Chapter 4
Desert Wind’s Story

Above Reed and Willow the wind smelt of the desert: hot sand among the scent of trees and creek water. Desert Wind sat on the hill. You could see the other houses from here, dark and squat in the moonlight. The creek slipped silver water between the feathered casuarinas. The yabby pond shone like a mirror on the hill. Desert Wind smelt the wind and remembered.

It was three years ago. She’d crossed the desert, and the mountains, and then another desert, a rocky one this time; then more mountains. She’d started to climb them. Then she’d heard music too. She shivered, remembering Banksia’s story the night before. It had been a shock to hear that someone else had followed music.

The mountains had risen like a thick wall out of a pale pink sky. It was dawn. She stopped to eat on a grassy flat between the trees, then rummaged in her pack for her flute. She always carried a flute. She played a few notes, sang the melody, played the song again, her music the only human noise among the sounds of trees and wind.

Something answered her song.

It was like the flute, and yet it wasn’t. It sang; it whistled through the cold morning air; it echoed from the rocks above. Then, silence: she thought she must have imagined the sound. But it sang again, as if teasing her.

She thrust her pack on her back and began to climb towards the music.

Again the music paused. It seemed to move away. It was like the tune she’d played … almost, but not quite. It was almost like a flute, but something more. It was as though the singer had taken Desert Wind’s music and added the songs of the wind and the birds and had woven them into another melody, brighter than the sun.

Could there be people on the mountain?

She kept on climbing. The music soared and faded up above. No matter how fast she climbed, it was always just beyond. Was it teasing her? Was she imagining it? Or was it ghosts?— or some ghostly echo or memory of human voices, of the people who had once filled the world?

On a cliff above, the music seemed to pause. She could hear distinctly where it came from now—a rocky ledge halfway up. There was something up there on the ledge—like a beehive, woven out of grass.

She found a toe-hold and began to climb. Her fingers gripped the crevices, brittle under her hands; her feet nudged into narrow ledges of rock. Upwards, upwards, nearly to the music …

The music stopped. If she stretched up, on her tip-toes, she could just see its source. It was a bird, just a bird—a large bird with a long feathered tail, like a lyre. It was a mimicking bird, who’d taken her music and given her its own. Desert Wind began to laugh.

The rock below her cracked, and she fell.

She seemed to fall forever. As she fell she could see tufts of grass growing in the thin soil of the crevices. She could see the warm hard rock. She could feel the cold air around her.

Then nothing till the pain.

She tried to move. Her leg was under fallen rock. Her arm was smashed and cold and useless. Blood was sticky on her face.

She remembered thirst, her tongue swollen in her mouth, and the taste of water, hot and sweet, when she finally found her pack. Days and nights lying under the rough cloth of her tent, too weak to put it up. Crawling on her stomach to the creek for water. If it hadn’t been so near, she would have died.

She remembered standing upright when she could, with a crutch of fallen wood. The bitter painful journey home. The horror on people’s faces.

Desert Wind closed her eyes to push the memory away. Months of pain took only a few minutes to remember.

They’d tried to reset her leg at home. They gave her exercises to build up the muscles on her ruined arm. They did their best. But she knew, even then, that she would never stride out into the world again. People would look at her with pity now, not as a woman who faced the cliffs and mountains and wandered with the wind.

Desert Wind looked across the valley again. The moon was fading as the sky turned light with dawn. She could see the trees on the ridges up above them now, dark black against the rosy sky.

It had been two years since she had gone past the ridges. She would love to cross a desert again, to see the sand rippling to the world’s edge, to clamber up the mountains to the sky. She longed for the thrill of finding a new plant again, one that had survived the wild years and could be useful to the valley.

But you needed two good legs to search the world. You needed two arms that worked.

She thought about the children again: both longing, for different reasons, to walk beyond the ridges, as she had longed to do when she was younger. For a moment she hated them, with their strong legs and arms. One day they’d take the world she’d known, leaving her here, a cripple, in the valley.

… Unless she took them with her. That way she’d share in all the new things that they found. Should she take them? It might be dangerous. How could she protect two children, crippled like she was? Did they realise what they might have to face, outside the safe small world they knew?

Did she want to take them? She’d never wanted to go collecting with others before. Kids would be pests, probably, talking when she wanted to listen to the bush, not knowing how to pitch a tent or light a fire.

If she didn’t take them, she couldn’t go.

The last time she’d followed the music of the bush, it had left her crippled. But she still longed for it, the songs of the wind and trees—her music, and Banksia’s. Could these two kids have an ear for it too? One more trip, that’s all she wanted: to get out beyond the valley once more, away from other people’s pity.

The sky was turning grey over on the far ridge. It would be dawn soon. Desert Wind grasped her crutch and pulled herself stiffly to her feet. She’d go down to Three Jasmines now, and Iron Fist, and tell the children they could go.