by Barbara Wood
The letter was signed, "Very sincerely yours, E. Dobson."
Joanna stared at the last line. The one woman who might have filled in so many important blanks was now dead, and the only other person, it seemed, who had had anything to do with Emily as a child was failing in memory.
She read the letter again to see if she had missed anything, and she paused over two phrases: "She had seen something unspeakable ... when she was in Australia," and "... something about your mother that made me think she was fated for tragedy."
So even back then, Joanna thought, among people who had had no idea of Emily's background or circumstances, people who could not have had any knowledge of poison-songs or Aboriginal curses—even Mrs. Dobson of Bury St. Edmund's had sensed the doom that had followed Emily around the world.
As she was about to fold the letter back into its envelope, Joanna realized there was one more page. When she brought it into the light, she saw that Mrs. Dobson had added a postscript.
"After rereading this letter, Mrs. Westbrook, I realized that I left out two things which you might wish to know. You enquired after information concerning where in Australia the Makepeaces had traveled. I do not know that, but if it will help, I do recall that in 1830 they sailed on a ship called the Beowulf. Of this I am certain, because I have always been intrigued by the Beowulf saga and thought the name of their ship rather ominous. The other thing you might want to know is that about a year after Emily had been living with Millicent, the strange little fur toy that she had had with her, when she arrived with the sea captain, suffered some sort of damage—I don't recall what. But because the child was hysterical, Millicent restored it by cleaning it and reinforcing its seams. In doing so, she discovered that there was something hidden inside the toy's stuffing, and when she brought it out, she discovered that it was a fairly large, rather dazzling gemstone, which we later learned was an opal. I don't know if this is of any use to you, Mrs. Westbrook, and I don't know what became of the opal. But I do hope that, in my small way, I have been of some help to you."
Joanna stared at the last lines. The opal! Hidden inside Rupert!
She went to her jewelry box, and brought out the stone. As she looked into its fiery red-and-green depths she wondered how it was associated with Karra Karra. Had her grandfather perhaps taken it from there? Was this the cause of her mother's sudden compulsion to go back, because something "else" was there, the "other legacy" which Joanna had never been able to ascertain? Had John Makepeace found an opal mine? Was that what the deed was to? Had Joanna in fact inherited more than just land, but something valuable beyond imagining?
She held the opal in her hand, felt its warmth, felt that it had an energy of its own, and wondered, What are you? Where did you come from? What is your purpose? Are your powers for good or for evil?
It was time now to address her grandfather's notes. Surely the answers were here, in these cryptic papers.
She laid the codebook on the desk before her, then placed the first page of her grandfather's notes next to it, and a blank sheet of paper opposite it. She looked at the first symbol, then located it in Giles Stafford's book.
And then, with one last glance at the opal, which flashed fire in the lamplight even though it lay motionless, she began.
TWENTY-THREE
J
OANNA WAS PUZZLED. SHE HAD BEEN TRANSLATING HER GRANDFAther's notes for a month now, and so far her efforts had turned up little more than a dry, rather uninspired account of John Makepeace's trek through the wilderness, following the clan of an Aboriginal chief named Djoogal. Joanna had found no clues as to where in Australia they had lived, or the name of the tribe they were a part of. Nor was there, as far as she could determine, anything in the notes that indicated what might have been the cause of her mother's fears. No mention of dogs, other than the dingoes the clan kept as pets, and little mention of snakes beyond the fact that the Aborigines revered the Rainbow Serpent.
The only significant thing she had learned was that the clan's totem was the Kangaroo Ancestor.
She sat back in her chair and rolled her head from side to side, releasing the tension that had been building up in her neck. Every afternoon, when Joanna sat down at her desk with the Tironian code book and her grandfather's papers, she expected to find something astonishing, a breakthrough. And every evening she was disappointed.
It was late. With the exception of Hugh, who had ridden out to the lambing paddocks to watch over the new lambs, everyone was asleep; the house was still and quiet. Now that the McNeals were gone—they had left two weeks ago—and shearing was over, life at Merinda had settled into a quiet routine. Soon, once the final interior painting was done, Joanna and her family would move into the new house by the river, and say a final goodby to this lovely old place.
But, tonight, peaceful and still as it was, Joanna felt tense and anxious. It was almost as if the very absence of anything startling in the notes was in itself some kind of omen. And then there was this disturbing business about dingoes coming close to Merinda. "Ezekiel said he's seen them just a few miles upriver," Hugh had told Joanna that morning. "I'm not going to take any chances. I've put extra men on dingo watch. Make sure Adam and Beth stay away from the river. The drought is making the dogs bold."
Dingoes, Joanna thought, as she watched insects flit around the chimney of her oil lamp. Wild dogs. They haunted her nights in dreams, and now they plagued her days. And Ezekiel—had he warned the other homesteads of the proximity of the dingoes, or was his warning particularly for Merinda, for her, for Beth? Beth had shown Joanna the dingo tooth the old tracker had given her. Joanna wondered if it had some significance, or if it was simply a good-luck piece, as Ezekiel had said.
