I had no strategy; I was in no condition to formulate one. Weak and confused, I had only the vaguest notion of the distance I should have to travel or of the time it might take me to cover the ground. The nausea and cramps were less troublesome now, but I was afflicted by a raging thirst and so preoccupied by my immediate need for water that nothing else seemed important. Every so often I would stop and listen, and occasionally I would hear, or perhaps merely sense, what might have been a thin trickle through overgrown or subterranean channels; but each time, my investigations proved fruitless.
I’m not sure how long I had been walking when I came upon the gully, but the sun was high in the sky, filtering through the branches almost directly overhead. The terrain below the track was less precipitous here, a rocky slope falling away into densely wooded shadow. The gully cut through it at right angles to the track, its course marked by a lush growth of fern and sedge.
I leaned out cautiously and sniffed the air. Moist earth and leaves; a cleaner undertone I could only interpret as fresh water. I stepped gingerly on to the slope and began to follow the line of the gully down, hugging its edge. The shadows deepened around me and the air grew cooler.
I don’t know whether it was the change of atmosphere, operating on a system sensitised by illness, that affected me at that moment, but I found myself suddenly struggling for breath and balance. My legs trembled violently and my vision dimmed. I sat down heavily among the tumbled rocks and, as I reached out to steady myself, the singing began.
I call it singing, but there was nothing melodic about the sound. A chant perhaps, a rhythmic, humming monotone swelling and diminishing among the trees, vocal rather than percussive, yet unlike any human voice I had ever heard. I listened for a minute or two, maybe longer, and little by little it dawned on me that the sound came from the gully. I scrambled to my feet and looked over.
The creature was only a few feet below the lip, crouching among the ferns, but I couldn’t make it out at first. I mean, I could see the curve and pale sheen of the bowed back, a white heel braced against a fissure in the sandstone, but I couldn’t make any sense of what I was looking at. I squatted down, angling for a better view, and as I did so, the thing raised its head and I saw that it was Daniel huddled there, stripped to his glistening skin and quivering like a trapped rabbit. His mouth was open but the singing, I realised in that instant of astonished recognition, had stopped.
He stared up at me, his eyes gleaming; his voice was as light as the breeze in the eucalyptus leaves. I leaned forward, straining to catch his words.
‘I could have stayed,’ he whispered, ‘only you wouldn’t have it. Sent me out into the dark alone.’
I said nothing, watching his eyes the way you’d watch the eyes of a wild animal. He ran his tongue along his upper lip. ‘You could let me in now,’ he said.
He raised his arms above his head like a small child asking to be picked up, but the opium had made me as cunning as he was, and I could see at once what he was after. I backed away from the edge and turned to run, but he hauled himself up the slope and lunged at me, clutching at my ankles so that I stumbled and went sprawling among the ferns. I felt his hands fumbling at my back – a soft fluttering, at once tender and malign. Then he began to test the space between my shoulderblades, pressing insistently on the spine, and I braced myself and clenched my heart like a fist, knowing that if he were to find a way through to its warm chambers, I should be lost.
‘Let me in,’ he pleaded. I looked over my shoulder and saw his face hanging above me, but crumpled now and streaked with tears. I shook my head and his features seemed to shift and blur like the contours of a stone seen through running water. ‘Daniel,’ I said very gently, my fear subsiding as the pressure on my back diminished, ‘you died. Last winter, in Jack Waller’s barn.’
He bent close to my ear and spoke again, but there were no words any more, just the faint whisper of breath passing between his fading lips and out into the damp air. He brushed my face with his fingertips and I raised my arm to push him away, but he was already drawing off, dissolving among the trees like a scarf of mist.
