And one day, as was inevitable, a boy came running to tell me that a ship had been sighted. A large ship with sails like clouds. With men climbing up and down the ropes on it like possums. And I was filled with the sudden memory of what it felt like to stand on the deck of a ship, my feet in shoes and heavy clothes upon my body, the wind and salt air around me.
The Bama had known it was coming, the way they knew that the Endeavour was coming, by smoke signals passed to them by other peoples along the coast. They were all watching it carefully, wondering what it might do. Hoping it would sail past them and away.
And I wondered what colour flag it flew. What language might they speak. French or English or Dutch or something else?
Then I wondered if they were truly going to come ashore here. But of course they were. As I had always known that one day they would. They would drop anchor and send ashore a longboat with a few armed men and some sailors. And an officer or two.
And the boy asked me if I was going to go down with the men to watch them from a distance. The way they had watched us first come ashore all those years ago. I looked across at the Captain, who was sleeping in the shade next to me. That tall and stooped old man, nearly as thin as a skeleton. He spent much time asleep these days, his fingers moving and his lips trembling as he voyaged through dream realms.
And I knew exactly what would happen next. For it was a story I had already told.
Garrgiil, a wise man now, came to me and told me that the day I had told him about for so long had come. And I said, ‘Yes. It is come.’
And he asked me if I knew what these men wanted.
‘Nothing good, I am sure,’ I told him.
‘Will you take the Captain with you?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. This was a day I had long prepared for.
‘Do you need help with him?’ he asked.
‘No, thank you,’ I said. ‘You have your own tasks. Do you remember the words?’
He nodded. He would do admirably.
‘Are you sure about this?’ he asked.
‘Most certain,’ I said, as if I had emerged from hours underwater as Gandhaarr had once told me, and could see the many versions of the future before me.
‘Where will you go?’ he asked me.
‘Up into the caves in the mountains,’ I said. ‘Until they are gone.’ Where Cook and I would fulfil our destinies, I now understood. Where he would meld into the landscape and I would be the one to witness it so I could tell the story. The point that everything in both our lives had surely been leading us to.
‘And what if they do not go?’
I knew the answer to that as well. But it was also nothing good.
But I said, ‘Then we will wait for another future than this.’