained clothes to wash. He tried to get Mary to lie down and sleep again, but she held to him desperately, and after a while he lay down beside her on the blanket, with her head pillowed on his arm and her arm flung twitching across his chest. He stroked her hair, and talked to her: soft tales of the island men, from Macassar and Koepang, who traded along the coast in the old days, quaint ribaldries from the miners’ camps and the bullock-trains, legends of the dream-people.
Little by little the panic drained out of her, her body relaxed, her breathing settled into the easy rhythm of sleep. For a long time he lay wakeful, her hair brushing his lips, her breast rising and falling against his own. Then, finally, the cold crept into his bones; he huddled against her for warmth and they bundled like lovers under the same blanket, while Billy-Jo paced the river-bank and listened for the bull-roarers and the song of death.
During the night the last wind dropped. Moonlight lay placid on river and plain and the ramparts of the Stone Country. The glacial cold of the desert crept across the swamp-land.
The cold was a trial to the kadaitja men. They were accustomed to going naked, night and day, but at night they slept with fires at their bellies and their backs, with the camp dogs curled beside them and their women-folk lending them the warmth of their bodies. This night of solitary, hungry walking was a ritual pain, another symbol of the sacred character of their mission. They must endure it until the cycle had been completed with the death of Mundaru.
The moonlight and the still air were other symbols – proof that the magic of Willinja was working in their favour. When the moon was high the man with the whipbird voice called them together and they converged on him accurately, although he was hidden from their sight. When they were all assembled, he had them hoist him on their shoulders, so that he stood, dark and massive in the sky, like a man walking on a moonlit sea.
For a long time he stood there, the light playing on his daubed body, quartering the grassland with his sacred spear, scanning every quadrant with eyes made keener by the aura of power within which he moved.
The whole country was wrapped in a silver dream. The swamp was flat as ice; the tree-boles were grey sentinels against the sky-line; their foliage drooped motionless against the stars. The grass was an unbroken carpet from the river to the lagoon and away to the dark ridges.
No bird sang. No animal stirred. Only the frogs and the crickets made a mystic chorus, punctuated now and then by the distant howl of a dingo and the haunting cry of a mopoke. The kadaitja man waited and watched while his companions grunted and braced themselves under his feathered feet.
Finally he saw the thing he had been expecting. Half a mile away, the grass was stirring as if a little wind were running through it, or an animal were nosing its way through the undergrowth. But the kadaitja man knew that the animal was a man and that his name was Mundaru. He knew more – that the magic of Willinja was working and drawing the buffalo man towards a sacred place, where the Tjuringa stones were hidden in a deep cave at the roots of a bottle tree and where the painted poles stood weathering round the leaf-covered entrance.
Before he reached it, they would take him. And when the spirit snake had been planted in his body, they would drive him towards it, so that he would die in the shadow of the power he had flouted.
It was enough. It was time to go. They lowered him back into the pit of grasses, and he told them where they must walk and how quickly, to come up with Mundaru at the first light of the new sun.
Some time in the small hours of the morning, Lance Dillon woke, cramped, chattering and agonised, but lucid for the first time in many hours. The place in which he found himself was strange to him. The ground was hard and pebbly and dotted with small tussocks of coarse grass. When he turned his head painfully from side to side, he could see the shapes of stunted mulga trees, white and skeletal, under the moon. Ahead lay a low, tufted ridge of limestone, at whose foot was a thick clump of trees. When he tried to look back to see how far he had travelled from the grass-land a spasm of agony shot through his shoulder, and he lay flat on the harsh ground trying to recover himself.
He knew very well that the lucidity was only temporary, a trough in the wave-like pattern of the fever. He must hold to it as long as he could. In the bleak radiance of the moon he saw how far he had strayed from the river and how his last hope of rescue had dwindled to nothing. It surprised him that he was not more afraid – that he was even relieved to be absolved from further effort and agony. The most he need do was dispose himself to die as comfortably as possible.
Many times in the years of his maturity he had been troubled by the question: ‘What would I do if I were to lose this and this – my hope, my ambition, my wife? How would I react, if tomorrow a doctor told me I had only six months, six weeks, a week to live?’ Now, in this brief interval of reason, the answers were plain to him. The hardest thing to accept was the inevitability of pain and loss and death. Before one accepted there were the haunted nights when one lay awake thinking of money and overdrafts, and bank managers and the wise faces of the bar-room prophets who knew all about bankruptcy except what it did to the innocent victim.
There were the bitter days when one was too proud to ask for a kiss or a word of understanding, the silent evenings when a man and a woman sat together in a room, yet in heart a million miles apart. There were the hours when they lay a foot apart in bed, each waiting for the other to make the first gesture of reconciliation – and finally slide dumbly into sleep.
And when one day, the seed of death was planted in the body, there was the racking fight to dislodge it – the fight he had just endured and which had brought him to this place – waterless, barren, a hundred yards from the limestone ridges. One had to submit in the end, but once the submission was made there was calm, the calm of the silver age, the last quiet time before the lights flickered out altogether.
