Corroboree (33 page)

‘In half-an-hour we can make four miles,' Eyre told him. ‘That will be four miles fewer to ride tomorrow.'

Arthur put in, ‘That's four miles further away from Jack Ketch, as far as I reckon it.'

They stopped at last. The plain was dark and warm; although the sky was still luminous and light, and prickled all over with stars. The horses shuffled and scraped their hoofs; and Weeip knelt on the ground, busying himself
with a firestick. Christopher had several times offered him lucifer-matches, but he had only stared at him mistrustfully, and shaken his curly head.

Eyre and Christopher walked around the campsite to stretch their legs. Eyre had sores on the insides of his thighs now, and his penis had become tender from grit which had lodged under the foreskin. There was a dryness in his mouth and throat quite unlike any dryness he had experienced before; he felt as if his tongue had turned to rough, brushed-up suede, and his sinuses had shrunk and shrivelled like cured tobacco-leaves. When he blew his nose now, his sinuses produced no phlegm. There didn't even seem to be any moisture between his eyeballs and his eyelids; and his eyes, like those of the rest of the party, were crimson from dust and glare.

‘Somewhere out there is the man they call Yonguldye,' said Eyre reflectively, ‘I wonder where he is tonight? I wonder if he's sensed that we're looking for him? They say that a Mabarn Man can feel you coming from twenty miles away.' Christopher slowly untied his scarf, with one hand, and then dragged it away from his dusty neck. ‘I can't imagine how we're going to find him. One man, in country like this. It goes on for ever.'

Eyre was about to turn back to the fire when a slight movement in the darkness caught his eye. He gripped Christopher's wrist, and said, ‘Ssh; there's something there.'

‘As long as it's not a bunyip, or Wulgaru the devil-devil,' Christopher whispered; but all the same he stood still, and listened.

The fire crackled. Arthur was talking to Joolonga in an intensive murmur, something about ‘I'll lay you odds. Well, I will. I'll lay you fifty-to-one.'

Christopher frowned. ‘It's nothing. Come on, you're just tired. Probably nothing more frightening than a mallee fowl, raking a bit of extra soil on to its eggs. Got to keep the babies warm at night, after all.'

He strolled back to the fire, and asked Weeip, ‘What's on the menu tonight, young man? I'm famished.'

‘Me too,' said Arthur. ‘I could eat a bloody horse.'

Dogger spat into the fire. ‘Don't make jokes about it,' he said. ‘One day you may have to.'

‘Well, that's charm itself,' Arthur retorted. ‘Gobbing in the fire like that. Good luck for you there wasn't no pot on it.'

‘What are you, the Governor's chief advisor on campfire etiquette?' Dogger demanded.

‘Oh, for God's sake stop arguing,' Christopher complained.

‘Well, damn it, here's a man who's been flogged, and locked up in jail and here he is trying to teach me manners,' Dogger protested.

‘My old mother taught me my manners, not the government of New South Wales,' Arthur shouted back at him. ‘And you wouldn't catch my old mother gobbing in the fire. You wouldn't catch none of my family gobbing in the fire. My Uncle Joe fell in the fire once, and burned half of his ear off, but he never gobbed in it, not once.'

‘What would you prefer?' Dogger snapped at him. ‘Would you prefer me to throw
my
ear in the fire? Would that be polite enough for you? For Christ's pity, years in those prison made you soft in the head.'

Eyre said, ‘Quiet,' and then, when the two of them continued to argue, he barked,
'Quiet
!'

They stopped bickering; and for one hallucinatory second, Eyre glimpsed four skeletons running through the scrub. He could hear nothing: no sound of feet running on hard-baked dust. No rustling of spinifex grass. Not even the soft clattering of spear-shafts. But he knew they were out there, daubed in their white pipe-clay bones; their faces reddened with the sacred ochre.

‘Joolonga,' he called, quietly.

‘Yes, Mr Walker-sir?'

Joolonga came up and stood beside him. He smelled strongly of fat and sweat and stale lavender-water.

‘Joolonga, is anybody following us?'

Joolonga stared at him. The campfire was reflected in his eyes, two dancing orange sparks.

Eyre said, ‘Are any blackfellows tracking us? Blackfellows painted like bone men?'