I lay there for a moment, my cheek pressed to the ground, trying to bring my trembling limbs under control; then I rose clumsily to my feet and dusted the debris from my jacket. I was anxious to leave the shadows and rejoin the track, but it was obvious that I couldn’t expect to travel much further without water. I listened again, holding my breath, staring into the gloom until something came clear: a curved ridge of stone overhung by ferns, black water brimming at the lip. Thinking about it later, I wondered how I could have seen the pool from where I stood, but I’m tolerably certain that, as I scrambled down the slope to the gully floor, I knew already what I should find and where I should find it. I pushed my hands in among the fronds until my palms touched water; then I crouched down, beastlike, and drank greedily, sucking cold mouthfuls from just beneath the oily surface.
The climb back to the track left me breathless, but I was eager to press on immediately. The water was seething and churning in my gut, but I had been refreshed by it, and for some time I tramped steadily without any particular thought of my situation. ‘One foot in front of the other’, my father would say, urging me on when, as a child, I trailed behind, complaining that I could go no further; one foot in front of the other.
It was a fallen branch, lying at an angle across the track, that checked me in my stride. Literally, yes, but I mean more than that. As I raised my right leg to step over it, the loose cloth of my breeches snagged on a projecting twig and I heard the dry wood snap, sharp as a pistolshot. I staggered backward, physically unbalanced but startled, too, by a bewildering flash of recognition: I had stepped over the same branch earlier in the day.
My first thought was that I had turned the wrong way on rejoining the track and was now retracing my steps. But that explanation, I sensed darkly through a rising wave of panic, was at odds with the evidence. The memory triggered by the crack of the breaking twig was not a recollection of having approached the branch from the opposite direction, but one that conformed in every detail to the more recent event. Even the twig itself, hanging now by a thread of bark and swaying erratically to and fro, seemed obscurely familiar. I stared down at it, my mind reeling.
I stood for a long time, rigid in the middle of the track, not so much attempting to make sense of the aberration as waiting for some clue or signal that might make sense of it for me. The silence deepened around me; the twig stopped dancing on its thread and hung still.
I moved, in the end, simply because the alternative was unthinkable. I stepped over the branch and continued on my way, but more slowly now, dogged by uncertainty. I remember stopping at intervals and scanning the undergrowth at the edge of the track, the way a traveller might search an English roadside for a milestone smothered by meadowsweet or dog-roses; but if I had been asked what I was looking for, I should have had no answer.
I had grown used to the dappled shade of the trees, and the full sunlight, when I emerged into it, hit me like a fist. Here the cliff plunged sheer below the track on one side; on the other a stand of stringybarks, monumental columns of solid white light, dazzled and perplexed me. My eyes watered and the sweat poured from my skin.
Surely I remembered this from our outward journey? Looking backward as we stepped into the shade, Bullen and I together, to see Billy toiling up the slope behind us in the punishing glare, bent under his burden. The sweep of the cliff-top behind him as he rounded the track’s long curve. Or had that been somewhere else entirely? I struggled to hold and clarify the vision, but the equivocal fragments fused with the scene in front of me, and I gave up the attempt.
I edged back into the shade and sat down. My head throbbed, not painfully but heavily, and the landscape pulsed and shuddered. Like a living thing, I remember thinking queasily, squinting upward to where the stringybarks stood in loose formation, their pale limbs lifted to the sky; and it was at that moment that I saw the lories.
A small flock of the elegant creatures perching among the twigs, the whole tableau seeming, at the precise instant of my glancing up, so unnaturally still that I might have been looking at an extravagant example of the taxidermist’s art. Just for that instant; then a breeze lifted the loose strips of hanging bark, rattling them softly against the tree’s white bole, and everything was in intricate motion – the twigs and leaves dancing and shimmering while the birds wove their elaborate patterns of sound and colour among them. And as I followed their movements, something stirred in the cramped recesses of my heart, forcing a cry from my lips, a cry of exultation that rose through the branches above me and was absorbed in the luminous air. Praise at its purest – wordless, impassioned praise, flying straight as an arrow to heaven. Yes, and the birds rising too, flashing crimson and azure against the softer blue of the sky, and some part of myself caught up in the winnowed air so that I had to place the flat of my hand against the hot earth to remind myself where I belonged.
