Authors: Margaret Tanner
An eagle soared skywards. What magnificent birds, so proud and free. Even though she adored her brothers, she savored the peace and serenity of being on her own.
In England she often took long walks through the pretty woods surrounding their home. She would never forget the soft greenness of her native land, but the untamed beauty of the Australian frontier had ensnared her. Gaudy parrots flitting through the bush contrasted starkly to the brooding, gray green of the gum trees.
She found herself on a steep narrow track leading upwards, and kept her eyes fixed on a yellow monolith, weathered over millions of years to form an archway over the spring. She congratulated herself for finding it so easily. In another ten minutes or so she would be scooping up crystal clear mineral water and letting it trickle down her parched throat. Resisting the urge to take a swig from the water bottle, she decided to wait until she got to the spring before having a drink.
Suddenly her horse’s head jerked, its nostrils flared. A snake slithered on the ground and struck. She screamed as the horse reared, throwing her. She hit the ground hard and everything went black.
When Tommy recovered her senses, she tried to stand up and the landscape seesawed in front of her eyes. With a groan of pain she raised her hand to her throbbing skull, and felt the warm stickiness of blood. She tried to focus her eyes. Where was she? No sign of the horse, no sign of the rock archway either.
By her reckoning, with the sun hovering near the mountain peaks, it must be mid- afternoon. What had she done over the last few of hours? Her hands and knees throbbed, her clothes were torn. She couldn’t remember doing so, but she must have crawled here. God alone knew where she was now, nothing seemed familiar.
Don’t panic. Stay quiet for a few moments until you get your bearings and gather your wits. Her head ached, a dull throb that stopped her from thinking coherently. Her lips felt cracked, her throat parched and scratchy. A quick glance at her hands showed the palms to be grazed, the nails dirty and broken. Her skirt hung in threads, even the knees of her pants were worn through and her elbows stung. In a crazed, delirious state she must have crawled and dragged herself along. How far? In what direction? Why couldn’t she remember?
She needed to find water or she would die. She recalled reading that birds always made for water at dawn and dusk. One simply followed them. The only problem—not one bird could be seen on the horizon.
She must have crawled down the mountain on a different side from where she started. No wonder she couldn’t see the archway. Silence reigned now; the bush, brooding in the afternoon sun, seemed somehow sinister. Thank goodness she hadn’t sustained any broken bones.
Feeling groggy and sick, she rose to her feet, hanging on to a stringy bark tree for support. The landscape didn’t seesaw any more, and by moving her head carefully she could look around. She sniffed the air and smelled smoke.
“Thank you, God.” A fire burned somewhere nearby; all she needed to do was follow the smoke until she found its source. What if it turned out to be some unsavory individual, or aborigines on the warpath even? She had to take the chance because she would not survive for long in the bush without water.
David would miss her when he arrived home, but he would have no idea what direction to start searching. Why hadn’t she left a note?
You were always reckless, Tommy Lindsay. See where your impetuous behavior has got you now
. Never to see David or Jamie again, her baby brother would lose his mother a second time around. She couldn’t let it happen to him. And what of Adam? Would he care?
The smoke was her last hope, in fact the only hope. What direction to take though? She appeared to be on the floor of a canyon. It was sandy and strewn with pebbles, probably some ancient dried up riverbed. Could she dig for water perhaps? The ground appeared so dry she would have to dig down a long way and even then it might prove fruitless. All that wasted energy for nothing. No, the smoke offered her the best chance; she would concentrate on that.
A slight breeze sprung up. She would go in the opposite direction, which should take her to the source of the fire. “God, please let my reckoning be right.” If it wasn’t, she was doomed. Maybe she should go with the breeze, but surely it would be blowing the smoke away? Going in the opposite direction had to be the sensible decision.
Before she changed her mind, Tommy set off. She couldn’t find her hat, and the sun’s furnace-like rays beat down on her unprotected head as she trudged along. The heat seemed to be bouncing off the walls of the canyon. She squinted skywards and was rewarded by a ribbon of smoke unfurling on the breeze.
It seemed like miles that she trudged, desperation forcing her wavering legs into motion. Left, right, left, she pretended to march, but it soon became painful to put her feet on the ground because they throbbed so badly.
Scraggy bushes clung tenuously to the canyon walls; but in some places the walls appeared smooth, shiny as glass.
She reached a fork. Left or right? If she carried a coin she would have tossed it. Her hysterical giggle came out in a croak. She could just about kill for a drink of water. The three wise men followed the star of Bethlehem. A ribbon of smoke guided Tommy Lindsay to her destination.
At last she was rewarded when the canyon opened up into a vast flood-plain of cracked, yellow mud, devoid of vegetation. It seemed like walking through a desert. Far away in the distance she saw trees, and the smoke seemed thicker.
Heat radiating up from the ground felt hot as the fires of hell, but she set forth with renewed strength. She dared not think about what she would do if on finding the source of the smoke, no humans were nearby.
The sun was setting like a giant, blood-stained ball when she staggered towards a rough bark hut. Two figures stood near an open fire and one of them started walking towards her. Tommy only had time to notice a woman dressed in filthy rags, before she collapsed on the ground.
Her next conscious thought was of water being poured into her mouth.
“Yer wake up now.”
