by John Marsden
His departure was an emotional affair for everyone, though the people of the fair, accustomed to comings and goings, probably recovered more quickly than Argus. He shook hands gravely with Tiresias, Titius and Jud, kissed the two twins on their cheeks, and was smothered in a bear hug by Ruth. Then he and Mayon walked a little way down the road together.
‘It’s been good,’ Argus said, feeling suddenly shy. ‘They’re good people.’
‘They’re a mixture of good and bad, like everyone else,’ Mayon answered with a smile. ‘But there’s one thing you still haven’t figured out about them.’
‘What’s that?’ Argus asked in surprise.
Mayon shrugged. ‘They’re all you, all a different part of you. Well, this is far enough for me. I hope our paths cross again. Goodbye Argus. Take care, as people say, but take risks too.’ The two embraced, as both felt tears smart in their eyes.
‘Goodbye,’ Argus said. ‘Thank you so much. Good-bye.’
And so it was now Argus’ turn to walk away, as Temora had done so recently and Mayon’s turn to stand and watch. But Argus’ direction was the opposite of Temora’s: his route led him inland, where hers had been towards the coast.
It took him some time to get back into the pace and rhythm he had developed before joining the fair. But he was glad to be on his own again, and realised he had been getting stale, physically and mentally.
For the first time in quite a while he began observing the countryside around him. He was still in cleared and arable land, of a type that had become familiar to him, but the further he went from Palatine the more the gradient increased, and the less inviting was the general prospect. After a few hours he was puffing a little, climbing into the hills and gaining height rapidly as the road twisted around. At length he paused at an escarpment and looked out at the plains he was leaving. The city of Palatine lay dark and heavy between him and the horizon. He could see the tents and caravans of the fair but he was able to look at them without too great a sense of loss.
Far in the distance was the ocean, almost flippant in its light blue insignificance. He laughed aloud as he thought of the memories and associations that the sea now held for him. It would be a part of his life forever. Other towns and villages were scattered across the countryside. Most of them were alien to Argus, and he wondered for a moment how it could be that they held individuals and families whom he would never meet or even see. Yet to them their lives were all-important, they were the suns in their local solar systems. How could they be oblivious of him, and for that matter, how could he be oblivious of them? A person’s life, his or her living and dying, were too important to be carried out in anonymity.
Argus sighed and turned away, resuming his journey. He realised that tonight, for the first time in quite a while, he would have to find a place to sleep, and that could be difficult in poor country. And this was poor country. Increasingly scrubby vegetation and loamy soil, large tracts uncleared, houses and settlements well apart. As the sky clouded over and the temperature dropped Argus began to step out, but was unable to see any promising shelter. Finally, as the road ahead seemed to offer no prospects, he left it and pushed through the small trees to a hill, hoping to find a cave or an animal hole. But there was nothing ready-made there.
The afternoon darkened and the rain started to fall; he broke off some branches and combined them with dead wood to make a crude shelter, then crept inside and sat, knees up to his chest, watching the rain thicken into a steady downpour. His shelter did not do much of a job; it screened him from the small drops by catching them and gathering them into big drops, which then ran down the back of his neck. Or that was the way it seemed to him. He unrolled his pack and supped on some sandwiches and dried fruit the twins had given him.
His spirits were high enough, though as the last of the daylight melted he found it harder to maintain his morale. It was too early to sleep so he amused himself by trying to rearrange the shelter so less rain dripped through; then he tried to do some mental exercises. But he found the process dreary.
When it was too dark to see any more Argus lay down and tried to sleep. The rain slackened off but was still persistent. He knew that by going to sleep now he would almost certainly wake up again in the middle of the night but he decided to face that problem when he came to it. He slept fitfully, dreaming that he was floating down a river that flowed, not towards the ocean, but towards a vast inland lake. He woke up, then slept again, dreaming this time of birds who were being chased and caught by savage predators, who leapt up and tore the birds out of the sky. He woke, wanting to urinate and, after some minutes of reluctance and procrastination, crawled out and relieved himself on a patch of grass. He returned to the shelter and fell back into a stormy sleep, in which he was alternately chasing and being chased by bright lights which shone with an intensity that was alluring at times, at times threatening.
