Corroboree (46 page)

‘What do you mean?'

‘Well, either we leave him here; or we put him out of his misery.'

'What?
We can't kill him.'

‘That lot will do worse. Especially since we seem to have done for their clever-man.'

‘For God's sake, the gun went off by accident.'

Dogger shrugged. ‘They don't know that.'

Eyre said, ‘We have to try. We can't just leave him.'

Dogger peered with infuriating thoughtfulness in the direction in which Christopher and Minil had just disappeared. ‘Listen, old mate,' he said to Eyre, ‘why don't you go and make sure that your chum's all right. That boomerang gave him a fair knock. And then there's your girlfriend, too.'

‘You'll shoot him, that's why.'

Dogger rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Well, you're right
about that. I thought perhaps you wouldn't want to see it.'

Impatient, angry at Dogger's defeatism, Eyre worked his way around Midgegooroo's shivering body until he was right up behind him. He rested the shaft of the spear on one bare knee, and grasped it in both hands as if he were cracking firewood. ‘We're not going to give in,' he told Dogger, fiercely. ‘If this were
you
lying here, with a spear in your back, I believe you'd thank me for what I'm going to do now.'

‘Not I, friend,' said Dogger, ‘I'd curse you all the way to Purgatory and back.'

Eyre pressed down on the spear's shaft with all his weight, trying to break it across his knee. Immediately, Midgegooroo threw up his arm and screamed. Dogger said, ‘For pity's sake, Eyre, leave the fellow be.' But Eyre was determined. He pressed down on the spear again and again, until he heard the wood cracking, and at last the shaft broke off, leaving only six or seven inches protruding bloodily from Midgegooroo's back.

‘Now,' he said, ‘up with him, and let's get him down to the horses.'

Midgegooroo was roaring with pain, his eyes bulging and his mouth stretched open like a frilled lizard. But Eyre seized the Aborigine's arm, and bent forward, and lifted him up on to his back; and Dogger, with a quick spit of disapproval, took hold of his other arm, and made sure that Eyre wouldn't drop him.

Hunched over like gnomes or goblins, they hurried down towards the creek-bed; while a fresh salvo of deathspears came whistling over the ridge and rattled against the rocks all around them. One came so close that it scratched Eyre's calf, and almost tripped him over. Dogger, glancing back, said, ‘They'll catch us if we don't run faster. For God's sake, Eyre, lay this fellow down and let's get away while we can.'

Eyre, panting under the weight of Midgegooroo's cold and sweaty body, could do nothing more than shake his
head. Then he began to slither down the loose shale of the creek-bed; half-tumbling, half-staggering, with the acacia branches whipping at his bare arms, and the rocks tearing at his bare legs. He managed the last few yards at jarring over-and-over roll, bruising his back and his hip; and Midgegooroo fell off his back and tumbled even further, at last lying concussed against a purple-flowered emu bush, his face grey.

Eyre stood up, just as Dogger came slithering down behind him. Two or three stray spears hurtled over the brink of the creek, and fell noisily down between the overhanging banks.

Weeip and Christopher were ready with the horses; Minil was already mounted up. Without a word, Dogger and Eyre dragged Midgegooroo over to the nearest horse, and while Christopher held the animal's reins, and shushed it, they hoisted him across the saddle, and quickly tied his wrists and ankles to prevent him from sliding off. The broken-off spear protruded bloodily from his back and gave him the appearance of having been nailed on to the horse. His muscles quivered, and he let out a deep bubbling groan, but then he lapsed into unconsciousness again.

‘Come on, let's get away from here,' Eyre ordered, and they turned their horses and began to pick their way back down the narrow waterway, riding as quickly as they could, but all of them aware that until they reached the open plains, they were far slower on their horses than a running man; especially a running Aborigine.

Dogger tried several times to reload his rifle as he rode, but it was impossible, and he scattered half-a-dozen balls on to the ground, as well as losing most of his primingpowder to the early-morning wind. Eventually, he cursed, and gave up, and slung his rifle back over his shoulder, and concentrated on making his way down the mountainside as fast as he could.

