Corroboree (49 page)

Minil, her eyes sparkling in the reflected light from the fire, said, ‘The Nyungar believe that food will always be given to them when they need it. Drink, too. They say
when they leave each other “never-starve”; it is a kind of goodbye, like “God-be-with-you.”'

‘Or, the Lord is mice pepper, as Weeip used to say,' smiled Eyre.

Dogger's pudding was so stodgy that when Eyre had finished it, he felt as if his stomach had been stuffed with kapok. He lay back on his blankets and looked up at the wealth of stars which sparkled overhead, and thought of Charlotte. Somehow, her face seemed less defined now; and he couldn't imagine her voice any more. But he still missed her. He still missed her softness and her silly innocence; he still felt aroused by her slyness and her smiles.

And while he thought of her, the cold pale moon rose again over the salt-lake; transforming it into a landscape of white and silver, a place of death from which only the spirits of those who had crossed it would ever return. A land without flesh, the Wirangu called it; and now Eyre understood what they meant. The body could not survive here; only the
djanga
.

He felt a dull, uncomfortable pain in his stomach. Perhaps he ought to walk out across the lake a way and try to empty his bowels. On a flat and treeless salt-swamp like this, privacy was impossible; and the most they could ever do to maintain their modesty was to turn away. He grimaced, and broke a little wind. No wonder Dogger's mother had called it hooting pudding. In actual fact, it was more like trumpeting pudding. On the other side of the shelter, Dogger broke wind too, and Eyre thought here we go, a musical evening; just when I'm really exhausted. He giggled, and then wished he hadn't. It wasn't very leaderly.

He slept and dreamed of Adelaide. When he woke up, he thought he was back at Mrs McConnell's, and for a moment he couldn't understand where he was. Minil was lying next to him, and when he sat up with a startled jerk, she said, ‘What is it?' in a hot whisper; and then, ‘
Naodaup
?'

‘I'm all right,' Eyre whispered back. ‘I had a dream, that's all. I had the idea that I was somewhere else.'

Minil touched his shoulder. ‘You're cold, that's why you dream.'

He twisted himself around in his blankets. ‘I'll be all right. It was probably that hooting pudding.' He picked up his watch and peered at it in the darkness. Three o'clock in the morning. Another hour or so before it would be light enough to travel on.

Minil said, ‘The other man, Christopher…'

‘What about him?'

‘I don't know. He is very strange. He seems to like you and yet also to hate you.'

‘Well, he has own his particular way of looking at things. I don't think he really hates me. It's just that he wants me to be somebody else; somebody different. And when I'm not … well, it makes him angry.'

‘You do not make me angry.'

‘Why should I?'

‘Sometimes white men make me angry. They call me “black polish”. Sometimes they touch me. Mr Harris at the New Norcia mission used to touch me. But you are not like Mr Harris. You are like Prince Rupert.'

‘Prince Rupert?' Eyre asked her, amused.

Minil lifted the side of Eyre's blanket and snuggled in close to him. Her skin was very soft and warm; a little greasy, but no greasier than Eyre's, who had been washing in no more than a pint of water for the past two days. She smelled of fat and woodsmoke and some musty but quite appealing fragrance that reminded Eyre of rosemary. Her breasts squashed against his arm, and she happily and immodestly thrust one thigh between his legs.

‘What made you say Prince Rupert?' he said, although he didn't much care what the answer was. His penis had risen almost immediately, and touched her curved belly with a blind kiss. In response, she reached down and cupped his testicles in her hand, and gently rolled them.

‘The Black Prince,' she whispered, as if that settled everything.

He lay on his back on the rumpled, uncomfortable blanket; and she climbed on top of him, not kissing him, but biting his shoulders and his neck and even his cheeks with her sharp, filed teeth. Her breasts swung against his chest, and he held them in his upraised hands, so heavy and full that they bulged out from between his fingers. Her nipples knurled, and he twisted and caressed them, and then pinched them hard, so that she pressed her hips against him, and shuddered, and let out short high gasps of pain and excitement.

