Corroboree (51 page)

He hesitated, and then he said, ‘Whether you believe you are the
djanga
or not, Mr Walker-sir; you are the man in the story. Captain Henry believed it, and from the moment Captain Henry believed it, and passed it on, it became true.'

Eyre knelt close beside him; felt the warm wet stain of Joolonga's blood through the knee of his britches. ‘Joolonga,' he said. ‘For God's sake, explain it to me. I don't understand.'

Joolonga almost managed a smile. ‘It is easy to understand, unless you are white, Mr Walker-sir. The truth is that you are the man in the story; you have become a part of the dreamtime; Australia has made you her own.'

He caught his breath; and caught it again. But there was too much blood in his lungs now; and all he could do was to give one last desperate choke, splattering blood all over Eyre's shirt and trousers; and roll sideways on to the ground, as if he were dodging away from a blow, and lie with his face against the salt.

Dogger came over and looked down at him.

‘Well?' he wanted to know. ‘Did you believe any of that?'

‘I'm not sure,' said Eyre. Stiffly, he stood up; then looked down at his bloody hands, and wiped them on his shirt. ‘I always thought that men made up stories; rather than the other way about.'

Dogger put down his rifle, and stretched, and scratched his belly, and yawned. ‘I don't know. They're a rum lot, these blackfellows. Old George Hubbard used to say that they'd all be better off dead. Well, save them some suffering. And, besides, who wants to end up as the figment of some savage's imagination?'

Eyre felt a grey wind across the salt-lake. He looked around, and although the body of the young Aborigine warrior was still there, lying twisted just where Dogger had shot him, the body of Yonguldye was gone.

‘Dogger,' said Eyre, and nodded towards the broken surface of the swamp.

Dogger stared for a moment, not sure what he was supposed to be looking at; but then he spat, and said, ‘Hell! The wily old bugger's made off!'

They crouched down by the spot where Yonguldye had fallen. Some of his blood-crusted emu feathers were stuck to the salt. Dogger traced the marks in the ground with the tips of his fingers, and said, ‘You hit him, all right, but not too badly by the looks of it. He must have made off while we were talking. They can walk silent, some of these blackfellows, and some of them say that they can make themselves invisible.'

Eyre took off his hat and wiped the grit away from the band. ‘Well,' he said, ‘that means that Yonguldye's still out there; either looking for us because he wants to make friends, and devour my knowledge; or else because he wants to sacrifice us to the great god Baiame, and eat my brains.'

Dogger jerked a thumb towards Minil, who had begun to boil up a thick barley soup. In the intermittent firelight,
her face was quite impassive, a mahogany mask. ‘It all depends on your point of view, doesn't it, chum? I mean, I'm the last man around to be a spoil-your-sport; but it does strike me that you ought to be taking her carefully; with a pinch of salt, if you know what I mean. If old squash-face was right, and
she
was wrong, then the consequences could be rather uncertain, if you understand me.'

‘I'm not sure that I do.'

‘Well, I'm not either,' said Dogger. ‘But what I'm saying is, take care, and keep your powder dry.'

But it wasn't only the question of Minil that was troubling Eyre that evening; it was the question of Arthur Mortlock. For if Joolonga hadn't poisoned him; who had?

Again and again, for over a week, they tried to strike out northwards, towards the shores of the inland sea. One afternoon, they managed to ride almost six miles further northwards than they had before, and Eyre was convinced that at last they had found a way through the salt swamp. Dogger even began to whistle, and Minil called to Eyre that as soon as they reached the other side of the salt-lake she would cook them a special meal to celebrate.

But then their horses' hoofs began to break through the crumbly crust again, and within ten minutes they were plunged belly-deep into thick, oozing mud.

Eyre shouted, ‘Let's try to ride on! Perhaps the horses can find a footing!' But after quarter-of-an-hour of thrashing and wallowing, they were forced to dismount, and drag their frightened, miserable mounts out of the mud
again; and stand filthy and bedraggled by the edge of the swamp looking northwards through the trembling heat at the distant horizon that Australia seemed to be determined to deny them. The 100-degree heat dried the mud on their clothes and on their horses' flanks in a matter of minutes; and so they looked like powdery white effigies of themselves; a monument to forlorn hope.