At the foot of the mountains, they had to cross a maze of wrinkled gullies, where the water that ran down from
the higher peaks had washed down with it thick clay sediments, and then eroded them into a complicated pattern of passageways and dead-ends. Their horses' hoofs slipped on the crumbly yellow earth; and for one moment Eyre thought that his horse was going to slide sideways down one of the gullies, taking him with it; but with a flurrying scrabble of hoofs, the horse managed to regain its ground.

Behind them, startling them, they heard a great warbling cry, and a rattling of spears and boomerangs. Eyre twisted around in his saddle, and saw at least twenty Aborigine warriors running across the clay towards them, jumping from ridge to ridge and runnel to runnel, shrieking and calling, and occasionally pausing to fit a spear into their woomeras and launch it off.

Eyre shouted, ‘Dogger! Stop here, and reload! One more good shot should keep them back!'

Dogger circled his horse around, and then dropped down from the saddle. While Eyre and the rest of the party began to make their way out of the clay gullies, he calmly loaded and primed his rifle, sniffed, adjusted his hat, and knelt down beside his horse's right flank; taking aim not at the leading Aborigine but at another, much further back.

Two spears landed close by, but he ignored them. He waited for the moment when the Aborigine at whom he was aiming was right at the top of the last steep slope, and then he fired. There was a flat
crack
, and a cloud of blue smoke drifted unhurriedly away from Dogger's rifle. The tribesman staggered, slipped, and then fell spectacularly head-over-heels all the way down the zig-zag creekbed, spraying blood over the rocks as he went. He landed disjointedly at the bottom of the slope like one of the dancing beeswax figures at Mushroom Rock.

Dogger remounted, and cantered after Eyre across the powdery clay, letting out a high, harsh whoop. Behind him, the Aborigines threw another heavy shower of spears, but most of them fell short; and the tribesmen had been too frightened by Dogger's marksmanship to risk
running very much closer. Even when it was launched from a woomera, a spear could only travel a hundred and fifty paces with any accuracy and force, whereas even an out-of-date muzzle-loading rifle like the Baker could bring a man down from over twice that distance.

At the top of the creekbed, Eyre saw Joolonga, his distinctive midshipman's hat silhouetted against the brightening eastern sky. As Dogger drew level with him, Eyre said, ‘Look!' and pointed Joolonga out; and Dogger reined back his horse and squinted back towards the mountains, his face as creased and wrinkled as the dry gullies they were riding over.

‘I should have picked
him
off, too,' sniffed Dogger. ‘He's a dangerous fellow, your Joolonga. Educated savages always are. They gain the knowhow, but they never lose the wildness. Can't trust them, not an Irishman's inch.'

‘He's clever just the same,' Eyre replied.

‘Well, that's all very well; but my mother always used to say that you ought to give men like that legroom in case they kicked at you; and throwing room in case they chucked a stone at you; and that you should never tell them how much money you were carrying or introduce them to your wife.'

‘Wise lady, your mother, by the sound of it,' Eyre smiled. For the first time since they had undressed yesterday evening, he was conscious that they were naked. ‘It's probably a good thing that she can't see you now.'

Dogger slapped his big round beer-belly. ‘Let's put a mile or so between us and these savages; and then let's get some britches between ourselves and these saddles.'

Christopher was waiting for them a little way away; holding the reins of Midgegooroo's horse. It was impossible to tell whether Midgegooroo was alive or dead; he hung over the saddle with his arms and legs trailing, and his entire bloody back was smothered with flies. Minil was riding next to him, and Eyre could see by the expression on her face that she didn't expect him to survive. As Eyre came closer, she said, ‘This man was very brave. He was
like one of the saints they told me about at the mission. St Philip, or St Jude.'

‘If we can dig that spear out of him, he may live,' said Eyre.

‘No,' said Minil. ‘He is dead already.'

They camped at noon in the hot purple shadow of a limestone outcropping ten miles west of Parachilna. The temperature was 113 degrees Fahrenheit, and all around them the flat salt lake appeared to move up and down in slowly-undulating curves, as waves of superheated air flowed over it. The rust-coloured peaks of the Flinders also rose and fell, as if they were observing them through water. Eyre had the extraordinary sensation of being on a ship again, although he knew it was only an optical illusion.