She was fierce: she bit and gnawed at his nipples until he cried out loud, and he was aware then by the restless snuffling from the other side of the shelter that they had woken Dogger. But somehow, knowing that Dogger was listening made their coupling even more exciting; and when at last she grasped his erection in both hands and pressed it up against her warm, swollen vulva, it was all he could do not to spurt out immediately, and anoint their stomachs with semen. But he made himself think of how low their stores were; and how long it was going to take them to find the inland sea; and so when he slid inside Minil's body, so deeply that she bent her head forward and quaked with the feeling of it, he was able to thrust into her again and again, lifting her up with his hips so that he penetrated her even more deeply, but still keep his climax at bay.

‘
Kungkungundun
…' she whispered; and he knew from Yanluga that she was calling him ‘loved one'.

He kissed her then; the bridge of her nose; her forehead; her lips; and she accepted his kisses with shy passion.

‘Loved one,' he breathed back at her, in English.

There was a moment when their bodies juicily slapped together; when her vagina squeezed him, slippery and hot; and when his penis began to jolt out the first tremblings of sperm. That was the moment of ultimate selfishness; when the demands of pleasure contracted tight inside their
own minds, and they both sought that bright white concentrated spark that would release all their feelings.

But, unexpectedly, Minil began to cry out first; and shake and shake and claw at Eyre's shoulders with her long broken fingernails until he knew that he must be bleeding. He had never known a girl reach any kind of climax before; and for a moment it put him off his rhythm; and his own ejaculation began to slide away like the mercury down a thermometer.

But then Minil thrust her hips at him again, and roused him up, and the wetness that ran down his buttocks made him feel that he had excited and satisfied her fully; and that gave him a pride that fuelled up his passion again. He suddenly groaned, and ejaculated right up inside her, right up against the neck of her womb; and it was then that she fell forward on him, and hugged him, and wiggled and wriggled her hips against him, and kissed him, and rolled her face against his, so that he could feel the tears, and the decorative scars on her cheeks, and her sharp teeth biting at his lips.

It occurred to him as they lay together afterwards, and Minil slept, that he may already have made her pregnant. She looked disturbingly young lying there against his arm, her mouth slightly parted as she breathed. She also looked remarkably black. But he didn't mind her blackness at all. It was rather like an exotic varnish on a body that was already beautiful.

Dawn cleared the skies again, and for an hour the air was remarkably limpid, so that they could see for miles. Ahead of them, the salt-lake looked flat and firm; although they already knew how deceptive it was. Behind them, they could see for the first time the encampment of the Aborigines who were following them: a strung-out row of improvised shelters and smouldering fires. Dogger spent a long time scrutinising the Aborigine camp through his telescope while Eyre tried to shave with nothing but soap moistened with spit. It was a slow and painful process; but Eyre was determined to be civilised, and not to grow
a beard. Every now and then Dogger said, ‘Mmm,' and Eyre said, ‘Ouch.'

After a while, Dogger said, ‘Have a gander at this,' and passed the telescope to Eyre. ‘Look to your left,' he said, ‘the big umpee second from the end.'

Towelling himself with one hand and holding the telescope with the other, Eyre inspected the Aborigine encampment. There were more than a dozen shelters altogether, and another score of blackfellows had probably slept out in the open, wrapped in their
bukas
. When he swung the telescope towards the left-hand side of the encampment, however, Eyre saw a larger shelter, and this shelter was decorated with feathers and skulls.

‘That looks like a medicine-man's hut,' Eyre remarked, He turned to Dogger, and said, ‘Joolonga?'

Dogger shook his head. ‘Wouldn't have thought so.'

‘But I shot Yonguldye.'

‘Perhaps you didn't. You know how the balls tend to drop out of these old Baker rifles, especially when you shake them around. More than likely you did nothing worse than burn his bum with a charge of powder.'

‘Then they're really after us,' said Eyre. ‘Yonguldye too.'

‘I would have thought so, yes,' sniffed Dogger.

‘And they'll still be determined to sacrifice us,' said Eyre.

‘Well, they'll still be determined to sacrifice
you
,' agreed Dogger.

‘Thanks very much,' Eyre snapped.

‘Don't mention it,' said Dogger, cheerfully.