Through Dogger's telescope, Eyre could make out the faintly purple peak of two distant mountains. He pointed them out to Dogger, who collapsed the telescope with a soft brassy whistle of air, and then shrugged. ‘You saw them first, you can name them,' said Dogger. ‘How about Mount Constance and Mount Charlotte?'

‘What would you call them?' Eyre asked Minil, who was standing a little way away from him, shading her eyes.

‘I would call them
manaro
,' said Minil. ‘That is northlanguage for breasts.'

‘And what about you?' Dogger asked Eyre.

For the first time in days, Eyre gave way to frustration and bitterness. ‘Mount Deception; and Mount Hopeless,' he said, and turned away.

Dogger said, ‘Eyre—' But Eyre snapped, ‘Never mind. We'd better mount up and make our way back.'

The following morning they tried for the last time to make their way northwards. It was one of the hottest days they had yet experienced, and they were becoming dangerously short of water and food. Eyre rode ahead wearing his smoked glasses, straining his eyes for any glimpse of hills or trees or even a gradual rising of the ground—anything to indicate that they could find a way across the terrible glittering surface of the salt-lake.

All the time, discreetly, Dogger kept a watch behind. Dogger knew Aborigines of old, and he was convinced that Yonguldye would be following them. It was Dogger's opinion that even if Yonguldye hadn't wanted to kill them on their first night at the
corroboree
, he would most certainly want to kill them now. They had slaughtered his
tribesmen and wounded him twice and more importantly they had humiliated him in front of his people.

They paused for half-an-hour just before noon, and Minil brewed up a pot of tea. Now that she and Eyre had become lovers, of a kind, Minil seemed to consider that it was her duty to serve Eyre like a wife; and she did whatever she could to clean his clothes and cook him food and make him comfortable. Dogger had been a little peeved by this arrangement at first; but he was humorous and adaptable, and he soon accepted it. Eyre was grateful to Dogger for not making his usual relentless fun out of it; although he was still given to grumbling out loud whenever Minil was riding Eyre with too many screams and cries. He would bark, ‘Keep that damned galah quiet, will you?' from the other side of the camp-fire.

Eyre was unsure whether he believed Minil or not. But, for the time being, her believability was unimportant. As long as she could cook for them, and help them to feed and water the horses, and as long as Eyre had a warm companion for the night, nothing else mattered. He would sometimes watch her, though, through the long glaring hours of the afternoon, her bare black back shining in the sunlight, her buttocks spread wide across her saddle, and he would wonder what and who she was; and whether she had a part in the dreamtime story, too. Then from time to time she would suddenly turn and smile at him, calm and erotic, and that smile would do nothing at all to make the mystery any more explicable.

They rode north until three o' clock; and then again the salt-lake began to deteriorate under their horses' hoofs, and one of the pack-horses sank to its knees and knelt there sweating and trembling, unable or unwilling to move any further.

Eyre sat on his horse in his smoked-glass spectacles, caked in white salty mud, his head bare under the relentless sun. ‘This is where we have to turn back,' he said, in a voice that was little more than a hoarse croak.

Dogger stared at him silently; and then dismounted. ‘Minil,' he called. ‘Give me a hand with this horse.'

Together, while Eyre watched them, Dogger and Minil cooed and coaxed the stricken horse back on to its feet again. It still seemed bewildered, because it walked around and around in circles, until Minil was able to seize its bridle, and even then it kept twisting its head around as if it were wildly disoriented.

‘Brain's gone,' said Dogger, tugging his hat further down over his eye. ‘Thinks he's back in some pasture somewhere. Seen it before. Horses trying to chew the ground because they imagined it was grass.'

‘Still, we have to turn back,' Eyre repeated.

‘Yes,' said Dogger.

They both looked for the last time towards the north. In the gruelling afternoon heat, they could see the tantalising ripples of a horseshoe-shaped lake, glassy and clear, reflecting the peaks of Mount Deception and Mount Hopeless with crystalline clarity.

‘That's your inland sea,' said Eyre, with cracked lips. ‘A mirage. A dream. And nothing else.'

‘Well, it's probably there all right; two or three hundred miles further north,' said Dogger. ‘But the question is: how does anybody get to it?'

‘Come on,' Eyre told him, and the three of them gathered their reins and began their long retreat south.