It was love that had lifted me, I realised, whirling me up among the beating wings; and love, I thought, looking down the track and seeing him standing there in a blaze of light, his white shirt fluttering in the breeze, that had brought Billy back from the world of the dead to guide me home. He was looking in my direction, one hand sweeping the dark curls clear of his face in a gesture at once familiar and disquieting. I called out and scrambled to my feet, but he started like a frightened deer and began to run back the way he had come.
‘Billy!’ I staggered into the sunlight and picked my way clumsily down the slope, calling and waving, but he neither slackened his pace nor looked back and, as I gazed after him, he rounded the bend in the track and was lost to view. Dazed by the glare and trembling with weakness, I should have been glad to return to my seat in the shade; but it was in my mind that he intended me to follow, and I drew myself together and stumbled after him.
By the time I reached the bend myself, I knew that such strength as I had been able to summon was failing. I remember thinking, carefully if not quite lucidly: I’m coming to the end. Perhaps I articulated the thought; at all events, I have a vivid but confused recollection of the words echoing through or around me as I raised my head and looked up the track to see Billy walking back towards me, no longer alone but accompanied by a taller figure. I stood staring into the light in a perplexity of hope and doubt.
If I was slow to recognise Preece, that was doubtless due in part to my own confused state, but also to the fact that the man himself appeared transfigured. He was bearing down on me with a force that seemed to disguise his halting gait, his mouth set in a thin, hard line and his eyes burning. Like an Old Testament prophet, I thought, as he drew up in front of me with his staff held menacingly before him, a prophet fired with rage against sinful humanity. And it struck me as a little absurd to be extending my hand to such a figure in such a place, but the formal greeting was, at that moment, all I was capable of imagining. He seemed barely to notice me.
‘Preece,’ I murmured, and my voice rang in my skull like a cracked bell. ‘I can’t tell you—’
‘It’s not you I want,’ he said curtly, glancing over my shoulder. ‘Where’s Bullen?’
I must have stood gawping like a fool. Preece leaned in close. ‘Bullen,’ he repeated. ‘Where is he? I tell you, Redbourne, I’ll have the hide off his back for what he did to Billy.’
‘Bullen’s dead,’ I said. I sank down at the side of the track, put my face between my hands and began to cry.
Water, I remember, fresh water from a tilted flask. And I remember them raising me to my feet, Preece on one side and Billy on the other, and helping me forward. I tried to keep step with them but my legs were weak and clumsy, and after a few paces my determination lapsed. We moved slowly. Sometimes the track narrowed, and one of my companions would drop behind; at one point I was obliged to negotiate a particularly difficult stretch unaided, and did so on my hands and knees. Billy spoke only to urge me on; Preece, as far as I can recollect, said nothing at all until we reached the upland clearing where the ponies were tethered. Then he turned to me, his gaze milder now and his voice soft. ‘You’ll take the lad’s mount, Mr Redbourne. Billy’s legs are good for a few miles yet.’
I wanted to thank them both, but the words wouldn’t come. Billy helped me up and I sat slumped in the saddle like the proverbial sack of meal while Preece adjusted the stirrups. ‘You’re a lucky man,’ he said. ‘Lucky we found you. And lucky’ – he straightened up and gestured back the way we had come – ‘the wind’s in the right quarter. If that bush-fire had been moving in this direction it’s ten to one you’d have been burned to a cinder.’
I twisted round and looked over my shoulder. The late sunlight was still bright on the nearer treetops, making them shine like polished copper, but out in the middle distance a long smudge of grey smoke hung above the forest, dulling the air for what must have been mile upon smothering mile. My head swam and I swayed forward, clutching at the pony’s mane. Preece swung himself, stifflegged, into his saddle. Then Billy clicked his tongue twice against his palate and we moved on.