The next time he awoke he realised that he was not likely to get back to sleep again. He sat up and listened but the rain had stopped and the only sound to be heard was the drops of water that rolled and splashed through the trees. Argus moved to the door of the shelter and looked out. The cloud had disappeared. The sky glinted and glittered with a fresh intensity. Argus spent a little time sitting with his arms around his knees, gazing up at it.
After twenty minutes or so he was about to turn away when out of the corner of his eye he saw a light shooting quickly across the sky. He turned back and watched intently. The light moved among the stars at speed. It shone brightly as it traversed the heavens in an apparently fixed path. It took perhaps a minute to pass from Argus’ view; the boy was transfixed for every second of that time, wondering what the light was and what it could portend. Long after it had disappeared he sat gazing at the spangled sky, hoping to see the light reappear, but he was disappointed. There was nothing to be seen but the everyday miracle of the stars in the night sky. At last, as the whitened sky in the east drew a gradual film over the purply blackness, he crawled back into the rough shelter and settled into a fitful new bout of sleep.
Chapter Sixteen
Following the road as it led up into the uncleared and unsettled areas, gaining height all the while, Argus saw ahead of him the figure of an old man on the road. The man was shabbily dressed but had a blanket-roll on his back much like Argus’. His head was bald on top but was ringed by long grey curls, which fell almost to his shoulders. Despite his venerable age he was walking quite rapidly, and Argus, who wanted to catch up with him, had to stride out vigorously to do so. When he reached him, he walked along with the man for quite a distance before either of them spoke. At last however the old man, without looking at Argus, said, ‘I have one very good friend’.
‘Oh yes?’ said Argus politely, wondering if the old man were perhaps mad.
‘Yes,’ said the man, ‘and here he is.’ With a flourish, still not looking at the boy, he drew a large orange from his pocket and held it aloft. Argus was now sure that the man was mad. ‘This is my very good friend,’ said the man firmly, then he began ripping the peel from the orange and stuffing its flesh into his mouth, gulping it down voraciously. Argus thought of a number of facetious remarks he could make but wisely decided to make none of them. The old man finished the orange and spoke again.
‘We’re on a road to nowhere,’ he said, ‘and the only way we can get there is by eating our friends.’ He danced a few steps, stirring up clouds of dust in the road. ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked. ‘Any question you want to ask me. Go on, any question at all.’ Argus was taken aback and did not know what to say. But the man was flitting on to another topic. ‘There’s nothing to say and no time to say it in,’ he declared. ‘There was a rabbit and an eagle, and then there was an eagle. Everything becomes the eagle in the end. But then, there’s another way of looking at it. When there’s a lot of light, you don’t notice the dark. When there’s a lot of dark you always notice the light. Now that’s a strange thing. And so I dance and I sing.’ He proceeded to do bo
th, singing:
A moth that flew to the moon,
Discovered, and all too soon,
The moon that burned so bright,
Would never defeat the night.
‘That’s true,’ said Argus, clutching in relief at what meaning he could recognise among the meanderings. ‘Ah,’ said the man, ‘but is it as true as that rock? As true as this road? As true as the word “true” that comes out of your mouth? Now there’s true and there’s true and there’s true, and that makes three, and that’s three trues, all different and none of them lies. But that can’t be right, because if there’s a true there must be a lie. And each true must give way to the next true that comes along. And so,’ he said, peering into the distance, ‘I see our road coming to a junction, and you are going a different way from me, and we must part.’
‘But,’ said Argus, astonished, ‘How do you know that I am going a different way?’