Joolonga looked out into the night. It was much darker now already, and the last luminosity was fading in the west, ushering in, for this day at least, the black wing of Narahdarn, the messenger of death. ‘This is a
kybybolite
, nothing more,' he told Eyre, in a soft, hoarse voice. ‘A place of ghosts, and unhappy spirits.'

‘Twaddle,' snapped Eyre.

‘No, Mr Walker-sir,' said Joolonga, calmly. There are men like ghosts; just as there are ghosts like men.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘Yonguldye already knows that you are seeking him out, Mr Walker-sir. The bone-men you have seen are Yonguldye's messengers, the ghosts from Yonguldye's camp.'

‘If they know where Yonguldye is, why don't they guide me to him?'

Joolonga shrugged, and took out his pipe. ‘This journey means more than you understand, Mr Walker-sir. What you have decided to do has deep meaning both for your own people and also for the Aborigine. Both peoples see this journey with hope; both peoples see it with fear. Captain Sturt wants to find his inland sea, and his precious stones in the ground; but he is worried that the respect you will give to Aborigine magic may make it more difficult for him to take all of the land and the riches that he wants. Yonguldye is pleased that a white man is recognising the ancient beliefs from the dreamtime; but he also fears the other white men who will come after you. That is why his ghosts are following you. But, neither people can prevent this coming-together. It is something that
must
happen. It was prophesied in the dreamtime, and the story of it was written in the caves at Koonalda, in the desert called Bunda Bunda.'

Eyre felt as if the ground had shifted under his feet. Offbalance,
perplexed, as if Joolonga's words had possessed the power to create a supernatural earth-tremor. The more he talked to Joolonga, the more unsure of himself he became; and the more he began to feel that as they journeyed forward into the interior, the further they were leaving behind them not just civilisation but time itself. Joolonga spoke like no Aborigine he had ever met before. It was not simply his wide European vocabulary that impressed Eyre: it was his ability to express Aboriginal ideas in white man's language, to make his own people understandable.

He had an inner perception, a clarity of thought, which even to Eyre was unexpected and disturbing. Eyre had never believed what most white settlers believed: that the Aborigines were idle, ignorant, savages; dirty and destructive; not even reliable enough to keep as servants. He had always seen magic in them, and understood something of their significance. But Joolonga was very different, and with each day they travelled deeper into tracklessness and timelessness, the difference became more apparent. It was like looking into the face of a wild animal, and suddenly realising that its eyes were knowing and human.

Joolonga said, ‘Have you seen the bone-man before?'

Eyre nodded.

‘Did they give you any signs? Any hand-signs? Or perhaps a bone?'

Eyre unbuttoned his shirt pocket and took out the stone talisman which the Aborigine warriors had given him on Hindley Street. He passed it to Joolonga, who made a protective sign with his hand before he touched it, rather like the sign of the cross. Then he examined it carefully, turning it over and over in his fingers.

‘It is a magical stone,' he said at last. These marks on it show that it belongs to Yonguldye, the one they call the Darkness. The stone has the power to draw you towards its owner, It is quite like the
Kurdaitja
shoes, only it works the other way.'

Just then, Dogger came up, with his hands in his pockets. ‘What's this, a Methodist prayer evening?'

‘Not quite,' smiled Eyre.

‘Well, tuck's ready when you are,' said Dogger. He caught sight of the stone which Joolonga was turning over in his hand. ‘What's that, a
tjurunga?
Let's take a look.'

Without comment, Joolonga obediently handed the stone to Dogger, although he kept his attention fixed on Eyre. Dogger joggled the stone up and down in the palm of his hand, and then said, ‘You know what this is, don't you? You know where it came from?'

Eyre shook his head.

‘It's a shooting-star, or a piece of one. You can find them at the Yarrakina ochre mine, up at the place the blackfellows call Parakeelya. They think the stones were once the eyes of emus, back in the dreamtime, and that they give you power over all birds.'

Eyre looked at Joolonga. ‘Didn't
you
know what it was?'

Joolonga's eyes were glittery but uncommunicative. ‘I have never been to Yarrakina, Mr Walker-sir. I have never been further north than Edeowie.'

‘But surely you've seen one of these stones before?'

Joolonga said nothing.

Eyre said, ‘If this stone came from Yonguldye, then it seems likely that he must have been camped near Yarrakina. Perhaps he even sent it on purpose, to guide us.'