She looked at the few pages that remained to be translated; she prayed the key to the mystery lay in them.
Joanna picked up her pen and resumed decoding the odd shorthand. "I am worried about Naomi," John Makepeace had written neatly five decades ago, "I fear that she is starting to change. Something strange seems to be happening to her."
Joanna was startled. After reading pages and pages of description about how the men of Djoogal's clan lived—how the men hunted, how they made spears and boomerangs, the men's rituals, their stories—the tone of John's notes suddenly changed. Joanna read more quickly now.
"Naomi is flourishing in this place, while my own self-doubts have been growing. What is worse, she says that I am leaving out half of the Aboriginal population, half the culture, in my observations, because I am leaving out the women.
"Naomi claims that Aboriginal women hold equal status with their men. I admit to their importance in the clan, for I have observed this myself. Despite the occasional hunted kangaroo brought into camp by the men, it is the women who do all the daily foraging for food. Aboriginal women also have control over their own reproduction and sexuality. The marriage ritual is a simple one—a woman declares a man to be her husband. Nor are the women restricted to childbearing and child rearing, while the men do all the important work. When vital decisions are made concerning the clan as a whole, men and women make them together, equally. When the clan follows the songlines, the men sometimes lead while the women follow, or the women sometimes lead while the men follow. However, I am speaking of the process of daily living. About the women's religious or spiritual importance to the clan, I see nothing significant, because as far as I can determine, it is the men who hold this power.
"Naomi argues this point," Makepeace had added, "saying that women do have rituals of their own, which are forbidden to men. Female rituals do exist, she says, and in many ways they are more important and more powerful than men's in that they involve fertility and giving birth—the life-force that is vital to the continued existence of the clan. For example, she has told me that the rituals revolving around a girl's first menstruation are far more complex, and demand much more secrecy and many more taboos, than the rites governing a boy's coming of age. Naomi says that the Aborigines do not seem to understand that it
is the man's seed that starts a child in the womb. Instead, they believe in 'ghost-babies'—a woman walks over a certain spot, and a baby-spirit wanting to be born will jump up inside her. For this reason, the power and magic of procreation are the sole purview of women, and it is these mysteries that are the essence of their secret rites.
"Naomi says that the reason European observers acknowledge only the men's rituals, thus drawing the erroneous conclusion that only Aboriginal men possess spirituality, is because those observers are men like myself, and so are allowed to hear only of men's matters. The result is a one-sided reporting of this culture.
"I suppose I should consider it an advantage having a wife with me who has made friends among the women of the clan, and who has been privileged to witness and even take part in some of their secret rituals. But she is not fully cooperative with me. Naomi will not divulge the nature of these rites; she claims she has promised the women that she would keep the secrets. But she assures me that they are ceremonies of the most solemn and pious nature. She adds that, when the women go off together alone, whether it is to forage for food or to perform a religious rite, it is a time of intense female kinship and spirituality.
"She might be right, I do not know. But it annoys me," he concluded, "that she keeps these secrets from me. I have told her that it is only for the sake of scientific inquiry and intellectual knowledge that I wish to be allowed to observe one of these secret rites."
Joanna stopped writing. She felt the night shift around her; the silent house seemed to stir and move and sigh. She reread the sentence she had just written. She suddenly sensed what was coming.
Beth awoke suddenly. It was dark. She was lying in bed, listening to the silence of the house. She wondered what had wakened her. And then she realized: Button wasn't on the bed. She had become so used to his heavy weight against her as she slept that his absence had wakened her. She sat up and looked around. Button was standing at the door to the veranda, scratching at it. "Do you want to go out, Button?" Beth said.
He was an old dog, and sometimes needed to visit the bushes during the night, so she unlatched the French door and opened it a few inches, expecting the blind sheepdog to spend a few minutes on the grass, and then come back in. But, to Beth's surprise, he rushed through the door, flew across the veranda, growling, and disappeared into the darkness.
"Button!" she said. "Come back here!" And she went after him.
The night was so silent that the only sound was that of Joanna's pen scratching across the paper. She had memorized the code by now; she hardly needed to consult the codebook. She wrote rapidly.
"The clans have been gathering for days here at Karra Karra," John Makepeace had written. "I had been told that the tribe was large, but I had no idea how large. Clans and families have been following the songlines for weeks, coming from north and south, east and west, to this place which I have learned is their holiest place. Karra Karra—the Mountain of Life. There are hundreds of people here, with still more coming. They light their fires, and they sing and dance. Relatives who have not seen one another in years celebrate reunions; old friendships are rekindled; bargains are made; marriages are arranged; and Djoogal sits in judgment on crimes that have been waiting a year to be judged—usually having to do with taboos being broken. It is a massive, noisy, lively gathering, and I marvel that Naomi and I, and little Emily, are the first white people ever to witness such a display.