Eyre finished wiping his chin, and put on his hat. Dogger said, ‘You've humiliated Yonguldye, that's the worst thing. Humiliation is worse than death; at least as far as a clever-man is concerned. You can bet your hat that he's wearing the
Kurdaitja
boots; and you can bet your hat that he'll follow you now to the ends of Australia, wherever they may be.'

Eyre returned the telescope. ‘It's time we left then, before they break camp.'

Minil came up. This morning she was wearing Eyre's
shirt tied around her shoulders, and her scarf arranged in peaks, like the wimple of a Brigittine nun. She came close to Eyre, but didn't touch him; but all three of them knew now that the triangle between them had changed during the night; and that Dogger was now the outsider. She said, ‘Will we have time for breakfast?' But Eyre shook his head. ‘We'll eat a few biscuits while we ride. I want as much distance between us and those blackfellows as we can possibly manage.'

‘I heard you say Yonguldye,' said Minil, simply.

‘Dogger thinks he may still be alive,' Eyre explained. ‘One of the shelters has skulls on it; or what look like skulls.'

‘Yes,' said Minil.

‘Yes, what?'

‘Yes—I too think that Yonguldye is alive. I feel it. He has a very strong—' she waved her hand around her head to try to describe mental power. ‘When he calls me, even when he is far away, I am sure that I can feel it.'

‘You feel that now?' Eyre asked her.

She stared at him. Her eyes were reddish-hazel and very wide. ‘Yes,' she whispered. ‘Yonguldye is still alive.'

All that day they rode westwards, skirting the edge of the salt swamp. The sun rose hot and white over their heads, and their shadows shrank beneath their horses as the thermometer rose to 112 degrees. Eyre wore his smoked-glass spectacles; but during the fiercest hours, just after noon, he felt as if the world were nothing but glaring white; white on white; and when he turned around to make sure that Dogger and Minil were following him, he thought that they looked like ghosts, bleached-out apparitions on a bleached-out landscape.

He drank as little as he possibly could; for their flasks were low now and there was no sign of a water-hole. But three mouthfuls during the course of the day was far too little to prevent his mouth from drying up, and his skin from cracking. At times he felt so hot and exhausted that he could have dropped off his horse and laid down on the
salt and let the sun slowly bake him into a gingerbread man, stiff and smiling. A happy, mindless end. And there were plenty of times when he felt like giving it all up, and turning south.

They ventured again and again into the salt swamp; at least once every two miles. But each time their horses broke the crust of the lake, and began to sink. Then they spent valuable time coaxing the horses out of the mud, and calming them down, before they set off westwards once more, searching with increasing desperation for a northern passage.

At three o' clock in the afternoon, Dogger passed the telescope to Eyre without comment. Eyre focused sharply, about a mile-and-a-half away; and there was Yonguldye, in his tall head-dress; and beside him was that familiar midshipman's bonnet that belonged to Joolonga.

‘We may have to stop and fight,' said Dogger.

‘They will kill us,' said Minil, with frightening certainty.

Eyre focused the telescope again. Behind Yonguldye there was a large band of Aborigine warriors; fifty or sixty, judging from the spear-points which rose from the dust.

‘We don't have a chance,' he told Dogger. ‘Not out here, in the open. We're going to have to think of a way to balance the odds.'

‘We've got rifles,' said Dogger.

‘Not enough,' Eyre asserted. ‘All they have to do is run into spear-range while we're reloading, and that will be the finish of us.'

‘Well, don't ask me,' said Dogger.

They rode westwards for three or four more miles, but now it was clear that the Aborigines were catching up with them. Eyre observed the Aborigines through Dogger's telescope every five minutes or so; and they were running at a steady, even, lope. They must have scented that Eyre and Dogger and Minil were very close now; some of their sharpest-eyed warriors may actually have seen them, even through the dust and the distorted waves of heat.

Eyre drew his rifle out of its saddle-holster and made
sure that it was loaded; this time checking that the ball was still in place. Dogger did the same; and also unsheathed a large cane-cutting knife with a curved blade, which he tucked into his belt.

‘What's that for?' asked Eyre.

‘Topping and tailing,' said Dogger, without smiling.