THIRTY

‘Thirsty work,’ Matthew told Charlton, ‘I’m beginning to understand what you’ve been talking about.’

It was their fifth day on the Namoi River, if you could call a succession of green-scummed pools separated by sand drifts a river. At least it was water, the only water in all that thirsty landscape.

‘We’ll see worse before we’re finished,’ Charlton told him, determined as always to make the worst of the weather prospects.

‘How far does this river go?’

‘Joins the Barwon about a hundred miles northwest from here. It’s another hundred and fifty miles from there to Fort Bourke.’

Matthew reined in his horse and looked about him. Everywhere drought was tightening its grip upon the land. Between patches of dusty mulga scrub the surface of the parched plains was broken into a crazy pavement of widening cracks, each plate of sun-dried mud curled at the edges like the scales of a gigantic lizard. In the distance dark columns rose tall against the clear sky as the hot wind raised the sand in spinning whirlwinds.

‘Without this river we’d be dead,’ Matthew said.

‘That’s why we came this way,’ Charlton told him. ‘We’ll be right for a while yet.’

Certainly the cattle and horses seemed in reasonable shape although away from the river the grazing was almost nonexistent.

‘As long as there are waterholes I suppose we’ll survive,’ Matthew said but it was a worry all the same. They had so far to go. What would happen if the pools dried up?

Riding ahead of the herd the two men came across a waterhole that was several hundred yards in length.

‘We’ll rest the herd here for a day or two,’ Matthew said. ‘You and me’ll push on and see what the water’s like ahead. I want to be sure there’s enough to carry us through to the Barwon.’

‘Always assuming there’s water in the Barwon,’ Charlton said.

‘There was enough for that steamer.’

‘That was back in February.’

Matthew was impatient with Charlton’s determined pessimism. ‘We’ll take a look anyway. At least that way we’ll know.’

 

Aggie was riding in the waggon with Nance. They had got on well from the first, something that Nance certainly hadn’t expected. When she had first heard that Matthew had invited Aggie to join the drive she had been jealous; jealous of her position as the only woman, jealous above all that Matthew, to whom she had offered herself back at Ballarat, should have done such a thing.

What’s she got that I haven’t got? she had thought, but later common sense had prevailed. She and Matthew, for better or worse, had passed each other by. Her future was with Git.

It hadn’t been difficult; it wasn’t as though she had ever loved Matthew. Besides, she had quickly found that Aggie was easy to like.

‘Was it because of Matthew you came on the drive?’ Aggie asked in her blunt way: she had been intrigued to discover that Nance had known Matthew for a long time.

‘I’m with Git,’ Nance told her.

‘I know you’re with Git. But if you knew Matthew back in Victoria—’

‘That was just a coincidence,’ Nance said to shut her up but Aggie was not shut up so easily.

‘It’s why I’m here.’

Nance looked at her curiously. ‘Because of Matthew?’

‘And to see the country.’

Nance laughed. The waggon creaked and complained as it bumped over the stones and sun-baked earth. ‘You’ve already seen all the country there is to see around here, I reckon.’

The fact was Aggie hadn’t known what to expect when she set out, from the drive, from Matthew, least of all from herself. She had told Matthew it was to see the country but that was rubbish. Face it, girl, she told herself, you came to be with Matthew. But with him in what way? Would she have fought Matthew off if he had come to her bed the first night out? Or welcomed him?

She knew the answer to that, too, but the question had never arisen because Matthew had not come near her. She should have been relieved but was not. Am I so unattractive? she asked herself crossly.

Aggie looked about her. The vast plain had a beauty of its own, particularly at sunset when the horizontal rays of the sun kindled red, ochre and blue tints across the landscape. Then the string of lowing cattle, the bunch of horses, the figures of the riding men glowed in the light as they pressed slowly onward through a cloud of golden dust. At night the darkness was shot through by an infinity of stars that kindled silver glints on the leaves of the bushes and provided a serene backdrop to the outlines of the men gathered about the campfires. Even the succession of pools they passed had a beauty of their own: the green waters like jewels in the yellow sand of the creek bed, the trunks of gum trees white as bones pointing to the brilliant sky.

On the far horizon the columns of wind-driven sand were on the move. Aggie watched as they merged and began to boil higher and higher in the air.

‘Look at that cloud,’ she said.

Nance turned her head to look where she was pointing. ‘It’s a sand storm.’