‘Because whichever way you are going, I am going a different way,’ said the man. ‘Do you go the same way as a bird? As a kite? Do you know the way home? Is there air in your shoes and between your toes? I expect not. So fly in circles until you find the air.’
They had reached the crossroad and Argus stood, irresolute. The road they were on continued to the west, still a well-defined route. The road crossing it was a straggling track that hardly deserved to be called a road. The boy looked at the man. The man gazed away, deliberately not looking at the boy.
‘Which way do you suggest?’ Argus asked at last. The old man shrugged. ‘One to the topmost,’ he sang, ‘and one to the coast.
One that goes to earth,
And another to a birth.
The only one it cannot be
Is the one that comes from the sea.
His dry crackled voice gave little comfort to Argus, who decided however that the way ahead looked boring, and so took the track to the left, to the south. The old man promptly took the one to the north and strode off along it, singing and muttering to himself. Argus shrugged and set out along his own chosen way.
The morning still had the cool freshness that characterises the early part of the day, before the sun has set about drying and heating the air and the ground. Argus walked and whistled. This was no time to be sour. He realised, with pleasure, that he was again noticing little things: the way a single blade of grass trembled as though palsied, though all around it was still; the way a creeper took such a tortuous path to the sun; the way one bird hopped on two feet while another walked, one foot in front of the other.
But the track soon began to dwindle into a path that was completely grassed over in places. A recent storm had crashed timber across it, so that Argus was now forced frequently into going over, under or around. After a while he began wondering what made him go on: not the rational thought that the track should lead to something. Perhaps the irrational reluctance to give up and return through what would be, with each step he took, stale territory. So he kept going, though with less and less of his earlier pleasure, and with less interest in the journey, as it took him through timbered country that was becoming depressingly uniform.
There was life, however, among the trees. A bird rose, almost at his feet, and flew swiftly away, with a harsh echoing cry. From bushes to his left a large black-and-white bird was hunted furiously by a small, aggressively maternal green and grey thrush. Detouring around yet another smashed and splintered tree Argus came face-to-face with a doe. He was enchanted. She gazed at him with troubled round eyes, big and brown, while the muscles under her coat trembled. She looked away, as if to say, ‘This is not supposed to happen. What can we do?’ Then, at some slight, half-imagined movement from Argus, she turned on the spot and fled, floundering through the broken branches in her hurry.
Argus went on. The country became more interesting: the forest was increasingly varied and the undergrowth thicker. The softness of the track and the moisture on the leaves indicated to the boy that he was passing into an area of greater rainfall. Presently the track crossed a creek. Argus slid over on a log but had to cast about for some moments to find the resumption of the path. It was obscured by fallen timber and marauding undergrowth.
More creek crossings followed, until inevitably Argus came to a substantial river. The water, although shallow, flowed rapidly. Looking up and down the river for a place to cross, Argus was struck by the beauty of the scene. Trees, tree-ferns and flowers crowded the banks on both sides. The further bank sloped steeply down to the water and vegetation covered every inch of it. Argus wondered at the inadequacy of a language that could provide only one word ‘green’ to describe the infinite variety of colours and shades on the slope.
The river itself was almost a continuous rapid: white water spumed among rocks, flurries of foam peered over huge boulders, providing just a hint of the churning below. Yet here and there were dark pools of extraordinary clearness. They reminded Argus of the eyes of the doe. He threw off his blanket-roll and approached one of the pools, gingerly stepping from rock to rock. A mottled dark-brown and green trout, sensing the boy’s shadow, swerved with frantic speed out of the pool and was lost in a rapid.
Argus saw another huge pool further down the river, with two old white logs forming a bridge across the end of it. He clambered down to it. Through the clear water he could see every stone on the bottom, every aquatic insect, every grain of sand. Just beyond the centre of the pool was a dark and deep hole, its darkness a challenge to the clarity of the water; yet Argus could even see the rocks on its bottom. He pulled off his clothes and slung them across one of the white logs, took his customary glance down at his body to satisfy himself that he was growing properly, then dived in, his teeth gritted in what was both a smile of pleasure and a grimace of appalled anticipation of the coldness of the water.