One more effort was demanded of him – to drag himself the final hundred yards into the shadow of the trees. Once there, he could compose himself decently in the shade and wait for death.
He raised his head again and sighted on his target a large bottle tree whose bloated trunk stood out from all the others in the clump. This would be his lodestar, the last goal of the last journey in the life of Lance Dillon. Summoning all his strength, he began to drag himself over the shaly ground towards it.
Every few yards he had to stop and rest, feeling the fever-wave rising to extinguish the fire of reason. He would lie flattened from face to foot on the pebbles, weak, gasping and waiting for the mists of weakness to subside; then he would go on, heedless of the sharp stones that raked his belly and his chest into running wounds. Each time he moved, he took a new sight on the bottle tree, and as he came closer he saw, ranged in a semi-circle before it, painted poles, some flattened like palm-leaves, some tall as maypoles, others hollow and thick as a small tree. Between them the ground was piled thick with fallen leaves.
Dillon had seen the like of them before many times. They indicated a sacred place: sometimes a burial-ground where the dead were stored in hollow palm-trunks, after their flesh had rotted away on platforms in the bush, sometimes a repository of sacred objects. The sight of it reminded him of the myalls who were coming to kill him. It was a casual reminder, tinged with irony. It was well that they should approach him with respect, walking over holy ground. Perhaps the ground might be too holy and they would fear to come to him – but he would still die and they could squat and watch him, just outside the painted poles.
His last halt was only five yards from the edge of the ring. The bottle tree lay perhaps another five beyond it and the intervening space was a carpet of dry leaves. He wanted to reach the tree, because its knotted, bulbous trunk would give him a back-rest, and he had the idea that he wanted to sit upright to watch the dawn and the coming of his killers. A bushman’s caution told him that the carpet of leaves might well hide venomous snakes, but a second reflection urged him forward. A snake-bite might finish him quickly – truncate the final agony to a manageable limit.
He crawled foot by foot over the last rough ground and into the dead leaves. There was a kind of pleasure in their touch on his scarred and naked skin. There was a dusty aromatic scent about them, as if an essence of life still lingered. He wondered whether anything of himself would linger after the final dissolution.
The tree was only ten feet away now, and he was pushing towards it through leaves as deep as his face, when without warning, the ground gave way beneath him and he felt himself rolling over and over into blackness.
Mary Dillon woke to moonlight on her face and the warmth of Adams’s body against her own. His breathing was deep and regular, and under the rough texture of his shirt she could hear the strong beating of his heart. Her head was still pillowed on his arm and she felt the stubble of his cheek on her forehead, just below the hairline. His free arm lay slack over her body and the dead weight of it held her to him like a bond.
The last mist of sleep still clung to her and she surrendered herself to the comfort of his presence. She had slept three years in the marriage bed with Lance Dillon, but it was longer than she cared to remember since they had lain like this, relaxed, content, with passion a whisper away, yet dormant and unprovoked. It was a sour comedy that a day’s ride and ten minutes of terror had brought her to this point with Neil Adams, while three years of contract and companionship with her husband had taken her a lifetime away from it.
Whose fault was it – Lance’s or her own? Whose fault was this moment of dangerous propinquity, when she shared the same blanket with a man who was not her husband. The love with which she had entered marriage had worn perilously thin under the chafing of time and circumstance. What drew her to Neil Adams was of new strong growth, hard still to define by name, harder still to deny, untested. Both situations carried a measure of guilt, but a greater one of accident and inevitability. In both the same question cried for an answer: where did she go from here?
Neil Adams stirred, muttering in his sleep, and his arm fell away from her. Carefully, so as not to waken him, she eased herself up to a sitting position and looked about her. The moonlit river flowed placidly through the night, where the shadows broke, the sand and rock ledges lay silver to the sky, and fifty yards away Billy-Jo stood, a black sentinel staring across the river towards the hidden chorus of the bull-frogs.
As if for the first time she saw the other face of the hated land – not hostile, but passive, not harsh, but empty and hungry for the touch to transfigure it to fruitfulness. What she was seeing now was what Lance had seen, in one mutation or another, and what he had tried vainly to communicate to her. In the first flush of revelation, it seemed she could get up and walk alone through the vastness without fear of man or bird or beast.
Lance had urged it on her many times, telling her that there were no wild beasts in the Territory and that even the wild nomads lived in order and peace, so long as their beliefs and customs were respected.
Then hard on the heels of the flattering illusion came the realisation that hardly a mile away was being enacted a drama of pursuit and killing, in which her own husband was one of the victims. As if to emphasise the pathetic fallacy, from far to the west there came the long mourning howl of a dingo. From the east another answered, then another and another, until the night was filled with a dreary graveyard chant, rising and falling like wind in the vacant air.
She shivered and slid back under the blanket. At the same moment Neil Adams opened his eyes. Their faces brushed. His arms went round her and the waste-land howling was hushed by his first whispered words.