The cloud grew rapidly as they watched it, its shadow looming over the plain. A breath of hot air, gritty with dust, blew over them.

‘It’s coming this way.’ Aggie looked about her. Fifty yards away Matthew and Charlton had their backs to the threatening cloud as they rode side by side through the twisted, blackened scrub. The rest of the team was busy with the cattle. ‘We should tell them,’ Aggie said.

‘They must surely have seen it for themselves,’ Nance said.

‘The day I take it for granted a man knows something better than I do will be a day to see,’ Aggie said, jumping down from the waggon. ‘Hey Matthew …’ At the sound of her powerful voice the men turned in her direction. She pointed at the cloud. ‘Sand!’ she yelled.

The roiling red-brown curtain had grown to cover half the sky. It looked no more than five miles away and was bearing down on them at the speed of a galloping horse. Sunlight mixed with dark bands of shadow reflected off its swirling surface. The voice of the wind, faint at first, grew in volume. It filled their ears with a banshee howling that deepened to a roar and drowned the bellowing of the frightened cattle. Everywhere men were riding to and fro in a frenzied but futile endeavour to prevent the herd from stampeding. They had no chance. With the earth shaking before the approaching storm, the beasts turned and fled. Aggie had seconds in which to see Nance trying frantically to unharness the team from the waggon before all sensation was swallowed up in a cauldron of heat, screaming wind and driven sand. The storm fell upon them.

 

Heat. Pain. After what seemed hours of apocalyptic noise, silence. Aggie stirred cautiously beneath the blanket of sand. The stillness itself was menacing. In the overwhelming silence the hiss of the sand as she dragged herself blinking into the sunlight was like an avalanche. Her hair was full of sand. Her lips, the corners of her eyes, her skin were crusted with it. She shook herself, drawing a deep breath into lungs that had seemed too long deprived of air, tested her limbs cautiously for evidence of injury—nothing—and looked about her at a landscape as unfamiliar as the surface of the moon.

Brown sand blanketed the landscape as far as Aggie could see. The harsh surface of the rocks was buried in it. Here and there contorted branches of mulga scrub thrust through the cover like the fingers of drowning men; otherwise all identifying landmarks were swept clean. Even the pools of water between the shrunken riverbanks were gone. As far as she could see nothing stirred. Aggie was alone in a wilderness of dry sand without food or water or companions.

 

Matthew spurred his horse frantically along the riverbed. Scattered across a couple of miles of country the rest of the team was looking for strays but Matthew was searching for something a lot more important than a few cows. Aggie was still missing and although reason told him she could not be far away his mind would not relinquish images of her choking and helpless, buried beneath a shroud of sand. A knock on the head, that was all it would take. Enough to stun her. The sand, seeping into her mouth and nose, into her lungs while she lay helpless, would quickly do the rest.

He came to the top of a dune and reined in, staring about him. No sound. No movement. Somewhere behind him he could hear the bellowing of cattle, the yip and yell of the boys as they rounded them up, but for the moment he was not interested in that. He stared down the flank of the dune, up the further slope, but nothing stirred. In every direction the sand stretched away, silent and inviolate. She could be anywhere. All he could do was carry on searching.

He rode on, more slowly now as he realised the impossibility of the task. If she were buried there would be no way of finding her before …

He would not permit himself to think about befores and afters.

Please let nothing have happened to her, he pleaded silently. Please, please …

A corner of his mind acknowledged his astonishment at his own depth of feeling. He had wanted her to come, of course he had, he felt good knowing she was with them, but to feel like this. It was something new and entirely unexpected. Perhaps not entirely new. He had known such feelings once before, at Mount Alexander when the miner had come and told him something had happened back at the tent. He had spurred his horse then, too, knowing with a sick certainty that something terrible and irrevocable had happened. But that was different, he told himself. That was Janice. I loved Janice. He had told himself he hadn’t but that had been a lie. He had loved her enough to make sure he never fell so heavily for anyone again. So why was he feeling like this? He refused to think any more about it. What he felt did not matter. What mattered was finding Aggie alive and unharmed. Heart pounding sickeningly, he rode on down the face of the dune.

In every other respect things had been less serious than he had first feared. Some cattle would be dead, certainly, but most of the herd had found shelter in the creek bed. The horses, too, seemed to have survived unscathed. The humans had fared worst. Several of the boys had been thrown when the storm overwhelmed them. Git had a broken ankle and Charlie Owen a couple of cracked ribs. The waggon had survived because Nance had managed to unharness the horses; if they had bolted it would almost certainly have been smashed to pieces. It had been a foolhardy thing for her to do and he would thank her for it later.