The dryness was stunning. Two of their seven horses sank to their knees when they set up camp: and one of them, a three-year-old chestnut which had carried their main bags of water all the way from Adelaide, lay on his side after a while and began to pant and tremble.

‘What do you think?' Eyre asked Christopher.

Christopher shrugged. ‘There isn't very much we can do, except put him out of his pain.'

They deliberately avoided talking about Midgegooroo. He was still alive, although he had lost so much blood that he was barely conscious. Dogger had speculated that some herb or other had been rubbed on the tip of the spear to prevent the blood from clotting; certainly it had run out of
Midgegooroo's back in a wide sticky river, and they didn't even have enough water to spare to be able to wash him clean. He lay on his stomach in a small crevice in the rock, his eyes wide, scarcely breathing, his back teeming with huge grey sand flies.

They had dressed now: Eyre in his wide kangaroo-skin hat and bush-jacket and wide cotton ducks; Christopher in his white shirt and riding-britches; Dogger in his familiar faded trousers and shiny-toed suede boots. Eyre had offered clothes to Minil, and she had happily accepted a blue shirt and a silk scarf; although she had tied the sleeves of the shirt around her waist, so that only her bottom was covered, and crossed the scarf between her breasts, so that it did nothing more than lift them up even more prominently. She had combed her hair back now and tied it with twine; and Eyre was struck by the gracious black profile which this revealed, and by the flared curve of her bare shoulders. It unsettled him slightly to watch the way in which she allowed flies to settle on her, to walk across her cheeks or cluster on her back, and make no attempt to flick them away, as Eyre always did; but she had a hypnotic naked beauty about her which appealed to him more every time he looked at her.

Whether she was aware of what he felt, or not, he found it impossible to tell. She made no obvious effort either to ignore him or encourage him. She was sitting now in the shadows, her eyes closed, her forehead sparkling with sweat, her thighs unselfconsciously parted so that he could see how the grains of salty sand clung to her vaginal lips. He found he had to look away; and think of anything else instead; of the expedition; of what Captain Sturt had done to him; and of Midgegooroo.

They were four hundred miles from civilisation on a roaringly hot salt lake, with one desperately wounded man and another who could only limp; and only two young Aborigines who were little more than children to guide them.

They drank hot water from their flasks, and ate two
grey-faced terns which Weeip had snared the previous evening and charred over his camp-fire. It was Eyre's instinct to eat only a little, and to save the rest for later, but Dogger reminded him that the meat wouldn't last the day, not in this heat.

‘Eat like an Aborigine,' he told Eyre. ‘Cram as much into your belly as you can, because whatever you save will be stinking by nightfall. You can't keep anything fresh, not in the outback. I think the only food that I've ever seen the blackfellows store is wild figs, which they roll up in balls of ochre, and hide in the trees. The rest of it, they keep in here,' he said, pointing to his stomach.

They talked about Joolonga and Captain Sturt. Minil told them exactly what Joolonga had been discussing with Yonguldye; how Yonguldye wanted to break open the white
djanga's
head at once and take all the magic that was stored there. Apparently Joolonga had been arguing that if he allowed Yonguldye to kill Eyre so soon, he would no longer have any guarantee that Yonguldye would direct him to the place where the firestones could be found; or north to the inland sea.

Surprisingly, Yonguldye had been determined to travel south to Adelaide to give Yanluga's body a traditional Aborigine burial, as he had agreed. It was a crucial part of the coming-alive of the legend that he should do so. Presumably he would have asked Joolonga to take him to Captain Sturt, and Captain Sturt would then have arranged the burial with Lathrop Lindsay.

Christopher said, ‘I really find this all rather hard to swallow.'

Dogger sniffed, with a dry catarrhal thump. ‘You're dealing with people who believe in magic here, matey. I've heard tell of that story of the white
djanga
myself, although the one I heard had a slightly different twist to it. I think the
djanga
ended up eating the clever-man, instead of the other way about. And there was something about a waratah tree in it.'

‘But it's quite extraordinary that the news of it should
have spread so quickly … and that we should have travelled all the way out here and found Yonguldye ready for us.'