"And tomorrow Naomi is going to take part in the most sacred, most secret of rituals. She will tell me very little about it, only that it involves mothers and daughters. Naomi has become increasingly secretive lately. She has been going off with the women, collecting the clay and paint and dyes with which they will paint their bodies. They have been instructing her in the secret songs, in the mysteries of the ritual, the taboos she must observe. She cannot sleep with me tonight, she told me. She must be pure for the ritual."
Joanna noticed that her grandfather's tone intensified here; she could sense his envy, his fretfulness at being left out.
"I have assured Naomi that I would not repeat whatever she told me, that she can be sure the secrets are safe with me, but she refuses to answer my questions about the ritual. I have reminded her that she is my wife, and therefore she must tell me what she is doing. Also, that she can trust me. I don't understand what has happened to her. Living with the natives has done something to her. She obeys me less and less; the authority I once had over her, when we were first married, is gone. Perhaps I made a mistake bringing her here. There is a streak of independence in Naomi now that I find most unattractive and unladylike. I remind her that I came out here to observe these people and to record their ways. Therefore, it is her duty to report to me everything she learns. My sweet Naomi, once so compliant, so obedient, has now become as headstrong as the women with whom she goes out food-gathering. And Emily, only three years and six months old, is beginning to exhibit the same willful tendencies.
"What, I wonder, will the women be doing tomorrow?"
Beth walked through the woods, calling Button's name. He had never run off like this before.
When she saw him ahead of her in a clearing, she called out, "Button! You naughty boy. Look, you've made me come out in my nightgown."
She stopped still. Something else was there in the bushes, close by. She strained her eyes to see. It stepped out of the shadows. She saw the squarish body, the erect, triangular ears, the short bushy tail and cream-colored fur. It was the wild, wolflike dog the Aborigines called dingo.
There were two of them, male and female.
Button, old and blind and going by smell and instincts, placed himself between the girl and the dingoes. "It's all right," Beth said in a small voice. But she was suddenly very frightened.
The night closed in around Joanna. She no longer wrote down her translation, but read her grandfather's notes by the light of the lamp.
"Naomi left our camp early this morning, before dawn, leaving Emily in Reena's care. She has gone to a secret place with the rest of the women, to prepare for today's ritual. The tribe is in a frenzy of activity—hunting, preparing food for the great feast tonight, dancing and singing. The men, strangely, seem to show no resentment at being left out of this vital rite. There are no priests here, no cardinals or bishops. The ones who will be performing this most important of the tribe's ceremonies are ordinary women, with no special status or titles, simply women who have daughters. Men are forbidden to have any knowledge of how the ritual is performed. No man has ever witnessed it. What do the women do, inside that mountain? Having witnessed the savage circumcision rites that are performed on boys, I can only imagine what unspeakable practices they submit their innocent daughters to, many of whom have only just left girlhood.
"I came to this place searching for the Second Eden. This new science that is polluting our age—with its so-called proof that God did not create and design the world—a science that is supposedly refuting the Holy Word of God by calling the Bible a book of 'myths and stories'—the new science in itself demands to be refuted. I came here to prove that the Holy Bible can withstand empirical analysis, that the Truth can be proven by the same intellectual examination that sets out to prove it false.
"I came seeking the Second Eden, a place where God created another Original Pair, who, this time, did not eat of the forbidden Fruit of Knowledge and so were allowed to continue to live in Innocence. The Aborigines know not the shame of nakedness, nor of fornication. They are exactly as God created them.
"But now I see that I was wrong. This is no Second Eden; it is one of God's mistakes. Here, the Serpent is worshiped, and the knowledge of the One God is absent. These savages revere stones and rivers and animals. But of the Lord they are ignorant.
"God forgive me, I was wrong, I was wrong. And now my sweet Naomi is about to be drawn into their sins, and away from the path of righteousness. And I fear she will be punished for it. If only we could go back to England. But how can we? The money is gone. The last of i
t went to pay for the land for our farm.
"I must know what the women are going to do inside the mountain, and protect Naomi from it."
Beth watched in fear as the male dingo began to walk toward her. Button growled. He backed up against Beth, pushing her away from the dingo. The female moved to the right, circling around. Button swung his head and growled at her. The fur rose up on his neck. His lips jerked over white fangs.
The dingoes moved closer.
Button growled, showed his teeth, and pushed Beth back with his hindquarters. She tried to think what to do. She reached for a stick and threw it at the wild dogs.
It landed between them, unheeded.
"Go away!" she said. "Scat!"
Gold eyes remained fixed on her. She saw mouths shiny with saliva.
When the male suddenly made a leap, Button flew up and sank his teeth into the animal. Beth screamed, and then the female turned on Button, seizing him by the tail. Beth stared in horror as the dingoes attacked the sheepdog from opposite sides. She saw fur fly, she heard terrible sounds, there was blood, Button's ear was ripped off, an obscene gash suddenly appeared in his flank. The dingoes fought the way they did when bringing down a kangaroo—one at the head, one at the tail, driving their prey mad with frenzy, reducing him to helplessness.
"Stop it!" Beth cried. She picked up another stick and swung it hard. "Get away!" she screamed, hitting one of them.