‘Well, it's quite likely,' Dogger sniffed. ‘The blackfellows travel from hundreds of miles away to dig out the ochre at Yarrakina. It's supposed to be first-class magic; the best ochre you can get.'

Eyre took the stone back, and dropped it into his pocket. ‘How far is Yarrakina?'

‘Couldn't tell you exactly,' Dogger admitted. ‘I only went that far north because I was hunting emu.'

‘You came all the way out here to hunt emu?'

‘Well, I was a younger man then,' Dogger told them. He hesitated, and looked embarrassed, and then he said,
‘Also, some sheep-farmer over at Quorn had told me that some emus have diamonds in their crops.'

‘Diamonds?' asked Eyre, incredulously.

‘That's what he said. He said he had met a bushman once who had shot an emu; and then, when he had cut it open, he had found a diamond inside it, a diamond as big as an egg. Well, a chicken's egg, not an emu's egg. And apparently the bushman had shot six more emu, and one of
those
had had a diamond in it, too. So he had ended up shooting two hundred of them, and making himself a fortune.'

‘You really believed that story?' Eyre ribbed him.

Dogger scratched the criss-cross, weather-beaten skin on the back of his neck. ‘Yes. I suppose I did. But who was to say it wasn't true? And when you've spent your whole life out beyond the black stump, well, you get to believe almost anything. But that's why I went up to Yarrakina. A blackfellow told me that there were thousands of emus there; he'd seen them whenever he went to mine for ochre. Only one thing, though: he warned me it was sacred ground there, especially around the ochre mine, and that if I didn't make sure I walked backwards, the monster Mondong would jump up and get me, and eat me up. They're very frightened of those ochre mines, the blackfellows. If you haven't been initiated, they won't let you anywhere near them.'

Joolonga said, ‘That is simply because the ochre was left in the rock by our ancestral spirits.' His voice was flat and expressionless; neither mocking nor reverent.

Eyre looked towards the fire. ‘You did say that Yonguldye had been heard of at Woocalla. Don't you think it would be better to go there first?'

‘Of course, Mr Walker-sir. But my information was not new; and it is more likely that Yonguldye has moved on to Yarrakina; or perhaps beyond Yarrakina.'

‘Nevertheless, it would be foolish of us to go past Woocalla; only to have to go back again.'

Dogger interrupted, ‘Let's have something to eat. My belly feels like a
paringa
.'

Weeip giggled.
Paringa
meant whirlpool; and Dogger had already amused Weeip and Midgegooroo with his gurgling stomach. He seemed to Eyre to have an infinite capacity for food and drink which he shared with the Aborigines. Down at the beach, Weeip had eaten so many cockles that his stomach had protruded like a medicine ball; and Dogger had devoured almost as many—pushing twenty or thirty into his mouth at one go, and then swilling them down with tepid tea. Even Arthur had been revolted, and that was probably why he had complained to Dogger tonight about spitting in the fire.

They sat around and ate a meal of cockle broth, and four roasted mallee fowl. Weeip had kept the cockles fresh on their slow, hot ride north from the ocean by filling two sacks with damp sand, and then pushing handfuls of shellfish deep into the middle of them. The dampness had been sufficient to keep the cockles alive. Weeip said that his father used to bury hundreds of freshwater mussels in this way; and that he had been able to return to his larder months later to find them still fresh. Eyre found this fascinating; because he had heard that apart from smoking turtle meat for long canoe journeys, and sealing up wild figs in large balls of ochre, and leaving them in trees, Aborigines had almost no way of storing food at all.

After they had eaten, Joolonga went with Midgegooroo to prepare the horses and their packs for the next day's journey. Weeip, while he scoured their tin plates with handfuls of grass, and built up the fire to last them through the night, sang Aborigine songs in a clear, high-pitched voice.

‘Wyah, wyah, deereeree

Tree-runner made a rainbow for the woman he loved

Together they walked in the sky

On the road of many colours.

Wyah, wyah, deereeree
.'

It occurred to Eyre as he listened that this was the first
Aborigine song that he had heard Weeip sing. He twisted himself around so that he could see the boy better. Against the firelight, naked and skinny, except for his protuberant stomach, his hair bound tight now with kangaroo skin thongs, he looked quite different from the boy who had recited the Lord's Prayer in Adelaide. Savage, wild, with that extraordinary prehistoric sexuality.