She opened her eyes then wished she hadn’t. An old crone, with matted hair hanging like rats tails about her shoulders, forced water into her mouth and hit her on the cheek at the same time.
“What yer doing here?”
“My horse threw me,” Tommy croaked. “Where am I?”
“Yer in hell.” The crone cackled, showing off a single tooth sticking out from her upper gum. Her yellow skin hung in layers, crinkled like dried up leather; her eyes buried in huge wrinkled folds, stared, unblinking.
“Yer want food?”
“No, thank you, just some more water please.”
“Ruby, git more water,” the crone hollered at a thin aboriginal girl who hovered a few feet away. The filthy rag the girl wore scarcely reached her knees; the top, ripped almost in half, showed most of her breasts. It wasn’t this that caused Tommy to cry out in distress. The girl wore a leg iron attached to a long chain.
“More water, git.” The crone cuffed the girl across the back of her head. With an awkward, lopsided gait, Ruby went to a shallow creek, which gurgled along, little more than ten feet away from them.
“Why do you keep her chained up?”
“Yer silly girl, stop her running orf.” The crone poked Tommy in the ribs. “Her belongs to my boy, Jake. He flail my hide if her gits away. Sol, me other son, can have you. He’s women keep dying on him.”
Tommy’s heart nearly catapulted out of her chest. An all-consuming fear gripped her in its steel jaws. She had truly stumbled into hell.
How could you do this to me, she inwardly railed fate. Death in the bush would be preferable to this degradation. Keep calm, she told herself, let the old thing think you’re too exhausted to move. If she got chained up there would be no chance of escape.
“I’m lucky to have found this place.” She injected a whine in her voice. “I’ve got so many blisters on my feet I can scarcely walk for the pain. I’ve twisted my ankle too.”
“Sol won’t be back for a while, orf working.”
Tommy didn’t ask what type of work he did.
“Orf after gold; don’t find much, always comes back to Ma,” the crone told her anyway. She obviously took pride in her son’s achievements. “Might stay now I got him another woman. Yer be good to my boy.” She hovered over Tommy like some demented witch.
“I’ll be very good to him. I can’t wait to meet him.” This old woman must be crazy. No sane person could believe she would want to have anything to do with some vile creature who, if he looked like his mother, would be revolting.
“Thank you, Ruby.” She took the wooden mug from the girl and gulped the water down.
“She don’t talk.” The old woman spat on the girl’s bare foot. “You call me Ma.”
“All right, Ma. I’m Tommy.”
This had to be a nightmare. After pinching herself hard on the leg, she knew for certain it was a shocking reality
. I’ve got to keep my wits about me and get out of this awful place
.
“How far are we from town, Ma?” she stopped guzzling the water long enough to ask.
“What town?” The old hag gave an insane cackle.
“I don’t know, the nearest.”
“Long way. No one gunna find yer out here. Don’t run off. Yer’ll wear a chain like Ruby if yer does.”
“I couldn’t run even if I wanted to.” Tommy pointed to her feet. “I’m just about crippled.”
“Jake be coming soon.” Ma’s prediction caused a tremor to pass through Ruby. Sheer terror clouded her eyes.
You poor thing, you’ll be coming with me when I go
. How would they get the leg iron off? It looked to be embedded in the flesh of her ankle. It must have been on for years. The chain, more than twenty feet long, was secured to a steel spike hammered deep into the ground. There must be a key somewhere.
The concoction Ma stirred in a blackened iron pot over the open fire smelled putrid. Tommy could not even begin to image what went into it.
“Ma.”
She heard the bellow just as a giant of a man broke out of the trees and lumbered towards them. His small head rested on his massive shoulders, almost as if he didn’t have a neck.
“Who that?” He spoke in the strange singsong way his mother did.
“Got lost, come here. Her be Sol’s woman now.”
Jake lumbered towards her. Tommy cringed back in fear as a pair of black, beady eyes peered into her face. “Sol can have er. Ruby, git here.”
Ruby edged towards him and he thrust a massive paw between the girl’s thighs. Except for the ragged dress, Ruby was naked. Nausea rose in Tommy’s throat.
“How long tea, Ma?”
“Yer got time.”
Tommy could not believe any woman would condone such depravity. These people weren’t human, they were bestial. Better to die in the bush than stay here. She could do nothing but watch poor Ruby being pushed into a crude lean-to at the side of the hut. Jake returned after a short time with a vacant, imbecilic smirk on his face.
“Yer gunna tie that gal up?” He gave his mother a slobbering smile.
“Nah, can’t walk, feet got blisters. Won’t get far on the sand flats with no water.” Ma slopped several ladles of stinking gruel into a wooden bowl for Jake who scooped it up with his fingers and started chewing noisily.
Ruby, appearing even more wretched than before, sidled over. Ma tipped a ladle of stew on the ground. Ruby set on it like a ravenous dog. It was the most disgusting scene Tommy had ever witnessed; to think one human could degrade another human in such a deplorable manner.
She had to free poor Ruby from this nightmare somehow.
“Want some?” Ma asked.
“No thank you, I’m not hungry.” Even if she could be sure the old woman wouldn’t slop it on the ground, she wouldn’t eat it anyway. Strange, there didn’t seem to be any dogs around. Bile rose up in her throat as the thought popped into her head that they had probably been cooked and eaten.