After an hour or so, Dogger said, ‘What about the opals? Are we going to go and look for the opals?'

Eyre said nothing, but continued riding southwards, with his back to the glory of which once he had felt so sure. But now there was to be no glory, no great discovery; not even a clever-man to bury Yanluga according to the rites of his religion. He closed his eyes as he rode and tried to think about anything and everything else, in order to suppress the sharpness of his defeat. He thought of Charlotte, and of Adelaide, and of riding his bicycle again, if the piccaninnies hadn't stolen it. But again and again the bitterness of having to turn back rose up in his gullet
like a cat's-cradle of regurgitated brambles. He cursed Captain Sturt and he cursed Joolonga and he cursed himself for being taken for a fool. He couldn't bring himself to curse Minil, although he began to feel that he ought to.

Neither could he bring himself to curse God.

That night, as they sat around their campfire, Minil said, ‘We have no flour left. Tomorrow we must find fresh meat. Kangaroo, maybe. Emu.'

Dogger finished his mouthful of pasty, half-burned bread, and swilled it down with warm water. ‘Won't be too soon for me, my lady.'

‘I don't think I've seen a single kangaroo since we left Parachilna,' Eyre remarked.

‘Don't you worry,' Dogger reassured him. ‘We'll soon be back in Kangaroo country; and even if we can't catch any for the first couple of days, we can always survive on lizards until we do. Nothing like a good grilled goanna; what do you say, my lady?'

Minil knew that he was teasing her; for she leaned forward and kissed him with surprising demureness on his grey bearded cheek.

‘Well, now,' said Dogger, his eyes bright. ‘You'd better watch yourself now, Eyre old chum. Don't want your lady straying to an old dinger-hunter like me.'

On the morning of the following day, their sick packhorse suddenly staggered and collapsed. They drew up, and dismounted, and Dogger felt the pulse in its neck. ‘He's almost gone,' he said; and then ‘He's gone.' The horse lay on the sandy ground with its purple tongue protruding and its eyes staring at nothing at all. Eyre looked away, thinking: my God, what has my conceit and my vanity brought to all of these people and all of these animals? Nothing but suffering and death. He began to feel like a Jonah, a curse on everything and everybody who had anything to do with him. It probably wouldn't be long before Dogger and Minil would be struck down with heat-stroke, and exhaustion; and then his devastation of all those whom he had ever loved or liked would be
complete. And there would be no chance of him ever returning to Charlotte.

Dogger said, ‘We'd better make the best of this poor beast. Are you any good at butchering; Eyre?'

‘For God's sake,' said Eyre. ‘Haven't you had enough?'

Dogger stood up. ‘Now, listen here,' he said, and his voice was a rasp. ‘You just stop behaving like Hunt's dog; which would neither go to church nor stay at home; and we'll all get on much better. It wasn't your fault that there were more salt swamps out there than you could manage; and it isn't your fault that we're having to go home with our tails between our legs. So let's make the best of what we have; and the best of what we have today is fresh horse-meat.'

Throughout the stunningly hot afternoon, Eyre cut up the dead pack-horse with a sharp sailor's-knife, hanging out some of the dark-red strips on a length of twine in the hope that they would be dried by the sun; and dividing the rest into bloody steaks. By the time he had finished there must have been more than 100 pounds of meat stacked up on every available plate and cooking-pan they had, clustered with grey sand-flies, but ready for a massive feast.

Minil built a fire out of dried bushes and twigs, and during the whole long evening they sat with lumps of horse-meat speared through by twigs, and roasted them in front of the glowing ashes.

Dogger said, ‘Remember what I told you about surviving in the outback, old chum; eat whatever you can, and as much as you can, whenever you can get it; because you never know when you're going to get it next.'

Eyre's chin was glistening with fat and blood, and he didn't know whether he wanted to vomit or die, but he managed to eat nearly five pounds of meat before he lay back, his hands clutching his distended stomach, and decided that even Purgatory would be better than another mouthful of horse-meat. Dogger and Minil continued wolfing for another half-hour or so; but eventually even
Dogger had to admit that he didn't care whether he saw another horse in his entire life or not, and lay back on his blankets with a curse on all four-legged animals, and a ripping belch, and in five minutes or so was fast asleep.