Travellers #2 (14 page)

A wave of air bumps me, soft, and smothering. Dust shrouds the shaking rims around. Shafts and stacks fall in shattered walls, and I hear again the smashing of glass, the collapse of the house of mirrors in the Garden of Dene. Illusion again. Like the reflecting of those deceptions in the glass walls and roofs, echo echoes echo. The roar subsides in a blinding confusion of dust. Jak trembling beside me. The river working, backing and filling, finding a new channel between tumbled turrets. Again unearthly melodies float out of the hollow heads of the remaining moon-faced guardians.

Below my feet begins a raw cliff face, new-cut by the chasm’s collapse. And over the lip of its precipice the river bends into space. A colossal rainbow springs. Snowflakes spin down the abyss. From around my neck I slip the green stone dolphin. Flung, it climbs the rainbow’s curve, balances green upon the snow-flecked air and, like the river, vanishes into silence.

Taur had rolled and stuffed his tunic and heavy cloak into my pack, a bag of dried meat, and his knife. I rolled myself in his cloak, crawled under an overhang. Shoving in under the rock. Jak crawling beside me. Like Bar all those years ago when the Travellers left me behind.

I dreamed Jess curved above the river, water flying off her coat, the rainbow shining. Tried to stop her picture there, but she faltered in mid-air, crumpled as the arrowhead swelled and burst out of her side. I groaned, and Jess fell.

Jak woke me with his whimper. I fed him the meat. He lapped at an ice-edged rivulet, crawled back, and I put my arms around him, buried my face in his ruff.

When I was little, my father carved me a toy, odd-shaped pieces of wood. Fitted together, they made a picture of Bar, my first dog. I thought of that picture, tried to prevent another forming in my mind. Stared at the rock overhead – its grainy surface. Pushed my face into Jak’s coat – staring at each hair in turn.

A chaos of pictures jumbled a succession of distortions in my mind. Sometimes the images were smashed reflections, grotesque derangements. Had there been a place called Dene, someone called Sodomah? I wondered who I was.

I said “Jak” aloud. “Jess,” I said. Then a face came back to me, a name I had forgotten. “Tara!” I repeated her name, the others, then her name again because there was another name I did not want to say, a face I did not want to see, a voice I did not want to hear. I stuck my fingers in my ears,
hearing only the boom of my heartbeat, and slept.

When I woke, Jak was hungry again, but I had nothing more. I washed the wound in my leg with ice water, bound it tight. If I leaned on my spear, the leg would carry me.

I did not look back at the raw granite edge where the river ran out upon air. Jak limping behind, we toiled through deepening snow up the pass. At first light I renewed the coverings on Jak’s pads, lashed the wrappings tight around my feet and legs, and climbed on, dizzy with hunger, seeing black mountains against a white sky, then a black sky against white mountains.

In a hollow between cliffs a stag wallowed shoulder-deep in snow. Its eyes rolled back, showing the whites. The air musk with its terror. Fingers blunt, somehow I drew my bow. Jak and I knelt side by side and lapped blood that steamed a crimson trench in the snow. The furry taste reminded me of something in another time, then I was snarling, thrusting frozen hands into the hot guts, crying as my fingers sparked and burned, tearing out and gulping the liver. The opened belly smoked on the glassy air.

Past icicles like the fangs of a mountain demon, we climbed the narrow throat of the pass. I looked down, saw us puny between precipices. Heavy air enshrouded us in vapour. Under a snow-packed gully, we picked our way between embedded boulders. I remember looking up the gully, its white slope curving to the sky. Jak looked and whined, trotted ahead, wrapped feet slipping on ice.

Almost through the pass, we gazed down a valley, its southern side blue with evening shadow, the other coruscating sunset gold. Wherever the country of ice and snow lay, the land of the mountain that ate the sun, we had escaped it.

I heard a voice sobbing. Jak leaned against my leg. Braiding ribbons of light across the valley’s shingle floor below, a river ran east. Through a tangled skein of cloud I saw an endless blue plain, tawny hills and scarps. One more step
would take us into the light of this new world, but I turned, limped back. Jack whined again, looking up the white sheet of the gully, and cringed to join me.

Standing between the boulders embedded to their waists in snow below the gully, I stared back down the dark gullet of the pass. As if I could see through the choke of mist and swirl, over the vast yawn of bluffs, the opal river, the desert, all our long journey.

Jak took my cloak between his teeth and tugged. “All right!” He bounded under a small bluff, the far side of the gully, whined again. “I’m coming,” I growled. And the air above us cracked. The tilted field of snow unfolded down the gully. I flung forward, weak leg crumpling, hands scrabbling, and Jak dragged me under the bluff.

A huge hand of air bowled us against its wall. Snow and rocks stormed down the gully. Jak showed the whites of his eyes. Stupid, but I laughed! And Jak bit my arm! I ran after him – skipping, dragging, swinging my leg – towards the vision of the river and the blue plain, my arm hurting where Jak had bitten, still shouting, laughing.

We looked back, saw the mountainside shift. Over the bluff, a white river in flood, bucking in combers, billowed and surged out of sight. A moment longer, we must have drowned.

