I don’t wake up until the boat is bumping against a jetty and Marta is calling out, ‘Hello! Hello, old friend!’
And I’m pretty grouchy about being woken up and that I’m s’posed to be polite and stuff like Ma said right away to these people I don’t know, even though they’s our inland sea Ockery Islands people.
‘Neoma, tie off the boat,’ Marta says, and I can do that. I can tie off boats in my sleep.
Old ladies, all before-times ladies, big straw hats and billowy dresses, and chunky beads clicking as they hurry down the jetty towards us, arms wide and full of noisy greetings for Marta, they pull her off the boat, her arms full of gifts for them. Kids and young people and men follow them down to have a look and some move off again, though a couple of men Marta’s age hug her too. The men is dressed like Marta and me, long sleeves, baggy trousers, flax or straw hats, coz that keeps the sun off and lets us work. Most of the kids hang around to eavesdrop.
One of the old ladies, with shiny grey curls, looks under my hat and says, ‘Ooh!’ about the bandage on my head, but turns back to Marta like she don’t know if I can talk for myself or not. I guess the bandage makes me look like a bit of a numbat. So I tie off the boat in my neatest knots and trail after Marta as she heads up into the village.
They sit her down at their fireplace and pass around tea. Marta asks what kind of tea and they tell her orange and some kind of bark. Marta looks around like she lost something and then finds me standing there watching and pats the seat beside her, which is jus’ a log with a cushion on top. I go and sit and get given a cup of tea too.
‘Thank you very much, Aunty,’ I say in my best manners. I take a sip. It’s not bad, this orangey bark tea.
Marta twists around and looks for the tallest hill, then asks if the siblings from the Valley of the Sun have come here too.
The old ladies say, ‘No, what you talking about?’ so Marta pulls out our drawing and passes it around and sets to telling the tale of what’s been going on in our village since the siblings came.
She stops and asks me to tell what happened when I went poking about.
‘Marta gives me and my friend Jag this bit of cardboard and tells us, go up the hill and draw this machine for me. So we go up and draw it from this best angle.’ I point to the drawing. ‘I’m the doer, so I do the climbing to figure out the angles, and start the drawing off. Jag, he’s the artist, so he tidies it up for me, but when he’s doing that, I get busy having a closer look at what they buried in the holes, and the dirt got real hot the more I dug, and when I scraped away the last bit of dirt a whoosh of heat blasted my head, knocking me over, so I kicked the dirt and covered it up again before it set fire to the whole place!’
‘Oooh!’ the ladies squeal. The eavesdropping kids gasp. I’m liking being the one with all the stories here, real well.
‘It’s a power source, powering the machine,’ Marta says. ‘But we don’t know what the machine does.’
Marta unwinds the bandage on my head and the ladies say, ‘Oooh!’ and ‘Oh dear!’ and ‘Child!’ then Marta whispers, ‘It might be nuclear.’
I dunno what ‘new clear’ is but the way the ladies’ eyes bulge and they shake their heads makes me think I’m prolly gonna die or something.
‘They can’t just wander in and put things like that right near your village without your say-so. Don’t they respect our wishes to live natural lives out here on the Ockery Islands?’ an old uncle says, and the others all nod and agree.
‘Arrogant, they were,’ Marta says. ‘They marched in and started work without so much as a hello! Speaking some Latin language. Have you heard about where the Valley of the Sun people come from?’
The old people all shake their heads again.
‘Never heard of them. I did hear of a war up north, and some people setting up a new government. Is it them, do you think?’ one aunty asks.
Marta shrugs. ‘I couldn’t tell you. I can’t speak any of those European languages well enough to tell the difference, but if I had to guess, I’d say maybe Spanish? They were tall and well fed, and sailing in small boats so their base can’t be far away.’
‘But why did they come to you and put something on your hill?’ the uncle asks.
‘It must do something important if it has a power source,’ one old aunty says.
Marta nods slowly. ‘Damn technology,’ she says. ‘We don’t need it.’
‘And it’s right there, messing up your hill!’ an aunty says.
‘Maybe we can grow a creeper over it,’ Marta says.
There’s a nervous giggle. Then everyone is back to sipping tea and thinking.
‘Where d’ya reckon might be a hill big as our Cottage Hill where maybe they put another machine?’ Marta asks, and they explain some place I never heard of called Jacob’s Reach. So Marta stands and tells them we’ll head there.
I shake their hands and say, ‘Go gently!’ polite as I can. And nod when they tell me to look after my head.