Everything was disturbed by his dive. Huge ripples spread, meeting the banks like breaking waves. The mud and sand were stirred into dark clouds. Insects fled, and a piece of bark, lodged for a long time against a rock, was set free and swirled away downstream. Argus saw none of this but instead continued the disruption of this tiny universe by slapping the water with his hand, running in an arc around his body. He laughed delightedly, but the sound of his own voice made him self-conscious in a way that his body and its movement had not, and he made no further sound.
For five cold, exhilarating minutes he explored the pool, diving repeatedly, bringing up stones and throwing them away, even going to the bottom of the deep hole and bringing up a small red stone so beautiful that he wanted to keep it. He placed it next to his clothes on the log, and went on playing.
When he was too cold to continue he used the log as a fulcrum to swing himself around and out of the water, and sat on the edge, feeling the warmth of the sun dissolve his goose pimples. As he dressed, he noticed that the red stone had dried, but it had lost all its colour and lustre. Frustrated, he threw it back to the edge of the pool, where it sat dully among the other dry rocks.
At last, reluctantly, Argus continued on his way. The path dropped down now into a small valley and gave signs of an approaching destination. Ahead, the tops of trees were replaced by clear sky. But Argus was still surprised when he came into a fertile and grassy clearing; at its edge was a small hut, built of timber on a base of rocks. Argus walked steadily towards it. It bore all the traces of habitation: a couple of chairs with clothes draped over them were on a verandah and an open book lay on the ground. The door was ajar and a cat walked casually out as the boy approached.
Argus went to the doorway and knocked, peering with naïve curiosity into the dark interior. There was no answer, but he thought he heard a soft moan. He called out, ‘Is anybody there?’ The cat brushed past his legs as it strolled back into the hut, unconcerned at his presence. Argus called out again, ‘Anyone home?’
There was a sound behind him and he turned, puzzled. It took him a moment to identify the noise as the wind rushing through the trees on the hill overlooking the clearing. He could see the trees bend as t
hey were thrown around by the gusts; then the trees further down the hill started to toss as the wind advanced. It blew across the valley floor and Argus felt its cool strength rustle and buffet him.
He turned again to the doorway, this time certain that someone had moaned within the house. He called out, ‘Excuse me, do you want me to come in?’ and on receiving no answer went in anyway. The hut was small and untidy, but it was clean. There was a main room, which seemed to be the living and eating area, and two doorways which appeared to lead to smaller rooms. In the ceiling was a loft, reached by a ladder. A huge fireplace contained several large cooking pots.
Argus went to the left-hand doorway and looked in. He found himself staring into the face of a young girl who was lying on a low bed. Although her eyes were open, she seemed not to see him. His heart began to beat very quickly. He realised at once she was ill, and his mind flew back to the hut on the beach that he had visited with Temora.
Feeling awkward and embarrassed, very much a trespasser, Argus tiptoed to the edge of the bed. He had been slow to take in the details of the sickroom, but could see now that the girl was pregnant and in labour. He had a fierce desire to run, but fought it down. He said to her, ‘Are you all right?’
She did not answer but seemed to refocus her eyes so that they were now resting on his face. Argus asked, ‘Is there anyone else around? Is there anyone helping you?’ Again there was no reply and the boy felt a little lost as to his next move. Finally, however, he went out to the main room again, poured a glass of water from a jug on the table, took that in and gave it to the girl. At first she seemed unable or unwilling to drink, but when he held it to her lips she showed more interest, and began at last to take small sips.
When she had finished Argus put the cup on the floor and said to the girl again, ‘Have you got anyone to help you?’ She looked at him now with eyes that showed understanding but she still did not answer.