I walled off a leaning rock with blocks of snow, a shelter. One arm bruised, clouted by a leaping stone; Jak’s bloody punctures on the other. Snow packed hard under my tunic and inside my leggings. I picked it out of my ears and nostrils, dug it from under my nails. My pack was filled with more of that driven snow. I gave Jak the raw meat I carried, rolled myself in Taur’s cloak. More of the snow rivers came down, closing the pass above, shaking the mountain. Between their cannonading, the eerie fluting of the guardians.

I woke crying, burrowed my face into the cloak and cried again while Jak licked my neck. For his smell on the cloak
brought back the pictures and sounds I had been avoiding: Taur singing the Travellers’ song; Taur pretending to listen to something outside the hut as he cheated me, playing our game with the wooden counters in the hut on Marn Island; Taur begging me to abandon the green stone dolphin. The picture faded, and once more I saw Squint-face’s fingers clutching over the Bull Man’s shoulder as the stone giant collapsed and carried them, the Salt Men, and the mountainside down and for ever out of sight.

Descending in sunlight next morning. “Taur! Isn’t the sun mild?” I called as if he was just behind me. As I had pretended after Hagar died. And Tara. And as hopeless.

I knew it was wrong: trying to believe nothing had happened. Not facing the fact of his death. I forced myself to think of his smashed body the other side of the mountain’s stone hulk. Hawk, Hagar, Tara, now Taur.

“People die,” I told Jak. “We are lucky if we have time to love them.”

The mountainsides softened by trees. I knew again the comfort of walking under leaves. In the afternoon, we ran from beneath the forest into the rush and glancing lights of the river. A pair of the ducks Hagar called parries honked, whistled, and cartwheeled downstream, dragging broken wings. Jak ignored their ploy, ran upstream, and caught two of their young. I struck Taur’s flint and steel and fed a smudge of smoke to flame. We roasted the ducks, ate, and slept.

I woke from a scarlet dream of horror and built up the fire. Afraid to sleep again, watched a procession in the flames. Our journey beneath the burning mountain, meeting the Bull Man. Travelling to Marn Island, across the strait, down the Western Coast. Taur grinned as he beat me at some game, bellowed the Travellers’ song, saved me and led us out of Dene and up the opal river. With dawn, the flames and pictures paled.

I slept in daylight. Nights I sat by the fire, escaping dreams of a crone, a squinting eye. When the moon sprang above black ridges and daubed the riverbed white, Jak and I travelled
downstream. Several days later the river debouched into the blue plain we had seen from the mountain. Long and level, the lake stretched forever east.

Filtered through perpetual mist and cloud along the mountains, the sun was no longer a demon but an amiable source of warmth. I could not believe this kinder light, plaited myself a new flax hat.

Jak looked for Jess. When I fed him, he seemed to wait for her to shove in for her share. When I sent him to head a deer, bring it down past me, he looked around as if for help. There was a fall in his manner, not a lapse of courage but of certainty and, watching Jak, I learned to grieve for Taur.

On a wall of creamy stone, with sweeps of charcoal I drew the Bull Man. Searched for clays, mixed in dyes and oil from fish. Painted Squint-face’s death, the collapsing mountain, a dog leaping across the arc of a rainbow. I was surprised how my hand remembered Hagar’s and Tara’s faces, even though I found it hard to see them in my mind. My first dogs, Bar and Mak, their faces formed familiar on the smooth rock. I wept and talked to Taur as I painted him teasing me, playing tricks, scything the Salt Men, taking vengeance on Squint-face who killed his mother and father, castrated him, and tore out his tongue. And I remembered the vanity of my search for the source of the green stone, how I deceived myself in the Garden of Dene.

In the clear air each morning, in the long light each evening, I stared across the blue plain of the lake. “We might find somewhere to live at its other end,” I said to Jak. “A place for a garden. Animals. A farm.” I did not allow myself to think of people – because they died. I had lost my father, my sister, Hagar, Tara, and Taur the Bull Man. And because people die I wondered if I had it in me ever to love again.

“We’ll have to think how to get down the lake,” I said to Jak. He leapt and barked until a hawk flew out of a gully, cried, “Kek! Kek!”.

For some reason it reminded me of that time on Marn Island when Taur hid on top of the knoll and barked until Jak and Jess were so excited they did not know whether they were barking back at him or at their own echoes. When the Bull Man was there, something was always happening, I thought, and found myself laughing and crying all at once.

“I wonder what Taur would have done to get down the lake?” I asked Jak, and he put his head to one side as if wondering, too. “Do you think there might be people there?” A leaf blew across the beach, and Jak pounced on it with both front paws, tossed it up with his mouth, jumped, snapped, and caught it as it floated down.

Charlie
the
Cheeky
Kea
1976

Rewi
the
Red
Deer
1976

The
Lake
1987

The
Mangrove
Summer
1989

Uncle
Trev
1991

Uncle
Trev
and
the
Great
South
Island
Plan
1991

Uncle
Trev
and
the
Treaty
of Waitangi
1992

The
Conjuror
1992

Harry
Wakatipu
1993

Dead
Man’s
Head
1994

The
Waterfall
1995

The
Battle
of
Pook
Island
1996

Because
We
Were
The
Travellers
1997

Uncle
Trev’s
Teeth
1997