But where was Aggie?

She was tough, self-reliant. She had come through a dozen experiences far worse than a sand storm.

Please, please …

He rode the mare up a fresh sandbank, the sand hissing like snakes as he breasted the slope. A dun-coloured tide extended as far as he could see: banks, dunes, plains of sand beneath a sky of pitiless blue. The tints of red and ochre had disappeared. The harsh and spiny vegetation was swallowed up. The sand dominated all.

Aggie came over the top of a dune fifty yards away. She was driving two beasts ahead of her, prodding them with a long stick she had picked up somewhere.

Matthew looked at her. Just that, and the world was right again. He blinked, swallowed.

Thank God.

‘You like to muster on foot?’ he asked as she came up. He knew he was grinning like a fool, didn’t care.

‘Better than sitting and doing nothing,’ she said. She was flushed with heat and exertion. She pushed a strand of hair off her face. He thought he had never seen anything more beautiful in his life.

‘How bad is it?’ she asked.

‘Bad enough.’

‘Lost much stock?’

‘Some. But the water’s more important.’ All the mundane talk, his heart singing. He gestured at the dunes spreading away into the distance. ‘The sand’s swallowed up a lot of it.’

‘What are we going to do?’

He squinted at the sun which by now had had almost reached the western horizon. ‘Tonight we’ll camp by the big waterhole. Tomorrow I’ll ride on and see how things are doing further north. The Barwon’s a hundred miles away and the cattle will need water to cover a stretch as long as that. So will we.’

‘Let me come with you,’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘I’ll take Charlton. He’s the expert on this part of the world.’

‘Why do you need an expert? Sand’s sand. You’re planning to ride north for a space and then come back, ain’t you? You reckon you’ll get lost without Charlton along to hold your hand?’

He smiled. ‘I wouldn’t say so.’

‘I can tell the difference between sand and water and I ain’t no expert.’ She glared as Matthew’s smile widened at her vehemence. ‘Did I say something funny?’

He shook his head, still smiling. ‘It won’t be a pleasure trip.’

‘That depends what we make of it,’ she said. ‘I came to see some of this country. Let’s go and see it.’ The cattle were straying; she yelled at them. ‘If I don’t get these fools back with the rest of them I’ll have wasted my efforts,’ she said. ‘No point in that.’

Water and grazing were the worry, now that the greatest worry of all had been resolved. The smaller pools had been swallowed up; even the large waterhole that Matthew and Charlton had discovered had been reduced to less than half its original size. As for grazing, there was none.

Charlton came trotting up. Behind him Brett Noonan and Joe Ogle had rounded up a dozen strays and were herding them towards the main herd by the diminished waterhole.

‘What’s it look like?’ Matthew asked him.

Charlton tilted his hat to the back of his head and scratched his brick-red forehead. ‘There was a bunch upriver smothered by the sand. Another lot bogged by that small waterhole we passed a while back. Could have lost fifty head, easy, in those two places alone.’

‘Where are the others?’

‘Tom’s bringing in some strays. Git and Charlie are over by the waggon. Git’s mad as a cut snake. It’s a clean fracture, thank God, but he won’t be riding for a while.’ Charlton grinned. ‘We had to cut his boot off, which made him madder than ever. Charlie should be all right in a day or so.’

‘I’ll go over later and see how they are.’

It was more urgent to get the mob together again. Injuries could wait.

He rode on, heart light, body light.

 

Matthew and Aggie set out at first light, taking with them a couple of spare horses and enough water and food to last them two days.

‘We should be back well before then,’ Matthew said, ‘but it doesn’t hurt to have extra.’

Charlton had given him a quizzical look when Matthew had told him he would be taking Aggie with him. ‘Don’t get lost,’ he said.

It had been bitterly cold overnight but the sun soon warmed things up. They rode north under a cloudless sky. There was no wind.

‘Thank God,’ Matthew said. ‘With all this sand we might have had to go through it all over again if the wind got up.’

They rode all morning without coming out of the sand-blasted country. It grew hot. The reflection of the sun off the sand pained their eyes. At last there was a change. Tufts of mulga began to appear through the sand. Little by little the dunes sank.

Aggie said, ‘It’s like watching the tide go out.’

‘What do you know about the tide?’ Matthew asked.

‘We lived by the sea until I was twelve.’

‘I know nothing about you,’ Matthew said, ‘yet I feel I’ve known you all my life.’

‘Not much to know,’ she told him.

That night they camped by a small waterhole in the riverbed. The effects of the sand storm had finally receded and they were surrounded once again by the familiar scrub, the clearly defined riverbanks with gum trees, standing guard over occasional green-surfaced pools. After the sand-covered landscape they had left behind them the sparse vegetation seemed almost lush.

‘About twelve miles,’ Matthew said as they sat beside the campfire. ‘The mob can manage that all right.’

Firelight played on their faces. Beyond, the land waited. Despite his worries about the herd Matthew felt good. He smiled at Aggie. ‘Tell me about this business of knowing the tides.’

She watched the flames, face ruddy, hair gleaming in the light. ‘My brother and I grew up on the coast south of Sydney. My dad was a fisherman. He drowned when I was twelve and my mother took us to stay with her sister in the city. I hated it. All those buildings and grey streets … It seemed so cramped after the sea. I couldn’t wait to get away. As soon as I was old enough I did.’

Matthew smiled at her. ‘Do you always get your own way?’

‘Usually.’

‘Lucky,’ Matthew said.

Her hand flicked her hair off her face. ‘It’s not that I try to boss people about. I just seem to want things more than most.’

‘And your brother?’

‘He didn’t care one way or the other but I needed a man along with me.’ She smiled sadly. ‘I suppose I elected him for the job. If I hadn’t he would probably still be alive.’

‘What are you going to do now you’re here?’

She lifted a shoulder, eyes fixed on the flames, said nothing.

Matthew watched her. The fire drew moving shadows across her face but could not hide her beauty: the good bone structure beneath the smooth skin, the brown hair that now as always had escaped from its binding to lie in tendrils about her face.

It was pleasant to watch her across the fire, hair as self-willed as its owner, brown eyes bright with reflected flame, long legs encased in men’s breeches. He had never seen her in anything but what she was wearing now, the trousers and boots, the working shirt buttoned high over her breasts. He studied her deliberately, seeking the shape of the body beneath the clothes, feeling a rising heat that had nothing to do with the fire.

‘When we reach Fort Bourke,’ he began and stopped, voice thick.

She looked up at him. ‘Yes?’

‘What will you do?’

Her eyes remained on his. He heard the rustle as a piece of wood collapsed in the flames.

‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

She did not answer him. He reached out and took her hand in his. Her fingers curled to interlock with his own. They remained unmoving for a minute, then he tightened his grip and drew her towards him. Her mouth opened under his. The flames crackled. Shadows shifted across the ground. Beyond the fire’s circle the spirits of the empty land, silent and eternal, watched.

 

Head pillowed on Matthew’s shoulder, Aggie’s eyes watched the dying flames. ‘I wondered if I’d misunderstood …’

She felt him shift. ‘Misunderstood what?’

‘Why you wanted me to come.’

‘It was your idea.’

‘It was my idea to come out here now, not to join the drive. I told you I wasn’t coming.’

‘Why did you change your mind?’

Aggie smiled at the red coals. ‘I told you. I wanted to see the country.’

‘I hope you haven’t been disappointed.’

‘I like what I’ve seen tonight.’

His hand moved, caressing her. ‘Only what you’ve seen?’

Her breathing changed. ‘And … felt.’

The hand moved again. Heat reawoke, focusing, building. She closed her eyes, yielding to sensation.

‘And now?’ the voice whispered.

Sensation flared. She sighed, limbs spreading.

‘Oh. Oh. Oh yes.’

 

In the morning they returned to the drive. They spoke little. To an observer nothing would seem to have changed yet everything had.

So that is what it’s like, Aggie thought. She carried pictures within her. Of Matthew, his skin so smooth in contrast with the crispness of the hair on his chest and belly; his fingers stroking, seeking, kindling fire; his smell of male, of dust and clean sweat; the roughness of his beard on her breast; the texture of his voice; the sensation of him filling her; his body hard and ribbed with muscle. Of herself; the tips of her breasts so sensitive against her clothes; her body moist; her being suffused with a sense of fulfilment. For the first time she could remember she was in tune with her life and where it was taking her. Casually she wondered how things would work out between Matthew and herself when they were back with the herd but did not worry about it. It was a new experience for her to rely on a man but now she did so. Matthew would work things out.